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Education and Inspections Bill

As the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, rightly said, we debated at considerable length a somewhat similar amendment to the Education Act 2002. Indeed, I believe that we secured promises from the then Minister. One thing I have failed to do is to follow up on those promises to see how far they have been met. We on these Benches sympathise very much with the amendment, and we must think about coming back on Report with something similar. In 2002, we looked at the number of pieces of paper generated by the regulations that were issued. Increasingly in the past few years, regulations are issued not in pieces of paper but electronically and, from my experience as a school governor of a relatively small primary school, I must say that the amount of regulation that is required and that comes across electronically to that school from the department is pretty horrific. A real effort needs to be made to limit the amount of regulation that is issued and to return to a time when we trusted the professionalism of our teachers and particularly our head teachers. We are now training our head teachers much better, and we really need to trust them more and to give them the discretion to be able to make their own judgments on a number of issues.