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Education and Skills Bill

A good question. ““Ethos”” refers, inevitably, to the qualities that a school has that make it distinctive and special, the qualities that parents admire and pupils appreciate—a commitment to discipline, to high standards, to making sure that an academic curriculum is available to all, a belief that every child, properly taught and appropriately nurtured, can achieve more than the parents may ever have envisaged. One of the distinctive features of faith schools is that, whether actuated by the individual tenets of the beliefs that motivated the founders or by the commitment of those within them to good education, they consistently outperform the mean level of other schools. They are something to be cherished, something that the previous Prime Minister made it clear that he cherished, and they are schools that, unfortunately, feel demoralised and under attack as a result of the Secretary of State's intervention—not a happy moment in his career. What was the consequence of the Secretary of State's intervention? We had lurid headlines about cash for places. Any suggestion that cash was determining access would have been worth objecting to, but there was no evidence that cash was determining access. As I pointed out on the Floor of the House, the money that was required and requested by those schools was required and requested for good reasons and entirely consistent with established practice, not affected by the clauses and amendments that we are discussing today. It was the case that the money that was asked for specifically by Jewish faith schools was asked for to provide the physical security of those children, who face a renewed and increased threat of anti-Semitic attack, and it was also required to pay for the explicitly religious Jewish studies, which are not covered by the amount of money that the DCSF remits for education in those schools. So it is entirely understandable that there should be a request for purely voluntary contributions. Within the community concerned, people knew that the contributions were entirely voluntary. It is the case, as was pointed out by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, that in some of those schools a third of parents or less are paying the voluntary contributions requested. If it was the case that those voluntary contributions constituted a barrier, if it was the case that they determined entry, why in those schools would so few be making that contribution? When the Secretary of State launched that attack, he was not aware of the precise figures, how many people had paid or their circumstances. If he had been, I doubt very much whether he would have launched his ill considered attack.