Education Bill

Debate between Lord Blunkett and Kevin Brennan

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Brennan]

I do not have time to list them all, as the Secretary of State knows, but here are a few examples: which subject students should study, how teachers should teach and what types of schools communities should have. He will say that he is just nudging them in that direction, but a nudge with a loaded gun is very different from a gentle steer.

What is it about the Secretary of State, assisted by the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), that makes him so obsessed with grabbing more and more power at the centre?

[Mr Blunkett]

Megalomania.

[Kevin Brennan]

I would not quite go that far, but whether it is the power to close schools or the power to discipline teachers individually, which has been so carefully and consensually put beyond politicians in recent years, we have to ask why the big power grab.

I do not know whether any Members with children have ever seen the TV cartoon “Pinky and the Brain”, but the Minister of State and the Secretary of State rather remind me of it. As the title suggests, there are two characters. Pinky is good-natured, but he is dominated by the Brain, who is self-centred and thinks he is a genius. Every episode, after the opening titles, there is the following piece of dialogue: Pinky says, “Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?”, and the Brain says, “The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world.” That could almost be a transcript of the ministerial meeting at the Department for Education. I know the Secretary of State thinks he is clever, possibly the cleverest boy in the Government, but trying to create an education system in his own image, with all the powers in his own hands, is ultimately a recipe for chaos, not world domination.

The Secretary of State is so intent on making sure that he grabs all the power to himself that he is getting rid of some of the bodies that might get in the way of his scheme not once but twice. Bodies such as the General Teaching Council, which was set up to give teachers the same professional autonomy as other valued professions, are abolished not only in this Bill but in the Public Bodies Bill, presumably just in case abolishing them once is not enough to make absolutely certain that they are absolutely dead. It is in case they suddenly rise up, like the false ending of some schlock horror film. We knew that the Secretary of State had a penchant for drama—we see it every week in the Chamber—although, I hasten to add, not enough of a penchant to include it in the English baccalaureate. However, killing a body twice to make sure it is dead is a bit over the top, even for him.

Why this centralising power grab? It is not just power for power’s sake, it is part of his vision of education. In their mind’s eye, the Secretary of State and the Minister of State see serried ranks of schoolchildren sitting at individual desks, preferably wearing short trousers, chanting after their teacher their conjugated Latin verbs and copying down the dates of the kings and queens of England from the board. [Interruption.] Did I hear a “Hear, hear” from the Conservative Benches? I think I might have done.

If the Secretary of State thinks that is how to raise standards, he is wrong. A curriculum designed to train a few people to run the empire is not a system that will inspire and motivate the next generation to use their talent and creativity to the maximum benefit of themselves and the country. He has made it clear that in his mind a grade C GCSE in an ancient language, a laudable achievement in itself, is more valued than an A* in engineering or information and communications technology. He is, to coin a phrase, creating an analogue curriculum for a digital age.

All pupils need the basic building blocks of literacy and numeracy, but beyond that, corralling pupils into a narrow range of subjects post-16 restricts choice and stifles creativity. Schools up and down the country, having been nudged by the Secretary of State with his loaded gun, are busily rewriting their timetables and pressurising pupils into taking GCSEs that are not necessarily the best ones for them to fulfil their individual talents. We must bear in mind the fact that they will already have studied history, geography, science and a modern language through the national curriculum. The English bac took a bit of a kicking from some Members on his own side of the House today, and he should listen to what they had to say.

Why is the Secretary of State doing all this? Just so that at the end of this Parliament, he can point to a measure that he invented and imposed ex post—that is a bit of Latin, in case anybody did not know—and say, “Look how we’ve improved things. More people are studying the subjects that we have retrospectively said they should have been studying all along.” It is actually pretty hard for people to fail a test when they have set the questions themselves. The provisions in the Bill on PISA tables are fine, but the Secretary of State had better stop misquoting statistics that he knows the OECD has disowned, and he had better stop ignoring evidence, such as that from Hong Kong or Scandinavia, when it does not suit his overall vision.

When the Secretary of State finally gets round to saying something about vocational education, which he seems fundamentally to believe is for people who do not do well academically, he should remember that medicine is a vocational training that he ought to support. His problem is that he sees the English baccalaureate as the premiership and any league table of vocational qualifications as the Beazer Homes league—[Interruption.] I agree that there is nothing wrong with the Beazer Homes league.

Finally, presumably the Secretary of State blames the previous Labour Government for the decline in social mobility in Government Ministers, and believes that it is our fault that the Government Front Bench is dominated by old Etonians, because we did not do enough on social mobility in government. On that point, I shall sit down.