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Education Bill

My Lords, I hear what my noble friend says; I am half comforted by it. As she knows, I edit the Good Schools Guide, and therefore have a long-standing and unhappy relationship with the Independent Schools Council inspection service, which has yet to return even one of my e-mails. Although I agree that it is inspecting much better than it used to, it still seems to take the school’s side rather more often than I find comfortable. I think that, because a lot of the people doing the inspecting suffer the same problem with difficult parents as the people who they are inspecting, they do not pay the attention that they ought to occasional signals of distress and therefore fail to spot underlying problems. I am very dubious about mixing education and welfare; they are different concerns and different skills. How is a young boy in distress going to talk to someone who appears to be a schoolmaster if he will not talk to his schoolmaster? You need a completely different character, training and skill-set to be a good inspector of welfare—to understand what is going on in a family, if you are in a local authority context, or in a school. I am not anticipating great disaster. Schools are light years away from what they were when I was a child and there is no general problem, but we all know that a lot of girls’ schools have eating disorder problems. There is certainly still bullying in some schools to an unacceptable level. Spotting those things requires someone to go round the school who pupils who have not talked to and who people at the school feel able to take into their confidence. As I said, that is a different character of person. For myself, I would be surprised if the ISC does that well. It may be a long while before we have a problem arising from it, because problems are mercifully rare.