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Education and Skills Bill

I shall not speculate on the timing of the announcement of Government new clause 14 or the motives that informed it. I simply say that we are happy to support it and believe it necessary to address some of the unfair practices used in admissions over the years, which have been identified in many reports, including the Education and Skills Committee report three years ago. We have two concerns about admissions, which informed our attitude to not only new clause 14 but new clause 18, which stands in my name and that of my hon. Friends. First, we want to ensure that pupils and parents can choose schools, so that schools are not choosing parents and pupils to select their way to better performance. We want to ensure that the consumer rather than the producer is in the driving seat, if I may put the matter that way without provoking any comment from those on the Benches behind me. We also seek to challenge the extraordinarily high levels of social segregation that remain in the school system, which the Secretary of State mentioned and the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) would acknowledge. Some of those elements of social segregation exist because of schools' catchment areas and are difficult to address without using more complex admissions procedures and selective devices. However, where there are elements of unfair admissions that we can address, we surely should address them. Although I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is quite possible for schools in deprived catchment areas to perform well, even with the challenging youngsters they often have, he will know that the results in our school system are, generally speaking, driven by a school's social composition and its admissions practices. The hon. Member for Surrey Heath recently received a very interesting parliamentary answer, which I managed to steal from under his nose to use in some of the press coverage, so good was it. He asked the Secretary of State to break down the 600 or so schools that were failing to hit the Government's target of 30 per cent. five A*-C GCSEs, including English and maths, and to identify how many schools in each decile, according to deprivation, were failing to hit that target. The results were pretty astonishing, and they demonstrated what I assume the hon. Gentleman wanted them to demonstrate. They showed that 54 per cent. of schools in the most deprived decile failed to achieve the Government's target. I believe that the comparable figure in the top decile was 3 per cent., so we know that there are extraordinarily high levels of social deprivation in schools in this country, and we also know that they have a powerful impact on driving opportunities for young people.