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Education and Inspections Bill

moved Amendment No. 3: Page 2, line 2, leave out ““educational”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, I should like to speak to Amendment No. 5 as well. The time has come to take the opportunity of the Bill to broaden schools’ focus a little. We have had several decades of focusing ever more closely on examinations and achievement to the point where examinations have become an end in themselves and have started to damage the real educational progress that we hope pupils will make. Over the past year or two, a lot of people in the educational establishment have started to look again at the wider purposes of school and what we hope they will do for our children. We can use the opportunity of the Bill to signal that in a couple of small ways. First, Amendment No. 3 would delete the word ““educational”” where it is essentially repetitive, because it is a subsidiary clause to a statement that clearly focuses on education and its provision. Schools ought to have regard to the whole potential of children—not just whether they will pass Maths and English but what sort of people they will turn into. Whatever their potential, in whatever sphere, and whether or not the word ““educational”” can be stretched so elastically that it covers everything from football to character, it would do no harm to the Bill to remove that word and to make clear that we expect schools to focus on the child as he or she is, not on some narrow aspect of that child. Amendment No. 5 merely repeats that sentiment in an earlier Bill where it would find a good home. I hope that the Government will feel, as I do, that this is how schools should operate and that it is therefore a change worth making. I beg to move.