Clause 1 - School travel schemes
School Transport Bill
9:25 am
Mr Mark Hoban (Shadow Minister, Education; Fareham, Conservative)
First, I shall comment on the admission made by the hon. Member for Southport. In the opening sitting, he described the Minister and me as amateurs. The hon. Gentleman is an experienced and distinguished Member of this House, who has served on many Committees. Perhaps in this case the amateurs have taught him a lesson.
I did not touch on the issue of grammar schools because that might have been divisive. However, the same issues apply to such schools and any form of selection or choice in relation to schools. It is interesting how this issue is developing; the Department would like some areas of Government policy to be supported through free school transport, but the Government are happy to leave other policy areas to scheme authorities.
I shall give an example. I rarely believe what I read in the newspapers, but today's edition of The Times reported that there might be free school transport between schools and places where extended school activities take place. It would seem that the Government are using free school transport to support one of their policy directions, but trying to deny people that right when they exercise a choice to go to a specialist school. Parents will choose whether they want to use those extended school facilities and will be provided free school transport to them, although some parents will not choose to exercise that right.
The Minister talked about some of the anomalies in existing schemes. Clearly, LEAs operate discretionary transport schemes at the moment; some operate such schemes for grammar schools, and provide free transport to those schools. Would the Minister be happy if, in their pilots, LEAs that had developed a good network of specialist schools came up with schemes that supported the choice of parents to send their children to such schools rather than to the nearest school? Although all schools are required to meet the full requirements of the national curriculum, most of us recognise that a specialist language college has greater resources and expertise for teaching languages than a school that does not specialise in languages. It would be helpful if local authorities had some indication from the Minister whether schemes that help to promote choice and enable parents to exercise choice by sending their child to a specialist school would be permissible.