Education and Adoption Bill

Baroness Eaton Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great honour and a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in this debate. Following such an expert, a previous Secretary of State for Education, in a debate on education legislation, is indeed a daunting task. The whole House joins me in congratulating him on an exceptional maiden speech. We all look forward to his many future contributions to the business of this House. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and I share northern roots and a keen commitment to and interest in the urban areas of the north. After all his past work in the city of Sheffield, he can indeed be described in his own right as a northern powerhouse.

I start my contribution to this debate by declaring, as usual, my interests as a former chairman of the Local Government Association and a current LGA vice-president. Furthermore, as a former teacher, I am particularly pleased to have the opportunity to speak in today’s important debate. Reform of education has been a common priority both for this Government and their immediate Labour predecessors. During the Blair Governments, for example, we saw struggling schools being relaunched under the Fresh Start programme and city academies introduced, resulting in the creation of autonomous state schools with private sector involvement. We also saw the demise of, to use Alastair Campbell’s phrase, the “bog-standard comprehensive” and its replacement with specialist schools and academies.

As a former leader of Bradford Metropolitan District Council and a serving member of that authority, I am aware that the role of schools in our communities has broadened in a way that makes many inner-city schools unrecognisable from a generation ago. Indeed, extended schools with breakfast and after-school clubs have begun to blur the boundaries between education, childcare and social services, while secondary schools have parallel staffs of mentors and behaviour advisers.

Under the coalition Government we saw the establishment of more than 250 free schools, set up and run by local people, delivering exciting new educational opportunities for communities around the country. In addition, more than 1,000 schools that were ranked “inadequate” became academies, bringing in new leadership to promote discipline, rigour and high educational standards. Currently, more than 4,600 schools benefit from academy status, enjoying more power over discipline, finance and the curriculum. However, too many children still do not receive the excellent education that they deserve.

Based on their manifesto commitments, the Government received a clear mandate in May to continue improving the education offered to our children by further increasing the number of academies, free schools and university technical colleges. Here I declare my interest as a trustee of the Sir Simon Milton Foundation, which is currently building a university technical college in Pimlico.

Fulfilling one of the key pledges made in our manifesto, the Bill contains provisions to turn every failing school into an academy and to tackle inadequate progress elsewhere by introducing new measures to target schools that are considered “coasting”. It is quite correct that, when a school is not consistently ensuring that all its pupils reach their full potential, it is held accountable for these failures and required to agree an action plan for improvement. The Bill also removes the bureaucratic legal hurdles that have so often been exploited by those with ideological objections to school freedoms, which have meant that pupils typically have to spend more than a year in a failing school before academy conversations take place.

Let us be clear: it is not simply being called an academy that helps failing or coasting schools to improve. What is important is what being an academy stands for: giving schools freedom over what they teach, when they teach it, and deciding who is best to teach it.

While most of my speech has concentrated on the aspects of this legislation that affect schools, we must certainly not forget that it is the Education and Adoption Bill. As the Secretary of State for Education emphasised when speaking to this legislation last month, the Bill is also concerned with improving the adoption system so that most of our most vulnerable children find loving homes as quickly as possible.

The current adoption system is highly fragmented, with around 180 agencies recruiting and matching adopters for only 5,000 children a year. It currently takes an average of eight months between placement order and match, which is far too long for any child to wait. I therefore strongly welcome the measures included in the Bill to speed up this process, including the introduction of regional adoption agencies and the provision of £4.5 million in financial support this year for those councils that lead the way in delivering this.

I believe that these proposals will create a larger pool of approved adopters to match from, improve the recruitment of adopters and ensure that vital support services are more widely available. Ultimately, it should significantly increase the choice of potential matches available, giving children a far better chance of finding a permanent family. While I strongly welcome these measures on adoption, I also hope that they will not detract from the importance of other types of long and short-term care for vulnerable children. Local and national government must continue to strive to improve the experience of all children in care.

In conclusion, a good education is not a luxury; it should be a right for everyone. As such, I strongly welcome the Bill and its provisions, which I believe will ensure that all children, whatever circumstances they are born into, receive the very best possible start in life, thus allowing them to fulfil their potential.