§
Lords amendment: No. 18, in page 9, line 32, leave out "this section" and insert—
section 19(2) of this Act;
(aa) having regard to paragraphs 2 to 4 of Part I of Schedule 1 to this Act, specify the respective numbers of parent members, staff members and appointed members who it is proposed should (with the person for the time being head teacher) constitute the board of management which succeeds the interim board of management;
§ The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Mr. Ian Lang)I beg to move, That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said amendment.
§ Madam Deputy Speaker (Miss Betty Boothroyd)With this it will be convenient to take Lords amendments Nos 25 and 80.
§ Mr. LangI can tell the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond) that the Opposition said at an early stage in the Committee that they were looking to spending 120 to 130 hours debating the Bill, but we have spent about 160 hours doing so. It is not the fault of Her Majesty's Government that the Bill has not been scrutinised in full detail in all its clauses.
All these amendments deal with the principle of ensuring a majority of elected parents on the board of management. There is a little history to amendment No. 80, which I shall need to explain to the House. However, so as not to keep the House in suspense, I shall reveal the end of the story straight away: this amendment was introduced by the Government in direct response to pressure from the Opposition.
The Bill as it was when first introduced provided that, when a school became self-governing, the board of management should have the same number of parent and staff members as has the school board; that the head teacher was to become a full member and there was to be an increase in the number of appointed members. That meant that the parents would have lost their overall majority.
It was quite clear in Standing Committee that there was a will on all sides to preserve the parental majority as it will be on school boards. Indeed the Opposition moved an amendment to that effect. In response to that, my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mr. Forsyth) undertook in Committee to consider whether boards of management should have an in-built parental majority, just as school boards will have. He also undertook to reconsider the provisions for the term of office of appointed members, a point on which the Committee did in fact make some amendment to the Bill. Amendments were made on Report reflecting the outcome of our reconsideration of 216 these matters; and since there was no opportunity to explain them at the time, I think it will help the House if I do so now. They provide the necessary context for the understanding of this group of amendments.
Although we needed little persuasion that there should be a parental majority, we do also attach importance to the provision that a board of management should have some increase over the school board in its outside representation. A board of management will have greater responsibilities than any school board can have; and it is likely to want to call on a wider range of experience among its members. However, if we increase the number of outside members and still want to have a parental majority there obviously has to be provision for an increase in parent members. That would be necessary in any case because the head teacher becomes a full member of the board of management, and that in itself would remove the parental majority.
Then a question arises. If extra places have to be filled by election, when will be the most convenient time to hold the election? Should one hold it during the run-up to self-governing status, or immediately after? This led us into a further consideration. If elections are going to have to be held in any case, it seemed to us that, for wider reasons, it would make sense simply to have new elections for the whole board. The change from being a school board to being a board of management is a considerable one, and individuals who may have been happy to serve on a school board, and even to support a proposal for self-governing status, will not necessarily want personally to take on the extra commitment and responsibility involved in serving on the board of management of a self-governing school.
It might also seem logical to get this new board elected and put in place as soon as possible after the decision has been taken that the school is to become self-governing. However we concluded on balance that this might complicate the transitional period unduly. There will be much to do for the management of any school during that period, in taking over from the education authority and preparing for the assumption of full responsibility, and it would be better not to add to that by a requirement to conduct elections and hand over to a new board.
Therefore, we concluded that the best and most convenient option will be to have the school board continue unchanged right through to the point where the school becomes self-governing. At that point, the school board will be incorporated as an interim board of management, and its duty will be to conduct elections to the board of management proper as quickly as possible and then to hand over to the newly elected board, whose members will in turn select the appointed members of that board. The board of management will thus be, in its composition, a slightly expanded school board.
That is the gist of the amendments which we tabled for Report and which were incoporated into the Bill as it left this House. Among them was this one which now appears as amendment No. 80 in today's list. It is the key amendment which discharges my hon. Friend's undertaking. However it was omitted by printer's error from the Notice Paper on the day of the Report debate, although it had been tabled and had appeared on the Notice Paper for the previous day. It was necessary therefore to table it again in another place, and that is how it comes to appear today as amendment No. 80.
217 I should have liked to explain to the House in more detail the implications of Lords amendments Nos. 80 and 25, but as the time for consideration is short, it would be sensible for me to finish—
§ Mrs. Margaret Ewing (Moray)Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
§ Mr. LangI would rather not, because I am trying to save the time of the House. It would be sensible if I brought my remarks to an end.
§ Mr. John McFall (Dumbarton)I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Mrs. Ewing): this is ridiculous. Ignorant comments from the hon. Member for Gainsborough and Horncastle (Mr. Leigh) on Scottish education only exacerbate an already bad situation and increase the frustrations that the Opposition feel.
We are pleased that the Minister has taken the point that we made in Committee about the parental majority. He is right to say that we made that point. When the School Boards (Scotland) Act 1988 was going through its stages in the House, we were against parental majority. We are for it under the provisions of this Bill, for the simple reason that schools dealt with under the School Boards (Scotland) Act still retain a link with the local authority, whereas for the schools dealt with in this Bill, that link is destroyed. For that reason, we think that a parental majority will enhance the democratic process of governing the schools.
The Government have not adequately answered the question of what constitutes the community and what constitutes the appointed members. As it stood, the number of community members or parents could be overruled by appointed members. We are concerned about the wishes of parents. During the recess, I visited every primary and secondary school and spoke to the parents of children in almost every one of those schools. I got the message that there was not much interest in the Bill's provisions. I told these parents that the Government were interested in doing their business by stealth. They have a public agenda and a private agenda: the public one says that they are interested in parents, while the private one sets out their naked ideological objectives.
If the Government were interested in parents, they would have consulted parents in Scotland. The hallmark of the Bill is the lack of consultation with parents or public representatives. It is sad that the Under-Secretary who was responsible for the Bill has moved on, because he will not get his comeuppance. He has left it in the hands of his friends.
§ Mrs. Margaret EwingHe will lose his seat.
§ Mr. McFallYes, perhaps he will. He has left the Bill in the hands of the Minister.
I visited Dallas in Texas two years ago and looked at schools there. I was taken round many fine magnet schools. I am sure that the hon. Member for Stirling would say that that is the objective for Scotland. Yes, the schools were good, but that afternoon I also went to see the supervisor or superintendent of education in Dallas and said that it was true that the city had good magnet schools in literature, business and science and so on. However, when I asked him about the attendance figures for Dallas, he said that the official drop-out rate—that is what it is called in America—was 45 per cent., but unofficially the figure was 55 per cent.
218 That shows that, if the Government go ahead with the Bill and ignore the parental majority, they will be saying that they do not care about the majority of the population, only about the minority. That is what happened in Dallas. That view is underlined in the Government's philosophy towards education and society in general. That is why there has been such an outcry in Scotland against the provisions, and that is why we do not see the Bill as a liberating or enabling measure—that is just a kid-on from Conservative Members—because if anything, it is a centralising Bill.
Ultimately, the Secretary of State has all the aces. In this capacity he is nothing more than a Stalinist, because he is taking exactly—[Interruption.] No, I never called the hon. Member for Stirling a Stalinist—I shall leave that to other people—but this is a centralising Bill. The Secretary of State will have all the aces. He will say what each and every school can do. The Secretary of State is showing his naked ideology by looking at Scottish education and saying that, although local authorities may have served their communities well, because they are non-Tory, they will have to go.
Scottish education and the interests of our young people are being sacrificed for those narrow ends. That is the message that we must put across, even at this late stage. It would have been one thing if the Secretary of State and his Ministers had consulted the public, but there has been absolutely no consultation. That is why the Bill will be thoroughly rejected. The only chink of light is that the Secretary of State was good enough—if one can call it that—to retain the parental majority on the board, thus enhancing, or rather keeping some, democracy and community involvement.
§ Mrs. Margaret EwingNot only do we have the farce of a timetable being forced on Scottish Members of Parliament as a result of the hypocrisy of Conservative Members, but the new Minister at the Scottish Office, who is responsible for education, is not prepared to allow one hon. Member who served at length on the Committee and who spoke at length, moving many amendments—which is more than the Minister did—to intervene to ask a simple and straightforward question.
§ Mrs. EwingIt is only because of that that I have to rise to put that question to him. [HON. MEMBERS: "Give way."] The Minister has spoken at length about the procedures, resolutions and ballots, but I wish to pursue him on the issue to which the Secretary of State gave voice on Report. Will there be encouragement from the Scottish Office for a moratorium between the establishment of a school board and the possible holding of ballots on opting out? The Secretary of State suggested that he would not encourage that procedure in the first one or two years of the establishment of a school board. When the Minister replies, please will he make clear the time scale that we are talking about? Will school boards be able to start that procedure almost immediately, or will there be a moratorium?
§ Mr. Calum Macdonald (Western Isles)Amendment No. 80, on which the Minister has asked us to focus as the most important in this group, sums up much of the deception underlying the whole Bill. The amendment purports to enhance or to increase democracy in the Bill, 219 but we know that the Bill is nothing less than a diminution of local democracy and of genuine community control over our schools. As my hon. Friends have said, that is what the Bill is about.
The Minister said that once schools became selfgoverning—I believe that I am quoting him—they would be "just as much a public and a community asset as before". How can that be when the Government are removing any powers, control or influence that the community may have over such schools when they become self-governing? If there is no community control and no community say, how can the community influence community use of the new self-governing schools?
What is happening is not an enhancement of local democracy, but a reduction in local democracy because communities are being stripped of any democratic outlet or expression that they have over the conduct, future, or fate of self-governing schools.
The bizarre concept underlying the amendment, and, indeed the whole Bill, is that, in some way, the local education authorities do not represent the democratic will of their communities, that they stifle or distort the will of the people and what they want in the schools in their local education authority area. That bizarre concept—that local education authorities are somehow undemocratic but that the new self-governing schools will be democratic—is absolutely bizarre—
§ It being one and a half hours after the commencement of proceedings on the motion, MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER proceeded, pursuant to the Order this day, to put forthwith the Questions necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded at that hour.
§ Lords amendment agreed to.
§ MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER then designated Lords amendments Nos. 65 and 94 as appearing to her to involve questions of privilege.
§ Lords amendments Nos. 65 and 94 agreed to. [Special Entry.]
§ Lords amendments Nos. 25, 80, 1, 66, 67, 81, 83 to 88, 2,40, 44,62,92,68 to 78,9, 47, 52, 56 to 61, 63, 64,79,91, and 93 agreed to.