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Education Bill

I agree absolutely, and my hon. Friend anticipates my point. The English baccalaureate shines a cold and difficult light of reality on what is going on. I will ask a question that Members might expect to come from the Labour Benches: why is it that, because I went to a private school, I was able to study Latin and a range of academic subjects which friends of mine who did not go to private schools were not able to study? When I applied for difficult and competitive jobs in television, I was told time and again that Latin looked interesting on my CV. Why was I given that opportunity and my friends at state schools were not? I do not think that that is fair. I make no apology for a system that will enable people from less well-off schools to study academic subjects, because it is resetting a balance. It is a case not of having either academic or vocational subjects, but of having both. It is really very simple. If we look at the other objective measures of what is going on, we see that universities have courses that they value. I have a concern that our schools, in their bid to look good in the league tables, are pushing our children through courses that the universities do not value as much. The statistics show that only 1% of children on free school meals are going on to Russell group universities. That is not because those children are any less able than the counterparts, but because we have got something wrong. I would like to run through a few scenarios that I have come across to add colour to what I am saying. First, there is a boy in my constituency who went to a school in one of the more deprived wards, and he was prevented from taking physics. He was an incredibly bright chap and wanted to study physics, but he was prevented from doing so, which was awful. Secondly, the head who took over that same school recently said to me how despairing he was that he had bright students who had been told that they would do only vocational courses. Vocational courses are obviously equally important—someone had to build the building we are in now—but that does not mean that academically able children should not be able to pursue their course in life as well. Thirdly, we do not have the vocational element right. I do not even like the name ““vocational””, because a vocation is what one does, so one can have a vocation as a brain surgeon, as a plumber and even as an MP, but ““vocational””, which has slipped into the political language, is a euphemism for manual, practical and technical skills and crafts.