---

Education and Inspections Bill

I was going to say that I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, will pursue that amendment. It is terribly important that there is a safety valve. Not all local authorities behave as perfectly as they might all the time. When a school is under the cosh for half a decade at a time merely because the chairman of the local authority education committee does not like it—it is perfectly possible; who will be imposed on the London Oratory, for instance?—there must be a reasonable escape. It is certainly possible as the regulations are provided for, but it is not in the draft regulations that there should be any such power for someone to adjudicate. There may be other ways out of it, but I very much hope that we pursue it. And I very much hope that we will get some support from the Liberal Democrat Benches. We would very much like to see this. If we do not get a satisfactory reply on it, I hope that we will pursue it to a Division, if we have to. I was disappointed by the Minister’s illustration of how the school improvement partner will be using all these figures to point out where a school could improve itself. The best schools were using these figures 10 years ago. The systems ought to be there so that it is obvious to a school that, ““We have a problem with our Afro-Caribbean children between the ages of 11 and 14””, or whatever it may be. I know of at least three commercially—or semi-commercially—available systems out there that will provide this information as a matter of course. Yes, the Government can help by providing some base data to feed into these things so that there is an accurate comparison between developments in the world outside. But a school ought to have a system that tells it not only that it has a problem in this area but also who can tell it how to do better with its 11 to 14 year-old Afro-Caribbean kids. The chances of it being a random SIP appointed by a local education authority are pretty small. At that stage you want to be going out to a much wider audience. I have always hoped that the Government would create a system that worked for spreading expertise and making it available to schools, but they never have. Beacon status has not worked and its successor has not worked particularly well. A good school will know what is wrong and where to go to put it right. I would support anything a Government did to do that, but the idea that this will be the SIP, or that the SIP should perform the function that the Minister described, I find extremely depressing.