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Health and Education

That is an important point, but I do not agree with the hon. Lady, because the statement by the Secretary of State some weeks ago—in fact, it was made in the week in which she and I were on a Select Committee visit to Canada—made the biggest change to the testing and assessment system since 1988 fully recognised the damaging effect of teaching to the test. In fact, I was going to go on to praise the Secretary of State for making that statement and changing our testing and assessment system and essentially getting rid of the increasingly redundant key stage 3 test, and for leaving the door open to future reforms to the key stage 2 test. The progress that we have made in the past few months on testing and assessment is hugely welcome. The progress on curriculum reform, with the publication of the Rose review and the new freedoms for individual schools to be more flexible about the curriculum so that they can tailor it more to children's individual needs and develop a more personalised approach to the curriculum, is hugely welcome. A consultation was launched this week, and the notion of a school report card, replacing the bog-standard league table is hugely welcome. I hope that there will be adequate time for all hon. Members to consider what ought to go into the new school report card, which I hope will abandon once and for all the idea that raw scores are the only measure of a school's success. I look forward to the far more sophisticated but easy-to-understand form of a report card that will pay full recognition to the complete range of a school's achievements. There are two points on which I want to focus in a little more detail, beginning with my annual comment on school admissions. The Secretary of State will know of my interest in the subject, and that the Education and Inspections Act 2006 made significant improvements to the admissions system with the new code. Only this week, the Government published the revised code on school admissions, which will take effect early next year. I welcome it as another step towards a fairer admissions system that is likely to lead us a little further down the road to a better-balanced school intake. As all the international research indicates, countries that have balanced school intakes and that have the least inequalities and the flattest hierarchies between schools by and large perform better on all educational criteria. I welcome the new duty on the admissions authorities to meet the needs of the local area, and I welcome the improvements to admissions forums so that they, too, are more representative, and have to consider the fairness of admissions policies for that area. There is one element in the new revised code that I hope the Secretary of State will speak about in his closing remarks: the school's ethos. The Department's press release says that schools will be allowed to advise parents of their ethos during the application process and ask that children respect that ethos. Will the Secretary of State assure the House that the issue of ethos will not become a criterion for the selection of children? If that does happen, and if children, or parents on their behalf, have to sign up to a particular ethos as an admission criterion, it will be a hugely retrograde step. I would be grateful if the Secretary of State commented on the question of ethos in his winding-up speech.