(8 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, it was a privilege to serve on the Select Committee. I join others in thanking my noble friend Lady Corston for her excellent leadership and presentation of our report. I join with her in thanking the officials who supported us, and the witnesses. In that sense, it was a joy to be a part of the committee because it worked so smoothly. I pay tribute, as she did, to the young people who gave evidence. That had an impact on all of us. Their words are threaded throughout the report’s recommendations, as they should be.
Before I get on to what I was going to say, I want to take up something the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said. I am about to agree with almost everything he said. In fact, I am about to concentrate on the thing he concentrated on. With his permission, I have to correct him on Birmingham because I would not want people to be misled. Michael Wilshaw did not say what the noble Lord said he said about the Birmingham education system—he has not asked for it to be taken over by the department. After the so-called Trojan horse scandal two years ago, a school-led organisation called the Birmingham Education Partnership was handed the legal responsibilities of the Department for Education related to school improvement. I happened to chair it, which is why I know that to be the case. It is now in its second year of operation. I think Ofsted will now say that things are improving in Birmingham as far as schools are concerned. I pay tribute to the school-led Birmingham Education Partnership, which has brought that about. Michael Wilshaw did say what the noble Lord said about Birmingham social care. That is perhaps where the misunderstanding has arisen. I would not want a story in the Birmingham Evening Mail tomorrow to say that Sir Michael said its schools were not of good quality.
Returning to the Select Committee report, it is worth thinking about the young adults the report is about. They are exactly the “just about managing”. When we talk about untapped talent we worry a lot about the young people with A-levels who do not get to Russell group universities and go to one of our other 100-odd universities. I reckon there is more unfulfilled potential and lack of skills capacity for our nation in the 53% who are in the middle than there is with students who go to university, but not Russell group universities. When we talk about productivity and not having the skills we need, it is this group that needs to be given the opportunity. When we talk about not delivering for this group, it is not just a question of their life chances, aspirations and all that that means; there is a fault in the system of the way we run the country. They ought not to be ignored, not just because it matters for them, but because it matters for all of us.
I say at the start that we should not assume that all this 53% should take vocational studies and that that would be suitable for them. Many of them should pursue academic careers. The point of our report is that they should have the choice. Many of them do not have it.
At the core of the report is the statement:
“Our recommendations support the development of a coherent and navigable transition system for those aged 14–24”.
Why vocational education is so important in this context is that everything we have ever done in vocational education has not worked as a system of transition. Every element of our education support system either does not work for vocational education or works less well than it does for academic education. If we look at the curriculum, qualifications and assessment, we see that we constantly change them, they are not understood and they are not a commonly known currency. In terms of place of learning, such children are moved from pillar to post—from further education to school and, very often, back and forth in years 10 and 11. On continuity of teachers, children have to have both lecturers and teachers to gain the skills they need. Careers guidance does not work for them. The education areas that they access are not as well financed as others.
The best way of understanding that is to make a comparison with children who follow an academic curriculum. If you follow an academic curriculum, you have all the continuity and coherence that you need. Indeed, if you are educated in a public school, you are very often in the same school from five to 18, with the same teachers, the same cohort of peers and the same pedagogy working towards the same end. If you talk to your teachers for careers guidance there, you are talking to somebody whom you are about to follow on the same track throughout life. It is amazing how for the most confident and highest-achieving group of people we give tremendous coherence and continuity; for those who often struggle, we give the least continuity and the least coherence. That for me is the most important thing. Unless we can solve it, nothing else matters. All the recommendations in the report and all the small changes that we try to make will not work if they are plonked into a system that is not coherent. That is where I agree so much with the noble Lord, Lord Baker. Unless we get rid of this big barrier at 16, nothing else will change.
That is why I join other speakers in saying how very disappointing is the Government’s response to the report. In response to the call for greater coherence, it states:
“The Government’s education policy … ensures transition from early years right through a young person’s education and onto work”.
No, it does not; it does not do that at all. At every single join, whether it is from infant to primary, primary to secondary or whatever, it is not good or cohesive. But the biggest join that does not work is at 14, 16 and 19. If we have a Government who believe that what we have at the moment works, we may as well not have written the report, because none of it will work unless we are prepared strategically, robustly and bravely to look at that 14-to-19 structure.
When we saw good evidence of what works—when we talked to university technical colleges, to some further education providers who were really trying to help with 14 to 19, and, to some extent, to studio schools —we found that what was making it most difficult for those good initiatives to work was that the system was working against them. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, talked about what works with UTCs. There are things about UTCs that do not work. It is really difficult to fill some of them. It is difficult to persuade some schools to let children go, for understandable reasons, at the end of year 10, because a UTC is trying to be a 14-to-19 school in an 11-to-16, 16-to-18 education system. All that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said could be even better if he was working with an education system that was 14 to 19 and not 14 to 18 with a big join at the age of 16.
The point that I want to make has been made so often and I have never heard a government response as to why we cannot do it: 16 transition is out of date. The only mention the Government make of that in their response is to tell us that they are going to make GCSEs more robust and rigorous. That will make the problem worse, because if they insist on making the exam at age 16 very robust, very high-stakes, very rigorous and very important to schools’ accountability, the whole school system will concentrate on what happens at 16. What 14 to 19 becomes is 14 to 16 with a pause and a concentration on GCSE, and an effort to pick up the pieces for two more years from 16 to 18. The proposal is quite clear: speed up the national curriculum—because it could do with being speeded up—and finish it at 14. There would then be an end-of-national-curriculum examination—call it a GCSE; call it robust; call it rigorous; call it what you want, but have it at 14. At that point, let us then have some proper pathways from 14 to 19 that are academic, vocational and naturally bring coherence, through which many of our good initiatives such as the university technical colleges and the work of further education could flourish. I invite the Minister to explain why that is not possible and why those issues were not addressed in the department’s response, which the predecessor Secretary of State signed off.
The Government deserve to be criticised for their response to the report, but, quite honestly, my Government did not get this right anyway. There comes a time when all politicians know that they have struggled with this area and all we want now is to get it right. There is no feeling of having to criticise the others. I will criticise my record on this—it was not as good the record in lots of other areas on which we delivered. There is an opportunity and there is good will. The report we are discussing today gives a framework to move forward, as long as the Government are brave enough to take the risk.
(8 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for introducing this debate. I had the pleasure of serving with him on the Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility. I know of his passionate interest in this subject, and I congratulate him on the way that he has introduced it. He has given us an insight into the extent of this problem and its importance. I also add my welcome to his for the noble Baroness, Lady Couttie, and say that I look forward to her maiden speech and wish her well during her time in the House.
To some extent, social mobility is a challenge of our time. Perhaps for the first time, there is political agreement across the spectrum that it needs to be addressed and we need to do better than we have done in the past. In truth, whatever we think about our country, whatever our achievements, and however proud we are of what we do, the fact that our social mobility record does not compare well with our competitors overshadows those achievements and makes us not the sort of country that we would want to live in. That underpins our need and desire to try to improve in this area.
As the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said, social mobility covers a wide area of issues. In the time that I have available, I am mainly going to concentrate on one, but I just wanted to acknowledge two other areas before I move on to that. First, we very often see social mobility as an issue for education and an issue about youth. It is not: we should live in a country where adults have the opportunity to be socially mobile as well, even if they did not have the opportunities during their youth. That falls to the area of skills and reskilling and giving people opportunities throughout their lives to achieve their potential and do as well as they can. Secondly, I am conscious that many children and young people achieve grades but find that they do not have the opportunities available to others because of their backgrounds. I acknowledge that that is a problem: it is about a change in culture throughout society, not just about what we can do in this House and through legislation.
I turn to my main area of concentration: those children who do not achieve in school and therefore do not experience the problem of having the grades but not getting the opportunities after that. If you look at the policies of both political parties for the last 20 years, you cannot say that there have not been attempts through the school system to try to increase and improve social mobility. Every policy that is launched now is introduced in the name of social mobility—in the name of giving those left behind a better chance and of closing the attainment gap. So it should be: that is a challenge that falls to education in schools. I acknowledge that success: today in schools throughout this country, there are young people who have been given opportunities through the school system, who are socially mobile and who will go to university and have the skills and opportunity to achieve what they want to achieve.
However, we are at risk of assuming that schools can solve the problem by themselves. I worry that, in answer to the question “What should we do about social mobility?”, too many people say, “We have to improve schools”. I know that we have to improve schools and that a failure to close the attainment gap in schools is a failure of the school system. I do not shy away from that, but I know that schools do not cause the problem in the first place. We should not shy away from that either. They are asked to address and remedy an endemic problem in our society: what they inherit with children at the age of five is a difference in attainment that is clear from the age of 18 months. Look at those geographical areas that underperform at GCSE and A-level, that we bemoan do not get as many children to university as we would like. When you look at what we call school readiness in that area, you find that that is low as well. We know that standards in schools are low in the north-east, but guess where school readiness is also low: in the north-east. We know that achievement is good in London boroughs, and—guess what—when you look at school readiness measures, they are actually far better in London than in other parts of the country. Let us be clear what we mean by school readiness. It is to be able to listen, to speak, to pay attention, to handle objects, to move confidently, to have self-confidence, and to have social skills. It is those basics that any person needs if they are to stand a chance of doing well throughout life and throughout school.
We know a lot about that group that does not have school readiness. We know that those children are more likely to be poor and more likely to come from families that have ill-health and low skills—not all lazy and dependent on benefits. We know that by the age of five, they will know fewer words than people from middle-class families; that their social and physical skills will be less developed; that their mothers are less likely to have attended antenatal classes; and that their parents are less likely to have accessed what we might call enrichment activities between the child’s age of nought and five. The Government have to ask themselves whether they are doing enough to address the needs of this age group. In truth, all Governments have a tendency to put their efforts, emphasis, money and resources on schools. As somebody who is passionate about schools—and I spent my ministerial time concentrating on schools—I am not inviting the Minister to stop focusing on schools. However, I invite him to consider that the way in which he could most help schools to close the attainment gap is to do more for the age of nought to five.
When I look at what the Government are doing on this, I acknowledge that they have put more money into childcare; I acknowledge the pupil premium, which was part of the coalition. However, the Commission on Social Mobility and Poverty says that the efforts to improve the school readiness of the poorest children are unco-ordinated, confused and patchy.
We know that despite the importance of this nought-to-five period, it is where our least-qualified and lowest-paid teachers are, and where there is less stability. Both the Minister and I could probably quote the floor targets for key stage 1 to GCSE and A-level. I also know by heart the underperforming local authorities or the type of school that is the most underachieving. I think I know what his targets are for every stage of school. I do not know what his targets are for the other years, what he is doing about children’s centres that are falling behind, or what the emergency intervention strategy of the Government is for nought-to-five provision that is not coming up to scratch. When I look through the DfE website, I cannot see a speech the present Secretary of State has made about early years, four or five months into her office. I will stand corrected if the Minister tells me that I am wrong.
Again, the best way to raise standards with some of our children in some of the most challenging schools from the most challenging backgrounds is to reduce the development gap between children when they start school. I very much hope that the Minister might consider adopting that as a target and working toward achieving it.
(8 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, the Minister will know from both his role and his close involvement in academies in London that London is the highest-performing region in our country and the best place to be poor if you want to go to a high-status university. Will the Minister explain what lessons the Government took from the success of London that led them to focus on more selective and grammar schools as a way of giving more opportunities to working-class children?
The noble Baroness is absolutely right. London has been a great success story. It started under the Labour Government with the London Challenge and their academies programme, which we have sought to continue. Of course, there are quite a few schools in London that are selective in one way or another. It is also fair to say that it is much easier to attract teachers in London than in many of the areas of the country where we see these underperforming schools. Although there are many lessons to be learned from London, there are still many coastal towns and former mining villages in this country that seem to have struggled, partly because of intergenerational unemployment and partly because they struggle to attract really good teachers. It is those kinds of issues that we are really keen to focus on.
(8 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, I thank the noble Lord for bringing this debate to the House. It is important, and I start by saying that I agreed with the thrust of his arguments. Although I might quibble over a detail or two, I am basically on his side on this issue. I also look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Finn. I know that she brings a wealth of policy experience and advice to this House and I look forward to watching how she changes from being an adviser to a policymaker. I wish her well and look forward to her speech.
I will start on quite a generous note, given that I agree with the thrust of the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I understand or accept some of the assumptions and concerns that underpin this policy; I faced these things when I was in the noble Lord’s position as an Education Minister. I cannot argue that there are not individuals with a set of skills, usually around subject knowledge, whom I would welcome teaching my children if I had children, or teaching in my school if I was a head teacher. Why would I not want my child to be coached by somebody who is a marvellous football coach or taught music by a marvellous musician? Why would I not assume that the skills and knowledge of a recently trained coder are probably more up to date than those of the IT technology teacher who trained 10 years ago? I accept that and I would like to think that there is a way of bringing those people’s skills to our classroom. However, I fundamentally disagree with the way that the Government have brought this about by saying that teachers in academies and free schools do not need any qualifications at all.
Let us be clear what that means. If we assume that the White Paper that was launched in June is still government policy—I am not sure about that—we will in four years reach a situation where every school is an academy or every school is a free school. That means that every school, no matter whether it is good or bad, whether it has a strong or a weak head or has been rated outstanding or failing in its Ofsted inspection, will be allowed to employ people to teach any subject to any group of people, in any context and in any environment.
That is what we have; that law has been made to accommodate the wish to get a small number of people with specialist skills into the classroom. That is what I am against, and that is why this is such a dangerous policy. It is so dangerous because, whatever else we disagree on across this House, I think that we have all come to the knowledge and understanding that the quality of teaching matters. Call a school what you like, but at the end of the day, the school leader and the school teacher will make the difference.
I have already acknowledged that subject matter is important. You can have all the pedagogical skills in the world but, if you do not know your subject, you are not going to be a good teacher. But the reverse is true as well. You can have all the knowledge in the world but, if you do not know the pedagogy, you are not going to be a good teacher. If you do not know how to keep discipline, you are not going to be a good teacher; if you do not know the skill of asking questions of children in different ways, you are not going to be a good teacher; if you do not know about special educational needs and the needs of statemented children, you are not going to be a good teacher; if you do not know how to assess and feed back, which evidence shows to be the most important thing for a teacher to do well, you will not make a good teacher.
My argument is that you can bring somebody with specialist knowledge into a school, but the other things that make them a good teacher will be things they learn through training to be a teacher. That is what you learn when you get qualified teacher status. I know very few people who could come to the classroom with both the specialist knowledge and all those sets of skills. Essentially, that is why I am so opposed to this policy.
We live in a time when the qualifications of a profession mark out the way that society views it. Many of our top professions require people to have the highest qualifications. For example, they take people from Russell group universities and want people with first-class degrees. Whether or not that makes them better at their job is irrelevant to this argument. It is a mark of the value that society places on the job that they do. Why would we not want the same for the people who teach the next generation? Why would we not want to send the message that they are so important that they need a qualification to do the job? The only senior job I can think of for which you do not need a qualification is that of politician. If this is about making all teachers as skilled, knowledgeable and good as politicians, perhaps that is another reason to think again.
In a way, the Government have acknowledged this. Chapter 2 of the White Paper published in June was particularly good: “Great teachers—everywhere they’re needed”. If you look at the policies in that chapter, you will find few with which I would argue: replace qualified teacher status with a stronger, more challenging accreditation; have only excellent heads approving sign-off for people who get QTS; strengthen training providers; increase ITT content; introduce a qualification for school leaders. All that is in the Government’s White Paper on what makes a good school and what makes a good teacher. If it is so important that it is in a policy document, how can the Government follow that up by saying that it is not needed by everybody who enters the teaching profession?
There are ways in which we can allow people with specialist knowledge and attributes to quickly get a QTS. I do not want to put them through slow routes that bore them and keep them out of the classroom longer than necessary. In my day in the department, we had the graduate teacher route and the registered teacher route, both of which were abolished by the coalition Government. Those routes meant that, if you had that subject knowledge, you could go into a school straight away but would train and get your QTS at the end of one or two years. That is the debate that we should be having about how we can fast-track into the classroom people with a good level of knowledge but without teaching knowledge.
I welcome anybody who wants to come into teaching and has something to offer children. But anybody who wants to enter one of the most important professions in this country should put their hand up and say that they are prepared to get the qualification that society deems important for doing that job. So having looked at both sides—those who are becoming teachers and the Government as the safeguarder of standards—I think that no one should be allowed in our schools if they do not have QTS, or if they are not at least working towards getting it in the foreseeable future.
(9 years, 5 months ago)
Grand CommitteeMy Lords, I thank the noble Earl. Lord Clancarty, for securing this debate. It is very timely given the end of the consultation on the next phase of the English baccalaureate. I join him in inviting the Minister to take note of this debate as part of the responses to the consultation. I agree with everything that the noble Earl said and I do not want to repeat it. Having said that, I think I understand where the Government are coming from as well. That is my starting point.
I am not against maths, English, science, foreign languages, history or geography. I am not against action to promote their learning and to cherish what they offer to the nation. However, I am worried about the way that has been done and the situation in which we now find ourselves.
I remember that when I was first in the job that the Minister is now in, I learned a valuable lesson which sounds easy but escapes your mind. If you say that you have a priority, you are saying two things: first, that I have a priority and, secondly, that I give less priority to the other things. That has been the problem with this story about the English baccalaureate.
I am giving the Government the benefit of the doubt. I do not think they are against music, art, drama, psychology or religious education. I suspect that they access these subjects for their own children and those they care for, so I do not think they are against them. However, I think they have forgotten the point about priorities. When they say that these subjects are important, what is heard is that the other subjects are not important. We should know by now that the English school system will act on that message with a rigour that is unmatched anywhere else in the world. That, therefore, is the problem with picking up the consequences of something that, by itself, was not a bad thing to want.
So we have a problem. One of the problems now is that schools are spending too much time talking about the curriculum and assessment, and how they can fiddle their staffing and their curriculum to get more points through the English baccalaureate. I have sat in too many conversations in the last two to three months where time has been spent on the adjustments that will need to be made to the curriculum to get a higher level in the English baccalaureate. That time should have been spent on teaching, learning and getting better outcomes from students in the classroom. So there is a problem and there is a consequence. The noble Earl made that quite clear.
We are bound by the national curriculum to offer a broad and balanced curriculum. We do not have one. This English baccalaureate is not a broad and balanced curriculum and that, by law, is what we are meant to be achieving. When I tabled a summer debate on the literacy and numeracy strategy, I said, “There is nothing to stop schools doing art, drama and all those things”, and I suspect the Minister may say the same. However, the reality is that schools are not doing so and are losing the facilities needed. The teachers are not being recruited. The time is not being made available.
We have, therefore, two problems. We have people spending time responding to the English baccalaureate and also reality that they are taking teachers away. It is no good the Secretary of State quoting in the consultation King Solomon Academy or Whitmore High School. It is great—fantastic—that they do this and offer the arts as well. However, we cannot have a school system where the law is made up on the assumption that everyone will do the things that Ministers think they should be able to do. On that basis, we should have no need for a school improvement system.
It is not that we are against the subjects of which the Minister is in favour. My question to him is twofold. He has made two mistakes. He has assumed that it is best to pursue a rounded academic curriculum and that these subjects define that. If that is what he believes, he has to defend his belief against all the evidence that shows that it is not the case. Secondly, he has gone back on the most sensible move that, 18 months ago, his Government made towards the Progress 8 measurement. Why on earth has he done so, producing a document two or three months ago that introduces five new accountability measures, all of which involve the English baccalaureate?
(9 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 15C and 16A. I guess that every Member of the House who has children thought long and hard about the school they wanted to send their children to. Finding the right school to meet the needs of a child at both primary and secondary level is crucial. In some cases where there is no suitable school, or which they think is not suitable, parents have gone to the free school movement and established their own schools. In other cases parents with the resources to do so choose to buy a school place in the independent sector. The choice of a school has been a hugely important part of our education system.
As I said in Committee, when a school closes or changes in nature, it is traumatic for the children, traumatic for the parents, and certainly traumatic for the staff. So what are we going to do? Going back to the previous debate, let us consider a school that is failing. The regional schools commissioner, who by the way is not regional and certainly not local, can decide that the school will close and that a sponsor for a new school will be found. There will be no discussion or consultation with parents. It might well be that the school that the regional schools commissioner puts forward is not the school the parent wants—but tough. For a long time, parental choice has been ingrained in, and has been an important part of, our education system. Various Secretaries of State, both Labour and Conservative, have enshrined the idea of parental choice and parental involvement. Surely, it is right that a parent has the opportunity to express their views.
Following Committee stage, I am pleased that the Minister has made some progress in this regard. He chooses to use the word “communication” and not consultation. When the regional schools commissioner has identified an academy sponsor to take over a school eligible for intervention, the sponsor must communicate to parents information about plans to improve the school. When the regional commissioner decides that a school is failing, will they write to every parent telling them what is happening and what will happen so that they have an understanding of why and when? The letter says that there will be guidance as regards schools causing concern and that they may, if they wish to, have a meeting or they may choose just to write to parents. Would it not be a good idea to specify clearly what should be expected of sponsors when taking over a school so that parents have that information?
Crucially, parents want more involvement in education. They want a say in their child’s schooling—everyone here has wanted a say in our child’s schooling. The selection of the sponsor is critical to the child’s future. Not all sponsors, as the Sutton Trust shows, are as effective as others, particularly, for example, in supporting disadvantaged pupils. I shall give an example of where consultation works. The line we have constantly heard—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, repeated it—is that a single day in a failing school is a day too long for that child. A single day in the wrong school is too much for that child. A single day in a school which the parents are unhappy with, or has had foisted on them, is too long. Let me give an example of parents who were consulted and made a change. It happened at a primary school in Medway with a large number of pupils who had special needs. They were not opposed to academisation but they were opposed to the sponsor proposed by the DfE. After consultation, and no doubt a short campaign, the academy withdrew. Presumably, it realised that it had not got the wherewithal to deal with that situation.
The other argument against consultation has been the line that it can drag on for months and years, et cetera, which of course is wrong. But it does not mean that there cannot be a very quick consultation over a few months so that the parents are involved. I hope that even at this late stage the Minister might consider how important consultation is to parents and their children.
My Lords, I will speak only briefly on the amendment because the issue of consultation has been covered in an earlier group. I will make two or three points. For me, consultation is not the most important part of the Bill, but it is an important point of principle. Once we decide something today, it will probably set the pattern for future ways we deal with schools, so it is worth spending some time on.
My first point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, about the now famous phrase that noble Lords have used during the passage of the Bill: “A day in a school that is failing is a day too long”. I am not sure why the consequence of that is that parents should be denied consultation; it should be that the education system gets its act together. Let us say that three years go by in a coasting school—a school is inadequate. It is not a case of who is to blame, but if you ask what went wrong—it could have been poor leadership; something that Ofsted missed; we could have missed the data; we may not have acted quickly enough; support put in might have been at the wrong point at the wrong time—of all the people who could have got it wrong, it probably was not parents. Yet the bit of the system that we change at this point is, “Well, we won’t consult parents”—almost as though they will be the problem, rather than the potential solution. This is not a huge point, but we have to ask why, if a child should not be in a failing school for a day longer, the education system responsible for that should just carry on working and why parents should be squeezed out.
The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, made another point about this terrible phrase, “We are where we are”. It is one of my least favourite phrases, but we are where we are. Over the last 20 years, one of the features that we have put in our education system, which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, just mentioned, is the increasing involvement of parents. I think the noble Lord, Lord True, mentioned what happened in consultation in the grant-maintained days. It is true that it was not a pretty sight, but, believe it or not, that was nearly 30 years ago. Lots of things have happened since then. Whether it is setting up free schools, parents’ right to call in Ofsted inspectors, or the mooted idea that parents should have the right to demand the curriculum, to sack the head or whatever, there has been a trend over the last 20 years of giving parents a louder voice, not only in the education of their own child, which is paramount, but in the education structure their child is in. Whether we like it or not, we are where we are with parental consultation. We have to make a really strong case, given the climate in which we are working, that parents should be excluded on this.
Under new Section 2A(2), introduced by the Minister’s Amendment 24, in a case of a failing school where the academy sponsor has not delivered the goods and must hold some responsibility, and where the department is taking action, the proprietor must be given an opportunity to make representations before the academy sponsor is changed. That is a big issue. If we write into primary legislation that an academy proprietor that has not done a good job—that is why the organisation has been moved out—must have an opportunity to make representations, I am not sure why would want to strike out of legislation the opportunity for parents to make representations as well.
Consulting parents is rarely a bad thing, but it calls for sensitivity and determination, because I do not believe that parents always get it right. I do not agree with the amendment that there should be a plebiscite in all cases and that we should take the action that parents vote for. However, it should be part of this important process.
I will speak also to Amendment 25. I am concerned that the whole tenor of this discussion has almost been, if I may characterise it in this way, along the lines of maintained schools against academies. As we know, there are some fantastic academies; we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Harris, about his schools, which I know to be highly successful. However, I am sure that he will agree with me that just as there are successful academies, there are also some failing academies, which over the years have caused a number of raised eyebrows and concerns. Equally, there are some very good maintained schools and some maintained schools which need sorting out. Whether that is done through an academy route or other means, it needs to happen.
I will first deal briefly with Amendment 25, which is about the inspection of academy chains. We know from media that Michael Wilshaw, our Chief Inspector of Schools, was very keen that the head offices of academy chains were inspected. Why? It is because academy chains deal not just with individual schools but with finance and governance, and all those important issues. Just as we would inspect local authorities that provide services and finance for schools, the same should surely be true of academy chains.
We have seen examples of academy chains where, perhaps because we have not had our finger on the pulse of the financial situation and the governance of those academy chains, we have seen all sorts of concerns. I was going to go through them all, but I have decided to cut short what I am saying. I understand that we can inspect individual schools in batches in academy chains but I will be interested to hear from the Minister in his reply how we can be assured that the issues of finance and other governance matters are dealt with correctly.
Amendment 15D, again, follows the discussion on the previous amendments. Over the next 12 months or two years, thousands of schools will potentially need to find academy sponsors because they are failing, or are coasting and becoming failing, or because academies themselves fail and have to find other new academy sponsors. That will put a tremendous pressure on the system. In this amendment we are saying that if there is a suitable maintained school which has value added above the national average, why not use that school and provide its expertise? It is clear and simple. If we are about ensuring, as we heard in the previous debates, that the pupil gets the best possible schooling and teaching, and if an academy sponsor is not available, why not use a council-maintained school?
My Lords, I will speak on a specific issue to follow up something I raised in Committee and to make reference to a note I received from the Minister’s office this afternoon, which I wanted to put on the record.
On this amendment, considering the difficulty there sometimes is in finding sponsors, we raised in Committee that this is a problem with a number of sponsors and the length of time it has taken in some instances to match a school to a sponsor. The Minister kindly responded to my point in Committee when I asked what the target was for doing the match. He said that there was a 12-week turnover and that 48 schools had not met that 12-week target. That is very reasonable. To get a sponsor matched with a school within 12 weeks is not unreasonable, and I would not complain.
I wrote to the Minister’s office about a month ago asking for a breakdown of how long the schools had been waiting that were in the 48 that had exceeded the time limit. I got a message by email only at the start of this debate. To tell noble Lords the truth, I am quite prepared to sit down and be told that I have read it wrongly, because I find the statistics rather worrying. If that is the case, I apologise in advance and will make sure that the correction is on the record. Of the 48 schools that were just inadequate, which exceeded the 12-week brokerage time, 16 took six to 12 months, 19 took 12 to 18 months, 12 took 18 to 24 months, and one took over 24 months. Therefore the department took over two years to find a suitable sponsor for one school which had been judged inadequate. A quick add-up shows that 32 took over one year. We have heard all about “A child shall not stay in a school that’s failing them for one day longer than necessary”, but who is responsible for that? Who is responsible for those children in that one school where it took the department over two years to find a sponsor? Who is responsible for the 32 that took over 12 months to find a sponsor? I am making a political point, but I am worried about the path we are going along, which has this as the only route and only solution for inadequate schools. Now we will add to it a whole lot more coasting schools and thereby increase the demand for sponsors, and the department seems to be failing miserably in delivering the sponsors in sufficient time. That leads me to conclude as regards this amendment that perhaps we need to look at alternative ways of finding sponsors and support if we go ahead.
Can the Minister ask his officials to convert the email to me into a letter to all Members of the Committee and place a copy in the House so that it can be seen alongside other correspondence which has been part of the consideration of the Bill?
Will the noble Baroness accept that the appointment of the regional schools commissioners has very much changed the landscape? The regional schools commissioners, who will be responsible for finding suitable sponsors, will know their patch, so to speak; they will know the sponsors that are available in the area and will be much quicker. There will not be the long delay there was in a very hard-pressed and overstretched central department in the Department for Education.
Very briefly, on Amendment 25, I am not sure exactly how Ofsted could inspect a sponsor. A sponsor is a business, with its finance, administration and human resources. That is not Ofsted’s business. Ofsted inspects education, not what a sponsor does, so I find that puzzling in the extreme.
Those figures are from November of this year, and the regional schools commissioners had already been in place. If demand is increased, the regional schools commissioners will be exceptionally overworked, and I am not as optimistic as the noble Baroness that they will solve the problem.
My Lords, surely the point is that the RSCs still cover a huge area. When we debated this matter in Grand Committee, we were told by the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, that there were 778 approved sponsors and about 20% were waiting to be matched with schools, but we were not told about the long delays. In our earlier debate we were told that a one-day delay would have a crucial impact on the lives of children, and I understood that argument. However, it appears that the great academisation process in itself induces months of delay in certain places and for certain schools.
I would be glad if the Minister would take away and consider the amendment between now and Third Reading. All it is saying is that there may be some circumstances where there is no suitable academy—and that is why it is taking so long—and a local authority or a maintained school might have a role to play. I would have thought that the Minister could give this a little consideration.
(9 years, 7 months ago)
Grand CommitteeThe answer to the noble Lord’s question is that we are not saying that, obviously; but as we made clear ad nauseam the last time we were here, there have been 1,500 failing maintained schools converted to academies, many of them very recently, all of which have been performing badly, many of them for years, under local authority-maintained status.
But it is also agreed that one in seven of the schools that converted from the maintained sector as excellent or outstanding stand-alone academies went on to require improvement or serious measures.
If we are arguing about statistics, will the Minister accept that the one I gave was given in a reply from his department?
There are 778 approved sponsors and about 20% are waiting to be matched with schools. The noble Lord asked which schools may need sponsoring. The precise number will vary from year to year and will depend on Ofsted inspections and test and examination results. We anticipate that as many as 1,000 failing maintained schools could potentially become sponsored academies under the new measures.
I think the issue about how long schools wait before they find a match with a sponsor is very important. I had heard anecdotally—so this is the Minister’s opportunity to put it on the record—that quite a number of schools are now known as orphan schools because they have been taken away from one sponsor and have not yet been given another one. Does the department have a target time in which an alternative or a first sponsor should be found? What is the department’s record on achieving that target?
We look for a sponsoring match to happen as quickly as possible but one of the issues that this Bill is attempting to address is the delays caused by the very process that schools have to undergo at the moment.
My question is not about that. Perhaps the Minister will write if she is not in a position to answer it now. It is not about the delay at the school end, it is about the delay at the department’s end in finding a suitable sponsor. Are there some schools—colloquially known as orphan schools—waiting for either an initial sponsor or a second sponsor? Also, does her department have a target time in which a sponsor must be found and what is the department’s record in reaching that target?
My Lords, I, too, support Amendment 17 and have great sympathy with the intentions behind Amendment 16, which I think raises the same question but addresses it from a different angle. Let us be clear: we all share the same ambitions of all schools being good schools and of action being taken if they are coasting or failing. Nobody is against that and sometimes it is important to restate that, because we get pushed to either extreme in arguing the points. So we are all on the same side in that, but the amendment tries to explore some of the options regarding what action should be taken. That is where the difference of opinion is—on the question of what to do, not on the need to take action. Therefore, we should try to resist accusing each other of not caring about kids in failing schools. That is not why we are in this business and why we are sitting in this Room.
The amendment picks out two or three weaknesses in the Bill. The first thing to do is to address failing and struggling academies in the same conversation and piece of legislation that address other schools. I cannot see that politically there is much wrong with that, and practically I am not sure why one structure should be excluded from the consideration. Therefore, I welcome the fact that what happens to failing academies is brought into this discussion. The only reason for excluding it from the discussion would be either if you believed that there was no such thing as a failing academy, which we know is not the case, or if you could honestly guarantee that merely moving it to another academy sponsor would always, in every single circumstance without any possible exception, be the solution. Even if you thought that, I do not know why you would want to put that in primary legislation, because if it is true now, it might not be true next term or the year after or the year after that. That is essentially what is being done in this part of the legislation. It is putting in primary legislation that either an academy will never fail or the solution will always be another sponsor. We are saying that the solution will sometimes be another sponsor but not always, so we should not leave out from primary legislation the option of taking a different course of action.
I think we also agree that an option might be school-to-school support. That might involve getting in good teachers from other schools to lead. Something that we have not taken up as a generic point is that schools need to belong. I believe in interdependence as much as independence for schools. The umbrella organisation under which a school lives, survives and is supported and which challenges the school is important. That is essentially what this argument is about. At the moment, we have two types of umbrellas: we have academy chains and multi-academy trusts—two phrases for the same thing—and we have local authorities. All we are saying here is that sometimes one will be the solution and sometimes it will be the other.
I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, who is far more experienced than anybody else in this Room in dealing with failing and underachieving schools. I hope he accepts that none of us—certainly not me and I think I can speak for all my colleagues on the Labour Bench—would justify a failing school being with a failing local authority. That would not make sense. The most important point that the noble Lord made was in his contribution to the first group of amendments. He said that you have to ask yourself: if a school is coasting, why has the local authority not taken action? Sometimes you will come to the conclusion that the school has not been well supported by the family of which it is a member and that it would be better off with another family. That is why the Labour Government put lots of schools into academy chains.
However, sometimes the solution is to do something about the local authority. I spent three years in the department doing something about local authorities and I shall pick out just three—Hackney, Islington and Liverpool, on all of which I led the interventions. The noble Lord will remember that they were all absolutely miserable local authorities and miserable families to belong to, but I do not think that any school now would not be proud to be part of Islington, Hackney or Liverpool. The irony is that every one of them had a different solution: Hackney’s was a trust; Islington was put with a not-for-profit partner; and Liverpool got new leadership at local authority level and is now doing well. So I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, does not think that, whatever this debate is about, the Labour Bench is excusing poor local authorities.
To be honest, it was the Labour Government who took action against poor local authorities because the Tories before us had not do so; no one had taken action by 1997. It was us who brought in the legislation and us who took the action. We have been around long enough to know that sometimes there are good local authorities where you would want to place a school. So should we really say that where you have a failing academy in a good local authority, we do not want a solution whereby it cannot be part of that local authority family of schools? Why can that not be one of the solutions? We are not saying that it must in all circumstances, but why can a failing academy in a good local authority not become part of that family of schools?
Although the amendment does not say so, I would also ask why it cannot become part of a multi-academy trust run by a maintained school. I was in the Lilian Baylis school last week with a Select Committee, and it was utterly outstanding—it was a joy to spend the morning there. However, it is not an academy, so it cannot set up a multi-academy trust. I do not know why you would deny a school neighbouring Lilian Baylis the right to belong to a multi-academy trust set up and led by Lilian Baylis, which is an outstanding and exceptional school. It is not allowed to do it until it becomes an academy. That is the nature of the discussion; it is not about whether to take action but about whether we are closing down options on doctrinaire grounds that would be better left open.
My last question has not been answered, so I take this opportunity to ask it. If Clause 7 goes ahead, it will place an awful lot more responsibility on regional schools commissioners. From my involvement in a number of regions, which are very large, I know that the commissioners are really stretched. I am not confident that they have the resources to do the jobs that are asked of them. If they get these additional responsibilities, will the Minister take this opportunity to let the Committee know what estimates he has made about what extra resources regional schools commissioners will have and what allocation of resources he will undertake?
I shall briefly respond, since I have been challenged on this—and that is good, because I respect my noble friend and what she has achieved over the years, not least in looking at local authorities. There is a separate question of how you deal with local authorities that are not performing; the Ofsted inspection of local authorities is one way of going about it. That is a very important question but the question today, in this Bill, is when you have notification from the DfE or wherever that a school is coasting and the evidence is all there, what you do tomorrow? The Bill suggests a route that has proven evidential foundations. No one is claiming that all academies are perfect; there are some real problems. On the other hand—this is where the point about local authorities comes in, and I want to clarify my own position here—I would not want to hand that school back to the local authority under which it developed the position of either coasting or failing. There has to be a route through that, which is what the Bill attempts to do. The local authority has all its democratic processes, education committees and the lot—they are all there. If the school was allowed to drift into coasting status, action is needed, and the last action I would recommend is to go back to the same local authority.
My Lords, I did not intend to intervene in this debate, except from my experience of trying to deal with schools that are failing. In my former constituency, I had a terrible case of failing schools on two occasions. My experience is that we have to face the fact that the time taken to put such schools right has been unbelievably long. The fact that that has been the case has put the Government into this position. Normally, I would have supported many of the arguments that have been made by the party opposite. I have lived through generations of children who have suffered because we could not take urgent action. I do not think that we should make these decisions without a real understanding of the history.
Listening to the debate, I want to say two things. First, I say to the noble Baroness that I do not think that law should set out a list of all the people who you might consult when you are consulting. It really is up to the people doing the consultation to decide who it should be. Of course it is true that people will naturally turn to a list which will not be dissimilar to that of the noble Baroness, but we have become very prescriptive about who would and would not be on the list. I can think of several other people who I would want to put on the list in particular places. For example, in the very bad situation that we were in in Felixstowe, I would want to put on the list discussion with local businesses about what they needed to give decent futures to the boys and girls in the schools that were so obviously failing. I could make a list that would be as credible as the one that the noble Baroness wants.
The trouble is that once you write a list like that, those who do not happen to be on it become kind of second-class citizens. However, I think that the noble Baroness would agree that by the time we put them, the church authorities, in circumstances in which that were appropriate for the school, and everyone else that we have talked about on the list, it would be as long as your arm. It seems to me very much better to have the formation presented by the Government. This was a good debate to have, but it would not progress our discussions to have that list.
Far more concerning are the comments made just now from the Opposition Front Bench. I listened with great care to the noble Lord as he put forward his case. I thought he was a little over the top in coming close to claiming that the Government were somehow dictating inappropriately and tying that up with almost everything else that the Government have done. Of course he does not like the Government; that is what he is there for. I have been in that position, and I know exactly what he is there for.
Let us be a little bit historically accurate. The truth is that local authorities for a very long time presided over a system where, when things went wrong, few things were done about it. We have all experienced that. I experienced it in a school in Leiston, where generations of children were disrupted because the local authority would not make the changes. That was a local authority whose political complexion I agreed with, so I am not making a party-political comment, I am making a comment about the historic facts of local authority control. It was very difficult to make serious changes. There was a curious belief that in this one aspect of life, the way things are done had to move at a very slow pace.
So it is quite understandable why the Government feel that there may well be an elongation of necessary steps. The reason that I am on the Government’s side is that, in the end, I am on the side of those children. I start with the children. Indeed, I remember having a very big argument with the secretary-general of the National Union of Teachers who had the effrontery to have over her stall at the Conservative Party conference the words, “Putting teachers first”. I said that that was not what she should be doing; she should be putting children first. The fact that she refused to accept that changed my views about the unionisation of teachers in a very direct way, and anybody who sees the annual teachers’ conferences will see the best advertisement for home schooling I have ever come across. There is a long history of this, and we have to break it. We have to break it for those children who will otherwise be trapped since so many schools are the unique opportunity that a child has. I am prepared to go a long way with the Minister, and I hope very much that we shall see this work. I am quite sure we can come back to it if it does not, but the one thing we cannot allow is a position in which children are condemned for long periods in failing schools. It is a risk worth taking.
It is like being in Piccadilly Circus in this Room at the moment. I shall speak briefly to this group and particularly in favour of Amendment 20 which is exceptionally reasonable and rather mild. I share some of the concerns about tick-box consultation, asI did when I was a Minister. You put the list of people in, and it becomes too mechanical if you do not watch it because the essence of consulting is lost. However, I have some reservations about Amendment 19.
I understand where the Minister is coming from on this because I experienced the same thing. I have a memory of a school in Leeds where 2% of pupils got five As to Cs. I had parental demonstrations against me taking action to close it down. I also saw the most awful demonstrators every time I went to intervene in a local authority. There is a bit of me that thinks—I wonder whether the Minister could stop talking to the other Minister because it is really disconcerting; this is a Committee to discuss the Bill, not to sort out other shenanigans—that that is the nature of the job. That is democracy. We are not Russia or North Korea. The nature of the job is that sometimes you get what you think is the most unreasonable opposition and it drives you mad. You feel like you have had a bad day at the office, but you have to get up and go through it again the next day. That is the nature of being a Minister in a democratic institution.
Some of the examples that the Minister has given during the passage of the Bill about interventions, particularly those he gave in his Second Reading speech in the discussions about Pimlico Academy, would not be stopped by Amendment 20 because all it does is state that the Secretary of State must call a meeting with the parents of the children in the school to explain what she is about to do and that she must take into account what they say. It has nothing to do with the sort of disruptions I had and which the Minister referred to at Second Reading. That is life, and it has to be got on with. This is about consulting the parents.
The other thing I learnt in difficult situations of this sort is that it is easier if you take parents with you. This is massive change for a school and the parents worry. Change frightens us all, and by not explaining it to parents and asking their view, you run the risk of driving them into opposition. What are they hiding? What are they fearing? Why do they not want to hear my view? As the Minister’s view will not be there, there will be murmurs in the playground and at the school gate, which means that consultation will take place by rumour, fact and misfact. You are not going to stop parents talking about what is happening and you are not going to stop them expressing their view. They will go and get the placards and oppose an academy conversion, whereas in some cases an academy conversion might be exactly right. I ask the Minister to split off in his mind his experience, because we should not be writing legislation on the basis of one Minister’s personal experience, and that perfectly understandable annoying aggravation which is the nature of being a Minister in a democracy. Look at Amendment 20 and explain how, when you are bringing about massive change that affects a group of children and their parents, you can possibly explain to them that it is unreasonable to call a meeting, invite them to attend, explain what you are going to do, listen to what they say, and take their views into account.
My Lords, the group of amendments including Amendment 19 proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and Amendments 20 and 22 proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, focus on the involvement of parents and others in decisions where schools are underperforming as well as in decisions about the conversion of schools which are performing well. I also hope to use this debate to reiterate why Clause 8 is so fundamental and should stand part of the Bill.
Why the new and strengthened intervention powers in the Bill apply only to local authority maintained schools and not to academies features again in Amendment 22. I hope that following our debates at the first Committee session and earlier today, many of which probed our approach to failing and coasting academies, noble Lords will be reassured that regional schools commissioners already take swift and effective action where an academy is not performing well.
The other main issue raised by Amendments 20 and 22 is the involvement of parents when a school is eligible for intervention and will either be required to become an academy by virtue of being a failing school, or may be subject to an academy order or other form of intervention where it is identified as coasting or has failed to comply with a warning notice. Looking first at schools which have failed and have been judged to be inadequate by Ofsted, as I have already said, we are clear in the Bill and in our manifesto that any failing school must become an academy with the support of a sponsor. It is illogical to retain consultation on whether a school should convert when our manifesto makes it so clear that that would be the outcome.
Clause 8 is also vitally important because we want transformation to take place from day one. As I said, the Bill will ensure that the academy conversion process for such schools will be as swift as possible, not delayed through debates about whether a school should become an academy or not. That is also why Clause 8 removes the requirement for consultation on whether a school should become an academy. Maura Regan, CEO of the Carmel Education Trust, a passionate woman who noble Lords heard from at last week’s event, summarises the case better than I can. She said that the difficulty with allowing a consultation or vote about whether a school should convert to academy status is that it is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. The adults’ perspective will largely always be skewed or biased. Moving swiftly to transform the school is about championing the interests of the child over and above many stakeholders not able or willing to grasp the long-term wider view. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, who made similar comments last week in Committee and to the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, who made similar comments in an earlier debate.
As I said at the outset, this is about putting children first. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, takes objection to the words “for too long the interests of adults have stood in the way of a child’s education in circumstances where a school is failing”, but sadly events prove that to be the case time and time again. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Deben for his very eloquent remarks. It seems that we have a fundamentally different sense of urgency on this side of the Committee compared with noble Lords on the other side. I have great respect for the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but it is as simple as that.
My Lords, I cannot allow that to stand. I requested in the previous debate that we did not throw that kind of remark across. I hope that the Minister would wish to put on record that no one on this side does not have a sense of urgency. If the Minister is going to do nothing while a school is converted to an academy, then shame on him because other things can be done while a discussion, a meeting with parents, takes place. The school’s hands are not tied with regard to changing the head teacher, getting someone in to help, putting challenge in and doing other things rather than converting to an academy. He might end up disagreeing with us but I hope he will not rest on the argument that it is because we are prepared to sit on our backsides while children fail. That is not the case, and I think he knows that if he thinks about it carefully.
I fully accept that on both sides of the House we want to put the interests of children first. Maybe we have a different approach to doing that. I have already described to the House that once a sponsor has been identified for a failing school, sponsors will be keen to engage with parents about their plans for the school, ensuring that parents understand what will happen next and have the opportunity to share their views on the sponsor’s approach. Widnes Academy is just such an example. The performance of the predecessor maintained school, West Bank Primary School, had declined and in May 2013 it was put into special measures by Ofsted. The Innovation Enterprise Academy, a high-performing local secondary academy, was named as the sponsor for the school, and its first action was to engage with parents, pupils and staff to seek their views about how the new academy should operate.
(9 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Blunkett on his maiden speech. It was a privilege to have been here. I have worked out that it is well over a decade since he and I spoke in the same education debate in one of the Chambers of these Houses of Parliament, so it is very good to have him by my side again. Speaking in front of your former boss is never easy—I know he will read Hansard—but I shall do my best.
I want to start on a note of agreement. Perhaps the main purpose of this Bill is to address what we call coasting schools, and I do not differ in my view that that needs to be done. I want to make sure that every child has a good chance and that every school succeeds, but there is a debate about how we define coasting. I listened carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, and have huge respect for him, but part of the problem is that the notion of coasting has that idea of lack of progress over time. He is right that the minute you start measuring between fixed points, you build in a delay in terms of actually doing something about it. I am sure that in Committee we will want to look at that definition. We all know the sort of school we are talking about, even though it might be difficult to define it. I have only one plea on this to the Minister. From what I have heard and read so far—he has mentioned this a number of times—this is partly about schools dropping below target. I remember, when I was in his job, that the coasting schools that worried me were those that were at 70% but that should have been at 90%. We need to be careful that we do not equate coasting with low attainment. That can certainly be true, but sometimes somewhere with 50% is not coasting and somewhere with 85% is coasting. The whole area of how we address that is quite critical.
I agree of course with the main objective of the Bill—to tackle coasting schools and ratchet up our wish to have every school improve. I also agree with the need to change. The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, was right, although I am not sure he is right now. I remember the first school that went into Ofsted special measures, which I think was a primary in County Durham or somewhere up in the north of England. At that time teachers were very resistant to change, but I do not think that is the case now as much as it was. They were resistant, but when I go round schools now I can see that they faced up to the weaknesses in their own performance and that they want the best for children. They are just like us: they want every school to succeed and every child to have a decent chance. The problem now is working with them to work out what change is needed. Some resist, but not everyone.
That really takes us to the core of the Bill. My comments will be very much like those of a noble friend who spoke earlier because, when I look at what I think are the two core beliefs of the Bill, I do not think they deliver that objective, which we share. I accept the need for change, but I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, about whether the only change worth anything is a change to an academy. I want change and want to put pressure on schools. I am not satisfied with where we are, but I do not believe that moving to an academy is always the right way forward.
I follow the noble Lord, Lord Harris, in speaking. I love listening to him: it is like all my dreams coming true as somebody who cares about education and children. In the noble Lord, we have a man who has succeeded at running an academy chain, and I take my hat off to him for what he has achieved. We need to somehow replicate him. However, the truth is that not every academy chain is like the noble Lord’s. I do not want to go over the figures again, but the Minister has to face up to the fact that there is no evidence that academies are a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of failing schools. We hear too infrequently in this Chamber the stories about non-academies that have done the same thing as academies. I could pull heartstrings about kids who have gone to Oxbridge, whose lives have been turned around and whose families will be different generation after generation because of what a school has done, where that school was a maintained comprehensive school. It does not matter. We know what our predecessors did not know: what matters is not the title on the door of the school but the quality of the teaching and the leadership that takes place in it, which can be found in maintained schools as well as in academies.
That is my problem with the Government’s approach. The importance of the Bill is that it takes us to that point of no return. This has been a long battle and a long debate but, when this Bill is passed, we really will be on the way to a fully academised system. That is dangerous, for all the reasons mentioned by my noble friend Lady Hughes. It is dangerous because we do not know what our world will look like under total academisation. I will not rehearse the figures, apart from one which, for me, is so important in making the Minister face up to the evidence which he seems to be ignoring and which his party is responsible for. The last big education Bill, which the Minister mentioned, introduced stand-alone academies. It was a very simple Bill: it was not about the tough end of the market or those schools that were failing kids or coasting, but about the easy end of the market. They were good or outstanding schools, and they were allowed to become stand-alone academies. Do you know what has happened in the five years since? One in seven of them has gone into the category of “requires improvement” or special measures.
When the Minister runs a department that has seen the consequences of his previous attempt to make every school an academy, how can he not face up to the fact that it does not work for everyone? That is my problem. It is not that I do not like academies—I will tell stories of academies. I want someone in government to tell the story of schools that are not academies but are doing well, because it matters. The fact that we have a Department for Education that is essentially a department for academies and a Minister for School Standards who is essentially a Minister for academies matters, because it creates the environment in which everyone else is trying to work. It focuses on structures, not standards, as we have heard. It is a false prospectus, because it seeks to guarantee magic success if you become an academy, and it is not relevant to or suitable for all people.
What really bothers me is that it drains the energy out of the school system. I go to a lot of schools, and they are focused on when the department is coming to get them to change to be an academy. You hear things like, “The department has phoned me. They are coming up to see me. Does it mean that they want us to become an academy?”. Schools see it as a field force for turning them into academies. That is not what the Department for Education is meant to be. It is meant to serve every child. It is meant to put as many resources and staff and as much money into maintained schools as academies. It is meant to go to maintained schools and say, “We will help you, and the solution may not be an academy”. That is not the sort of department that the Government are running, and it worries me stiff, because it is not the way to do things.
My worry with this area of policy is not that academies are wrong but that we have an Animal Farm situation where it is, “Academies good, everything else bad”. We know the end of the story in Animal Farm, and that worries me a great deal.
When the noble Lord introduced the Bill in the previous Parliament, he made it appear as though he could run all schools from Whitehall. He has realised that he cannot and that he was wrong, so he has introduced school commissioners. I register one point of concern about commissioners. They are run off their feet, their areas are too large, they are insufficiently resourced and they cannot do the job that is expected of them.
Let us understand what has happened. The Government have created a new tier of regional government: unelected, unaccountable, with no obligation to parents, answerable to nobody but the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and the department, but essentially regional government. When one of the main thrusts of academisation is to get local government out of the picture, I do not understand why the answer must be to impose regional government on the education system in the form of the commissioners. It is not about the individuals. I think that the noble Lord has picked some really good men and women to do the job; I take my hat off to them. In the long term, it is not an answer to the problems that he has himself caused by deciding that he could run everything from Whitehall.
As my noble friend Lady Hughes said, that is a nonsensical approach to devolution to local authorities. I tried to make a list. What we have had from this Government is that a local council can be trusted with the public health budget but not to nominate the members of an interim executive board for a school. A local authority can be given the whole of the skills budget, which is several million pounds, but it cannot open an order to close a school. A local authority can be trusted with the transport infrastructure for the region but is not allowed to talk to an academy sponsor without the permission of the Minister. I do not know where that is going because, if those local authorities are good enough to be the powerhouses of our country, they are good enough to do those things with our schools.
That point must be answered, because it is the third central weakness at the core of the report: one size fits all, from now on it is academies or nothing; regional commissioners taking over from the Government, insufficiently resourced with no accountability to anyone; and a total lack of faith in local authorities.
I respect the Minister greatly, but this is a “Me, me, me” Bill—“Only I can do it, only I can decide what the school should be”. It is scraping the barrel—“Only I can decide who can be a member of an interim executive board in Wigan”. How that message will build partnerships with the other people in the school system with whom the Minister and his team have to work, I fail to realise.
Let me finish on a positive note, as we agree on so much. We are the lucky generation. When the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who is not in his place at the moment, started school improvement—as I always say that he did—the department did not have the evidence about what works. We do. Three decades of successive Governments working on school improvement in partnership with schools and others has showed us what works. It is the quality of leadership, what happens in the classroom, high aspirations and good values. Nowhere in that evidence list does it say, “Every school needs to be an academy, and do not trust local authorities”.
(10 years, 1 month ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, I should like to comment on the parts of the gracious Speech that deal with education and children’s policy. In doing so I welcome some of the measures in the gracious Speech and other measures which the Government have indicated they will take forward in the coming months. I welcome the principle of extra childcare, although as we have heard today there are a lot of questions that need to be asked. The changes to the adoption process are well intentioned and will probably mean a better deal for more children. I certainly welcome the Government’s intention to continue with the pupil premium, and I hope that they will continue their work with vocational qualifications, where I think they had a good record in the last Parliament.
In particular in the debate today, I share with the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, the ambition to raise standards in schools. Whatever else may divide us, I do not doubt any noble Lord’s wish to make sure that every child receives a good-quality education and leaves school with the skills and attitudes they need to survive in the world, to contribute to society and to flourish. It is perhaps timely to recognise the progress that has been made. I always say that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, started the revolution way back in 1988. Since then it has been non-stop change. In that time we have seen every measure of success improve: twice as many children achieve five A to C grades, including in English and maths.
It also behoves us to remind ourselves that when we are talking about improvement, whatever we do here the real difference lies in the quality of the teaching and leadership in our schools. That is how we should measure the proposals that have been put forward. Anything politicians or Governments do must be judged by whether it is likely to improve the way head teachers lead schools and the way teachers teach.
I turn to the legislation on the extension of academies. This is important legislation, but let us be clear: it is not about whether individual academies are good schools. I could join the noble Lord, Lord Nash, in citing many academies that have done a good job and I have been delighted to visit many of them. I have seen the extra capacity that a sponsor brings. I have shared in the joy when schools have been turned around, and we can only rejoice that more children have more life chances. I could also give an equally long list of non-academy schools that have done exactly that.
However, I do not take away from the successful performance of many individual academies. The proposed Bill in the gracious Speech is not about that; it is about whether academies should spearhead the next stage of school improvement and in effect become the predominant school structure, particularly for secondary schools. The Bill is looking at an education system that is at a tipping point. More than half of our secondary schools are already academies, and the Bill will contain proposals to limit the right of people to object to schools changing to academy status. They are the very same parents who are being told in different legislation that they are the people who know best what is good for their children, but no doubt we will return to this during the passage of the legislation.
If we are to take that step and have academies spearhead all school improvement, which would be a pivotal step and a big moment in the development of education policy, the Government have to give evidence and assure us on three counts: first, that these schools deliver better results for more children than any other type of school; secondly, that it justifies the expenditure and human resource that will need to be put into making the transition; and, thirdly, that it does no harm to other already successful parts of the school system. Although I admire individual academy schools, I am not persuaded that any of those three criteria can be met. Despite the individual success stories, there is no evidence that the success of academies as a group justifies them being given the pre-eminent position in our education system that the Government suggest.
I put forward this evidence. Five years ago we passed legislation in this House that set up what were known as stand-alone academies: academies that were judged by Ofsted to be “good” or “outstanding” could convert very easily from maintained to academy status. One in seven of those schools was subsequently categorised as “requires improvement” or went into special measures. Ofsted has found that we do not just have a postcode lottery in maintained schools: more than eight out of 10 sponsor-led academies in London are “good” or “outstanding”; only just over three out of 10 are in the east of England. Academies have not got rid of that postcode lottery; whether you get a good school depends on where you go to school.
Although the Sutton Trust noted the very high performance of academy chains such as Harris and ARK, it concluded that most academy chains,
“are not achieving distinctive outcomes compared to mainstream schools”.
That is why the Select Committee that looked at academies and the evidence behind them concluded:
“Academisation is not always successful nor is it the only proven alternative for a struggling school”.
Quite frankly, there are still too many unanswerable questions and points of weakness in a school system that would be made up only of academies. Oversight of these schools by the Department for Education leaves a lot to be desired. It is still not clear what happens when an academy fails, and we have still not sorted out how much local authorities’ responsibility for standards is then matched with giving them powers to intervene in academies.
That is why I am worried about this Bill and why it will need very special attention when it comes to the House. Quite frankly, the Minister and his department have lost their ability to think critically about academies. The phrase “the emperor and his new clothes” comes to mind. I cannot ever recall seeing a Select Committee report where the responsible government department disengaged from the issue and the debate as much as the Department for Education did with the report on academies. In the words of the Select Committee,
“the DfE failed to address our terms of reference and instead presented a sustained paean of praise to the success of the policy”.
That is no way to develop policy on one of the most important services that we provide and that ensures for all of us the next generation that we would want.
The Government are making a mistake that many of their predecessors have made: they wish to find a school structure that can give all the answers to all the problems that we have. I have counted 17 different school structures since the end of the war in 1945; none has managed to deliver all the improvement that we want. I only wish it was that easy. I look forward to the debates on the Bills that have been in outlined in the gracious Speech when they are presented to the House of Lords. They will indeed cause debate, but there are many serious questions that the Government will need to answer.
(10 years, 11 months ago)
Grand CommitteeMy Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, for allowing us to have this debate. I did not realise that we had not had the opportunity to discuss the guidance, which is very important. I thank her for giving us that opportunity. There are problems with careers education guidance at the moment, and I want to say something about that, but let me be clear that there were problems with Connexions as well. We have not got it right for 20 years, so it is not a party-political point. Successive Governments just have not got this right, and I want to address why that might be the case.
One point that has not been said is that we all understand and know about the importance of careers education and guidance for everyone, but for no one more than the youngster trying to break away from the pattern of employment that their family has had for generation after generation. How it plays into that social mobility agenda and opportunity agenda is huge.
When I look at the guidance, I cannot argue with any single aspect of it. Having employer engagement is great; having employers in school is fantastic; work experience is wonderful; raising aspirations and showing people new visions is just what we want. It is right that schools should have a choice in who provides the services for the children in their care. I also like the encouragement that schools are getting to use destination information. When I look at the component parts that address the careers problem, I cannot argue against them. So why is it not working? That is what I really wanted to look at. In truth, the problem is that it does not hang together. Although all the elements are good and sound, every single one of them risks failing and is likely to fail in a considerable number of schools throughout this country.
If we take businesses, it is great that there is business involvement but, during my very early years of teaching, I used to be a careers teacher, and I can tell your Lordships that some of the most difficult classes I had were when I had an employer in who was not very good at talking to recalcitrant 14 year-old boys. So the notion that the minute you get employers in it is all wonderful is just not true. Our children get good-quality work experience, but if you are in an inner-city comprehensive school, trying to get that quality work experience with no external help for a cohort of 200 students a year is very difficult.
If we look at the structure of schools themselves, none of them do not care about what happens to their children but all the levers are against them doing the careers education and guidance right. It is not just that there is a history of saying that the best thing is to stay until the sixth form and go on to university, as has been said today. Schools carry that weight and history with them, but they are also rewarded for saying that. They are seen to be better schools because sixth forms mean more money and more pupil funding for that age range. All the incentives are for them not to send children into apprenticeships or down to the local college.
Children have to make a decision, but the areas of the curriculum where that used to be encouraged—PSHE and citizenship—are no longer there. The problem is that Ministers will always be able to give us examples of where there is really good practice. However, to be really honest, the chances of all those elements hanging together to provide universal careers provision across the country—of them being brought together by a school that puts it top of its priority list—are next to none. This cannot be a subject where some kids miss out. We have to be able to guarantee that it is available for everyone.
I want to look at something which I think is not often mentioned. I remember that when I was a young careers teacher, I always used to think that there were really three elements to it. You had to give the child information and aspiration—the tools to get some stuff into his or her head. You also had to give them the skill to assess their own strengths and where they were—what was and was not reasonable. But the most difficult thing was getting them to make the decision and, having made it, to stick with it for the rest of their school life. We sometimes underestimate how difficult it is, especially with some children, to equip them with the skills to make the decision and stick with it. I often think of this analogy: anyone who has been house hunting knows of the huge gap between really liking a house and saying, “Yes, I’ll buy it”. It is exactly the same thing as saying, “I really like that job. I wonder if I could do it”. But jumping in and staying with it for years, throughout the rest of your career, is very difficult.
I hope that I do not often say this, but I do not think that we have ever had anything as good as the careers service that we had in the 1980s, when I was teaching. Certainly in my area, which was Coventry, we were an exemplar. As a careers teacher, I taught careers guidance lessons, but we had, devolved from the Coventry careers service, a careers officer who was full time and two assistants. I pay tribute to Bill Grantham, who was our careers officer. So what the children had in our office was not just my skills as a teacher but his skills as a careers officer and those of his team.
It was he who gave the impartial advice; it was he who said, “Is that what you want to do? Well, this is how you need to go about it”. Most crucially, it was he who gave the school leadership and the teachers the confidence to put careers at the centre of what they did. We were not equipped to do it, but with him there, by our side, on our senior management team, we had the cohesion that is so often lacking. I hope that, on this occasion, learning some lessons from the past may stand us in good stead for the future.