Prepared: 16:38 on 19 November 2009
Sitting where I do, I sometimes think that we make schools so accountable that we paralyse them from action—not entirely, but it is a question of balance. Those of us in the House who take an interest in education will know that when the Department for Children, Schools and Families was set up, the remit of our Committee changed. It is a difficult remit, because it is not a tidy departmental responsibility. Matters to do with children, schools and families stretch across at least 10 Departments.
The Committee wanted to consider three things about school accountability, which are what most people think of as the three great educational reforms in the past 20 years. They date from about Lord Baker’s time, although they are not all associated with him. We all know them. The first is testing and assessment, and I remember that people always used to say that Ken Baker, as he then was, had read “The One Minute Manager”, which said that if something cannot be measured, it cannot be managed. They said that that was behind the great fashion for testing and assessment that has run through this country’s education for the past 20 years.
The second matter that we wanted to consider was the national curriculum. Everyone in the Chamber will know that we believed that although the inspiration behind it was right—testing and assessment had gone too far—it was too crowded and needed greater flexibility. We said that the pendulum should swing back in the other direction.
The third matter was school accountability. I cannot go into too much detail about what we are going to say about it, but I shall give a tiny bit of the flavour of our analysis. School accountability should lead to improvement both in schools and in children’s well-being and outcomes. Too often, schools focus on the former rather than the latter. They focus just on examination results rather than on the other things that we do for children in schools, which are broader than just the number who get good GCSEs.
Any Government have to get their message clear, because it is not school buildings or testing and assessment that improve the quality of education that children get. The quintessential element that improves their education is the quality of the teaching that they get. It is not rocket science, is it? It is about the quality of the teachers and of the leadership and support of the teaching team. In everything that we do, the priority should be investment in high-quality teachers. We have seen more investment in teachers and some really good change in the quality of people coming into teaching and being retained. It has not gone far enough, but it has gone pretty darn far.
Teaching staff want some stability in their lives. It looked as though the new relationship with schools would bring about a real change in what schools faced, such as a simplification of red tape, rules, regulations and so on. I say to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that although some simplification has flowed from it, there is still a bewildering array of new initiatives. That has partly negated all the good stuff in the new relationship.
We have also had the Government’s 21st century schools White Paper, which signalled even greater complexity in many ways. Additional statutory duties on governors are coming through, and there was the national challenge, which was mishandled in some ways. There were good intentions, but initially the wrong view was given to many schools about the value that they were adding to the educational process.
We have not yet written up the final report on school accountability, but my own view is that the strong thing about evaluation in schools is their self-evaluation. That is important both in how Ofsted approaches the running of a school and in a school’s quality. However, we have yet again seen the role that Ofsted plays. Self-evaluation started and it told our Committee, “We want self-evaluation to be innovative and imaginative. We actually have schools that make videos of what they do.” However, I think I visit more schools than anyone in the Chamber—the Secretary of State has probably overtaken me, but if he ever moves on to a new job I might still be here and going to schools, as I have been for 10 years—and I find that everyone says of the self-evaluation form, “They say you don’t have to fill this in, but I’m not going to be the one who puts their head above the parapet and does not fill in the form in the way that Ofsted says”.
The Committee and I will look very carefully at the Queen’s Speech and the guarantees that have been announced. There are some very good ones, and I hope that we will find a system that is less onerous on schools, gives them more power of self-regulation and takes some of the load off them in areas where they have been getting too many complex messages.
We have the right to point out in this debate something that was missing from the Queen’s Speech. As Chairman of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, I have learned a great deal about child protection. There have been tragic cases up and down the country, including the murder of children and dreadful things happening to them in extreme cases. A worrying number of vulnerable children have come to dreadful ends and been dreadfully treated in our country. It is a small percentage, but it much concerns everyone in the field.
Child protection is a vital element of the work of the Department and the Select Committee, but I would have liked today’s debate to have touched on the protection of childhood. We have an interesting and laudable ambition for the eradication of child poverty by 2020, and I celebrate that, although it will be darn hard to achieve, because the goalposts will move all the time. It will be a great struggle, although some very good things have been achieved already.
I want to talk, however, about the poverty of childhood. When I started talking to, and being lobbied by, people, as Chairman of the Committee, I felt some reluctance toward those who said that we were truncating and squeezing childhood and that the pressure on children in our country was intolerable. However, having considered the matter, I think that it is true. The commercial world impacts on children. They are seen as a soft target for advertising and are pressured into growing up too young; they are pressured to adopt fashion accessories too young and to have mobile phones and accessories and so many other things too young. Often they are pressurised by advertisers.
I have said this to the Secretary of State before: to have a Cabinet colleague who believes, in an age of childhood obesity, that we should relax the rules on product placement seems damn crazy. I believe that very strongly. The pressures on children from commercial advertising alone are already great, without their getting even worse.
Mr. Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con): The hon. Gentleman has touched on an interesting theme. Would he agree, however, that with so much pressure on young people, the wonder is that so many of them turn out really well? In the main, they get a bad press, but more than 99 per cent. of them do valuable work, including charitable work, and get on with their lives splendidly. A disproportionate amount of press coverage is given to the rotten apples.
Mr. Sheerman: The hon. Gentleman is right, and he knows that I agree with him.
Another aspect of childhood today is sexual awareness. Our country still has worryingly high rates of teenage pregnancy. The life of a girl who gets pregnant very young is more or less likely to be destroyed—she will probably always be poor—but we do not take that seriously enough in this country.
The country is also awash with a focus on early sexual activity. I talked recently with members of another Select Committee who had looked at the amount of pornography on the internet available to children. That disturbs me greatly. An inquiry has been conducted into that—[Interruption.] An hon. Gentleman is laughing, but I think that the accessibility of pornography to children in our schools is a serious matter. When I go to infant schools, teachers say to me, “Children come here, at five and six, simulating sexual behaviour that they should know nothing about.” That is disgusting.
I was angered the other day when I read that Rupert and James Murdoch wanted to turn BSkyB into a more trusted and loved broadcaster than the BBC. Two days before, I had read that the Murdoch empire is not only the biggest carrier of pornography in the world, but has now bought a major supplier and maker of pornography in the United States. I do not know what “trusted” and “loved” meant, but a company that makes such filth available to children does not impress me. Our children should be protected from pornography, whether it is on BSkyB or the internet. Childhood should be protected.
I shall say something that Government Front-Bench Members might not like. I talked earlier about the age of 18 being the age at which children cease to be children. I shall return to the Government’s guarantees set out in the Queen’s Speech, but first I remind the House of the five outcomes—the guarantees of childhood—in “Every Child Matters”: to be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution and achieve economic well-being. There is nothing wrong with those.
I would like, however, to say one thing to Front-Bench Members and, given the opportunity, the Prime Minister. In an answer during Prime Minister’s questions last Wednesday, the Prime Minister said that he now believes in votes at 16. I think that that fashion started with the Liberal Democrats, but the Prime Minister and the Leader of the House now seem to believe it too. However, I think that we should think extremely carefully before moving to votes at 16—it would mean adulthood at 16 and the end of the protections of childhood between 16 and 18.
Many of the things that I speak about are based on evidence sessions and intensive consideration of a subject. The first inquiry last year was on children in care and looked-after children. Having seen the vulnerability of 14 to 16-year-old children, and that of 16 to 18-year olds out in the world who are open to every kind of exploitation, we realised at the end of the inquiry that we do not want the protections of childhood to finish at 16. We lose those protections at 18 to our cost as a society.
I have commented on what I liked about the Queen’s Speech—it contained some very good things—and it is my Select Committee’s job to ensure that they measure up to the way that they were promulgated in the House yesterday and today. There are one or two things that I wish had been in the Queen’s Speech, but hon. Members can be assured that Select Committee members will consider promulgating those ideas in the coming months.