Education Bill

My Lords, in moving Amendment 124 I shall speak also to Amendments 125 and 139 in the same group. These amendments return to the subject of providing appropriate education to meet the needs of pupils with a high ability or aptitude in learning or other specialist skills. We had a brief debate on this in the last day in Committee before the summer Recess. There was general support on all sides of the Grand Committee for the view that, despite the importance of providing appropriate education for high-ability children, the education system does not do this particularly well at the moment. We could do better. It is important for several reasons. First, all children deserve the opportunity for educational excellence. It is also important for the national interest. The top few per cent of our children in ability and aptitude are those who go on to be, in many cases, the leaders in business, the arts and the sciences. If we are to compete globally, we cannot afford not to have our most able children educated to the highest international standards for the good of society as a whole. It is also important for social equity reasons because, at the moment, we have an education system where the most able children from poorer backgrounds are often unable to achieve entry to schools that can meet their expectations, and the better schools in many parts of the country are accessible only to those who can afford to pay for them. For all those reasons, it is important that we provide for the needs of the most able children. The amendments that we discussed at our last sitting concerned ways of imposing an obligation on schools to meet the needs of high-ability children and the possibility that academies might group together to provide common facilities and classes for groups of high-ability children—were there insufficient numbers in any one school to make that effective on a single-school basis. My amendments take the same principle a step further by recognising that the needs of those children may be best be met by having an academy, covering an area, which specialises in providing for the needs of high-ability children. If we take a year group in any school of 150 to 200 and the top 5 per cent of the ability range, we are talking about seven to 10 children. Seven or 10 children are not enough to form a class that can devote the appropriate skills and resources to teaching that top-ability range. Academic research suggests that high-ability children perform best when they are taught in peer groups where the class size is 20 or more, but to achieve the appropriate use of resources, you often need a much larger group to devote the specialist teaching from which they can benefit. The simple notion here is that the academies framework should be flexible enough to allow schools which are specialist academies providing for high-ability and high-aptitude children. They would not be narrowly defined by a local catchment area, because we would not want many of them, but I can imagine major cities or large towns having one or two. That would cope with those of the top few per cent of children who wanted to apply to go to those schools. There would not be a compulsory 11-plus; there would not be compulsory entry; but they would be available for children of high ability who could benefit from them. That would enable children of whatever income level or background to have access to schools that could fulfil their potential. I stress that I am thinking particularly about children from the less advantaged parts of our cities and country, who are at the moment disadvantaged. They are the children who may have high potential but whose local school is likely to be one of the less-well performing schools just because of the peer group and the circumstances of the school, whereas children of better-off parents may well be able to afford to move to a postcode where the average level of schooling is higher—or, of course, may be able to take advantage of private education. It is the children from poorer backgrounds whom our current system disadvantages, because in many parts of the country there is no provision for high-ability children to have a first-class academic education within a peer group of similarly able and motivated children within the state sector. It is not just academic provision which is important here. We all know that children need confidence from the support of being in an environment where they are encouraged to raise their aspirations and lift their eyes to what they may achieve. What many of the grammar schools and direct-grant schools provided in the past for many of our generation was the ability for children from those less advantaged backgrounds to mix with children in a peer group that enabled them to realise that their horizons could be wider. They could aspire to reach the top of our professions and businesses, and, indeed, aspire to political careers. It is important that such academies are provided to meet the needs of able children from less privileged backgrounds. The amendment talks about aptitudes other than just for learning, and I mentioned in the amendment, "““aptitude in musical, artistic or other specialist skills.””" As noble Lords will know, a number of specialist independent schools in the country provide excellent education for children with, for example, high musical ability. Those schools are available only to those pupils whose parents can pay the fees, or who are able and lucky enough to get a scholarship. Presumably we would all think it is a good thing that there are specialist music schools in the country which provide for those very able children; why should those schools not be available—again, we would not need very many of them—for children with high musical or artistic skills whose parents cannot afford for them to go to the current independent schools? Amendment 124 allows for the possibility that schools could be specialist in either academic or other skill areas. I should point out that the wording on the paper here, as it reached the list of amendments, has the word ““and”” at the end of it—““at end, insert ‘, and’””. I only noticed going through it today that that word should probably have been ““or””. The amendment is not intended to limit the previous conditions under which academies can specialise: it is an additional opportunity. I hope noble Lords will not mind if I speak to it on that basis. Amendment 139 is a consequential amendment: if we are going to have schools which specialise in providing for high-ability children or children with specialist skills in some areas, then clearly those schools have to be able to select those children on the basis of their ability or aptitude. It does not require, and I would not specify, any particular age group. I think it is important that these schools can be flexible in terms of the age group in which people are recognised as having the appropriate talent. It does not specify how they select them. Obviously one would hope that they would be as innovative as possible in recognising underlying aptitude rather than just demonstrated results. However, it is important that schools which focus on the needs of high-ability children have some means of selecting them from those parents who wish to apply to have their children go to a free state school. The last of the three amendments is Amendment 125. It goes one step further, in recognising that there are indeed many such schools in existence in the country, some of which were available to children paid for by the state in the past, but which moved into the private sector with the ending of the direct grant school system. Where such schools exist, if they want to return to the state sector and provide this kind of specialised selective education or academic education for children of high ability, why should we not allow them to move back, and into the status of academies? This amendment would allow them to do so. It seems to me almost beyond argument that, if we have schools that provide very high quality education for children of high ability which at the moment are available only to children whose parents can pay fees for that education, it must be hugely socially beneficial to allow those schools to be open to children whose parents cannot afford the fees. Why should we exclude 90 per cent of the children in the country from the best schools, if those schools want to open their doors and become part of the state sector? I hope that will have universal support. My noble friend Lord Lucas has another amendment that I shall let him now speak to, which has a similar objective, although a different wording. I should be happy to support that also, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on how the Government view such arrangements. I hope that it will be positive and that at Report he will be able to come back with the best form of wording to enable these objectives to be met. I beg to move.