New clause 2 - Powers of Head Teachers
Anti-social Behaviour Bill
2:45 pm
Mr Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath, Conservative)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
We now return, perhaps for the first time this afternoon, to an issue of huge substance, although I am not seeking to minimise the importance of the Government accepting an Opposition amendment. New clause 2 represents something that is at the core of my party's policies.
I shall refer to one particular passage:
''Let's give heads more power over discipline in the classroom. We will abolish the costly and bureaucratic appeals panels that second-guess heads and governors''.
That is a policy commitment from the shadow Secretary of State for Education and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Green), speaking to our party conference last autumn.
Whenever we discuss the abolition of appeals panels, Government Members, and perhaps Liberal Democrat Members, say that the panels were created when the Conservative party was in government. When the appeals panel process was instituted in legislation, however, nobody in our party anticipated that the Government would mess about with the national lottery in the way in which they have, which they promised never to do when they were in opposition. Indeed, when they were in opposition, they tabled amendments to the national lottery legislation saying that no Government should ever do what they have done. They have messed about with the national lottery to allow the Community Fund to provide lottery funds to an individual whose raison d'être is working with parents to use appeals panels to overturn the decisions of heads.
The matter came to a head because the head of a Surrey school in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), which is not far from my constituency, decided that because of death threats issued repeatedly over the phone to a particular teacher, who, if I remember correctly, happened to be the head of PE, some children should be excluded from the extremely good secondary school, which I know well. I also happen to know the chairman of governors, who is a former senior county councillor.
The governing body backed the head in that exclusion but the appeals panel overturned it. Why did the appeals panel overturn it? It overturned it because that individual, whose raison d'être is to work with parents who are disgruntled about exclusion decisions, went along to the hearing to try to persuade the people on the panel to overturn the view of the head and the governing body. Conservative Members consider that to be a travesty. It was a gross misuse of the national lottery.
The national lottery was supposed to be about good causes. It beggars belief that the people in the Community Fund can think it appropriate to give lottery money to that individual, whose contribution to society is to try to undermine heads and governing bodies. I wish that I had the people on the Community Fund in front of me, so that I could cross-examine them, which I used to do when I was a barrister in court, on exactly what they think they are playing at, not with taxpayers' money but with lottery money, which is the people's money. Such decisions contradict the idea that the Community Fund is about good causes.
I do not blame the Minister for the Community Fund's daft decisions but I blame the Government for
messing about with the original idea of the national lottery. Under the rules of the national lottery as John Major designed it and the Conservative Government set it up, that sort of travesty could not have happened and money could not have been given to that individual. I cannot remember his name because my anger has driven it from my mind; I wish that I could remember it because I would put it on the record.