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Education Bill

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 78, which is in this group. It is a very simple amendment to put community cohesion back on the list of items Ofsted will inspect. When I learnt that it had been taken out, I was very perturbed because if schools have responsibility for community cohesion, as I have been told, I believe that it is necessary for Ofsted to look at what they are doing for it. I think that this is more than ever an extremely important area for schools to concentrate on. It is about not racism or equality; it is about the community in which they live and being part of that. Now that we have more faith schools not of the faiths that we were used to, free schools and academies, it is more important than ever to have community cohesion in the list for inspection. Without community cohesion, young people will not understand what it is to live in a community. If somebody wishes to ask, ““What is community cohesion?””, Ofsted has a very good checklist of the issues under that heading. We should not deprive schools or the community of this inspection, or stop children learning about and understanding their own and other communities.