FORUM: Back to ‘them and us’ education?

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Published: 17 February, 2011
by GLENDA JACKSON

A central and monstrous aspect of the Education Bill is that it will reintroduce a form of selection in our schools, warns Hampstead & Kilburn’s Labour MP

THE contributions we have heard from the government have painted a virtually dystopian picture of education in our country in which virtually every classroom is a battlefield, every teacher is incompetent and lacking in inspiration, every child is badly taught and where examination results 

are lamentable in comparison with other countries.

The ability of children who receive free school meals to make it to Oxbridge seems to have been the recurring theme. 

Mel Stride, who was the most recent Member to make that contribution, gave the example of Westminster School. 

If he is so concerned, why is he not arguing ferociously with the government to fund pupils in our schools to the level charged in fees by Westminster and for class sizes to be as small as the standard not only in Westminster, but in every private school in this country?

The bill is a typical government piece of legislation. 

It purports to be under the overarching aegis of giving back to people in this country the right to make local decisions that affect them in their local areas, but it does exactly the opposite.

It will put powers into the hands of the Secretary of State that are currently undreamt of by many local authorities and by the schools in my constituency.

What I find most paradoxical is the way government members have bought what the government are attempting to sell in the bill. 

It starts with early-years education, because the government has trumpeted loud and long that every disadvantaged two-year-old (we are yet to know what will constitute that disadvantage because the government have given us no detail) will be able to have nursery education. 

They then attempt to convince us that a child going from age two to five will, of course, be given a place in a local primary school.

There is a desperate need for primary school places in my constituency and there will then be a gradual progression on to secondary school. 

It looks, certainly from what the government has said and from what has happened in my constituency, as though when children get to the age of 11 there will be no comprehensive schools left, only academies and free schools.

The central and monstrous aspect of the bill is that this will reintroduce a form of selection in schools. 

If there is no concerted local area agreement on what constitutes an admissions policy for all schools, we will see a return to what people of my generation lived through, which is the “them and us” approach to education for all our children.

The Secretary of  State asserted that the government are committed to ensuring that every child in this country has the best possible education. 

How can that conceivably be so when we are looking at a situation in which academies and free schools will be the only schools available to local people? 

We have no idea what the capital costs or revenue costs of those schools will be. 

This is the idea that we are making a real inroad into affording opportunity and aspiration for every child, however disadvantaged their background, by introducing free education for two-year-olds, when we know that Sure Start facilities are being closed even as we speak.

The lack of imagination from government members never fails to amaze me.

The idea that this bill is going to ensure that every child has an absolutely clear ride from the age of 2 to 18, that there will never be a bump on the way and that at every single 

point they will be encouraged, inspired and told to aspire is utter nonsense. 

I shall not go down the road of discussing the abolition of the education maintenance allowance for those who stay on at school until aged 18.

For Liberal Democrat party members – who I presume obtained their degrees from the Pontius Pilate school of political philosophy – to support this bill is yet something else of which they have real cause to be ashamed.

But no one should be as ashamed as the Conservative Party, which, despite its protestations about caring for every child in this country, is setting in train an educational system that will create not just one or two 

but three tiers of education in this country.

• This is an edited extract of Glenda Jackson’s speech during a debate on the bill in the House of Commons last Tuesday.