Education and Adoption Bill

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2015 Grand Committee

My question to the Minister is: are we confident that we can resource all this work sufficiently? Potentially, we could be talking about a lot of schools, and at the moment RSCs are a lean operation. The Minister needs to reassure me more about how the work will be carried out than about the actual definition. If the work is underresourced, there is a danger that that will be seen as naming and shaming, whereas all of us in here today, wherever we are sitting, want this work to be about school improvement. If this is to be serious school improvement, it will need serious and properly funded work.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

Briefly, I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, has just said. It is practical common sense. We all know what we mean by a coasting school. At the heart of it, it is one that is simply not getting better; it is just staying where it is. My experience of good schools is that they always want to do better. They will be proud of and pleased with what they are doing, but they will tell you that next year they will do it better and make this or that improvement. The coasting school is one that has just stopped doing that and is sitting there, content with what it is, not brilliant and not below the bar, but not providing that stretching that a good school does for all its pupils.

We should not try to extend the definition, which is a very crucial part of the Bill, to a whole shopping list of all the things that we would like to see in a school. We could write a book on the subject—and many people have—of all the things that we would like to see in a school. My strong feeling is that all schools, by law, have to provide a broad and balanced curriculum and, if they are not doing so, they are failing. If they are not providing all the things that enrich and enhance the experience of their pupils, again, they are not just coasting—they are failing.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

Would the noble Baroness not accept that some schools do neglect sport, the arts and social skills? We know this—and that those skills often underpin academic success, so they need to be there. If they are not there, you will not get academic success, either.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

Absolutely. That is why we have Ofsted, which picks these things up. It is my firm belief that schools need looking at very regularly. I do not mean that they need a full Ofsted inspection but, as I said at Second Reading, they need somebody to go in to make sure that these things are happening and to make sure that the school then takes action on the deficit that has been identified.

We have a well-defined definition that is workable; it is not complete, and I do not think that the Minister will claim that it is, but it will flag up the need for further action. Let us get it clear at this stage of the Bill—because some of the amendments later seem to cast doubt on it—that nobody is going to force a coasting school immediately into academy status; it is going to be given an opportunity to improve by other means. After the kind of things that we have seen in the press this week, as if all coasting schools were suddenly going to be made academies against their will and without any consultation, let us just kill that myth among ourselves.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)]

My Lords, I was not planning to intervene at this stage but I would like to ask the Minister to address a question in his summing up. Like the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan and Lady Perry, I think that the definition—whatever it is—has to be very clear and simple. My concern about it being simply about academic content and not having just one phrase that adds to the roundness of the whole is that we all know that when schools are under pressure—we all know what a coasting school looks like and when it is defined as such it will find itself under pressure—they will work very hard at the things that will take their scores up, which will be the academic areas. That could be to the detriment of the other areas.

I went to a very good programme that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, arranged. I will say more about that later, but one of the impressive things that the regional commissioners were talking about was how to develop leadership, which in all organisations—and some of us have had to work to change things round—is what is important. Leadership is developed by developing roundness in children. I would just like the Minister to think about how there could be some sort of phrase—a relatively straightforward and simple one—which ensures that schools do not focus just on the academic areas, because they are under pressure, at the expense of developing the other skills that will bring those young people forward and make them the next leaders in schools and in society.