Academies Bill [HL]

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I apologise if the wording of my amendment is not exact. It is merely there to bring up the subject of inspections and to make it clear that I want them to be regular, not just every five years or so.

There is a good model of how this could be done. Every year, we are retiring a few thousand headmasters and deputy headmasters who have immense experience and the ability to judge a school pretty rapidly—the good ones. They know how to read a school, how a school works and what to look for. They have the ability to be immensely supportive and they are not that expensive because they have pensions. They have a commitment to the job and all they want is a reasonable return for the effort that they are putting in. If we were to pay £300 a day, that might be a figure with some echoes—we do it for that. It should not surprise us that heads and others with a real vocation and dedication to helping other people are prepared to work and put in similar effort for a similar amount of money. You are not looking at a lot of money. You are looking at people whom parents and heads naturally trust. You are starting off on a pretty good basis if you are staffing your inspectorate with that sort of person.

These people could go once a year into every school—and I do say “every school”. What is the point of an inspectorate not visiting outstanding schools? How are inspectors ever going to learn what best practice is if they never go into the best schools? Part of the point of an inspectorate ought to be spreading good practice. They should be there to say, “This is what I saw the other day”, or, “Why don’t you talk to him or her about that because they seem to be getting it right?”. If all you are doing is going round the schools that are not performing well, all you can do is spread bad practice. To be an effective inspector, you need to be in touch with good practice and with what is going on in the world of good schools. A simple report to parents—a paragraph or so, to say that since the last inspection report things are progressing, this is particularly good, there is still a bit of trouble on that but, overall, we are happy—is what parents need to know that they can take a baseline from the previous Ofsted report, read through it, know that things have improved or are much as they were and take a reasonable decision. Most schools with a head who is open to ideas will benefit enormously from having someone such as that around.

Once schools have come to trust the system, you would find that they were asking for extra days. When I was a governor of a college under the old FEFC system, we were looking to have these people in more often. We would say, “We’re not doing what we should do in biology. Let’s get the biology man around to give us an extra bit of help there”. Schools, particularly primary schools, are little, isolated, lonely places. They want support and they want to have contact with people who can provide that support and good ideas. At the moment, all we have is the school improvement partner system, which is too low-level and local. We would do much better if we moved to making that part of the inspection system. I think that we could run that bit of the inspection system for about £10 million a year and have a report on every school, every year. Over and above that, you obviously need a full inspection system. Every now and again, you need to go in and do the whole works. Even if you are quite generous on the budget and say that you will spend 10 man-days on average every five years, that will cost you only £20 million or so. Then you have the central system over that.

There is an enormous obsession with data in the current central system. Collecting the data imposes immense burdens on schools. Teachers worry about measuring every aspect of every child’s performance because the school improvement partner or the inspector may pick them up on this or that, which is not constructive. You do not need to look at data on that level. Any mathematician will tell you that, apart from in pure mathematics, figures are always wrong. Figures do not provide value on their own; they provide value only in relation to what is happening on the ground. Inspections should be about the human aspect of schools: the quality of the teaching; the quality of the atmosphere; the staff; and the relationships in the school. They are things that numbers never throw any light on, although numbers can be useful in confirming what is happening.

If we were to budget £50 million a year for Ofsted as a whole, that would be enough. We could then perhaps devote another £50 million to the same organisation, perhaps, if it was running well and was focused on supporting schools that were having a hard time, bringing them round and making them straight—if it was picking up schools that had scored four and setting them right—which needs a lot of concentrated help and advice very fast. That would still be half the current budget, but it would provide about 10 times the value. I beg to move.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

I support much of what my noble friend has said. It is desperately important to have proper monitoring of what is going on in these new and very innovative schools and to have feedback, not only to the schools—I will come to what my noble friend said about the positive nature of the feedback that is needed, which I agree with him about—but also to the Secretary of State. Ministers need to know how well the experiment is going and what adjustments are needed from time to time.

I wholly agree with my noble friend that the current Ofsted system is not what is needed and not what we are asking for. It seems to have put everything into one rather unsatisfactory basket. Ofsted inspects for health and safety issues and can fail a school on the height of its security fence. That is not the professional judgment of educational experts. The people who should be doing the assessment of the school’s success and innovation should be people who were successful professional teachers who know what they are talking about. Popping in to see whether health and safety rules are being obeyed or whether security is being maintained is not what an educationalist should be doing. There should be a firm and distinct line between that kind of inspection and the professional judgments that my noble friend so well described.

It is important that we have a cadre of people who are constantly in touch with schools. I say to my noble friend that we need more than simply a once-a-year report. Somebody should keep in touch with the school on a fairly regular basis and go in from time to time to be a shoulder on which the head can—one hopes not cry—pour out her or his ideas, thoughts and problems when they arise, and provide wisdom and judgment. As my noble friend said, they also need to be a sounding board so that the Secretary of State and Ministers can understand what is really happening in these innovative and exciting academies.

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[Lord Bates]

Indeed, the guarantees were not just without any meaningful evidence as to what they actually meant, but without any resources so that teachers would be able to undertake that additional, onerous responsibility.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

If I might add another voice from the Back Benches: to try to guarantee to every parent that their child will have an ideally good school—what a wonderful thought that would be. People have been trying ever since the end of the Second World War to provide a good school for every child; successive Governments have not succeeded in doing so. There are still an awful lot of schools which fail an awful lot of children, so to try to put into legislation a promise to parents that they will have a good school for their child is really an absurd suggestion.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, when my children were at primary school I recall the primary head teacher telling me with great joy one day that there had been a very large package delivered in the school playground. They were not sure where it came from and had asked the police to inspect it. They had indeed blown it up; it was 400 pages of further instructions from the Department for Education. Of course, we agree with many of the aspirations set out in the proposed new schedule but, as the noble Baroness will have heard from behind the Front Bench, we are committed to giving schools more freedoms to get on with the job, with fewer detailed instructions taking less time away from teachers for teaching. What she is suggesting is very much the kind of approach that we want to move away from.

As my noble friend Baroness Walmsley and others have said, writing things down on paper and spending a long time negotiating them does not necessarily make them happen. We therefore share the aspirations but not the method. For most of us on this side of the Committee, part of what was wrong with education policy under the previous Government was the overdetailed instructions and prescriptions to schools, which we all know that teachers grew intensely to dislike. The aim of this Bill and of the Bills which will follow it—a larger Bill is promised for this autumn—is to free teachers to talk with parents and deal with pupils, and not to spend an immense amount of time with pieces of paper and negotiations. I therefore urge the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

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Amendment 73 gives a right of appeal to those who have been excluded. The provisions of the Human Rights Act and other relevant legislation mean that simply to exclude children from school without a right of appeal risks tying up head teachers in court battles to defend an exclusion. The coalition Government have stated that this is not their intention. Since more than 99 per cent of exclusions are overturned on appeal, this is a simple provision for an appeals process which does not undermine the authority of head teachers but frees them from unnecessary bureaucracy. I hope noble Lords will respond positively to these amendments.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, I am unhappy about these amendments on several counts. First, they seem to impose, again, external restrictions on academies, whereas the whole object of the Bill is to take away all the impositions that have been put on them. Secondly, Amendment 72 would give the local authority an overriding say in the exclusion of pupils. Surely, if a school is to be free and able to manage its own affairs, it should not have to operate in partnership with a local authority that no longer has any statutory or financial authority over it.

I have discussed these amendments with the principal of one academy, who assures me that academies are happy to operate independently and in informal collaboration with other schools in their area, though not necessarily within the same local authority, particularly over aspects of their work which might well affect those other schools. For example, if a pupil is excluded from an academy, it might well be that another school would be the better and right place for that pupil to go. In that case there is nothing to stop Fred, the principal of one academy, calling Mary, the principal of a maintained school, and saying, “Look, we’ve got a lad here who isn’t fitting into the academy well and is behaving very badly. We’re intending to exclude him; would you be willing to take him on?”, and so on. Trusting professionals in the service to do sensible things and work together on a collegiate and happy basis is far more likely to work than all this imposition of things from outside and putting them in legislation. I hope that the noble Baroness will reflect on the lack of trust which this kind of amendment suggests.

[The Earl of Listowel]

The reassuring words of the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, are very helpful. When I visit special institutions for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties or children’s homes, I am concerned that often one finds that the children with the most severe difficulties are pooled together in one place. They become difficult to manage, difficult for each other, and difficult for those who are caring for them. When comparing Denmark and this country, one of the differences is that Denmark intervenes and takes children into care earlier. Children’s homes are used more and there is more of a mixed bag of children in them. Thus, the temperature of the place is lowered. As a result of this provision, I would not want to see the most difficult children pushed into one place. I hope that the Minister can reassure us that further thought will be given to how we can support head teachers in academies and non-academies to work together. For example, a small amount of resources could be put into a yearly local get-together where such people would be able to speak to and to meet each other.

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[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

I shall direct my comments to Amendment 72, although I also support Amendment 73. On this occasion, I shall disagree as strongly as I might with the noble Baroness, Lady Perry.

Of all the freedoms that academies may be granted, it is the freedom not to take part in the education of vulnerable excluded children that worries me most. This amendment is important and, if we do not pass it, we do so at our peril. Quite frankly, academies are not queueing up to take these excluded children. The children are often difficult to teach, they come from homes with difficulties, they do not do anything for the school in terms of its position in the league tables or its Ofsted inspection and they do not improve the school’s social image. Let us say it as it is: these kids are not top of the pecking order in terms of schools wanting to take them on.

We also know that traditionally we have dealt poorly with these children. If they go to a pupil referral unit, all the evidence is that they are very rarely reintegrated into the mainstream education system, they do not pass their exams, they do not continue in education, they do not fulfil their potential and they do not carry on to university or have the life chances that they might have. That is the problem that we are trying to solve.

This problem started in my day—and one knows how one becomes precious over things that began when one was in the department, so I apologise for that. Co-operation has now been built among schools so that they say two things—that their prime responsibility is to their children but that there is a generosity of spirit that accepts an obligation towards children in the community. That has meant that schools have had that generosity of spirit and have been prepared to take other children on to their rolls, rather than having them excluded to a pupil referral unit. That is my first point: if you can keep an excluded child or a child who is not settling in school within mainstream education, that has to be better than excluding them from mainstream education. That will not happen if you leave it just to market forces.

The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, made an interesting point when she talked about an academy phoning another school to say, “We have a child who does not seem to be settling or fitting in here. Will you take them?”. That is the way it will be. The middle-class schools that are already full will be able to say, “No, because we are full”, while the schools that will have to, by law, say yes are those that serve deprived areas. Those that have spare places will have to take on such children. The schools will already have children such as those, whom they will be working their socks off not to exclude, and they may not have the capacity to deal with these children.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

I hope that the noble Baroness will accept that principals of academies may well share our concern for the most deprived and difficult children. The principals of academies whom I have talked to have expressed every bit as much concern and care for the difficult and disadvantaged children in society as we have in this House, who do not have to run schools. There seems to be a kind of arrogance on our part in assuming that, unless we control the schools, put things in legislation and make them do it, they will not of their own free will wish to do the right thing.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

But the evidence is on my side. The number of exclusions by academies is very great, while the number of children at risk of exclusion by non-academies being taken in by academies is very small. That is why the amendment is important. This is not about the Government saying to schools, “You must do this, that or the other”; it is about a partnership that already exists. We are not instructing schools to form these partnerships; they exist already. The schools work together and make professional judgments. There are times when a child needs to be out of a school. Such children do not settle, the relationships are broken and the damage is done. They need to be elsewhere. The best system is when schools, through generosity of spirit and professional judgment, almost come to an arrangement to help each other out. By doing so, they also help children out.

The only point of including the local authority in the amendment is that someone has to broker the arrangement. I do not care who it is. All that the local authority does is broker the partnership that provides this better way of dealing with excluded children. The local authority cannot tell a school to take a child—and that is good. All that the local authority does is hold the ring for families of schools to make professional judgments about where these excluded children should go. My prediction, which I know is accurate, is that if academies are allowed to exclude themselves from this partnership of schools that deal with these most vulnerable children, a lot of academies will do exactly that and the burden will fall on schools that are not academies but are still in the partnerships.

I have listened carefully to the Minister. As well as emphasising independence, he has emphasised partnership. Academies under his Government have to partner with an underperforming school to raise standards. What better way is there of cementing that relationship and philosophy than by his Government also saying that academies should stay in the partnership and play their part in making sure that we deal with our excluded children as effectively as we can? We have not done that well in the past, but the partnerships that have flourished in the past few years provide the evidence that that is the best way to proceed.

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[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, perhaps I may say how much I agree with what my noble friend Lady Williams said about the perverse effect of league tables. The good instincts of many school heads that I advocated in response to what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said have been stifled by the imposition of league tables. The heads want to help these disadvantaged children but dare not do so in case it pulls them down the league tables, with all the perverse effects that that would have on their finances, reputation and everything else. I hope that we can continue to have faith and trust in the good instincts of those who run schools and that we can release them from the perverse effects of collecting detailed information and statistics simply for league table purposes.

[The Earl of Listowel]

Again, I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, has said. As far as I know, the best performing country, Finland, does not have league tables but relies on excellent teachers and trusts them to make the right decisions for children. As I recall, Finland also does not have exclusions, but has smaller, very mixed-ability classes.

Two things come to mind in this debate. The two amendments in the group are well related. There is the danger with academies that they will not be so well supported by, for instance, the good approach of having a child psychotherapist working regularly with teachers to talk about particular problematic children. That is a good approach, but it is easy to think that it is too expensive and a bit of a luxury and that an easier option would be to move a difficult child somewhere else. I have sympathy with both sides of the argument. Given that these things are already established, I would prefer to keep the status quo, because league tables have a perverse influence. I look forward to the Minister’s response. If he could say a little more about the plans for league tables and how they will be improved, that would be helpful.