Education Bill

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) for the second time in succession. It has also been a great pleasure to participate in proceedings in Committee on the Bill. I am still relatively new to the House and I found it encouraging, compared with the spectacle that we see at Prime Minister's Question Time, to see parties on both sides coming together to put their experience and best interests at the forefront of trying to improve education in our country. I pay tribute to all the parties for doing that. I should like to comment mainly on my new clause 1, but first I shall make a couple of points about special educational needs, which the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) has mentioned. It was a great pleasure, a week ago, to welcome the Secretary of State for Education to Bedford to talk to the head teachers of our three special schools, the Grange, Ridgeway and St Johns, and to talk about the Green Paper. The coalition Government have moved forward significantly in understanding what is required for children with SEN not only while they are at school but when they are preparing to go on to the work environment. That is a record that the Government can build on over the next five years and which will be a tremendous success and tribute to them. The Secretary of State's discussion with the head teachers in Bedford and Kempston was most illuminating. Two of those three schools are outstanding and one is good with outstanding features, so they are already providing excellent education to children, and their knowledge and experience is most valuable. It is important to consider the particular impact of the Bill on exclusions. The Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), knows how important this issue is, particularly for children with autism and the impact on them if they are later excluded. I hope that he will take into account the recommendations of the special educational consortium about future decisions so that he can make sure that the issue of exclusion does not have an undue impact on children with autism. New clause 1 would pay particular attention to schools with a history of educational underachievement, by which I mean achieving below the minimum national floor standards for a number of years. It would give the Secretary of State the powers that he or she might require in such circumstances to intervene to support change and to provide educational opportunity to the children in those areas. The new clause is not about passing comment on teachers; indeed, the teachers who go to poorly performing schools are sometimes the most inspired and capable teachers in the country. The new clause is not about resources either. Too often, when we look at educational underachievement we think that throwing money at it will solve the problem, but often it does not tackle the problem directly. Indeed, it can hide the problem or provide an excuse for continuing with underachievement while the benefit of the additional resources comes into play. That is all very well when one is looking at a five-year investment to do something as a business, but the critical urgency is that every child gets only one chance at each year of their education. Every year of delay in overcoming educational underachievement is a year lost to a whole cohort of children that will not be recovered. In those circumstances—I will go on to explain how they arise—it would be a mistake for the Secretary of State not to have the opportunity to intervene to provide hope to that cohort. My concern is with providing the opportunity for fast action to be taken to remedy a legacy of educational underachievement, because, as we have rightly heard many times, educational underachievement compounds social separation. Hon. Members on both sides of the House recognise that a good start to education in the early years leads to better educational attainment in later years and greater chance of success in later life. When educational achievement is combined with catchment areas, the problem of social separation is compounded, with housing stock and rental prices around underachieving schools going down and with parents flocking to areas where schools perform well. I see that happen in my constituency and my borough. That effect compounds the view taken by parents that particular schools are bad. I do not know whether there is such a thing as a bad school or a good school—a school is a school—but we have a responsibility to ensure that parents do not have to make the terrible sacrifices that many make. Some parents put enormous effort into getting their child into a school other than the local, ““bad”” school and then they have to spend an hour or so driving their child to that ““good”” school to avoid the other school. That is precisely because we have this tyranny of catchment areas, which may be compounded despite the best efforts of my right hon. and hon. Members on the Front Bench to improve educational performance if they do not have more power to be more radical than they are providing for themselves in the Bill. The Government have made substantial progress, particularly, as the right hon. Member for Birkenhead mentioned, with the significant advance of the pupil premium. I would add to that the potential advance of free schools, which should be embraced on both sides of the House as part of an effort to get our teachers to address educational underachievement. If I have one criticism of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State it is that he listens too much to those who believe he is too radical in that area; there is plenty of scope for him to be more radical. The problem that the new clause seeks to address is the situation that arises when members of a local community combine to frustrate those who would challenge the existing orthodoxy. However, it focuses only on areas where that orthodoxy is failing children by maintaining a standard of education that is below the national minimum accepted standard. In those circumstances, which I know from my own area can persist, a local authority may not take action with a school and the school may have absolutely no interest in taking action itself. The school will always seek to have more time and the local authority will always want to maintain its influence and control over the school. Such a system might not be failing the local authority or certain teachers, but by heavens it is surely failing the children whom our educational system is supposed to be serving. Let me give an example that comes readily to mind: the efforts in my constituency to establish a new academy, the Kempston free school, in an area of educational underachievement. I shall not use this opportunity to talk specifically about the teachers or the actions of particular teachers in those schools. They work extremely hard to get improvement for the pupils, but over the past five years satisfactory results have not been achieved overall. What has the borough council done about that? It has asked for more time. What have schools tried to do? They are trying to do their best, but the results have not yet met the national minimum standards. One teacher resigned his job, worked with local parents and wanted to take up the freedoms that this Government have permitted to establish a free school in his area. He had a passion for education and directed that passion at an area of economic and educational disadvantage. That is what everyone who has a passion for education should seek to support. The reaction of the local authority was, essentially, to kick the scheme into the long grass, pretend that it cared, go along with the process, make sure that it checked the boxes that the Government said it must check, but in reality to stifle and seek to eradicate the effort and initiative of those volunteers. What was the reaction of the schools? They made some good points. What would be the impact on their budget? What would happen with falling rolls when children decided to go not to the existing schools but to the new school? Those are valid points and ones that I wanted to raise with the Secretary of State, but I needed a free school there to do it. It is far better for that discussion about how best to allocate resources in areas of educational underachievement to take place among establishments than to maintain the line that continuing to put funds into a school that is failing is a sign of one's commitment to education, because it is not. Educational commitment is what motivated Mark Lehain and the parents and volunteers who supported the Kempston free school. They were inspired to help children in their area, and they were stymied by a local authority and by the efforts of local schools. They wanted a site. The local authority had plenty of sites that it could have made available. Did it welcome the group with open arms? No. It did the minimum required to ensure that it accommodated the Government's process. Let us look at the other side. Whereas the local authority can pull its whole local bureaucracy full time to the effort, and the educational establishment can use its incumbency and the loyalty that parents naturally have to their school, regardless of its overall educational performance, what could the free school people draw on? They could draw on their inspiration. They could quit their job to demonstrate their passion. They could get parents and others to say, ““Yes, we really want to do it,”” but that was never going to be a match for the combined resources of the local authority and the local teaching establishment. What was worse were the actions of our teaching unions and the Anti Academies Alliance and its fellow travellers in the Local Schools Network, who will crush anyone who threatens the orthodoxy of our teaching establishment. It is a disgrace that those unions flood local meetings to make political points, rather than allowing local meetings, which are part of the consultation process, truly to represent the interests of local parents and teachers. It is disgraceful that people will attack others for their passion when they have an inspiration to provide education for children, albeit not through the established ways, but through a free school. Those people are teachers and care about education just as much as any other teacher. Why is it legitimate for those teachers to be attacked for trying to find an alternative way to serve their local community? In all these efforts, when the only thing that the people who wished to set up these schools in areas of educational underachievement have is their own inspiration and voluntary effort, I say they need extra help from a Secretary of State who can say, ““Here we have the evidence. You have had years of educational underachievement. Here we see that you are not fulfilling your overall mission to educate people in your area. You have an opportunity to do so by providing another academy and I, the Secretary of State, will intervene, disapply all the things that stand in the way and all the tools that can be used to stop people making that advance, and provide that lifeline of support so that children in areas of educational underachievement will have fresh hope and opportunity.”” That is what parents in such areas expect from a Conservative Government and a coalition Government. That is what they were hoping for when they got the pupil premium. That is what they are looking to the Bill to provide—an extension of power from the Secretary of State to local areas. I hope the Minister will listen and seek to embrace that vision as he moves forward. In a few years we will look back on this period, with the current Secretary of State, as a great opportunity to help many who are suffering severe economic and educational disadvantage. New clause 1 seeks to achieve that.