Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Ritchie of Brompton and Lord Sutherland of Houndwood

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Ritchie of Brompton]

My Lords, I shall speak to my amendment in this group, Amendment 108A. As has been said, the passage of the Academies Act last year allowed us considerable debate on the merits of the academy system introduced by the previous Government and accelerated by the current one. Academies have become an established part of the education system and I do not want to revisit that debate. Through this probing amendment I wish to raise local government concerns over the ability of the education system to react to local circumstances. Here, I must yet again declare an interest as the chair of the LGA children and young people’s board.

Amendment 108A would alter Schedule 11 to allow it to continue to recognise the Government’s ambition of seeing schools transferred to academy status, but would retain the necessary local flexibility in the school system to allow for local needs to be taken into account and avoid the creation of a potentially burdensome process for establishing new schools.

Schedule 11 creates a requirement for a local authority seeking to establish a new school first to look at setting up an academy. Councils do not object to that first part of the schedule. However, its subsequent provisions establish a process by which the local authority must report to the DfE on the process of establishing that new academy. Further provisions place restrictions on the establishment of new schools, requiring a council to seek permission from the DfE before considering alternative models of provision and giving powers to the department to order a council to withdraw a notice issued to invite proposals for establishing a new school.

The DfE has projected that while overall pupil numbers in state-funded schools have been in decline, they will increase from this year onwards. Indeed, by 2014, pupil numbers in maintained primary schools will be more than 8 per cent higher than in 2010. Despite the current contraction in demand for secondary school places, the increase in demand for primary school places over the next three to four years is likely to create a sudden boom in the demand for pupil places such that the education system has not had to react to since demand began to decline in 2004.

The primary concern of a council and its community when managing this demand and seeking to establish a new school should be the needs of local parents, and of course of children. Furthermore, councils must be able to balance place provision to ensure that the needs of the entire local area are met. We need to ensure that the Bill does not reduce the ability of local parents, education providers and councils to respond quickly and effectively to new demand and that local choice and diversity of provision are maintained.

Unfortunately, the later provisions in Schedule 11 could restrict the ability of local communities to decide what type of school is established, not only by the creation of burdensome and bureaucratic reporting requirements but ultimately by placing decision-making in the hands of departmental officials in Whitehall rather than locally elected representatives in town halls. Councils understand their residents and local areas well. If local parents do not want schools to be established as academies, there needs to be an option to reflect local parental demand and to establish other types of schools. Councils should not be required to get permission from Whitehall before responding to and implementing the wishes of local residents.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I hope to speak to briefly on this question in view of my earlier remarks. This is a crucial clause, which has to do with the direction of government policy and a struggle that might develop between national policy and local authorities. The Academies Bill has gone through. I supported that, and I support the direction of travel in this Bill, not least because it clarifies very considerably what the Academies Bill amounted to. There are two or three points of difficulty that I want to mention, to which I hope the Minister might respond.

First, if every school becomes an academy, which is a possibility, then, as we have consistently pointed out, there may be cracks in the system. There has to be some oversight should these cracks appear. This is not regulating schools; it is trying to find a coherent policy that serves the needs of the whole community, should every school become independent of local authority control. As I said, the direction of travel is right, not least because we have had many decades of local authority supervision of schools and we do not have a system that any of us is content with. That is the reality, and it is one good reason why we should support the Bill, another being the excellence of the academy policy of the previous Government and the way in which many schools want to sign up to it. We have to give this a fair wind.

I have read the Explanatory Notes very carefully, and paragraph 180 contains a series of bullet points on which it is possible for local authorities to take a view on founding a further school. The most significant of these is a loophole. It is the last bullet point in paragraph 180, and it reads:

“Local authority proposals for a new community or foundation school”,

are possible,

“where following publication of a section 7 notice no proposals are approved by the local authority, no Academy arrangements are entered into, or no proposals are received”.

There is therefore, as I read this, room for the local authority to take steps to make provision for what otherwise might be absent.

I have two further points. First, the proposals for a series of schools becoming in effect independent over the years lack a proper sense of scrutiny of what might happen over the next five, 10 or 15 years in some of these schools. I shall speak to this point when we come on to exemptions from inspection and I shall not expand on it now. Secondly, 20 years ago a Secretary of State came up with a great new whizz and said to me, “Stewart, I plan to make all schools directly answerable to the Secretary of State. What do you think?”. I gulped and pointed out to him that this might mean that in Parliament he would be answering questions about the state of the lavatories at Walford primary school because there would be no other place to go to raise the questions. I hope any sensible Government would want to avoid that kind of situation.