Education and Adoption Bill (Fifth sitting)
(9 years, 5 months ago)
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The Chair
Before we start, I remind Members that the sitting will run to 11.25 when we will rise for Question Time. We will resume at 2 pm. Members have requested to dispense with their jackets, and I have agreed to that.
Clause 2
Performance standards and safety warning notices
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
I beg to move amendment 14, in clause 2, page 2, line 9, after “period of compliance” insert “, which shall not be less than 15 working days,”
This amendment sets a minimum period—15 working days—within which the governing body must respond to a warning notice before the schools becomes eligible for intervention.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 15, in clause 2, page 2, line 19, at end insert—
“(ba) in subsection (4) for paragraph (b) substitute—
“(b) the reasonable action which they require the governing body to take in order to remedy those matters within the compliance period””
This amendment ensures that any actions which the governing body is required to take can reasonably be undertaken within the compliance period.
Amendment 21, in clause 2, page 3, leave out line 10
This amendment restores the definition of “working day” to section 60.
Kevin Brennan
I understand that we will have the pleasure of your company all day today, Sir Alan. We are very happy to serve under your experienced chairmanship.
This morning we continue the process of steadily reversing towards the beginning of the Bill, having disposed of clause 13 last Thursday. We are now considering clause 2. Clause 13 was about the adoption part of the Bill. We now move to the element that deals with schools. As we consider amendments 14, 15 and 21, I want to observe what the House of Lords Constitution Committee said last week about the Childcare Bill that is progressing through Parliament. I have a copy of the Constitution Committee’s report on that measure, and it is apposite to the amendments to the Education and Adoption Bill. At first I thought the report had nothing to say about the Childcare Bill, because when we open it, the pages are blank, but if we look carefully, on the first page there are three short paragraphs about it. These words are relevant to the Education and Adoption Bill and the amendments:
“In our last report, published in June 2015, we drew attention to a concerning trend—a tendency by the Government to introduce vaguely worded legislation that leaves much to the discretion of ministers.”
That might describe the provisions that we are discussing today. It goes on to describe the Childcare Bill as
“a particularly egregious example of this development.”
That is why that Bill is now in a little trouble in the other place.
The Minister for Schools (Mr Nick Gibb)
This Bill is very specific. The hon. Gentleman will have had details of the regulations that we intend to table on the definition of “coasting” schools. The clauses that we will debate are very specific and do not leave much discretion to Ministers. As for the definition of “coasting”, detailed regulations will be scrutinised by a Committee of this House.
Kevin Brennan
I am grateful to the Minister for his intervention. I understand why he felt the need to put that on the record. When this Bill makes its short journey through Central Lobby to the other end of the building, I am sure their lordships’ Constitution Committee will look carefully at our deliberations and at the content and detail of this Bill. They will also note the way in which we have been conducting our business here.
We are on clause 2, having completed clause 13. Detailed regulations were not available in time for Second Reading or the beginning of Committee stage but were published at 10 pm on the evening before evidence sessions began. Our witnesses did not have the opportunity to look at the draft regulations before giving evidence, other than the one who stayed up for hours in the night to study and attempt to make sense of them. Those witnesses might have views about the constitutional propriety and legislative sense of doing business in that way, but we shall have to wait and see.
The amendments look at the period within which a governing body must issue warning notices, with the purpose of probing Ministers’ intentions. A warning notice is currently issued by a local authority to tell a governing body that it must take specific action, or further intervention will occur. The Bill provides that the Secretary of State can issue a warning notice to a maintained school directly. That notice will give the governing body roughly three weeks—15 working days, in effect—to take the action specified. The Bill does not set a time limit, and Ministers’ intentions are therefore not entirely clear. I hope that the Minister will be able to clear that up in his response to the amendments.
For example, Ministers might envisage much more significant actions being required during the period of a warning notice. If so, warning notices might be in place for much longer than currently envisaged. If that is the Government’s intention, will the Schools Minister elucidate the maximum time he envisages a warning notice lasting? We would like to have a reasonable idea of what period we are talking about. Is it four weeks, rather than the current three weeks? Is it six weeks, 12 weeks, six months, a year or years? As the Bill is drafted, we simply do not know what Ministers’ intentions are. Can the Minister give some examples of why it might be necessary to have lengthier warning notices than are currently issued? If that is Ministers’ intention, why is it necessary?
On the other hand, it is possible that the opposite is true. With the Bill effectively removing the right to object or appeal against warning notices, we want to be sure that the warning notice system is used fairly and transparently. In other words, do Ministers envisage a shorter period than 15 working days for a warning notice? Again, as the Bill is drafted, we do not know.
To probe that, amendment 14 proposes that the minimum period of compliance be restored, so that we can at least know Ministers’ intentions. If a longer period is appropriate, we would want the flexibility to achieve it, provided that we have the clarity I mentioned from Ministers about their intentions. If governing bodies are to engage seriously with the process of warning notices, they need assurance that they have the appropriate amount of time to do so properly.
There is only so much a school can do in 15 working days. Simple changes of rules or procedures could be possible within that period, but developing a complex action plan takes time, and implementing it takes even longer, as does negotiating with potential partners. It cannot be done quickly. That is why the requirements of a warning notice need to be reasonable, though no doubt Ministers always believe that they are reasonable in their actions. That is why amendment 15 would introduce reasonableness.
An example of a warning notice from Ministers is that sent by Lord Nash to the Gloucester academy on 16 December 2013. Hon. Members might be surprised that Ministers occasionally send warning notices to academies. Ministers usually say that academies are the answer to everything and that academising schools will solve all the problems of the education system. Surprise, surprise, it turns out that academies are also schools and just as likely to fall into problems as any other school, because they are institutions made up of human beings. They are not infallible and changing the name on the front of the institution from school to academy does not guarantee that they will not have to be subject to an intervention.
Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)
My hon. Friend’s point about academisation being the only solution was also raised in the evidence session. I point him to the response from Sir Daniel to my question. I asked,
“And you think that academisation is the only response to coasting…?
Sir Daniel Moynihan: No”.––[Official Report, Education and Adoption Public Bill Committee, 30 June 2015; c. 14, Q26.]
He then gave a list of other measures that can tackle coasting. Does my hon. Friend think that that relates to his point?
Kevin Brennan
It does, although we will deal with that in more detail when we get to the part of the Bill that relates to coasting schools. I am not surprised that my hon. Friend is anxious to reach that element since it is clause 1 and he might reasonably expect that by now we would have reached it. We are in a curious time warp, which the Government introduced, whereby we have travelled forward in time to clause 13, are now back to clause 2, will gradually move through clauses 2 to 12 and eventually re-enter the time machine to go back to clause 1 next week.
Kevin Brennan
The Minister is keen on science and I am sure his purpose is to remind the Committee that time is relative. That is why we are enjoying time being shifted around by the Minister rather like in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” where a time-turner is given to Hermione so that she can attend more than one lesson at once. That is another proposal that the Minister might possibly be considering.
Before we get too confused about where we are, I referred to the intervention that Lord Nash issued to an academy, because currently Ministers can issue warning notices to academies. The clause would give them the ability to issue warning notices to maintained schools directly.
Here is that example of the warning notice. The school in question, the Gloucester academy, had one month to respond to it. The Committee might think that sounds rather generous, compared with the 15 working days that I mentioned earlier as the period in the amendment and in current legislation. In fairness, the Minister gave that academy one month, although that included Christmas and new year. Perhaps it was not quite as generous as it first sounded.
Under that warning notice the requirements were:
“Implementing the necessary strategies to (1) improve the quality of teaching and learning, including the quality of feedback and assessment and the use of teaching spaces in the new building, (2) improve the attitudes of a significant proportion of students towards their learning, (3) improve the knowledge of faculty leaders about appropriate use of additional funding to support those relevant groups of students, (4) improve staff morale”.
These could all be said to be reasonable things to expect a school to undertake under a warning notice. I have no objection to any of those proposals—they all seem eminently sensible—but a new timetable also had to be written by the beginning of the January term. Anybody who has, like myself, been involved in timetabling —albeit my experience was in an analogue age—knows how complicated that is. It is not just a case of drawing numbers on squares on a board in the senior staff room; it involves having the right staff for the right lessons at the right time and not clashing with anybody else. The timetable had to be written by the beginning of the January term and specialist teachers found for every class in every year group, all within the period of the warning notice.
Nowhere does it say what level of progress would need to be made within the one-month compliance period. There is no indication of the expectation of the level of progress that could reasonably be made within this period. Neither does the warning notice offer, as one might expect that it would, any support or advice as to how all these things might be achieved in a school that, we must assume, already lacks capacity to improve itself; otherwise, it would already have been in a position to have done so. It seems to me that it is necessary for a warning notice to set reasonable targets, as we have set out in amendment 15. By requiring actions that are reasonable, schools can be given targets that are precise and genuinely achievable within the compliance period.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the type of warning notice that Lord Nash used for an academy, as he just described, with the items he listed and the ability to deliver on them within the timeframe he gave, might be what the Government have in mind for maintained schools? How would the 15 days that my hon. Friend is envisaging enable these things to happen? Things such as staff morale take an awful lot longer than 15 days, as he said. How will his amendment help to deliver if this is the kind of warning notice the Government have in mind?
Kevin Brennan
As I explained at the outset, my amendment is an attempt to probe the Minister’s thinking by putting the 15 days back in, although I acknowledge that it can take considerably longer than 15 days for the sorts of actions outlined in a warning notice to take place. The Minister may be able to give more detail about the period he envisages, whether he thinks the interventions should be reasonable and whether a reasonable length of time should be allowed for making the interventions.
Kevin Brennan
I suspect that the Minister might not be surprised if I say I beg to differ about exactly how precise this Bill is in what it does. I suspect that will form some part of our exchanges in the next few days.
Returning to the power that was taken in 2011 by the Secretary of State, ably represented in Committee at that time, as now, by his Schools Minister, presumably there has been a pressing need which explains why that power is no longer sufficient and why the Secretary of State now needs to take the power directly to issue the warning notices. If there was something terribly wrong about the way that local authorities work—issuing warning notices or failing to issue warning notices—Ministers would presumably have had to use the power that they took in the 2011 Act a lot; perhaps to issue dozens, maybe hundreds of warning notices since taking that power to direct local authorities to issue those notices.
What is the actual number of occasions that the Secretary of State has issued such directions since that power became available in November 2011? According to a written answer from the Minister for Children to my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) on 16 June this year, the Secretary of State has issued directions not on hundreds, or dozens of occasions or even double figures; the Secretary of State has issued directions to local authorities to issue warning notices on precisely four occasions in the last four years.
How can the Minister argue that there is a need so pressing for the Secretary of State to have to lay down primary legislation in order to issue orders directly herself when the Government are struggling to average one direction per year to local authorities since they took the power to direct local authorities to issue those warning notices?
The Opposition believe that Ministers should have to demonstrate that they need to acquire more power and are not just doing it to sound tough. If they really needed this power, surely there would have been many more occasions on which they would have chosen to direct local authorities to issue warning notices than there have been in the past four years since they took that power under the 2011 Act, which amended the Education and Inspections Act 2006. We will listen with interest to the Minister’s justification for taking that approach in the light of the coasting attitude to the need to issue directions to local authorities over the past four years.
Even if the Minister is unable to accept amendment 15 as we have drafted it—I understand that Ministers generally have an aversion to accepting any wording proposed by the Opposition—will he assure the Committee that any actions set out in warning notices by Ministers will be reasonable? What is his assessment of the example I gave of an academy warning notice required by Ministers? I do not argue with the prescriptions within that warning notice—they seem to be fairly standard proposals. Do Ministers seriously put forward the idea that they are the sorts of things that could reasonably be achieved in full during a one-month warning notice period?
John Pugh (Southport) (LD)
Would it be helpful if the Minister told us how many warning notices—over and above four—have been given to academies?
Kevin Brennan
Yes. I apologise for not having that answer to hand myself. I am sure that if the Minister does not have that number before him or in his mind, he will—through the well-established process of parliamentary in-flight refuelling—be able to obtain that information by the time he gets to his feet.
Kevin Brennan
We are, as ever, mightily grateful to the Minister for his remarkable memory. I thank him for the almost magical way in which he brought that figure to mind for us.
Will the Schools Minister explain what capacity there will be within the offices of regional schools commissioners to have the ability to issue and carry through warning notices if, indeed, that is how he envisages the process? Would he elucidate a little more the process and the involvement of regional schools commissioners in the ministerial issuing of warning notices? In the oral evidence session, we heard about the capacity constraints on regional schools commissioners. Is the Minister able to tell us more about that? I look forward to his responses and to any other contributions from members of the Committee. Does he agree with us that in clause 2 it might be reasonable to set out the minimum reasonable requirements?
Mr Gibb
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan, as we begin the clause-by-clause scrutiny of the schools elements of the Bill following thorough scrutiny of clause 13 last week. The Bill gives regional schools commissioners and local authorities the power to intervene to secure swift action in schools that are not providing children with the quality of education that will enable them to meet their potential. There are several ways that underperformance manifests itself in our schools and the Bill ensures a strong strategy for dealing with each of the situations that can affect schools and lead them to underperform.
The key legislation is the Education and Inspections Act 2006, which gives local authorities, and in some circumstances the Secretary of State, the power to intervene when schools are underperforming. The Committee will remember that this legislation, introduced by the last Labour Government, only found its way on to the statute book because the Conservative Opposition voted for it. Had we not done so—had we abstained or voted against the Bill—it would have fallen. It was a piece of principled opposition, under the leadership of the then newly elected Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr Cameron). In my judgment, it was a key decision that led to the election of the Conservative-led coalition in 2010. If I were giving advice to the Labour Party to help it win an election in the future, I would say that it needs to look at the lessons that we learned after 2005 and to adopt that approach to opposition. Though, of course, I am not here to give such advice to the Labour Party.
Clause 2 amends section 60 of the 2006 Act. As currently drafted, that section gives power to local authorities to issue a warning notice to schools when there is a real concern about standards, or the safety of pupils or staff at a school is threatened, or there has been serious breakdown in the way that the school is managed or governed. This is what section 60 is designed to address, but the grounds for intervention are different from those for failing schools—those judged inadequate by Ofsted—which are set out in sections 61 and 62 of the 2006 Act. They are also different from the powers that we are seeking in order to tackle coasting schools, which have been touched on briefly in this debate and which would appear in proposed new section 60B of the 2006 Act, introduced in clause 1 of the Bill. Coasting schools are automatically eligible for intervention.
The purpose of clause 2, which allows for the issuing of warning notices where there is concern about the performance of a school, is to give the same power to the Secretary of State that currently exists only for local authorities. The clause thus changes the words “local authority” in section 60 to “relevant authority”, which is defined as including the Secretary of State as well as the local authority. This relevant authority would be able to issue a warning notice to the governing body of a school. Critically, the clause allows regional schools commissioners, on behalf of the Secretary of State, to issue such a warning notice rather than having to wait for the local authority to do so.
Despite the existence of these powers, 51 local authorities have never issued a warning notice to any of their schools. Where action is needed, because a local authority has failed to act or has acted ineffectively, it will now be possible for regional schools commissioners to move quickly and directly. A warning notice gives a school the opportunity to show that they can make the necessary changes but, if they cannot, regional schools commissioners and local authorities can take further steps.
Kevin Brennan
I am sure that the Minister has anticipated what I will ask. If his concern is that 51 local authorities have not issued warning notices to any of their schools, yet he took the power in the 2011 Act, which amended the 2006 Act, to enable the Secretary of State to direct them to do so, why has it happened on only four occasions?
Mr Gibb
The power to direct a local authority to issue a warning notice was included because a high number of local authorities—51, as I said—have never issued warning notices. The power is complex and time-consuming, because we have first to direct a local authority to consider issuing a warning notice and we can only do so where it refuses. Also, the local authority is still able to make a judgment on its compliance with a warning notice, even when directed to do so by the Secretary of State. There have been circumstances in which an obstructive local authority that does not want to intervene can block the process. That is why we are introducing these powers for the Secretary of State to intervene directly without having to go through the indirect process of directing a local authority.
Kevin Brennan
The Minister says that local authorities have obstructed that process on occasions. Will he give us some examples, so that we understand why the position is so pressing that the Minister has to legislate in this way?
Mr Gibb
I was giving a hypothetical example of where a local authority could obstruct—[Interruption.] I understand that there may be circumstances where a local authority can obstruct and will endeavour to find specific examples to give to the Committee.
It is clear from the way that the Bill is drafted what has to happen when the Secretary of State issues a direction to a local authority to issue a warning notice: the secondary process has to be gone through. Of course, the key issue is that the local authority then judges whether a school’s governing body has complied sufficiently with that warning notice. We want to sweep away those intermediary steps so that we can take swifter action to deal with underperformance of schools.
I understood from the opening remarks of the hon. Member for Cardiff West that there was agreement in the Committee and that the Labour Opposition wanted to take swift action to deal with underperformance. If, as it appears, there is no desire by the Labour Opposition to intervene swiftly in schools that are not providing the quality of education that a young person needs, it would be good to get that on the record.
Kevin Brennan
As the Minister has directly challenged me, let me say that, of course, we want swift and appropriate action to be taken: that is our position. He has to explain to us why the clause is necessary, but as yet Committee members—certainly, Labour members—have not been convinced by his arguments, not least because he is unable to give us any examples of obstructionism under the current process, and because the powers to direct local authorities to issue notices already exist. We are yet to be convinced.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
If the Minister does not have examples of local authorities that have been obstructive, will he give examples of situations where he would have liked to issue an order but could not do so, because of the difficulty and complexity involved?
Mr Gibb
I am sure there are plenty of examples of underperforming schools where this provision would have been helpful. We are trying to avoid the situation in schools such as Downhills, where assiduous campaigning prevented standards from being improved and tried to prevent academisation. As a consequence of introducing measures, there has been a huge improvement in the quality of education that young people there receive. We are taking these powers to deal with those kinds of issues, to act directly, not indirectly, and ensure that we can take action swiftly.
Let me deal with the amendments. Amendment 14 would amend clause 2 by introducing a minimum compliance period of 15 days for a warning notice. Under current legislation, there is a fixed 15-day period within which governing bodies are required to comply with a warning notice, regardless of why it was issued. This restricts the use of notices in many cases, so it makes sense to give schools more time, in certain circumstances, to bring about the necessary change. In other instances, of course, more urgent action is needed.
Under the changes that the Bill proposes, we will remove the requirement for compliance with a warning notice within 15 days. Regional school commissioners and local authorities will be able to set timescales for compliance on a case by case basis. We expect that flexibility to be supported by local authorities as well as regional school commissioners, given that these changes will undoubtedly make warning notices a more effective tool and therefore more likely to be used.
There is a need for flexibility in setting a compliance period in some cases. Local authorities and regional school commissioners might want to allow more time for improvements to show up—for example, in exam results. That could be when a school was on a downward trajectory but new leadership had been brought in, or where a national leader of education is working with a school. In those cases, regional school commissioners and local authorities would have greater confidence and would want to review the impact before any further action was considered. On the other hand, regional school commissioners or local authorities might in some cases want to set the compliance period at less than 15 days—for example, to address a breakdown in leadership and governance or a threat to the safety of pupils and staff. Here there may well be circumstances where a local authority or a regional schools commissioner cannot wait 15 days to see whether a governing body will act to address an issue. Amendment 14 would take away the flexibility for regional school commissioners or local authorities to act swiftly in some of the most urgent cases.
Kevin Brennan
I appreciate the clarification about both the longer and shorter period. One of my questions was whether the Minister envisages any maximum length of time during which a warning notice could be hanging over a school. By the same token, does he envisage a minimum period in which it will be reasonable to comply, even in the instances that he has outlined of an emergency?
Mr Gibb
We do not envisage a maximum period. There are certain powers in the 2006 Act, for example, the power of the Secretary of State to direct a governing body to enter into arrangements or the power to suspend delegated budgets. There is a two month period within which the powers can be used if there has been a failure to comply with a warning notice, but that is not quite the same thing as a period in which to comply with a warning notice. We want flexibility for local authorities and regional school commissioners to act more swiftly than within 15 days—or, in terms of compliance, less swiftly, when a longer period is needed to demonstrate that standards have improved.
Amendment 15 would amend clause 2 to state specifically that governing bodies can be required to take only reasonable action to remedy matters identified in a warning notice. I can understand the hon. Gentleman’s concern that regional school commissioners and local authorities should act reasonably when issuing warning notices. However, I can reassure him that the Secretary of State is reasonable and always acts reasonably. I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point that we cannot assume that every future Secretary of State will be as reasonable as my right hon. Friend. We have to prepare for the worst, such as the prospect—unlikely though it is—of a Labour Secretary of State. Let me reassure Opposition Members that the Secretary of State and the regional school commissioners acting on her behalf have a common law duty to act rationally and reasonably—the same common law duty that applies to local authorities. It would be unlawful for them to require a governing body to take any action that a governing body could not reasonably be expected to carry out.
Kevin Brennan
Am I right that the Minister is proposing to the Committee that, rather than ensure that the test of reasonableness is contained in the Bill, he would prefer that this was fought out in the courts, perhaps in some sort of lengthy dispute about whether the Secretary of State or regional school commissioners had acted reasonably? That is the very thing I thought he was trying to avoid with this Bill.
Mr Gibb
It would not make any difference whether the phrase was in the legislation or we were relying on common law. This is a long-established common law principle, on which there is a whole raft of case law. It is not necessary for it to be in the Bill because it applies to all legislation on the operation by public sector bodies of these kinds of powers and duties. It should also be borne in mind that regional schools commissioners are exercising the Secretary of State’s powers and the Secretary of State is accountable to Parliament for any decisions that regional schools commissioners make.
Amendment 21 aims to restore the definition of the term “working day” to the Bill. The reference to working days in current legislation exists only to help with the interpretation of the fixed compliance period of 15 working days. As the Bill proposes to remove this fixed period, there is no need to define working days. Regional schools commissioners and local authorities will now be able to define their compliance period in terms of months or end date, for example, as well as days, whichever is clearest and most relevant to the circumstances. On the basis of those explanations of the purpose of this part of clause 2, and our response to the amendments, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will feel that he does not need to press them.
Kevin Brennan
I thank the Schools Minister for his response. I should have mentioned, as he rightly did, that amendment 21 is purely a technical amendment that it was necessary to table because of our proposal to restore the minimum time period for complying with a warning notice.
In some ways, the Minister’s contribution raises more questions than answers, and we need to ponder those further. He said that we were considering the Secretary of State’s acquisition of this particular power because local authorities had been obstructing the current process. As I said, that process was introduced by the amendments to the 2006 Act that the Schools Minister made in 2011 to enable the Secretary of State to direct local authorities to issue notices. It would be concerning if local authorities were deliberately obstructing the law passed through Parliament in 2011 so, perfectly reasonably, I asked the Minister for examples of when and how local authorities had carried out obstructionist tactics to try to get in the way of the Secretary of State exercising her lawful power of instructing local authorities to issue warning notices. He was not able to give us an example.
We are legislating here. This is the law of the land we are creating, so we ought to be able to say to Ministers, “If this is your justification, show us the practical real-world examples of where there has been genuine obstruction of Ministers exercising their lawful power.” If that were demonstrable in any serious manner, we would, as reasonable people, have to take that very seriously indeed when taking our views on the clause and the Bill. However, he was not able to give us an example, even after a reasonable pause for in-flight refuelling, so I am concerned by the justification that the Minister has for the clause. Can he provide compelling evidence that what he said is correct—that there is genuine, systematic obstructionism that prevents the Secretary of State from being able to exercise her lawful power in this area?
The Minister alleged that local authorities were obstructing the Secretary of State’s power to instruct them to issue warning notices. Following that, he perhaps slightly gave the game away about whole swathes of what the Bill is about when he expanded further and remarked—I think that this is an accurate quote, but I am sure that Hansard will check—that the intention was to “sweep away…intermediary steps.” What that actually means is to wipe out locally and democratically elected voices and institutions from the whole process. That is not because there is any systematic evidence of obstructionism in the process by those locally and democratically elected institution because, despite the Minister’s allegations, he could not provide us with a single example of that happening, let alone any systematic evidence.
Mr Gibb
Clause 2 also enables local authorities to issue warning notices more efficiently and quickly, so it does not sweep away the involvement of local authorities in dealing with underperforming schools. It helps local authorities to act more swiftly, and it also enables the Secretary of State to do that more swiftly, through the regional schools commissioners.
Kevin Brennan
I am grateful to the Minister for that intervention, but “sweep away intermediary steps” were his words, not mine. It was he who made the allegation that local authorities—to which he now says he is keen to give more power—were actually an obstruction in this process, and that that was why the Secretary of State needed to take further powers. The picture becomes even more confused as a result of what the Minister says.
Mr Gibb
Let me help the hon. Gentleman. Section 60(1)(c) of the 2006 Act assumes that, in relation to the powers of local authorities, the governing body could make representations to the chief inspector of Ofsted
“against the warning notice during the initial period”.
That is an intermediate step, and we are sweeping it away for local authorities just as much as for the Secretary of State.
Kevin Brennan
I have a feeling that we will return to that, perhaps when we discuss the next group of amendments or others down the line, but the Minister’s statement about the reason why the Government are taking these powers for the Secretary of State to be able to issue warning notices directly, albeit by using regional schools commissioners, still stands on the record. Incidentally, regional schools commissioners are individuals or bodies that have no description in statute, as far as I am aware. They were invented without the then Secretary of State feeling a need to put the proposal in legislation and to bring it before Parliament. Nevertheless, the power to issue these warning notices, as envisaged in the clause, will be devolved on behalf of the Secretary of State.
Bill Esterson
My hon. Friend mentions regional schools commissioners. During our evidence sessions, a regional schools commissioner said that he had a very small number of staff and that commissioners oversee an average of 500 schools. That number is growing and, if the Minister gets his way, I suspect that it will grow rapidly. Does my hon. Friend agree that that commissioner’s very small number of staff raises interesting questions about how the provisions of this clause will be fulfilled, if that is to be done by the commissioners?
Kevin Brennan
I agree with my hon. Friend—I think that I alluded to that point earlier. I asked the Minister to indicate his view of regional schools commissioners’ current capacity to cope with directly issuing these warning notices, in addition to all the other responsibilities being placed on them by the Bill and other Government actions. The Minister did not say anything about that, but perhaps he will be able to give us more information when we get to the clause stand part debate. How does he envisage regional schools commissioners coping with the extra responsibilities that are given to them through the clause, albeit indirectly through the Secretary of State? Does the Minister think that a significant resource issue will need to be dealt with as a result of the changes in the Bill? My hon. Friend makes a valid point that could be dealt with in more detail during the clause stand part debate.
The Minister did not deal satisfactorily with my observation about the power taken in the 2011 Act to allow the Secretary of State to direct local authorities to issue warning notices. The Minister said that the power was not being used because of obstructionism by local authorities and because the current process is too cumbersome. Perhaps that is why only four such notices have been issued—it is so cumbersome that Ministers have only managed one a year since 2011.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak asked the Minister for examples of how the process is too cumbersome to be carried out by Ministers, but I did not hear an adequate response to that point. The fact that Ministers have not used the power does not mean that it is unusable. It is up to the Minister to demonstrate why they have met this alleged roadblock in exercising powers that they themselves took in 2011. That point is relevant to some of our later groups of amendments, so I might come back to it.
It was perfectly reasonable for us to table the amendments. At this point, I do not intend to press them to a Division, but they raise issues that we need to explore further, perhaps in the clause stand part debate, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Mr Gibb
We have had quite an instructive debate. It is clear from the tone and nature of the hon. Gentleman’s amendments, and how he introduced them, that there is not the same determination among Opposition Members to tackle underperformance in our schools as there is among Government Members. What drives this Government—indeed, what drove the previous coalition Government—is a determination to raise education standards in every school, so that every local school is a good school, which means taking powers to tackle underperformance wherever it exists. When we talk about social justice, we mean ensuring that every young person has the best education that they deserve. That is what the powers are about; that was what the whole of the previous Government’s reform programme was about; and it is what this Government’s reform programme is about.
This is also about one nation. There are pockets around the country where some local authorities are presiding over schools that are letting young people down year after year. We want to ensure that we tackle schools in those local authority areas, which is why the Secretary of State is taking the powers through the Bill.
Kevin Brennan
It really does not do the Minister any credit to characterise the proper scrutiny of the powers that he and the Secretary of State have taken as in some way suggesting that the Opposition have any less concern than him about raising standards or, indeed, social justice. It would probably make a lot more sense and save us a lot of time if he were to acknowledge that we are all sincerely trying to raise standards and to promote social justice, and that it is perfectly legitimate to ask probing and detailed questions about whether Ministers’ powers will be effective in that mission.
Mr Gibb
I am pleased to have elicited that response. We do need to work together to ensure that there are high standards for all our young people in our schools.
In his careful scrutiny of the clause, the hon. Gentleman raised the question of cases in which there has been obstruction by local authorities. There have been very few cases, as we have issued only four notices. In the case of Henry Green school in Coventry, we directed the local authority to give a warning notice. Not only did it refuse, but it launched a judicial review against the direction from the Secretary of State. Over time, the school’s results improved, so we agreed not to continue with that direction. However, we maintain that the action was lawful and justified at the time. It is a relief that the school’s standards improved as a consequence of what happened.
The process has been cumbersome. We have first to direct a local authority to consider issuing a warning notice. We can direct the local authority only when it refuses, so that is a step that delays matters. The local authority is then responsible for judging whether the school has complied with the warning notice, even when it has been directed to do so by the Secretary of State.
Steve McCabe
I recall the Minister’s colleague last week extolling the virtues of judicial review. Is the Minister seriously saying that if an authority decides to seek a judicial review, that is evidence of the authority being obstructive?
Mr Gibb
Of course judicial review is a perfectly valid and reasonable system to check the actions of the Executive, but it seems odd to use that power when action is being taken to try to improve standards in a primary school.
I want to address the issue about capacity. In the previous Parliament, 1,100 schools became sponsored academies, which is one of the reasons why 1 million more pupils are in good and outstanding schools today than was the case were in 2010. The fact that we have already issued 107 warning notices to academies demonstrates that regional schools commissioners have the capacity to tackle underperformance. They are advised by bodies made up of heads from their areas. Advisory bodies are attached to all the regional schools commissioners. The commissioners have the discretion to decide whether a warning notice is required and they draw on the knowledge of their headteacher board.
John Pugh
I listened carefully to the Minister’s exchange with the hon. Member for Cardiff West about the redistribution of powers that the Bill facilitates, especially the powers of local authorities and the Secretary of State. I think he said—he will correct me if I am wrong—that the powers of local authorities à propos governing bodies to deal with representations are implicitly increased by the Bill. Will he clarify that point?
Mr Gibb
I am grateful for that intervention. Clause 2 changes the reference to “local authority” in the 2006 Act to “relevant authority”, which covers the local authority and the Secretary of State. The other changes that we are making to section 60 therefore apply to the local authority and to the Secretary of State. I cited earlier that the original section 60(1)(c) of the 2006 Act states that a maintained school was eligible for intervention if
“either the governing body made no representations under subsection (7) to the Chief Inspector against the warning notice during the initial period or the Chief Inspector has confirmed the warning notice”.
Subsection (7) of the Act is deleted by clause 2. That provision was introducing delay in tackling underperforming schools, and we are removing it, not just for the Secretary of State, but for local authorities.
Mr Gibb
I am not sure that I have understood the hon. Gentleman correctly. I wonder whether he would reiterate that. I do not think that anybody is in a weaker position than before. Section 60 is about issuing a warning notice to a school. It is not the same provision as clauses 1, or clause 7, under which an academy order is issued automatically for schools in Ofsted’s category 4. This is about schools that are not in category 4, but about which there is concern on the part of the local authority or the Secretary of State, or the regional schools commissioners. The provision enables them to take action that may lead to discussions with the school. We hope that everyone will work together with local authorities and the regional schools commissioners, and with the school’s governing body, to try to bring about rapid improvement of the problems causing underperformance.
If there are no further interventions, I hope that the hon. Member for Cardiff West asks leave to withdraw the amendment.
Kevin Brennan
As I mentioned, we do not intend to press the amendments to a Division. At some point, I suppose that we should explore a little bit further the single example that the Minister has given of obstructionism by a local authority. Although I understand that the school in question improved without the warning notice coming into effect, it will be interesting to find out more details about that case. I am sure that, during the Committee’s proceedings, the Minister will provide all the other examples that have led him to think it necessary to legislate in this way, rather than providing just one example of a local authority’s thinking that a warning notice was not necessary. Perhaps it had already taken action or thought that the Secretary of State was exercising their power incorrectly. Judicial review exists so that individuals and corporate bodies may challenge the Executive if they think powers are being used inappropriately, and it is then for the law to decide whether they are correct.
We are not, thank goodness, in a country where Ministers can simply direct people on any matter in a way that they see fit, with no legal challenge available for people if they think that the Executive’s power is being used inappropriately. I should hope that, in this anniversary year of Magna Carta, all Committee members from all parties subscribe to that principle; otherwise, we are all in trouble.
The Minister made a rather political point—I do not object to his making political points: we all do—claiming that Labour Committee members do not have the same objectives and do not want social justice and school improvement. I spent 10 years teaching and was privileged to work with young people, trying to do exactly that. That remark is unworthy of the Schools Minister. I hope that he accepts that, even if we disagree sometimes about how that should be achieved, all of us are trying to enable young people and children to fulfil their potential and play a full part in our society.
The objectives may be the same, but it is up to the Government to justify their solution and to argue for and prove to the Committee and Parliament, and the country, that their proposed solution is best. That is why we are here and why the Minister is here. He must continue to do that throughout our proceedings.
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
The Chair
Before we debate the next group of amendments, I remind Members that we had a full and frank debate earlier when amendments were presented and we had the ministerial response, with comments from both sides. We then had an indication that the amendment was to be withdrawn. We spent considerable time discussing other matters connected to other clauses. I remind Members that at the end of this series of amendments, there will be an opportunity in the stand part debate to raise and discuss matters, and not to spend time on amendments that have clearly been indicated for withdrawal. That would save the Committee an immense amount of time and make progress to the end of the Bill.
Kevin Brennan
I beg to move amendment 16, in clause 2, page 2, line 28, after “warning notice” insert
“, except a warning notice give under s.60A,”
This amendment clarifies that a local authority may give a warning notice under section 60A (teachers’ pay and conditions warning notice), to be inserted by this Bill, even though the Secretary of State has given one.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 17, in clause 2, page 2, line 31, after “warning notice” insert
“, except a warning notice give under s.60A,”
This amendment would enable a local authority warning notice under section 60A to remain in force even though the Secretary of State has given one.
Amendment 18, in clause 2, page 2, leave out lines 30 to 34 and insert—
‘(4B) If the local authority informs the Secretary of State that the local authority has given a warning notice to the governing body of a maintained school, then the Secretary of State may not give a warning notice to the governing body.”
This amendment would ensure that a governing body could not have two different warning notices in quick succession.
Amendment 20, in clause 2, page 3, leave out lines 8 and 9
This amendment restores section 69A of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 which allows the Secretary of State to require a local authority to issue a warning notice.
Amendment 22, in clause 2, page 3, line 10, at end insert—
‘(7A) In section 62 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, for subsection (2) substitute—
(2) The circumstances are that—
(a) in the opinion of the authority—
(i) the standards of performance or progress of pupils at the school are unacceptably low, and are likely to remain so; or
(ii) there has been a serious breakdown in the way the school is managed or governed which is prejudicing, or likely to prejudice, such standards of performance; or
(iii) the safety of pupils or staff of the school is threatened (whether by a breakdown of discipline or otherwise).
(b) for the purpose of subsection (2)(a)(i), the standards of performance or progress of pupils at a school are low if they are low by reference to any one or more of the following—
(i) the standards that the pupils might in all the circumstances reasonably be expected to attain,
(ii) where relevant, the standards previously attained by them, or
(iii) the standards attained by pupils at comparable schools,
(c) the governing body have been informed in writing of the authority’s opinion.””
Section 62 under the School Standards and Framework Act gives a local authority power to take immediate action against a maintained school when there was a serious risk to pupils at the school. This amendment is aimed at probing the likely use of section 62 powers in the light of Clause 2.
Amendment 23, in clause 3, page 3, leave out lines 33 and 34
This amendment removes the requirement that the Secretary of State be informed about a local authority use of a section 60A warning notice.
Kevin Brennan
Thank you for your guidance, Sir Alan. You have just indicated the amendments we are to consider. Amendment 16 would clarify that a local authority may give a warning notice under section 60A (teachers’ pay and conditions warning notice), even if the Secretary of State has given one. Amendment 18 would ensure that a governing body could not have two different warning notices in quick succession. Amendment 17 would enable a local authority warning notice under section 60A to remain in force, even though the Secretary of State had given one.
Amendment 20 would restore section 69A of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, which allows the Secretary of State to require a local authority to issue a warning notice. Amendment 22 refers to section 62 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, which gives a local authority power to take immediate action against a maintained school when there is a serious risk to pupils at the school. The amendment is aimed at probing the likely use of section 62 powers in the light of clause 2.
The amendments are designed to bring a degree of sense and order to the warning notice process or, if that is an over-ambitious aim, at least to understand how the Government intend to do that. We would like clarity on that from Ministers. It is clearly unreasonable for a school to receive two different—or indeed two similar—warning notices in quick succession. As ever, in drawing up policies, Ministers seem to have great problems in seeing matters from the viewpoint of a school and the impact of Government policies on schools. That is especially the case when we are presumably talking of schools that are in some way already short of capacity. The possibility that the school might be asked to begin to deal with requirements under a warning notice and then have them replaced by something different is clearly unsatisfactory, if that is what is envisaged in the clause.
Amendment 16 probes whether the term “warning notice” in new subsection (4A) refers to both types of warning notices: the section 60 performance standards and safety warning notices and the 60A teacher pay and conditions warning notices. In other words, a local authority can issue a section 60A warning notice if the Secretary of State has issued a section 60 one, and so on. Amendment 17 also relates to that.
Amendment 18 further explores whether the legislation is in danger of making matters even more complex. It will be highly confusing for a school, if it is trying to make rapid progress, to work to a local authority section 60 warning notice only to find that work on that must come to an abrupt end when the Secretary of State imposes a section 60 notice and stops the local authority notice that the school was already working on. Where is the evidence that, when imposing a warning notice, a local authority asks for the wrong kind of action?
Presumably, when a local authority has imposed a warning notice on a school it has done so for a reason and has not done so lightly, imposing actions that it believes will help to turn that school around or will improve the situation that triggered the warning notice. Where is the evidence that a local authority notice is likely to include the wrong actions and that a regional schools commissioner—who will have to keep an eye on a much greater number of schools than any local authority and with very limited resources, as we heard in the oral evidence before the line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill commenced—will have greater local knowledge or capacity to understand what needs to be done in relation to those warning notices?
Why does the Minister think that a regional schools commissioner, with a small number of support staff, will have better capacity to pick the right kinds of action in a warning notice than a local authority, which has, potentially, greater capacity and deals with a smaller number of schools about which it, presumably, and historically, already has more intimate knowledge?
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
I believe that we heard from Ministers last Tuesday that they would be providing extra resources to regional schools commissioners. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be helpful if they confirmed exactly what resources they will provide, and does he further agree that it would also be helpful for them to confirm how regional schools commissioners will work with local authorities? At present, as I understand it, they only work with headteachers of academy schools.
Kevin Brennan
Yes, I think that would be extremely helpful. I remember the days when Ministers were concerned about the growth of quangos, as they used to be called—bodies appointed by Ministers but without any direct accountability to the public. It seems to me that we need to understand whether the Minister is growing a whole new series of quangos around the country in creating—by stealth, in effect, and without use of legislation—the office of regional schools commissioners. Currently, as we found out from the oral evidence sessions, the commissioners have relatively small operations, namely half a dozen or so staff, but are now being given all these extra responsibilities. Who knows what other responsibilities are to be placed upon them in the future? It is inevitable that questions about accountability will grow as these institutions become more and more significant in the educational landscape and, potentially, as more and more Government resources are given to them to carry out the additional duties that the Government place upon them in this legislation and elsewhere.
The second point that my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley made in relation to headteacher boards—which is what I think she was referring to—was a question that I raised with Lord Nash during the oral evidence session. I asked him whether it was time for headteachers of maintained schools to be treated as equal to headteachers of academy schools by allowing their participation in headteacher panels, not least because of the expansion of the regional schools commissioners’ duties to have more and more responsibility for maintained schools.
How can the regional schools commissioners be properly advised by a headteacher panel that does not contain any maintained school headteachers, especially if they are dispassionately, properly and neutrally to deal with the problems faced by maintained schools? We have not yet even got to the question of key performance indicators of the regional schools commissioners in relation to targets for academisation. All sorts of problems are contained in my hon. Friend’s intervention, which I am sure the Minister will refer to.
Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)
If a school has been failing so badly, does it not suggest that the local authority is failing because it should have kept an eye on the school in the first place?
Kevin Brennan
I am making the point that local authorities are complaining that the current system restricts them from taking that action even more quickly. Through the amendments, we envisage that local authorities could act more swiftly. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say.
Bill Esterson
Did my hon. Friend think that the previous intervention was odd as a criticism of local authorities? If the criticism applies to local authorities, could it not also apply to chains and, ultimately, to regional schools commissioners if we have stand-alone academies in serious difficulty? It struck me as a rather strange comment.
Kevin Brennan
I would not accuse the hon. Member for Portsmouth South of making a strange comment, but my hon. Friend is right; we could ponder whether a double standard is applied to local authorities and academy chains. There is certainly a double standard with regard to inspection, but we will come back to that. Alternatively, it might be an illogicality in the observation.
Mrs Drummond
We have already discussed the fact that 131 academies have been put into special measures. If we have managed to do that, local authorities have surely been failing if they have not been looking after their failing schools.
Kevin Brennan
We should all be concerned to ensure that any school, whatever its character, delivers on behalf of its pupils, and that these interventions take place. We support academisation as one means of school improvement, but we simply say that it should not be used exclusively as the only way to bring about school improvement.
I would welcome a much more level playing field in the debate on this. Now that 60% of secondary schools are academies—the Minister has pointed that out several times—the whole issue of school improvement in academies will become bigger and bigger. If the answer to a failing school is to academise it, we need to know in much greater detail what the answer ultimately is to a failing academy. That is going to be a live debate during the passage of the Bill and in this Parliament.
Amendment 23 relates to clause 3. New Members may be surprised to know that the way we do things in this place means that from time to time we debate amendments to other clauses if they relate to the amendments contained within a previous clause, but we may decide upon them at a later stage. At this point we are debating clause 3; although, technically speaking, it occurred slightly later in the Bill, it has been grouped here. It removes the requirement that the Secretary of State must be informed about a section 60A warning notice in order to probe why the Government think it necessary to legislate that the Secretary of State should be informed.
The National Audit Office report of 30 October 2014, “Academies and maintained schools: Oversight and intervention”, made it clear that the Department for Education does not know in any detail what is happening in schools. Perhaps there are times when it needs to get out of the way a bit and allow others who do know what is going on in local schools to do a proper job—that was the view expressed in the NAO report. That view is shared not only by Labour Members but by Conservative representatives at a local level, so it would be extremely useful to hear the Minister’s response to that and to our amendments.
Mr Gibb
One aim of the Bill is to simplify the complex process of warning notices. The current process for performance standards and safety warning notices is set out in section 60 of the 2006 Act, which is the section that clause 2 of the Bill amends. The current process for teachers’ pay and conditions warning notices, to which some of the hon. Gentleman’s amendments apply, is set out in section 60A of the 2006 Act. That is the section that clause 3 seeks to amend. The Bill seeks to improve the effectiveness of both types of warning notices by freeing up the time scale for compliance, as we discussed when we debated the previous group of amendments. It enables the Secretary of State to give performance standards and safety warning notices and it removes the process by which governing bodies could make representations against the warning notice, which had drawn out the process in the past.
The changes to the time scale for compliance are being made both to performance standards and safety notices and to teachers’ pay and conditions notices. The Bill sets out in clause 2(2)(e) that where the Secretary of State has issued a performance standards and safety warning notice, the local authority cannot then issue one of its own to the school in question. That change is not about preventing local authorities from issuing warning notices. In fact, this legislation deliberately retains the power for local authorities to issue warning notices. As I said when we debated the previous group of amendments, it improves the flexibility and efficiency of the process for local authorities as well as for regional schools commissioners. We know that 51 local authorities have never issued a warning notice. Where local authorities have been inactive or less effective than we would wish, we want regional schools commissioners to be able to step in quickly. In cases where that is necessary, it is right for a local authority’s power to issue a warning notice to that school to be frozen, preventing the school from being subject to potentially conflicting requests from two different statutory bodies.
Bill Esterson
I am curious about something that the Minister just said. He said that this improves the ability of local authorities to issue a warning notice. Yet clause 2(2)(e) says:
“after subsection (4) insert—
“(4A) If a local authority are notified that the Secretary of State has given a warning notice to the governing body of a maintained school the local authority may not give a warning notice unless or until the Secretary of State informs them that they may.”
I do not understand how that makes it easier for a local authority to issue a warning notice.
Mr Gibb
Because clause 2(2) is all about how the conflict of two different bodies issuing warning notices is resolved. Where a local authority has issued a warning notice and there is no conflict, it is now more flexible and easier for it to do so. Clause 2 is about regional schools commissioners intervening in cases where they are unhappy that the local authority has not taken sufficient action to deal with an underperforming school, or where a local authority has intervened but has done so in such a way that the regional schools commissioners, as advised by the headteacher boards, are unhappy that sufficient progress is being made or the right action is being demanded by the local authority. The purpose of that paragraph is to remove the conflict of powers.
Kevin Brennan
I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central. I did not realise that he was seeking to intervene again. I am sure he will do so in a moment.
I wanted to clarify what the Minister just said. Exactly what happens to a local authority warning notice when the Secretary of State, through the regional schools commissioner, issues one as well?
Mr Gibb
Clause 2(2)(e) is very clear. It says:
“(4A) If a local authority are notified that the Secretary of State has given a warning notice to the governing body of a maintained school the local authority may not give a warning notice unless or until the Secretary of State informs them that they may.”
It goes on to say:
“(4B) If the Secretary of State gives a warning notice to the governing body of a maintained school, any earlier warning notice given to the maintained school by the local authority ceases to have effect from that time.”
It is very clear in the Bill, which should please the hon. Gentleman. He is keen for these things to be in the Bill and those provisions are explicitly stated with admirable clarity.
Bill Esterson
The Minister still has not dealt with the point I raised. The Bill clearly states that the local authority is depending on the decision of the Secretary of State, as he said. I do not see how that makes it easier for a local authority. It seems to me that that is giving the local authority a massive hoop to jump through by having to rely on the Secretary of State first.
Mr Gibb
Well, no. In normal circumstances, if a local authority is concerned about the standards in a particular school in its area, it can issue a warning notice under section 60. If this Bill goes through, we will have made that easier because there will be no appeal to the chief inspector. The regional schools commissioners will only intervene in those circumstances if they are unhappy about the quality of the warning notice and the action that has been recommended and demanded by the local authority. In most cases where a local authority is issuing a warning notice—and unfortunately there are 51 local authorities that have never done so since the power to issue warning notices was introduced—if the regional schools commissioner is unhappy, then they will intervene. If they are happy with what is happening, they will not intervene: they will be happy that the local authority is taking the necessary action to deal with an underperforming school.
Steve McCabe
I notice that this is the third or fourth time that the Minister has cited the example of 51 local authorities not issuing warning notices, in order to persuade the Committee that there is a problem here. Would he concede that in those 51 authorities there have been many negotiated action plans which have resulted in satisfactory outcomes, and therefore there has been no need for warning notices?
Mr Gibb
That is an assertion that the hon. Gentleman is making. What I do know is that in a number of local authorities, the overall level of educational attainment and progress is significantly lower in those local authorities than it is in others. That is the problem that we are seeking to address.
I return to the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Cardiff West. The changes to clause 2 would mean that regional schools commissioners could begin to tackle underperformance or serious concerns about the issue of management or tackle issues that relate to safety swiftly, without having to rely on the local authority to act. That also means that regional schools commissioners would be able to act without having to go through the complex process of directing the local authority to consider and then to issue a notice. These processes have such uncertain outcomes that they have been used on just four occasions, as we have debated in the last group, with little success in driving improvements or bringing schools into eligibility for intervention where necessary.
Amendments 16 and 17 seek to ensure that teachers’ pay and conditions warning notices are unaffected by the changes we wish to make to the performance standards and safety warning notices. The amendments proposed say expressly that a pay and conditions warning notice already in force would remain in force despite the regional schools commissioner having issued a performance standards and safety warning notice.
The amendments also propose that a local authority that is prevented from giving a performance standards and safety warning notice by virtue of the RSC having issued one, could still give a pay and conditions warning notice. I hope that I can reassure Opposition Members that it is not necessary to make such changes, because the Bill already does what the amendments purport to do. The type of warning notice that clause 2 applies to is clearly identified in the first sentence of clause 2, which says:
“The Education and Inspections Act 2006 is amended as follows”.
It talks about the performance standards and safety warning notice in the next subsection. Nothing in the Bill therefore removes the effect of a previously issued teachers’ pay and conditions warning notice, nor does it stop a local authority from subsequently issuing one, even where the regional schools commissioner goes on to give a performance standards and safety warning notice to the school. They are separate issues under separate sections of the 2006 Act.
Turning to amendment 18, I believe that the hon. Members for Cardiff West and for Birmingham, Selly Oak, are seeking to ensure that a school is not subject to simultaneous warning notices, which may be conflicting and will certainly be confusing. I understand that intention, which is why the Bill already proposes to suspend a local authority’s power to give a school a warning notice where the RSC, the regional schools commissioner, has notified the local authority that it has given such a notice. However, the Bill does not propose to provide for a corresponding suspension of the regional schools commissioner’s new powers, as drafted in the Bill, to give a warning notice where a local authority has already given one, as amendment 18 proposes. That is because the new power for the regional schools commissioners to act and give warning themselves is intended for where local authorities have failed to act, or there are delays putting at risk plans for swift school improvements.
We want local authorities to be able to continue to give their own warning notices and to do so effectively. If they did so effectively, there would be no reason for the regional schools commissioners to take action themselves and no need to prevent them from doing so. But recent experience shows that there are too many examples where local authorities have been too reticent to issue warning notices. I cited the 51 local authorities, but there are 28 local authorities that have never issued a warning notice or installed an interim executive board.
Kevin Brennan
Rather than local authorities failing to issue warning notices, which we have already discussed, surely what the Minister is saying is that the regional schools commissioner’s warning notice would trump the local authority’s warning notice, because it was deemed to be inadequate. Can he give us some examples of local authority warning notices that are deemed to be inadequate where the power for the regional schools commissioner to trump those warning notices would be appropriate?
Mr Gibb
If the hon. Gentleman got out a little more, he would know that there are local authorities around the country that have standards that are clearly lower than those of other local authorities serving the same demographics as those local authorities. That is what we are trying to tackle in this Bill—giving the regional schools commissioner power to deal with local authorities that have over a period of years failed to provide the quality of education that we want for our young people.
Kevin Brennan
I shall have to give up my hermit’s lifestyle and get out a little bit more often than I do.
The Minister avoided my point by having his little dig at me. My point was about the examples he will cite. Where are the examples of where local authorities have issued warning notices, where it would be necessary for the regional schools commissioner to step in and trump them with their own warning notices? I do not dispute that there might be examples of where that is necessary; I simply ask the Minister to provide some for the benefit of the Committee, some of whom may not get out as much as he does.
Mr Gibb
I will endeavour to do so during the debates. From looking at the performance tables and the performance of various local authorities, it is clear that some are not issuing warning notices, and many local authorities are not providing the same quality of education that we see in the best-performing local authorities serving similar demographics.
Amendment 20 seeks to retain the power of the Secretary of State to direct a local authority to issue a performance standards and safety warning notice, a power that we propose to remove. If, as the clause is currently drafted, the regional schools commissioners are able to give the performance standards and safety warning notice themselves, the need for them to direct the local authority to act is no longer needed, so the new arrangements will be a more streamlined and efficient way of securing improvements. The Bill takes away a power that the Secretary of State had and no longer needs.
Amendment 22 seeks to change specific provisions in section 62 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, which enables a local authority to take immediate action to prevent or end a breakdown of discipline in a school. The amendment expands the grounds on which local authorities can take action to include educational performance, leadership and governance and wider safety concerns: the same grounds on which they can already use their powers to give warning notices. Those are two separate pieces of legislation. The first, in the 1998 Act, is a long-standing provision that enables local authorities to respond immediately where there are serious issues of safety and discipline that demand urgent attention. That should not be diluted.
The second, which is in the spirit of the Bill and improves the warning notice regime, is about ensuring that schools can be required to demonstrate robust action to improve performance in a school where there are wider concerns. It surely cannot be right to blur the lines between the two pieces of legislation with different aims, as the amendment would appear to do. We want to ensure that the powers available to both local authorities and regional schools commissioners are clear and proportionate to bring about improvement. I therefore urge the hon. Gentleman not to conflate two distinct but equally important issues.
Amendment 23 proposes to remove the requirement in the Bill that the Secretary of State be informed about a local authority’s use of a teachers’ pay and conditions warning notice. We propose to amend the process for issuing performance standards and safety warning notices to schools as part of a wider package of improvements to the intervention system for underperforming schools. We are also making amendments to teachers’ pay and conditions warning notices to maintain some consistency between the two processes and to make improvements where they are appropriate. We consider that requiring a local authority to inform the Secretary of State about the issue of teachers’ pay and conditions warning notices ensures that any action that the regional schools commissioners might wish to take in an underperforming school—to issue a warning notice to tackle serious concerns about governance—is consistent with any action that the local authority was already taking on pay and conditions. In view of those comments, I urge the hon. Members for Cardiff West and for Birmingham, Selly Oak not to press their amendments.
Kevin Brennan
We have had an interesting and informative discussion on the amendments. Again, it raises interesting questions. On the academisation issue, we are interested to find out how many schools fail only after they become academies. We may explore that later. The Minister has made it clear that the regional schools commissioner is being given the power effectively to trump any warning notice issued by a local authority. Again, we are not given a tremendous amount of compelling detailed evidence of the need for this power.
Mr Gibb
No inspiration from this Minister at this moment. However, the hon. Gentleman might like to visit Blackpool or Suffolk. Those are two of 12 local authorities that have been judged ineffective by Ofsted. Those two local authorities were criticised for the lack of pace in securing Ofsted’s required improvements. Those are two places he could visit.
I would say to the hon. Gentleman that in most cases we do expect local authorities to work well with regional schools commissioners to agree the action needed. It is only sometimes that some local authorities will be too slow and it is those examples that we want to use these powers to tackle.
Kevin Brennan
I am grateful to the Minister, though disappointed as we were hoping for a moment of inspiration and an example of the sort of warning notice issued by a local authority that would be so inadequate that it would be necessary for a regional schools commissioner to come in and trump it. There are no doubt examples of this; the Minister would not be legislating unless there were. I am not saying that there are no examples. I am just saying that the Committee is entitled to have one or two laid before it in order to consider whether this is the right way to deal with a problem the Minister has identified but for which he has not provided the practical evidence. That is rather disappointing because we would like to see the evidence.
The Minister once again cited the fact that 51 local authorities have never issued a warning notice. That is a perfectly valid observation, but the Minister ought to be able to demonstrate to the Committee that, in taking that approach, those are the local authorities that have a far worse record than those that have issued many warning notices. I do not know the reason; the Minister has the full panoply of the civil service to advise him. It may be that those local authorities that have not issued warning notices have very good schools and have not had to do so, or they may have taken a different approach to school improvement which has borne fruit in a way as productive as the route of issuing a warning notice.
Simply saying that there are 51 local authorities that have not issued warning notices does not demonstrate anything, unless the Minister can tell us that when the numbers have been crunched, the statistics show that those 51 local authorities are clearly performing more poorly than the average of all the other local authorities that issue warning notices or, indeed, than the 51 top local authorities that issue warning notices.
Bill Esterson
As my hon. Friend is talking about the use or lack of use of warning notices by local authorities, it strikes me that we have not actually heard from the Minister a justification of why warning notices are such an effective tool of school improvement. I would have expected to have already heard that during this debate. I wonder whether my hon. Friend would agree that perhaps we should expect to hear a justification of that from the Minister, alongside an analysis of the 51 local authorities and whether they are right or otherwise not to have used these notices.
Kevin Brennan
Yes, I agree that that is exactly the sort of thing that we should be able to expect from the Minister, to justify the actions that he is taking. As I said, where is the evidence that not issuing warning notices is the problem? Has he calculated the performance of those local authorities that do not issue warning notices against those that issue lots of them? Where is the evidence that not issuing warning notices is a sure sign of underperformance? That is a legitimate question to ask, and the Minister ought to be able to answer it.
Notwithstanding that, I recognise that the debate we have had on this group of amendments raises a number of interesting questions. I also acknowledge that some of the amendments within the grouping were intended to probe the Government’s intentions, and the Minister sought to answer on those in his response. I note the points that he made about not wanting to conflate two different pieces of legislation. I simply observe that the way in which the Government go about education legislation these days—not writing new Bills but effectively only amending existing legislation—makes confusion between different pieces of education legislation more and more likely. Indeed, that also makes it more and more difficult for those charged with doing so to understand exactly where education law stands in relation to many of these matters.
It is difficult for the Minister legitimately to criticise us for seeking to table an amendment to change an earlier piece of legislation, which appears to provide the potential to make a lot of the improvements that we might want to make to the Bill. It is difficult for the Minister to criticise us for doing so, given that that is the method which the Government use to make education legislation these days. Notwithstanding that, and notwithstanding the fact that the Minister has not provided all the evidence that we would like to see, we will not seek to press our amendments to a vote in Committee.
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
The Chair
Colleagues, it is very rapidly approaching the hour when we have to leave. There is less than a minute to go. I suspect that we should suspend now, and then return to this place at 2 o’clock when we will proceed. I remind Members that at 11.30 today the House will observe a minute’s silence in memory of 7/7. Perhaps they could try their utmost to fulfil that obligation.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Margot James.)
Education and Adoption Bill (Sixth sitting)
(9 years, 5 months ago)
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The Committee divided: - Ayes: 6 / Noes: 11 - Question accordingly negatived.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
I beg to move amendment 19, in clause 2, page 2, line 46, at end insert—
‘(2A) Any power exercised under this section by the Secretary of State must be done by Order.”
Clause 2 removes the mechanism for governing body appeal to Ofsted. This amendment requires the Secretary of State to exercise any power under the amended section 60A by Order contained in a statutory instrument under section 181(1) of the Education and Inspections Act 2006.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 34, in clause 5, page 4, line 44, after “may” insert “by order”.
The amendment requires Parliamentary accountability and visibility in the direction making power of the Secretary of State.
Kevin Brennan
I welcome everyone back for the Committee’s afternoon sitting. We come now to the third and final group of amendments to clause 2. Amendment 19 is an attempt to answer the problem of clause 2’s removing the mechanism for a governing body appeal to Ofsted. We are seeking more clarity about the decision to remove a governing body’s right of appeal to Ofsted following a warning notice. As the Bill removes the power of a governing body to appeal against a warning notice, the amendment would insert, as an alternative way of getting some measure of appeal, direct accountability for all decisions to intervene by the Secretary of State. It would require those interventions to be made via the mechanism of a statutory instrument.
It is clear from this and other actions by the Government that the Government lack confidence in Ofsted. Perhaps the fact that Ofsted has recently had to sack so many of its contracted inspectors—the very same inspectors on whom the Government have relied for judgments about which schools to intervene in—has led Ministers to strip Ofsted of the role of hearing appeals against these notices. I do not know. Perhaps the Minister will clarify why he does not think that Ofsted is a fit body to hear those appeals from governing bodies. However, just because the Government have lost faith in Ofsted’s ability to hear an appeal of this kind, that does not mean that they should completely abandon basic principles of natural justice. If Ofsted is not trusted by the Minister for Schools and the Secretary of State in this respect, surely something else should be put in its place as a safeguard against the arbitrary use of ministerial power.
The Schools Minister and I may disagree from time to time about the reasonableness of the actions that he takes and that the Secretary of State takes. I accept that we will sometimes see things differently when we are looking at ministerial actions, but as the Minister himself pointed out earlier in today’s proceedings, we are legislating for all future possibilities, including the most unlikely of possibilities for who might be sitting in his seat or the Secretary of State’s seat in the future. I remind him that there was a time when he was on the Opposition side and I was on the Government side. A week is supposed to be a long time in politics, so yes, that is ancient history, and I accept that we are likely to be in the same position for a few years to come, but on a serious note, we are legislating for all future Ministers, so we should be vigilant about legislating for anything that allows the arbitrary use of power by Ministers.
Amendment 19 means that, when issuing a notice, the Secretary of State would have to do so by order, rather than by direction. There would therefore be an opportunity for Members to pray against the statutory instrument—to use the technical term that we use in this place, not always understandable to the public—or, in effect, to put a question mark against what the Minister is doing to trigger at least a debate on the use of the power, against which the right of appeal is being removed from governing bodies.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the issue is about not only who is Secretary of State, but an additional layer of accountability? As we heard time and again in evidence last week, that confuses the system and adds yet more challenges to a demoralised and over-pressurised workforce. Does he agree that the amendment would allow Parliament to scrutinise the impact on the workforce and on the education system as a whole of any order by the Secretary of State?
Kevin Brennan
With her usual acuity, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is an additional argument. We will be hearing from her later about her amendment, and I look forward to that immensely.
Amendment 19 proposes a minimum, light touch, democratic and parliamentary safeguard against a clause that introduces ministerial fiat into the Bill. Members might not be aware of this, but even the closure of a motorway slip road has to be done by statutory instrument through this place, yet apparently the Secretary of State, under the Bill, will be able to intervene in a school without any parliamentary accountability being necessary.
The Minister for Schools (Mr Nick Gibb)
Does the hon. Gentleman think that, were the local authority to use the powers under discussion, those interventions should be subject to a negative resolution procedure in the House?
Kevin Brennan
Preferably, another route of appeal would be available when the power was exercised by a local authority, namely an appeal to Ofsted. Given that the Minister is sweeping away any right to an appeal to Ofsted on behalf of governing bodies—presumably because he has lost all faith in Ofsted’s being able to deal with it—there must be some alternative. I am interested to know whether there is such an alternative, and whether that might be through a statutory instrument. That is particularly apt when the Minister, who is after all accountable to Parliament, would be making such an order—or, indeed, such a direction—unless the amendment is accepted.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
It was interesting that the Minister asked about an appeal to the local authority. Does he think that that is a route to be explored, if he is concerned that using statutory instruments is excessive? Perhaps a local authority is the route to deal with such matters.
Kevin Brennan
The Minister was not suggesting that—I am saving him the trouble of explaining that to the Committee. He was testing whether, in the case of a notice laid by a local authority, there should also be a means of appeal through a statutory instrument, as envisaged in the amendment. I am simply saying that it is worrying that he is sweeping away any right of appeal and that such an approach has severe dangers—we will hear from several Conservative Members this afternoon, but I do not know if they are concerned about natural justice. The Schools Minister may be able to tell us, when he makes his remarks, about how he thinks the clause will fulfil the normal common-law requirements on natural justice—he mentioned common law in this morning’s sitting, so perhaps he will explain that point to the non-lawyers among us this afternoon.
All governing bodies are not necessarily up to scratch—everyone acknowledges that. The National Governors Association admits that governing bodies vary in quality across the country, and says, as we would—I am sure the Minister would—that
“governing bodies need to be honest and realistic about their own performance”.
However, there are many competent governing bodies across the country, which play a central part in school improvement and are capable of adequately challenging headteachers and senior leadership teams. There should be some channel for their concerns to be heard.
The revocation of the fundamental democratic right in the clause genuinely offends against natural justice. Disallowing any means of appeal constitutes unfettered power of the sort that the Minister has previously denied that he is seeking. I took the trouble of reminding myself of what the Minister has said on this issue in the past. In this case, it was during proceedings on the Education Act 2011, specifically when discussing the insertion of section 96A into the Education and Inspections Act 2006—again, this business of making legislation by amending previous Acts, which we were talking about earlier. At the 20th sitting of the Public Bill Committee on that legislation—it was a much longer Bill than this one; hon. Members will be relieved to hear that this Committee will not be sitting for that long—the very same Schools Minister who, Lazarus-like, is sitting here now after being taken out of the Government for a while, said:
“While we believe that the intervention power is necessary, we do not believe that the power of the Secretary of State should be unfettered. Schools will be able to make representations to Ofsted against the warning notice, whether or not it is given as a result of a direction. Ofsted will be the final judge of whether the warning notice should have been given. If the notice is confirmed, and the school fails to take the necessary action to remedy the concerns set out in the notice, the school will then become eligible for intervention.”––[Official Report, Education Public Bill Committee, 31 March 2011; c. 835.]
There we have it—that is what he said back in 2011.
It is therefore only fair that the Minister should give the Committee a full and properly justified explanation of why he now disagrees with himself. We all look forward to hearing from him at the end of the discussion on this group of amendments, and I may want to probe him a little further once we have done so, so I will leave my remarks there for now.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Sir Alan. I will speak briefly in support of amendment 19.
During debates so far on the Bill we have heard a lot about accountability, which is why I am so surprised that, when it comes to the powers that the Bill gives the Secretary of State, there is so little by way of accountability. In our sitting just last Thursday we heard that the Secretary of State will not have to justify her reasons for intervening to regionalise adoption services; now, in clause 2, we see that she will not have to answer for her decision to intervene in a school, either.
I find it a strange trend, at a time when there is such a lively public debate about devolution and giving control of public services to communities, that when it comes to schools the Secretary of State seems to be accumulating ever more power. Clause 2 will mean that interventions can be signed off from Whitehall with no public scrutiny and no way for the decision to be effectively challenged. Taking away governors’ right of appeal makes the Executive completely unaccountable. Parents and governors need to be able to have confidence in the decisions that are being made about their school and they will not be reassured when those decisions are handed down from Whitehall while they have no ability to challenge them.
We all agree that turning underperforming schools around is important, but precisely for that reason, there needs to be proper accountability in the decision-making process. Parents will want to know that the decision has been made carefully and not on some whim of the Secretary of State’s. That is why amendment 19 will require a statutory instrument to be laid before the House before an intervention can be made. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West noted, it is not just Opposition Members who have opposed giving the Secretary of State unbridled power. I repeat that, back in 2011, this Schools Minister said,
“we do not believe that the power of the Secretary of State should be unfettered”.––[Official Report, Education Public Bill Committee, 31 March 2011; c. 835.]
Somewhere along the way it seems that he and the Government have changed their mind. If the Minister is not willing to accept amendment 19, will he please tell the Committee why he no longer believes that the Secretary of State needs to be accountable and why these decisions should be taken without proper scrutiny?
Louise Haigh
It is a great pleasure, Sir Alan, to serve under your chairmanship on my first Public Bill Committee. I support amendment 19 and I shall further examine the impact on subsection (2)(h). First, I ask the Minister for a clarification. Paragraph 19 of the explanatory notes state:
“The governing body’s entitlement to make representations against the warning notice to the local authority, and the local authority’s obligation to consider those representations, is removed by clause 2(2)(h)”.
However, the actual effect of this subsection, which removes subsections (7) to (9) of section 16 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, seems to be to remove the entitlement of the governing body to make representations against the warning notice to Ofsted, which may then uphold the warning notice or not. Perhaps this is just another symptom of the unnecessary haste with which the Bill was drafted and put before us, but it would be helpful if the Minister clarified his understanding of this provision and, if necessary, issued corrected explanatory notes.
I want to talk briefly about the real impact that the already highly stringent accountability regime is having on hard-working, dedicated teachers across the country and why I want some right of appeal to be maintained. On Friday night, I hosted a meeting with local teachers to hear about their experiences in the profession. I am sure the Minister will want to advise me on better ways to spend my Friday nights, but following the Minister’s response in the evidence session last week, when he told me there had never been a better time to be a teacher, I was interested to hear from those working on the front line whether they agreed. A wide range of staff attended, from lunchtime assistants, teaching assistants and newly-qualified teachers to teachers with 20-plus years of experience and heads of primary and secondary schools. We covered a range of issues that are currently affecting the profession, from the impact of academisation and the lack of CPD to the increasing use of teaching assistants and unqualified teachers in place of fully-qualified and experienced teachers, but what came up from every single person in the room was their fear of the current inspection regime. They fear that they will be judged as failing, inadequate or, as a consequence of the Bill, coasting. That is why this amendment, securing natural justice, is so important to those teachers.
One teacher with 18 years of experience in the profession broke down in tears in the middle of the meeting, describing working 50-plus hours a week, constant box ticking and evidence taking and excessive marking and paperwork—all things that she described as having nothing to do with why she originally chose to take up this vocation. Perhaps that would be worth it if it were all genuinely necessary to guarantee the best education for all our children, but there was a very strong feeling that the accountability regime cannot always be relied on to provide an accurate measure of quality.
My concern is that the clause will only add to the pressures outlined. For a governing body not to be able to make representations to Ofsted on the basis of a notice it believes to be based on inaccurate claims simply ratchets up the pressure.
I note that one group of teachers was not at the meeting on Friday; there was no one over the age of 50. Perhaps that is a consequence of the increasing number of teachers who retire early. Dealing with “inadequate” or “coasting” schools will ultimately rely on good teachers, such as the one who broke down in front of me who is now selling her house, so that she can leave the profession—something that she never thought she would have to do and least of all wanted to do.
The measures in the clause are perhaps minor compared with the Bill’s impact as a whole, but the direction of travel is important. We should remember that the effect of legislation is not just on processes and procedures, but ultimately on the professionals who operate them and, of course, the pupils, and we all want them to succeed. I hope that the Minister will consider these points and those made by my hon. Friends, and I look forward to his response.
Mr Gibb
Welcome back, Sir Alan, after our short break. I will start by responding to the hon. Members for South Shields and for Sheffield, Heeley. First, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley is absolutely right: the teachers whom she met on Friday are right about the workload that teachers endure at the moment. TALIS—the teaching and learning international survey—shows that teachers in this country are working significantly longer than the OECD average, perhaps by eight hours a week, yet the teaching hours that they work, according to that survey, are similar in this country compared with the OECD.
What is happening in those extra eight hours if it is not adding to the sum total of teaching in our schools? The answer is the sort of things that the hon. Lady is talking about: data collection, lesson preparation and marking. When we asked the teaching profession about its concerns about workload in response to TALIS and to what people were telling us, the issues that came top of the 44,000 responses were first, data collection and processing; secondly, the concept of deep marking; and thirdly, issues to do with lesson planning and so on.
We are taking measures to deal with these issues. We are setting up working groups, following that workload challenge, and looking at issues such as what is called dialogic marking to see whether that is the right approach. From my discussions with teachers, including the National Association of Head Teachers and other unions, I think that that is not the right approach to marking. We are absolutely looking at that to see how we can take away the pressure that is emanating from somewhere in the education world to insist that dialogic marking is used to give feedback on pupils’ work. We are also looking at data collection and resources that teachers use. We are absolutely committed to taking on the challenge of teachers’ workload, and we are determined to address it.
The hon. Lady referred to the explanatory notes, and again she is spot on. There is an error in the explanatory notes, which incorrectly refer to schools making representations to the local authority when, in fact, we are talking about representations made to Ofsted. She is right and that explanatory note will be corrected.
The hon. Member for South Shields referred to several issues where the Secretary of State will not have to answer. I have to disappoint the hon. Lady, but the Secretary of State does have to answer for everything that she does. She answers to us in the House at least once a month in Education questions, but also in other debates—Opposition day debates, Adjournment debates, Back-Bench debates and so on—so the hon. Lady is wrong to say that the Secretary of State will not have to answer, because she will.
Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)
My hon. Friend the Member for South Shields pointed out in her speech that teachers were feeling extra pressure from the additional inspection regime that will be added under the Bill. I notice that the Minister has not addressed that aspect in his remarks, and I wonder whether he will come back to it. As my hon. Friend expressed powerfully, in addition to the local authority and Ofsted, an additional level of inspection will put extreme pressure on some teachers. Will the Minister address that point before he moves on?
Mr Gibb
I was struggling to understand the precise point about Ofsted; there is no additional inspection regime under Ofsted. The coasting issue is outwith anything that Ofsted does. In fact, we will debate this when we come to clause 1, which should be very soon I believe. We have set out clearly the metrics for the definition of a coasting school; it is based not on Ofsted judgments, but on performance measures, both attainment and progress, as set out in the regulations. We will debate that when we come to clause 1, but it is certainly not based on Ofsted judgments.
Amendment 19 relates to the power that we seek under clause 2, which was discussed earlier today and which will amend section 60 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, to allow regional schools commissioners to give a performance standards and safety warning notice. Amendment 34 relates to the power that we seek under clause 5, which will amend schedule 6 of the Education and Inspections Act by adding proposed new paragraph 5A to provide that, where a local authority appoints an interim executive board, the Secretary of State, via the regional schools commissioners, could give directions on the IEB’s size and composition and on its members’ terms of appointment. This power will help to minimise the number of IEBs that do not work effectively—for example, they might be too big or not appropriately skilled—and help to ensure that they can make effective decisions on improving their schools.
Amendments 19 and 34 would achieve similar aims of requiring that any warning notice or direction about an IEB was made by an order contained in a statutory instrument under what will be section 181 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006. Under section 182(1) of that Act, such an order would be subject to the negative procedure. I understand hon. Members’ desire to ensure that there is due process behind any intervention, whether issuing a warning notice or giving directions about an IEB. Amendments 19 and 16, however, would introduce a different level of scrutiny of the Secretary of State’s power to issue warning notices from that which currently exists for local authority warning notices. That would involve unnecessary scrutiny of IEB direction and serve only to create more delays and bring more complexity into the system, which we are trying to reform to reduce delays and complexity. As hon. Members will know, statutory instruments are more properly used for changes in regulations or closing motorway slip roads than for tackling school underperformance.
When a regional schools commissioner issues a performance standards and safety warning notice directly to the governing body of a school under the new proposal in the Bill, they will do so only when they are convinced that the underperformance, the problems with governance or the safety issues warrant taking such action. Similarly, any direction in respect of a local authority IEB will be made only when the RSC judges that such action would be beneficial for the school in question. RSCs will be advised, of course, by their headteacher boards, which are there to support them in making effective decisions. Therefore, an appropriate level of challenge will be built into the system. Using a parliamentary procedure for secondary legislation would be disproportionate. As RSCs are exercising the Secretary of State’s powers, the Secretary of State is, as I mentioned in response to the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley, already accountable to Parliament for the decisions that they make.
The hon. Member for Cardiff West made some references to Ofsted and the removal of the appeal to the chief inspector that is in this clause. Ofsted has had 40 representations against warning notices and has only upheld two of those appeals. The appeals process slows down action because the warning notice is paused while Ofsted considers the appeal, and the compliance period only begins again once the warning notice is confirmed.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
I am trying to understand this general truth. An appeals process slows down action in any circumstances, but the purpose of the appeal is that the action might not be appropriate. That is why it is being challenged, so it is funny to use that as a defence.
Mr Gibb
Yes, but we are not talking about an appeal against a fine or a prison sentence; we are talking about an appeal against a warning notice to a school to require it to improve standards. That is a whole different ball game.
In any case, warning notices have to be reasonable. The Secretary of State will be accountable in Parliament for notices issued by regional schools commissioners. The Association of Directors of Children’s Services has long called for this step to be removed, as has Ofsted, which wants to see the process of warning notices streamlined and to ensure that schools take steps to improve as soon as possible. This is about swift action to ensure that school standards improve.
Peter Kyle
I do not want to try the Minister’s patience with my interruptions, but in recent weeks 40% of Ofsted inspectors have been released from their contract because they were not able to perform their duties to the standards expected. Does that not illustrate why appeals are so important? In the past, it might have been not the challenge that was incorrect but how that challenge was dealt with at the other end. We need to look at the appeals process, but now that we know that some of the inspectors making the judgments were, themselves, not up to the job, might the schools not have been right in the past?
Mr Gibb
We are talking about an appeal to Ofsted, so the hon. Gentleman’s query is rather strangely worded. What is happening at Ofsted is a reform process that Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector, has been preparing for some time. Inspectors are now directly employed by Ofsted, rather than through various subcontractors, which is a better way of managing inspections. It is a worthwhile reform, and I commend Sir Michael for what he has achieved in his determination to improve the quality and consistency of inspections. With those final words, I hope that Members now feel able to withdraw their amendments.
Kevin Brennan
I listened with great interest to what the Schools Minister had to say. We had an interesting discussion about this group of amendments, with good contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for South Shields and for Sheffield, Heeley, as well as interventions from other hon. Friends—with the exception of our Whip, who stays quieter than most of us for most of the time.
As I have said, we are concerned about the removal of any kind of appeal. I take seriously the Schools Minister’s point; we do not want any encumbrance in the system that would prevent swift action being taken in schools when necessary. We all take that seriously, but it is not a reason to sweep away any notion of natural justice. People who are often working extremely hard to run a school may feel that they have been the subject of an injustice in how the notice has been issued.
We should be extremely cautious about sweeping away any means of appeal. I hoped that the Minister might propose some alternative that would overcome his concerns about the potential misuse of an appeal to Ofsted in a process that he clearly does not think is appropriate, or that he might come up with some alternative means for people to have such decisions reviewed or to appeal against them. We do that all the time with constituents who come to us with concerns about a decision made by the Executive, the bureaucracy or a powerful institution. People feel that they are voiceless and do not have an opportunity to appeal against decisions. We help people all the time. Why should a governing body that feels it has not been treated fairly in the issuing of a warning notice by the Secretary of State not have a similar basic right to have the decision properly reviewed? Why can it not have an appeal mechanism—one that is not necessarily overly bureaucratic or lengthy? I cannot see any justification for allowing no means of appeal whatever.
The Schools Minister said that regional schools commissioners would issue a warning notice only where they thought it was warranted. If a public official or body is going to issue a warning notice that effectively tells an organisation that it is not running a school properly, the very least we expect is that the notice is warranted. If we are all supposed to be massively grateful that regional schools commissioners will not issue notices where they feel that they are unwarranted, I do not regard that as a crumb from the Minister.
Kevin Brennan
I see a breach in the Government Back Benchers’ Trappist vow of silence.
Kevin Brennan
Not until I have teased the hon. Gentleman a bit—[Interruption.] He can sit down while I am doing it. In fairness to him, he has previously contributed to our proceedings.
James Berry
The hon. Gentleman is a former Minister, as he has reminded us, and he well knows that all Ministers have to act rationally. That is a basic common law requirement of any Minister, so his point does not take the argument any further, does it?
Kevin Brennan
That is why we need some form of appeal, to determine whether Ministers are acting reasonably and rationally, which is exactly what I am arguing. Rather than our having to go to judicial review and line the pockets of the hon. Gentleman’s lawyer friends, we could make an amendment so that Members of Parliament could consider the matter for themselves. We could have free use of his expertise. I remind him that praying against a statutory instrument is not a common occurrence—although it happens from time to time. It is an outlet or a safety valve where there is real concern that a Minister has exercised a power in this way. I am glad that he has taken the Schools Minister’s advice to get out more by joining in with our proceedings this afternoon. Some of his hon. Friends should follow that advice during the rest of our proceedings. I look forward to hearing from them. I am not convinced—[Interruption.] I make an exception for everyone who has done so, because I can hear some grumbling from the hon. Member for Portsmouth South. She has made a thorough and interesting contribution to our proceedings, which I welcome.
Clause 2 means that there is no safety valve. The Schools Minister said that an RSC would only issue a warning notice when it was warranted. They will be advised by their headteacher board, which will consist only of academy heads. I hope that the Minister will reconsider that. He said that there had been 40 such appeals to Ofsted and that two of those appeals were successful. We can read that in a number of ways. I have a feeling that, if all 40 appeals had been successful, the Minister would have told the Committee, “That’s another reason to get rid of the appeals, which are wasting everybody’s time by overturning these decisions.” If two out of 40 are wrong, is it not right that those two decisions should be overturned on appeal? If a wrong decision is taken, is it not right that it should be reconsidered? I think it is right. I do not propose that we should be overly bureaucratic. I would like to know more from the Minister about the alternatives. I feel that he has made his mind up on that.
Interestingly, he said that Ofsted’s reforms—bringing all its inspectors in-house—would improve quality. Perhaps the Government could learn that lesson in other areas from time to time. Contracting out is not always the answer to providing a quality public service. I will leave that thought hanging. On that basis, it is vital to lay down a marker about the importance of the principles of natural justice. I invite the Minister to give us a few more thoughts before we decide how we will dispose of the amendment.
Mr Gibb
I will be brief. I see your expression and sense that you want us to make some progress, Sir Alan. The powers that the Bill gives to the Secretary of State are identical to the power that exists for local authorities. The hon. Gentleman and other Opposition Members have not suggested in their remarks that the process of local authorities issuing a warning notice should be subject to a statutory instrument. Neither has he suggested that a byelaw is passed by the local authority before a warning notice is issued. He is asking for a process that does not apply to local authorities.
The hon. Gentleman quoted our exchanges from the Committee that considered the Education Bill that became the Education Act 2011. He cited my quotes about the insertion of a new section 69A into the 2006 Act. I refer him to clause 2(6) of this Bill, which says, “Omit section 69A”. We are repealing the very section that he cited as evidence of wanting to build in safeguards for new powers. We are now repealing the very powers that we sought safeguards over in 2011. Therefore, he should be an effusive supporter of clause 2, especially of clause 2(6). With those few remarks, I urge him to withdraw the amendment.
Kevin Brennan
I am grateful for that further clarification, if that is what we should call it. I freely accept that, as is often true on such occasions, all Opposition amendments may not cover every eventuality. We are on a journey of passing legislation, and there is a long way to go before it comes into law. That does not mean that we cannot add to the Bill on Report or when it is considered in another place.
We may well need to revisit the correct form of an appeal in relation to local authorities issuing warning notices. I am pointing out that Ministers are taking the power to issue a warning notice and abolishing any means of appeal against that, which seems a rather illiberal step for the Government to take. I ask my hon. Friends to join me in testing the opinion of the Committee on the amendments.
Question put, That the amendment be made.
Mr Gibb
I sense from the hon. Member for Cardiff West that there is a desire for the debate to be short, and I will try to keep it so. This clause would be fine. The warning notice process is that through which an underperforming school or one with poor leadership or governance, or one where there is a threat to the safety of pupils or staff, is required to make improvements or else become eligible for intervention. The Government recognise that this process can be unwieldy and uncertain. It is dependent on the local authority and potentially on Ofsted, and it imposes on the school an unrealistically short time scale for action. How can a school demonstrate that it has taken meaningful, long-term improvement action in just 15 days? Under this clause the Secretary of State, through the regional schools commissioners, will be able to issue a performance standard and safety warning notice directly to the governing body of an underperforming school without waiting for the local authority to act and without having to direct it to issue a warning notice where it has failed to act. The warning notice process is weak, complex and flawed, and it detracts from the real issue of the school’s underperformance.
There are 28 local authorities which have never issued a warning notice to any of their schools or to an interim executive board. Where action is in fact needed—whether in these authorities or not—it will now be possible for regional schools commissioners to move quickly and directly if a local authority has failed to do so. At this point, the local authority’s power to issue a warning notice to that school will be suspended, to avoid the school being confused or distracted by conflicting notices. The regional schools commissioners would be able to set a realistic timescale for the governors to act. They may still set 15 days, as the law currently stipulates, but they will be free to set a different timescale where appropriate, for example, to allow time for improvements to manifest themselves in exam results. There will be no provisions for a school’s governing body to appeal to Ofsted.
The clause would also remove the redundant power for the Secretary of State to direct the local authority to consider and then to issue a warning notice where it has failed to do so. We would of course still retain the power for local authorities themselves to issue warning notices, which can be effective in encouraging schools to raise standards and deal with poor governance or safety. We would allow them to be flexible in setting timescales for action. We consider that giving an additional power to regional schools commissioners to issue warning notices themselves will be of benefit and remove some delays and complexity in securing vital improvements. These measures go a long way towards ensuring that the warning notice process for underperforming schools is efficient and fit for purpose, and achieves the aim of ensuring that schools make the necessary improvements for the benefit of their pupils or become eligible for intervention. The process would allow schools—for example—to become sponsored academies. I therefore move that the clause stand part of the Bill.
Steve McCabe
I will be very brief. It seems to me that one of the central parts of the argument about this clause is whether the Minister has succeeded in persuading the Committee that he really has evidence to justify the powers that he seeks to take. Let me preface my remarks by pointing out that I like the Minister. He and I came into the House at the same time. In fact, I can remember tipping him in a poll of new Tories to be watched. Let me be clear on what I meant by that—new Tories who might succeed in climbing up the ministerial ladder, not slippery characters we needed to keep an eye on.
I should take advantage of this opportunity to clarify something raised earlier. I asked the Minister if he could cite some examples of local authorities being obstructive and say why he needed new powers. The Minister cited the example of local authorities seeking judicial review and went on to comment specifically on Coventry City Council and Henley Green primary school. I am sure the Minister did not want to mislead the Committee on this matter, but it is worth pointing out that at that time, Henley Green primary school was not in special measures. It was not a failing school. In fact, it was a school that had just received a “satisfactory” Ofsted report and some excellent comments in particular categories. What had happened was that its SATs results were way below the Government minimum. As a consequence, the Government decided that it should be part of a forced academisation programme. Before that, there had been no examples of the Government forcing a school to become an academy unless it was in special measures or had failed Ofsted before.
Coventry council objected because it said that the Secretary of State did not have the power in law to force academisation in these circumstances. It pointed out that it had already met voluntarily with the head of the school and had agreed an action programme in which Frederick Bird school would buddy the school to improve the situation. It was extremely successful. Within a few months, the SATs results had moved beyond the minimum standards, and in English and Maths had risen by more than 20%. So successful was the programme that the Government decided not to challenge Coventry’s decision, acknowledged that they were wrong and backed down. So it would not be right for the Minister to pray in aid this example of a council being obstructive to defend his position. This was an example of a council taking a very sensible course of action that led to the right outcome. It was a council quite legitimately seeking to test whether the Secretary of State was exceeding his lawful duties. I do not think it was the Minister’s intention to mislead us, but as this is such a central part of the argument about this clause, it is only fair that the Committee should have a much fuller picture.
John Pugh (Southport) (LD)
I was going to say that it is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan, but we were both on the Crossrail Bill and I have to say that it was not a pleasure all the time.
I have something to add about the appeal mechanism. Although I think that amendment 19 is a little too heavy-handed to address the issue, I want to appeal to all Members to consider carefully the concept of appeal. With regard to governing bodies, in certain cases an appeal for them would be worthless because they can be part of the problem. I am sure that members of the Committee can think of poor governing bodies in their own areas that have very little to say in defence of poor results and performance. However, there is another side of the story and I would like to give an example from my neck of the woods.
I have in my constituency a single-form-entry primary school that fell below the standard for entirely comprehensible reasons. There were quite a lot of staff changes, which make a big difference in a single-form primary school, and the school also had intake changes produced by an increase in migrant workers. The governing body rapidly found itself trapped in a room with somebody who described themselves as a broker on behalf of the Government and said that the school must join an academy chain as soon as possible—with which, incidentally, the broker had some connection. I never knew there were such people called brokers, but there are indeed; I am simply recording what they do. I have heard many descriptions of what then went on. There was an extraordinarily abrasive and unpleasant conversation, in which the broker said that either the school must join the academy chain, or the head and the governing body—the full set—would be replaced.
Kevin Brennan
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. Is he aware that some of those brokers, as revealed in parliamentary answers, were being paid up to £1,000 a day by the Department for Education to carry out the work that he is describing?
John Pugh
I have not finished describing it. A number of witnesses—people I have learned to trust—described the conversation as brutal and tantamount to bullying, and we are all against school bullying. Neither the head nor the governing body in that case was weak. They were saved at the last hurdle, because Ofsted produced a more favourable picture by bringing in objective data. The school is now thriving, and is part of the local education authority family. Had the broker got their way, it would have joined a chain, in which the nearest other school was 20 to 30 miles away. That example illustrates what can happen if some of the hurdles to what is called improvement are clipped away. Not only might there be a brutal, ineffectual intervention, but we might be endorsing a form of bullying, which we would all regret.
Kevin Brennan
I am sure we all want to confirm that we like the Minister. One of the reasons why I like him is because he welcomes the fact that when others disagree with him, they do so vigorously. He enjoys the cut and thrust of debate. We should not be misinterpreted as not liking him on a personal level.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak and the hon. Member for Southport have given practical illustrations of why it is important that there is a safeguard or appeal mechanism in these sorts of processes. This may have settled down a bit now, but during the early years of the coalition Government—I should point out that there were Liberal Democrat Ministers in the Department for Education—some of the activities being carried out by those mysterious academy brokers were extremely dubious. They turned up at schools and metaphorically took the headteacher for a walk in the woods with a rubber truncheon, with the express intention that, by the time they came back from that treatment, they would roll over to anything that was demanded of them—in particular, that they would join an academy chain, whether or not that was the right solution for the school. For doing that work, they were paid huge sums of public money—up to £1,000 a day—by the Government. It is right that a light should be continually shone on those sorts of activities.
In our view, clause 2 represents an unnecessary further step towards centralising control over the school system in the hands of Ministers. It does so in two ways. First, it gives the Secretary of State the power to issue a warning herself. That might seem a small step, because the difference between the Secretary of State telling a local authority to do something, which is what the 2006 and 2011 Acts set out, and doing it herself might seem modest, but it is significant. Previously, the Secretary of State had to channel warning notices through local authorities, thereby ensuring that they are engaged in the process and that schools do not receive mixed messages. The clause does not even contain any requirement for the Secretary of State to consult a local authority before issuing a warning. There is no requirement on her to inform herself properly about what has been going on, merely a right to insert herself into the process whenever she feels like it.
Bill Esterson
We heard evidence last week that the only way to improve schools is by academisation. However, we heard that from the chief executive of a chain of academies; we did not hear it from anybody else. It is not surprising that the chief executive of an academy chain would say that, or that other people take the view that there are other routes to improve schools.
As my hon. Friend just said, the clause is about speeding up the process of academisation by removing some of the barriers; by removing the opportunity for people to appeal or slow down the process when the Government decide that it is appropriate for a school to become an academy. As several hon. Members have already said, we should look at the evidence. I served on the Education Committee in the last Parliament and we did just that. We produced a report on academies and free schools. We took evidence and travelled around the country; we got out of this place, as the Minister said that we should. We spoke to schools and took written and oral evidence right across the schools estate. We took a lot of advice; it was a very thorough inquiry. What did we conclude? We concluded:
“Current evidence does not allow us to draw conclusions on whether academies in themselves are a positive force for change.”
What did we mean by that? We meant that it is too early to say that academisation in itself is the way to improve schools. We left open the possibility that there are other ways forward, and it is important that that point is taken on board.
It is crucial that the evidence is considered when creating legislation. From the evidence taken and in the stand part debate so far, we have heard that there has been limited use of the power of issuing a warning notice by local authorities. We have heard scant evidence that the local authorities have been wrong to use that power only sparingly. The Minister spoke about what happened in Coventry, which he thought was an example of a local authority dragging its feet. However, that turned out not to be the case; it was anything but, given that there had been a better way of improving the school and resolving the issues that had led to concern in the first place. This one example did not stack up; it did not provide the evidence that the Minister hoped it would.
Indeed, there are many other forms of school improvement. When the Education Committee looked at the evidence over many years, it found that activities such as the London Challenge had produced sustained, measurable and long-term improvement in schools. When that was rolled out around the country, there was the start of a big process of sustainable school improvement. The Committee did not find that, so far, that is true when it comes to academies as a whole.
The other thing I was hoping to hear about in this part of the discussion was what it is about warning notices that really makes a difference. I intervened briefly on my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West on that point earlier. I hoped that the Minister would pick up the point, so perhaps he can do so when he responds. Where is the evidence of success in the use of warning notices—not just the individual case studies, but where are the data backing up the success of warning notices that justify a whole clause? They may well exist. I am not against the use of warning notices but, given the importance attached to them and the fact that they are so crucial that they take up a whole clause, I would expect the Minister to justify their use per se and why he has found it necessary to amend it. Perhaps he could deal with that point.
We also heard hon. Members ask whether the change to speed up the direct intervention by the Secretary of State by using regional schools commissioners is justified. That would increase the tendency to centralise decision making and involvement in local schools. Listening to the Government over five years—and I do not think it was just the Liberal Democrat influence on the Conservatives—I thought the Government were committed to the concept of localism. The Government went on and on about localism and its importance. Yet with academisation, we have had a centralising tendency, taking everything to the desk of the Secretary of State, which is not alleviated by having regional schools commissioners.
Measures such as those in clause 2 would reduce localism further because they would take away the opportunity for consultation and the right to appeal. Where are the checks and balances? Where is the local knowledge being fed in to decisions about whether a warning notice is required? Where is the opportunity for proper, informed debate and scrutiny around such important decisions for the future of children’s education in a school subject to a warning notice?
Those are the questions raised by the way the clause is drafted; and those are the questions that my hon. Friends were trying to tease out with their amendments. I am afraid they are questions that remain unanswered so far. I live in hope for when the Minister comes to respond, as everybody else has said. He is a decent and honourable man, whom we all like. We like him dearly. I am sure that, even without all these compliments, he would want to answer the questions being raised. Unless he does, the question remains about the real purpose of the proposed changes in clause 2 and elsewhere in the Bill.
I challenged the Minister on Second Reading and make the same point now. If there is more to this proposal than meets the eye, the Minister has the opportunity now to say whether his real purpose in making changes such as the increase in the use of warning notices is more than an attempt to unblock something that he claims exists but has not really been a problem—the delays caused by local authorities in the use of warning notices. That has not really been the problem that he is perhaps trying to say it is. Or is it something else? Is it something much bigger?
Is the real agenda that this is a means by which the Government are trying to get to the point where every school in the country becomes an academy, but they do not want to say so because they are worried that that would cause real concern. Is he really trying to get that through? Is that what he is trying to do? If that is the case, he should say so. In addition to answering my questions, might the Minister also take the opportunity to say whether his true aim is to turn every school in the country into an academy whether it wants to be one or not?
Mr Gibb
I am overwhelmed by the kind comments from Opposition Members. I must apologise to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak that the tip proved so abysmally wrong. I just hope that he did not put any money on it and I apologise profusely for leading him down that garden path.
When it comes to the Bill, however, I am not leading anyone down the garden path. There is no hidden agenda regarding warning notices. They are an extremely powerful tool. Once we have a less rigid compliance period, local authorities and regional schools commissioners will be able to require action and set the ambitious levels of improvement that they expect to see. If the school improves, the warning notice has delivered its result and has helped the school to take action. If a warning notice fails, there are other powers to require the school to enter into arrangements—we will come to the relevant clauses shortly—such as partnering with a more successful school, entering into a federation or collaborating with national leaders of education to ensure improvements.
Therefore, my answer to the hon. Member for Sefton Central is, “What’s not to like?” The provisions actually came into being under the previous Labour Government in the 2006 Act, albeit only with Conservative support in the Lobbies. It is a good measure and we are simply extending the same power that the 2006 Act gave to local authorities to regional schools commissioners, who must act reasonably, which is important. The common law requirement to act reasonably has filtered through the debate. Public bodies, including the Secretary of State and those acting on her behalf, are required under principles established through case law to act reasonably, rationally, lawfully and fairly. They can be held to account by the courts if they fail to act in accordance with those public law principles. The Secretary of State is also directly accountable in this House for the actions of regional schools commissioners through Education Question Time and parliamentary written questions.
The five years of the coalition Government saw many successes, one of which was sorting out the economy and bringing us back from the brink of financial ruin. There are other examples across Whitehall, but I want to cite that 1.1 million more pupils are in “good” or “outstanding” schools today than in 2010, and that 100,000 six-year-olds are reading more effectively today than in 2011 as a consequence of our reforms to the teaching of reading through phonics. That figure of 1.1 million was achieved through a whole range of measures, in particular the academies programme, which, again, was started under Labour and was turbo-charged by the previous Government. There are 1,100 sponsored academies that started life as under-performing schools, which is a colossal achievement that has led directly to over 1 million children being taught in “good” or “outstanding” schools.
The hon. Member for Sefton Central also mentioned localism and questioned whether the Conservative party is truly committed to it. Yes, we are—as he almost acknowledged. The academies programme is taking such powers to the frontline and to teachers and professionals. The academies programme is all about autonomy for professionals. It is not about delegating to another statutory body; it is about giving powers directly to teachers, so that they can do their best for the children in their schools.
Regional schools commissioners do not intervene or interfere in schools that are performing well. They are only interested in intervening when schools are underperforming.
Bill Esterson
On the point about so-called increased autonomy, the Education Committee heard evidence that schools that are in chains now have less autonomy than they did when they were maintained. How does the Minister explain that as a localism success?
Mr Gibb
I don’t buy that argument. Groups or chains of academies are all about collaboration between the professionals within those chains. Those chains are often led by former or current headteachers. It is about collaboration, working together and finding a common vision. The most successful academy groups are those with a central, core vision that is developed by professionals within the chain. That best practice is then rolled out, which is how very successful chains such as Ark and Harris have managed to deliver remarkable achievements in some of the most deprived parts of the country.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak responded to my example of Henley Green, but I must tell him that the warning notices are not for “inadequate” schools; they are separate provisions in the Bill and the 2006 Act for schools requiring action because they need to improve and are underperforming for other reasons—for instance, poor SATs results, as the hon. Gentleman cited. That was the case with Henley Green. During the process, the results did rise above the floor, but we are talking about the floor standard. The Government agreed to withdraw the direction but maintained that it was justified at the time. We do not resile from the direction being the right thing to do. As a consequence of action, the school’s standards rose above the floor.
The hon. Member for Stockport raised concerns about brokers.
Mr Gibb
Southport; I apologise. The hon. Member for Southport raised concerns about brokers. We expect very high standards from brokers. While they are not civil servants, we certainly expect them to follow civil service standards of behaviour. Brokers are commissioned by officials from the Department to visit schools and report back to officials on the discussions they have had. If they are not meeting the high standards we expect of them, the hon. Gentleman should send us more details and we will investigate. In my experience of dealing with brokers, they are very professional people who are determined to raise standards.
I hope that I have dealt with all the concerns raised, and I urge the Committee to support clause 2.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 2 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 3
Other warning notices
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Mr Gibb
The clause would amend the process for issuing a teachers’ pay and conditions warning notice—a type of warning notice that only local authorities have the power to give. Such a notice is given to a school by a local authority when a school fails to comply with a schoolteachers’ pay and conditions document. Failure to comply with the notice means that the school becomes eligible for intervention. That does not necessarily mean that the school will become an academy, but it would allow the local authority or the Secretary of State to appoint additional governors or an interim executive board. It would also allow the local authority to suspend the school’s right to a delegated budget if the school did not comply with the written warning notice.
The clause would amend the timescale for compliance with the notice from the current statutory 15 days to a period specified by the local authority. That will give the local authority scope to choose an appropriate period, to recognise the action that the school is required to take and to allow the school time to demonstrate that it has taken the necessary action.
Finally, under the clause, the local authority would be required to give a copy of the notice to the Secretary of State when they give the notice to the school’s governing body, which will allow the regional schools commissioner to monitor more effectively local authorities’ use of such warning notices. The school’s governing body would no longer be able to make representations to the local authority. That will speed up the process and ensure consistency with a performance warning notice. We propose to remove the equivalent process for making representations to Ofsted.
Kevin Brennan
As the Minister said, the clause affects warning notices that relate to teachers’ pay and conditions, amending section 60A of the Education and Inspections Act 2006. It raises some of the same issues that we debated at length on clause 2, and I do not propose that we do the same now.
In particular, the clause removes a school’s right to make representations in response to a warning notice. However, the process as a whole is more straightforward than the one in clause 2. Removing the Secretary of State’s power to issue an order clarifies responsibilities. It might be worth asking why, if it is appropriate here, it is not appropriate elsewhere.
The Opposition agree that it is important to maintain a national framework of pay and conditions or we could get into a process of a wasteful and continuous bidding war—even more than there is currently—between schools that are trying to attract staff from one another. A national framework also does something to ensure that all staff are treated fairly, reduces the ability to play favourites with staff, and has some bearing on something that is becoming more of a concern, which is the ability of heads and senior staff to pay themselves inflated salaries at the expense of other staff. That, potentially, is a growing feature, particularly in areas of the system where there is no requirement to adhere to the pay and conditions document. The Minister has taken the opportunity to explain the Government’s thinking and, having had an extensive debate on clause 2 and the amendments, I do not propose to detain the Committee any further on clause 3.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 3 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 4
Power to require governing body to enter into arrangements
Kevin Brennan
I beg to move amendment 28, in clause 4, page 4, line 7, leave out “section 60A” and insert “sections 60A, 61 and 62”
This amendment and those to clause 7 are to find out what happens to the existing provisions in Part 4 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 should the Government’s proposed amendment to section 4 of the Academies Act 2010 found in clause 7 come into effect.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 41, in clause 7, page 6, line 6, leave out “61 or”
The amendment removes the borderline Ofsted “Inadequate” judgement schools (schools requiring significant improvement, or notice to improve) from the scope of this new provision.
Amendment 43, in clause 7, page 6, line 10, leave out “61 or”
The amendment removes the borderline Ofsted “Inadequate” judgement schools (schools requiring significant improvement, or notice to improve) from the scope of this new provision.
Amendment 44, in clause 7, page 6, line 10, at end insert—
‘(4) The Education and Inspections Act 2006 is amended as follows:
(a) in section 63 (Power of local authority to require governing body to enter into arrangement) in subsection (1) after “60A” insert “, 61 or 62”
(b) in section 64 (Power of local authority etc to appoint additional governors) in subsection (1), after “intervention” insert “other than by virtue of sections 61 or 62”
(c) in section 65 (Power of local authority to provide for governing body to consist of interim executive members) in subsection (1), after “intervention” insert “other than by virtue of sections 61 or 62”
(d) in section 67 (Power of Secretary of State to appoint additional governors) in subsection (1), after “intervention” insert “other than by virtue of sections 61 or 62”
(e) in section 68 (Power of Secretary of State to direct closure of school) in subsection (1), after “intervention” after “60A” insert “, 61 or 62”
(f) in section 69 (Power of Secretary of State to provide for governing body to consist of interim executive members) in subsection (1), after “intervention” insert “other than by virtue of sections 61 or 62””.
The amendment is to remove the inconsistency in legislation that the local authority and Secretary of State can exercise intervention powers even though the Secretary of State is under a duty to make an Academy Order.
Kevin Brennan
Amendment 28 highlights some of the confusion that may have been caused by the speed with which the Bill has been produced. We hope to obtain some clarity as a result of the debate. As it stands, it seems that there are two contradictory sets of provisions relating to schools eligible for intervention. The provisions of the 2006 Act are not being repealed so the battery of intervention techniques set out then is still in force. Clause 4 reinforces some of those by giving the Secretary of State the power to use them. Clause 7, to which some of the amendments relate, says that schools that receive an adverse inspection report must be academised. There is a need for clarity about which of those provisions has priority.
Our view is that the Bill should be making provisions for maximum flexibility. We will therefore propose to amend clause 7 to make it permissive rather than mandatory, but we will come to that later in our deliberations, possibly on Thursday.
Amendment 28 asks why the Secretary of State is seeking powers in clause 4, through proposed new section 66A, to direct a school with an “inadequate” Ofsted judgment to seek support from other bodies—in other words, to enter into arrangements—when it must be academised. Amendment 28 excludes clause 7 schools from the scope of this new power in clause 4, in order to test the Government’s thinking in this area. The purpose of Amendments 28 and 44 is to enable the Government to make their position clear. Do they contemplate the use of the powers of intervention set out in this clause when clauses 61 and 62 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 apply—that is, after an adverse inspection outcome—or do they not? If not, they should say so and make it clear that they are entirely inflexible and will always pursue academisation regardless of its suitability in any particular situation. If that is the Government’s position, what evidence do they have to support it?
Mr Gibb
We are now debating clause 4, a favourite clause of some Opposition Members, although that joke is probably a little bit old now. [Interruption.] I wrote it very late last night, so apologies to members of the Committee.
Amendments 28, 41, 43 and 44 raise the issue of how we intervene in failing schools—those which Ofsted has rated as “inadequate”. The Academies Act 2010 permits the Secretary of State to make an academy order in respect of a maintained school that is eligible for intervention within the meaning of part 4 of the Education and Inspections Act. Clause 7 of the Bill amends section 4 of the Academies Act 2010. It places a duty on the Secretary of State to make an academy order in respect of schools that are eligible for intervention by virtue of sections 61 or 62 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006—schools that have been judged by Ofsted to have either type of “inadequate” rating.
There are two types of “inadequate” rating. There is a “serious weaknesses” judgment, which is defined in section 61 of the 2006 Act as requiring significant improvement. There is also a “special measures” judgment, which is defined in section 62 of the Act. A school is judged to have serious weaknesses if one or more of the key judgments is “inadequate” or—this is an important point—there are important weaknesses in the provision for pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. I know this will interest the hon. Member for Cardiff West, who mentioned the importance of identifying and tackling extremism in some of our schools. A school is judged to be in special measures if it is failing to give its pupils an acceptable standard of education and its leaders and governors are not demonstrating the capacity to secure the necessary improvements.
Despite these distinctions, the fact is that both categories of school are “inadequate”. Any school judged to be “inadequate” by Ofsted is failing its pupils and there is a strong moral imperative to act quickly to secure for them the high quality of education that they need and deserve.
Amendments 41 and 42 seek to disapply clause 7—the requirement to make an academy order—to those schools with a serious weaknesses judgment from Ofsted, leaving the power applying to only those schools with a special measures judgment. So there would not be an automatic issuance of an academy order. If the school receives a category 4 Ofsted judgment, the automatic academisation order would not apply if the judgment related to serious weaknesses and not special measures. A school with serious weaknesses may be failing in terms of pupils’ behaviour and safety, the teaching it offers, or the progress and attainment of pupils. In some cases, it will be a combination of those things. I hope that hon. Members will agree that this is not acceptable and we have to take urgent measures to tackle those schools. We are talking about a group of schools that are the outliers. In England today, 20% of schools are, according to Ofsted, providing outstanding education to their pupils. A further 62% are graded “good” and 16% require improvement. Clause 7 does not affect those schools; instead it targets a small minority of schools at the very bottom, which have been judged “inadequate” and failing.
Our manifesto was clear that we would tackle failing schools from day one. I hope that hon. Members—certainly those on the Government Benches—will agree that it is absolutely right that both categories of “inadequate” schools are included in the duty as set out in clause 7. I urge hon. Members to reject the amendments tabled by Opposition Members that seek to apply that provision only to one category of “inadequate” schools.
Kevin Brennan
The Minister understands that, in tabling that amendment, we are seeking to understand exactly what his intentions are. Is he absolutely clear that it is the right thing to do to compel the academisation of a school in these circumstances, even where there is powerful evidence that another approach would work better?
Mr Gibb
Yes, the evidence of the sponsored academies is compelling: those underperforming schools that have been converted to a sponsored academy have, over a four-year period, seen their grades rise by, on average, 6.4 percentage points compared with 1% for local authority-maintained schools in the same period. Similarly, for primary schools that are sponsored academies, their results have improved by around 9%—significantly higher than the figure in the same period for maintained primary schools.
Kevin Brennan
I think that I have heard the Minister quote those figures before but will he be clear for the Committee? Is he quoting a figure of 6.4% for schools that have been academised—is he comparing that improvement with figures for schools in similar circumstances that have adopted other means of school improvement, or is he taking a figure for schools to which academisation is applied as a means of improvement and comparing them with the generality of other schools that have not had any kind of intervention of this sort?
Mr Gibb
I will come back to the hon. Gentleman to get the precise wording right; since he has asked a specific question, I want to give him the right answer. But my understanding is that those schools that have been sponsored academies for four years have improved their grades by about 6.4% compared with local authority schools over the same period. I will come back to him with precise chapter and verse on what I mean when I talk about local authority schools over the same period.
Amendments 28 and 44 both pose questions about why, given the new duty to make an academy order for any maintained school that Ofsted has rated “inadequate”, we might still require intervention powers in such schools. It is a perfectly valid question. Amendment 28 specifically questions why clause 4, giving the Secretary of State the power to require governing bodies to enter into arrangements, is applicable to schools that are eligible for intervention because they have been rated “inadequate” by Ofsted—because they are going to have an automatic academy order. Amendment 44 then questions why we are retaining in the law a wider range of existing intervention powers, for instance to replace the governing body with an IEB or appoint additional governors to be used when a school has been found by Ofsted to be “inadequate”.
An academy order is made in respect of a school to enable its conversion to academy status; while this Bill aims to speed up the process of achieving academy solutions in failing schools, the making of an academy order, on its own, does not mean that a school becomes an academy with an effective sponsor in place overnight. Where a school has been found to be failing, it is clear that transformation needs to take place in that school from day one in order to bring about improvement as swiftly as possible. We know from our experience that other intervention powers can therefore still prove valuable in failing schools that will, in time, become sponsored academies. Such powers may allow for the diagnosis of current problems and enable some early improvements to be made in the period before the academy solution is in place. For example, Norton Canes and Heath Hayes, two primary schools in Staffordshire, were both placed in special measures in 2012-13. In June 2013, the Secretary of State appointed interim executive boards to both schools and issued academy orders. The IEBs, which worked in a challenging environment against a backdrop of considerable resistance from those opposed to such improvements, conducted reviews of teaching and leadership in the schools and identified problems and improvements that might be made before the schools progressed to become sponsored academies in the REAch2 Academy Trust in January 2014.
The Secretary of State’s additional powers to intervene in “inadequate” schools may be necessary when the local authority has taken action in the school and that has not proved effective or helpful, or to ensure effective governance before a long-term solution is put in place. That was the case in the Dorothy Barley junior school, which was judged to require special measures in December 2012—the third time that it had been judged “inadequate” by Ofsted in eight years—and an Ofsted monitoring visit concluded that it was not making enough progress towards removal of those special measures. The Secretary of State appointed an IEB and issued an academy order in October 2013 with an explicit duty on the IEB to conduct the school so as to secure the provision of a sound basis for future improvement.
Dorothy Barley had been in a serious situation for some time and urgent action was required to ensure that it received the support and expertise it needed to improve rapidly and sustainably. An IEB was the best way to do that and its effective governance was important to support the school’s transition to academy status in June 2014.
Clause 10 requires that local authorities and governing bodies take all reasonable steps to facilitate the conversion of a school into an academy when an academy order has been made. Clause 11 gives the Secretary of State the power to direct that school’s governing body or local authority to take specified steps for the purpose of facilitating conversion into an academy.
We were asked on Second Reading what that would mean for that school’s governors or the local authority. In the event that governing bodies were to fail to facilitate conversion, or to comply with such a direction, it may be necessary for the Secretary of State to put in an IEB to facilitate the conversion. I hope that helps to answer some of the issues raised by the hon. Member for Cardiff West as far as his amendments are concerned.
I have had some in-flight refuelling, so I hope that I can also provide the hon. Gentleman with the answer he required. In secondary sponsored academies open for four years, the proportion of pupils who achieved five good GCSEs, including English and Maths, in the 2014 results was 6.4 percentage points higher than they had been in their predecessor schools. In that same period, results in local authority-maintained schools were 1.3 percentage points higher than they had been in 2010—I infer that that is for all local authority-maintained schools, but if that is wrong, I will come back and correct what I just said.
The first sponsored primary academies that have been open for two years have seen the proportion of pupils achieving the expected level improve by 9 percentage points since opening: from 58% in their predecessor schools to 67%. That is double the rate of improvement seen in maintained schools in the same period, which showed a rise of 4 percentage points: from 75% to 79%. That is the national figure so it is the figure for all maintained schools and I can confirm that the 1.3 percentage points figure was also for all maintained schools. With those remarks, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will feel reassured enough to withdraw his amendment.
Kevin Brennan
I am aware that a Division in the Chamber might interrupt us, but I am grateful to the Minister for clearing up that point. He has used that statistic often in his remarks and I pointed out—perhaps not very well—during the oral evidence sessions that that is not a like-for-like comparison. That is a good reason why all such claims by Ministers should be subject to testing by the UK Statistics Authority.
I invite Ministers to do that, because there are lies, damned lies and statistics, as has been said all too often, but the UK Statistics Authority was created by the last Labour Government in order to give people some certainty and comfort about the statistics that Ministers were using. Of course, for these comparisons to be meaningful we would have to compare schools that had become sponsored academies as a pathway to school improvement with schools that took another pathway to school improvement but had been in a similar position in requiring to be improved. We will return to that and some of the evidence around that when we get to clause 7.
The Minister said that there had been a 6.4% improvement in the performance of secondary schools at GCSE.
Kevin Brennan
We were discussing the statistics that the Minister used in his remarks and in the evidence sessions. He provided helpful clarification of the statistics he quoted of sponsored academies improving their GCSE five A to C grades, including English and maths, results by 6.4%, compared with local authority maintained schools’ increase over the same period of 1.3%. He accepted that that was a comparison between schools that had been made sponsored academies and all maintained schools, rather than a comparison between schools that had been made sponsored academies and schools with similar issues that had been subject to other school-improvement methods.
Similarly, the Minister quoted statistics for primary schools, saying that sponsored primary schools had improved their performance at double the rate of maintained primary schools, again comparing sponsored academies with all maintained primary schools, rather than comparing like with like—in other words, taking schools at a fairly low base and comparing their performance with that of all other schools, without comparing them like for like with schools that had achieved similar levels of performance but had attempted other means of school improvement. That is like saying that football teams that have engaged new managers have done better than all the other teams in the league, rather than comparing the teams at the bottom of the league that have engaged new managers with other teams at the bottom of the league that have tried something else, such as buying a new player or attempting a new formation in their play.
That is why I appeal to Ministers to subject all of their favourite statistical observations to the UK Statistics Authority for comment, so that we can have independent assessment of them. I am sure that would hugely enhance the quality of our debate and bring a better use of statistical evidence to our proceedings when considering the most effective policy for school improvement, which is why we are all here. I invite the Minister to do that.
Bill Esterson
My hon. Friend is right. I am reminded of the Labour party’s attempt to get the Office for Budget Responsibility to scrutinise the budget plans of all the parties before the election. Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a similar reluctance now to look at evidence? Does he also agree that there is a danger of the Hawthorne effect? Early examples of new initiatives tend to attract the very best people and, therefore, have better outcomes than over time. Statistical analysis should be carried out over an extended period before any conclusions are reached.
Kevin Brennan
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I think that is an additional point, although sponsored academies have been with us for some time, as the Minister pointed out, so there is some long-term evidence. My hon. Friend is right that any new initiative, in whatever field but in particular in education, is likely to attract those who are most enthusiastic and have the zeal to be part of an interesting, innovative change. It is understandable that very high-quality educational leaders might be attracted to new initiatives in education, and we have to factor that into any judgment of the success of innovations. Quality teaching and leadership are scarce resources. We all want to increase the quality of teaching and leadership, but we will not do that simply by “initiativitis”. We have to look into how we can grow better school leaders and better teachers through valuing them, paying and training them well, so that we attract the very best into the profession.
As the Minister fairly and accurately noted, we are trying to tease out in our amendments why clause 4 is still applicable to “inadequate” schools if under clause 7 they will be automatically academised, without being subject to the Secretary of State’s discretion, if they fall into either “inadequate” category. It is interesting that, as the Minister confirmed, there are two types of “inadequate” school: those with serious weaknesses that require improvement, and those that are in special measures. That can be confusing, given the new Ofsted category “requires improvement”. It is worth reminding hon. Members that “inadequate” schools can fall into either of those two categories.
The Minister confirmed that clause 4 will still apply to “inadequate” schools, despite the fact that they will be automatically academised under clause 7, because the academy order could take some time. It is not always caused by the obstructionism of ideologically motivated people, otherwise known as parents. It is often due to delays and bureaucracy in the Department for Education, problems with the legality of who owns the land and other issues that rightly have to be sorted out. The Minister said, in effect, that in the meantime it is good to be able to do other things. So he has freely admitted that other methods work. He is making a deliberate effort in the Bill to retain the ability to use other methods of school improvement in the interregnum during which the academy order is going through. We know through parliamentary answers that the orders can take years, and not because of the obstructionism of ideologically motivated people, otherwise known as parents.
It is good to have an admission from the Minister that other methods of school improvement work. We will seek, throughout our debates, to show that that is the case, and that by fettering Ministers’ ability to pursue those other methods, the Minister restricts their ability to undertake effective school improvement. I do not intend to press the amendments to a vote, but if the Minister has a point of clarification, we would all be glad to hear it.
Mr Gibb
The point of comparing the 6.4 percentage point increase in the proportion of pupils who achieve five good GCSEs, including English and maths, over four years with all schools is to put it in perspective, and to highlight the way that grades have improved generally. It is the same with the primary sector. We want to put the nine percentage point increase in perspective, and compare it with how the proportion of those achieving level 4s has increased nationally so people can see the figure in context.
There is plenty of other evidence I could cite for the success of academies. There is the 2014 Hutchings et al survey, published by the Sutton Trust, which finds that the best academy chains outperform other state-funded schools, and that across the board disadvantaged students in 18 of the 31 chains in the study are improving faster than the national average. The research found that disadvantaged pupils in sponsored academies made greater improvements in the proportion of pupils with sub-level 4 key stage 2 attainment going on to achieve five A to C GCSEs with English and maths than schools in the other comparison groups. The research identifies that chains of three or more academies had a greater impact than solo academies.
The benefits of collaboration within academy chains in helping to raise standards and develop future leaders of the teaching profession were identified as far back as 2011, when a Public Accounts Committee report said that,
“sponsored academies see collaboration across chains or clusters of academies as the way forward which will help to further raise standards and develop future leaders.”
Finally, in 2012 Ofsted highlighted that sponsor-led academies can make a positive difference, particularly those that are part of a well managed group or chain of schools. That is really the essence of the academies programme: professional autonomy and the excitement that the hon. Gentleman talked about, combined with the fact that there is a formal collaborative arrangement. The most successful academy chains use that collaborative arrangement to provide a central vision, which is then spread throughout the schools in the academy group.
Kevin Brennan
I want to respond briefly because the Minister has introduced a whole new raft of information at this very late stage in the debate. Again, one could probe and test some of the statements that he has just made, although I will not at this point. Yes, of course, the best academy chains do very well. They are the best academy chains, and that is why they are doing very well. When is the Minister going to cite how the worst academy chains are doing? That is the point. He is making an argument here for the whole programme, rather than for just a limited part of it. The best maintained schools actually do very well indeed, too. This is my point about having to look at all these different things. Of course, the Minister did not quote the Select Committee report, about which my hon. Friend might be about to intervene. I am reluctant to go on too long.
Bill Esterson
In the Education Committee report, there was a Sutton Trust comment that,
“most [chains] are not achieving distinctive outcomes compared to mainstream schools”.
My hon. Friend is right that the best are doing best, but overall I am afraid that the evidence was not there. That is what the Select Committee found, and that is what it reported.
Kevin Brennan
I am not going to test your patience any further, Sir Alan, and, as I said, I do not intend to press the amendments to a vote. However, I look forward to the Minister’s agreeing at some future point to subject all his statements on statistics to the scrutiny of the independent statistics authority.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Kevin Brennan
I beg to move amendment 29, in clause 4, page 4, line 22, leave out “creating or joining” and insert “creating, joining or leaving”
The amendment leaves open the possibility of leaving a federation and joining another as an option for a school eligible for intervention.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 30, in clause 4, page 4, line 23, at end insert—
‘( ) to take specified steps to make the governing body a member of a person with whom the Secretary of State has made an Academy Arrangements under section 1, Academies Act 2010.”
Although it is possible within the law for a maintained school governing body, as a corporate body, to be a member of an Academy Trust, the Government is understood not to support this course, leaving academisation as the only “hard” way a school can be involved in an Academy Trust. The amendment gives the Secretary of State the option of requiring a maintained school to be a member of an Academy Trust.
Kevin Brennan
Amendment 29 leaves open the possibility of leaving a federation and joining another as an option for a school eligible for intervention. Amendment 30 reflects the fact that, although it is possible within the law for a maintained school governing body as a corporate body to be a member of an academy trust, the Government are understood not to be particularly in favour of this course, and therefore they leave academisation as the only hard way that a school can be involved in an academy trust. The amendment would give the Secretary of State a bit more flexibility, with the option of requiring a maintained school to be a member of an academy trust. Again, here we are probing the thoughts and intentions of the Government. In amendment 29, the possibility of leaving a federation and joining another is envisaged as an option for a school that is eligible for intervention.
It might occasionally be hard for Ministers to contemplate this, but new structures do not always work. It is not always the case that when something new is invented, it will work. Some federations, as we know, have been highly successful. All parties have promoted and supported the federation of schools. However, legislation should always allow for the possibility that, in any particular case, change might not work. It is entirely possible that this might not work. I am afraid that the Bill is full of presumptions of this kind. It never allows for the possibility that Ministers’ particular flavour of the month policy may not be successful, and, in some cases, may make things worse. The clause is an illustration of this, and our amendments are an attempt to tease that out. Federations can and do work, but if they do not, there needs to be a way out. That is the important point.
Mr Gibb
I was intrigued when the hon. Gentleman said that change might not work. He sounds very conservative in his outlook. He reminds me of Lord Salisbury, who said:
“Change? Change? Aren’t things bad enough already?”
So I think the hon. Gentleman is bidding for the Lord Salisbury award of the anti-change brigade.
Mr Gibb
The hon. Gentleman is also wrong to say that we see schools as a hierarchy with academies at the top and maintained schools at the bottom. We do not. I acknowledge that there are some very good primary and secondary schools in the maintained sector in this country, and we need to do everything we can to encourage excellence throughout the system.
Kevin Brennan
Although the Minister has made a welcome statement—I wish he would say it more often—will he now accept the compelling evidence that headteacher panels should not only consist of academy heads, if that is his position, but include heads of maintained schools?
Mr Gibb
The role of the headteacher panels in each regional schools commissioner area is to advise on the brokering of academies from the maintained sector into the academy sector. Lord Nash indicated in the evidence session last Tuesday that he would consider the matter again when the Bill comes on to the statute book and panels have a greater role in intervening in underperforming schools in the maintained sector. He is right to raise that and I put on the record the same issue in the same manner as Lord Nash.
The amendments probe the intentions behind the power set out in clause 4 to require a governing body to “enter into arrangements” and how it will be used. Local authorities already have that power, but we also want regional schools commissioners, on behalf of the Secretary of State, to have the power available to them to use quickly and effectively where necessary.
Clause 4 enables regional schools commissioners to require governing bodies of schools that are eligible for intervention to enter into several different arrangements to ensure that schools take steps to improve. In some instances, a regional schools commissioner might use the power to require a school to enter into a contract with an organisation for
“services of an advisory nature”,
which could include directing a school to take on support from a national leader of education or an organisation that specialises in school improvement. There are over 1,000 national leaders of education—the excellent headteachers in our school system that the hon. Member for Cardiff West mentioned—and we intend to increase this number by 400 within the next year and further beyond that.
Support from strong leaders has been shown to improve standards. Research by Sheffield Hallam University for the National College for Teaching and Leadership showed that 89% of schools had seen an improvement in their leadership and management skills, knowledge and practice and the quality of their teaching and learning since being supported by a national leader of education. A wide range of NLE support is available. Academy heads can support weaker maintained school heads and vice versa, and the focus can be tailored to the needs of the school.
Clause 4 also specifically gives regional schools commissioners the power to require a school to create or join a federation. Federations can be created under provisions in the Education Act 2002 to provide a structured collaboration for a group of maintained schools, either as a hard federation under section 24 or as collaborating schools, commonly known as soft federation, under section 26. The following words are a bit dull: the School Governance (Federations) (England) Regulations 2012 set out exactly how federations operate under section 24 of the 2002 Act. The School Governance (Collaboration) (England) Regulations 2003 set out how schools collaborate under section 26 of the Act. In short—back to the interesting stuff—the primary difference is that a hard federation operates under a single governing body, whereas soft federations keep independent governing bodies, but share a joint committee to which powers can be delegated.
Federations provide a form of structural collaboration similar to what multi-academy trusts do for academies, allowing maintained schools to support one another and share resources. In Hackney, for example, the Primary Advantage federation has considerable experience of working in partnership with schools in challenging circumstances and has been able to develop a strong teaching cadre across the federation. There are, however, important differences. Multi-academy trusts have more flexibility and freedom over their budgets, curriculum and staff than maintained schools have in a federation that remains within local authority control. The multi-academy trust structure also accompanies these freedoms with stronger accountability. Multi-academy trusts are one legal entity and are held to account rigorously for their collective educational and financial performance.
Leaders of outstanding multi-academy trusts are keen to share their views of the benefits. Stephen Moon is the executive principal of Tollbar Academy, which has been graded by Ofsted as outstanding for the past five years. He has said:
“Academy status has given me far greater flexibility and the independence to utilise staff in a way that best meets the needs of the students…Being a member of the MAT has financial benefits too, because as a large institution we can demand better value for money from contractors allowing our resources to go that bit further.”
Sir Dan Moynihan, who is chief executive of the Harris Federation and gave evidence to our Committee on Tuesday, has said that multi-academy trusts ensure there is a
“strong strategic steer from the centre, but our local governing bodies are still responsible for making decisions about their schools and they are very effective.”
Kevin Brennan
I am grateful for the Minister’s quotes, but why does he not have any quotes from headteachers about what they feel are the benefits of being involved in a federation?
Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)
I declare an interest: I am a governor at Milton Park primary school. We had a federation between the infant and junior school, and we have now become a primary school. We also have what some would consider a weak federation with Portswood, one of the leading schools in Southampton, which has been helping us over the past two years to reach “requires improvement”. Another form of soft federation is clustering of schools within a local authority, which has also worked very effectively.
Mr Gibb
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that helpful intervention. She is a champion of education in Portsmouth. I have visited schools with her and seen her dedication and determination to help schools raise their standards. I pay tribute to her work in Portsmouth, not only on education but more generally too.
Amendment 29 seeks to expand clause 4(1)(d), which gives regional schools commissioners the power to require a school’s governing body to create or join a federation of schools as a way of improving standards. The amendment seeks to introduce an additional power to require a governing body to leave a federation, perhaps so that a regional schools commissioner or local authority can direct a governing body to leave an ineffective federation and join another if that is seen as appropriate. If an underperforming school were part of an ineffective soft federation, there are sufficient powers elsewhere in the Bill to enable the regional schools commissioner to require the school to leave the federation. If a school’s continued membership of a hard federation were likely to prevent improvements, the commissioner could issue an academy order on behalf of the Secretary of State.
Amendment 30 seeks to introduce a new specific section to the power. That new section appears to introduce a new solution for an underperforming school, allowing the school to remain a maintained school but collaborate with an academy by becoming a member of an academy trust but not an academy itself. We do not think that is the right approach because it would lead to an unsatisfactory compromise. Simply being a member of an academy trust would not allow the maintained school to benefit from the strong governance structure of a multi-academy trust, from shared staffing or funding, or from being part of a robust line of accountability, which is a critical element of the academy programme. Maintained schools would be denied those benefits if we accepted the proposition in amendment 30 that maintained schools could simply become a member of an academy trust rather than securing enduring structural change. Given those explanations, I hope that the hon. Member for Cardiff West will not press his amendments.
Kevin Brennan
I am grateful to the Minister for his response. As I indicated in my remarks, the purpose of the amendments is to probe the Government’s thinking a little further. I note the helpful and knowledgeable remarks of the hon. Member for Portsmouth South about clusters. She made an important and pertinent point.
Once again, I urge the Minister not to give the impression that only academy schools and academy chains can deliver excellent education, because it sometimes results in a view among headteachers, schoolteachers and parents that the Government do not believe that maintained schools and academies have an equal status. I am grateful to him for putting on the record that he does not hold that view, but it would be useful if he included schools other than academies and academy chains when giving examples of excellent performance.
Mr Gibb
I can cite Elmhurst primary school in Newham, an excellent school which has had superb maths and reading results, and St Paul’s Catholic College in Burgess Hill, West Sussex—my area—which I visited a couple of years ago and which is absolutely brilliant. I could cite other examples too.
Kevin Brennan
We really welcome that from the Minister. Perhaps we can have a one in, one out policy in future when he praises schools, so that he will take the trouble, every time he praises an academy or an academy chain, to take the trouble to praise a maintained school. We will have achieved something by our amendments, even if we are not going to press them to a vote, if they result in that new approach. On that basis, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Kevin Brennan
I beg to move amendment 31, in clause 4, page 4, line 26, at end insert—
‘( ) the local authority,”
The amendment requires the Secretary of State to consult with the local authority prior to giving the governing body a notice under new section 66A.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 32, in clause 4, page 4, line 26, at end insert—
‘( ) the parent council established under section 23A (Parent councils) of the Education Act 2002,”
The amendment requires the Secretary of State to consult with the Parent Council prior to giving the governing body a notice under new section 66A.
Kevin Brennan
Amendment 31 requires the Secretary of State to consult the local authority prior to giving a governing body a notice under new section 66A. Amendment 32 requires the Secretary of State to consult the parent council prior to giving the governing body a notice under new section 66A. The amendments illustrate, in a way, the problems that arise when Bills are drafted using the cut-and-paste approach to education legislation that I described earlier. That is the tendency these days. It must have something to do with the availability of modern technology and the ability to do control-C on your computer, lift something and put it into another piece of legislation. It has made things far too easy for Governments—probably all Governments—to take this cut-and-paste approach to education.
It is barely credible that even this Government would require a maintained school to enter into collaborative arrangements without even consulting the local authority or a formally constituted parent council of that school. I would like to be charitable, as we are reaching the latter stages of the afternoon and a cup of tea beckons, and suggest that this is perhaps just sloppy drafting and Ministers will not have any problem in accepting the amendments.
Just to reinforce the proposal, it is very probable in this kind of situation that the local authority will have undertaken, at the least, a range of formal interventions and will have supported the school’s efforts to improve. It may also be responsible for schools that are involved in providing support and will have a view of that school’s capacity, what risks there might be to its own performance, what support is available and how effective it is likely to be. Surely, therefore, it would be wise for the Department to acknowledge that it needs to listen to the expertise that is available locally, on the ground, about schools, that it needs to take account of those things that have happened before—it is unlikely that nothing will have happened at this stage—and that it needs to ensure that what it does is consistent with the overall strategy in the area, rather than undermining a strategy for improvement if there is a good one in place.
This kind of intervention, in other words, does not happen in isolation from everything else that is going on. Proper consultation is essential. That means listening and occasionally being prepared to think again, if necessary, on the basis of what has been heard. Will the Minister clarify whether it is his intention not to require any consultation of the kind mentioned in our amendments? If not, is he prepared to accept our amendments or table his own later if there is something defective or unacceptable in the wording but he understands the gist of what we are saying and what we are trying to achieve here? If he intends not to require any consultation, will he give a full explanation as to why?
Mr Gibb
Amendments 31 and 32 both relate to clause 4. As the hon. Gentleman explained, they raise the issue of consultation in decisions about the future of the school, specifically relating to the new power that clause 4 gives to the Secretary of State. This is an identical power to that which local authorities already have. He might call that cut and paste, but it is about replicating those powers to require a governing body to enter into arrangements with a view to securing improvement in the school’s performance, and giving them to the regional schools commissioners.
Clause 4 would give the Secretary of State the same power that local authorities already have to require a school’s governing body to take action to improve their performance. It would give regional schools commissioners the power to require a school to take certain measures rather than having to rely on the local authority to use its power. This would only apply to schools that were already eligible for intervention. Regional schools commissioners could require a school to contract with another party—for example, the governing body of another school—to provide advisory services, to collaborate with a maintained school or further education college, or to federate with another maintained school or schools.
Clause 4 includes requirements for regional schools commissioners to consult prior to using this power. This is a different position from that in clause 7, which makes it clear that for all failing schools an academy order must be made in respect of that school. In those circumstances, there would be no further debate about what must happen to failing schools, to ensure that action can be taken from day one. For schools that have become eligible for intervention other than by being found to be inadequate, it is appropriate to give the governing body the opportunity to respond and take action before intervening. That is why there are provisions in the Bill for consultation, such as in proposed new section 66A inserted by clause 4, which states:
“(2) Before exercising the power conferred by subsection (1), the Secretary of State must consult—
(a) the governing body of the school,
(b) in the case of a foundation or voluntary school which is a Church of England school or a Roman Catholic Church school, the appropriate diocesan authority, and
(c) in the case of any other foundation or voluntary school, the person or persons by whom the foundation governors are appointed.”
So there will be consultation with those bodies.
Steve McCabe
Does the Minister think that he is missing the point here? He is listing who will be consulted but those who will not be consulted are the headteacher, the staff, the parents and the local community. Is he not destroying any concept of a partnership in education?
Mr Gibb
I was not aware that the amendments suggested that, but amendment 31 proposes that the local authority should be consulted before regional schools commissioners use this power. Clause 6 introduces section 70A into the Education and Inspections Act 2006. One effect of that is that the Secretary of State must notify the relevant local authority before exercising certain intervention powers, including this power in clause 4 to require the governing body to enter into arrangements. We inserted this new requirement to notify local authorities because it is important that local authorities are aware of any proposed interventions in schools in their areas. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. We want collaboration. In the majority of cases, we hope that the regional schools commissioners and local authorities will be working well together to agree on suitable interventions, but given that RSCs may often be intervening because local authorities have failed to do so, we do not think it is necessary for the local authority to be formally consulted by the Secretary of State.
Amendment 32 proposes that where a foundation school has been required to establish a parent council then that council must be consulted before regional schools commissioners use this interventionist power. Parent councils are advisory bodies which must be established by the governors of foundation schools in which the majority of governors are appointed by the foundation trust. Other maintained schools may choose to establish a parent council, but this amendment would not require those to be consulted. Clause 4 as it stands already requires that the regional schools commissioners must consult the governing body of the school, which will include parent representatives, before the power can be exercised. In the case of a foundation or voluntary school, the appropriate diocese of a Church of England school or a Roman Catholic school must be consulted, as must the trust or foundation that appoints foundation governors in any voluntary or foundation school. The clause already ensures proper consultation with representatives of the school before the power can be used. On that basis, I urge the hon. Members to withdraw their amendments.
Kevin Brennan
It is not my intention to divide the Committee but it is important to outline the distinction between notifying someone and consulting someone. The Minister said that there is a requirement in the Bill to notify people of the Government’s decision to use the powers. I might notify him that I have brought him a cup of tea with milk and sugar, but if I had consulted him I might have found out that he wanted a cup of black coffee. There is a big difference between consulting and notifying, and we should not confuse the two.
The Opposition are of the opinion that, in general, it is better to have consultation with local bodies rather than simply notification or diktat from Ministers of their intentions. A consultation need not be burdensome, bureaucratic or a nature that would hold up school improvement—unnecessary measures—but it might well, as I said in my initial remarks, bring forward information that would assist the Government or regional schools commissioners in the type of intervention under consideration. I will not press the amendment to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Louise Haigh
I beg to move amendment 27, in clause 4, page 4, line 32, at end insert—
‘(2A) Before exercising the power conferred by Subsection (1), the Secretary of State must consider the long-term impact of requiring the governing body to enter into the proposed arrangements on the pay, terms and conditions of employees of the school, and satisfy himself that likely changes will not reduce the ability of the governing body to employ effective staff.”
This amendment would require the Secretary of State to consider the long-term impact of academisation on the pay and conditions of teachers and other employees of the school.
This is a probing amendment that would place a new duty on the Secretary of State to consider the impact of forced academisation on the pay, terms and conditions of employees of the school and whether that would reduce the ability of schools to employ staff. Clause 4 confers on the Secretary of State the power to make arrangements where a school is considered eligible for intervention and, therefore, to take necessary actions to ensure its improvement. The Bill does not take note of the impact on teachers’ pay and conditions and, therefore, the potential impact on retention or recruitment in the plan to force academisation.
In last Tuesday’s evidence session, we heard that one of the biggest factors in a school’s success is high-quality teaching staff, especially in leadership positions, but schools across the country are struggling to recruit entry level and senior teachers. When I put it to the Minister in our evidence session that there was nothing in the Bill to address that, he simply said:
“No; it is not about that.”––[Official Report, Education and Adoption Public Bill Committee, 30 June 2015; c. 85, Q98.]
That is precisely what is wrong with this legislation. My amendment is intended to explore what might be done about the issue. Many of my Opposition colleagues and I would have preferred a very different focus for the first Education Bill of this Parliament, but we are where we are. You have been kind in allowing this amendment to be debated, Sir Alan.
I hope that the Minister will, at the very least, outline how he intends to address the problem and prevent the Bill from worsening it. Most academies have continued to follow the national pay and conditions set out in the blue book, despite the exhortation of the Secretary of State to abandon traditional pay scales across academies, but some academies have not and, in those cases, it is not unusual for teachers to find themselves on lower pay per hour than they would have been previously under national conditions.
The amendment relates to the use of unqualified teachers in some of the worst academy chains—most academies refuse to use unqualified teachers, in my experience—and, as mentioned earlier, to the increasingly inappropriate use of teaching assistants. Indeed, the DFE’s figures show that the number of unqualified teachers has risen by 20% in the past year.
There is an understandable concern in the teaching profession that academies will move to harmonise contracts between those agreed under TUPE and those new contracts for new starters. The subsequent race to the bottom in pay and conditions could have hugely damaging implications for teacher morale and, therefore, the retention of existing teachers at a time when retirement rates in teaching are at a high not seen since the Major Government. As one head described to me last week, it used to be the case that when teachers were looking to move schools, heads and other colleagues could provide them with advice based on the leadership of that school, the geography, the demographics, and perhaps the culture. Now potential employees have to look closely at the sponsor, the pay on offer, the different maternity conditions and sick pay, or perhaps at whether the school is likely in the near future to be deemed inadequate, failing or, under this Bill, coasting, or potentially swallowed up by an aggressive academy chain.
Kevin Brennan
I congratulate my hon. Friend, particularly as someone so new to this House, for showing initiative in tabling her own amendment to the Bill and for giving my throat a rest while she did so. I am sure that during the course of the Bill we will see similar initiative taken by Government Back Benchers and I look forward to debating their amendments, as I am sure they are equally keen to scrutinise and probe the Government’s intentions on the Bill properly. We obviously have a treat in store for us in our remaining debates.
Of course, national pay and conditions are effectively disapplied in academies and free schools and all this is having an impact. My hon. Friend is right to suggest that the Government should consider having a proper look at the longer-term impact of this on the pay and conditions of teachers and support staff, and on staff morale, and at the long-term impact on recruitment and retention. We know and have given warning that we feel that recruitment and retention of teachers is going to be a real issue during the course of this Parliament. I emphasise that we would like to lay down a marker that we think we see a bad moon rising, to coin a phrase, in this area. The Minister should listen very carefully to what my hon. Friend has to say. She put her amendment very coherently and cogently and therefore deserves a proper response. I am sure that she will get one.
Mr Gibb
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley for tabling her amendment and enabling us to have this short debate. The issue about legislation is that one only legislates when one needs to. The issues that she raises are of course important but we are taking measure to deal with them. The workload challenge is an issue very dear to the Secretary of State’s heart; we are determined to reduce teachers’ workloads and that is why we conducted that survey, to which 44,000 teachers responded. It made it very clear where the problems lie, particularly in areas such as data collection or how people perceive that Ofsted requires teachers to conduct their marking—we are addressing those issues with the working parties that I said we had established.
The Bill enables us to deal with poorly performing schools; that is why it is a limited Bill with only 15 or 16 clauses. The hon. Member, however, is also wrong to talk about there being a crisis in the retention or recruitment of teachers. There are of course challenges with recruitment—graduates leaving university are at a premium in terms of firms wanting to recruit them. When there is a strong economy, which is often the case under a Conservative Government, there will be competition for graduates—
Mr Gibb
We are bringing down the deficit. It has been reduced from 11% of GDP to under 5% and we will bring it down further. I say to the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley that over 90% of teachers continue in the profession following their first year of teaching, which has been the case for more than 20 years. Figures that say otherwise are simply inaccurate. I think that it was the Association of Teachers and Lecturers that cited some figures in the lead-up to its conference last year that were proven to be inaccurate.
The proportion of teachers joining the profession has risen—it is now 53,000 a year—and over three quarters, 76%, of new teachers are still in the profession after five years of service. More than half, 55%, of teachers who qualified in 1996 were still teaching 17 years later. I reiterate the point that I made in the evidence session that there has never been a better time than now to be a teacher, particularly an ambitious teacher. There are so many more opportunities now to lead—to lead at a younger age or to lead an academy chain—and to have the support for able and ambitious young teachers to become leaders in their profession early on. Organisations such as Teaching Leaders and Future Leaders are doing a wonderful job in helping young people to become leaders in their profession.
Amendment 27 focuses on teachers’ pay and conditions and proposes adding a new subsection to clause 4. Before exercising the power to require a governing body to enter into arrangements to help deliver school improvement, the Secretary of State would be required, under the amendment, to consider the long-term impact on the pay and terms and conditions of employees. In particular, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley appears to be concerned that an assessment should take place on whether any change might reduce the ability of a governing body to recruit. I understand that she is concerned about the impact of academisation.
I refer back to the core purpose of the Bill: tackling failing and coasting schools as a way of ensuring that every child in this country receives a good or outstanding education. I say this because any action that the regional schools commissioner would take on behalf of the Secretary of State would always be predicated on improving the standards of the school. Some of the actions taken might, for instance, require a school to enter into a stronger collaboration, such as a federation. That is what it is all about—this clause is not about academisation; it is about intervention in maintained schools to secure improved standards. The hon. Lady is making her argument about academies; indeed, other clauses would give regional schools commissioners greater powers to require underperforming schools to become academies. In some circumstances, academisation may in fact make it easier for a school to manage and recruit staff as well as to offer more exciting CPD opportunities. An example of this is the Templar Academy Schools Trust, which was formed in 2011 in south Devon and now contains four schools, two primary and two secondary. The staff benefit from collaboration because all four schools in the trust allow teachers to move between schools, to develop their skills and to further their careers.
Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)
While a Trappist monk’s or nun’s main focus is to get a particular project carried out efficiently when choosing to engage in a community discussion, total silence is not an explicit vow. I want to share with the Minister that at Berwick academy—where I am a governor and led it to be an academy a few years ago—we have radically changed how we use teaching assistants, mentioned by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley. We are taking on more qualified people on better pay scales to boost the impact they can make in the teaching and learning programme, both in and out of the classroom, for the children who most need that extra support.
Mr Gibb
My hon. Friend cites another good example. Again, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for her interest in education. I distinctly remember before the previous election, rather than this one, visiting schools with my hon. Friend. She is a great asset to Berwick-upon-Tweed, and long may she remain its Member of Parliament.
Some interventions, such as the forming of a multi-academy trust, may make it easier for head teachers to be more flexible with their staffing, and offer better long-term opportunities across the academy chain. Any intervention, whether structural or the provision of additional support from a national leader of education, is taken in order to support a school to become “good”. It has been noted by Ofsted and others, as I said earlier, that schools in challenging circumstances—in particular those going into special measures—often experience difficulties in recruiting and retaining good teachers. Therefore, the improvement that the Bill will bring about will ultimately make it easier to recruit.
Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend agree with the comments made in the evidence session that endorse the point he is making now, that academies, trusts and chains have greater freedoms in their budgets, on retaining excellent teachers and freedom from local authority control? That is at the heart of their success, and the Bill endorses that approach.
Mr Gibb
Yes, my hon. Friend is right. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work she has done in the past few years as chair of the Michaela free school, which is a school to watch. I am hesitant to praise an academy because I will be required, on the one in, one out rule, to praise a state school, so let me praise Wroxham primary school in Hertfordshire, which is an absolutely superb maintained school, but I also pay tribute to the work that Michaela does. That is a free school that is still in its first year of year 7. When I visited a few months ago I was astonished by the standard of behaviour, the academic achievement and the knowledge-based curriculum. That is certainly a school that we shall watch closely in years to come because I think it will become an example for many other schools to follow.
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
On the basis of one in, one out, will my hon. Friend also mention Lytchett Matravers primary school, which has recently been through Ofsted and achieved a result of “good”? I am a governor of that school.
Mr Gibb
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work he does. Being involved as a governor is very important. I thank him for putting on record the excellent standards of the school he cited. If we have the opportunity to leave the building and get out, I would love to come and visit that school. On that basis, I urge the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley to withdraw her amendment.
Louise Haigh
I am grateful for the Minister’s response and I am pleased that my amendment awakened hon. Members on the Government Benches. I am genuinely grateful that the Minister recognised the incredible workload that teachers are under, although I would correct his earlier statement. The OECD workload survey showed that teachers in this country were working on average 12 hours longer than teachers in countries surveyed elsewhere.
The Minister mentioned that the issue is not just about Ofsted, but about the perception of Ofsted. I am grateful that the Secretary of State is taking action on those working groups to look into that. I will follow that work closely. I am disappointed to hear that the Minister does not feel that there is a crisis in recruitment and retention, because I believe that his own data and surveys demonstrate exactly that. I take exception to the idea that we are experiencing strong economic growth. I was unemployed in Sheffield last year, and my brother is currently unemployed and is struggling to find work in the north of England, so I would take exception to the idea that we are experiencing strong economic growth—in the northern powerhouse, at least.
The Chair
Just to let you all into a little secret, the Committee was supposed to end at about 5 pm today, but as we have had a Division we are allowed to go on for a little longer. We can discuss another two amendments in the time allotted if we have some brevity.
Kevin Brennan
I beg to move amendment 33, in clause 4, page 4, line 39, at end insert—
‘(5) Any expenditure incurred by the local authority under this section shall be met by the Secretary of State.”
The clause leaves open how expenditure incurred by the local authority directly or indirectly (as the body which maintains a maintained school) by a Secretary of State notice. This amendment requires the Secretary of State to pay.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 35, in clause 5, page 5, line 2, at end insert
“and any term which requires the local authority to expend additional resources than it had budgeted for will be met by the Secretary of State”
The clause leaves open the possibility that the Secretary of State could pay unreasonable amounts of money to Interim executive Board members she appoints. This amendment requires the Secretary of State to pay.
Kevin Brennan
I think there has been some discussion through the usual channels that we might knock off these amendment and clause 4 stand part. That would be deemed to be acceptable progress on all sides.
The purpose of amendments 33 and 35 is to ensure that any financial expenditure incurred by a local authority is rightly covered by the Department for Education. There must be control over decisions of the Secretary of State that require additional expenditure by the local authority or the school governing body. The amendment would require that the Secretary of State pays if the cost is more than what the local authority would have paid.
The very simple principle is that if the Secretary of State wants something done, resources should be provided. It cannot be right that the Department for Education can impose unlimited costs on local authorities when local authorities have no way of controlling that expenditure. Councils, like all organisations, plan their expenditure, and cannot be expected to pick up the tab just because the DFE wants something done. I would welcome the Minister’s response to these probing amendments.
Mr Gibb
Amendment 33 seeks to require the Secretary of State to reimburse local authorities where they incur any costs resulting from an RSC using the powers in the clause. Where a school is in need of support to improve, it should generally be funded from within the school’s existing budget. For instance, they could bring in a national leader of education, collaborate or set up school-to-school support.
Research by Sheffield Hallam University for the National College for Teaching and Leadership showed that 89% of schools supported through the NLE programme had seen an improvement in their leadership and management skills, their knowledge of practice and the quality of their teaching. Where there is a cost involved when a school has become eligible for intervention while under the control of the local authority, it will be right in some circumstances to expect the local authority or the school to meet the costs associated with any necessary intervention. It is unlikely that any costs associated with the regional schools commissioner requiring schools to enter arrangements to improve would be any higher than if a local authority required the same action of its schools. Local authorities already receive funding from the Department to support their central responsibilities, including school improvement.
The Government recognise that ensuring schools have access to the best possible support and advice, along with capable leadership in a strong accountability framework, will help standards to improve across the board. For example, in the spring term of 2013, Gawthorpe academy in Wakefield worked with Ash Grove junior and infant community school, which was judged by Ofsted to require improvement. A specialist leader of education was provided by the academy to support the development of teaching across the school, with the aim of teachers sustaining momentum and continuing to improve their teaching after the specialist leader left. In June 2014, Ash Grove received a further inspection and was rated as “good”. The Ofsted report commented on the significant improvement in teaching quality since the previous inspection. That example of one school supporting another through the SLE programme is relatively low-cost, but the results can be significant.
Clause 5 is about the appointment of interim executive board members. An IEB is a governing body appointed for a temporary period with the specific task of ensuring school improvement when there has been a decline in standards or a serious breakdown of working relationships in the governing body. If used effectively, IEBs can provide a challenge to the school’s leadership and secure rapid improvement.
Amendment 35 would require the Secretary of State to pay the local authority any costs—over and above any costs it had budgeted for—incurred as a result of the Secretary of State directing a local authority as to the terms of appointment of members of a local authority-appointed interim executive board. Such terms of appointment could include setting out the roles and responsibilities of members or details for any remuneration and expenses. I reassure Members that we do not expect local authorities to face increased costs due to regional schools commissioners exercising that power on behalf of the Secretary of State. Currently, the Secretary of State and the local authority can choose to make a payment to IEB members to cover allowances as they consider appropriate. Any costs associated with the terms of employment for an IEB established by the Secretary of State should not be higher than those usually incurred by a local authority, and should certainly be reasonable given that we only expect IEBs to be in operation on a short-term basis.
The Bill is about ensuring that intervention in underperforming schools is fast, effective and deliverable. The clause as it stands will help to achieve that. In view of that, I hope the hon. Member for Cardiff West will withdraw his amendment.
Kevin Brennan
I suspect that we will not agree on what the Minister just said, but I am grateful to him for putting the Government’s position on the record. These probing amendments were intended to find out more about the Government’s thinking. On that basis, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Mr Gibb
The clause would give the Secretary of State, via the regional schools commissioners, a power similar to the one that local authorities already have to require a school’s governing body to take action to improve its performance. The Government recognise that ensuring schools have access to the best possible support and advice, along with capable leadership in a strong accountability framework, will help to ensure that standards improve across the board.
The clause would give regional schools commissioners the power to require a school to take certain action, rather than having to rely on the local authority to do so. It would only apply to schools that are already eligible for intervention. Regional schools commissioners would be required to consult first. They could then require a school to contract with another party—for example, another school—to provide advisory services, to collaborate with a maintained school or further education college, or to federate with another maintained school.
The value of schools coming together to pool expertise and resources is that they can achieve collectively what could not necessarily be achieved by an individual school. The power to direct schools to take advice and collaborate would sit alongside other measures in the Bill and would form part of our new array of intervention measures to help ensure that schools improve and that children get the education they deserve.
Kevin Brennan
I shall make only a few observations in the few moments left today. The clause would be of limited significance were it not for clause 1 of the Bill, which we will come to later in our discussions. However, there is an initial confusion between this clause and clause 7, because this clause empowers the Secretary of State to take a range of action in relation to schools eligible for intervention. This category includes schools in special measures, but clause 7 states that the only action to be taken in relation to a school in special measures is academisation. We discussed that earlier on, and it was a welcome admission that methods other than academisation can actually lead to school improvements. I will not pursue that point much further in the clause stand part debate.
Clause 1 will change everything, because it reinforces our argument that it was quite wrong to take the clauses out of order. Making a judgment on clause 4, on which we are now having a stand part debate, depends on whether or not clause 1 is accepted and certainly on what the regulations on coasting schools actually say. We have draft regulations from the Government, but that is going to be a very significant factor. However, we are where we are.
Education Datalab stated in evidence to us that 1,179 schools will be classed as coasting under the definition put forward by Ministers. This is not the place to debate the rights and wrongs of this definition, but it has certainly been rubbished by quite a number of commentators. This is the place to recognise that this is the clause that will enable the Secretary of State to intervene in all of those schools. We know from the press release what the Government think will happen next. It states:
“The government’s regional schools commissioners—8 education experts with in-depth local insight supported by elected head teacher boards from the local community—will then assess whether or not the school has a credible plan to improve and ensure all children make the required progress. Those that can improve will be supported to do so by our team of expert heads, and those that cannot will be turned into academies under the leadership of our expert school sponsors—one of the best ways of improving underperforming schools”.
Of course, as we found out in the oral evidence session, regional schools commissioners themselves have a conflict of interest here, in that they have key performance indicators which include the percentage of schools to be academised. Again, I will not labour this point here, but we should also pause to consider the workload on regional schools commissioners. We once again raise the point as to whether or not they have adequate resources to do the job that they are being asked to do as a result of the Bill. I will not go into great detail about what that involves, but there is a huge amount of work to be done. Schools are not random pieces to be moved around the chessboard, and I do not think that even Garry Kasparov could move 1,000 pieces around a chessboard. We are asking eight regional schools commissioners to take on an awful lot here, and we know that even the Department for Education is not coping with its current responsibilities. As the National Audit Office pointed out:
“The Department does not yet know why some academy sponsors are more successful than others”.
In conclusion, of course we can pass this particular clause. We are probably about to do so—I am glancing around the Committee Room to check the strength of the Opposition against the Government. We can pass this clause, but if we do, we should not imagine that it will have anything like the impact that Ministers are claiming. Nevertheless, the press release has been issued and headlines have been gained as a result. By the time everyone notices that not a lot has changed, it will all be forgotten and I suspect that it might be time for another ministerial initiative.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 4 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
The Chair
That concludes today’s business.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Margot James.)