Education Bill

Take two. I will speak to new clause 10 and amendments 9, 10, 11 and 13, which are in my name and those of my hon. Friends. Our main objection to the Bill is that it takes power away from parents and pupils, particularly at crucial moments in the education journey. Decisions about admissions and exclusions can be life-changing for children, and giving parents the power to challenge them is an essential part of any fair school system. Over the past decade, improvements have been made to ensure fair admissions in English schools, and the Bill will take those safeguards away. It will severely weaken parents' rights in respect of admissions at both local and national level, and it will limit their ability to seek redress both for their own children and for others who come after them. That would be bad in any event, but when we consider that weakening of accountability in the wider context of the education system that the Government are building—a highly competitive free market—we see that it represents a real danger to the life chances of our children, particularly those with the least support. Let us put the Government's changes to admissions in that wider context. First, in time, there could be more than 20,000 separate admissions authorities operating in a free market, accountable only to the Secretary of State and able to bypass local checks and balances. Secondly, on top of that free-for-all we will have the polarising effect of the narrow, academic English baccalaureate. In the competitive education market, schools will desperately try to raise their bac scores, and we can see how the risk will emerge of admissions policies being constructed to support that attempt. Now is emphatically not the time to weaken the powers of the schools adjudicator to rectify non-compliance with the admissions code. With the checks and balances gone, there is a real and present danger that there could be more unfairness in the system and that parents will find it harder to get fair access to good schools.