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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I want to support Amendment No. 16, to which I have appended my name. Therefore I do not agree with the arguments of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth or, indeed, those of my noble friend Lord Alton. The character of the problem with which this amendment tries to deal is very different from that which was put forward in their eloquent speeches. The right reverend Prelate speaks as a representative of a long-established national church and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, also speaks for one of this country’s long-established religious communities. This amendment tries to grapple with the problem of how to succeed in the ambitious project of creating a new basis for national life in large areas of the country, particularly urban areas. Therefore, one cannot deal with it or think of it in the same relaxed way as those opponents. In view of the ambition that we have, it cannot be right to allow exclusive faith schools to be set up funded by the public purse. That is a very important point. If funding is private and these are private schools, I agree that the Government have no interest in the matter. In those cases, schools have an absolute right to their own admissions policy, but this is part of national policy. We are trying to integrate new communities into the life of this country. They are much more ethnically and religiously diverse and are much newer than the communities that noble Lords who oppose this amendment spoke about. I argue that once you get into thinking about this as national policy, we have examples which involve compulsion. How was the United States created? It had a national policy of school integration in order to create Americans. I am not saying that we should do that, but the US faced that problem and that was how it coped with it. On the whole, over the years it has been immensely successful. Religious communities have survived and have not been destroyed. Americans have been created and an American sense of national identity has been established, which is what we are trying to do here. It is a question of getting the balance right. The amendment concedes that what the new minority faiths have asked for is the right to set up new schools which are funded from the taxpayer. They will be mainly Muslim schools. We, as representatives of the legislature and guardians of the taxpayer, have a right also to say that there should be some concessions in recompense; that is, the right to have some say in the admissions policies of these schools, which is very reasonable. The balance in this amendment is exactly right, which is why I support it.