Education Bill

My Lords, all of us sympathise with the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, regarding the appalling letters she and others of us have received from time to time and which completely miss the point of this debate. I do not think that any Member of your Lordships' House would think that a school ought not to have clear policies on bullying, the aspects of life dealt with in citizenship education, personal social, health and sex education, and even healthy eating. However, where I part company with the noble Baroness is that if these issues are a matter for close inspection by Ofsted, then the global views of that organisation—it has global views, although that may alter—become written in stone. Once these policies are apparent, schools often are scared to deviate in any way from what they come to believe is the letter of the law. The grades given by Ofsted to schools are very talismanic. The school is outstanding, satisfactory or merely good. Heads and governors become hugely anxious that an Ofsted report will say something detrimental and, if the buzz from other local schools already inspected is that it is important to tick the right boxes by adopting certain policies on sex education, certain aspects of discipline, citizenship education or even on the consumption of hamburgers and chips, sadly they will have those policies. We have seen far too much evidence of that. We should leave these decisions entirely to individual schools. We should not want to take from the hands of heads, teachers and governors the right to make professional decisions in these areas of school life. Of course, every one of the items mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in her amendment is absolutely important, but we should trust the staff on the spot to deal with them and not impose upon the staff, as inevitably this amendment would, an Ofsted view—and that, sadly, means a government view—about these matters. Professional teachers and their governors are best equipped to know of the appropriateness of, say, certain aspects of sex education, certain specifics for bullying, and dietary needs in their own schools, and it is the whole thrust of the coalition's schools policy that schools should be free to take the decisions that the situation demands. I ought to add that Ofsted entirely lost its way by trying to inspect—and, therefore, inevitably setting into concrete—so many areas of school life, with something like two dozen criteria. I welcome the Government’s new view that schools should concentrate broadly on teaching, learning, discipline and leadership. If you get those right, everything else falls into place. I should like to leave noble Lords with one thought. A paragraph or two that is passed by your Lordships can quite literally lead to 1,000 pages of bumph for an individual school. That is true. It is not necessary for Ofsted to inspect all these matters. I therefore oppose the amendment.