Education Bill

Debate between Lord Quirk and Lord Lucas

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk]

While the Minister is taking the deep breath that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, has urged upon him, may I give him an extra couple of minutes of breathing time by saying what a difficult job he is going to have in offsetting the arguments presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight? Surely it is the outstanding schools that need to be inspected in order to have reports coming out showing what can be done in state sector, mainstream schools. Once every five years is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, nothing compared to the extra bureaucracy which we are threatened with in some kind of compensation for this. I hope that the Minister will bow to the wisdom that has been cast before him this afternoon.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I add my voice to those who have already spoken. I am greatly saddened by this Government’s attitude to inspection, which seems to me to be coloured by too many years in opposition listening to schools complaining about inspection. Indeed, inspection under the previous Government was not generally taking a constructive turn, but then, we had not constructed it in a constructive way ourselves previously. I had hoped that this Government would go back to first principles and ask what inspection is for. If you start by saying that it is to make sure that our children are receiving the best possible education, then you need a system which is much faster to react than the current one. It can take Ofsted three years to pick up that a school is going wrong, because their data are always backward-looking and they always want two years of that before they believe that there is any trend in place. So in the schools that I have seen and known to have gone wrong, it has been the third year or the beginning of the fourth when Ofsted have come to call and by then, a lot of children’s educations have been harmed. I would have been looking to produce something which was much faster to react, rather than something which is going to be slower to react.

To pick up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, and the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, it is essential that inspectors, the people who are seeing a lot of schools, see the very best. The point about the best schools is that they are utterly surprising and jaw-dropping when you see them: you could not believe that what they are doing could be done. When you have seen it, you start to understand how other schools could do it too, but if you have not seen it, you just do not know; you just accept that the ordinary way of doing things is sufficient, that the platitudes that, “We are doing well by our children here” are right, because it is okay by the current average, rather than being anywhere near the potential of the children. When you see the difference that a really good school can make, you understand that there is a long way to go; not that schools are bad at the moment, but that the good schools can be a great deal better than they are. That understanding comes from going round outstanding schools and being able, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, to set your yardstick on the basis of what you know can be achieved with children like these in a school that really understands how to deal with them.

We do not have that; we have something that goes backwards. We have a decision to remove outstanding schools from the purview of Ofsted. However, things change. I came across a school by chance the other day—Glenthorne in Sutton. It is sprouting all sorts of new initiatives. You can study three A-levels and golf, as well as tennis and football, to a professional standard. It is great to see these initiatives but no one will take a look at them. No one will know whether they are going right or being balanced correctly. It will be three years before anything shows in the figures. However, a good, experienced head, going around six months into the project, would know whether it was going right. To think that you can do this by remote control—that we are looking after the future of our children by stepping back in this way—is a profound misconception. I am afraid I despair of changing the Government’s mind at the moment, but give it a year or two, let an outstanding school or two crash, and then we will think about it again.