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Schools

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. However, it was a Statement, as one expected, of old, rehashed ideas and the Government’s admittance that they have failed to get to grips with some of the serious concerns that are giving parents and teachers alike great anxiety. With this White Paper, the Government had a great opportunity to transform our approach to the education of children in this country. What the Secretary of State has in fact shown is a failure to address why so many of our young children are not reaching minimum requirements in reading, writing and numeracy from primary school age straight through to secondary education. We have seen a frightening rise in the numbers of young people not in employment, education or training. We have seen a rise in truancy and in the numbers of children repeatedly suspended from schools. The Government seem to have tacitly accepted this by ditching their national strategy for numeracy and literacy after years of lauding its success. Many of today’s parents are the product of a childhood under a Government who have taken more and more responsibility away from them and handed it to the state, while failing to make available effective educational provision. The Government cannot release themselves from being the architect of the failure of so many children to thrive and reach their full potential at school. This programme proposes to strengthen the responsibilities of parents to their children’s behaviour. If parents fail to comply, they will be prosecuted and fined up to £1,000. We all agree that parents have a key role to play in the support they give their children and schools in tackling poor behaviour, but surely we need to see what can be done to help parents carry out those expectations rather than criminalise them. We know that often the most disruptive children come from disruptive backgrounds. Do the Government really think that criminalisation of inadequate parenting skills is the way forward? The Minister said that all primary school children will have an entitlement to one-to-one tuition and all children in secondary school will have an entitlement to personal tutors. How will this be funded? Where will all these tutors come from? Will they have appropriate training? When will they come into action? Furthermore, it is proposed to have an extra 4,000 teachers for dyslexic children. Where will they come from? What qualifications will they require? Will the process involve special educational needs assessments? How does the Minister propose to fund the proposal set out in the pupil-parent guarantees, as there seem to be huge financial implications? I am sure that the Minister will quote the Secretary of State’s view that £400 million has been freed up due to the let-up of the recession. Can she explain exactly what this means and where this money will come from? The abolition of school league tables in favour of an ill defined and uninformative report card system will surely have one big loser—the parent. At a time when we need parents to have access to far more detailed information about the schools they are sending their children to, it would be a travesty to offer only a one-page report card that includes, laughably, a rating on how the school teaches children to control their feelings. Can the Minister offer any reassurance to our concerns that with such a paltry selection of very general information—consisting apparently of, among other things, ratings on truancy levels, sporting prowess and attendance at lunch—there seems to be little encouragement for schools to lift their academic standards. Surely just rating schools A to F will leave parents unsure about schools’ exact academic achievements. The Conservative Party has consistently argued for the strengthening of league tables, a process which would require a great deal more data to be made accessible to parents. As it is, this seems like another of those lost opportunities that we have become used to under this Government. A second and more serious point that I hope the Minister can clarify is what the actual function of the grades will be. If they are for parent information, they are remarkably uninformative. If, like under the New York system, they are to be used to justify sanctions and benefits for bad and good schools, it is important for the Minister to inform the House of what these might look like. It would be useful to know whether the system will be a means for state control of school behaviour or of giving information to parents. It would seem that the Government have not grown tired of watering down and rehashing the ideas of the Opposition. School chains are part of what Ed Balls calls an, ""uncompromising approach to school improvement"." Apparently they will engineer a situation whereby high-performing schools and education providers will take over less successful neighbours to create chains of successful schools. Surely this is nothing more than a watered down version of Conservative Party policy for opening the market to new providers. The Secretary of State called this White Paper radical during an interview on Radio 4. Will the Minister explain what is radical about taking a policy that the Opposition have developed, removing all its innovative aspects and then passing it off as new and revolutionary? The Minister will say that raising to £200,000 the salaries of head teachers who take on these chains of schools will be an incentive. However, it seems unlikely that it will provide the answer to the problem of the energy that head teachers put into running successful schools being taken away by working with poorly performing schools without the necessary support mechanisms. Will the Minister assure us that these super heads will have available the support mechanisms to ensure not only that their successful school will be managed properly but also that the new schools that they take on will be properly facilitated. This is a missed opportunity from a Government who have run out of steam. The proposals bring nothing but more bureaucracy, tinkering and meddling. The Government’s own report card would state "grade F". I look forward to the Minister’s response.