Education Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I shall start with what I think is going to be my only line of agreement with the Government on this. To take the attitude that intervention in schools should reflect the risk of schools doing badly, and to say that we should intervene less when schools are successful, is absolutely right. As my noble friend has just said, that is a principle that was followed by the previous Labour Government, so I am with the Minister on that. We should not be constantly going in to excellent schools and getting in the way of them doing an excellent job; that is an absolute principle.

The second absolute principle is that inspection should be universal for all our schools. Does the Minister really think that one visit every five years is going to be a big burden on outstanding schools? One visit by Ofsted inspectors every five years; that is what happens at the moment, that is what the data say.

The reason for drafting this clause perplexes me. I am trying to think what motivates it because, to be honest, I never thought that the Tories would go soft on inspection, and that is what they have done with this clause. They fought hard to put Ofsted in the legislation, they fought hard to put it into schools, they have argued the case with head teachers and teachers, almost all of whom were opposed to inspection when it first started, and the Labour Government did the same. The political parties have been on the same side on this; we have thought that inspection was a necessary part of raising standards. So I am absolutely perplexed why the Tories, of all parties, should go back on this now. This is a principle, and you would have to come forward with some absolutely outstanding reasons why this principle should be broken. That principle is that in a devolved system, more than ever, every school should be inspected. Every parent has the right to know that the school which their child attends should be inspected. Every child should have a right to be reassured that the school which they attend should be inspected. That is an inalienable right and should be a fundamental structure of our school system.

The second question is: is doing that once every five years a terrible burden on schools? I do not think it is. To some extent, that is where the argument finishes. If you believe that those rights should not be given to parents and teachers, vote against this amendment. If you really believe that one inspection every five years is a terrible burden—do not forget that some children will have gone almost right the way through a secondary school in that time while there has never been an inspection, as they will have started in year 7 and might leave in year 11—then vote against this amendment.

I am going to be really helpful to the Minister here. I am going to warn him not to get into a position that I know I got into when I was a Minister. It is a great ministerial habit when you come up with an idea. Listening to the debate, I have to say that when the Minister responded to my friend Lady Hughes on the previous amendment it was the most troubled that I have heard him in the whole consideration of this Bill. I did not believe that he had convinced himself, let alone the House. What is happening now is that the Government have a policy but they are, in honesty, persuaded by the arguments against it. Rather than withdrawing that policy, they are seeking to put plaster in the holes and rearranging the bricks: “Well, let’s have greater risk assessment. Let's talk to the heads when they are new. Let’s do this, that or the other”. I can tell your Lordships that that is how the camel was invented, rather than the horse.

I remember when we ourselves got into exactly that position. You do not want to backtrack, because this is politics, so you start trying to plaster up the cracks. But what you end up with is so disastrous that in two years’ time you are asking, “Why weren’t we just brave enough to say that we got that wrong”?. I say to the Minister that he is at that point now. He should take a deep breath and protect himself from having to come to your Lordships’ House in two years’ time to answer many questions and queries about an inspection system that clearly will not work.

I have two more points to make. I really worry that the Minister may have constructed a terrible bureaucratic tangle in order to get out of the political difficulty that he is in. He will now have an army of Ofsted inspectors doing more risk assessments. They will have to weigh and measure the schools and collect the data. Now they will have to go and talk to every new head when he or she is appointed to a school—perhaps the Minister could tell us how many interviews that is going to be in a year—just to check their plans for that school. The Government would not have to do that if they backed this amendment. From the schools’ point of view, we are meant to be freeing them from this terrible burden of one inspection every five years, but what is the Minister putting in its place? He is making them provide more data. He has the local authority checking on them, so that it can refer back to Ofsted. He has the new heads having to talk to Ofsted and he has a third of them having to be inspected every five years. They will not know where they stand. I can assure the Minister that it would be easier for them and less of a burden if he would just say, “Once every five years, and that’s it”.

My last point is this, and to some extent it is the most important point for me. From the point of view of the Ofsted inspectors, it is crucial that they measure the standards of every single school in this country by the performance of the best. That is absolutely central to effective Ofsted inspection. If you say to your average Ofsted inspector—not the ones doing the one-off thematic reviews—who spends their time going into schools, “Thou shalt not be seeing any outstanding schools”, how do they know what outstanding looks like? When they go to the satisfactory school, it might be the best that they have seen for six months and they might think that that is outstanding. To help the Ofsted inspectors, it is crucial that, as part of their job, they see outstanding schools as part of their regular inspections.

To be helpful to the Minister, I think I know why he, or his colleagues—I am sure that it was his colleagues and not him—came up with this terrible idea: it is this idea of having a long list of freedoms which you can grant to schools to prove that the policy of granting freedoms to schools works. We saw it in the debate on admissions on Monday and we have seen it today. These are wrong freedoms, because they are freedoms that answer the political drive of the Government and they stand in the way of raising standards. This is the moment when the decision is made: go on and the camel will have several extra humps in two years’ time, I promise the Minister that. I passionately support this amendment, more than anything else in the Bill, and hope that noble Lords, having listened to this debate will vote to preserve universal inspection. I praise the Tories for bringing it in in 1988; I think it would be terrible if they voted to get rid of it now.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

Now that we have more faith schools not of the faiths that we were used to, free schools and academies, it is more important than ever to have community cohesion in the list for inspection. Without community cohesion, young people will not understand what it is to live in a community. If somebody wishes to ask, “What is community cohesion?”, Ofsted has a very good checklist of the issues under that heading. We should not deprive schools or the community of this inspection, or stop children learning about and understanding their own and other communities.

[Lord Quirk]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 79. Clause 40 requires the chief inspector to consider a familiar quartet: the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils. Amendment 79 would insert the word “linguistic”. In other words, we would wish the chief inspector to focus upon the child’s unique and very precious language faculty, and properly so, because language proficiency is not only essential for the other desiderata in Clause 40, for example social and cultural development, but, more widely, it is a precondition for the whole of education itself.

Many thousands of our children start school linguistically impoverished and hence cognitively impaired. The numbers extend far beyond the unfortunates with pathological problems that require serious intervention by speech and language therapy. These are a tiny unfortunate minority compared with the far greater unfortunates who by reason of family dysfunction or social circumstance have little experience of parental or sibling chatter let alone bedtime stories. They have been denied the rich linguistic exposure that more fortunate children can happily take for granted.

The language faculty depends crucially upon early intervention. Language development is something that has to happen as early as possible, pre-school preferably, as we have just heard in relation to Amendment 76A, moved by my noble friend Lord Northbourne, and as we did on his very first amendment, last week, when the elegant intervention by the noble Lord, Lord Peston, was especially memorable. If serious linguistic deficiency cannot be spotted before school, and if it cannot be spotted at least in the first few terms of primary school, then the consequences are disastrous.

None of this is controversial, and it is indeed in line with Her Majesty's Government’s policy. What we are talking about is language development that merely leads to the confident, competent command of English. Surely that is not a lot to ask of an English education, but at present we fall very far short of it. Employers are on record as preferring teenage recruits who learnt their English in Poland, Russia or China, because it is easier for everyone to understand their less sloppy diction and to read their better-formed sentences and clearer handwriting. We could go further. Without giving pupils a sound basis in English, how can we attract far more to go on and learn Spanish, German, even Mandarin? As noble Lords will know, one of the proposers of this amendment, the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, chairs the all-party group on foreign languages.

Among possible objections to our amendment, let me just mention two. First, adding the word “linguistic” may invite further additions—“mathematical”, for example. But language is different, and is genuinely unique. It is the precondition of all else, from the rules of maths to the rules of football. Secondly, it may be objected that the addition of “linguistic” creates a tautology, since it is implicit in “social” and “cultural”. We would disagree. Doubtless some degree of social and cultural development need not depend upon language—even, perhaps, enough for inspectorial hurried box-ticking. But inspectors must in our view be required to pause and address language development as an area requiring their separate and specific consideration. Indeed, so far from being superfluous, we would argue that the omission of the word “linguistic” from the clause should be seen as a glaring oversight, so much do its neighbours “social” and “cultural” depend on it as the faculty by which all other development is both inculcated and expressed.

This brings me to a further and final point in urging this amendment. Clause 40, to repeat, requires that the chief inspector “must consider” how pupils are developing in four different respects:

“spiritual, moral, social and cultural”.

This is a quartet, of course, that is quite familiar in Ofsted-speak. It has been on Ofsted’s agenda for some time. Perhaps the Minister can give us some indication of the success that inspectors have had in grading children according to their development in these four respects. What does the Minister expect the inspector actually to do before ticking, say, the “spiritual” box, thus declaring his satisfaction at the pupil’s spiritual development? Then, when he moves on to the box labelled “moral”, what does he actually do before ticking that all is well with their moral development?

Now, if the next box were labelled “linguistic”, I know—and, more importantly, I know the inspector would know—how a professional assessment in this crucial area would be made. I would have confidence in what a tick meant and know that actual, speedy attention would be given if a tick were withheld.

My point is obvious. Not only is successful development of the language faculty essential for progress in all else that education has to offer, but linguistic development is observable, quantifiable and objectively assessable to a degree that makes the inspectorate’s judgment of critical value.

[Baroness Warnock]

My Lords, I very strongly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, as well as the amendment just spoken to by my noble friend Lord Quirk.

Linguistic deprivation is just as serious as any other form of deprivation that a child can suffer. An enormous amount of linguistic knowledge, practice and efficiency is learnt before the age of two or two and a half years. There are a vast number of children whose parents—or whose single parent, very often—are quite unable to supply the kind of stimulus that children essentially need, and from the deprivation of which they really cannot catch up. How can children start learning to read when they hardly have any vocabulary in the language they are supposed to be reading? It seems to me that before school is the crucial time, but as we have heard the most difficult and most needy children are very likely those who do not take advantage of pre-school provision.

Here I must repeat something that I have said a million times before, which is that I believe that the BBC has a huge responsibility for those children who are at home before school, and are not getting out of their home. The BBC should be providing radio programmes with songs and stories which supply what children’s parents very often cannot supply, namely constant exposure to language. I was also delighted when a noble Lord—I am afraid I cannot remember which—said at an earlier stage that one of the worst things that has ever been invented is the pushchair which faces away from the parent, so that the parent who is pushing the child cannot speak continuously to the child even before the child has any language to respond in.

I think that this is of enormous importance, and should be in the Bill, more so than all the stuff about spirituality and morality. I entirely agree that that can all go, because we cannot measure it anyway. What cannot go is what can be measured, which is the vocabulary of a child and his ability to communicate and respond to other people talking and singing to him.