Clause 2 - Duties in relation to diversity and choice
Education and Inspections Bill
6:45 pm
John Hayes (Shadow Minister (Vocational Education), Education; South Holland and The Deepings, Conservative)
Owing to the mechanics of the Committee, I am in the happy position of having either to limit my remarks to 10 minutes or to extend them to 10 minutes, depending on how things proceed. I shall speak briefly to amendments Nos. 5, 161 and 88. Amendment No. 5 has stimulated a healthy discussion in Committee about the ethos of schools. At the heart of that discussion is proper consideration of whether leadership in a school—an essential element in developing an ethos that delivers a high-quality education—is a science or an art.
Is the effective education of children about a series of management, teaching and learning techniques, and things that can be adopted, borrowed and learned from other institutions, or is it something more ethereal? Is it a mystical capacity to inspire; a semi-magical blooming of a child’s capacity to comprehend, analyse and empathise? In truth, I guess that it is about both. It is about teachers having the right techniques and a school having the right ethos. It is also about understanding the special quality of teachers to get the best from children and to help them to achieve their potential. I do not take a dogmatic view about such matters; indeed I do not take a dogmatic view about anything.
It is self-evident that, in spreading best practice, we will be building on the good things that already happen within almost every school. Hardly a school in Britain does not have some good practice. When we talk about poorly performing schools, we must not assume that there are not good teachers labouring in them. We must not assume that children are not making progress in them. We must not assume that those schools are doing nothing right. That is certainly not the case. It is for us in this House to talk up teachers and schools, not to talk them down as has too often been the case for a long time across the political spectrum.
The sense of communal identity built on shared value that elevates expectations and allows all members of a school community to contribute to a process that grows along with the institution seems to be something that we can identify and share through the collaboration and mentoring that the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough mentioned a few moments ago. She is right about the availability of technology to allow that process more easily. It is true that we should be able to take advantage of technology to share among schools some of the skills, resources and strengths that I have described. I welcomed her contribution in that respect. It is entirely in the spirit of our amendment No. 5 on sharing good practice.
I turn briefly to amendment No. 161. I first became interested in special needs education when I was a county councillor and a member of an education committee. After the Warnock report and the subsequent Act of Parliament that was introduced by a Tory Government—misguidedly, in my judgment—I began to have profound doubts about the inclusion strategy that was then the orthodoxy across the political spectrum. I defended several parents who wanted their children to be educated in special schools, as I did many parents who were seeking out-of-county and, indeed, out-of-country placements for their children because places other than the local authority were best suited to provide an education in line with their statemented need. I supported parents who were trying to find their way through the statementing process, which bamboozled and intimidated so many, and I became convinced that, although inclusion works for some, it simply is not good enough. For many, it does not deliver the goods or match a child’s particular needs. We should be bold and brave enough to do what Baroness Warnock has belatedly done and to admit that some of the assumptions that underpinned the Act and which were embodied in her report were wrong.
In principle, statementing is quite a good idea—my view on the issue may differ from that of my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, although I do not know, because we have never talked about it. I believe that it is good to crystallise a child’s needs, because that gives the child and their parents an entitlement that they would not otherwise have. That is, of course, a good idea, and although the process may be too complicated, the principle is right. I am convinced, however, that the best way forward for many of the children who have been statemented is a place at a special school. That is particularly true of children with learning difficulties of one kind or another, but also of children with the kind of physical disabilities that my hon. Friend mentioned, and deafness was principal among his considerations.
In that respect, I was going about my business in Spalding on Saturday, as I routinely do, when I met a constituent in the photographer’s shop that he runs—indeed, I was picking up the pictures that I showed the Committee earlier. We conversed about the business that we were transacting, and I talked to him about his profound deafness. He talked about his educational background and said that he went to a very good school. I asked where it was, and he named it, but I will not, for the sake of discretion, say where it was. Rather poignantly, he said that it had closed down, although he was not making a political point, and I did not choose to exploit it either. However, the school’s effect on that man’s life was to make him aware of his potential, raise his expectations, allow him to prosper and bring him into the community in a responsible position as a respected local businessman.
Hon. Members could replicate that experience perhaps many hundreds of times in speaking about their own constituents, and I want young people in this generation to have the same opportunity as that gentleman to fulfil their potential. I therefore strongly defend special schools and strongly amplify my hon. Friend’s comments about not only their survival, but their expansion. Let us be more ambitious than simply saying that special schools should be saved; new special schools should open where they are necessary to meet demand and where parents want them for their children.
Although special schools are so important, the reasons why may not be self-evident. First, special schools allow a concentration of resources that is hard to duplicate in the mainstream, as are the skills of the teachers. Secondly, they provide confidence and security to young people who are often extremely vulnerable. We talked earlier about disadvantage, and there can be no greater disadvantage than beginning life with a handicap—I use the word advisedly, because I know that it is not the modern idiom—that inhibits learning. Thirdly, such schools are often smaller and therefore more intimate, so the relationship between staff and students is special. Their character and, to use a word that has perhaps been overused today, ethos are something to behold.
Jacqui Smithrose—