Academies Bill [Lords]

Karen Buck Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

I hope that the Committee will excuse me if I intervene briefly in my capacity as Second Church Estates Commissioner to deal with the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert). What he was talking about was something of a straw man. There is nothing in the Bill that changes the existing relationship between the state and faith groups, although it is important to remind the Committee of a couple of things.

First, the reason why there are so many faith schools among primary and secondary schools in England and Wales is that, as part of the Education Act 1944, the then Government persuaded the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church to place at the disposal of the state all the Church schools that they had previously run. The then Government simply could not have delivered universal state education through the 1944 Act if the Churches had not brought all their schools into the state system.

Secondly, one fundamental principle of the 1944 Act was that, so far as possible, children should be educated in accordance with the wishes of their parents. No one is obliged to send their child to a faith school; they do so because they wish to. I suspect that it is the experience of us all in the House that faith schools in our constituencies are consistently and substantially over-subscribed. I have one faith school in my constituency—Blessed George Napier school, a Roman Catholic comprehensive secondary school in the diocese of Birmingham—that is consistently over-subscribed, because parents wish to send their children there.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Could the hon. Gentleman help me to understand why, across the piece and on average, faith schools have an intake that is substantially less deprived than maintained schools?

[Tony Baldry]

I do not accept that as a principle or an assertion, although I would be happy to meet the hon. Lady to talk about it, because the Church takes considerable pride in the fact that it admits into its schools a wide range of pupils, from all backgrounds, all faiths and all cultures, particularly in London. The Church of England sees that as an important part of its outreach and its commitment to the community and society as a whole.

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[Glenda Jackson]

I do not wish to be rude, but the hon. Gentleman is not a testament to his own education. He does not listen to what I say. The point that I was making about a community was not about education, but about the way in which communities work together over a wide spectrum of experience, ethnicity and age. I consider that the Bill has enormous potential to create a serious breakdown in social cohesion—

[Ms Buck]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Glenda Jackson]

May I just finish the sentence? Then I shall be delighted to allow my hon. Friend to intervene.

It seems to me that the strongest bulwark against that serious breakdown is to ensure that we have an admissions policy that is fair in the broadest sense, as suggested by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas).

[Ms Buck]

Is not my hon. Friend’s point reinforced, and that made by the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) undermined, by the extraordinary variation in the intake of precisely the pupils whom my hon. Friend has described—pupils who are on School Action Plus, pupils with special educational needs and pupils who are entitled to free school dinners? Schools with a significantly larger proportion of pupils in those categories almost invariably struggle to achieve the educational standards achieved by schools that choose to take fewer such pupils. Will not allowing more schools to choose less deprived pupils increase that variation between higher and lower-performing schools?

[Glenda Jackson]

I entirely agree, and we must take that seriously.

We have come so far in so many ways in this country. I know that the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) disagrees with me, but over the past 13 years I have seen a transformation of the schools in my constituency and a transformation of the educational levels of pupils in my constituency, and that seems to be increasing. There are invariably benefits in such circumstances, because of the wide variety of people whom our children meet. The variations in culture, language and tradition feed into schools in a way that has an intrinsically positive effect not only on the children’s education, but on the quality and stability of life in this country.

I am a product of the 11-plus, and I remember distinctly what happened at the time. I lived in a very small town. I was probably related to two thirds of the people there, and everyone knew me and my entire family. The results of the 11-plus came in. As I walked to school people asked me, “Have you passed?” and I said, “I don’t know.” “Oh,” they said, “You’ve failed.” I went home for lunch. The brown envelope had arrived; I had passed. I went back. In the intervening time, my mother had run around and told everyone that I had passed.

What is most shocking to me, however—I did not realise it at the time, but I realise it now—was the attitude of adults whom I had known all my life. I must say in fairness to them that they had always looked out for me and mine and ours, because at that time there was a community culture of looking out for our children. They had changed in a second their view of what I was capable of and of what I was as a human being. If Government Members really wish to return that burden to the shoulders of 11-year-old children, I throw up my hands in despair because I do not know what they want from education or what they expect of our children.

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[Mr Brady]

My hon. Friend is being uncharacteristically ungenerous; Mr Blair needs all the support that he can get right now given that some of his friends are not helping him much.

As the ballot arrangements were introduced by a Labour Government and have been nurtured and kept in place by Education Ministers throughout the period of Labour government, I am sure that the shadow Minister will support my amendment. I am also sure, given the very strong support that the Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), has given to the continuation of grammar schools—he has also visited some of the excellent schools in my constituency—that the Government will want to reassure us that grammar schools are entirely safe under the Bill, and I look forward to hearing that reassurance.

During the general election, all four candidates in my constituency, which I think probably has the best state schools in the country, were to a greater or lesser extent supportive of the selective system. Even the Labour candidate was reasonably warm about grammar schools because he, like me, is an old boy of Altrincham grammar school for boys; perhaps that helped to condition his views on the subject. The Liberal Democrat candidate was strongly in support, and I hope that our coalition partners will follow suit and strongly support the grammar schools in the two Divisions on them this evening. The other candidate from the United Kingdom Independence party was also very supportive.

[Ms Buck]

Can the hon. Gentleman help me with one point? If grammar schools are, as he and other proponents of them claim, a route for high-achieving children from more deprived backgrounds, why do they have fewer children who are entitled to free school meals than other schools?

[Mr Brady]

There are a number of reasons, but the principal one is that most inner-city grammar schools were sadly destroyed by misguided policy, so there are fewer grammar schools in the most deprived areas and they tend to survive—[Interruption.] No, I am responding to the hon. Lady’s point. They tend to survive in the outer-urban and more rural areas. The reduction in grammar schools, particularly in London, where there are so few, has had another effect: they have become more selective over time. In my borough of Trafford, we select about 35% of that cohort to go to grammar school, but selection can amount to as little as 1% or 2% of the ability range at some London grammar schools.

[Ms Buck]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point about the national statistics, but is he saying that, in Trafford, grammar schools have the same proportion of children on free school dinners as non-grammar schools?

[Mr Brady]

That would depend on the part of Trafford that one was in, and the figure would largely relate to the school’s catchment area, but overall grammar schools have become more selective than they should have had to become.

I do not want to detain the Committee for long. The crucial point about amendment 49 is that it would protect the status quo not just of the excellent schools that are thriving and popular in their communities, but of their protection in current education legislation. If the amendment is accepted and those schools become academies, they will have the protection of a parental ballot, which will transfer with them and prevent any change in their status without reference to the parents. I hope that the amendment is uncontentious, and I very much hope that my Front Benchers warmly welcome it.

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[Vernon Coaker]

That could be a debate that the hon. Gentleman will want to have another time. The context for this debate, though, is to consider the changed profile of schools that wish to become academies as opposed to the profile of schools that are already academies. We are debating a different situation in which those academies, through a funding agreement rather than through statutory legislation, now have to abide by various things such as admissions codes, exclusions and so on. That is the point that we are making about the genuine difference between these two sets of the schools and the need for some of the amendments that we have before us.

[Ms Buck]

Is the Minister not wrong? There are actually cases in which two schools serve the same neighbourhood and one has a dramatically lower number of children on free school dinners, on School Action Plus or with special educational needs than the other, which is only a few hundred yards away. Neither school is situated in a more affluent area; they simply have different intakes. That shows that something else is going on in their admissions policies.

[Vernon Coaker]

Such a difference in intake is certainly true in many cases. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn pointed out, it is also crucial for us to understand the difference between the profile of pupils at the new academies that the Government intend to set free and give all sorts of freedoms to, and those at the existing academies. The study by the Centre for Economic Performance is extremely important in that respect.