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Education and Skills Bill

In fairness, I said that it is right—I very much agree with the hon. Member for Surrey Heath—that individual schools are capable of performing outside their social intake with strong leadership and good education. However, anyone who denies that there is a strong correlation between the social intake of a school and its results has only to look at the parliamentary answers that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath is getting back from the Government, which show in the starkest terms the link between social class and educational performance. Although it may be true that some of those schools suffer from the inability to attract high-quality school leadership, given the tough conditions that they face, it is difficult to argue that the big gaps in performance are simply due to the effectiveness of the teaching rather than the social composition of the schools, which has a powerful influence even though individual schools can clearly perform far better, or in some cases far worse, than their social catchment would indicate.