Education Institutions: Autonomy and Accountability
(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Perry of Southwark
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the appropriate balance between the autonomy and the accountability of educational institutions.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
My Lords, it was the French Prime Minister, François Mitterrand, who, on introducing reforms of education in France in the 1980s, declared that accountability had to be “le contrepart même”—the exact balance—to the autonomy of institutions in the education system. We need no persuasion today that the issue of accountability of schools and teachers, as well as the degree of autonomy that they should be allowed, is central to the future shape of our education system.
Rather than starting with the accountability side of the equation, I begin by asking how much freedom schools and teachers need if they are to accomplish all that they and we hope for our children’s education. There is plenty of evidence to show that granting freedom to professionals to do the job they are trained and motivated to do is the surest way to achieve high quality.
In his excellent book, Education, Education, Education, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, says rightly that,
“governors—and the headteachers and management teams they appoint and sustain—need to be unambiguously in control of their schools without managerial interference from local and national bureaucracies”.
This, he says, is the magic ingredient of the success of academies. I agree. It is the quality of leadership in a school which determines its success, which means good governors, a good head and a good management team.
Of course, as we have seen all too recently, there can be governors who are not capable of good governance, and heads and teachers who get it wrong, but this does not mean that the model is faulty. As Samuel Johnson said—in what is my favourite quote—it is,
“happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust”.
Through the huge expansion of academies and free schools, this Government have had the courage to trust schools and teachers. I rejoice in that.
We have at present possibly the best generation of teachers that we have ever enjoyed. They are well qualified and well educated, with strong support available from heads and senior staff for those who enter the profession for the first time. I pay tribute to the previous Government for the Teach First initiative, which has brought some outstanding young graduates into our schools. This Government have made teacher quality rightly central to their policies, and new entrants to the profession are of the highest quality, as are many of their older colleagues. It therefore makes absolute sense to trust their professionalism to the maximum extent.
Teachers, like doctors with their patients or other client-centred professionals, are more motivated to do the best for the pupils in their charge than to seek the approval of those above them in the hierarchy. We want them to feel that way, for that way quality of provision lies. However, as Mitterrand said, this freedom needs to be exactly balanced by accountability. The public who pay their taxes for public services, as well as the parents and students who benefit from the public service of education, have a right to know whether the provision offered is of good quality and appropriate for the needs of its recipients.
In achieving the delicate balance of accountability and autonomy, it is important that teachers and heads are not distracted from their prime self-motivation towards their pupils by the imposition of too much bureaucratic regulation. We need them to be looking into the classroom and the children in it, not looking out to the inspectors and regulators. Good schools and good teachers are not driven by their external regulators; they take them in their stride, recognising that if they behave with professional dedication to the task at hand, the results will be what the regulators seek. For this reason, I welcome and applaud the much needed changes which this Government have made in the two key tools of accountability: inspection and examinations.
Ofsted was set up for the best of reasons: to inspect every school often and thoroughly. Such a remit demanded a huge taskforce. By the time the excellent Sir Michael Wilshaw came into office as chief inspector, more than 2,000 people were involved in inspection, employed by private contractors, mainly part-time and often with scant educational know-how or even none at all. Quality control of their activity had therefore to resort to giving them a list of predetermined items in boxes to be ticked, rather than trusting informed, senior professional judgment. As a tool of accountability, Ofsted in this form far too often simply alienated teachers. More seriously, it could, especially for the less secure and inexperienced teachers, reduce their creativity to meeting the tick-box requirements, which might bear little relation to a broad education.
It is therefore with huge pleasure that I welcome the decision to trust future inspection mainly to the 400-plus HMI who are experienced, senior professionals whose judgment can be trusted, and to dispense with the contractors. HMI can judge the key index of a school and the experience of the pupils. This may or may not match the items in the box-ticking exercise, but it will go to the heart of whether the school is providing the pupils in its care with an education fit for the values of our society, and which allows every child and young person to achieve across the widest possible range of elements in and beyond the curriculum.
In my view, it is not possible to overestimate the value of this change. By applying the broad professional judgments that teachers accept and share, Ofsted can become a tool to reward good schools and good teachers for their creative ways of achieving the best possible outcomes for their pupils. It can also become a more developmental and less regulatory tool that will spread good practice and encourage those schools which are struggling to succeed in providing the high-quality education that other comparable schools have achieved.
Examination results are the second measure of accountability by which schools are rightly judged. This has not always been a reliable measure to use. When schools and their pupils were allowed a wide choice of subjects at GCSE, the results were hard to compare. Those schools, and there were many, which avoided basic English and maths, for example, might achieve good GCSE results overall, but when their performance including English and maths was measured, it was not so impressive. In one school, 100% of the students achieved five good GCSE grades, but only 45% included English and maths. The EBacc was therefore a much needed incentive for all schools to include these basic tools, and now the new standard allowing more choice at key stage 4 is an innovation that will raise true performance standards for all young people. The inclusion of high-quality technical and vocational qualifications that was announced last week will at last bring real quality to areas that are attractive to the many young people whose motivation is more practical than academic.
Finally, the long-debated issue of value added has been recognised in a simple and fair way by the planned introduction of progress 8 as a measure for secondary schools. This charts the progress from entry standards to GCSE performance and will be the measure of whether a school is achieving appropriately. At last, a school’s performance will be measured in relation to its own intake rather than against schools with very different pupil populations.
I am proud of our Government and the developments in both autonomy and accountability which are being introduced. Above all, I hope that through these changes the many excellent teachers who serve us so well in schools and colleges every day will find that their dedicated and creative work will flourish, and that they will welcome them.
The Lord Bishop of Birmingham
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to address the topic of autonomy and accountability in our educational institutions, particularly in our schools. As noble Lords can imagine, coming from Birmingham, this is a very pertinent topic. We are experiencing a perfect storm of anonymous allegations. Birmingham City Council is conducting various investigations, of which I am a part, into those allegations.
There is confusion among ordinary people between politics and process, about which the noble Baroness has been telling us and which the Government are promoting to achieve high standards. There is also confusion between faith and fear. These are softer, organic areas that need to be introduced and understood when we are trying to raise standards, achieve excellent exam results, and put in place a proper inspection regime. Of course, we all want our children to have an excellent education. We want high academic standards and high vocational standards for pupils for whom those are appropriate. We especially want good governance, and that is something we are all attending to at the moment.
In terms of our accountability and sense of autonomy, we also want a real and in-depth understanding of what it means to have an ethos in our schools—whether they be church or community schools, academies or free schools—of both diversity and unity. These are areas that local people care about deeply in trying to achieve the very best for their children.
You might want me to mention a wonderful biblical pattern of accountability and autonomy, where human beings in many faith traditions are expected to grow up to be responsible, engaged and fulfilled. In the Christian scriptures, if you turned to Matthew chapter 18, you would see the appropriate introduction about receiving the kingdom of heaven like a child, and the parable of the lost sheep, where so many people can go wrong and stray from a pattern that is set out for them. Then there is the command to forgive; not just once or twice but an infinite number, of 70 times seven. There is a culture of empathy and sympathy, but also a culture of real responsibility, and in the middle of that, there is a little teaching about accountability and how it might work in an ordinary community.
If your neighbour offends you, go and see them personally. If that does not work, take two or three trusted people with you and allow them to examine the controversy or problem. If that does not work, then bring the whole community together and examine the issue. If it is unresolvable, then there are harsh things to do. There are examination or inspection judgments. However, there is a pattern there which ordinary, local people can instinctively understand and which would allow us not only to have autonomy locally, but also to have responsibility where it truly lies, in those local communities: responsibility for education and unity, but also for rejoicing in diversity.
In our own Church of England in Birmingham, I should mention the expansion we have had in the academies programme which the Government have been promoting. This is something we have embraced and found to be very effective. However, to achieve the ambitions of the Government and the excellence we want for our children in a great variety of communities, we have formed a diocesan board of education trust, which publishes, for example, an academies accountability framework. Such a framework enables both support and challenge in our local schools. In other words, it expects responsibility and people to be accountable, but at the same time, where there is difficulty, they should have the appropriate support at the appropriate level.
This lays out clear requirements and expectations. It is a local framework of support and there is proper challenge within it. There is complete clarity about the improvement of tasks before the school, the resources that are available to tackle the tasks, clear lines of accountability to monitor and evaluate the pace and scale of the improvements required, and an appropriate balance between support, challenge, self-evaluation and external evaluation. In a church school, we would go further, to give a guarantee to parents, communities, pupils and staff about what are the various granular expectations that they would find in various areas to do with religious education, prayer and worship, spirituality, valuing of pupils, opportunities that there are at any good school, and what the school should undertake to achieve those values to do with ethos.
I am arguing today for accountability and autonomy, but in our experience, the way to make this succeed in all our schools is to make sure that there are proper, local and trusted arrangements: trusted by pupils, staff and parents, by the whole community and, of course, by the Secretary of State.
Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Perry on securing this debate and on the expert and typically penetrating way in which she introduced it. It is also a privilege to follow the right reverent Prelate, who comes fresh from Birmingham to tell us how it feels there right now, and with some gloriously practical suggestions. Even better, some of them are based on parables. There can be no argument about the fact that the more autonomy an institution has—whether it is a school, company, university or public body—the more likely it is to be successful.
That belief underpinned the introduction of local financial management and GM schools in the 1980s, from both of which far-reaching reforms the academies movement developed. Equally, it is beyond argument that all truly successful institutions, especially publicly funded ones, regard the establishment of clear, accessible lines of accountability between them and those they serve as a sine qua non. If you do not have those lines, you are not a success. There should, therefore, in theory, be no conflict between on the one hand the autonomy of educational institutions, and on the other the absolute clarity of the systems put into place to ensure their full accountability.
When local financial management was introduced in Norfolk schools in the late 1980s, school heads, until then accustomed to asking, and blaming, county hall for everything, realised that the buck would now stop with them. After some initial nervousness and after, together with their governors, appropriate and thorough training, the vast majority relished the extra responsibility and flexibility it gave them, especially as it was made crystal clear to the wider community that that local accountability was underpinned by the more general accountability of an elected local authority.
That was a halfway house between full LEA control and a step towards autonomy, and it was always intended to be transitional because the movement towards full schools autonomy was unstoppable. No one today is making the case to restore the role of LEAs. The 22,000 schools in England now include 2,500 academies and 174 free schools, with many more to come. The overwhelming majority of those academies and free schools are hugely successful, transforming their pupils’ life chances. The problems with the system, as we have seen in Birmingham and elsewhere, often boil down to a lack of appropriate oversight and an incomplete preparation of heads and governors for what autonomy and accountability actually mean in practice. We are once more in a transitional period.
I have a very simple definition of accountability, which I do not find an abstract concept; it is about knowing who to speak to if things go wrong, as I rather think the right reverend Prelate said. The government website on complaints guidance—which I assume applies to all schools, including academies and free schools—encourages parents first to raise matters of concern with the head. But what if he or she is the problem? Well, then you go to the members of the governing body. However, will you know or can you find out who they are without going through the head, and will they tell the head? Alternatively, you can contact the DfE direct, although that might be daunting for some. However, does the department now have the resources to deal with the volume of cases it receives in the Schools Complaints Unit, and how, practically speaking, are they dealt with? I hope that my noble friend will be able to tell us the answers to both of these questions.
I think that LEAs’ roles are now limited to child protection cases, and Ofsted—which is in a way a long stop—can deal only with whole-school issues. I think I am right in saying that it cannot seek to resolve or establish cause for any individual complaint. There are now regionally based Ofsted offices; perhaps my noble friend can tell us what the role of those offices is and whether staff in them have systematic contact with local schools and a systematic report back.
I will give two examples of the accountability problem. A town council in Norfolk with no educational role at all has just called a public meeting in order to oblige the local academy trust to explain its policies and plans to parents and the public following the resignation of more than half the teaching staff and, I think, the head. There is undoubtedly an inside story here, and I do not know what it is, but there is no doubt that the children’s education is currently suffering from the uncertainty. In that case, although it is an isolated one, the situation does little to demonstrate an understanding of accountability within that particular academy system. These will be isolated examples. At another local academy, no fewer than 16 key members of staff have left, feeling unable to complain to the head or to the chair of governors because she, the chair, has been put in place by their employers, the academy chain. Now, that is not good. The students, parents and staff in the school do not know who to speak to. This is bad, but it is isolated and not at all like the pattern of overwhelmingly successful academies. In Birmingham, accusations of extremism in schools are serious enough. However, as serious, if not more so, are the allegations that complaints were made but the lack of a clear accountability system apparently made it impossible for them to be dealt with. I know that four or perhaps five investigations are now under way, so I will say no more about that because we shall all know more when those investigations have reported.
We are again in a transitional period. I spoke earlier of the training and oversight arrangements put into place to ensure the success of the 1980s schools reforms. Those simple principles are still relevant. Academies and free schools will transform our education system. The best academy chains already prepare staff and governors to be accountable. That work is being done and the experience is there. We do not need a nation-wide, one-size-fits-all solution, just to use all the clichés. What we need is reassurance that it is understood, no matter how humdrum it may be, that the preparation of heads, teachers and governors for ensuring the accountability of all our schools is as important as their academic performance.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, I begin by saying how much I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, in her analysis that local authority control no longer exists. I get so angry when people refer to schools needing local authority control. Control disappeared years ago. Local accountability, as the noble Baroness said, is important.
I refer to personal experience in education in Lancashire over a 20-year period as a councillor. It is often forgotten that all the great innovations subsequently claimed by all political parties—such as nursery education, a full year in reception class and education maintenance allowances—began as local authority initiatives, working accountably with the local community. I cite one example in Preston, which occurred because the tax arrangements meant that Skelmersdale suddenly lost Courtaulds to Spain. That was one of the initiatives that led to encouraging young people to stay on in full-time education and training as an alternative to going on to what many now agree were youth training schemes with no future. That is important.
I praise the many leaders of our Catholic and Anglican schools and Jewish leaders in Lancashire, and my noble friend Lord Patel of Blackburn, for developing in the early 1980s an education document about education for a multifaith, multicultural society that was totally agreed across the community. In the early days in Blackburn, we saw the BNP rising. The response was to bring people together rather than to let people divide us.
The noble Baroness referred to teacher innovation. I pay tribute to the late Lord Joseph, who said of the curriculum that there was no place for a politician to make a comment about which books teachers should use; I shall say no more on that.
He was also superb on political education. In a statement circulated to all Lancashire schools, he said that, when questioned by secondary school pupils, a teacher could say that they were a member of CND but should also say that other teachers or their parents or councillors might hold totally different views. Sir Keith took the view that education was an important process, and our best teachers recognised that.
In looking at accountability and the role of local authorities in the future, it is important that we recognise the importance of responding to the needs of the whole community and of the school. In particular, children facing problems should be able to draw on the range of local authority services, with a co-ordinated approach taken towards social and housing problems, which afflict the lives of our children.
My conversations with the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, go back over decades. I am sure that she will remember the local authority higher education funding body and the former Preston Polytechnic, now the University of Central Lancashire—I blow the trumpet for it at this stage—which developed the most diverse student intake of its time. It accepted people from all sections of society. It co-operated successfully with Lancaster University and the Open University, with students being able to switch between them for different modules or different years of their course. Perhaps an answer to the funding crisis now being faced by people going into higher education would be to look back at that sort of experience.
I have worries about accountability and judging schools. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, I believe that HMI has a deep fund of experience which is invaluable in looking at how to help schools. London First gave us a very good example of heads from one school going into another school, of linking and pairing. In the early 1980s, which were not easy financially, we in Lancashire developed curriculum co-ordinators. A good individual teacher in a specific subject or year would be given supply cover to go and work with another teacher. That is the variation on the scheme that London First operates, but it costs money, because one has to have people able to leave their own class and go into another.
I worry about the local community becoming more fragmented. I worry that we may not have the balance of experience. I remember a Conservative county councillor—she was the aunt of the noble Lord, Lord Horam—being appalled when we were interviewing for a head teacher in a school in a very deprived area. Quite obviously, county councillor Mrs Horam was uneasy about the candidate who had been the most forthcoming. She had answered all the questions beautifully and, in despair, Marjorie turned to me and said, “Is there any other question you could ask?”. I grasped at the fact that that candidate had been on a course to identify gifted children. I asked, “Was it a good course? Was it useful—was it great?”. She answered, “It was a superb course and I learnt a lot from it, but it wouldn’t be useful in a school serving an area like this”. At that point Marjorie Horam put her pen down and we nailed her.
It is important that there is a thread of responsibility in making appointments and judgments about teachers, which must involve those with experience—like Marjorie, who knew that something was wrong—and be able to draw on that. Those children come from communities which have both very diverse problems and some very similar problems. In the middle of dealing with the problem of surplus places, which was a fraught experience, I had to talk to people about meeting the needs of all the children. I worry that we are in danger of continuing to provide schools where they are not needed, and not providing them where they are.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful for receiving permission to speak in the gap. I was interested in speaking in this debate because at the moment, as the governor of a fairly newly converted primary academy, I am in negotiations with our academy chain over the scheme of delegation between the local governing board and the academy chain. That has thrown up an interesting conundrum about the role of the local governing board in relation to the academy chain.
That is first illustrated by who appoints the head. If the academy chain appoints them, and delegates responsibility for management and organisation of the school to the head, the local governing body has very limited responsibilities; it becomes a very largely advisory body. Yet when Ofsted comes along, it will look to and examine the local governing body, which will be held responsible. Therefore the relationship between the local governing body and the academy chain is an extremely important one.
If one takes the traditional local authority model, the local governing body appointed the head and was responsible. It set the scheme of delegation and had broad strategic responsibility. However, if the head did not perform, the local governing board had to make sure that it was accountable. When Ofsted came along it would examine the local governing board for doing that. If, however, the academy chain is to appoint the head, and sets the scheme of delegation and organisation, there is a very considerable fuzziness there, and it is not clear whom Ofsted should examine and hold responsible. You also lose the link between them, as the local governing body represents the local community. That is an interesting issue, and not one that we have fully resolved, although we are discussing it. However, I thought it was worth raising in this debate.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for tabling this debate today and for giving us a chance to have what has been a well thought-through and—despite the shortage of numbers—very detailed and interesting debate. The debate was also very topical, sadly, for the wrong reasons. As we know, a number of examples have hit the headlines which are an illustration of the fact that the Government have not found the right balance between autonomy and accountability, and that a number of challenges remain. That is particularly sad because when that balance fails, it is the children’s education which suffers, and many of these young people will never get a second chance to recover those lost years from an education that has been damaged. Therefore we all have a responsibility to get this issue right.
We know, for example, the issues that have been in the headlines recently: the collapse of Discovery Free School, concerns over the mismanagement at E-ACT academies, the poor educational standards at the al-Madinha Free School and the financial concerns at Kings Science Academy. All those remind us of what can go wrong if we do not get these policies right and rush them through. As the National Audit Office said,
“the primary factor in decision-making has been opening schools at pace, rather than maximizing value for money”.
There is a concern about the pace at which these changes have occurred.
Now we have the turmoil at the Birmingham schools and the Trojan horse allegations. This was an issue that the Minister’s predecessor was worried about back in 2010, but was then unwilling or unable to intervene. We know now that the Permanent Secretary has been asked to investigate that issue. We await the outcome, but I would be grateful if the Minister would confirm that the Permanent Secretary’s report will be made public when it is concluded, so we can all share the lessons. I should tell the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, that one of the rumours coming out from Birmingham was that people felt they did not have anywhere to go. The complaints existed and they were desperate to have their voice heard, but people felt that, for whatever reason, it was not being heard at a local level. We therefore all have something to learn from that.
Now, four years on, we have a situation where schools which were given a clean bill of health by Ofsted suddenly find themselves being downgraded on re-inspection, leading to questions about Ofsted’s role, independence and judgments. We cannot be sure that these concerns and problems are contained only in one city. Already, new allegations are coming to light elsewhere, each one again highlighting that there is a problem about the local oversight of what is happening in our schools.
Whatever the outcome of the inquiries now taking place, particularly in Birmingham, I hope that the Minister recognises that the impact on community relations has been particularly damaging. I could not have put better myself the issues raised by the right reverend Prelate about the challenges to the local community that have occurred in the way the allegations have come to light and been handled by all sides, particularly by the media. That is a particular challenge for us. We also perhaps expect too much from Ofsted, because it is now the only intermediary between individual academy and free schools and the Secretary of State. In a sense, it is put in an impossible position, because it is expected to oversee, in quite some detail, a growing band of autonomous schools, facing it with particular challenges.
I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, that because of Ofsted’s style and the way it behaves when it goes into schools, there have been a number of occasions when it has lost the confidence of the teachers in the schools and the governors. That is a real concern to us when it is the only port of call for many people. Like the noble Baroness, I welcome the fact that the inspectors have been brought back in-house and that quality is being driven up, because it was long overdue.
Of course, not all the schools caught up in the turmoil in Birmingham were academies. While I am sure that Birmingham City Council has its own governance issues that it needs to address, the fact is that, of the 21 schools recently inspected, five out of the six found to be inadequate were academies. I hope that the Government are coming to realise what we told them all along: that 5,000 schools and rising cannot effectively be monitored from behind a desk in Whitehall. The Minister will know that this point was made to him in a private briefing by civil servants recently. They advised that, as ever more bad publicity came from failing schools, there would be a growing public realisation that the department did not really have the tools to enable it to intervene effectively.
I hope that the Government are now reflecting on what has gone wrong with this policy. Perhaps the Minister will share with us details of the steps that they are taking, rather belatedly, to put in place an intermediary tier of accountability.
On these Benches, we already have proposals that we believe will address this accountability deficit. David Blunkett’s recent report sets out an effective blueprint to devolve power down to local areas and ensure that all schools are supported and challenged to improve. This echoes the argument made by the right reverend Prelate and, indeed, by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, that we need more local oversight and involvement in the performance of schools. Under our proposals, a new director of school standards would be appointed in every area. The director would have powers to intervene in underperforming schools, to broker collaboration and to commission new schools.
The issue of collaboration between schools marks a clear distinction between our approach and that of the Government. My noble friend Lady Farrington commented on the London Challenge, which was introduced by the last Government. It was highly successful in transforming poorly performing schools in London and went on to achieve some of the fastest improving schools in the country. The key difference in that approach was that it was done through a policy of sharing best practice and collaboration between schools. It happened in London, and my noble friend went on to point out where it happened elsewhere in the country, such as in Lancashire. We need to learn more about what schools can do in terms of collaboration rather than have them acting as isolated, autonomous institutions.
A recent OECD report has confirmed the importance of this approach. It states that:
“Knowledge about strong educational practices tends to stick where it is and rarely spreads without effective strategies and powerful incentives for knowledge mobilisation and knowledge management”.
The report goes on to identify a number of high-performing PISA countries and regions, including some of Michael Gove’s favourites such as Finland, Japan and Shanghai, and shows that they have strong histories of co-operation networks and shared resources. Those are what have made them successful. But that does not happen by osmosis. The plan has to be laid down and determined, with a clear expectation that this is the way schools will behave, and rewards have to be linked to it.
The report goes on to address another clear dividing line between ourselves and the Government, which is on the importance of high-quality teachers. Again, this point was made eloquently by the noble Baroness, Lady Perry. It emphasises the need for continuous professional development. We on these Benches believe that all teachers should be qualified and expected to be involved in continuous professional development, and should indeed be periodically revalidated. The OECD data support this approach. Further, this research has been backed up by the Sutton Trust and shows that teacher quality can make as much as a year’s difference to the learning progress of disadvantaged children, so it is a very important tool when addressing the issue of social mobility.
To sum up, while we share some of the Government’s desire to give teachers autonomy over the curriculum and how subjects are taught, we believe that it has to go hand in hand with the professionalisation of teaching and evidence of continuous school improvement. The problem with the Government’s approach is that schools sink or swim, and sometimes they sink. When they do, they take with them a cohort of children and their aspirations and dreams. We do not think that that is the right approach. We believe that driving up teacher quality, allowing for early intervention in all schools, a new element of local oversight and, most important, building in an element of continuous improvement through learning and collaboration, are the right way forward. I hope that the Minister will be able to agree, and I look forward to hearing what he has to say.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Perry for securing this important debate and for her insightful speech. I also thank all noble Lords for their valuable contributions. Autonomy and accountability are the two key pillars of our school system, and the OECD PISA results show clearly that greater autonomy coupled with strong accountability can lead to a better-performing school system. Strong evidence of this can be seen in countries such as New Zealand and Poland.
By contrast, we have seen in Sweden the perils of an autonomous system which is not strongly coupled with accountability, and we can see in Wales the shambles created when you have neither. It is therefore critical to strike the appropriate balance and we have done exactly this in creating a self-improving, school-led system, which has the resounding success of the academies and free schools programmes behind it. As my noble friend Lady Perry mentioned in quoting the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, the academy programme gives schools the magic ingredient of the freedom to run their schools in the best interests of their pupils.
We are continuing to work to bring decisions much closer to schools through the introduction of our eight regional school commissioners, through which we are trusting school leaders to run their own system and provide the department with much better local intelligence to enable it to insist on matters to which my noble friend Lady Shephard referred. Unlike the Labour Party, we believe that breaking the country into eight regions run by leading heads and supported by other leading heads on their teacher boards is the way to run the system. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, referred to the Blunkett report, which talks about breaking the country into 50 bureaucracies, each with their own layers of management. We feel that that would basically be a retrograde step.
As the PISA findings show, the more freedom given to schools, the better the performance of the whole system. In sponsored academies open for three years, for example, the proportion of pupils who achieved five good GCSEs, including English and maths, has increased at twice the rate of local authority-maintained schools. Converter academies are more likely, against the new tougher Ofsted inspection framework, to retain their “outstanding” ratings, or to improve from “good” to “outstanding” than LA schools.
Combined with this is the outstanding success of the free schools programme. I should also mention that academy chains, with their clear lines of sight mentioned by my noble friend Lady Shephard, are working particularly well, as recently outlined in an excellent study by the University of Southampton. Of course, these chains and other local groups are very much focused on schools working together locally to create a less, rather than more, fragmented school system.
On the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham’s point about local arrangements, I assure him that—certainly since I came into office—we have concentrated the academy programme on local regional clusters of schools working together, such as in his own diocese. It has worked well in the London Challenge, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, referred.
The free schools programme has been an unqualified and outstanding success; I use the word “outstanding” advisedly. Free schools are inspected by Ofsted after only four or five terms from opening and, so far, of those free schools which have been inspected, 24% have been rated “outstanding”. This is a truly remarkable experience and the facts speak for themselves. I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, is still in denial about this, but those facts are pretty powerful. The fact that we have closed one and a half free schools with 200 pupils in them—although that is significant for those 200 pupils and their parents—compares not only to the 24% “outstanding” figure but to the 175,000 new places we have created under the free schools programme.
By comparison, 73 local authority maintained schools have gone into special measures this year alone, and 38 council-run schools have been in special measures for 18 months or more. In 2013, Ofsted found that one in three local authority action plans in relation to underperforming schools were not up to standard. As my noble friend Lady Shephard said, no one is making the case for reinstating the local authority model. Indeed, Ed Miliband said exactly that himself in other place only a few days ago; although, as I have said, the 50 bureaucracies planned by the Labour Party are, in fact, a return to the local authority system.
We are committed to increasing autonomy for all schools, not just academies and free schools. Through reforms linking pay and performance, bringing teacher training closer to schools and reducing bureaucracy and box-ticking, and dramatically reducing regulation, we have made it easier for schools to focus on what is important: ensuring that children succeed. With Ofsted reporting that schools improved faster last year than at any time in Ofsted’s history, we are clearly getting it right. Autonomy must be strongly coupled with accountability and, under this Government, academies and free schools are held more rigorously to account than council-run schools.
All schools should have strong financial controls in place. However, academies and free schools have stronger and tougher financial frameworks and are held up for greater scrutiny than council-run schools. That enables swift resolution if there are any financial issues. In local authority maintained schools, it is the local authority that has responsibility for financial oversight. The frequency and depth of audit is variable and maintained schools are often not subject to the same rigour as academies and free schools, which must publish annual audited accounts submitted to the EFA. We monitor those carefully and will investigate immediately and diagnose any problems. That accountability mechanism works extremely well.
We also have the ability to issue a pre-warning notice if we have any concerns. Since 2011, we have issued 44. Over half, 26, were for the relatively few academies approved under the previous Government; 18 were for those approved under this Government. In the eight academies issued with pre-warning notices in 2011, there was an average improvement of 16 percentage points in the proportion of pupils achieving five good GCSEs in 2012. For those issued with a pre-warning notice in 2012-13, the average improvement rate so far has been 8 percentage points.
We have also recently strengthened the guidance for local authorities by putting in an expectation that they act quickly and do not wait for Ofsted to go in before intervening. We expect warning notices to be issued in instances where, for example, standards are below the floor, disadvantaged pupils are achieving low standards, or there is a sudden drop in performance.
In giving schools greater autonomy, good governance becomes increasingly important, as the right reverend Prelate mentioned. Our reforms are designed to encourage that and we are focusing governors on three core functions: the vision and ethos of the school, as the right reverend Prelate again mentioned; holding the head to account for the progression and attainment of pupils and the performance management of his or her staff; and money. Since 2012, the quality of school governance has been central to the overall inspection judgment on the overall leadership and management of a school.
We are committed to ensuring that children at primary school have the best possible start in life and have increased primary accountability in a number of ways: with the new curriculum; an increased emphasis on the importance of grammar, punctuation and spelling; abolishing the requirement for schools to use national curriculum levels; reintroducing level 6 stretch papers for key stage 2; and the introduction of phonics at every stage of teaching. That helps help children to develop faster; evidence shows that children taught to read using phonics could be “two years ahead” by the age of seven.
As my noble friend Lady Perry mentioned, in secondary school we have introduced new accountability measures to provide clear information and give a fair and balanced picture of each school’s performance. She was quite right about the failure and falseness of the exam accountability system previously. As a result of the scandal of false equivalence that operated previously, under the previous Government the number of pupils doing a core suite of academic subjects fell from 50% to 22%. All the evidence from all successful education jurisdictions around the world is that it is necessary for pupils to do that core suite of subjects, particularly those from a disadvantaged background. I am delighted to say that, under this Government, the number of pupils doing that core suite as a result of our EBacc is now back to 36%, and we expect it to rise further this summer.
As the noble Baroness mentioned, our new accountability measures include: progress 8, which will track the progress of all pupils of whatever ability throughout their school careers, and should focus schools on the attainment of all pupils rather than on what Tristram Hunt has described as the great crime of the C/D borderline; attainment 8, the percentage of pupils achieving a C grade or better in English and maths; and the EBacc. Alongside that, our destination measures will be important. The Government have also set tougher minimum standards for schools. We have raised the floor standards at primary to 65% from 60%, and at secondary to 40% from 35%.
High-quality inspection is an important aspect of the school accountability system. Building on the changes that the coalition Government put in place in 2011 to focus inspection more strongly on teaching and learning, Sir Michael Wilshaw has set his own priorities, which are helping to drive improvement. The inspection framework was amended in September 2012 and a higher benchmark has been set. When inspecting schools, Ofsted now holds them to account for the attainment and progress of their disadvantaged pupils, and the gap between them and their peers. The abolition of the “satisfactory” label was clearly an important move.
The number of Ofsted categories has also been substantially reduced to avoid confusion, and as my noble friend Lady Perry said, in future Ofsted itself will take control of far more inspections. Moreover, the regional operation to which my noble friend Lady Shephard referred is working extremely well. She also mentioned a number of cases, and I am reasonably sure that I recognise one of them. I can assure her that the department is monitoring the situation closely, and I would encourage any teacher or parent who has concerns about any matter that they do not feel is being dealt with effectively at the local level to contact the Education Funding Agency. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, referred to the Permanent Secretary’s report. I do not know whether it will be published, but I am sure that the Secretary of State will be very happy to answer any questions about it; of course, it is looking into any warnings that the department may have received in 2010 and previously.
I turn now to the excellent points made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham. Perhaps I may take this opportunity to thank him for all the work that is done by the diocese of Birmingham Educational Trust, and ask him if he would kindly pass on the department’s thanks to Reverend Jackie Hughes for her excellent work over the years and its best wishes for every success in her retirement. I also pay tribute to the trust’s academies accountability framework, a copy of which I have with me, which is particularly clear on matters like challenge and lines of accountability.
My noble friend Lady Sharp talked about the relationship between the local governing body and the centre, which is very important. The academy chain may appoint the head, but it is important that the local governing body is made aware of all the KPIs and targets so that it can advise the centre of its performance. Only today I had an interesting conversation with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, about this in relationship to a playgroup, and I suggest that it would be very helpful to her if she talked to my noble friend about it.
I come back to the old story about non-qualified teachers, which we had again earlier today in the House. I think that noble Lords know our arguments on this. We do not think it is right to deny people the opportunity of having the best teachers, and there is no clear evidence at all that QTS is an effective arbiter in itself of the quality of teaching.
I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords for this debate, and to my noble friend Lady Perry for her comments and support. In conclusion, by creating a system that is autonomous by giving schools the freedom to innovate and upholds them to a higher level of accountability, we are giving more children and young people a firm educational foundation on which they can build the rest of their lives.