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Education Bill
8:30 pm
Mr Phil Willis (Harrogate and Knaresborough, Liberal Democrat)
If I have given the hon. Gentleman that impression, I apologise profusely. That is certainly not the case. We will be lost if my party, or any other party, goes back to the bad old days of a division between vocational and academic education, as if the two can be separated like sheep and goats—one lot going off on an academic path, the other on a vocational one. If that is the vision, I want nothing to do with it. [Interruption.] I agree with the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) who is saying from a sedentary position that that is not the case. I was simply trying to respond to the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West and ensure that he did not go home tonight and toss and turn in his bed agonising over what I may have meant.
I urge the Minister to give us clear parameters for key stage 3 and to leave key stage 4, in terms of advice and disapplication, until we have had an opportunity to consider where we are going with the curriculum for 14 to 19-year-olds.. Although innovation is important and we support it, the framework in which it takes place is also important. Increasingly, there are national considerations for key stage 4 and beyond, and I think that a desired objective of the Government—certainly, one of ours—is to increase participation beyond the age of 16. That must be a fundamental premise for whatever we do with the curriculum for 14 to 19-year-olds and it requires careful guidance. We do not want to go back to a situation where only the privileged continue in school to key stage 4.
In respect of disapplying the curriculum, will the Minister give me his thoughts on what will happen to religious education and say whether it will become something that could be disapplied? Will the Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education, which looks at religious education syllabuses throughout local authorities, be disbanded? That would allow individual schools either not to teach religious education and to be disapplied from the agreed
syllabus of a local authority, or to pursue fairly fundamentalist religious teaching. I hope that the Minister can give some reassurance on those issues.