Academies Bill [Lords]

The House has been blessed this afternoon that so many contributions have emanated from people who have such experience in matters of education, so it is my choice to lower the tone somewhat drastically. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Government's proposals are ideologically based. This seems to me to be a harking back to almost two decades ago, when the given text for the Conservative Government was essentially ““privatising the world””. We have already seen their first incursion into attempting to privatise the NHS and it is clear to me that what is being proposed in this Bill is the first step in, essentially, privatising education. If it does not privatise education in the overt monetary sense, it will certainly revert back to the bad old days of the 11-plus, of a grammar school system and of secondary schools that were much lower than bog-standard. It seems to me that that is what the Government are working for. For example, my constituency is served by two local authorities—Brent and Camden. Both are looking at a serious shortfall for available school places not only in secondary schools but in junior schools for a variety of reasons, not least the increase in population. Both were savagely disappointed because their schools were taken out of the Building Schools for the Future programme. No one on the Government Benches has been able to give me or any of the head teachers, governors, parents and pupils in Brent and Camden a reason why their schools have been excised—we have been given no economic reasons and certainly no educational reasons. These local authorities in my constituency are blessed with a multiracial, multi-ethnic society, and it is absurd for the Government to believe that the kind of freedom that they argue will automatically be brought about by the expansion of the academies programme will help some of the most disadvantaged of our children in some of the most disadvantaged areas. I thought that we had already established in this country that if we truly wish to ensure that disadvantaged areas and disadvantaged children receive the benefits that we expect for our own children—all of us in this Chamber would not accept for our children what it seems to me that the Government intend to impose on other people's children—we must learn the basic lesson that a school alone cannot do it alone, however much money we pour into it, however much we expand it and however much the teachers wish to work there. That is a point that no one has raised, which is also reflected in a sense in the NHS: there are certainly very deprived areas that teachers do not wish to work in. How will we persuade them to go into there? By giving them more money? Apparently not, because this Government are saying that there is absolutely no money anywhere. The same is true as far as the NHS is concerned—there are certain deprived areas in which GPs do not wish to work. We cannot simply say to one organ of society that it has to be the sole repository of transforming those areas of our society that we wish to see transformed. We already heard a most thoughtful, highly detailed contribution, clearly coming from many years of experience, about the difficulties experienced in some schools by some children with special educational needs. I have seen this for myself within my schools. Not infrequently, the issues that create behaviour in an individual child in a school have nothing to do with the curriculum, the teachers or the physical environment in which a child finds itself. That child might have to live in seriously substandard housing in very overcrowded conditions. If we are saying that we genuinely want to ensure that every child in our society should have the best of educations, we must look much wider at the external influences that in many instances could make it virtually impossible for children to learn, and that is not exclusively to do with the issue of special educational needs. I am deeply cynical—I frankly and freely admit it—about what the Government are proposing for education. My constituency was Hampstead and Highgate and now, through boundary changes, it is Hampstead and Kilburn, and I can remember distinctly what every single state school in my constituency was like in 1992. Every spare moment that every teacher, every governor, every parent and, not infrequently, the pupils had was engaged in trying to raise money. They were attempting to raise funds to buy basics such as paper, pencils and books for the school library. Not in every school, but in the majority of schools in my constituency at that time the plaster was kept on the walls by the artwork of the pupils and miles and miles of Sellotape affixed by the teachers. Books were unknown as a teaching tool—pupils were lucky if they had the copy of the chapter they were looking at that day. If a computer was found in one of my schools, that was headline news—it was the equivalent of finding the educational holy grail. Now, the situation in every one of my schools has been transformed beyond recognition. They have been physically improved, the quality of teaching has improved, visitors are tripping over whiteboards and children have computers that they can take home with them. Educational standards were always high because when I was first elected and for many years after that, the local authority was a Labour-controlled local authority and, despite the savage underfunding of year after year of Conservative Government, it always prioritised education. The standards were always high and the schools have always been oversubscribed, but if we go down the road that is being advocated by this Conservative Government, I can see—as others have said tonight—not only a deterioration of educational standards but a serious breakdown in social cohesion. There is not a single school in my constituency at a junior level where there are fewer than 49 to 53 different languages spoken. I can distinctly remember when I was first elected going with groups of my colleagues, mostly from London I admit, to argue frantically for section 11 money still to be there to assist in the teaching of English as a second language. There are enormous benefits for all our children in what we see in our schools. I recently visited a junior school in my constituency in which, because of the influx of people from the European Union and other parts of the world, the children are now learning Portuguese and Somali. When I was that age, I did not even know that those languages existed. There are huge benefits from that, but the divisive process that the Government are committed to reintroducing will savagely attack all that has been achieved not only on an educational level but in the social cohesion that I, as a London MP, believe is one of the blessings of living in this great capital city. The Government's approach will move us back to the terrible days of the 11-plus, of grammar schools and of children being discounted utterly at the age of 11 if they did not pass the 11-plus.