Orders of the Day — Self-Governing Schools etc. (Scotland) Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 5:27 pm on 6 March 1989.

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Photo of Donald Dewar Donald Dewar , Glasgow Garscadden 5:27, 6 March 1989

No, as I want to get on.

As the Secretary of State will have noticed, I do not like the Bill. I do not want to spend a great deal of time going through the rest of it in detail because I recognise that I have already spoken for some time, although not as long as the Secretary of State. Let me hasten to assure him that I do not believe that the technology academies—although non-selective in statutory terms, they will make selection according to attitude and motivaton—represent educational progress in Scotland. We shall oppose in Committee the rigid testing in primary schools. It is educationally distracting and has almost no educational support.

I am not happy about the proposals for colleges of further education with boards of a minimum of 50 per cent. drawn from local employers. One of the great fallacies and a rather insulting assumption is that a horde of under-employed industrialists in Scotland nothing better to do than sit on boards of further education colleges, the Scottish enterprise boards and the crimebusters panels. Most industrialists I know have their hands full trying to maximise the return on their capital and trying to obtain orders to keep their work force in being. I take no delight in the idea of a further education plc, with all the fears that that will bring for the teaching of special subjects that are not commercially attractive.

Even the ancient office of rector of our universities is to be cut back at the behest, so rumour has it, of principal McNicol of Aberdeen university. I warn the Secretary of State that I—and, I suspect, many of my colleagues—took a close interest in that office when I was a student at the university of Glasgow. I should want a more substantial argument than the weak assurance that there have been approaches from certain universities. There would be. It does not seem to make the case for change very adequately.

The Bill is arrogant, ill judged and insensitive. That is the heart of the matter. The cause is the capitulation of the Secretary of State. Once again, he has fallen meekly into line, although there is always a mystery whether he is behind his hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mr Forsyth) or the Department of Education and Science.