Katie Lam

I was very sorry to hear the story that the hon. Member for Reading Central (Matt Rodda) shared. I will speak about a different aspect of the Bill: schools and admissions. Good schools, and the good teachers who run them, are exceptionally precious. At its best, a good school truly can transform the lives of its pupils by fostering their natural talents, by helping equip them to tackle challenges and by expanding their intellectual horizons. When good schools are working well, they should be able to grow, so that more parents can choose to send their children to a school where their talents can be cultivated and their interests encouraged. That is a simple principle—one that Members from across the House, and indeed everyone everywhere, should be able to agree to. A good education should not be the preserve of only those children who have parents who can afford to pay for one. Enabling more pupils to attend the best schools in the state sector means that that kind of education can be offered to more children, yet, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) has set out, the powers that this Bill will create on pupil admissions will achieve precisely the opposite. They allow the Government and regulators to limit the growth of good schools, or even force them to shrink, in order to make sure that schools that are performing less well can stay open. The most generous interpretation of the Government’s intentions is that this change is being made in the name of bureaucratic convenience. As the number of pupils entering the school system falls, it is true that local authorities will need to make decisions about which schools remain open and where. The Government Minister responsible for defending this legislation in the other place said that the proposals are “very much a function of the time, in terms of demography, that we find ourselves in.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 April 2026; Vol. 855, c. 541.] Even if that was the case, it would be completely absurd to tackle this problem by limiting the growth of good schools in order to make life easier for bureaucrats in local government, and for headteachers at schools that are not performing well. Wherever possible, surely we should be enabling the growth of good schools so that they have the capacity to take on more pupils, if and when schools that are performing less well need to reduce their numbers. If parents make decisions that they believe are best for their children, who are bureaucrats to tell them otherwise? In practice, limiting the growth of good schools will keep more children trapped in failed schools for longer, deny them the opportunity to flourish and deprive them of the firm foundations for life that a good education can provide. Even if this was being done in the name of bureaucratic convenience, it would be grotesque, but I fear that the reality may be even worse. Since this Government came to power, we have repeatedly seen the Department for Education take steps that undermine the progress made by the last Government in this area, including by making it harder to turn failing schools into academies. Time and again, we have seen this Government put their ideological instincts ahead of what works in practice. Regardless of whether their proposals are motivated by ideology or convenience, the result will be the same: fewer children able to attend good schools, depriving them of the strongest start in life.