Education Bill

John Bercow Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

I find it upsetting when people complain about my presence in debates. Frankly, I think that the hon. Gentleman has secured a very good deal.

There is no bigger barrier to the recruitment and retention of good teachers than poor pupil behaviour. Figures published last month showed that in nearly one in five secondary schools, behaviour is judged as being no better than satisfactory. In the latest year for which we have figures there were over 363,000 fixed-period exclusions, of which 80,000 were issued for threatening behaviour or verbal abuse against an adult. Recent polls by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers found that two in five teachers had dealt with physical aggression during that year, and that a quarter had been subjected to a false allegation by a pupil. That underlines the fact that too many teachers have been hindered in doing their jobs because of poor behaviour. I fully understand why teachers have felt that the system, and the Government, have not always been on their side. The Education Bill will ensure that the pendulum swings back in their favour by strengthening teachers’ powers. They will be able to issue same-day detentions, and to search for, and confiscate, items such as mobile phones and video cameras. We considered these measures in detail in Committee. I hope they are used only very rarely, but I would rather teachers were able to decide for themselves whether to use them and I am confident that they will help protect the rights of all children to learn in an environment free from disruption and bullying.

Just as importantly, the Bill will also extend better protection to teachers from false and malicious allegations. Teachers will now have pre-charge anonymity when faced with an allegation of an offence by a pupil, to prevent false accusations being used to undermine teachers’ authority. Teachers have campaigned for that for years, and it has been delivered by this Government in our first year. Of course, we will continue to listen to those who seek to extend these provisions to other staff in schools and colleges, but we also need to tread carefully in relation to cherished rights of free speech in a free society.

Discipline is just one area in which teachers have not been afforded the trust and respect they deserve. Over the past decade, for every step forward, there have been three steps backwards as yet more targets and diktats were issued to schools from the centre. Understandably, much of the debate in Committee was about whether to retain the legislation that piled up under the previous Government. I do not doubt that much of that was well-intentioned, but it has clearly failed to address the performance gap this country faces, especially for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

We are determined to raise the professional status of teachers by giving them the space and flexibility they need. Since the Academies Act 2010 the number of academies has more than trebled, from 203 to 658. All those schools are able to decide what is best to raise standards for their pupils, free from red tape and political interference. That is why it has attracted not only Toby Young, but Peter Hyman, Tony Blair’s former director of strategy and author of the autobiographical book, “1 out of 10: from Downing street vision to classroom reality”. Peter Hyman is setting up a free school in Newham. Newham School 21 will teach children between the ages of four and 18 and aims to be open in September 2012. The Bill provides for two new types of academies: alternative provision academies, and 16-to-19 academies, which will extend the benefits of the programme even further.

The Opposition have complained that the Bill centralises power, yet at the same time they complain when we strip back the layers of instruction and guidance telling schools and colleges how to co-operate, which they put in place. Similarly, they protest when we end the requirement on every local authority to set up forums, irrespective of their actual needs or unique circumstances. The Bill will help us bring an end to the perpetual revolution that has been inflicted upon schools, by allowing professionals—not the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency or the General Teaching Council—to do what is best for them.

Just as we are liberating professionals from bureaucracy, so we are ensuring that there is stronger accountability to parents. The Bill will sharpen school accountability by reducing the number of areas in which Ofsted inspects to just four—pupil achievement, quality of teaching, leadership and management, and behaviour and safety—with outstanding schools and colleges also being freed from routine inspection, so that more focus can be diverted towards those that need it most.

The independent regulator, Ofqual, will ensure that our qualifications stand comparison with the best in the world by measuring our relative performance. Because we are prepared to take action where schools and local authorities fail to give children their one chance of a good education, the Bill strengthens the Government’s power to intervene in poorly performing schools, which often have higher proportions of disadvantaged pupils. The Minister for children, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather), is introducing an entitlement to free early-years provision for 130,000 disadvantaged two-year-olds across the country. The scrutiny in Committee has allowed us to set out clearly that we will maintain the free entitlement for all three and four-year-olds at 15 hours, and that we will ask Ofsted to review the impact of the two-year entitlement.

We are also ensuring that more resources are targeted at the education of the poorest through the pupil premium, which will be worth £2.5 billion every year by 2014-15, and the Bill will ensure that funding for apprenticeship training takes priority when young people have a place, so that we deliver on our ambitions to expand the programme and make it the primary work-based learning route for raising the participation age. Thanks to the vigilance and scrutiny of the Chairman of the Education Committee, we have now removed a reserve power to suspend this offer, which underlines our commitment further. In addition, the scrutiny provided and arguments put forward by my hon. Friends the Members for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) and for Wells (Tessa Munt) on the issue of school governors and the proposals in clause 37 have allowed us to improve our policy in this area. We have retained the principle of governor appointments based primarily on skills, while also meeting their desire to reflect stakeholder groups with an interest in schools, in particular staff and local authorities.

The schools White Paper, “The Importance of Teaching”, set out a pathway to close the attainment gap between those from the poorest and wealthiest backgrounds, and to reverse this country’s decline in international performance tables, so that all who are educated in our state schools have the opportunity to compete with the school leavers and graduates of countries with the best-performing education systems. This Education Bill will allow us to take important steps on that journey, and I commend it to the House.

[Mr Speaker]

May I gently point out to the shadow Secretary of State, as I equally could to the Minister, that there are Back Benchers who would also like to contribute and that would help the House?

[Andy Burnham]

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

The Secretary of State’s first Bill was rammed through with unseemly haste, under procedures normally reserved for counter-terrorism measures, when the odour in the rose garden was still pleasant and Labour leadership candidates were still on the hustings, so we can at least say that this Bill has had a more thorough airing. I therefore thank the members of the Public Bill Committee for their work on it, and I thank the Officials, Officers and other staff of the House who have enabled the Committee’s work to take place. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) and for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), who have done an excellent job.

The Schools Minister has been assiduous in his replies, and I thank him for that, but his courtesy has not extended to the production of the essential documents, such as the draft admissions code, that are needed to give this Bill the fullest possible scrutiny. That is highly regrettable—it is insulting, even, to Members of this House—and I trust that the same discourtesies will not be repeated towards Members of another place. Talking of discourtesies, it is a shame that the Secretary of State could not dignify us with his presence this evening. He made a cameo appearance earlier, but he obviously has something more important to do than be here to see his own Bill through. I do not know whether he has a good reason—perhaps he does—but we should have been able to expect him to be here.

Like the Health and Social Care Bill, the Education Bill threatens a free-for-all in our public services. It is a reckless gamble with standards and with the life chances of our children, with no evidence to support it. That is why we will vote against it tonight. Our principal objection to it is based on the fact that it takes power away from parents and pupils and hands it back to providers and to the centre, in the form of the Secretary of State. That is the flaw at the heart of the Government’s vision for public service reform. If they give more freedom and autonomy to providers, be they general practitioners or hospitals in the health sector or head teachers and schools in the education sector, they have to balance that with a corresponding empowerment of the public—parent and patient guarantees—and more ability for service users to hold providers to account. That is what is completely absent from the Government’s vision: this is a provider-led reform with an accountability deficit.

The health reforms have been paused, partly because of fears that the system being created lacks moderating checks and balances. Many people working in education, who will be watching these proceedings, have exactly the same fears about these schools reforms, but sadly the House, in its votes this evening, has failed to respond to them. This is a right-wing reform of our education system, a ripping up of the fabric and frameworks that have stood our services and our children in good stead for years.

Tory Cabinet Ministers are now boasting about this radical right-wing agenda. Iain Duncan Smith has said:

“We’ve got a lot—my welfare reforms, the education reforms…all of these are big, big Conservative-driven themes.”

I believe he said that today. William Hague went as far as admitting that the Lib Dems were crucial—

[Mr Speaker]

May I say to the shadow Secretary of State that he is quite an experienced Member, and he should not refer to serving Members of the House by name?

[Andy Burnham]

You are absolutely right, Mr Speaker, and I apologise.

The right hon. Member—I am struggling to remember his constituency now—[Hon. Members: “Richmond.”] That is it; I was going to say for North Yorkshire. The right hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Mr Hague) said:

“A Conservative government with a very small majority or in a minority would have been massively constrained in what we could take through parliament.”

There we have it: this is a right-wing agenda propped up by the Liberal Democrats.

We heard today a bid from the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady), supported by 35 colleagues on his side of the House, to extend selection to our state education system. We know that the Secretary of State, although he could not be here this evening, attended a reception in Parliament—I think it was just before Christmas—where the hon. Gentleman asked him whether he would extend selection through his free school movement. The Secretary of State said:

“My foot is hovering over the pedal; I’ll have to see what my co-driver Nick Clegg has to say”.

Those of us who read Mrs Gove’s entertaining columns in the newspaper know what happens when the Secretary of State puts his foot on the pedal: utter chaos and disruption ensues for anybody in his vicinity. In this case, I think the co-pilot would be better off getting out of the car before the Secretary of State puts his foot down on the pedal—but as we know, the co-pilot is still unfortunately locked in the boot.

We were expecting a bit of muscular Liberalism today—indeed, we were promised it—but sadly there was none. It was just as we suspected. Parents watching this debate want to know that their child has a fair chance of getting into the school that they choose, that they will have good teachers, and will be able to get good careers advice to support them in their choices. Instead, they are getting a free-for-all with no guarantees, a weakening of the admissions system, unqualified teachers in state schools and a withering away of face-to-face careers advice.

I am sorry that we did not get the chance tonight to move an amendment, which my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West was going to take on, about the need to have qualified teachers in our state schools. I hope that Members of the other place will return to that issue to stop this risky gamble with standards in our schools.

The Bill exposes a curious contradiction in this Secretary of State’s approach to school reform. He has not decided yet whether he truly believes in freedom and really wants local people to get on and do the job that they want—as the Minister just said he did—or whether he wants to dictate to them what they must do and how they must do their jobs. We have an Education Secretary who preaches freedom, but then wants to dictate the books that children read in primary school. He says that teachers know best, but then demands that they use synthetic phonics to teach reading. He lauds professional autonomy, but makes it clear which subjects he approves of in his English baccalaureate and which are second best. That is not good enough: he needs to decide. If he wants teachers to get on with their job, he should let them do it. We should not have this contradiction at the heart of policy that is causing people across the country to lose patience with him.

I gather that the Secretary of State is downstairs at a function or party this evening. I find it hard to believe that he is not here to speak up for his own Bill, to defend it and to tell us why I am wrong and why he has the right vision for our schools. The fact that he is not here means that he cannot face this House to ask for the 50 powers that he is taking in the Bill. We might have thought—might we not?—that he would have the courtesy to come and ask the House for those powers. It is a sorry state of affairs, and shows something of the arrogance that increasingly characterises the Government.

I believe that the Secretary of State is failing to take the education profession with him. They need stability and he is providing chaos. He is losing the confidence of head teachers and teachers. The Education Bill will now move to the other place and I know that their lordships will seek to moderate it, protecting fairness and promoting high standards in every school for every child. I urge them to do so and to give the Bill the fullest possible scrutiny, because this House of Commons, as it has shown today, is in danger of sleepwalking towards an elitist two-tier education system that will be good for some children and some schools, but not all children and all schools.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. There are 11 minutes to go and several Members who wish to participate. Extreme brevity would facilitate the maximum number of Back-Bench contributions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. You will have noted that the Secretary of State was not present for the Third Reading of the Education Bill. I wonder whether you can give any advice as to whether, when a Secretary of State does not turn up for the Third Reading of their own Bill, which I think is quite unusual, any information should be given to the House, or possibly as a courtesy to the shadow Secretary of State or Opposition Front Benchers, as to why they are not here. We understand that the Secretary of State, who is apparently now standing somewhere nearby at the Bar of the House, was available to come here. Are there any procedures by which it would be normal for the Secretary of State to give notice that he is not going to participate on Third Reading?

[Mr Speaker]

The short answer to the hon. Gentleman is no. Any Minister can provide a rationale or an explanation for presence or absence if he or she so chooses, but there is no formal procedure for so doing. The question of who appears on behalf of those on the Treasury Bench is purely a matter for them, not a matter for the Chair. The hon. Gentleman has nevertheless registered his point.