---

Children, Schools and Families Bill

My Lords, I rise to respond to the debate from the Opposition Benches. It has been of extraordinarily high quality and a quite astonishing level of expertise has been brought to bear. I want to try to weave as many of the thoughtful contributions into my remarks as possible, but time is running out, so I will keep my speech as brief as I can. No doubt the Minister will be able to respond with support from what must be one of the most sizeable Bill teams I have ever seen assembled. At a time when I am sure the pupil to teacher ratio in primary schools is doing pretty badly, it is nice to see that the ministerial adviser ratio is in a very healthy state indeed. The Bill is a political afterthought, and that is why it has been brought forward at this stage in the Parliament. It is very much about making political points for debate. So be it, and we shall respond to them. The first point I want to make from these Benches is on the complexity of the Bill before us. My noble friend Lady Verma commented on this in opening the debate from these Benches. She talked about the complexity, bureaucracy and centralised control that we are witnessing. That was added to by my noble friend Lady Bottomley and was powerfully remarked on by the noble Lord, Lord Alton. I was struck by a couple of statements in the Minister’s opening remarks. First, she said that education had been at the heart of this Administration and that after 13 years the education system was in a position of which one could be proud. I shall look at that statement in a little more detail because many people would take a contrary view. They would point to the fact that half of all pupils leave school without achieving five or more A to C grades at GCSE, including English and Maths; 300,000 pupils are suspended from school each year for bad behaviour; every year more than 100,000 children—one in five—leave primary school unable to read or write properly; and that after 13 years of missed opportunity we have dropped from fourth in the world for science standards to 14th; from seventh in the world for literacy standards to 17th; and from eighth in the world for mathematics to 24th. Coming from an inner-city part of Tyneside, I have a life long belief in the power of education to narrow the gap between the most disadvantaged and most advantaged in society. It is one of the most important instruments a civilised society can use to narrow that gap. In my case, it began to be narrowed in Gateshead only when, under the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher, a city technology college was established in a town where the expectation of people staying on and going to university was limited; only 10 per cent of pupils in Gateshead stayed on at that time. Now, as a result of the city technology college raising the bar in terms of expectations, we have seen what can be achieved. That school is regularly sending 63 per cent of children on to good quality universities and large numbers on to Oxbridge universities, nailing the myth that because people come from disadvantaged backgrounds they are incapable of achieving the highest levels of academic success. We on these Benches certainly adhere to that. It is therefore particularly galling after 13 years that two-thirds of working class boys aged 14 have a reading age of seven or below. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, referred to that figure and the implications that it has. What makes the decline even worse, more tragic and costly is that the gap is widening between the richest and the poorest. This year, nearly a quarter of a million children left primary school unable to read, write and add up properly; overwhelmingly they were from the poorest families. This year, more than half the children leaving comprehensives failed to achieve basic GCSEs; again, overwhelmingly they were from poor families. Nearly 40 per cent of those children eligible for free school meals failed to get a single C pass at GCSE. This year, hundreds of schools entered no children at all for either A-level history, geography, physics, chemistry or biology—and invariably those were schools with the poorest families. This legislation does nothing towards narrowing the gap. In fact, even the Guardian, no less—at this point noble Lords opposite may wish to pay attention—on 8 May 2009 pointed out: ""Britain under Gordon Brown is a more unequal country than at any time since modern records began in the early 1960s, after the incomes of the poor fell and those of the rich rose. As a result, income inequality at the end of Labour’s 11th year in power was higher than at any time during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership"." Would the Minister like to come back to the Dispatch Box and still claim that this is a record of which they are proud? Faced with this staggering record of failure, what do we find is the target in the legislation that is needed to reverse this terrible record, particularly among the poorest in our society? The answer, of course, is to attack home schooling, when these are parents who are making huge sacrifices for the benefit of their children. Home schoolers are not failing children in this country; the state is. It is not the parents who take an interest in their children that we should be worried about; it is the parents who do not take any interest in their children that we should be worried about. When will the Government wake up to the problems that they face in their own state system? When will they stop obsessing over the spelk in the eyes of others, namely the home schoolers, and start addressing the plank in their own eye in terms of failing standards? The Government are patronising about parents and yet they fall in love with legislation, while all the evidence points in the opposite direction. The Bill will mean that, instead of parents being presumed to have the right to educate their children, they must in future apply for that right to be returned to them from the state. That is surely anathema in a civilized country, particularly when those parents do an outstanding job of educating their children. Then, of course, the target turns to personal, social, health and economic education. At this point I wish to respond to the invitation of the noble Lord, Lord Layard, who invited us to say a bit more about what we would do. First of all, we need to look at the record. We have had some 30 years of believing that, if only you provide an education for people and tell them about conception and the alternatives to abortion, then, basically you would solve this problem—education is the answer in these areas. We beg to differ, because the numbers beg to differ—this statement was very powerfully made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, in his remarks. Teenage pregnancy rates are now double the western European average: teenage pregnancies account for 7.1 per cent of all births in England, compared to an average of 3 per cent in western Europe. A study shows that when we are dealing with sexually transmitted diseases, those numbers have doubled since 1997. Over the past decade the number of young girls under the age of 16 seeking abortions has risen by 27 per cent. If the answer was simply more education, surely the trend ought to be heading in the other direction. Our proposal would be to have a greater partnership with parents. Parents care passionately about their children, about their life chances. They understand that their life chances are limited should they have children early on and that there is nothing better for inspiring young people and tackling the issue of sexual relationship education than inspiring them with their own potential for their life and what they can achieve going forward. Some comments were made about the importance of character—the importance of moral education. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bradford made the point very powerfully about teaching people not only the functionality, but also the moral context and the importance of character in arriving at those conclusions. Legislation already exists in this area. A question was asked as to what we would see as good legislation. Good legislation recognises the importance of the parent in the raising of their children, which places an emphasis on morality and on character, which trusts parents and school governors. In the Education Act 1996, the last Education Act of the previous Conservative Government, we set out the following broadly based curriculum. We said it should be one which, ""(a) promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society, and""(b) prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life"." That seems a straightforward statement: allowing parents, teachers and governing bodies to interpret that in their own setting would seem to be the best way forward. As for pupil-parent guarantees, which have been referred to on many occasions, rather than removing burdens on teachers and giving them the powers they need to deal with disruptive pupils, we see a proposal which could open the floodgates for litigation against schools and undermine their work and authority. As my honourable friend Michael Gove has put it: ""The fundamental problem with … guarantees is that the Government have run out of money and are reduced to printing promises that they know they cannot redeem".—[Official Report, Commons, 19/11/09; col. 163.]" They are like some bankrupt regime—maybe they are a bankrupt regime—that keeps the printing press going even though it knows that the pieces of paper that it is sending out are worthless because it does not have the resources and reserves behind it with which to deliver. At the end of this long Parliament, we are in great need of change that will raise standards of education in this country. Instead we have a Bill that concentrates on bureaucracy at the expense of action, centralised control at the expense of trust and narrow prescription at the expense of freedom. The Bill is a monument to a Government who have run out of ideas for addressing the real challenges of raising standards of education in this country and so hide behind guarantees, entitlements and agreements instead of taking real action to create genuine change. Everyone knows what goes into successful education. It is great leadership in a school, inspiring teachers, the support of parents and well behaved children. We would move towards a framework in education that reflected just those principles. We would give teachers the powers that they would need to keep order in the classroom. We would deliver more robust examinations, reflecting a more rigorous curriculum. We would guarantee freedom, independence and choice by removing regulatory barriers to make it easier for educational charities, groups of parents and teachers, co-operatives and others to start new independently run state academies. The Bill will do none of these things and it will do little to address the problems of poor standards in education, particularly those impacting on the poorest in our society. The need of the hour is for a Government who will free up teachers, trust parents and inspire children, especially from poor backgrounds, to achieve their personal best. The Bill fails that task and it fails in restoring the broken society. It is time that we had change in order to give those children a chance.