---

Education and Inspections Bill

I, too, shall speak to the new clauses moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) which also bear my name, and particularly new clause 39. I want to contribute also from personal experience, as someone who was educated equally at a grammar school and a comprehensive school. I was part of the generation that went through the changes implemented by the then Labour Secretary of State, Shirley Williams, and my school, Wolstanton county grammar school, became the Marshlands comprehensive school in my fourth year, when I was 15. I speak, too, as someone representing a constituency where selection remains very much part of the landscape. In 1997, as part of my rite of passage, I contested Chesham and Amersham, that favourable ground for Labour in Buckinghamshire, so I am familiar with a broad range of opinion about the academic selection still practised in that county. Before I begin my remarks, I crave your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker, to take this opportunity almost a decade after that election to pay tribute to the late Keith Kingswood. Keith was the secretary of the Chesham and Amersham constituency Labour party, a tough calling in an area where for many people even new Labour conjured up the same fears as old Vikings. Keith, a very erudite and educated man, was above all a fervent opponent of academic selection all his life and a leading light in the Campaign for State Education, CASE. Sadly, during that election, Keith died and was never able to see a new Labour Government. Such was his dedication that he flew over to New York to see his son to register a postal vote, of all things. During that visit, he contracted a mystery virus and never recovered. In 1997, while many people were still partying to the strains of ““Things can only get better””—and they have—on election night we went quietly to bed and, with his family and widow Janet, laid Keith to rest at his funeral the next day. There is no better tribute to Keith’s lifelong efforts than the work done by Comprehensive Future, by the Socialist Education Association, of which I am a vice-chair, by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North, and by dedicated educationists like Fiona Millar, in drafting and tabling the new clauses. Of course, we would all like the Government and my hon. Friend the Minister for Schools to support the new clause or even allow a free vote. After comments I have heard from many Labour Back-Bench colleagues, Ministers and indeed some of the Whips, I have no doubt that if there were a free vote, new clause 39 would be passed today. I passed my 11-plus. I was also the only person in my year who did so and was refused entry at a grammar school—the Catholic grammar school of choice—because of a bad reference about my behaviour. The Whips’ reach is long and I am still getting bad references now. So I went to Wolstanton, which is a non-denominational school, where I am now a governor, and in hindsight that did me the world of good, because I do not think I was made for the Christian Brothers’ discipline. I was distraught at the time, however, and so were lots of children who, for whatever reason, ““failed””—in inverted commas. That was the language. There were good friends of mine who passed but went to the secondary modern round the corner, the Blessed Thomas Maxwell, either because other mates were going or because grammar schools were seen as snobby and ““for them, not for us””. And then there were the kids—and parents—who at that age did not know, did not care and did not have a clue. That was a disgraceful and divisive way to run an education system—to mark out large numbers of children as failures, based on an arbitrary test on an arbitrary day at an arbitrary age.