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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I join the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, in paying tribute to the outstanding work of our head teachers and teachers in all types of schools up and down the country. I see that work day in and day out. I visit schools frequently and make no discrimination between the successes of different categories of schools. All of them are equally community minded, whatever their formal legal status, and it is absolutely right that we should pay tribute to them. It is fair to say that no Government in recent times have given them more practical support than this Government in terms of resources to enable the profession to succeed, its pay, its training—and in terms of its numbers, given the sheer size of the teaching profession, which has grown substantially in recent years and is vital to teachers being able to do their jobs. So I hope that those big issues of principle that the noble Baroness mentioned do not turn out to be the great divisions that she described. I continue to believe that many of her concerns are due to misapprehensions as to the design and effect of the policies that we are talking about. She repeated the view, which she articulated powerfully in Committee, that only community schools—that is, schools in the legal category of community schools, which is simply one characteristic of their governing bodies’ formation—could be relied on to act in a community-minded spirit. I deny that contention. There are effective schools in all categories that are extremely good at promoting community cohesion. I also pointed out to the noble Baroness that a disproportionate number of schools that offer low standards of education—which, frankly, neither she nor I would find acceptable for local communities—have the legal status of community schools. If only we have the determination to be bold in this area, it is absolutely within our power to see the development of many more successful schools serving communities honestly without fear or favour in the way that she would wish. We could have many more such schools if we were prepared to see the further development of mission by schools, including more flexibility in their governance, which is what trust status brings about.