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Queen’s Speech

My Lords, it is a pleasure to open the contributions from these Benches to the debate on the humble Address today, which covers such important matters as equality, social affairs, health and education. I will concentrate my remarks on education and children, this being my portfolio, and leave the other matters to the galaxy of talent arrayed beside and behind me. I, too, look forward to the two maiden speeches. At this stage in any Parliament, it is tempting in a debate such as this to review the Government’s record and this afternoon I have no intention of resisting that temptation. I am afraid that I have rather a lot of negative things to say but, before I do so, I will pay a few compliments. It is true that this Government have tried to do more for children than any other recent Government. The results of their efforts may be limited, but I for one have never denied their good intentions and I do not do so now. I may differ from them in the way in which I would achieve the much needed improvements in the lives of British children, but I share the Government’s intentions on the whole. Their greatest success has been in the sphere of early years, where the Sure Start children’s centres, based as they are on multidisciplinary working, enable problems to be identified early and help to be given. Before I turn my attention to the legislation that we are promised and that is within my portfolio, I will review where we have got to in the past 12 years. The Government have been far from inactive. Since 1997, the variously named education departments have produced 11 Green Papers, nine White Papers, 11 education Bills, 500 press releases and 1,800 statutory instruments. Each year, the amount of guidance sent out by the Department for Children, Schools and Families amounts to 4,000 pages of documentation, which is more than the King James Bible. The Bills relating to children brought forward by the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice are too numerous to mention. We have had a £500 million literacy strategy, a numeracy strategy and the Every Child a Talker strategy, which I welcome. There is no doubt that more money has been spent on education and on the fabric of school buildings. We have had money and legislation by the bucket load, but have we had progress? Perhaps we should compare a few statistics. In 1997, after 18 years of a Conservative Government, more than half—54 per cent—of 15 year-olds failed to achieve five good grades at GCSE. In 2008, according to the DCSF’s figures, more than half of 16 year-olds failed to achieve five good GCSEs including English and maths. In 1997, only 63 per cent of 11 year-olds reached level 4 in English. In 2009, we still had one-fifth of children leaving primary school without being able to read and write properly. In 2008, the equivalent of 2 million more school days were lost than in 1997 as a result of truancy. In 1996, according to a survey by the Association of County Councils and the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, 600 schools still had outside toilets and there was a £32.2 billion backlog on school building repairs. That situation has much improved. There are no outside toilets. The Government must be flushed with success. But the Building Schools for the Future programme is two years behind schedule and still if you want a new school it usually has to be an academy, whether you like it or not. Since 1997, the number of young people not in education, employment or training has gone up despite the Government’s best efforts. Despite the target of reducing NEETs to 8 per cent by 2010, nearly 12 per cent of 16 to 18 year-olds are currently in this category. Even more worrying statistics relate to the discrepancy between the life chances of children in different demographic groups, a matter that I would have thought would be a top priority for a Labour Government and certainly would be for a Liberal Democrat one. Fewer than one in four children entitled to free school meals achieve five good grades in GCSE including English and maths. Only 7 per cent of children in care achieve those grades in all subjects, compared to 62 per cent of all children, despite the Government’s target of 15 per cent for this category of children. This Government have been ambitious and very keen on setting targets for themselves, but last December the DCSF admitted that it had failed to achieve half of them. Research has shown that many more schools in poorer areas than those in richer areas fail to meet the Government’s target of 30 per cent of children achieving five good passes in GCSE including English and maths. It seems that, while the gap between rich and poor has widened under this Government in economic terms, so has the gap in educational terms. There is a strong correlation between socio-economic background and educational achievement, with its consequent negative effect on social mobility, and that is after 12 years of a Labour Government. As regards children’s rights, the rights that a child can expect to be honoured are determined by the setting in which he finds himself, but we will debate that in more detail, I hope, during Second Reading of my Private Member’s Bill on children’s rights. This Government seem to believe that if you legislate it happens, but it does not. It is just like a child writing out his Christmas list for Santa, pushing it up the chimney and then waiting confidently to see lots of interesting lumps and bumps in his stocking on Christmas morning. But it is not like that in the real world. In the real world, Santa’s little elves have to do a lot of very hard work to make the toys. Here, I am drawing a parallel with teachers. Most people in education know that driving up standards, the stated objective of this Government, is best done by taking note of good research and by investing in high-quality teachers and school leaders and then giving them the training, support and freedoms that they need to do the job, rather than by constantly imposing new bureaucratic burdens. Even before legislating, the Government have failed to take account of evidence in setting their priorities, a good example being the profligate way in which they threw away years of detailed research when they arbitrarily dismissed the findings of the Cambridge Primary Review. Take class sizes. Official statistics in May this year showed that 10,000 five to seven year-olds were in unlawfully large class sizes—that is, over 30. England’s primary school classes are among the largest in the developed world, the average being 26. Among the OECD countries, only Japan, Korea and Turkey have larger ones. This is despite clear evidence that class size matters a lot at this age and despite the Prime Minister’s declared aim of reducing class sizes to those that exist in private schools. Indeed, I do not think it a coincidence that, while this situation exists, the UK has plummeted down the international league tables of reading and maths standards. Unless the child gets a good start at school, it is very difficult for even the best teachers to correct the situation. The Liberal Democrats are committed to a costed policy of reducing infant class sizes to 15 so that the teacher has enough time with each child, a policy that neither of the other parties will fund. After 12 years of Labour government, we still live in a country where performance at school is determined by how rich your parents are and where you grew up. The poorest children currently fall behind before they even start school and often fail to catch up. We on these Benches want to break the link between social background and academic performance so that all our children can fulfil their potential. That is why we have devised a pupil premium, increasing the funding for the poorest children to private-school levels—and, unlike the Conservatives, we have said how we would fund it. Apart from driving up standards, this Government have made a great thing about parental choice. I have no problem with that as long as it is real choice. However, in January 2009, one in six parents did not get their first choice of secondary school for their child and over 20,000 parents did not get their child into one of their top three. Children themselves are not getting a true choice of curriculum in school. Many schools no longer offer a GCSE course in a modern language. There is much evidence that schools are choosing exam courses with the infamous league tables in mind rather than offering what is best for the children. Courses with four GCSE equivalents are offered to boost the school’s position in the league tables instead of others that are perceived to be more difficult. These league tables have skewed our education system and stifled choice to a horrifying extent and it is high time that they were abolished. Let me now turn to what is on offer in this short parliamentary Session, the swansong of this dying Government. We are offered a pick-and-mix schools Bill that is worthy of the late, lamented Woolworths. The Children, Schools and Families Bill, which is to start its progress in another place, contains one or two desirable things, such as the mandatory PSHE, which the Minister mentioned and for which I have long campaigned. In parenthesis, I assume that the courses will contain the material about the unacceptability of domestic violence, on which I congratulate the Government. However, much of the rest of this Bill is premature, unpiloted and no more than aspirational. Indeed, it even amends measures in the apprenticeships Act on which the ink is hardly dry since we passed it through this House no more than a month ago. Little did I know when I expressed concerns and reservations about the new schools complaints system a few weeks ago that the Government were already planning to open the floodgates with a whole lot more meaningless opportunities for parents to complain. I was staggered when I read the first clause of this Bill, about pupil and parent guarantees, to find that it contains a set of "ambitions" for pupils and "ambitions" for parents. I have never come across this expression in a piece of legislation coming before this House in the 10 years that I have been here. I can only surmise that this Bill is no more than a lot of ambition with no prospect whatever of becoming law or providing anything real to the children of this country. I looked in a little more detail and consulted my Oxford English Dictionary, where I read that the word "ambition" means, ""a strong desire to do or achieve something"." The root of the word, I discovered, comes from the Latin "ambire", meaning, ""to go around (canvassing for votes)"." I leave your Lordships to draw their own conclusions about the real purpose of this piece of legislation. But what are these ambitions? Does the list contain the ambition for every child to fulfil his true potential, as suggested by the Minister? No, it does not. Schools can carry on concentrating on the C/D borderline at GCSE in order to protect their position in the league tables instead of helping the potential grade F pupil to reach grade E or the B-grade student to raise his sights to an A. But no, the first ambition is for all pupils to go to, ""a school where there is good behaviour, strong discipline, order and safety"," motherhood and apple pie for lunch every day. I jest about the last two, but this ambition raises a serious point about the safeguarding of children in schools. I have seen research where members of school staff have been convicted of child abuse offences against pupils, some of the gravest severity, and yet a subsequent Ofsted inspection bears no reference to the failures that might have contributed to the abuse. Neither have the failures to safeguard been inspected against to ensure that no such thing ever happens again. It is the duty of parents to hold schools to account for the safeguarding of their children, but parents look to Ofsted for evidence of this and Ofsted is failing in its duty to parents. What is more, the DCSF is not holding Ofsted to account for this failure. Unless that changes, the Government’s ambition of a safe school for every child will not be achieved. Will the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, agree to meet me to discuss these very serious problems to which solutions have already been found in other common law countries? I will mention only one other item in the Bill, which is the proposed introduction of a new licence to practise for teachers. I believe that that is premature. It is essential that the Government should carry through their welcome commitment to introducing an entitlement to continuing professional development for teachers before introducing a licence to practise or it will be meaningless and people will get around it. That entitlement needs to be real and comprehensive so that all teachers have a fair and equitable chance to meet the requirements of the new licence—and, of course, the quality of the CPD experience is crucial. If we simply add the licence to practise as another layer of accountability on to teachers and schools, the message that they will take from the initiative will be not that they are trusted, but rather the opposite, which would be a disaster. I look forward to debating all these issues in greater detail at the Second Reading of the Bill. I also welcome the Child Poverty Bill, in which I will take part. First, however, I look forward to the Minister’s response to the debate.