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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I support the amendment. I have the highest regard for the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, the former Chief Inspector of Schools. He has written almost as many reports on schools as I have read. We are both experts on inspectors’ reports. Before I further express my support for the amendment, perhaps I may chide the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for saying that the implication of my amendment is to impose quotas of 25 per cent. The amendment would not do that. It would give powers to local authorities, if they wished so to use them to create community cohesion, to establish a quota of up to 25 per cent. We must not hear misrepresentations as early as four o’clock; it really is a little bit naughty. I support the amendment because it is helpful. It is not an alternative to my amendment. It is helpful because faith schools should be inspected more regularly and in a tighter way—I agree with the noble Lord entirely on that. However, it is being asked to carry a weight which it will not be able to sustain. It would make the inspectors the instruments of a policy—on which I suspect all your Lordships agree—for a happier and more cohesive society. Can we really ask the inspectors to do this? First, as the noble Lord knows, the inspectors inspect schools on very precise details; for example, is this school teaching history to key stages 3 and 4 correctly? In foreign languages, are the children able to practise sufficiently the language which they are studying? Do they have the equipment to do it? What is the quality of teaching? Again and again, some very subjective statements are made, but the inspectors are used to working in close definitions. The first thing they would have to ask is—I am not being pettifogging—what is the meaning of ““community””? If an inspector examines an exclusive Jewish or and exclusive Muslim school in, let us say, Tower Hamlets, what is the community of the cohesion with which the inspector is concerned? Is it just Tower Hamlets? Or is it Tower Hamlets and East Ham? Or is it the whole of east London? Or is it the whole of London? That is what inspectors will ask and what the Government will at some stage have to define. They will have to define exactly what ““community”” means in this context. I suspect that what the amendment is getting at is a report on relationships—the relationship of that school with the other local schools, the relationship of that school with the parents and children of other schools. Inspectors will have to look at precisely what is taught in schools under religious education. That was raised by the noble Lord I think. The inspectors will have to make a comment on one of the most difficult fine lines in religious education: where religious education ends and indoctrination starts. That central question has to be asked. Inspectors will have to comment on it and they will have to attend a large number of religious instruction classes in schools to determine that. If religious instruction veers off into indoctrination, communities can suffer a lack of cohesion and trouble can start. Inspectors have a huge task. On relationships between schools, which my noble friend Lady Carnegy mentioned, and whether schools can have joint activities, it is marvellous if that can happen, but let us be realistic: there will be no joint activities in sport between a Muslim school and a non-Muslim school because of dress codes; there will be no combined swimming galas; there will be no combined music classes; there will be no combined art classes; and in drama there will be no desire to stage Romeo and Juliet between a Muslim school and an Anglican school because every page of Romeo and Juliet is against the Koran. I suspect that there will not be a great desire to stage a combined King Lear, because filial devotion in that play is not exactly what it ought to be. I ask your Lordships to be realistic about this. I entirely accept that relationships and activities are important between schools and they exist in some areas: for example, Catholic schools in Glasgow take their children to the local mosque. I know that because of an episode that appears in a very good novel I read this year, which I recommend to your Lordships, called Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan. It is about a Catholic priest in Glasgow and some ghastly Catholic yobbos—sometimes Catholic schools turn out ghastly yobbos—who are taken to the local mosque and the result is not community cohesion. But that is fiction. Schools can come together on civics and learn about that, but the degree of co-operation beyond that is not all that great. That is why people who support my amendment would like to see schools where children of different faiths play together in the playground, sit together in maths and physics lessons, talk together over lunch and go home on the same buses. We think that that is a happier system and a better way to create community cohesion. I turn to one specific point made by the noble Lord that reports should be acted upon. As the writer of many reports, he will know that sometimes reports are acted on and sometimes they are not. A recent Chief Inspector of Schools, David Bell, put in a report only a year ago that many Muslim schools, "““must adapt their curriculum to ensure that [they provide] pupils with a broad general knowledge of public institutions and services in England and help them to acquire an appreciation of and respect for other cultures in a way that promotes tolerance and harmony””." We all agree with that. What have the Government done as a result of that report? Perhaps the Minister can direct our attention to particular papers that have been issued by the department to implement that recommendation from the inspector, because many reports, as he will know, are not acted on. Mr Bell also said: "““The growth in favour of schools needs to be carefully but sensitively monitored by government to ensure that pupils at all schools receive an understanding of not only their own faith but of other faiths and the wider tenets of British society””." The department is miserably deficient in that. In the past year, I have asked various questions of the department on faith schools and I get the reply that the information is not held. I have asked how many children from other faiths go to faith schools and it has no idea. It did not even know that the admissions procedures in some faith schools require photographs, which is actually illegal. For some time, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has had on his desk a report about a school in Sussex which has only four pupils and which has radical weekends. Why has he not closed that school? If we are to depend on inspectors’ reports, we must be satisfied that they are acted on. Although I support the amendment—I think it embodies the direction in which we all want to go—by itself it carries a weight which the issue cannot bear and that is why I hope many noble Lords will later support my amendment.