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10.49 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment (Mr. Robin Squire): I will not be able to cover all of the matters raised by my hon. Friends in the 11 minutes available to me, but I am grateful to all of those who have taken part. The debate was kicked off by my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington), who gave his customary excellent speech on the subject. He was nobly, trenchantly and intelligently supported by my hon. Friends the Members for Colne Valley (Mr. Riddick), for Waveney (Mr. Porter) and for Gravesham (Mr. Arnold), and there were incisive interjections from my hon. Friends the Members for Lancaster (Dame E. Kellett-Bowman) and for Southport (Mr. Banks). It was a tremendous achievement.
I shall take up two points made by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Ms Morris). First, I shall certainly consider her suggestion that we provide a debate in Government time on the chief inspector's report, if only--as my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham said--to ensure the attendance of Opposition Back Benchers. Secondly, she implied that the Government have reduced Ofsted's budget. She knows--although the House may not fully be aware of it--that because of good budgeting, Ofsted has advised us that it will not be able to spend its full budget this year. The Government were advised in time, and we have made the appropriate adjustments and increased the budgets appropriately for the ensuing years.
I shall refer to the other main points of the debate as time allows. First, I wish to pay tribute to the work done by Ofsted in raising education standards. The chief inspector's annual report is one of the key education documents produced during the year. It provides a thorough review of the state of the nation's schools, and shows both success and failure in the classroom. It is based on evidence from actual inspection reports, and therefore has an authority that is difficult to challenge.
A number of key points in the report have been raised this morning. In particular, the report provides evidence that all types of school can achieve excellence. More than 200 successful schools were picked out for special commendation, some of which--as has been made clear--are in the constituencies of my hon. Friends. The schools range from inner-city primaries to shire county secondary schools. The report records that the majority of schools have satisfactory or better standards of pupil achievement and teaching, and adds that there is generally good behaviour in all but a few schools and a growing confidence among teachers about meeting national curriculum requirements. These are the positive points, and the teachers in the schools concerned deserve our warmest congratulations.
The report does not seek to disguise the fact that there are still areas that require major improvement. These include the need to raise standards of pupil achievement in half of our primary schools and two fifths of our
secondary schools, and the need to improve standards of teaching--one lesson in five remains unsatisfactory. The report has given clear messages about what needs to be done, and the Government have already put a wide range of measures into effect to secure improvement. I shall spend a few moments on those.
The inspection system introduced by the Government means that schools are now inspected on a regular basis. Some 6,000 schools have already been inspected. All have had reports published and all have had to draw up action plans which have addressed any areas of weakness identified in the inspection report. That is crucial information in helping schools to improve, and is the sort of independent expert analysis that schools did not routinely receive in the past.
The report observes that there are already clear indications that the process of inspection and action planning is helping schools to improve their teaching methods. We know that inspecting all schools is a massive undertaking, but it is one that we are determined to achieve. Ofsted has taken decisive action through the recruitment of a large group of additional inspectors to ensure that the four-year inspection target is met.
For our part, the Government have introduced the new post-inspection grant for education support and training to help schools with their action plans after inspection. The grant enables LEAs to target help on schools with serious weaknesses. My hon. Friend the Member for Waveney helpfully raised the subject of the nature of future inspections. We are considering carefully how we should proceed once the current initial cycle of inspections has been completed. More than half of all secondary schools have already been inspected and all schools will have been inspected by July 1998. Now is a good time to take stock and to consider what our permanent inspection arrangements should be.
There is already a fair degree of consensus that any new arrangements should ensure that all schools are regularly inspected, but perhaps with more targeting towards schools with serious weaknesses. The Secretary of State and the chief inspector are giving thought to the matter, and we hope to announce further details on our thinking by Easter.
The key to high achievement is good teaching, and the report makes it clear that while there are many excellent teachers, there are still a small minority whose performance is consistently weak. This problem must be tackled. We in the Government can help, but ultimately only the school itself can secure a lasting improvement. Some hon. Members already know that, from April, Ofsted inspectors will be working to a new and more sharply focused inspection framework that is the product of extensive consultation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney said, from the same date, the inspectors will be reporting to the head when they find examples of excellent or very poor teaching. That will not diminish the role of the head and senior staff, but should be a valuable management tool. It will also provide useful feedback to the teacher concerned.
On the wider front, the Teacher Training Agency is also actively involved and is working to improve the quality of initial teacher training by drawing on inspection reports from Ofsted that are also now being published. It has also undertaken work to target in-service training priorities--for example, subject knowledge at key stage 2; improving behaviour; and discipline and school leadership.
In recognition of the very important role of head teachers--this is highlighted by the report--the TTA is working to establish a new national professional qualification for aspiring head teachers that will set a rigorous national standard for headships. The qualification will be in addition to the head teachers' Headlamp training scheme that is already well under way.
The chief inspector's report shows that there is a need to tackle mediocre and poor standards of literacy in many schools. It recommends that schools should review the quality and consistency of teaching to set and achieve higher targets. Similarly, there is much that could be done to improve the progress and attainment of pupils in terms of number work. It is because we share the chief inspector's wish to see such an improvement that we have announced the establishment of up to 20 literacy and numeracy centres, aimed particularly at improving teaching in primary schools. There are also new rules for training primary teachers, with at least 50 hours to be spent on training in the teaching of reading and 50 hours on arithmetic.
My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury made several comments, and in particular highlighted what he saw as the difficulty of dismissing bad teachers. No one denies that in schools, as elsewhere, there can be difficulties in dismissing inadequate staff. I must stress that teachers have the same rights under employment protection law as any other employee but, because of our legislation on the local management of schools, any well-run school now has powers to take the necessary action either to improve performance where a teacherhas been identified as being currently deficient, or,if necessary, to dismiss.
I await clarification from the Opposition of their recent comments about hastening the process. It seems at first sight, however, that their proposals will lead either to the weakening of the employment position of teachers--which seems unlikely--or to the Opposition in some way
taking back the powers that we have given to school governors. I would personally deplore either of those options.
My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury also referred to primary and secondary funding but, with precisely two minutes remaining to me, he will not expect me to go into that subject at great length. He will know that powers do lie with LEAs to vary their local management of schools schemes, and to ensure that greater assistance is given by those schemes to primary schools relative to secondary schools on the per-pupil funding basis.
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