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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I support the amendments, particularly Amendments Nos. 55 and 56. In doing so, I declare an interest as chair of the Children’s Workforce Development Council and president of the National Children’s Bureau. The Minister may persuade me that the law is sufficient to achieve what we want, but I would not want to miss an opportunity. This is a very important debate, which is a tribute to the Government’s achievements in Every Child Matters and the five outcomes. The delivery of the five outcomes into legislation was a key moment in moving towards an integrated service for children in workforce reform. In acknowledging that in serving children well and in bringing them up and preparing them for life, everything is important, but by themselves they are not sufficiently important and have to be integrated. These old debates about our schools, education and caring, and whether we should find time to look for the personal development of children or whether education is always about passing exams were, to some extent, put to one side. The Every Child Matters outcomes were a very proper acknowledgement that what we want for children is the development of all their abilities—certainly academic but others as well. We want an integrated service in which to deliver that. That does not take away from the very special talents that teachers have and from the very particular purpose of schools but, as I have travelled around the country, I have seen education delivered best when it has been integrated with other children’s services. My only reason for pushing consideration of this being included in primary legislation is that, since leaving the Department for Education and Skills and going back into the real world, even four years later I sometimes visit schools which are only just beginning to implement things that were passed in my time in the DfES. In politics we sometimes underestimate the difficulty of implementation. We should seize as many opportunities as we can to send a clear signal about what we want to achieve. I suspect that this amendment is something no one disagrees with. I bet that no one is going to stand up and say, ““It would be a really bad idea to ask parts of the education system to secure the well-being of children””. Does anyone want to argue against securing the well-being of children? So the debate becomes whether we are adding anything here, and whether we are making it any easier to achieve these objectives by putting them into primary legislation. My first reason for supporting this proposal is that the crusade or huge cultural change involved in persuading professionals—teachers and those looking after children who are not teachers—to think differently needs every encouragement and tool we can possibly harness and give it. We should not miss any opportunity to make that happen. Thinking back to when I was at the department, at certain times I saw words going into legislation and, to be honest, I thought, ““I am not sure that putting that word into legislation is going to achieve much””. But what I saw over the years was that it kept the agenda on that word and sent a clear signal to the education world that change was needed. I shall give a few examples which I know my noble friend on the Front Bench will agree with. Way back in the late 1990s we put into primary legislation the provision that schools and local authorities have a duty to secure high standards. If ever there was no need to put something into legislation, it was a reminder to teachers that they are about achieving high standards. It was almost an insult, but it was necessary and it has worked. Over the months and years it has allowed people constantly to go back to the legislation and say, ““Look, this is what you are about. This is about high standards””. In truth, the notion of high standards has now become part of the vocabulary of what schools do. I could make a powerful case for words that we put into legislation, such as the need for local authorities to promote choice and encourage diversity. In themselves the words do not mean a lot, but they provide the background to a set of priorities towards which we want things to move. I wonder if this amendment would achieve that. It would help those of us out in the field who are trying to enact the five outcomes necessary to an integrated delivery, getting professionals to cherish their own skills while acknowledging that others can contribute to the job they are doing on behalf of children. To me, this amendment has that sense of those primary legislation clauses which said, ““You are about standards; you are promoting choice; you are promoting diversity””. I think it might help those who are trying to take Every Child Matters, a very important and fantastic agenda, into the field. For those reasons, I ask my noble friend to consider it. To tell the truth, it is a good trick to mirror something in the Children Act 2004 because it sends the same message to different groups of professionals—and we are trying to encourage them to work together. I look forward to hearing my noble friend’s comments, but from my reading at the moment, this might just be something that will help us in the years to come.