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Lord Rooker: My Lords, perhaps that subject and the alternative can be debated when the Bill comes before the House. However, it would be untenable simply to cite fixed penalty offences if the police were not able immediately to take the vehicle off the road. It would be barmy to cite a fixed penalty offence and then allow the driver to continue driving uninsured. Currently there is no power to impound. That power is needed and has therefore been included in the Bill that is before Parliament.
Lord Campbell-Savours: My Lords, the congestion charge is based on number plate recognition. Is there not potential scope there?
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Lord Rooker: Exactly, my Lords; it is the same technology. This technology offers long-term compliance and improved detection and enforcement capabilities. The feature it offers is a continuous enforcement from the records rather than offences on the road. Matching the two databases together, people will know that the keeper of a vehicle does not have a road fund licence. The keeper of the vehicle has a responsibility to ensure that the drivers are insured. The two databases will therefore be matched together.
Inquiries Bill [HL]
The Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs and Lord Chancellor (Lord Falconer of Thoroton): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That it be an instruction to the Grand Committee to which the Inquiries Bill has been committed that they consider the Bill in the following order:
Clauses 1 to 44 Schedule 1 Clause 45 Schedule 2 Clause 46 Schedule 3 Clauses 47 to 50.—(Lord Falconer of Thoroton.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Education Bill [HL]
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Skills (Lord Filkin): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.
I am delighted to be here today to speak about a measure which takes forward the Government's continuing drive to raise education standards. We all share the ambition for our children and young people that they should be given every opportunity to flourish and to achieve to their full potential. The Bill has a significant part to play in that process.
Perhaps I can start by paying tribute to the hard work and determination of those in our schools who have made such significant strides in recent years. Ofsted tells us that we have the best qualified cohort of teachers we have ever had. In 1997, in more than 350 secondary schools, less than 20 per cent of the pupils got five good GCSEs. Today that number is less than 100. In primary schools, 77 per cent of pupils are achieving level 4 in English and 74 per cent are achieving that level in mathematics. Both of those figures are very significant increases over previous years. The reforms in the Bill are designed to build on those achievements.
The Bill's first strong theme is about unlocking the energy and potential of frontline staff and their leaders within schools to get more educational achievement
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for more children. We plan to do that by establishing a new relationship between schools and those in central and local government who share the responsibility for the education service. This new relationship with schools will be built on smarter accountability, less bureaucracy, greater financial stability and transparency.
I turn first to smarter accountability. The new system of inspection, rather than being a disruptive event every six years, will provide a much more frequent "light-touch" check on progress. Drawing on the school's own improvement processes, each school will be supported by a school improvement partner. This system has already been trialled in 61 schools in six local authorities, and these school improvement partners will provide through the "Single Conversation" an annual challenge to the senior leadership of the school. Early feedback on the system is extremely encouraging.
I turn next to the matter of less bureaucracy: avoiding unnecessary preparation for inspection, removing multiple bidding processes for resources, doing away with separate post-inspection action plans, and replacing dry annual reports and poorly attended parent/governor meetings with a much more accessible and wide-ranging school profile. Those are some of the reductions in bureaucracy which we think are absolutely necessary to give schools more scope to focus on getting improved educational outcomes.
I turn thirdly to financial stability and simplicity. We will tackle the rationalisation of funding streams through internal processes in the DfES. But more than that, we will enable the setting of three-year budgets for schools. This will be the first time in recorded history that this has ever taken place, thereby giving, we hope, strong local leadership, clarity about resources, freedom from bureaucracy, support and incentive throughout the school improvement partnership to do better and to raise local authorities' ambitions for all their children. We believe that these amount to a significant regime of improvement for schools.
There has been much speculation on the department's view of local authorities, not all of it based on a reading of the department's five-year strategy or the discussion that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has been having with local authority leaders. We believe that there is an important role for local authorities in the education agenda, not least in linking it up with the wider children's agenda. As the House knows, the Government have given local authorities a massive and major new leadership role about leading for better outcomes for all children in their areas, spanning not simply traditional education but all the five outcomes that we discussed during the passage of the Children Act.
But that role for local authorities is not simply the old role—it must change as society and schools and their needs for the public and children change. Key components of that will be reinforced by this Bill: first, the local authorities as the strategic leaders in their areas, working with partners, introducing strong self-confident
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schools to ensure that all the services for children in an area work together for the benefit of children and their families. Next, we must define and agree the way in which dedicated school funding is distributed among schools, and agree what part of it needs to be devoted to spending outside individual school budgets. Next, the local authorities will be the champions of the child and family—the guarantors of an appropriate level of service, responsive to need. They will retain their powers of intervention, acting at the earliest possible moment, to tackle school failure. No child should be condemned to attend a school which fails to offer an acceptable standard of education.
Also, the local authority, in its role as champion, will be responsible for providing education for those of school age who need to attend alternative provision. One of the changes in the role of local authorities over the past decade or so is increasingly in seeing themselves as bodies with a strategic leadership role to commission to achieve outcomes, rather than as the managers of a set of input services by themselves. Many local authorities have welcomed that shift of focus as providing a much wider leadership role. The Bill builds on the leadership that those local authorities have shown in that respect. Voluntary and community sector partners, as well as the private sector and other local authorities, may all have a part to play in delivering excellent and efficient services.
The development of children's trust arrangements will extend joint commissioning across children's services. We propose a modest extension of that concept—that where local authorities are planning to replace a secondary school, they should invite proposals from partners rather than simply proceed to establish another community school.
Before I flesh out these in a little more detail, I should add that another substantial theme of the Bill is to carry forward the work of the National Assembly for Wales. The provisions in the Bill take forward the Assembly's 10-year strategy for comprehensive education and learning—the Learning Country. That strategy also has a focus on raising standards, on breaking down barriers to learning and lifting the skills base in Wales.
Perhaps I may now return to the first of the themes and illustrate how the Bill will help to unlock the potential in our schools. Regular inspection by Ofsted was introduced 12 years ago and since then it has inspected every school in England at least twice. Under a succession of distinguished chief inspectors, including the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, Ofsted has made a major contribution to improving standards in education and the transparency and accountability of the school system. We want to build on that achievement. We now look to link the principle of inspection more effectively into schools' own processes, so that all the energy in the system is devoted to improvement—which is, of course, the purpose of inspection.
An inspection even once every six years is an infrequent and threatening event, with the current long period of notice involving extended and intensive
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preparation, causing stress for staff and disruption for the work of the school. Schools have made great strides in developing their own cycle of school improvement. Self-evaluation feeds into school development plans updated on an annual basis. We want to reinforce those trends in good schools. The new three-year, short notice, lighter touch inspection introduced by the Bill will be much less disruptive. External inspection should always be challenging, but we hope that the new arrangements will quickly come to be seen as a helpful health check. The evidence from the extensive pilots already points positively that way. Schools will feed in their self-evaluation evidence to the inspection team. Inspectors will then engage with the schools in a professional dialogue, examining the evidence in support of the self-evaluation.
We are not introducing these reforms blindly. Ofsted consulted on them in February 2004 and received over 1,000 responses, with more than three-quarters in favour of the proposals. These proposals and those for the new relationship with schools are being trialled with schools and local authorities. There are 29 school improvement partners working with the 61 secondary schools in the current national trial of the new relationship with schools. All partners have been accredited through a national development and assessment process.
The Bill establishes beyond doubt the role of inspection in reporting on how schools will contribute to all of the five outcomes for children set out in that Act—health, protection from harm, education, training and recreation and the contribution made to society and social and economic well-being.
Clause 2 provides that the Chief Inspector shall report on,
as defined in the Children Act. Good schools have always played a part in promoting all those outcomes and it enhances rather than detracts from their core business.
The Chief Inspector will be directly responsible for the quality and content of all inspection reports. He will be able to intervene directly, and so more quickly, to rectify any mistakes and address concerns. Early experience from the trials shows that there is a greater consistency and quality in the inspection process. Head teachers have written to Ofsted, praising the improvements that the new system is already demonstrating. We shall also remove much of the activity after an inspection by combining the post-inspection action plan into the school improvement plan. Reports will also be improved. They will be shorter, sharper and provide a realistic picture of what life is like for the child at that school.
While most schools will continue to do well, one focus of inspection is to identify schools which are in urgent need of serious improvement and support. We propose to retain the category of "schools requiring
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special measures". Evidence supports that this serious category has led to significant improvement. Since 1997, more than half a million children have benefited from improvements in the standards of schools placed in this category.
The Bill also addresses some weaknesses, allowing the judgment of inspectors to be informed by recent developments, such as a new leadership team, or evidence that the school is now on an upward trajectory. For those schools judged to be causing most concern, the chief inspector will instigate a peer review by a senior HMI to review and assess the evidence and the likely judgment before anything is published.
We will simplify the other designations of schools with weaknesses, introducing the concept of schools requiring significant improvement. This can include those where pupils are not performing badly in absolute terms but are not doing as well as they should. Follow-up by the local authority and in some cases the Secretary of State will remain unchanged. The revised arrangements will ensure that poor schools are identified, supported and challenged to drive up standards.
The Bill will also ensure that extended schools experience a single inspection event and report rather than having separate inspections of education and childcare. We will also provide a more integrated approach to inspections of early years settings which are not schools and shift the focus of those, so that Ofsted inspectors look at what it is like for a child in the setting. These reports will show how the provision contributes to better outcomes for children.
Parents, as a child's first and closest educators, have a stronger influence on their child's educational achievement. So we must take every opportunity to have parents involved in education, both at home and in understanding the work of schools. The current arrangements do not work well. Given the opportunity to meet annually with the governing body, few parents ever turn up to do so and they do not find annual reports very informative. The Select Committee in 1999 proposed the abolition of the parents meeting as a statutory obligation and we are now giving effect to that. We want schools to engage with parents in a more proactive manner in much richer ways than simply holding a formulaic meeting. This might still mean holding a meeting, but for other schools it could mean more regular meetings. It is clear that, consistent with the overall approach, central government should get out of the business of prescribing the detail, be clearer on what the outcomes look like and support schools in their attainment.
We must all ensure that parents have a clear set of basic information on the performance and achievement of their school. We propose to do that through the school profile, which will be a four-page document, using centrally provided data to which schools will be free to add descriptive and contextual material. It will give parents a better understanding of how the school is performing, how it is meeting the full
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range of needs and what it is particularly proud of. It will also tell parents how their views have been taken into account and how they can be heard.
I turn to the subject of the skills of the workforce. If we are serious about helping every child to reach his full potential, we must provide coherent support for the development and continuous improvement of the professional skills needed by all members of the school workforce. The renamed Training and Development Agency for Schools will lead that task. Its key aim will be to raise educational standards by improving the training and development of the whole school and promoting career opportunities throughout the workforce. The agency will look at how the school workforce and its development can better support the outcomes for children.
We shall also reform the data collected on teachers and other staff. In future, information should be collected once and used many times. We shall use the available technology and have a single survey feeding a new school workforce database. A final step in freeing up schools will be the removal of the barriers that prevent our schools offering courses normally associated with higher education. Some schools are already making such an offer to their pupils—for example, by making use of the widely respected and accredited material produced by the Open University. Where schools feel that students are receptive to the stretch that these generally small or modular courses offer, we wish to allow them to be able to make them available as a small part of a young person's 14-19 programme of learning.
I turn to the crucial issue of finance. We intend to secure financial simplicity and stability for schools. The bidding culture is wasteful of time and energy and it can divert strategic planning into an unedifying chase for funds. Added to that rationalisation is a far more fundamental and far-reaching reform—three-year school budgets. Discussions with the Secondary Heads Association and the National Association of Head Teachers show that there is real excitement throughout the 20,000-plus schools in our country at the prospect of being able to plan their budgets and resources on a longer-term basis. It allows them to have a clearer platform of financial certainty within which to give strong leadership to deliver improved educational and other outcomes for children. We consider that to be fundamental.
We are proud of that move forward and have been delighted by the way in which it has been so warmly received on consultation so far. The Secretary of State will be issuing a consultation paper in January next year, setting out the detail of how this will be taken forward. That will give the House the opportunity to get the flavour of the detail, as well as the headline message.
I turn to the new role of the local authority as strategic leader and champion of the child and family. As strategic leaders, we shall look to local authorities to be creative in ensuring the delivery of high-quality services in their areas. The joint area reviews, to be carried out under the Children Act, will provide them
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and their communities with an assessment of the work needed to improve services. Local authorities are uniquely placed to bring together the range of partners needed to create the effective partnerships—formal and otherwise—to realise those improvements. Schools will play a key role in that.
On funding, local authorities will continue to receive grant from central government. They will continue to operate and agree local funding formulae. They—not others—will need to determine the split of the dedicated school budget between individual school budgets and funding for alternative, non-school provision. In future, they will be able to agree that with their school forum rather than seek agreement from us in Whitehall. All local authorities now have representative school forums, and many find them to be growing in confidence and capacity.
As champions of children and families, local authorities will also retain all their powers of intervention and challenge. We shall re-enact the requirement for local authorities to set themselves challenging targets.
As the champion of the child and the family, local authorities must also have the capacity to intervene where things go wrong, and as soon as there are signs of problems. They will play a vital role in helping to turn around a school which is causing concern. They will retain responsibility for an action plan, setting out the steps needed to support the school in making progress.
Local authorities also have a key role in working with more vulnerable children, such as those in alternative provision and those at risk of exclusion, those who have been excluded, and teenage mothers or whatever. Securing the attendance of this vulnerable group is essential. The Bill closes a loophole whereby parents are now required to secure their children's attendance and it provides local authorities with the sanctions that already exist to enforce attendance at mainstream school. As with school attendance, the assumption must be that preventive work will secure attendance wherever possible, but the existence of sanctions reinforces the seriousness of this issue.
We intend to create a scheme that will allow all local authorities to check applications for free school meals online. Currently, more than 200,000 families are eligible to claim but do not do so. The scheme will make it easier for them to obtain the benefit with less of a stigma and less bureaucracy.
My final point concerns the role of local authorities as commissioner. Local authorities are already required to invite proposals from a range of possible providers when they plan to open an additional secondary school. The Bill extends that requirement to apply to the provision of all new secondary schools, including ones intended to replace existing schools which are closing.
We believe that that will inject more choice into the secondary education market, encourage new providers to come forward with their proposals and lead to a more diverse range of schools. These provisions will also give local people the opportunity to express their
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views on a range of options for meeting the needs of their communities and their children rather than a single option, as is currently the case.
I hope that my description of the provisions has been helpful. I am confident that there will be wide agreement about many of the measures in the proposals. As ever, we shall no doubt wish to scrutinise the detail, but the fundamental issue that I wish to make clear in my opening speech is that we believe that the Bill will make a significant difference to schools in terms of freeing them from bureaucracy, giving them a platform of financial certainty, and providing clarity about what they are seeking to achieve and support in doing so. That will matter both to parents and to the children whom the schools serve. It will also support local authorities as they move to their new strategic role. We believe that it will make a significant difference to educational outcome. We have been grateful for the active participation of many in shaping the thinking that has led to the Bill.
For Wales, the Bill represents a further legislative platform in the National Assembly's far-reaching programme of support and development for comprehensive education and lifelong learning, described in The Learning Country.
I look forward to what I am sure will be a wide-ranging and informative debate. I commend the Bill to the House.
Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Filkin.)
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