My Lords, I will briefly enter this debate on Amendment 35A and the question of whether Clause 28 should stand part. There is a so-called route to school improvement that my noble friend Lady Morris mentioned: you change your intake. It is relatively quick and it is not painless at all for the school, but because of the way our systems work it can be done. But it is immoral and socially unjust. It is not the right way to do things.
The fact that, in a debate, we can even talk about “children whom no one else wants”—which I put in inverted commas, as my noble friend Lady Morris did—is frankly quite appalling, and that is why I am enthusiastic about this Clause 28 stand part debate. My noble friends Lords Hunt and Lord Grocott made excellent speeches, which I hope they will redeploy if we ever get a Second Reading of the Private Member’s Bill I introduced this morning, because they made all the relevant points. I will not repeat them, except to say that the comprehensive principle is essentially about levelling up, because if you have schools choosing parents and children, you have selection for some and rejection for others. Frankly, no education system ought to reject significant numbers of children; they should just not do it.
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The fact is that, for large numbers of children—whether the areas in which they live have grammar schools or have all the difficulties outlined by my noble friend Lord Knight in terms of how the transfer between year 6 and year 7 works—year 6 is blighted for those children, their parents and carers and often, frankly, for their wider family members who are also worrying about where their niece, nephew or whoever else might end up. This is a year when these children, who are at the top of their primary school, ought to be developing their leadership skills in an age-appropriate way and ought to be looking to the next phase of their education and thinking about how exciting it is going to be. However, what they are actually doing is worrying: of course, they are worrying about SATs, but they are also worrying about where they are going to end up. The idea that some of them end up in one school and some end up in another—sometimes on the basis of admissions arrangements which are completely inexplicable to parents—is an absolutely terrible thing. If we really want education to work for all children and to be the service that can do the best by all children and young people, we certainly need to have reassurance from the Minister about no expansion of grammar schools, but we also need to ensure that we have genuinely fair admissions arrangements for all children, wherever they are.