Children and Families Bill
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
I listened very carefully to the Minister. I think we will all want to read his comments in Hansard because it was quite a technical response, although I appreciate that that was absolutely necessary. I have a query about the phrase “single point of access”, which I would not mind him expanding on.
A lot was said about the difficulties of parents in accessing more than one tribunal. That is right. Has the Minister reflected on the message it gives to those people we are asking to integrate a service? A lot of people doubt that that can happen and will not take the Government seriously on this. If you really want to change the culture of three separate public services, you must not give them an excuse not to make the change. Throughout the discussion of this Bill, we have said that it is not about passing a law but about changing the culture. Having such a pivotal part of the whole procedure still split into three separate parts is actually saying, “At the end of day, we could not do it. We wanted to integrate, but when it got to the tough bit, the bit about the appeal, we, the Government, could not do it”. The naysayers will say, “There you are. We told you it couldn’t be done”. I know it is not the Minister’s intention, but what will happen is that that will ripple down the system, and people will say there that there is another inconsistency in what the Government say and that they say one thing and then do a different thing. The bit of the process that is the Government’s responsibility is the appeal. If we cannot change government culture and get it integrated, we are undermining genuine attempts by the Government to change the culture further along the channel.
I was not clear about what the Minister said. He gave two responses. One was, “I really think this amendment is right, but I do not think it can be done”, and the other was, “I do not think this amendment is necessary”. I was not sure which side he came down on. It is important that we know that between now and Report because that will give those people who feel strongly about this an indication of where the campaigning needs to be done.
I end on this single point of access. I wonder whether the Minister was actually saying that he has a compromise that he might suggest on Report around something called a single point of access. I am sorry for the long intervention, but what we can expect on Report in terms of a direction of travel is important so that people who have put a lot of work into preparing these amendments will be able to marshal their arguments.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
I have a great deal of sympathy with what the noble Baroness said. It is true that the excitement of the Bill is in the bringing together of these three services, but the noble Baroness’s argument has not answered the Minister’s point about giving priority to SEN children over children who are very sick with cancer or other diseases. It is inherent in the system that that problem will remain. We cannot, just by will, say that bringing them all together will somehow stop there being a different route for SEN children from that for other children, and that point has to be answered.
Children and Families Bill
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Touhig (Lab)
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Massey’s Amendments 35 and 37. I will also speak to Amendment 36 in my name. Amendment 36 would grant control of the pupil premium to the virtual school head. It would ensure that virtual school heads are responsible for allocating the pupil premium to looked-after children.
Clause 9 is one of the few parts of the Bill that provides extra support for children in the care system. It amends Section 22 of the Children Act 1989 by introducing a duty upon every local authority to appoint an officer whose role will be to ensure the promotion of the educational achievement of looked-after children. The role is usually referred to as a “virtual school head teacher” or “virtual head”. The idea of the virtual head is not new. My noble friend Lady Massey referred to pilots; pilot schemes have been trialled in 11 local authority areas and have been shown to be extremely successful.
Why is this amendment necessary? Well, the most recent figures we have show that in 2011-12, just 14% of children looked after for at least one year achieved A* to C in GCSEs, including English and Maths. That compares with 58% of all children, so there is no doubt that children who have entered the care system, and who are likely to have experienced abuse or neglect before entry into care, need additional educational support. Once in care, the disruption that can be caused by a placement breakdown or move can also severely impact upon educational achievement.
As parents and grandparents, I am sure we all know that young people approaching their GCSEs have enough to contend with without needing to worry about whether they will be living in the same house when they take the exams. For many young people in care, this is a common reality. It is little wonder that their success rates in exams lag behind the norm. The original proposal to require local authorities to provide a virtual head was contained in the report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked after Children and Care Leavers, Education Matters in Care. At that time, the chairman of the all-party group was Edward Timpson MP, who is now the Children and Families Minister.
The all-party group went further. It also recommended that:
“Virtual School Heads should control the Pupil Premium”.
The pupil premium allows for a level of financial support for eligible children, which is currently about £600 per annum, to be used by their school. The all-party group report also noted that virtual heads have little control over how the pupil premium is spent and recommended that the system would be more effective if they were given control of this resource. As the present Children’s Minister recommended that these changes were necessary when he chaired the all-party group, I am sure that I am not alone in being a little disappointed that they are not included in the Bill.
The arguments in favour of their introduction remain and I hope that when we consider the Bill on Report, we will ensure that these provisions are properly made. The case for allowing the pupil premium to be controlled by the virtual school head seems to be supported by recent comments made by Ofsted’s chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw. He expressed concern that a significant minority of schools are struggling to show how their use of the premium is having any significant impact upon the attainment of those pupils it was intended to assist, so clearly there is an issue that Ofsted recognises. I hope that the Minister will see the wisdom of this amendment, and I look forward to his reply.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I support the amendments in this group—in particular my noble friend Lord Touhig’s amendment—but I very much support the point made by my noble friend Lady Massey about the need to evaluate. That is a theme throughout the considerations of this Committee. It is not that nobody has thought of doing the right thing but that we have not been good enough in implementation and monitoring, and in amending what we do in the light of the evidence. That is why that amendment is important and is one that we should pursue.
My comments will be in particular about the pupil premium. It is a brilliant little idea. I admit that when I first looked at the Bill and when we were discussing it at Second Reading, I could not be against the notion of the virtual school head but it did not quite ring right with me. I was not against it but I was just not sure that it would have any impact. Perhaps those local authorities that have voluntarily carried it out and feel they own it will make a success of it. My worry was that once you made it statutory throughout the nation, it would become just a job to be done and a box to be ticked. It needed some sort of bite beneath it that would give it teeth and make sure that something happened. I did not raise this at Second Reading because I could not think of anything at the time, but I think that the pupil premium might be one of those things that means that schools and other places in the education system have to sit up and listen because there is a control of resource in someone else’s hands. That might just give the edge to this post, new as it is, as it starts its contribution to education.
There are perhaps one or two other reasons. My noble friend Lord Touhig was right to say that the evidence at the moment is that some schools are not spending the money to greatest effect. Many are, and there are now lots of things that will help them spend the pupil premium to great effect, such as the toolkit. A lot of good work is being done by Ofsted and a lot of people. My worry is that this could be one of the cases where the group of people on whom it is spent least effectively are those children who are looked after. They seem to miss out on every bit of the system. This gives us a chance to make sure that in this we actually give them a head start.
I envisage that those people who are virtual heads could build up a body of expertise and experience about how best to spend the pupil premium. In that way, they could be champions of spending quite a significant amount of money. I am sure that teachers throughout schools in all local authorities might then look to them for advice. I trust that they will do it carefully. I would sooner the amendment said “in partnership with schools” because I do not think it will work unless it is in partnership with schools. Perhaps after consideration here, if it were to be brought back on Report, my noble friend Lord Touhig and others might wish to reflect on that. However, it is a really good addition to what is basically a good idea—the virtual school head. Until this amendment, they ran the risk of not having any teeth to do their work.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I am delighted by the cross-party support which Clause 9 has attracted. In spite of the modest progress in recent years in the attainment of looked-after children, progress is nowhere near what it needs to be. That is why we have decided to make the role of the virtual school head statutory, so that all local authorities are required to appoint a dedicated officer to discharge its duty to promote the educational achievement of the children it looks after.
Natasha Finlayson, of the Who Cares? Trust has said:
“Virtual school heads have been shown to have a positive effect on the attainment of young people in care”.
Ofsted’s thematic inspection of the role of virtual school heads published last year found that, where the role works well, it has a positive—some might go as far as to say transformative—effect. One of Ofsted’s key findings in that report referred to the very effective support virtual school heads provide. That support not only made a difference to children’s educational progress but often enhanced the stability of their placements and had a positive impact on their emotional well-being. Every inspection report of local authorities will in future, from November, include how virtual school heads are improving outcomes for looked-after children
On the aim of Amendment 36, I am sympathetic to the motivation of the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. If we want to maximise the benefits of pupil premium funding it is right to expect the virtual school head to have a role. As looked-after children will attract a pupil premium plus of £1,900 in 2014-15, dialogue between schools and virtual school heads will be vital.
We have therefore signalled our plans to extend the role of the virtual school head to work with schools to manage the pupil premium plus and ensure that the money is spent on securing the best educational support for children in care. Discussions between the school and local authority on the content of a child’s personal education plan and how the pupil premium will be used to support meeting the needs set out in that plan are crucial. That is a message that we intend strongly to emphasise in guidance.
I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss the role of the virtual school head in relation to care leavers. We know that their educational outcomes are not good enough compared to their peers and I recognise entirely how important it is that someone is there to support care leavers who are in, or who wish to return to, education. I can see therefore why there are calls to extend the role of the virtual school head to cover care leavers. In a number of local authorities, the virtual school head’s remit includes some overlap with care leaver services.
Although I share the objective of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in the amendment, I believe that addressing the educational needs of care leavers will not necessarily be met by adding a new duty to Section 23B. Extending in statute the role of the virtual school head to care leavers too widely risks undermining the very reason we are making the role statutory: to redouble our efforts to narrow the intractable attainment gap between what looked-after children achieve compared to their peers. If we extend the role of the virtual school head, it would add significant burdens to the local authority and the person undertaking that role and would dilute the impact of the role. We do not wish to do that.
I do not wish to appear complacent on this point. Supporting care leavers to stay in education and training is vital. That is why we have extended local authority responsibilities to care leavers up to the age of 25, where they are in education and training.
Under its new inspection framework, Ofsted will be looking at the quality of care leavers’ services and whether they have access to appropriate education and employment opportunities, including work experience and apprenticeships. They are encouraged and supported to continue their education and training, including those aged 21 to 24. Care leavers are progressing well and achieving their full potential through life choices, either in their attainment in further and higher education or in their chosen career or occupation.
If we are changing legislation, we have to be really sure that the changes are for the better and we have to have evidence of impact. We know that the virtual school head has had an impact on looked-after children nationally, and we cannot risk diluting that. There are other ways to ensure that the support that care leavers get to continue their education and training takes place.
I hope that I have provided reassurances to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, of our commitment to improving outcomes for all looked-after children and care leavers, and that they will join me in welcoming our recent announcement on the pupil premium plus and withdraw their amendment.
Children and Families Bill
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I will address Part 3 principally in this debate on Second Reading. However, I acknowledge that many of the other parts of the Bill offer a great deal and I look forward to discussing them in Committee, particularly after the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Perry. I often find myself following her in these debates, and I think that this is the first time that I have agreed with almost everything she said, so perhaps this is a very different sort of Bill than we normally discuss.
I welcome this Bill and its intentions. I think that there are many good things in it. We make a lot of speeches about two things: raising educational standards and closing the gap. It is closing the gap that we have always found very difficult, and at the bottom of that gap are very many of the groups of children and young people whom we are trying to assist in the Bill. They are children who need to be looked after, children who have a disability, children who have a special educational need and children who have had difficulty in early family life. If we can get that right, we as a nation will do a great deal to achieve our larger educational aims of raising standards across the board. I therefore welcome this Bill.
A look at special educational needs and the statementing process is somewhat overdue, so I very much welcome this provision and, indeed, some of the details. I do not quite buy into this idea that it is a revolution or that it is a chance in a generation. I do not see it that way because, when you look at what is in the new education, health and care plans, they essentially are trying to do the same thing as statementing did but in a different way. That is happening because statementing did not work as well as we would have liked it to work. The players are still the same—the health authority, the schools, the education services, the care authorities and the parents. There is no new player in this mix. The plan comes at it in a different way to try to make it work.
What annoys me most about this is that it is about some very fundamental things in education: identifying a child’s strengths and weaknesses; setting objectives as to how they might improve and how their needs might be met; reviewing progress; and working with the family to do the best we can for the child. That is done every day in every school for children who do not have special educational needs. It is the nature of good teaching and the nature of a good school. What we fail to do, right across the parties and right across society, is to try to make that system work for children who have extra needs. For them, the co-ordination does not work, and they need it far more than many children without SEN. I see this as another step along the road in the journey to try to get better at delivering this. Nevertheless, we are far better than we used to be 20 or 30 years ago, so it is not always a bad story. If we do that, we can then perhaps get on to debating the things that we debate for children who do not have SEN, such as pedagogy, curriculum, and all those things that will raise standards.
If we are to get this right, we have to understand why integrated working has never happened before. Let us be clear: it has been open to the authorities and the powers that be to deliver what is in this Bill before this Bill arrived. If health, social care and education legislators had wanted to deliver a seamless service for children with special educational needs, they would have done it; and it is a shame that they have not done it. We are trying, all together as politicians, to find a legal structure to make it happen. I think what we can best hope for is a change of culture so that people actually say that it is a priority, that they want to make it happen and that they will roll up their sleeves and do it.
I think that, in the past, three things have gone wrong—or, rather, have been less than perfect. If this Bill helps those, it is a success; if not, it is not. One is the relationship between the different services as to whether they work. Too often in the past, education has had to beg the other services to take note. That is because the priorities have not been aligned and the budgets have not been aligned. Quite honestly, health and care professionals go to work without often thinking that SEN children are at the top of their priority list. A group of education officers go to work knowing that they are at the top of their priority list, and they have had a hell of a difficulty trying to get others to pay attention.
The second area that has not been right is responsibility and accountability. If you are not accountable for what you are meant to do, the chances are that you will not do it. The third thing has been resources. Quite honestly, we have raised expectations for children with special needs and their families that we would give them a tailor-made plan and deliver it, and it has not always happened. So, as we go through the Bill, my test for its success will be as follows. Does it make the relationships work more effectively? Does it put responsibility and accountability in the right place? Will the resources be there to make sure that we deliver?
There is a lot to welcome, particularly taking the plan to age 25 and the efforts to make the voice of the child stronger within this whole process. However, I will concentrate on some things that I want to look at as we go through the Bill that I think deserve further consideration. I either do not quite understand them or am against them—I have not quite made up my mind. Some have already been mentioned, such as the groups of children left out of the Bill, children with SEN, children with a disability but without a special educational need, and minimum standards for care plans—I will not say too much about that because it has been mentioned.
I will pick out two points that have not yet been mentioned. One is the qualification for SENCOs. I welcome that very much. I find it strange, given that we have just dropped the mandatory qualification for headship, that we are now putting in law a mandatory qualification for SENCOs. Nevertheless, I welcome it. It looks, to me, as though teachers teaching children with special educational needs will still be able to have no qualified teacher status at all. I do not understand, if we are making it a requirement for SENCOs to have two qualifications, why those who are teaching the very same children they are organising would be allowed to do so without QTS. Perhaps the Minister could comment on this.
My second point is about pre-school learning. This is the second time that this Government have dropped the requirement for a group of education providers to be inspected by Ofsted. I am a great admirer of Ofsted; I think it plays a good part. The first time this was done was with schools which had got outstanding Ofsted inspections. I did not agree with it but I could see the rationale behind it. I cannot see the rationale for some childminders not to be subject to Ofsted when we cannot guarantee their quality. Nevertheless, I welcome the broad thrust of this Bill and very much look forward to the debate that I suspect we will have in Committee.
Education: Personal, Social and Health Education
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(11 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lady Massey on leading this debate. Her support for this subject has been assiduous and she has shown real leadership over the years that I have known her. I thank her for keeping it on the agenda.
I have listened carefully to what noble Lords have said and agree with the main thrust of the argument, but with one or two caveats or differences of emphasis which I will just point out. Of course it need not be a discrete subject and of course it is about the ethos of the school and things like that. To sum it up, it is about what we teach, how we teach and the type of place a school is. All those things are important, and need a bit of space on the curriculum. Personal, social and health education is a body of knowledge as well as a set of attitudes and a number of skills. Sometimes, we almost find refuge in the view that we do not need to worry, as it will be covered by good English teachers or good maths teachers, or by the good old PE teacher or the religious education teacher. Because we have had that attitude and have never really got the subject to the top of the priority list, it has never been taught as effectively as it might be. There is a big difference between teaching it and children learning. Very often, we tick the box as “done” when we have made sure that it has been taught, but we really should tick the box when we are sure that students have learnt. There is still a big gap between teaching it and students learning it in this area of the curriculum and of knowledge. When we think about what we want for our own children—when we describe the sort of citizens we would want children to be—we mention much of what would be covered in this area of the curriculum and of knowledge. That is the nature of its importance.
Crucially, although I do not think that children do not have the facts about some of the difficult issues to do with health education or sex education, I believe that they do not necessarily have the ability to make the right decision at the right time. We all know from our own lives how difficult that is. It is very much an adult skill which we need children to gain pretty early on in their lives. That will not be taught in maths or in English, or necessarily in science or PE. Around that is what is missing when we have tackled how this subject should be taught. I am traditional about this. We know what makes a good teacher, what makes effective teaching and what brings success, but we do not have them in PSHE, which is the problem.
I have five comments that I want to throw into the debate. First, the subject area needs to be valued: schools, students and teachers need to know it is important. I have not heard the Secretary of State make a speech about PSHE and I am not really sure what the Government’s policy is. I cannot think of even a handful of ways in which this Government have given the message to the school system that PSHE is important. Secondly, we need recognition for pupil progress and achievement. We have that in the academic subjects but we do not have that in this subject. Thirdly, we need to train teachers. Fourthly, there is a best practice pedagogy. There are good and bad ways of peer mentoring, and teachers need to know what the effective ways are. Fifthly, it would be great to have one of our leading heads say, “I started my career as a PSHE teacher”. That route to school leadership has not yet happened. Although no one is against PSHE, my worry is that we are not sufficiently for it to get it to the top of the agenda. We can make nice speeches and feel comfortable with it, but unless we look at why students are not learning it as effectively as they might do, we will not make the progress that this subject certainly needs and deserves.
Education: Development of Excellence
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Morris of Yardley
I will try to do so. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for bringing this debate to the House. From the number of speakers, your Lordships can see what a popular debate it is; the only consequence is that we have very few minutes in which to express our views. I want to concentrate on one aspect and illustrate it with a number of examples, and to begin by sharing some of the noble Baroness’s words. She paid tribute to the high standards that we have and the improvement that has been made in our education system. She put that down in large amount to the very hard work of school leaders and teachers. I join her in thanking and applauding them. I have not always shared her analysis of where we are now or how we have got here, but perhaps that will wait for a later debate.
The point I want to start on is that where we have had success and raised standards—on almost every indicator, we are performing better than a decade ago—it is because we have identified what works and enabled schools to copy that behaviour. That spreading of good practice has rarely been invented in Whitehall; it has usually been found in our best schools. Whitehall at its best has created the structures and means of spreading that to other schools. I pay tribute to both Governments, as through a whole array of measures—Excellence in Cities; federations and chains; heads working in both good and underperforming schools—we have managed to do that.
I want to concentrate on two or three examples where the actions of this Government are deterring schools from doing what we know works and will raise standards. The first example is in sport and art, and all those subjects which are not in the English baccalaureate. I do not want to make an argument against the English baccalaureate. I do not need to be persuaded that the subjects within that assessment and examination are ones which children should know and learn, and be confident in. Our nation and each of those children need them for the future. However, the consequence of that policy is that up and down the country schools are dropping subjects that are not in that group. The noble Baroness mentioned the consequences of targets and league tables: teachers teach to the test and concentrate on those children who can deliver the results. That is what is happening with the English baccalaureate. I cannot have a definition of a successful education system that is not rich in sport, art, music, creativity and all the subjects that are not part of the English baccalaureate.
My second example is the pupil premium. It is an excellent initiative, and I congratulate the Liberal Democrats on bringing it to government, but they must have been as worried as I was to see the recent research that states that schools are not spending the resource on the interventions that are proven to have the greatest impact on school achievement.
In both those cases, and in vocational education, which I think I can confidently leave to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, the Government are taking actions that are defensible in their own right, but the consequences are that some schools are not doing the things they ought to do.
I know from my experience as a Minister that Governments are bound to have priorities. That is the nature of government and is where Governments put their energy and resources, but the Government have to understand that in having priorities there are implications and consequences. Two years into this Government, some of those consequences are coming to fruition: there is too little emphasis on art, creativity and music, and professional autonomy is not balanced by the obligation to use teacher interventions that work with children. Getting that balance right is crucial to delivering an education system that encourages and delivers excellence for all our students.
Education (Exemption from School Inspection) (England) Regulations 2012
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I am surprised that this measure has come back as a statutory instrument, given our debate during the passage of the Bill. It is an ill advised piece of legislation. Like my noble friend who moved the Motion, I want to look at it on the strategic level and on points of detail.
The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, made a significant contribution because there has been agreement over the 30 years since her colleagues’ 1988 education Act that inspection constitutes an essential part of the infrastructure of education policy and it was the first time that I had heard any senior politician from any of the parties be so critical of inspection per se as part of the framework. If I follow the logic of what the noble Baroness said, I am left wondering why we are letting Ofsted into any school in the country. If Ofsted is so weak and if we should now start to question its role in the education service, it cannot be just for outstanding schools; it must be in respect of the schools for which we worry far more, which are the satisfactory and less-than-satisfactory schools in our education system. There was no logic in that.
I, for one, still believe that inspection has been an essential part of basic education policy for the past 30 years. Successive Governments have abided by this. The narrative goes something like: “We want to give more freedom to schools, to encourage them to innovate and take on local character, to trust them more and more, and we are more confident in doing that if there is an accountability mechanism at its core. The better the inspection framework and the better our testing and the publication of that data, the more successive Governments have felt that they could free up so much more of the education system”. I still abide by that. It has been a shared concern across the parties and I am really worried if Members on the Government Back Benches—and perhaps the Front Bench, from whom we will hear—begin to challenge that shared understanding that we have had for a number of years.
The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, talked about a fall in standards in our schools over the past few years. I fundamentally disagree with her. That is not what I have seen, and I do not believe it describes what is going on in our schools. However, I do remember—because I taught in it—the school system before we had any inspection at all. I would not want to go back to that. The standard of education, the quality of teaching and the number of children being let down was far greater before we had this accountability framework, including inspection, than it ever has been since. That is my first point. Strategically, the Government are pushing freedom for individual schools. Logically, they have every reason to care more about the inspection framework and the accountability framework, rather than less. They are throwing it away.
My second strategic point, or point of policy and substance, is that if you read the Explanatory Memorandum—which I think was disingenuous in many ways—it says that allowing outstanding schools not to be inspected by Ofsted is a reward for good performance. We have spent years trying to persuade schools that being inspected by Ofsted is not a punishment. It is something that is good for schools and good for teaching, which they should accept. If being exempt from inspection is a reward for good performance, what does it say about those schools that we are asking Ofsted to go into more frequently? It must be that it is a punishment for underperformance.
If struggling schools see Ofsted inspections as a punishment, rather than as something that can be an essential step in improving their performance, that absolutely takes away all the progress that has been made over the past 20 years in trying to get a new generation of teachers to view Ofsted in a completely different light.
The second point the Explanatory Memorandum makes is about freeing up staff time. Ofsted inspection should not be taking up lots of classroom time. That is why we have moved to shorter notice for inspection and to inspectors being able to come in with two or three days’ notice. It is an admission by government that having Ofsted in your school wastes the time of teachers. Frankly, if we want to free up time, it ought to be for teachers who are teaching in schools that still have a long way to go, rather than in those that are outstanding.
The last point, of course, is saving money. If this is a money-saving measure, say so. Let it be. Let us talk about that, but let us not pretend that it is a decent educational measure.
In terms of local accountability, one of the things about Ofsted is that it gives a national framework for inspection, and it does not actually rely on local accountability. I want a system where the schools in the poorest areas are compared with the schools in the richest areas; the south with the north; the east with the west; the poor with the rich; the ethnic minorities with the affluent white. Unless we have a national inspection framework, we will never get that.
On details of policy, most of these points have been made, but I will make one more. The panoply of bureaucracy that is being built up as part of the risk assessment will take away any extra time or money that might have come Ofsted’s way. As the years go by, there will hopefully be more schools that receive outstanding Ofsted reports, go into that category and will have to be risk-assessed every year. We are assured that there is no trigger or tick box, so careful judgments about all these schools will have to be taken into account.
I will finish with two or three questions, some of which build on those which have already been asked. First, I want to pursue one of the questions outlined by my noble friend Lord Hunt. He asked whether schools will be reinspected. If in future Ofsted criteria change, will schools be inspected again or will they be allowed to be free for life from inspection against a set of criteria that is no longer being used?
Secondly, why are special schools not in this group? If we are going to exempt outstanding schools, then why are we not going to exempt special schools?
Thirdly, the Explanatory Memorandum talks about, I think, 60% of people who were in favour of a risk-based approach to inspection. I am in favour of a risk-based approach to inspection, but I am not in favour of this. Will the Minister let us know what the consultation report said about the number of people who were in favour of this particular recommendation?
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for raising this very important subject. I share many of her concerns, particularly the concerns raised by several noble Lords about the rapid changes in school quality and how we can be sure we get on top of that in good time and do not allow some of these children’s education, and their time in school, to be wasted.
In one particular aspect of our education, which is faith schools—we have heard about creationism—there has been a lot of concern in debates on education Bills in this House about how they work in practice. Many faith schools deliver great education to children, but they are a special complexity for this country, and there is therefore concern about how this regulation may be implemented in that regard.
I have sympathy with the Government’s position. I listened with great interest to what the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, said. I was reminded of the experience in Finland, where there is no school inspection system. Finland's Minister of Education says:
“Teachers in Finland can choose their own teaching methods and materials. They are experts of their own work, and they test their own pupils. I think this is also one of the reasons why teaching is such an attractive profession in Finland because teachers are working like academic experts with their own pupils in schools”.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
Why are the data less reliable with those schools than they are with non-special schools? That has been the thrust of the Minister’s argument: that data are strong enough for us to be able to take this course of action. The data are the same for the special schools, so what is the problem?
Lord Hill of Oareford
There are some harder judgments to make about some of the children who might typically be in special schools or pupil referrals. That is a fair point. Given the particular sensitivity about those schools we would prefer to proceed cautiously in that respect.
At bottom, this is an argument about trust, not just about trust in schools—and I am not seeking to make a political point—but about whether we feel that we can trust Ofsted to do its job. There is a difference of opinion between us over the meaning of “proportionate”. What the Government have been doing has been made possible by the great increase in information that we have encouraged, as well as by the further strengthening of risk assessment that has been put in place, partly as a result of concerns expressed by Members of this House. It is no more than a logical expansion of developments in recent years. I commend the steps that we have taken to the House.
Schools: Well-being and Personal and Social Needs
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I am glad to be able to contribute to this debate and congratulate my noble friend Lady Jones on bringing it to the Chamber. I do not think that anybody is going to speak against improving the well-being of children or meeting their personal and social needs. I shall wait to the end of the debate to see whether any noble Lord does—perhaps the Minister will. However, it is an area of contention, where there is genuine debate and some uneasiness about how we are progressing. The crucial thing is not to persuade the world, those in the educational system or politicians that those things are an important part of education; it is to try to understand why we do not do it very well and to overcome those barriers.
However, the world has moved on and we now have a better understanding of the consequences of not getting this right, which in some way increases our support for it. I shall refer to three areas, two of them being pretty obvious and the third being the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Layard. First, there is a body of knowledge about sex education, drugs education, physical education and physical well-being that needs to be given to young people. That comes under this area of learning. There is a set of skills and attitudes— resilience, teamwork, self-esteem and confidence—which children and young people need to develop if they are to do well in the world. We have come to accept during the past few years that schools have a role to play in that, because for some children all those things are developed at home. Some children would get all that knowledge and all those skills without going to school, but the truth is that many do not and everyone could contribute to good-quality education in that field. I accept the point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester that, years ago, the church called it “character”; it was the same debate.
As my noble friend Lord Layard pointed out, we have become stuck because we have seen these things as competing forces—it has been an either/or. We have wanted either education for qualifications or a rounded education. We have pitted one against the other with terrible consequences when we come to evaluate our performance. What is new is the body of evidence and research that shows those approaches not as an either/or but as interdependent. If we can get social and emotional literacy right, children will improve their academic skills as well. More than that, we are now developing a pedagogy and ways of working in school that are beginning to lead to progress in how we teach SEL effectively in the way that we have been trying to make progress in how to teach literacy and numeracy effectively in years past. The pedagogy in this area is therefore slowly catching up. The more it catches up, the more powerful is the case for making it an integral part of what we would do.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Layard about the research coming out of America—Joseph Durlak and Roger Weissberg have done some excellent randomised control studies. I disagree with them slightly on the social, emotional, and academic learning programme. With the primary SEAL programme, the evidence about the effects of that sort of learning on academic attainment and well-being is far better.
This is a very important time. We have a choice: either build on these changes which are taking root and try to take what we can from them in delivering a good quality of education; or ignore those seeds that are shooting through. That is the crux of this debate. The Government of whom I was a member could be criticised for being top-heavy and too instructive, but we tried to put in place a structure on which these things could develop. Whether it was the PSHE programme, compulsory citizenship, SEAL, the sports partnerships, the creative partnerships or training teachers, it was a structure which allowed those things to flourish.
My great worry is this: I am seeing that structure decline and fall away. I do not think that this area of pedagogy and effective teaching is sufficiently strong to withstand that. The danger comes from two things that the Government are doing. First, if they hold true to their pledge to let teachers decide about curriculum and teaching methods, the risk is that this area of school activity is not well enough rooted to withstand that. Too many schools, often those which lack confidence or are in areas where children are disadvantaged and behind in basic skills, feel that they do not have time for these things. The second risk is that—even if the Government do not keep to their pledge, as seems likely, to leave it to schools to develop curriculum and pedagogy—the messages that they are giving are not about this area of teaching. I do not have much of a problem with poetry; I do not have much of a problem with literacy or numeracy; but I look at the utterances of Ministers and cannot find the speeches. I cannot see the press releases; I cannot read the leaked documents in the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail that talk about this area of the curriculum. Quite simply, schools and teachers get the message inadvertently—because I do not believe that the Government take this view—that it is not valued.
We are at a vital time where it is for the Government to help us make the decision on whether we build on this growing body of knowledge, understanding what we did not know 10 or 15 years ago, and put some support in there for us to do better, or we go backwards and turn our back on the progress that has been made.
I look for three things from the Minister: first, an acknowledgement of what the research is telling us and how the Government might build on it; secondly, a clear signal, which the Government may give in any way they wish, that this area of teaching is valued and that schools are expected to do it, with the impact that it can have right across the academic curriculum as well as in its own right being explained to them; and thirdly—and this is where I am most likely to disagree with the Minister—the Government should provide some sort of infrastructure. If they do not like the structure that we had, that is fine, but they need something, because all the evidence and all the experience of past years tells us that, when the going gets tough, this gets left out. It deserves better than that.
Education Bill
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Lord Storey
My Lords, I have said before in this House that the most important thing for a student is the quality of the teacher—not the qualifications, necessarily, but the quality. There can be the best buildings, the best resources, but unless there is quality teaching, then that child will not be able to make the progress that they deserve. If you have poor teaching and a poor teacher, that child loses the year, and the year can never be repeated. It is lost for good.
Since I have come to this House, the one thing that has struck me in education debates is that in every speech and contribution I have heard, the child is at the centre. I have felt quite emotional, to be honest, about the care that has come to me from the comments that people have made. We had a debate on special educational needs, and I was absolutely stunned by the remarkable contributions from everybody in this House.
However, one thing said constantly in that debate was that it needs to be about training, and about understanding the child. You cannot just put anybody in and expect them to be able to teach, understand, and relate to the child. It has to be a whole package. That is not to say that everybody must be a qualified teacher. There are examples of people who have a natural gift for teaching but are not qualified. How do we make that system work? Well, we have a system presently that allows that to happen.
I speak from practical experience. At the tail end of the summer term, I had a situation in my school where a teacher left. Working in that classroom was a teaching assistant; an advanced, higher-level teaching assistant, who was—to use an expression—“stunning”. The pupils thought the world of him. Being a conscientious, thoughtful person, I checked with my local authority, which said, “Yes, as long as he has a higher-level qualification and you’re happy with him, he can take the class”, which he did for three weeks. He was fantastic. The children progressed. I have to say, I would rather have had him than—no, perhaps I should not say that. He progressed and did incredibly well. He was also supported by the school and other teachers, who were able to compensate for any areas in which he needed to develop. As a result of that, he has decided that he will not just be a higher-level teaching assistant; he will go on to be a teacher.
There are occasions when you can put people who do not have the formal qualifications in the classroom, and they can do a remarkable job. My noble friend Lady Benjamin constantly reminds me that pupils from the Caribbean often need a very different type of teacher, and that maybe the qualities that we currently have in our teaching profession are not always able to deal with those situations. That is dealt with, again, by encouraging teaching assistants who are working with teachers in the school environment.
When the Minister replies I hope he will deal with the questions that have been asked by my noble friend Lady Walmsley. I also hope he will reflect on how we might combine both desires.
I do not have a problem with free schools. I remember the first free school, which was Scotland Road Free School in Liverpool in the 1960s. What I have a problem with is saying that you can have non-qualified teachers in an educational establishment. If free schools are to be successful, they cannot be seen to be on the margins. Parents will soon think, “Oh, these are inferior places. They haven’t got any qualified support in those schools”. They will not send their children to them once the initial idea has started.
I will make one further point. There are whole areas of teaching that, in a complex society and a modern world, people who work with children need to know about—safeguarding, for example. Are we saying that these adults who will teach in free schools will not have any training in safeguarding, or in the problems of special educational needs? The list goes on. We need to be absolutely sure that we get this right.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I also support this amendment, on which there is a fair degree of unanimity across the Chamber. My position is approximately the same as that of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland. We do not want schools where everybody has the same qualification. Over the past 10 to 15 years, we have very much moved to having different qualifications in schools. Clearly, what we want is for someone to be qualified to do the job that we are asking them to do, and for people to know what they are qualified to do and what their training is. We have never had that in the past. We have been a one-qualification profession. We ought to be more like medicine and move away from that, to having a number of different qualifications.
We have a record of getting this right. The movement of bursars into the maintained sector has been hugely successful, as have the teaching assistants and higher-level teaching assistants to which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, just referred. Therefore, we are on a journey of trying to get this right. The issue that faces us now is: where do we go next? I should have thought that where we go next is to look at the evidence of what has worked so far, the skills that are needed in the school and what training is needed. I absolutely accept that there will be some individuals who have experiences and a skill set that teachers and head teachers will want to use in schools. Some of them, as the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, said, will be absolutely excellent in their field. They may have a skill set that teaching would go alongside.
There is a fair degree of unanimity across the Chamber over our vision of what we want schools to be like. Therefore, the question is whether the legislation that the Government are putting forward will arrive at that end. I do not think that it will. I cannot see why this big debate about how we get a qualified workforce—whatever the qualification may be—is being squashed into free schools. I would have thought the debate was bigger than yet another freedom that we can give to free schools. The debate is about the qualifications we need for all our schools, whether they be maintained schools, community academies or free schools. The Minister must address in his reply what this has to do with free schools. It has to do with all schools. I am not sure why he has cornered and corralled this debate into free schools. It is bigger than that.
Education Bill
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, I am moving Amendment 76, which was tabled in the name of my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, at his request. The amendment would delete Clause 39, which we have just been debating in respect of the government amendments. As we have heard, the clause amends the current requirement under Section 5 of the Education Act 2005 for the chief inspector to inspect and report on every school. The clause provides for certain schools to be exempt from such inspections in future, as we have heard, subject to necessary regulations being approved by Parliament. I recognise that exempt schools may still be subject to inspections as part of the chief inspector’s surveys of general subjects and thematic reviews, but I remain concerned, as does my noble friend Lord Hunt, that this still leaves a potential gap in the inspection regime.
According to the Government, the aim is to introduce greater proportionality to the inspection system for schools and, in particular, to reduce the inspections for outstanding schools. The concerns about this are for two principal reasons. First, the open-ended nature of the clause would allow the Secretary of State to exempt other categories of schools, such as academies or free schools. We all know that Ministers have either been in a state of denial or embarrassed when academies have not done well in their Ofsted inspections. No doubt we will see the same phenomenon with free schools. Will the Minister confirm that the Government have no intention of seeking to exempt academies and free schools en bloc from regular inspections in future?
My second objection is to the principle of exempting outstanding schools per se. This flies in the face of the Government's approach to regulation in other sectors and the evidence is that not all outstanding schools will remain so. Indeed, of the 1,155 schools that have been judged outstanding by Ofsted, on subsequent inspection over 30 per cent had a reduced grading, including 58 that went from the top grade of outstanding to the third grade of satisfactory. Given that, I find it difficult to understand why outstanding schools should be exempted. Perhaps it is because the Government do not want to fund Ofsted to do these extra inspections properly and this is simply a way in which to reduce the cost. If that is the case, I would be delighted if the Minister was frank enough with your Lordships to say so.
The Government apparently believe that risks can be reduced, because Ofsted will develop a risk assessment approach, including a basket of indicators that flag up concerns. We have heard described very well by my noble friend Lady Morgan the risk-based approach being undertaken by Ofsted but, because the data that will inform that approach are likely to be gathered a number of years after a school inspection, there is a real risk of a school deteriorating and students suffering for some time before any intervention on that basis is triggered. For example, I would be concerned about the impact of a free school being established in an area where an outstanding school has a catchment area, attracting children who would otherwise enrol into that school, however outstanding it may be, and causing a sudden deterioration just because of a loss of funds.
There are all sorts of scenarios that are not just around a change of leadership. I remind the Minister of the debate that we had on Monday around admissions, when I put it to him that the fundamentals to which the Government have to have regard in a free market-based system of school improvement such as that which they are adopting are fair funding, fair admissions and inspection as a form of accountability. He replied:
“These are the three principles that we need to uphold”.—[Official Report, 24/10/11; col. 642.]
So he agrees—and yet, as with admissions, he is watering down inspections in the context of moving to a more market-based schools system.
I am grateful to the Government for reflecting on the debate in Committee. As we have heard from the Minister, the Government are now proposing that any move to exempt a category of school will be subject to the affirmative procedure. That is welcome, but, of course, this House only very rarely rejects such legislation. This really is our only chance to decide whether or not we are happy with some schools being exempted from inspection, potentially for ever.
I have also noted the intention to trial the new approach in schools where a new head teacher has been appointed, and the Minister has made it clear that Ofsted will adjust the risk-assessment process so that at least 5 per cent of outstanding schools will be inspected each year. As far as it goes, this is welcome too, but it does not go far enough.
I would contrast, as has my noble friend Lady Hughes of Stretford, what the Minister is currently proposing in education with what is happening in other sectors. Let me refer him to the NHS, as she has done. This summer, the health regulator CQC announced it was replacing its light-touch style with an annual inspection of each NHS and independent sector provider. As the CQC says:
“When people’s lives and well-being are at stake, the public don’t want to hear about light-touch regulation.”
That philosophy should surely apply as much to education and the teaching of our children—to the life chances of children—as it does, perhaps, to our death chances in the NHS. What is so different about children that we do not want to regulate and inspect their education? Indeed, let us look at this in a commercial context. Would a big retailer such as Marks & Spencer not quality-assure its best stores as much as its underperforming stores? I put it to your Lordships that Marks & Spencer would quality-assure every retail outlet that it has.
I find it extraordinary that Mr Gove, the Secretary of State, is seeking to exempt outstanding schools when he was recently so critical of the methodology used by Ofsted to rate outstanding schools. Only five weeks ago, at the National College for School Leadership, he voiced this concern. Yet now his Minister in your Lordships’ House, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, is seeking to exempt the very same schools from regular inspections. The public and parents surely have a right to know whether standards are being maintained or not. If the inspection system is to retain its credibility, regular inspections are essential for all schools.
Finally, I would simply say to the Minister, who I am afraid was floundering around about why he needs to proceed with this exemption—he has had to compromise and come up with all the whys and wherefores in making this all right—would it not just be easier to drop this and give way to common sense and have all schools inspected? I beg to move.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I support this amendment. I shall start with what I think is going to be my only line of agreement with the Government on this. To take the attitude that intervention in schools should reflect the risk of schools doing badly, and to say that we should intervene less when schools are successful, is absolutely right. As my noble friend has just said, that is a principle that was followed by the previous Labour Government, so I am with the Minister on that. We should not be constantly going in to excellent schools and getting in the way of them doing an excellent job; that is an absolute principle.
The second absolute principle is that inspection should be universal for all our schools. Does the Minister really think that one visit every five years is going to be a big burden on outstanding schools? One visit by Ofsted inspectors every five years; that is what happens at the moment, that is what the data say.
The reason for drafting this clause perplexes me. I am trying to think what motivates it because, to be honest, I never thought that the Tories would go soft on inspection, and that is what they have done with this clause. They fought hard to put Ofsted in the legislation, they fought hard to put it into schools, they have argued the case with head teachers and teachers, almost all of whom were opposed to inspection when it first started, and the Labour Government did the same. The political parties have been on the same side on this; we have thought that inspection was a necessary part of raising standards. So I am absolutely perplexed why the Tories, of all parties, should go back on this now. This is a principle, and you would have to come forward with some absolutely outstanding reasons why this principle should be broken. That principle is that in a devolved system, more than ever, every school should be inspected. Every parent has the right to know that the school which their child attends should be inspected. Every child should have a right to be reassured that the school which they attend should be inspected. That is an inalienable right and should be a fundamental structure of our school system.
The second question is: is doing that once every five years a terrible burden on schools? I do not think it is. To some extent, that is where the argument finishes. If you believe that those rights should not be given to parents and teachers, vote against this amendment. If you really believe that one inspection every five years is a terrible burden—do not forget that some children will have gone almost right the way through a secondary school in that time while there has never been an inspection, as they will have started in year 7 and might leave in year 11—then vote against this amendment.
I am going to be really helpful to the Minister here. I am going to warn him not to get into a position that I know I got into when I was a Minister. It is a great ministerial habit when you come up with an idea. Listening to the debate, I have to say that when the Minister responded to my friend Lady Hughes on the previous amendment it was the most troubled that I have heard him in the whole consideration of this Bill. I did not believe that he had convinced himself, let alone the House. What is happening now is that the Government have a policy but they are, in honesty, persuaded by the arguments against it. Rather than withdrawing that policy, they are seeking to put plaster in the holes and rearranging the bricks: “Well, let’s have greater risk assessment. Let's talk to the heads when they are new. Let’s do this, that or the other”. I can tell your Lordships that that is how the camel was invented, rather than the horse.
I remember when we ourselves got into exactly that position. You do not want to backtrack, because this is politics, so you start trying to plaster up the cracks. But what you end up with is so disastrous that in two years’ time you are asking, “Why weren’t we just brave enough to say that we got that wrong”?. I say to the Minister that he is at that point now. He should take a deep breath and protect himself from having to come to your Lordships’ House in two years’ time to answer many questions and queries about an inspection system that clearly will not work.
I have two more points to make. I really worry that the Minister may have constructed a terrible bureaucratic tangle in order to get out of the political difficulty that he is in. He will now have an army of Ofsted inspectors doing more risk assessments. They will have to weigh and measure the schools and collect the data. Now they will have to go and talk to every new head when he or she is appointed to a school—perhaps the Minister could tell us how many interviews that is going to be in a year—just to check their plans for that school. The Government would not have to do that if they backed this amendment. From the schools’ point of view, we are meant to be freeing them from this terrible burden of one inspection every five years, but what is the Minister putting in its place? He is making them provide more data. He has the local authority checking on them, so that it can refer back to Ofsted. He has the new heads having to talk to Ofsted and he has a third of them having to be inspected every five years. They will not know where they stand. I can assure the Minister that it would be easier for them and less of a burden if he would just say, “Once every five years, and that’s it”.
My last point is this, and to some extent it is the most important point for me. From the point of view of the Ofsted inspectors, it is crucial that they measure the standards of every single school in this country by the performance of the best. That is absolutely central to effective Ofsted inspection. If you say to your average Ofsted inspector—not the ones doing the one-off thematic reviews—who spends their time going into schools, “Thou shalt not be seeing any outstanding schools”, how do they know what outstanding looks like? When they go to the satisfactory school, it might be the best that they have seen for six months and they might think that that is outstanding. To help the Ofsted inspectors, it is crucial that, as part of their job, they see outstanding schools as part of their regular inspections.
To be helpful to the Minister, I think I know why he, or his colleagues—I am sure that it was his colleagues and not him—came up with this terrible idea: it is this idea of having a long list of freedoms which you can grant to schools to prove that the policy of granting freedoms to schools works. We saw it in the debate on admissions on Monday and we have seen it today. These are wrong freedoms, because they are freedoms that answer the political drive of the Government and they stand in the way of raising standards. This is the moment when the decision is made: go on and the camel will have several extra humps in two years’ time, I promise the Minister that. I passionately support this amendment, more than anything else in the Bill, and hope that noble Lords, having listened to this debate will vote to preserve universal inspection. I praise the Tories for bringing it in in 1988; I think it would be terrible if they voted to get rid of it now.
Lord Quirk
While the Minister is taking the deep breath that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, has urged upon him, may I give him an extra couple of minutes of breathing time by saying what a difficult job he is going to have in offsetting the arguments presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight? Surely it is the outstanding schools that need to be inspected in order to have reports coming out showing what can be done in state sector, mainstream schools. Once every five years is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, nothing compared to the extra bureaucracy which we are threatened with in some kind of compensation for this. I hope that the Minister will bow to the wisdom that has been cast before him this afternoon.
Education Bill
Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I see that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, is exercised by his inability to define what a parent’s responsibilities are. Along the same lines, he is looking for us to define what “fair access” is tonight.
I would like to speak to my Amendment 70 in this group. It is identical, I think, to the one that I tabled in Grand Committee when I raised this issue. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, said, we are making some changes in this legislation to the powers of the adjudicator. I was concerned that, since the adjudicator cannot look at wider issues but only at the complaints put before him or her, there was nobody who could take a view across the piece and see whether injustices were arising in different places in the country. Indeed, if one could see a pattern emerging, somebody ought to do something about it.
I followed up our debates in Grand Committee by raising the issue with the Secretary of State. I pointed out that we on these Benches do not usually want to give additional powers to the Secretary of State, but in this case we thought that it was necessary, partly because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, said, the schools landscape is becoming more and more complex and diverse and many schools are now their own admissions authorities. So I am pleased to say that, along with my noble friend the Minister, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State is of the view, as I understand it, that he already has these powers and duties. The only reason I tabled my amendment again was to give my noble friend the opportunity to put it on the record under which statutes the Secretary of State already has these duties. If that is perfectly clear, I see no reason to press my amendment.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I support the amendments and I, too, look forward to the Minister’s reply. I learnt last week that I cannot speak after him, so I may as well speak now in anticipation of what he might say.
I think that this is a really tricky issue. My noble friend was right to say that if more schools are becoming their own admissions authorities, that is when the problem sets in. The system can just about cope with one or two schools being their own admissions authorities, but, to recall a bit of history, the reason why the legislation that is now being repealed and changed got on the statute book in the first place was that some London boroughs were already in a position, mainly through the predominance of church schools, to make their own admissions arrangements. The sort of situation that my noble friend described of some children always missing out on the oversubscription criteria, through no fault of their own, is not something that he imagined; it actually happened in some of the London boroughs. That is why what I can see might look like a fairly complicated system of controlling admissions came about. It could be even worse if we move to a situation where nearly every school is its own admissions authority.
I have two or three points on this. I do not speak for my party on this because I know that this is not my party’s position but, frankly, I have never seen why being your own admissions authority is a freedom that one should have. Heads need freedom to run their schools but not to select the students who should go through the gates and enrol on the register in the first place. That has always been my view, even when my party was in power. Maybe one could live with it then because there were not as many schools with their own admissions arrangements, but I really cannot see the point of it. I cannot see what advantage there is to a child or a child’s parent.
The reason why this is so important is that we all know the trauma that some parents and children go through when unable to secure an appropriate place at the age of 11. We have all seen children whose start at secondary school is blighted by the fact that they did not get the place that they wanted. We have to live with that; life is not fair and not everyone can have their first choice. Imagine this, though: we create a situation where some child gets to the age of 11 and cannot get a suitable place because they do not fit the rules. That is not the same thing as not getting your first choice. No one wants you, and you end up getting your fifth or sixth choice, all because of this contradictory oversubscription criterion.
I come to the same conclusion as others, despite my relatively strong views on this. I do not say that this is a freedom that schools ought to be granted but, if I accept for a moment that that is to happen, I honestly cannot see how the system will work unless there is a referee in the middle putting down some ground rules. The amendments, containing an overarching duty to ensure fair access, are right.
My last point is this. Let us be clear: schools will play these rules for all they are worth. All the history of schools being their own admissions authorities shows that some of them—not all, but a good number—will seek to admit the children who they want to admit, and they are not usually the poor, the dispossessed and those who do not like turning up to school. I am not just making this up. There is no greater advocate or defender of teachers than me in almost all ways but all the evidence shows that, when the admissions arrangements can be controlled, the schools tend to do so in the schools’ favour and not in the pupils’ favour. We are not on a level playing field here. Schools will not play fair without some overriding principle, and the one that is in the amendment would suit the purpose very well. I support it.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, in some ways there is not much more to add, but I want to reinforce this point. I understand and have sympathy with a model of school system improvement that builds on the international evidence by the likes of Michael Barber, through his work at McKinsey and elsewhere, on the importance of school autonomy, even if it is autonomy collaborating with others, as part of driving forward school improvement. If you go for that big time, as this Government have done with the rapid expansion of autonomous schooling through academies and free schools, there are certain fundamentals that we have to be clear about the Government retaining responsibility for.
I suggest that the core functions that the Secretary of State has to hang on to and be held accountable for in this Palace are fair funding, fair admissions and objective inspection. We can argue about some of the other stuff, such as how much of a curriculum there should be and the teaching of history in school—we debate that beautifully and with much erudition. At the core, though, it is those three things that the Government should be concerned about in order to ensure that the operation of the market, which is almost what autonomous schools become, does not disadvantage those who are least articulate, least advantaged and least able to help themselves. It is a struggle for the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, to define fairness in this context but for me fairness is ensuring that no child or family is disadvantaged by who they are, where they live and what their income is, and that they have equal opportunity to access good schooling.
As has been said, the growth of autonomy leads to growth in the number of schools that are their own admissions authorities. I have some sympathy with my noble friend Lady Morris; some co-ordination by local authorities in administering admissions makes it much easier for parents. However, I recall that in my day it was the schools, rather than the local authorities that were admissions authorities, that were most likely to fall foul of the admissions code. I do not think that it was anything to do with the fact that they were largely faith schools or with their faith foundation; it was the fact that they were their own admissions authorities. Some aspects of the code were quite complex and they did not have the expertise in-house or within the school to ensure that they were compliant with the code. We found some gross non-compliance with the code, which is why things were toughened up.
In many ways, I do not have a problem with the Government’s code. What I have a problem with is ensuring that there is proper regulation of the code, with teeth. To remove the admissions adjudicator’s ability to direct schools and the adjudicator’s power to look at the admissions arrangements is to remove teeth. The Government are still unable to answer this through their amendments which we will discuss later. The code has to be independent to protect the Government from charges of political interference, because sometimes these issues become quite political at a local level and Members of Parliament are asked to be involved.
This amendment is the minimum that the Government could get away with. If they are not minded to accept this amendment, we should think again about introducing something tougher at Third Reading and, if we need to, restoring some of the adjudicator’s powers.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
I see that the Minister is trying to be helpful and I entirely accept what he said about the Secretary of State having powers to take action to ensure that a school’s admission arrangements are fair. I accept that and I think that the Minister has made that point on a number of occasions. However, the problem arises as regards co-ordinating different schools with different oversubscription criteria. In a local authority area each school could be applying the admissions criteria fairly but a child could still be unfairly ignored by the system because of the way in which each of the separate rules apply to him. In that case, who has the power to go in and sort it out?