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Health and Education

That is an extremely important point, and it highlights the crucial significance of greater co-operation and communication between police, local authorities, and the national health service. Whenever there is a tragic case such as that of baby P, the media routinely decide to target social workers, but they are less aggressive about the inadequacies in some of our policing systems, and certainly about those in some of our health care arrangements. Finally on children in care, the reluctance of some local authorities to increase the number of children in care is certainly partly a financial matter, but we have to accept that the quality of institutionalised care that our country has provided over many decades has been appalling. That partly explains the reluctance to put more children into care. If we learned the lessons of some of the Scandinavian countries and provided a higher quality of residential care, and could be assured that the quality of parenting that children would receive in a residential setting was without question better than that which they received at home, perhaps we would be less reluctant to put children into care, temporarily or permanently. On schools policy, in my constituency, since 1997 every primary school, secondary school, and GP surgery has had its roof fixed. My local hospital has not only had its roof fixed but has been totally rebuilt. That is to the enormous credit of my party's Government. In addition, there is the welcome prospect of seven new local health centres being built in the very near future. My local authority is on the verge of being able to rebuild or refurbish all its secondary schools, where necessary. The chief executive and the director of children's services in Bury are keen to support the bid that they submitted on 20 November to the revised Building Schools for the Future programme. The Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Family is likely to be in north-west England in early January, and it would be extremely useful if he could find time to visit Bury and talk to the chief executive of the local authority and the director of children's services about the very good plan that the local authority has submitted to the BSF programme. My constituents could then look forward to the most dramatic schools rebuilding programme that they have ever seen. That is enormously to the Government's credit. Also enormously to the Government's credit is the inexorable rise of standards in schools over the past 10 years. It is unfortunate that each year, when the GCSE, A-level and key stage test results come out, parts of the community, and Members in parts of this House, routinely want to rubbish the improving standards and achievements of our children. It is unfortunate that the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee has left the Chamber, because he raised a number of interesting issues, on many of which I could agree with him; there is a good deal of common ground between us. He raised a number of issues to do with micro-managing our schools system. That is astonishing coming from someone of the party that introduced the Education Reform Act 1988, which imposed on a generation of young people the most micro-managed system imaginable, and which resulted in the hugely prescriptive national curriculum, Stalinist forms of testing and assessment, and the unbelievably inaccurate league tables that are routinely published, and which drive the behaviour of head teachers in our schools. It is beyond belief that anyone who supported that legislation could accuse this Government of wishing to micro-manage our school system. One of the most interesting developments of the past 12 months is the recognition, not just by the Government but in all parts of the House, that the era of the ERA—the Education Reform Act—has probably come to an end. We have exhausted the advantages gained from the 1988 Act—and there have been some—and we have to build on that and move on. The shift of direction to a more comprehensive approach to children's services, with a greater emphasis on children's well-being and a new focus on the remaining inequalities in our school system and on the importance of social mobility, is welcome, and I look forward to the proposed legislation in the Queen's Speech significantly advancing that new agenda.