Clause 36
Education and Inspections Bill
4:00 pm
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister (Schools), Education; Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, Conservative)
The hon. Gentleman needs to be careful with evidence-based policy making in the education sector. Much evidence-based policy is not scientifically based. We will table an amendment later in the Committee to insist that research paid for by the Department for Education and Skills is scientifically based, with a control group of randomly placed children. That cannot be done deliberately, but it can be done inadvertently, and we need to focus only on research of that kind. In America it is now the law that state-funded research must be scientifically based. We need to ensure that the evidence on which we base our policy is as rigorous in education as in medicine.