Education Bill

I do not quite know how to follow that speech. The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) was a very good member of the former Select Committee, which I chaired. He was always an excellent contributor, but he always got the issue under discussion out of proportion. There has been a full Select Committee report, and I hope that people will read that as well as pay attention to the hon. Gentleman's speech today, at one stage of which I thought the men in white coats might be coming. When the Committee was looking into this matter, I got the feeling that the hon. Gentleman was rather taken over by the home educators. Home educators are very good when they are good, but there is evidence, in the Badman inquiry and elsewhere, that there are all sorts of people who use home education because they do not want to send their children to school yet do not want to be prosecuted. Home education is a right, but if people take up that right they must also accept that they have a responsibility to offer the children in question a coherent and stimulating educational programme, and I believe that local authorities have the right to check on that, in the most sensitive way possible. I therefore hope people make a balanced judgment of his new clause 22. The previous Select Committee spent a lot of time on these matters. One of the great victories for those of us who work on Committee reports is someone taking notice of what they say. That is wonderful, although normally there is about a two-year time lag before notice is taken. I think our report on admissions policy was one of our best, with recommendations such as giving teeth to the schools adjudicator post and making sure that the code of admissions is obligatory and schools do not merely have to take note of it. When we conducted our inquiry, I was amazed to discover that really nice people—really nice heads and educators—would bend every rule to get the selection process that suited their school. That was the case even for head teachers who looked as though they came from central casting and seemed to conform to the stereotype of the good, confident head teacher. I remember asking one particular lady, ““How many looked-after children do you have at your school?”” ““None””, she replied. I then asked, ““How many children with special needs?”” She said: ““Very few.”” My next question was: ““How many children on free school meals?”” We found that the school did not have any children in that category. I therefore asked whether or not the school had taken notice of the code, to which she said, ““Yes, we took note of it.”” That is all anyone had to do; that is why the code was not working. Our Committee recommended that if we were to have a code, people should have to take notice of it, and if they did not, the schools adjudicator could say, ““Come on! There is a code and you should obey it.”” It took some time—about two years—before the then Government made the code obligatory and gave the adjudicator teeth. Why did the schools adjudicator not have the teeth to intervene? It was because it was almost impossible to call him in. That had to happen in a very special way and very few people understood how to get him involved. Very often we would find that a group of schools knew that one or two schools were ignoring the code—everybody knew it. There are communities of schools, and I sometimes think that this Government like to forget how important that is in an area. Schools are not all little citadels that do not want anything to do with each other; they co-operate, meet and share ideas. They share a great deal when the local education system is working well. People knew that some schools were breaking all the rules and not taking any notice of the code, but they were too nice to do anything about it. People were nice about heads and acted in a collegiate way. All I want to say on this group of amendments is that if anyone rolls back the admissions code from being a fair code to which people have to pay attention, and if we weaken the link so that the schools adjudicator cannot get involved, make an inquiry and put things right, we will take a dramatic step backwards in the education of this country.