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State Schools (Independence)

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for pointing that out; it is indeed the case. I hope that the Minister and other Members will join together if not in the Lobby, then in this Chamber today, to find some consensus on how to improve education. It needs to be said at the outset that not all schools with independence are good and that not all schools that conform to the micro-detail of Government diktat are necessarily bad. Far from it. We need to be careful not to assume that independent automatically necessarily means better. I acknowledge the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), whose most excellent pamphlet on setting our schools free largely inspired the debate. In office, political parties are inclined to argue that things are generally better than they are; in opposition, they are sometimes tempted to argue that things are worse than they sometimes are. My criticisms of the education system are not directed at any one Government. I want to make a broader point about failures in our education system that I believe are a product of a centralist system that has been in place for 20 or 30 years, if not longer. The following facts prove that there is a problem in our education system. A quarter of 11-year-olds cannot read or write sufficiently well to allow them to tackle the secondary school curriculum. One in five school leavers are functionally illiterate and innumerate. The state has supposedly been looking after them and educating them for nine years, but it has failed in its most basic task. Many school leavers arrive at university without the basic literary skills that they need for their coursework. That failure has been masked by extraordinary grade inflation. For example, between 1992 and 2002, when Governments of both parties were in office, the proportion of A grades awarded at A-level rose from 13 per cent. to nearly double that figure. Those are the facts. However, we can debate the reason for that failure. I contend that the education system is failing because of over-centralisation and the quango state that administers our education system. That system is run at the behest of remote quangos and remote elites—schools adjudicators, curriculum and qualifications authorities and unaccountable bureaucrats in the local education authorities. Remote elites make decisions; local pupils, schools and parents take the rap. That is how our education system is run—almost regardless of which Minister holds office. The quango state has run education not only badly in terms of output, but incredibly inefficiently. It has been estimated that about 45 per cent. of education spend does not go to the schools, but is sucked up by the education quango establishment. Those quangos—for instance, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, with its plush offices in London—always seem to have enough money for such things. Regardless of the fact that there might not be enough teachers in the classroom, local education authorities never seem to run out of bureaucrats. The quango state absorbs an extraordinarily large amount of money that ought to be going to schools. The national curriculum is devised by distant experts. Targets and guidelines are set and imposed on schools. That process began in the early 1990s, if not before, but in recent years it has turned into an avalanche. Centralism is the problem. If we are honest, we will admit that Governments of all parties since the 1970s have thought that they could run education better from the centre. Some on my side of the House might be tempted to mention grant-maintained schools. They might have been decentralising, but whatever freedoms the schools gained from their LEAs were offset by greater scrutiny and accountability through the national curriculum and targets set by central Government. Grant-maintained schools show how not to set schools free, as the mechanisms for further central control remained in place. Instead, we need a bold new approach to decentralisation to devolve not so much just to town halls, but directly to parents, pupils and the schools themselves. We need to take power and responsibility away from the quango state and devolve it downwards directly to the users.