Free Schools and Academies

Baroness Berridge Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lady Evans for securing today’s debate and getting an opportunity to talk about the good news of English schools in the midst of such bad global news. I was one of the Schools Ministers in DfE in the midst of the terrible global news of the pandemic. I hope the Minister will bring forward further changes to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, building on the changes announced by the Prime Minister today.

I think it is a sign of good government and putting children first that you change your mind, and it was that spirit and focus on children that led Michael Gove to take on the idea from Andrew Adonis—the noble Lord, Lord Adonis—and others and turbocharge the academies programme. By the time I joined in February 2020, that turbocharged programme had created more than 2,400 charitable trusts running schools in a contractual relationship with the Secretary of State, and most children in England by that time were in an academy or free school. By statute, failed schools were no longer allowed to languish in local authorities, which were at best reluctant to admit failure, at the expense of the children. It was not a conspiracy—just human nature and local authorities having other priorities.

The academies’ freedom to work across local authority boundaries enabled the creation of different faith schools within the free school system. There are now numerous Sikh, Hindu and Muslim schools with wider catchment areas. Sir Hamid Patel of Star Academies served Muslim and other communities with excellence and integrity, and there were new Church of England secondary schools such as Fulham Boys School. It was a sadness, though, that no black-led Church denomination managed to establish a successful school, despite these denominations having a long history of Saturday schools. That freedom to work across local authority boundaries also assisted the creation of the specialist schools, the UTCs and the specialist maths sixth-form colleges.

No one promised that there would not be failed trusts, but school and trust failure is revealed swiftly, and that is a much-needed achievement. Children do not have another chance. Getting in quickly is imperative, so I join with other noble Lords: I am concerned about the discretion being added to an academy order when a school has failed.

Sorting out DAOs remained a priority even in a pandemic: those disadvantaged children, already in a failed school, were then faced with a pandemic, so it had to be. Of course the system still has weaknesses. I think I used to describe single-academy trusts as often in splendid, outstanding isolation: they were often some of the best academic schools but with woeful levels of free school meal pupils, and many were grammar schools. I really had hoped that, instead of focusing on the academies, this new Government would sort this. It is possible to sort the low admission of free school meal pupils.

Just over a month into my service, the Prime Minister closed all schools, except for vulnerable children and children of key workers. For someone for whom school was a place of safety, I knew what this could and did mean. Local authority priorities became children’s social care, public health, refuse collection, children’s social care, adult social care and children’s social care—I hope noble Lords get my drift. Inadvertently, the academy system came into its own. In the pandemic there were areas where the local authority encouraged trusts to “do schools”—hubs were set up, best practice was shared across the schools and the local authority got on with children’s social care. The best MATs did all the back-office functions and schools just did discipline, safeguarding and education. That was invaluable in a pandemic.

What of the Department for Education? Due to that contract with the Secretary of State, there were teams of civil servants called, I think, regional directors. The DfE was operational. It was not just policy and delivery. Those teams knew English schools, the leaders, the local authority and the trust that in one instance had lost its finance director, who had died in the February before the pandemic. They knew how to plug that gap. Without REACT teams, I cannot imagine how schools and local authorities would have coped.

It may seem a strange time to send this postcard from DfE sanctuary buildings, but I wish to encourage His Majesty’s Government to utilise, embolden and encourage these academy trusts. When you are planning the biggest local government reorganisation for decades, why is the mood music for the local authority now more on schools? Even if that is your overall direction of travel, why not wait? The eye of many a local authority will be off the ball during such a reorganisation —it has to be. The people running local authorities are only human. I hope that some will be humble enough to call on their academy trust to “do schools” and focus, in the midst of reorganisation, on children’s social care.