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Education and Inspections Bill

I thank my noble friend for the very considerate response to my amendment, and I am encouraged that he will go away and consider it seriously. I shall not go over all the arguments again, but perhaps I may make two points as succinctly as possible. First, he returned to the judgment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bingham, but that was about how the obligations under the convention were fulfilled. The point that I make in the amendment, which I consider to be important, is that we are not saying that we are doing this because we have obligations under some convention; the convention is there because this is something that we believe is right. If in our society we believe that it is right to recognise the fundamental right of the child—full stop—to education, then it seems to me that it would be good and would strengthen the Bill to say that right at the outset, and then everything else follows on from that. It is about how we fulfil that right. It is not the case that we have to introduce arguments, if challenged, about whether we will have obligations under conventions here and conventions there. We are saying that this, at the heart of our education policy, is the right that we recognise, and everything follows from that.