Academies Bill [Lords]

Debate between Yasmin Qureshi and Julian Smith

Monday 19th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I thank my hon. Friend for that helpful intervention. Yes, that is what I am saying, and I have seen it across the country.

Perhaps such a view is unfashionable in this day and age, when everything is about selection and performance, but we are forgetting the ordinary children from ordinary families. Do they not have the right to be with “the very bright child” in a school that provides excellent educational facilities? Why cannot the poor child from Farnworth or from the Newbury estate in my constituency go to a school attended by children from Chorley New road, a posh part of the constituency? We need everybody to be together. Children from less well-off backgrounds, whose home lives might make it difficult for them to perform well academically, need to be in schools where they can get help and where everyone’s standards are raised. I know that this is an old-fashioned way of thinking—or perhaps it is not, but it is not the conventional thinking now. I find it surprising that everybody is sleepwalking into and justifying this system of selection.

[Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady understand that the coalition Government are not proposing to expand selection, as the Bill makes clear? I have three excellent selective schools in my constituency—the hon. Lady is now not listening to me. Does she propose that these schools be disbanded and all the fantastic opportunities that are there for those children be lost?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Clause 6(4) of the Bill states:

“For this purpose a school is a ‘selective school’ if its admission arrangements make provision for selection of pupils by ability, and…its admission arrangements are permitted to do so by section 100 of SSFA 1998”.

What is that? It is selection.

[Julian Smith]

If the hon. Lady looks at the clause in more detail, she will see that there is no chance of expanding selection. The point is that there are some good selective schools, which are being allowed to continue, but the Government are not expanding selection.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

The Bill enables the very good school to fast-track into becoming an academy, and it does not say that there has to be proper consultation with the local authority or with the people in the community who use the school. If it is not a question of the very good schools wanting to become more selective, why would they want to go for an academy system? We are told that the Government are not putting any further money into the academies—