Education and Inspections Bill
1:00 pm
David Chaytor (Bury North, Labour)
It would give me food for thought. However, I have phrased amendment No. 180 to take that point on board. Plucking out an arbitrary figure or percentage in Committee is probably not the best way to proceed, which is why my amendment suggests that such matters should be dealt with by regulations under secondary legislation, because that would allow for a period of more careful consideration and consultation on what the right percentage should be.
My right hon. Friend the Minister’s explanation of why the Government considered a threshold and rejected it is probably sound. Arbitrary figures in such circumstances can lead to all kinds of unintended consequences. It is probably better to come to a judgment with all the evidence than to have a single trigger, because single triggers can vary by accident. For example, the expulsion of two children from a school would affect the threshold for the number or percentage of parents who could demand a new school. Such small, practical matters must be considered, which is why the issue would be dealt with better by secondary legislation.
I have spent most of the 20 or 30 years of my political life encouraging the voices of parents to get more of them involved in decisions on their children’s education and the overall planning of education in their local district. That is not easy. We should not overestimate the simplicity of such matters. I am arguing not against giving parents a voice, but in favour of balancing the voice of some parents with that of others and the wider community. We have to recognise that in planning a local education service, there needs to be an authority that takes on board the interests of all parents and children in the district—not only the interests of parents of children currently in school, but those of the next generation, looking 10 or 20 years ahead. We need an authority that can look not only at the current wider situation, but take longer-term decisions. Understandably, most parents are interested primarily in what happens to their own child, in their own school, for the period that that child is at that school. That is why I have put down markers pointing out that handing over supreme decision making to a small number of parents probably is not in the longer-term community interest.
Factors relevant to school performance also are at the heart of the amendments. The weakness in the Conservatives’ argument is that they start from a hugely ideological position that local education authorities are disastrous bureaucratic obstructions to the advancement of education in this country. Frankly, if that is their view, I am surprised that they are even fielding candidates in the local elections in two week’s time, but that is something that they will have to discuss with their own electorate.
Such a view defies the reality that, during the 136 years in which we have had some form of local education authority in the United Kingdom, the schooling system generally has advanced. Levels of achievement among our children have improved significantly—if they have not always improved year on year, they are certainly doing so now—and local authorities have played an important role in that. That is not to say that local authorities are the driving force behind the quality of education, or that there are not better and poorer local authorities, but to take as a starting point a sweeping generalisation that local authorities are an obstruction and make no contribution whatever to the provision of quality education in a given area is non-credible.
If we look at Ofsted’s frequent thematic and annual reports, and its reports on individual schools, we do not find it drawing a hugely close relationship between the performance of an individual school and that of a local authority. The fact remains that there are many local authorities in the United Kingdom that in recent years have received extremely good Ofsted reports, but still contain schools that are in difficulties. Furthermore, there are many good local authorities in the United Kingdom that more recently have obtained extremely good reports from the comprehensive assessment conducted by the Audit Commission, but that still contain within their boundaries schools in great difficulties. It is a mistake to assume that there is a direct relationship between the quality of the local authority and that of the education in all the schools within that authority's borders.