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State Schools (Independence)

I congratulate the hon. Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell) on securing the debate. I shall comment on a few of the issues raised. I was somewhat surprised at how little reference there was to the debate that we have been having over the past few months on the Education and Inspections Bill, which I believe strikes the right balance between moving away from a very centralised, local education authority-controlled education system towards more independence for schools. However, some ideas flagged up today by Conservative Members go too far down that route. On admissions, when I intervened earlier the focus of the debate was very much on pupils with special educational needs, to whom it was said a price tag is attached which acts as an incentive to take in such children. I was looking at the matter in a broader context, in relation to pupils who might be termed less desirable from the point of view of a head teacher who wants the school to do well in the league tables. In my constituency, for example, there are pupils from refugee backgrounds who have English as their second language, and whose parents, often, are illiterate, so that they do not receive support at home. What would happen to them? I welcome the move to give more power to head teachers and parents. I think that, often, those at the chalk face in the teaching profession know what is best for children. Parents, too, obviously know what is best for them, but that does not necessarily apply across the board. A great many parents, because of their educational background or social circumstances, do not have all that great a role in their children’s education at present. I welcome the moves in the Education and Inspections Bill to give the local authority the role of parents’ champion and of supporting parents in exercising a greater say in their children’s education. However, there will always be some children whose parents are not the best people to make those choices for them. There must be a mechanism to enable other people to supervise the child’s education and make the right choices. The hon. Member for Harwich frequently used the term ““expert”” pejoratively, which is quite demeaning to people who work in the education profession. I recently met, in my constituency, a group of educationists who work with children who have special educational needs, and they are devoted to making sure that children in the city of Bristol get the best education. To dismiss their contribution and the expertise that they have built up by working with children, parents and teachers over the years is going too far. The hon. Gentleman also talked about local education authorities all in the same breath, as though all were equally bad. There are local education authorities that do an incredibly good job of ensuring that schools perform well and give pupils the best deal. That leads me to my main points. I am in the unfortunate position, I suppose, of representing the place that has the worst-performing local education authority in the country as far as state secondary schools are concerned. It is now adrift at the bottom of the league tables by about 5 per cent. As the Secretary of State would tell hon. Members, even Hull is performing better than Bristol these days. We accept that we have a serious problem. It is not a recent development. Over many years the local authority has failed to tackle the problem of underperformance in Bristol’s state schools. We have schools where not even one in five pupils achieve five good GCSEs. In two schools serving my constituency, with a very diverse intake of pupils, not one African-Caribbean child achieved five good GCSEs last year. People admit that the state school system in Bristol is failing pupils. As a result there has been a mass exodus from Bristol schools, either into the private sector or out to schools in Gloucestershire and Somerset. It is estimated that about 50 per cent. of parents choose to abandon Bristol’s state secondary schools as a result of that poor performance. I accept that the local authority has not got to grips with that, and although there has been some incremental improvement and the school results were up last year by a tiny percentage, unless there is change on a radical scale we shall fail another generation of children. That is why I welcome some of the proposals in the Education and Inspections Bill to give schools more independence. I have in my constituency a school that is a shining example of what happens when schools are given more independence. It is one of the first city academies. Before what was called the St. George school became an academy it was one of the most unpopular with parents and one of the most under-subscribed schools in Bristol. Parents went to great lengths to avoid sending their children there. It serves a deprived area and parents in the locality do not have high incomes, but they would still scrape together the money to send their children to private schools or bus them out of the county, because they did not want to send their kids to St. George. The pupils were disaffected and the exam results were dismal. When St. George became a city academy and got the independence—and, admittedly, the capital injection that went with that—things turned around dramatically. In the past year, 51 per cent. of pupils gained five or more good GCSEs. That was a 19 per cent. increase on the previous year. There are some schools where not even 19 per cent. get five GCSEs in the first place; it is a fantastic increase. The academy is now the most improved school in Bristol and one of the best performing academies in the country. That success is all the more remarkable in the light of the intake of pupils at the academy, 35 per cent. of whom have free school meals. That compares to a national average of about 10.5 per cent. and a Bristol-wide average of less than 10 per cent.—about 9.3 per cent. Sixty per cent. of the pupils in the academy come from visible ethnic minorities and 31 languages are spoken there. Many pupils come from refugee families and live under the constant threat of deportation or have endured traumatic situations to get to the school. Often they start at the school with a limited grasp of English, but leave with a very good education. They have a real pride in their school. I do not say that all that has been achieved at the academy is due to independence, but whenever I have visited the school it has been clear that the head teacher can mould what happens there to the needs of the people who attend it. For example, he is working with the Institute for Fiscal Studies on piloting a financial capability study, which teaches children the basic facts about handling money—finance—and how to run their finances in future life. From speaking to IFS representatives I know that those children go home and teach their parents how to do the same. The school is in an area with a significant financial exclusion problem, but it is also in a city that is fast becoming one of the biggest financial services centres in the country, and the curriculum is being tailored both to deal with problems that pupils and their families might experience in the wider world, and to give them a leg up into the job market. They will get a diploma, on completing the course, equivalent to a GCSE.