---

Schools

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. I congratulate the Government on the investments that they have made in the schools system, which has led to some improvement. However, unlike the Minister, I would claim that we have always had state schools which have been as good as the best in the private sector. I have always been something of an apologist for state schools and we have many to be proud of. While the Government have put much needed resources into the schools system, there remains their gross failure during their 10 years to reform the secondary school curriculum. One reason why around 50 per cent of young people do not gain grades A to C is partly that most of them are totally unmotivated by the curriculum that they are offered. The Government’s failure to pick up and implement the Tomlinson report in 2004 means that they are left with a continuing process of relative failure in secondary schools. The Statement echoes elements of the White Paper, Your Child, Your Schools, Our Future: Building a 21st Century Schools System. As with so many of the White Papers that we see these days, it is a re-announcement of a lot of initiatives which have existed previously. Among them are a number of initiatives that we would applaud. The one aspect of it that seems so unreal in the present circumstances is where the money will come from. In spite of Speaker Bercow’s announcement last week that new ideas were to be announced first in Parliament, we had a good preview of this White Paper on this morning’s "Today" programme. The Secretary of State indicated that he had found £400 million in his budget to fund these initiatives for 2009-10 and 2010-11. This may be so, but where is the money coming from in future? We know that many cutbacks are still to be made. Among those elements of the White Paper that we on these Benches would applaud is one-to-one tuition for years three to six and, if the young people still need it, in the early years of secondary school. We have long argued that more money should be spent on those pupils who come from a disadvantaged background than on other pupils—we call it our pupil premium. We are glad that the Government have at long last accepted that this is so. Again, it is an initiative which, had they only put it into practice 10 years ago, might have led to very different results from our primary schools and fewer young people in the category of not in employment, education or training. We also support to a certain extent the New York-style report cards on schools. There is no doubt that league tables are a crude way of measuring a school’s performance, particularly those that are based largely on the crude examination score. Attempts to create value added measures of school performance have not been very successful. As the Government are considering a broader report card to measure schools, why when they look at local authorities are they going back to the league-table mentality and crude exam results? The White Paper refers to authorities that have been in difficulties and says, ""if this year’s exam results reveal serious weaknesses in these areas, or any area of the country, I will do whatever it takes to secure the progress of children and young people"." Again, it is back to using exam results to measure performance. One of our reservations about the Government’s proposals is that, like the Opposition, we do not fully understand what the guarantee means. Does criminality for parents mean that parents will be fined? Does it mean a criminal offence? ASBOs have proved to be unsatisfactory. I do not think ASBOs for parents will prove to be any better. Who is sued if the guarantee is not met? Is it the governors who are sued? Is it the local education authority or is it the Department for Children, Schools and Families who will be sued if the guarantee is not met? If it is the governors, the Government will find it increasingly difficult to find people to volunteer to be governors. The responsibility you take on as a governor is already formidable and if you are likely to be sued if the school does not deliver it could be even more so. On federations, on these Benches we have long argued that the right way to approach education is co-operation not competition. As the Minister knows, we had a lot of reservations about the schools policy which set one school against another and we continue to have those reservations about the academies programme because it puts them outside the community. In our view, schools are there to serve a community and need to co-operate with one another. We like the idea of a federation but we have grave reservations about sharing heads. As everyone knows, a good school is where you have a good head and a good leadership team and it is not easy to share those with other schools. If a head’s attention is divided between two schools, it does not always work. Neither do we want to see shared boards of governors. There was a time when many schools were run with shared boards of governors or schools managers, as they were then called. The concept of a board of governors is to be a link between the community and the school. It is not a good idea to have shared boards of governors between a lot of schools. Federations in terms of co-operation between schools—yes; federations in terms of having lots of schools with one head or one leadership team or one board of governors—no, that is not what we want to see. We do not understand why the Government are proposing to slim down boards of governors. They have slimmed them down a lot and boards of governors work quite effectively now. There does not seem to me to be any room for slimming them down more. Given the responsibilities they are putting on boards of governors—the fact that you have to have a governor who represents special educational needs, a governor for children in care, a governor for health and safety—it is difficult to see why you would want fewer governors. Governors are an important link between the community and the school. Can the Minister tell us more about the Government’s proposals for teachers, including the requirement for a Master’s qualification and licence to practise? Are they proposing that no one can teach until they have a Master’s degree? If they want teachers to have a Master’s degree, I would hope it would become part of the CPD training and that teachers would not only get time off in order to acquire these extra qualifications but could do so in bite-size chunks. In that way they could gradually build up those qualifications and be recompensed for having done so and for having given up their own time for doing it.