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Education and Inspections Bill

This group of amendments relates to admissions, as the Minister said, and many of them are technical. However, amendment No. 35 ensures that the governing body of a community or voluntary controlled school carries out the admissions decisions of a local authority. At present, as the Minister said, although local authorities are the admissions authorities for such schools, there is apparently—this was news to me—no statutory duty on governing bodies to comply with these decisions. Amendment No. 36 will ensure that the governing body of a foundation or voluntary school consults its faith schools before determining their admission arrangements under section 90 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. It will also give faith groups the new power to refer an objection about admission arrangements to the schools adjudicator. This new power follows representations made to the Government by the Church of England and the Catholic Church. I recognise the value of this amendment in ensuring that faith schools implement the views of their faith’s hierarchy in respect of admission decisions. At present, many faith schools are run predominantly for the benefit of members of the faith. For instance, under the Roman Catholic code of canon law, Catholic parents have a duty to choose schools that can provide a Catholic education, and no school may be called a Catholic school without the permission of a competent ecclesiastical authority. It is clear that religions and denominations should play a key role in determining the admissions policy of their schools. Amendment No. 36 would, for example, allow faith groups to disseminate best practice with respect to admissions, and to encourage their schools to adopt common admissions frameworks. It would help to back up the Church of England’s recent commitment to ensuring that 25 per cent. of the pupils admitted come from non-Christian backgrounds. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition that that is a great example of social responsibility, but without this amendment the Church of England would have no recourse against its own schools if they decided to defy the policy of its hierarchy. Amendments Nos. 38, 39 and 40 enable the schools adjudicator to consider whether his decisions should be binding for the full period permitted by regulations, or, as the Minister said, whether a shorter period would be more appropriate. This is a sensible amendment, which we support, as it prevents the need for a school to seek permission for trivial changes following an adverse judgment from the adjudicator. Amendments Nos. 43, 44 and 45 relate to pupil banding. Clause 49 amends section 101 of the 1998 Act, which currently permits banding in cases where schools make their intake representative of the ability range among applicants for admission. The Bill extends this by allowing schools to band in order to have a different range of abilities that are representative of, say, children at several different schools, all children in the local authority area, or children throughout the country. However, if a local authority wanted to introduce this new form of banding to one of the schools for which it was an admission authority, it would need to seek the consent of the governing body. These amendments extend this requirement to the existing form of banding. This issue was overlooked when the Bill was drafted. We raised it in Committee, and I am very pleased that the Government decided to take on board our concerns and to introduce these amendments. We were concerned that, while banding can be a useful tool where schools want to ensure a genuine all-ability intake, if imposed on schools, banding risks becoming a tool for social engineering and could severely hinder parents’ ability to choose schools for their child. We were particularly concerned that local authorities might use the duty in clause 1 to promote fair access as a pretext for imposing banding across a wider area. We were also concerned that some local authorities might seek to promote banding more widely because of an obsession with a school’s intake, rather than a focus on school standards. In my view, it is teaching and leadership that play the pre-eminent role in ensuring school quality, not intake. Education should be primarily concerned with ensuring that each child fulfils his or her potential, not with ensuring a particular mix of abilities in a school. Parents will not have confidence in the education system if it requires their child to be bussed across town simply to satisfy an arbitrary quota on ability range, especially when that is imposed contrary to the wishes of the school. Schools need to be free to decide to adopt banding when that suits the school’s ethos and circumstances, and it should not be used to push social agendas that lack the support of parents. Therefore, we welcome the amendment and will support it and the others in the group.