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State Schools (Independence)

I agree completely. Great—let us try that, but we have to be realistic about our abilities, especially when we are dealing with the educational establishment that we have. The opinion of one professor of education writing recently, which Chris Woodhead mentioned in a speech, is that"““The great challenge for education in the 21st century is…the discovery of a holistic, problematised pedagogy””." Does that mean anything to you, Mr. Chope? It means nothing to me. Then there is the commissioner for London schools—an official person, presumably—who said recently:"““In the light of research into the brain and theories of learning, teachers’ questioning techniques will have moved (by 2050) beyond traditional methods.””" That is what we are dealing with, and what my hon. Friend will be dealing with as a Minister. We will go on debating the issue, but let us not get any more bogged down. I must not speak for too long, because others might want to get in. However, my hon. Friend has raised an interesting debate that need not necessarily be the preserve of members of the Conservative party. I have great hopes for the hon. Member for Taunton, whose early intervention convinced me that there are people in the Liberal party who also believe in localism and local determination—I hope that there are such people in the Labour party, too. Such people might follow us in supporting the concept of schools being given increasing powers over their budgets if, for instance, there was a shortage of maths or language teachers. Indeed, there is a great crisis in languages in state schools, as well as in mathematics and science teaching, and it is independent schools that are saving sciences and languages in universities. That is something that the Government should be worried about. I hope that all hon. Members here would agree that schools should be given more independence over their budgets, if that is what they wish. The great divide is of course over selection. My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich was again right to say that we should not get bogged down in the debate about grammar schools. That debate has gone—it is finished, it is in the past. A Conservative Government would not need to say that we will introduce a grammar school in every town. That was one line in the 1997 manifesto. It is not going to return and the debate is in the past. All we need to do is give head teachers and their governing bodies increasing powers over admissions. It was said earlier that the only result of doing that would be that schools would choose pupils, and that pupils and parents would not be able to choose schools. It is claimed that if we give head teachers greater power over admissions, large numbers of schools will suddenly become ultra-selective and turn people away, and there will be no decent schools for kids. Indeed, I am not sure that my children could have got into grammar schools, although I am not for or against those schools—that is irrelevant. For the sake of argument, does the Minister or anybody else think that if we gave head teachers increasing independence, there would be a revolution in our schools? Teachers are actually quite conservative in how they run their schools. Those running a pure comprehensive school are allowed to test anyway, to create a pure comprehensive system, in which there are three bands, of the most able, the middle and the less able. If comprehensive schools were given the freedom to select who they wanted, some might become more academic, some might remain comprehensive and some might admit more pupils of less academic ability. We do not know. There are schools in the independent sector that cater for all abilities. There are Winchesters and the Etons, which are highly academic and highly selective, but there are also many independent schools that cater for middle and lower ability ranges. I therefore urge hon. Members to forget the party political polemic about grammar schools and to think about giving more freedom and responsibility to head teachers to run their own schools in their own way. Let us imagine that we did that and allowed schools to run their own budgets—we allowed, in effect, all schools to become grant maintained. The problem with the creation of grant-maintained schools was that only some schools became grant maintained, so there was a dispute about whether those schools were receiving preferential capital funding. Let us imagine that all schools had the freedoms of grant-maintained schools in respect of hiring and firing, selecting and deselecting, their budgets and paying French teachers and others. I do not believe that there would be a revolution in those schools, but I do believe that there would be a revolution in terms of choice and freedom, and that that would be extraordinarily beneficial to our system.