Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I have to declare my interest as chair of the National Society, which oversees Church of England schools, although obviously they are all devolved around each diocesan board. I also apologise that I cannot be here for days two and three in Committee. I have a long-standing family holiday booked, and my marriage and parenthood are more important. I assure noble Lords that things will be covered by other Members on these Benches.

I have been told clearly by Members of this House that I should be very concerned about Clause 1, and indeed Clauses 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and so on. Because of the nature of the people who have expressed those concerns, I listened very carefully. However, in principle I am persuaded that the move towards full academisation warrants the Secretary of State being given some additional powers. I disagree with a large number here: I think the direction of travel is abundantly clear. It is full academisation. If that is the direction of travel, we need to ensure that system is appropriately covered.

The Secretary of State has always had some powers. For example, because of the new Diocesan Boards of Education Measure, all dioceses have recently had to produce a new diocesan board of education scheme. Every single one of those has had to be submitted to the Secretary of State to sign off. Not in one instance has the Secretary of State asked any questions back of any diocese because, with the process that has been gone through, the schemes never landed on the Secretary of State’s desk until we knew that they would be happily signed off. So some powers already exist, and there is an argument that some need to exist in what is the emerging new system. We have to move away from the contract-by-contract basis that we are currently operating with academies. To put them all on a statutory basis makes complete sense.

That said, along with everyone else, I express deep concern about the way the clause is drafted. Oddly, it is both too loose—what are “examples” in legislation?—and too prescriptive and interfering. Somewhere, that balance has gone completely skew-whiff in the way it is worded.

Clear boundaries need to be established. I have looked and thought very carefully and, contrary to the noble Lord, Lord Young, I think that the Amendment 1 is correct in saying “must”, but it has to then go with Amendments 3, 6, 9 and 13—and possibly Amendment 11, which is in a different group. We need it clearly stated, and these seem very clear around what standards should be set—and then they will leave academies free in all the ways in which we have said that they need to be free to set a lot of their policies.

I hope that the Minister and the whole team will be open to taking these amendments and the concerns raised seriously and that they will return on Report with a very different Clause 1. I hear what was said about not returning to Report until the autumn, and I think that is very wise advice.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I rise towards what I imagine is the end of a very rich and telling debate. We have seen huge expressions of concern about this Bill, and particularly the initial stages of it, from all sides of your Lordships’ House. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, about the difficulty of amending the Bill. I am working with a number of campaign groups and parent groups, trying to work out how to deal with the lack of clarity, the incoherence and contradictoriness of so much of the Bill, and it is proving very difficult. I apologise in advance that, normally, I try to put down all my amendments before the first day in Committee, but I have not managed it this time, because there is so much—and so much concern out there.

I shall try not to repeat what has already been said by others, but I have to begin the debate on this Bill by reflecting back on my 10 year-old self. When I was 10 years old, I was absolutely fascinated by and loved lungfish. They are absolutely amazing and fascinating creatures, and I remain amazed and fascinated by them, but I do not believe that every child in this country should be made to learn about lungfish. That picks up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman. Many of us have things that we think that everybody should know, but the person who should help children to discover the things that they are interested in—the teacher in the classroom with them—is the person who can best help every child to learn what fascinates them, what interests them and what will be of use to them and their community. Clause 1, in particular, is heading in the opposite direction.

I attached my name to Amendment 13, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman of Darlington and Lady Wilcox of Newport, as a bit of a sample and a case study. This is where the Secretary of State is given the power to direct the amount of teaching across the school year. Let us think about the very different situations in which schools find themselves at this moment—although it could be at any time—at the tail-end of a hugely destructive and damaging pandemic. Let us think about a small rural school to which pupils have to travel very long distances from a very young age, with long travel times and difficult travel. How can a Secretary of State sitting here in Westminster say, “You have to do this many hours”, even when the head teacher and the other teachers know that their pupils are exhausted, worn out and struggling? There needs to be a balance in people’s lives and a balance in the way of teaching.

I am thinking about the idea that you can apply one rule to something as simple as the number of hours of teaching in a year. How do you classify what teaching is? Of a day spent going out walking through a national park and exploring it without any particular formal curriculum elements, but giving pupils the chance really to experience and be in nature, is a Secretary of State going to say that it does not count in their hours? How can that possibly work?

I want to pick up on one interesting point that the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, made about Ofsted. He suggested that it could just inspect multi-academy trusts under the Government’s proposal. Now, the Green Party wants to abolish Ofsted but what the noble Lord proposed might be a really interesting step along the way, given that we know how immensely damaging Ofsted’s visits to individual schools are. I do not agree with making every school become an academy or part of a multi-academy trust, but that is a really interesting example of the way that this whole debate has run, and of how the Bill is half-baked and not thought through. There are so many possibilities and different ways in which it might develop.

I want to say one final thing. Perhaps to the surprise of the House, I am going to bring up Brexit—not because education ever had anything to do with the European Union but because the slogan that essentially decided the result of the Brexit referendum was “Take back control”. I do not think people were really thinking then, or think now, that the right thing is to have taking back control mean that the Secretary of State for Education has control, at a fine, detailed level, of the education of every child in this country.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to add one thought to the debate. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, the Bill is setting out a brand-new structure for schools in this country. What is unclear is what that structure will be. What is the dynamic or philosophy, or even the structure that lies behind this proposed new system of school education? It has been nominated as academies—it has their name attached to it. I am a doubter about academies. We could have an interesting debate, probably more on this side, about their role and what they have achieved. Because it was raised by my noble friend Lord Young, I have to say that I find his reference to failing schools in London, with the implication that there was a mass failure of schools there, offensive. However, I am not going to debate that today.

What is before us today on the structure is not about academies at all. Multi-academy trusts are, in fact, the antithesis of academies as originally envisaged. These are large, bureaucratic, non-local, geographically distributed organisations, with no local involvement other than as a toothless add-on. We will try to do our best later on to build in local and teacher involvement. I would argue for school-student involvement in the way that they are run, but these will be big organisations and the dynamic will be for them to become even bigger. They will be big, bureaucratic organisations which are effectively under the thumb of the Secretary of State. Is that the schools system that we want? I certainly do not think it is.

As a final thought, we saw research this week from the Institute of Education showing that the one thing multi-academy trusts do not do is to rescue failing schools. Its evidence showed that they had no impact on rescuing failing primary schools and very little on rescuing secondary schools. So I am incensed, in part, by the failure to recognise the role that local authorities should still play in governing our education system.

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[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I start by saying that my noble friend Lord Storey is unable to be in his place today, so, as a co-signatory to his Amendment 8, I will introduce it on his behalf. Why is it important to have mental health specified in Clause 1(2)(b) in relation to standards? In parentheses, we have just discussed three groups using the telescope to look up to the night sky, trying to see the strategic issues related to the Bill, and I am going to follow the opposite route of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and look down the microscope at one very particular issue that I think needs to be in the Bill, despite all our concerns about these clauses on academies.

Why should standards need to specify mental health? It is very straightforward. It is because, in the pyramid of support for children and young people with mental health problems, schools are absolutely on the front line of a universal service, and teachers and staff are often the first to be able to identify worries. They are also the non-specialist primary care workers. Over the last 10 years, we have seen a substantial series of policy announcements—at least 19—which cover or include mental health, starting in 2011 with the strategy paper No Health Without Mental Health, which recognised the importance of early intervention and pledged to improve access to psychological therapies for children and young people.

A year later, the No Health Without Mental Health implementation framework was published, describing how different bodies, including schools, should work together to support mental health. In 2014, there were four further policy actions; there were five in 2015, including early intervention funding. In 2017, the Green Paper on children’s and young people’s mental health was published and included incentivising schools to identify and train a designated senior lead for mental health, funding for new mental health teams and a pilot for a four-week waiting time for access to specialist CAMHS teams.

That Green Paper was a start, but most people agreed with the Education and Health and Social Care Committees, which published a joint report saying that it was going to fail a generation. So, before Covid even struck, we already had a very public recognition that various parts of the public sector were not serving our children and young people with mental health issues well, including schools, principally because they were not getting the financial support or formal guidance they needed.

In a YoungMinds survey, three-quarters of parents said their child’s mental health had deteriorated while waiting for support from child and adolescent mental health services. In total, less than 1% of the NHS budget is spent on children’s and young people’s mental health services. The number of A&E attendances by young people aged 18 or under with a recorded diagnosis of a psychiatric condition has almost trebled since 2010. So, even before Covid started, many children and young people struggled with mental health problems. It is not that they were not there before Covid, but now lockdown and the various other pressures that children have had to face have exacerbated those underlying problems and they are now very evident to schools, to parents and, above all, to children and young people themselves. In fact, 83% of children and young people in a survey by YoungMinds reported that the pandemic has made their mental health condition worse.

I come back to this pyramid of support for children and young people. Its absolute firm, solid base is the role of our educators and associated staff in schools. The long litany of government papers shows that there needs to be action. Just subsuming mental health into a general health standard will go exactly the same way as all the other papers—strong on words, very light on action. My noble friend Lord Storey and I are arguing that we need to specify mental health here; otherwise, it will not be the priority it should be, not just for schools but for our local authorities, for local NHS bodies—whether they are CCGs or not—and, above all, for government to provide grants to make sure that it can happen.

I also support Amendment 37, which strengthens our amendment by referring to guidance by the Secretary of State to schools, and strongly support Amendments 9 and 11 in the names of my noble friends Lord Storey and Lord Addington. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 21A in my name. We are again addressing Clause 1; I will put to one side the whole question of whether it should be there at all. We had a discussion earlier about what schools should be—that we should be talking about not just structures but what they should be doing and how they should fit into our broader social framework. This amendment is an attempt—a preliminary one, I stress—to look at how we might see schools as part of a community, not just as institutions turning out pupils to go into the workforce at the end of their time in them. With that in mind, there are three elements to my attempted draft.

First, proposed new paragraph (u) suggests

“consultation, engagement, and co-production with pupils, parents and the wider community”

on what the school is. As many noble Lords have said, with multi-academy trusts potentially scattered all around the country, as some of them already are, how do they get embedded in the community and how does the community contribute to the trust? This is an attempt to write the setting of standards into Clause 1 to say that the school must be part of a community.

I went through the Bill and analysed the appearances of the words “pupil”, “parent” and “community”. Interestingly, “pupil” appears 58 times, quite often when the Bill talks about safeguarding and welfare, both things we could not possibly disagree with. There is also quite a lot about attendance at schools, which I will get to later. However, nowhere does the Bill talk about what role pupils might have in deciding their own education and having a democratic role in the structure of their own school. My representation to your Lordships’ Committee is that, if we want to be a democratic country, we want democracy to start in schools. Those most expert in the experience of being a pupil at a school are the pupils.

The word “parent” appears seven times. Two are in the context of the rights of parents with children at religious schools. There is a duty to explain the attendance policies of schools and a duty on parents to provide info to schools. However, again, there is nothing about the role of parents in running, deciding, guiding or acting in schools. I know that amendments to other sections of the Bill will try to ensure that there are parent governors; that is one way of doing it, but it is by definition only a very small number of people. This is an attempt to say that parents should have a much bigger, broader role. I have been a governor and seen parent governors facing huge wodges of paperwork; not every parent will be able to engage as a governor, but they should be involved.

Particularly interesting is that “community” appears only a few times in the Bill and that every reference is to the category of “community schools”. There is no reference to the actual community in which a school is placed.

That is what this amendment is seeking to do. Proposed new paragraph (u) looks at seeing a school as a co-production of all the parts of a community. Proposed new paragraph (v) looks at academies and proprietors reflecting the needs of the community, so it is dealing with the structures and what the multi-academy trust and trust governorship are doing. Proposed new paragraph (w) looks at the contribution the school makes to the whole life of the community. The school at which I was a governor served a very poor, disadvantaged and diverse community, and as a practical example of the kind of thing that a school can do on a very small scale, it organised a number of events where parents got together and shared their different craft skills. Many of these parents had no language in common, but this was a way for people to make friendships within a community across different language groups and backgrounds, so the activities of the school were helping to build a community. That is the sort of thing a school needs to be doing.

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I hope to assure the noble Lord that those requirements will be written into the academy trust standards. If academy trusts do not meet those standards there will be enforcement mechanisms that they will need to comply with. If there is non-compliance on a specific standard where the trust is otherwise meeting requirements, it is likely that the Secretary of State would issue a compliance direction, which sounds like it might emulate some of the interventions the noble Lord took with my noble friend when he was previously Minister. If a trust failed to comply with a number of standards, or the Secretary of State was satisfied that non-compliance indicated a weakness in the governance or management of the trust, he might issue a notice to improve. The requirement on academies when it comes to special educational needs that is in place at the moment will be replicated in these standards. There will be a mechanism by which to enforce the meeting of those standards.

That takes me on to Amendment 22 on the inclusion of work experience. Again, we do not intend to use the regulations to place any significant new burdens on academies but we will replicate existing requirements in this area. For example, academy trusts must secure independent careers guidance for year 8 to year 13 pupils and have regard to the underpinning statutory guidance, which makes it clear that secondary schools and colleges should follow the Gatsby benchmarks of good career guidance and offer work experience placements as part of their careers strategy for all pupils. As the noble Lord will know, the Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Act 2022, due to be commenced in September, will extend the duty to secure independent careers guidance to all academy schools and alternative provision academies, and bring year 7 pupils into scope for the first time. That will be replicated and, as I explained to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, there is also a mechanism to ensure that those standards are met and enforced.

Finally, I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on the importance of extracurricular activities. It is not our intention to go beyond the existing requirements on schools. For many of those activities, the school is best placed to design activities that meet the needs of its pupils and, to address the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, situate them in its community. On the noble Baroness’s Amendment 21A, there is already provision in the funding agreement that requires academy trusts to ensure that each of its academies is at the heart of its community, promoting community cohesion and sharing facilities with other schools, other educational institutions and the wider community. It is our intention to reflect that in the academy standards when they are developed.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Could the Minister address the point I made about democracy within schools and pupils having a say about their own education? If she is not able to do so now, will she do so later?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

Again, I think that would be something that would not be set out in the academy standards but would be best developed by schools themselves. I think I have covered all the points raised in this group, and I hope the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw Amendment 8.

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[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. I have just one narrow point I wish to add. One thing that is lacking and to me seems essential is some reference to school students and their participation in the governance of their schools. To me, the case for those over voting age is unanswerable: they can vote in a national election, but they have no right to participate in the governance of the institution to which they belong. Given that the Labour Party’s policy is, I think, votes at 16, I would make the case that school students from age 16 should have a statutory right to participate in governance. I would even suggest that there is some scope for clear guidance to involve even younger children. I believe that there is some interesting work done in many primary schools now where the children are involved. Unfortunately, I missed the boat on making this specific point in an amendment, but I am sure that this issue that will return on Report and I hope that, at that stage, some reference to school students could be included.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton—indeed, he picked up on a point that was in my Amendment 21A about the involvement of pupils, and the follow-up question I asked the Minister. Perhaps we can work on that amendment on Report, because it is crucial and I do not think we have to keep it to voting age, or even 16. At some level, pupils should have a say in their education if we operate in a democracy.

I am aware that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, is not currently in his place, but I feel strongly that I need to respond to what he said about stars in education and star teachers. Underlying that is a real concern about importing traditional private sector approaches that have seen some executive head teachers receiving extremely high levels of pay. What we have to acknowledge, particularly in an educational setting, is that, ultimately, we are talking about a teacher who should be part of a team of teachers working together. Every teacher has something to offer and the idea that we hold up some people as stars and everyone else just has to follow what they do is a deeply damaging approach to education.

I also note the point the noble Lord made about curriculum resources. Of course we do not want every teacher to have to start from scratch, but there is also grave concern that this Bill talks about multi-academy trusts as proprietors. By law, they are not for profit, but if they are very large institutions buying curriculum resources and other supplies from commercial suppliers, we really have some questions to ask about where value for money and the right approach to public service are in that kind of structure.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly welcome my noble friend’s amendment. I, along with my noble friend Lady Blower, have a number of other amendments in this area.

I want to encourage the Minister to say something about this. Clearly, she has heard all our concerns about Clauses 1 and 3. I just want to suggest that one way through may be to consider the super-affirmative procedure for dealing with the issue of standards. We debated earlier the issue that even an affirmative instrument allows us only a debate. The advantage of the super-affirmative procedure is that it allows both Houses of Parliament opportunities to comment on proposals for secondary legislation and recommend amendments before orders for affirmative approval are brought forward in their final form. The idea of the super-affirmative procedure is that those orders are implemented in enactments where an exceptionally high degree of scrutiny is thought appropriate—for instance, for the scrutiny of certain items of delegated legislation made or proposed to be made under Henry VIII clauses.

Take my noble friend Lady Chapman’s earlier amendment, in which she sought to replicate the standards in relation to independent schools and said that, basically, this would give a much more explicit set of standards to work on. If you combine that with the super-affirmative procedure, you might achieve a greater and more effective way whereby Parliament could scrutinise what the Government seek to do. However, I really do not think that simply having regulations is the way to do it. I urge the Minister to consider this procedure as one way through, because it would give Parliament an opportunity to comment on the draft regulations and the department an opportunity to go away and consider it before coming back with the substantive order. In some ways, this would be a very good way to deal with some of the issues in this Bill.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly to Amendment 28 in the name of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, to which I have attached my name.

I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, just said. However, what particularly attracted me to this amendment was its reference to

“an annual report on the exercise of the powers … and … an annual impact assessment on the exercise of those powers.”

The Minister reassured us a number of times in our debates on earlier groups by saying that “it is not the intention of this Government” to do this or that. The annual review proposed by this amendment would ensure, whatever Government are in power, an assessment of how the law is being used. Given the current powers in that law, many Members who usually sit on the Benches opposite might think that this would be a good idea with a different Government in place.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly. This amendment is in the spirit of many of the amendments that were moved before. Basically, we need it to see what is coming and get some opportunity for comment. Is the super-affirmative procedure here the same as that for the amendment I moved earlier? No, but it is another way of skinning this particular cat—if one is allowed to use that expression any more.

We must make sure that Parliament sees this and can interact with the process. That is what we are all arguing about here and what has dominated both Part 1 and Clause 1 of the Bill. If the Government accepted something like this amendment or some combination thereof, they would probably have a much easier time of it and rather less excitement in Committee.