Education Bill

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 126A. The previous Government made a good deal of progress in closing the gap between state and independent schools, to the extent that two or three independent schools crossed back into the state sector. This Government have made considerable further progress in that direction. It is clear that the institution of free schools and the freeing-up of obligations on academies generally will reduce the demand for independent education and bring children back into the state sector. The pressures now imposed by the Office for Fair Access will have a similar effect. There is a question to be asked of the Opposition. Do they share my ambition to see over time some of the independent sector reabsorbed back into the state sector? If so, how far are they prepared to go to achieve that? It does not seem to be going very far to allow a selective independent school to come back into the state sector as a selective state school. I do not share my noble friend’s views on selection. I rather like the Toby Young form of selection—that is, that every child should learn Latin. That seems to be an academic equivalent of university technical colleges. You set out to be a different kind of school, but it is the parents who choose whether to send their child to that school, not the school that chooses whether to accept the parents. I very much hope that that form of differentiation will prove to be stable and will be a pattern to which schools that are presently selective will find themselves able to adapt once they see that it produces a workable and fine school. We are indulging in a very interesting set of experiments. In my amendment, what I am interested in is not the bottom end of the independent sector, which has been crossing the divide until now and, I suspect, will continue to do so as financial pressures mount, but whether we can move far enough to allow some of the cream of the independent sector to come back to the state sector. What I have set out here—not with anyone’s particular permission but having talked to a lot of people about it—is a way in which we might achieve that, and I do not think that that would be a bad thing for the state sector. One of the problems of the division that we have at the moment, with 7 per cent independent and 93 per cent state is that the 7 per cent is sufficient to allow a lot of institutions and professions to headhunt and recruit principally in that sector. They can get all they want from there. It would be much healthier if we could reduce that percentage and have a number of stellar schools come back into the state sector to change fundamentally the attitude of recruiters, particularly in the professions, to the question of where they get their recruits. The Labour Party has had several chances radically to undermine the independent sector but has never done it, so why do we not move rather more gently to achieve what should be a common objective between me and the Opposition? Given all the progress that those in the Labour Party made in their years in office, I do not think that it is that big a step.