Schools: Free Schools
Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Nash
I could give a very long answer to that question but essentially I agree with my noble friend. The free schools programme is an outstanding success, and I use that expression advisedly. Free schools are much more likely than other schools to be rated outstanding after four or five terms of opening. On Monday, I mentioned a number of free schools which I invited noble Lords to visit and which have been rated outstanding within a few months of opening. There are seven, but I am sure that noble Lords across the House will be delighted to hear that many more have recently been judged outstanding in their fifth term of opening, and these reports will be published shortly. Therefore, we should be loudly praising the heads, teachers, parents, sponsors and governors of these schools.
The Lord Bishop of Oxford
My Lords, given that prevention is better than costly cure, can the Minister let us know what is being done to make sure that free schools are established as groups of interdependent schools, rather than independent and autonomous units? Can he let us know how what we have learnt from the academies programme—that we need to get schools grouped together in multi-academy trusts—is being transferred to free schools?
Lord Nash
The right reverend Prelate makes an extremely good point. Although it is true that a number of outstanding schools have been established entirely independently, the way forward is the school-to-school support model, with schools operating in local clusters and secondaries working with their primaries. We are taking this learning, which has been very successful in the academy movement, into the free schools movement.
Children and Families Bill
Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a film maker because it is in that capacity that I have spent the past 18 months making a documentary film about teenagers and the internet. I wish to speak only to Amendment 233, which is the narrowest of the amendments in the group, but in my view it is important and I have added my name to it.
The amendment is very modest, but within it lies the suggestion that at this time young people need additional help to navigate a world in which the very concept and experience of growing up has changed completely. It is a new and confusing world in which videos featuring beheadings occupy the same space as a homework assignment. The intense sexualisation of media and merchandising, the ubiquitous presence of hardcore pornography and the pressures of 24/7 connectivity are not simply the stuff of the Sunday papers. These are palpable pressures in the real-world lives of young people, and they have real-world impacts. Young people mirror pornographic scenarios denuded of the concept of consent and, most importantly in my view, of intimacy of any kind. They adopt a culture of anonymity that teaches cruelty without responsibility.
The working group should pay particular attention to the role of the internet and social media in sex and relationship education and in online bullying and harassment. It should do so with one eye on the particular problem of young people with learning difficulties, who are extremely vulnerable in this unfettered world. It should address the specific question of the demands placed on young women of body image, sexual norms and its relationship to self-harm. I have read much of the research and it is compelling.
The Government’s stated position is that the current, 2000 curriculum provides a good foundation on which teachers can build. But it has not been updated in 13 years. In that time, the ways in which young people access information, learn about sex and negotiate their interpersonal relationships has profoundly changed. The advent of the smartphone has been a game-changer. It is not simply about the internet and computers; the smartphone ensures that the adult world, in its full beauty and abject horror, is in the hands of children. It is a device which ensures that, once in trouble, a child finds it very difficult to get away. It is a personal device which effectively means that parents can no longer reasonably expect to fully know what their child is accessing or who is accessing their child.
The Minister has also said that the Government,
“trust teachers to deliver the education that pupils need and adjust it for the modern world”.
Teachers are crying out for a new level of information, uninflected and up to date. As someone who has conducted hundreds of hours of interviews over the last year, with some of the most eminent academics on this subject, I have had access to the research. I have also done hundreds of hours of interviews with young people. It is beyond any single teacher’s capability to collate information in a meaningful way and in an up-to-date manner, for the new world order that presents so many problems for young people. I cannot imagine any reasonable grounds on which the Government would refuse to gather the most recent research and best practice, and put it in a form where it is easily accessible to teachers and parents.
I quote the Minister again:
“Technology is moving very fast, and we do not think that constant changes to the regulations and top-down diktats are the way to deal with this”.—[Official Report, 30/1/13; col. 1580].
It is moving very fast. Very soon, we will have an entire generation that has learned its sexual norms from hardcore pornography; friendship rules from Facebook, and self-image from Pinterest and the rest. Of the many professionals I spoke to, not one—either technological or educational—suggested a list of sex regulations or diktats. However, hundreds of adults—parents and professionals—say that they feel more equipped to guide the young when they have the authority of robust information.
I have been absent from this Chamber during Committee on this Bill, so I have had the singular privilege of reading nine days of debate in one weekend. One of the exciting, or perhaps encouraging, things—and noble Lords may not realise this—is that the conversation was littered with the words “holistic”, “whole child”, “whole family” and “child-centred”. I suggest that this modest amendment sits very well within the deliberations of the Bill and reflects that attitude. The only possible reason for rejecting it, because it marks such a small step that needs so little in the way of resources, is the fear of what the working group it would create might recommend. I would ask the Minister to find a way of gathering the guidance, even if there is then a further debate and a fight about what we might then do with it.
I will not quote the many supporters of this idea because others have already done so, but I take the opportunity to say that all the research I have done and the people I have gathered on my journey I would be happy to put in the service of the Minister and Her Majesty’s Government.
The Lord Bishop of Oxford
My Lords, I also would like to speak briefly in support of Amendment 233, which was so ably and vividly introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. I have a particular responsibility in the Church of England for education, so I am pleased to be able to bring that authority and support, as it were, on behalf of all the schools that I represent. This is a small but important and crucial piece of work.
As has been said, it is interesting to note that the Mothers’ Union, the Children’s Society and a further 70 different organisations which are involved in and have some knowledge of this area all support the proposal. It was a few years ago now, but the board of education that I represent worked with the Sex Education Forum to try to produce some new guidance, but unfortunately that work was not taken up. It is clear from all we have been saying that the purpose of education is not simply to present children who can pass exams, but to create an opportunity for young people to take control of their lives and values, and to realise their hopes through their approach to life. It is a much larger task, and for that social, emotional and spiritual intelligence is important, along with academic prowess. When the chips are down, nothing matters more to us than our relationships and how we form them. As we have just heard described so vividly, this is a new age for people as they form their relationships.
Building a network of friendships and exploring more intimate relationships with particular people are hard tasks for young people today because they have been made extremely complex by the rapid changes in technology. It is in fact some 13 years of revolution since the last guidelines were produced. This is a fascinating world, but it is a jungle, and our young people have to navigate it. A rare consensus seems to be building around the need to update the guidelines, so it is vital that we seize this opportunity. As part of its commitment to addressing these issues, the board of education that I represent has been compiling resources for use in church schools and any other schools to help combat homophobic bullying. That is an important piece of work, but the problems go much wider. Given that, I want to say briefly that we need to get on the case urgently.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield
My Lords, briefly, I lend my support to all three amendments. In their different ways they are designed to do something about which I feel absolutely passionate, which is to make sure that all children and young people, in whatever sort of school they are, have access to high-quality, age-appropriate and up-to-date sex and relationships education. Of course, I always put it the other way around and say “relationships and sex education”, for a reason I shall come to in a moment; that is absolutely critical. We must focus on the need for all young people to understand the importance of healthy relationships. It should serve them as part of their fundamental education going through life.
I have read through all the evidence of what people think at the moment. We have heard it and I do not want to repeat it. We know what the National Association of Head Teachers thinks. We saw the reports of the consultation on PSHE education in March this year and the Mumsnet survey. I will just quote from the Brook survey of 2011, where one in four young people said they did not get any sex and relationships education in schools at all and 26% of those that did said that their SRE teacher was not able to teach it well. I fundamentally believe that relationship education should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum and taught by specialist teachers and others who really understand these things. At the very beginning, I should have declared an interest as vice-president of the charity Relate.
The Lord Bishop of Oxford
My Lords, this is an important amendment. The Refugee Children’s Consortium, a coalition of more than 40 NGOs that are involved in this sphere, is very concerned about this legislation and is looking for changes. Three or four weeks ago, I was with a group of four young people in Cowley in Oxford; 16 years old, three were from Eritrea and one from Somalia. They were so pleased to be at the end of a journey that had taken months, and to have access to education and safety. That was the thing they kept on saying: “We are safe”.
The Children’s Society told me that this is the time of maximum happiness. From that point on, it is all downhill, with 95% of the young people who come there having to go back at the end of a process that in many cases will lead to destitution—the word that we have used quite often. That, of course, has many implications for physical health, as a result of being malnourished and not being able to get access to a doctor. It leads to illegal work, sexual exploitation and all kinds of problems. There must be another way, a more humane and civilised way, of handling vulnerable young people who have all their lives before them. It seems crazy that, at the age of 18, everything should just turn over. Their needs for education and safe housing are basic things. The age of 18 should not be so critical that it makes people destitute. This is a really important amendment and we need to take it seriously. Destitution is not the answer.
The Countess of Mar (CB)
My Lords, for 21 years I was a lay member of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal. I used to hate it when we had young people of 18 presented to us for deportation. These youngsters had been through school, some of them having come to this country when they were seven, eight or nine years old, but they had no clue how to go through the legal system or get a solicitor—there were free lawyers in those days. It would have been extremely difficult for them to establish a life in their own country again. Many had lost touch with their parents, or their parents had died. They did not know what they would be going back to and, in many cases, did not speak the language. It is incumbent on us—this is maybe part of the social care aspects of the Bill—to see that social services ensure that their immigration status is settled before they are 18, so that when they leave school or are out of the care of the community they know where they stand.
Education: Citizenship
Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts(11 years ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Oxford
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for calling this debate. Citizenship education is an important subject and I will speak mainly about it as it is lived in, through and around what happens in schools rather than necessarily what happens after those school years; although what the noble Lord spoke about is important.
Citizenship education prepares young people for life in a complex, modern society where we all need to take our political, legal and economic responsibilities seriously, within the context of a sustaining moral framework. I want just to draw attention to a particular partnership which should exist in this whole field of citizenship education, which is the one with religious education. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Religious Education held a meeting last week where a whole number of young people, from different schools, spoke movingly about how important RE has been to them as the only opportunity they have at the moment to examine how they can live respectfully with difference, how they can understand people who have a very different world view and how they can live together in a harmonious community when they are encouraged to be in an adversarial relationship.
It is undoubtedly the case that you cannot understand the modern world without understanding religion, which has become more, not less, important in the past 20 years. Some of that religion of course, as we know, has been unhealthy; but most of it is of huge value, especially when it is realised that religious faith is the driving force behind the lives of over 70% of the world’s population.
Good RE encourages respect, tolerance, participation, community building, charitable activity, social engagement—all the things that we believe are part of citizenship education as well. Good RE creates active, informed and responsible citizens. The trouble is that RE is under severe strain at present, not through the intentional actions of the DfE, but through the unintended consequences of several key decisions. The English baccalaureate excludes RE; the reform of the so-called national curriculum excludes RE; RE is way down the list for GCSE reform; RE teacher training places have been halved in the last three years; bursaries for teacher training in RE have been removed; and so on. This has resulted in a reduction in staff, in classroom time, in resources and in exam entries and a deep fall in teacher morale. The British Humanist Association is as concerned about this as the RE council of which it is a part.
I mention this because RE is a natural handmaid for citizenship education and this malaise in RE is deeply damaging to the long-term health of society. WB Yeats said that the purpose of education is not to fill a bucket but to light a fire. The fire here is that of young people believing in a healthy, participative, respectful, values-based democracy. Citizenship education and RE are the best tools we have to shape such a society and to rescue it from utilitarian ideology. The noble Lord’s Question concerning citizenship education is therefore deeply important and I am very pleased to take part in this discussion.
Education Bill
Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 88 in this group. I support my noble friend Lady Turner in her previous amendments. She has explained the issues very well and I know that she has had extensive consultation with the Minister on them. We have heard most, if not all, of her arguments before and I think that they are very powerful. I know that there is some sympathy for her arguments among various faith groups. While the issue is about religion, it is mainly, I think, about fairness and discrimination.
In Amendment 88, my chief concern is the fostering of segregation in schools on the basis of religion. The change proposed by the Education Bill will make voluntary-aided faith schools the most attractive option to religious groups seeking to set up schools because they will be the easiest to set up. This is especially so if the local authority is readily in favour of the school, in which case proposals would be extremely likely to succeed. It is hard to see how this change is justified in light of the drive towards free schools and the fact that free schools cannot religiously discriminate in admissions for more than 50 per cent of their intake. Surely this is a reflection that faith-based admissions criteria should be curbed, not increased. This will increase religious segregation in admissions, extend discrimination against staff of no religion and increase the number of schools teaching faith-based religious education. I believe, as does the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, that all schools should include and educate all pupils together so that they can learn from each other instead of being segregated on religious and other grounds.
The Lord Bishop of Oxford
My Lords, Amendment 85, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, seeks to make it plain that religious criteria may not be used to employ staff in academies without religious designation or to make it obligatory to teach RE in such a school. That seems to me to be unexceptionable and I wonder why the amendment is needed. If it seeks to achieve a result that we would all agree with, it does not seem to me to be necessary. Like all independent schools, academies may use religious criteria in employment only when they are designated as a school of religious character or when a genuine occupational requirement, such as being a chaplain, is shown. Amendment 85 seems to me to be unnecessary at best and potentially confusing at worst.
In my view, Amendment 86 is more serious because it seeks to impose the genuine occupational requirement regime on to voluntary-aided schools, although strangely not on academies, as I read it. The occupational requirement is a substantially lesser power than that which currently pertains for VA schools and I believe that it is inadequate to protect these schools’ faith-based ethos. Noble Lords will appreciate that the faith-based ethos of the school is central to its character and to its performance, which are closely linked. It is particularly important that the leadership of the school is on board with the foundation of faith, because from the leadership flow the shape and character of the school and from that character flow the performance and the standards of the school. We might also note that the commitment to the religious character of the school is necessary in order to fulfil the terms of the trust, which lies behind the school operating on that particular land. That is basic trust law, so we need to keep in line with that.
I assure noble Lords that the governors’ powers of appointment are used with considerable flexibility, sensitivity and discretion. It is far from the case that all staff are from the relevant faith background. Schools want the best person—the best teacher—and the faith commitment of a teacher is only one of many criteria. Local factors are always relevant. I also think that the risks of discrimination are much exaggerated or overstated. I have been able to find hardly any evidence of discrimination in practice. Why would a teacher entirely opposed to the faith basis of a school want to teach in that school? The dual system ensures that, for teachers and other staff, there is always a choice of schools of a different character.
Amendment 86 also seeks to prevent religious reasons being used as a proxy for other kinds of discrimination. Sexual conduct is what the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, will have in mind. I am shocked at the very thought. Let me be absolutely clear: sexual orientation is not relevant and may not be taken into account in employment in a Church of England school. Sexual conduct can surely be taken into account in cases of alleged misconduct, and absolutely in the same way in relations between the opposite sex as the same sex. I therefore believe that Amendment 86 should be resisted.
Amendment 87 seeks to impose a consultation if Section 124AA is to be disapplied by the Secretary of State, thus enabling a VC converter academy to have the employment powers of a VA converter academy. We understand that the Secretary of State will require a consultation anyway as a matter of guidance or of regulation. That is surely fine. There would have to be a consultation if a voluntary-controlled school wanted to become a voluntary-aided school. However, I suggest that it would be better to leave that matter for guidance rather than for legislation, especially in the light of the requirement by the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, that the Secretary of State have regard—that strange phrase—to the consultation, because goodness knows what that will be seen to mean in later years. I believe that this amendment should also be resisted.
Lord Deben
My Lords, I believe that these amendments should be resisted because they are discriminatory. I was fortunate enough to be able to pay for my children’s education. I did so because I wanted my children to go to Catholic schools. I do not think that we should discriminate against poorer people who cannot make that choice. It is perfectly reasonable to choose that you do not want your child to go to a faith school, but to deny the right of people without the resources to choose a school in which the fundamentals are faith-based seems to me a retrograde action that is entirely unacceptable.
It is perfectly reasonable to have some categories of school in which this issue does not arise. These amendments seek to limit even more those categories that exist at the moment. I say to those who put them forward that there is a new kind of illiberalism, which is very determined to remove from parents what for many of us is the most important element in education: we want our children brought in the fear and love of our Lord. We should have that right whether we are rich or poor. After all, it is the church that started education in this country and it is the church that has upheld that education. It is a historic agreement between state and church that has enabled us to have a society in which secular people and religious people can live together in harmony. The increasing demand of those who want a society in which their particular—I have to say—arrogant determination that everybody shall be educated in their way is wholly contrary to the liberal society that we have created.
There used to be a very nasty phrase, “Scratch a liberal and you find a totalitarian”. I am afraid that this is increasingly true in our society. People who claim to be liberal are determined that their liberalism shall—
Education Bill
Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Oxford
I, too, declare an interest as a bishop of the Church of England. It will not surprise your Lordships to know that I resist the amendments in this group. As a preliminary, I say that we easily encounter in this kind of debate the myth of neutrality, with the idea that the amendments might lead us into a distinction between church schools—or, at least, religious schools—and religiously neutral schools. That is a common myth: that we would have religious schools and non-religious schools. I am not sure that we have a basic philosophical agreement on that point; I do not want to pretend that we do.
It is unnecessary to change the law, which seems to be working well. We have the existing safeguards; we have the possibility of withdrawal. The fact that so few parents use that right of withdrawal suggests to me that most parents think that it is working pretty well. A generous experience of spiritual and religious reflection goes on in assemblies; obviously, I go to a lot of them. In them, I experience not just Christian worship but spiritual reflection. I know that that is one possibility under the amendments, but it is the religious and spiritual element that is really important. If we take religion out, we have lost the key domain.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
I had no intention to intervene in this debate, but the right reverend Prelate said that he thought that the current law was working well. I have no doubt that it may be from parents’ perspective, but when Ofsted inspections of schools take place, do they not often find that the daily act of collective worship is not taking place? From the point of view of the practicality of the school, it is not working that well. I am not aware of huge numbers of parents complaining that the daily act of collective worship is not taking place. People like school assemblies, but if, for practical reasons, it is hard for them to come off because there is not a big enough hall, parents are not complaining in large numbers.
The Lord Bishop of Oxford
I just point out the statistic that 98 per cent of primary schools have a daily act of worship. The noble Lord is quite right that in secondary schools the figure is not as high as that: it is between two and three acts of collective worship a week; on other occasions, the school is meeting for an assembly purpose. That is what I mean by the generous interpretation of religious and spiritual reflection, which is crucial.
Secondly, the system of opt-in rather than opt-out would drive a wedge into our schools which would be regrettable. We could find social division. As it is, there is a difference between collective worship and corporate worship. Collective worship is a gathering of everyone who is together in a certain place at a certain time, such as a school. Corporate worship is when people opt into the faith and want to go to a church. Therefore, we have a collective gathering which allows youngsters to experience something and not just learn about it. As we are legally charged with promoting the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils and society, experience matters, and the candle, the singing, the prayer, the stillness and the silence, which are so often present, are all part of the experience of the spiritual, which is part of what we are required to provide.
Thirdly, there is the problem of a wedge appearing between two different types of school. One of the glories of our system is that it is an integrated church state system or a system of church schools within the state. It works well because it is integrated and, if we drive a wedge by saying that there are church schools over here and non-religious schools over there, we will deny ourselves something rather precious about the British system. There is much more that I could say but I will not go on.
Lastly, let us remember that in 2010 the Office for National Statistics said that 71 per cent of the population of this country still want to identify with—I think that that is the phrase—the Christian religion. If we are swapping statistics, 86 per cent of people in this country go into a church at some point during the year, but if 71 per cent want to identify with the religion, that would seem to indicate that most parents are happy with the way that we go about things at the moment. We have a good British compromise and, if we rock the boat with this, I do not know quite where that will lead. I think that it will probably be to our detriment.
Baroness Turner of Camden
My Lords, I support the contributions of my noble friend Lady Massey and the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, to this debate. In my view, the law as it stands is a legacy of a society which is unrecognisable compared with the one that we have today, with its wide variety of beliefs and traditions. The Bill provides an ideal opportunity to modernise an outdated and overly prescriptive law, and the amendments give us the opportunity to do precisely that.
Although it is true that parents have the right to withdraw their child from collective worship, for many parents this is very unsatisfactory because it means that the child may feel excluded and separated from their classmates, and this can have a very damaging effect, particularly on very young children. In some respects, I speak from personal experience in that regard. My mother was a Roman Catholic and my father was not, but they insisted that we went to state schools, and my mother filled in the appropriate forms to the effect that I was a Roman Catholic. Therefore, when I went to school, instead of going in with everyone else, I sat outside the door. It was thought right and proper that I should be separated from the rest of the children. I remember being very upset about this, getting home and saying to my mother, “They don’t really like me, you know, because I’m a Roman Catholic”. Perhaps that is one reason why I grew up to be a secularist. That is by the way but the fact remains that it is not a very good solution simply to say that parents can withdraw their children. Much better in my view is the kind of assembly envisaged by my noble friend Lady Massey, which is available for everybody. People can attend irrespective of their religion or no religion.
I turn to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. Amendment 92 would at least ensure that conducting an act of worship was made optional for schools without a religious designation, and Amendment 93 would make attendance at worship optional for all children. However, the less satisfactory amendment from my perspective is Amendment 94, which would lower the age at which pupils may withdraw themselves from collective worship from sixth-form age to a default age of 15.
The three amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, would certainly be an improvement on the present situation, and we now have an opportunity to reform what I think is a very outdated way of looking at collective worship. I therefore hope that the Government will be prepared to respond suitably to these amendments.
Education Bill
Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts(13 years ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Oxford
My Lords, last Friday, rather curiously, I found myself at Blenheim Palace twice in the day. In the evening I was at a ball celebrating 100 years of a diocesan social work agency called PACT, which specialises in working with adoption, fostering and children’s support, but in the morning I was with 200 head teachers of church schools in the diocese of Oxford, celebrating, among other things, 200 years of church schools throughout the country. They were a very impressive group of head teachers, skilled, dedicated and looking forward to the challenges of this new era and the new things that are to be done.
As we all know, the Church of England has a huge commitment to education, going back not just 200 years to the foundation of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor, but way beyond that to the first schools in the country in the monasteries and religious foundations of our land. We are proud to have been deeply committed to this most essential of tasks for a very long time. Our nearly 5,000 schools, with nearly a million children in them, have high standards, are popular, and have values, disciplines and habits of the heart that parents recognise as deeply worth while. The future, seen through the eyes of those head teachers at Blenheim, is indeed full of opportunity as we continue to provide schools of both distinctive and inclusive quality, serving the communities in which they are set.
The Bill before us seems by and large to be a tidying -up exercise, but I find myself wondering whether we have had a sufficiently broad, conceptual debate into which it fits. I wonder whether we have seen the coherence of the overall educational strategy, or if we are simply letting a thousand flowers bloom and trusting that, with a bit of luck, the eventual outcome will be a garden that is both beautiful and productive. Those of us involved in education are scrambling to keep up with the pace of change and are hoping that there are not too many unintended consequences. Is the overall educational vision clear, beyond, of course, promoting localism?
The question that exercises me is whether we are promoting, and whether this Bill supports, a vision of education for the whole person or for just part of a person. Are we concerned with the full human flourishing of every child, or just developing the skills that will serve the economy? William Temple told the story of a father who sent a note to his son’s school that said: “Don't teach my son poetry; he’s going to be a grocer”. That is a very impoverished view of education. This is the debate that I wish we could be having today, and which, in a sense, lies unexamined behind our Bill. There is a risk, for example, that the review of the national curriculum could skew the learning outcomes in a more instrumentalist direction, when what we want is the full, rich development of children’s incredibly diverse potential.
In this context, I do have some concerns, as noble Lords can imagine, about the English baccalaureate. We need our children to be more factually informed—absolutely—but not at the expense of the grocer’s son learning poetry. The humanities matter, and I could make a particular case for the high value of RE as a rigorous tool for learning about human society, local harmony and global peace making, as well as exploring personal values, ethics and belief systems. If we are to have the English baccalaureate and RE is not included in it, society will be very much the poorer in the next generation.
These are general comments on the context of the Bill, and I regret that we are not first discussing and exploring an overall educational vision. However, there are three markers that I should like to put down at this Second Reading. These are to do with the way in which the Bill and the White Paper on which it is based impact on the work of churches in their schools and colleges.
First, we will want to follow up in Committee—and, I trust, in further discussions with officials—a number of technical issues concerned with land and trusts for schools converting to academy status, and staffing arrangements at academies with a religious character.
Secondly, I want to express some concerns about teacher training in the future. It will be essential to ensure a denominational balance in initial teacher training. This is currently a duty, but I am not convinced, from what I know so far, that it will remain so. It is vital that the denominational balance be retained in order to ensure an adequate supply of appropriately trained teachers for our church schools. This is not just about RE teachers but all teachers. I am concerned about that.
I was at Whitelands College at Roehampton University last month, where the principal said it was the most rewarding job that he had ever done in his life. There are 11 other Anglican and four Catholic universities and university colleges, but because they have teacher training as a major part of their foundation, the proposal to base training in schools is posing a very real and destabilising challenge to them, I have yet to be convinced that it will improve the quality of training. Between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of training time is already spent in schools.
Thirdly, and in conclusion, the Church of England is committed to working with this Government and Governments of every hue to further the goal of offering the best educational experience possible to every child in the country, including the grocer’s son. Education unlocks virtually everything else in a young person’s life. In the church, we want children to think for themselves and to act for others. To that end, through the national society and the diocesan boards of education, we are, in a thoroughly open-minded and energetic way, pursuing how to make all these new systems work, and are looking forward to making those changes to the system that are ahead of us. We are committed to all of this.
Lord Baker of Dorking
Could I ask the right reverend Prelate a question, as he speaks in this House for the Church of England? This Bill promotes the establishment of more faith schools and more Church of England schools; I went to one myself. What is the current admissions procedure of Church of England schools? I believe he made a speech during Holy Week that seemed to be slightly at variance with the Statement made in this House three years ago, when there were long debates on this subject, on amendments that I moved, to ensure that any new faith schools would recruit at least 25 per cent from outside the faith. That was something the previous Government supported for a time but then abandoned. Following that, the archbishop said that the admissions procedure of all new Church of England schools would be 25 per cent from outside the faith, or from no faith. I thought that was very sensible and appropriate, and I hope that it would be an example for other faiths. Is that still the admissions procedure of the Church of England?
The Lord Bishop of Oxford
The admissions procedure for the Church of England always rests in the hands of the local governors. They are advised by the diocesan boards of education, which in turn are advised by the National Society, which I chair, so in our admissions advice we give no particular figures. That 25 per cent is on the books but it is not in the current advice. That is for individual decisions to be made. I could expand on what I was trying to say, but I think this is probably not the time.
We are committed to co-operation with Government, but if we are going to back these head teachers, like the ones I was with at Blenheim last week, I hope that there are some changes yet to be made to the Bill.