Queen’s Speech
Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
My Lords, I am delighted to be participating today in this debate on the gracious Speech. I will restrict my remarks to issues of education, and in particular the need to help those who come from more disadvantaged sections of our community. I should also declare my interests as a governor of a primary school which is now an academy and as an honorary fellow of both the City & Guilds Institute and Birkbeck College.
I will start by saying how pleased I am that the Government have seen fit to drop their original proposals for the forced academisation of all local authority schools that have not so far become academies. I am thoroughly with the Government in terms of wishing to improve the quality and the performance of schools and, in particular—as mentioned by the Minister in his introduction—in the wish to change the appalling statistic of how many children leave primary school unable to cope with the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic. As the Minister mentioned, despite the improvement, one in five children leaves primary school without really being able to cope with the secondary school curriculum. This is, I think, a very difficult issue to deal with and one that as a nation we have failed to grapple with over time.
The reason why I am pleased that we are not forcing academisation is that the evidence does not indicate, as the Minister seemed to imply, that academisation leads to improvements in the quality of teaching. Academisation, which the school that I am a governor of went through, costs a fair amount in legal fees because land and assets are transferred from the local authority—roughly £50,000 to £60,000 per school. We have something like 15,000 primary schools still to be converted, so it is a big issue. We are talking about a lot of money—between £300 million and £500 million—to convert them.
The key issue in terms of improving the performance of schools is the quality of the teachers concerned. We could spend that money on improving CPD for teachers and training more teaching assistants. A higher-level teaching assistant is paid something like £20,000 a year, so for the £60,000 that one might be spending on legal fees, one could in fact employ three higher-level teaching assistants and make an important contribution to the quality of teaching in our classrooms.
We should look at countries such as Finland, which has traditionally topped the PISA tables and which insists that people should have five years’ training to become a teacher. One problem that we face in the classroom is the degree of stress that the current system imposes on teachers, and for that matter on pupils. I pick up the point that was made by both my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter and the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, about the importance of creativity within the classroom and the inclusion within the broader curriculum of subjects such as drama, dance and sports—I know that this something that my noble friend Lord Addington talks about a great deal. There is undoubtedly too much emphasis today on testing and league tables. Testing for diagnostic purposes is very important—but, equally, it has created far too much stress. Two in five teachers in this country leave teaching within the first five years. If we want to improve the quality of teaching it is vital that we have a stable workforce. At the moment we face very real problems in both recruiting and retaining teachers.
Like the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, I am a member of the Select Committee on Social Mobility. Our report concentrated on the transitions to work for 16 to 24 year-olds. We felt very strongly that too much emphasis was placed on what might be called the “golden route”, when in fact the majority of young people—between 55% and 60%—do not go through the golden route of GCSEs, A-levels and on to university. We called our report Overlooked and Left Behind. The reasons why these young people are left behind are extremely complex, but one issue is undoubtedly that many are demotivated by the secondary school curriculum that they face, which has long been—and continues to be—too academic. There has been a failure to have a broader curriculum and to include the creativity of the arts subjects. Subjects such as design and technology, home economics, sports, drama and dance have largely been dropped from the curriculum these days; it is all narrowly academic and demotivates a great many pupils.
I will make a number of points on the proposals relating to universities. Major changes are suggested to structures in relation to both teaching and research. There are considerable worries about both sets of reforms. In many senses, it is almost reform for the sake of reform and one wonders sometimes why, if it ain’t broke, we are wishing to fix it. The Government seem to have ignored many of the responses to the Green Paper consultation and pushed ahead with their proposals to link the ability to raise fees with the performance in the teaching excellence framework. The proposal is to allow three years for the system to bed down, but there are real doubts as to how adequate the teaching excellence framework will be and whether its reliance upon the National Student Survey and jobs data is really justified. In particular, there are fears that the latter will create a two-tier system, because all the evidence indicates that those from wealthy homes go into the higher-paying jobs.
The second issue is that of encouraging new entrants into the university sector by changing the procedures and requirements for degree-awarding powers. This has been very much welcomed by the further education sector, which has traditionally provided a considerable number of higher education courses, including the well-known HNC and HND courses, which have now largely been overtaken—rather sadly, I think—by foundation degrees. The problem has been that since 2012 the universities that accredit these courses have tended to take them in-house because they wish to keep the fee income. We have seen a huge drop in the number of part-time students on these courses. I have raised this issue in the House before; it is a huge issue, which none of the Government’s proposals have really addressed.
If we look at the demographics, we can see perfectly well that this country is going to have to use older workers more intensively. People are going to have to carry on working longer than they used to, and we are going to have to rely on older workers more than we used to. When this is combined with technology, their skills and capabilities will get increasingly out of date. It is therefore essential that we have institutions such as further education colleges that can provide part-time degree courses—often disproportionately for those who come from poorer homes. The problem is that many of these people already have debts of one sort or another—mortgages, bank overdrafts, car loans and so forth—and they are loath to take on any more. Yet the only answer the Government have provided is more loans, which do not seem to have provided the answer.
I will finish with one further observation. To my mind, what is lacking in the education system in this country today is not competition but joined-up strategic system thinking. Collaboration, not competition, should be the name of the game, and none of the reforms envisaged in the gracious Speech will give us this.
Schools: Parent Governors
Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Sharp of Guildford
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what considerations have led them to recommend the abolition of the statutory position of parent governors on school and academy governing boards.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I declare an interest as having been for the past 40 years first a parent governor and subsequently a governor of state schools.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, we are not abolishing parent governors. I pay tribute to the many thousands of parents who play this vital role, and I expect that many parents will continue to do so. Boards must be free to appoint parents for their skills and expertise to govern in the interests of all pupils. For the first time, all academies will in future be required to engage meaningfully with and listen to all parents.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I thank the Minister for his reply. I recognise that the Government are anxious to establish skills-based governing boards, but does he not recognise how incongruous it is that as the Government are to some extent discouraging parents from sitting on the governing boards of ordinary schools, they are at the same time extolling the role of parents in setting up free schools? Does he not also recognise that many parents like myself started as parent governors and learned through that experience and training the skills of critical analysis and leadership, which allowed them to provide leadership within their communities, often going on later to stand as councillors and perhaps even Members of Parliament?
Lord Nash
I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s support on parental engagement in free schools. I agree with the point she has made about people being able to develop their skills. We very much want parents to be involved, and school governing bodies provide an opportunity for them to acquire new skills. That is one of the reasons why many employers encourage their staff, particularly their younger staff, to sit on the governing bodies of schools and academies, and indeed we have an active programme with employers to develop this.
Regional Schools Commissioners
Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Nash
I agree entirely with the noble Lord about the importance of parents, who provide absolutely vital feedback. Governing bodies will be free to have many, if not a majority, of governors who are parents, and many will continue to do so. But, as I have said, they must be chosen for their skills.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
My Lords, could the Minister explain how these arrangements fit in with the new devolution agenda? In particular, will London and Manchester take over responsibility for the regional schools commissioners?
Education and Adoption Bill
Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts(9 years ago)
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Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
The noble Earl’s concern for vulnerable children is well known and entirely to his credit, but I wonder if he would acknowledge that the alternative to failing and failing and failing again is to succeed academically. The one thing which has bedevilled educational attainment over many decades has been low expectations: saying, “What can you expect? It is because of their miserable backgrounds and troubled families”, and all the rest of it. The answer is that we must have expectations. These young people deserve to achieve. I agree entirely with the noble Earl that pushing them too hard, too soon can be counterproductive, but the alternative of just sitting back and saying, “Well, they have such awful backgrounds, they are so vulnerable and they find life so difficult that we must not push them at all”, is something I could not go along with. I really believe that raising expectations is the whole thrust to success that this Government are so determined to achieve—and that is raising expectations for all children.
I know that noble Lords opposite have pointed out that some academies are failing. No one disputes that—of course there will be failures in any system, and they will made to stop failing and start succeeding. But if we are to give every child genuinely the best education, we have to look at what some academies have done brilliantly with the most vulnerable children in the most difficult circumstances and then pull the others up so that instead of 7%, 8% or 11% getting decent GCSEs, 90% do so. Listen to my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham and look at what he has done. Some of us have visited several of his schools and have seen what can be achieved.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
I point out to the noble Baroness that there are also local authority-controlled schools where one has seen a very similar turnaround. High expectations are not the preserve of academies alone. Good teachers always have high expectations.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
Absolutely. I would be the first person to say that there are some wonderful maintained schools and some very good local authorities. Nevertheless, it is true, and the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, made this point, that local authorities have had decades to get this right and have allowed far too many schools to fall below the standard and taken no action to improve that. It was right that central government should move in to try to do something about it. I am sure that noble Lords opposite would have alternative ways to do that; the Labour Government did a great deal when in power as a central authority to help to raise standards, and they are to be highly praised for the legacy that they left in London and so on. There is a good history of central government moving in when local government is failing, and there is no question that plenty of schools that have been taken out of local authority control have succeeded. That does not mean that there are not lots of excellent local authority-maintained schools.
“( ) In determining whether to make an Academy order in respect of a maintained school in England, the Secretary of State must consider the availability of a suitable sponsor with a value added measure above the national average.
( ) If no suitable sponsor is available, the Secretary of State must appoint as a sponsor a willing council-maintained school or local authority with a value added measure above the national average.”
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
My Lords, this amendment takes us to Clause 7, which is about failing schools, not coasting schools. It makes academisation mandatory for all failing schools: those which on inspection are judged inadequate or in need of very significant improvements. We put forward this amendment at the behest of the Local Government Association, which is worried about its responsibilities for finding sponsors for such schools. I shall quote the association’s briefing:
“We are concerned about the capacity of the pool of current and potential academy sponsors to take on large numbers of additional schools. Councils are also reporting difficulty in finding sponsors for new schools or schools found inadequate by Ofsted. The DfE itself has already halted the expansion of some of the largest academy chains in response to concerns that rapid expansion has affected standards and Ofsted has issued critical reports on the performance of some chains. Recent DfE figures show that only 15% of the largest chains perform above the national average on an ‘added value’ measure, compared to 44 per cent of councils”.
This picks up work that has been done by the Sutton Trust in the two reports it issued this year and last year on academy chains. Summing up its findings in the 2015 report, the trust said:
“Overall, in comparison with the national figures for all secondary schools and academies … the sponsored academies in this analysis have lower inspection grades and are twice as likely to be below the floor standard. In 2014, 44% of the academies in the analysis group were below the government’s new ‘coasting level’ and 26 of the 34 chains that we have analysed had one or more schools in this group”.
It also noted that there were significant variations between chains and within chains with,
“a larger group of low-performing chains … achieving results that are not improving and may be harming the prospects of their disadvantaged pupils”.
It goes on:
“The contrast between the best and worst chains has increased in 2014. Some chains with high attainment for disadvantaged pupils have improved faster than the average for schools with similar 2012 attainment. In contrast, the lowest performing chains did significantly less well over the period 2012-14 than schools with similarly low 2012 attainment”
It is not surprising that the Sutton Trust’s main recommendation was that,
“the DfE and regional schools commissioners … should specify and operate clear, rigorous criteria for all sponsors”,
and that school-based federations and trusts should be expanded; that is, linking up well performing schools, sometimes perhaps in the local authority maintained sectors, with schools that are failing rather than necessarily making them into academies.
This is more or less precisely what this amendment is proposing. Subsection (1) suggests:
“In determining whether to make an Academy order in respect of a maintained school in England, the Secretary of State must consider the availability of a suitable sponsor with a value added measure above the national average”.
For example, the Harris Academy chain, which is very well regarded, would be regarded as a suitable sponsor. However, only 15%—quite a small group—of academy chains are in that category, although they are the larger academy chains.
The amendment goes on to provide that:
“If no suitable sponsor is available, the Secretary of State must appoint as a sponsor a willing council-maintained school or local authority with a value added measure above the national average”.
So the amendment picks up on the two proposals from the Sutton Trust report by saying on the one hand, “Look hard when you are choosing a sponsor—don’t just choose any old sponsor. Make sure that it is one with a very good record in coping with this sort of school”, while on the other hand it refers to where there is no local sponsor available.
It is certainly true that many academy chains concentrate on particular areas and that there are not always chains that are available and have schools locally. When you are part of an academy chain, it is quite important to be able to link up with other schools in the chain and be able to compare best practice. The school of which I am a governor is part of an academy chain, but no other local schools are part of it, and that poses problems. It means that we have to travel about 50 miles to go to a meeting—usually around the M25 at 6 o’clock in the evening, which is not the best thing to do—so as I say, there are problems with not having a local sponsor. Sometimes linking up with a strong local authority-maintained school is preferable, even if it is not itself an academy. Many local secondary schools are now academies and if you have a good, strong local academy, then putting the school under that umbrella is preferable to trying to link it up with a far-distant chain. I beg to move.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I thank noble Lords who have participated in this debate. Will the Minister clarify one point? I do not have a copy of the Academies Act with me and I have therefore been unable to check it, but my memory of it is that, in effect, where a school fails, it is initially up to the local authority to effect, so to speak, the process of academisation. The Bill changes it so that:
“The Secretary of State must make an Academy order in respect of a maintained school in England that is eligible for intervention by virtue of section 61 or 62”.
That means that the Secretary of State is now the person to take action. In effect, the Minister said that local authorities do not have to worry at all about this because the regional schools commissioners will take responsibility for it. They will have to worry about whether there is a good academy chain. I said that it is important to take local issues into account. There are a lot of academy chains that are not performing very well at the moment as well as those that are. It is not preferable to bring in a poor-performing academy chain rather than use a strong local school. The preferable solution is to link up at a local level so that the school has locally available mentors that it can easily talk to. I rather object, in some senses, to the way that the Minister said, “Don’t worry any more because the regional schools commissioners are going to take this problem and they’ll sort it out because all our academy chains are so super”. They are not. The Government recognise that. This is an important amendment. We want a more sympathetic approach to it. As we are in Grand Committee, we cannot vote here, so I shall withdraw the amendment.
Lord Nash
The noble Baroness is right that the key to school improvement is local school-to-school support. I could not agree more. The academy model is now focused on that, so sponsors will either be a local sponsor in the local MAT formed out of a local outstanding school, and we have created several hundred in the past couple of years, or a part of a national MAT with a local hub. That is essential. I agree entirely with the noble Baroness.
“School conversion: children with special educational needs and disabilities
After section 4 of the Academies Act 2000 insert—“4A School conversion: children with special educational needs and disabilities
Before entering into Academy arrangements in relation to a school which has been the subject of an Academy order under section 4(A1), the Secretary of State shall—(a) provide guidance to the person with whom the arrangements are to be entered into about collaborating with other schools to provide any necessary specialist provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities, in cases where the individual school is not able to provide it;(b) require the person with whom the arrangements are to be entered into to provide details of their plans to support—(i) children with special educational needs and disabilities who have an education, health and care plan; and(ii) children with special educational needs and disabilities who do not have an education, health and care plan.””
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
This is a probing amendment and it comes from the Royal College of Speech and Language specialists, who are quite worried about the present position of special educational needs in schools.
As noble Lords will know, following the enactment of the Children and Families Bill, which we dealt with in the previous Session, there have been considerable changes in the treatment of children with special educational needs. What used to be called statements are now education, health and care plans. Approximately 2.5% of children in schools have the equivalent of a statement. Many local authorities are way behind with the issuing of education, health and care plans. Therefore, at the moment there is a mix of the two. Somewhere in the region of 15% or 17% of children have special educational needs. These are now dealt with in the school framework, and we have done away with the categories that used to be called school action and school action plus. Now, it is the responsibility of the school to identify children with special educational needs and to make provision for them.
The speech and language specialists are particularly concerned with those who have special educational needs in speech, language and communication. Something like 7% of children have such needs, and around 50% of those will come from disadvantaged homes—those who are eligible for free school meals. This is the most prevalent group of children with special educational needs in primary schools.
One can see that if children come to school not able to talk properly—in some cases, not talking at all—they cannot be taught to read. The first thing you have to do is to get children chatting away. This is what many reception classes are all about: getting the children to interact with each other and talk to each other and, from that, learning how sounds are formed and so forth.
As I said, the speech and language specialists are very concerned that children with SEN, particularly those with speech, language and communication needs, who do not have statements or EHC plans may not receive the specialist support that they need to enable them to fully engage with their education. Without that support, they are at risk of not having the best start in life and may be unable to achieve their potential, both at school and in life. The speech and language specialists are trying to get the Government’s thoughts on this.
The amendment does two things. First, it is designed to address whether schools will be encouraged and supported to collaborate where an individual school does not have the necessary level of specialist support for children with special educational needs and disabilities, including speech, language and communication needs. Secondly, it deals with how academies will provide support for those children with EHC plans and, crucially, given the vast number of children with special educational needs and disabilities who do not have EHC plans, those without them. It also addresses whether the Government will keep under review specialist provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities in schools of all types, both for children with EHC plans and for those without.
As I said, this is a fairly straightforward amendment. It requires reassurance from the Government that where in the past children have had specialist support, they will continue to get the support that is necessary. This is particularly true in primary schools, where the help of the specialists is particularly valuable to teachers, some of whom do not have the competence to cope. I beg to move.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
My Lords, I am very pleased indeed that the noble Baroness has tabled this probing amendment. I have for some time been very closely involved with a charity called I CAN, which works with children with severe communication difficulties. Working with the charity, I have been made aware of how extremely specialised this treatment is. Many of these children are speechless, not because they have any physical disability but because of severe emotional difficulties, and getting them to the point where they can engage in any kind of intelligible conversation is a hugely long and difficult path.
One of the most moving experiences was when the people who work with these children in specialist units demonstrated that these children can sometimes sing when they cannot speak. About eight or nine of these children came in front of us and sang, and you could hear how rusty and unused their voices were because that is the only time they use them. I am therefore very conscious of how important it is that specialist help is available. Of course, good teachers will work hard and some of them will succeed in getting these children to speak, but the idea of making sure that through collaboration they are able to have really specialist help is very important, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, this amendment prompts a question in my mind, which the Minister might be able to write to me about. Some schools are better at catering for children with special educational needs, so they attract more of them; they get a reputation as being good at it. One would not wish those schools to be penalised because they happen to be good at working with children with special educational needs. In the metric that the Government are developing to judge progress and whether or not a school is coasting, I hope we can be assured that over the three-year period there is not a risk that we penalise a school because it is very good at working with children with special educational needs. The children may not make so much progress academically but they will have been given excellent support in other ways. I hope that makes sense.
I will say one other thing. I can see that the notion I expressed earlier about allowing children to fail, particularly children in care, is a difficult concept, which I should probably correct somewhat. What I was trying to say is: allow children to fail, fail and fail again until they are successful, and each time they fail allow them not to feel so badly about failing that they do not want to try again but allow them to keep on trying until they are successful. Obviously, ideally one wants to help them to be successful the first time round.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I apologise for speaking again here, but perhaps I may add something. I am the special educational needs governor of a primary school, and when the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, was talking about the time it takes to get a statement and so forth, I was thinking about the cost of supporting children with special educational needs. As noble Lords will know, a primary school receives about £4,000 a head, and the average cost of supporting those with special educational needs is about £8,000. It can vary from £4,000 to something like £16,000 or £17,000 if there has to be an extra teaching assistant because the child is disruptive. On average it takes a couple of years to get a statement for those who are at the extreme end and it will cost about £16,000. A small primary school finds it very difficult to cope in terms of resources because budgets are so tight at the moment.
The Earl of Listowel
I suppose what flows from that is that the educational attainment of other children may not progress as fast as it might because the resources are focused on the most disadvantaged children. So, again, a primary school that is good at attracting children with special educational needs may appear to perform less well—indeed, it may actually be performing less well—academically, although it is doing a good job with children with special educational needs, because its resources are being spent on those children rather than on the wider population.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I remind the noble Earl that schools receive extra resources for those young people—especially now, with the pupil premium. However, there is an overlap between the two groups and, although we have to be careful to ensure that the pupil premium resources are not spent exclusively on those with special educational needs, there is a reason to use some of those resources for some of the activities.
Baroness Hughes of Stretford
Before my noble friend Lord Watson speaks, perhaps I may ask a question. This is an important amendment and it made me realise that I did not know terribly much about what academies have to do in relation to children with special educational needs and disabilities. Can the Minister tell us—if not today then in writing after the Committee—what information schools have to provide, when they are to become academies, about the arrangements that they will make for children with special educational needs and disabilities? Secondly, what statistics does the department have on the numbers of children with SEND who are currently in academies, compared with those elsewhere in the education system?
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
My Lords, Amendment 18, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford, concerns provision for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities at schools which have been judged inadequate by Ofsted and will therefore become academies with the support of a sponsor. This amendment would mean that before a sponsor could take on a failing school, it would have to submit detailed plans about how it proposed to support pupils with SEN and disabilities, both those with an education, health and care plan and those without. Where there is doubt that the individual school would be able to offer specialist provision for these pupils, the Secretary of State would have to provide guidance to the sponsor about how collaboration with other schools could provide this. The purpose of the Bill is to ensure that when a school has failed there will be swift, decisive action to bring about urgent transformation. We do not want this to be unnecessarily delayed.
In response to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, we have set out in the draft Schools Causing Concern guidance that the number of pupils with SEN should be one of the factors that RSCs take into account when determining the best course of action for a coasting school, so they will consider it. While I recognise the noble Earl’s concerns in this area, we believe that this amendment is unnecessary and I will set out the reasons why. I reassure noble Lords that we have a robust system in place to ensure that academies are identifying and addressing the needs of pupils with SEN and disabilities—a system that we reformed extensively only last year. All academies are subject to the same requirements and expectations as local authority-maintained schools in their provision for pupils with SEN and disabilities.
To address the concern that the noble Baroness raised on behalf of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, we are not just talking here about those students with more complex needs, who qualify for education, health and care plans. We have also strengthened requirements on schools in relation to how they support all students with SEN. The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, asked about that system. It includes the requirement for schools to produce an SEN information report, which must be published on their websites. The report must describe the kinds of special educational needs for which provision is made at the school and information about the school’s policies for making provision for all pupils with SEN. The report must also describe how it involves other bodies, including health and social services bodies, local authority support services and voluntary organisations, in meeting the needs of pupils with SEN and supporting the families of those pupils.
As I have said, academies must follow the same requirements on SEN provision that apply to maintained schools. The sponsor taking responsibility for the failing school must therefore ensure that the school complies with all these requirements. This means that information about the academy’s provision for SEN and how it will collaborate with other organisations as part of that provision must be available, even without this amendment. Sponsors taking on a new school will have to give careful consideration as to how the needs of pupils with SEN at the school are met and whether they can put any additional support in place.
An example, particularly drawing on the collaboration that the noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned, is Dorothy Barley Junior School and Special Needs Base, which became a sponsored academy in 2013. The sponsor identified for the school, REAch2, has “inclusion” as one of its founding principles, and took care to consider the potential impact of academy conversion on SEN pupils. REAch2 committed to make provision for children with SEN through inclusion in mainstream classes and, where necessary, outside class. The trust already included a number of primary schools with specialist units providing support for children with SEN—including a specialist speech and language unit at Aerodrome Academy in Croydon, a centre for children with autism at Tidemill Academy in Lewisham and a specialist unit for children with autism and ADHD at Hillyfield Academy in Waltham Forest—so it had strong experience of delivering SEN provision and managing specialist units. We entirely agree that collaboration really helps in this area. Local authorities will of course retain responsibility for services such as education, health and care plans and for the assessment and monitoring of SEN provision once a school becomes an academy.
Academies are inclusive schools which play a full part in providing for children with SEN and disabilities. The noble Baroness, Lady Hughes, asked for some figures. Sponsored academies have a higher proportion of pupils with SEN than the average across all state-funded schools. In January 2015, 17.3% of pupils in sponsored secondary academies were identified as having some form of SEN, compared to 14.3% of pupils in all state-funded secondary schools. In relation to sponsored primary academies, 17% of pupils were identified as having some kind of SEN, compared to 14.4% of pupils in all state-funded primary schools.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, asked about exclusions. I can reassure him that there is no trend suggesting that academy exclusions are more likely to be overturned. Academies and maintained schools have the same rate of reviews resulting in the independent review panel directing a school to consider reinstating a pupil.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, for raising in her amendment the matter of collaboration. There are certainly many benefits, as I have mentioned, and many MATs already have common SEN policies across their schools or share specialist provision. We therefore do not see that it is necessary to require this in law. We believe that it is right to leave it up to the professionals to decide exactly how best to meet the needs of pupils with SEN, and where collaboration between different schools would be of benefit. It is in the best interests of children with SEN and disabilities, as it is in the best interests of all pupils, for the failure of a school to be addressed as swiftly as possible. On the basis of these reassurances and my explanation of what is already occurring, we hope that the noble Baroness will withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I am very grateful to noble Lords for participating in this debate. I thought it was going to be just a quick debate; I am delighted to have the support that I have had around the Committee. I thank the Minister for her response, which, as I expected, was a reassurance that these procedures are already in place.
I will raise just one issue with her. Perhaps she might take this away and think about it. As she will know, with the transfer of so many schools into academies, many local authorities have run down their capabilities of coping with special educational needs and providing help. Increasingly, it is left to outside consultants to provide that help. I know that quite a number of authorities are struggling to meet the demands that are required in reviewing the education, health and care plans, and something of a backlog is building up. There is also a question of whether they have the capabilities to do the monitoring that is now written into the Act; the local authorities are required to monitor these facilities in both local authority state schools and academies. If they are to do this monitoring, it is important that they actually have the capability to do it. Perhaps the Minister and the Chief Inspector of Schools might need to think about this. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“(a) parents and guardians of registered children,(b) teaching and support staff of the school,(c) the local authority,(d) the governing body of the school, and(e) any other such persons as they deem to be appropriate.”
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
This is me again. I apologise for that. To some extent, we are going over ground on this question of consultation that we have already discussed at some length. In Clause 8, proposed new Section 5 of the 2010 Act is headed, “Consultation about conversion: schools not eligible for intervention”. These are the schools that convert to academies of their own choice. New Section 5(1) spells it out on the consultation:
“Before a maintained school in England is converted into an Academy, the school’s governing body must consult such persons as they think appropriate about whether the conversion should take place”.
I believe I am right in saying that that wording comes directly from the Academies Act, and was the form of words that we eventually agreed for that Act after a lot of discussion on the issue. My amendment proposes that rather than having this rather vague wording,
“such persons as they think appropriate about whether the conversion should take place”,
we should make it more specific and talk about,
“parents and guardians of registered children … teaching and support staff of the school”
and the local authority, which we need to refer to because if a local authority school is converting voluntarily to an academy, it needs to take the local authority along with it in the discussions that it has. Since the governing body will be initiating this action, paragraph (d) of my amendment is relatively unnecessary. My amendment refers also to,
“other such persons as they deem to be appropriate”.
My amendment would effectively spell out the process of consultation in those circumstances. This very much picks up on the discussion we had last Thursday on consultation with regard to coasting schools. During that discussion, the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, who was responding for the Government, made it clear that in such circumstances the Government would certainly expect that there would be consultation with the parents. I remind the Committee what the noble Baroness said on that occasion:
“In practice, we envisage that where a school meets the coasting definition, the governing body will voluntarily inform parents. Issuing a communication to parents is already the normal approach taken by schools following the publication of exam results or Ofsted inspections. In fact, schools are not required to notify parents of Ofsted judgments but they do, and we would expect schools to adopt a similar approach in this situation. We would certainly expect governing bodies to be as open as possible with parents”.—[Official Report, 5/11/15; col. GC 415]
Indeed, one does expect them to be open with parents.
However, I take issue with whether the noble Baroness was right in saying that schools are not expected to communicate with parents about Ofsted judgments. Section 14(4)(c) of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, as I read it, states that the appropriate authority, which is the governing body, shall take such steps as are reasonably practicable to secure that every registered parent of a registered pupil at the school receives a copy of the report within such period following the receipt of the report by the authority as may be prescribed, which is five working days. I think I am right in saying that under present legislation parents do have to receive a copy of the report, and that there is therefore discussion with parents about it. I basically agreed with what the Minister said on that occasion—namely, that consulting parents and staff is the least that should be expected from a governing board that decides to pursue the conversion route. However, legislation and guidance usually spell out what is expected and there seems a very strong case for spelling it out on this occasion as well.
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
My Lords, before the Minister sits down, I make plain that you do not have to be a member of the Conservative Party to support the Government on this one. It is interesting that he quoted two Cross-Benchers who have spoken in comparable terms. It is rather important to take account of the history of this and what people’s experience has been. We are not dealing with the best local authorities; there are good ones, but we are dealing with the others. Lastly, for the avoidance of doubt, I raised the question about the word “must”. I have been satisfied with the Minister’s reply relating to a later clause in the Bill.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I am sorry; I was forgetting that I was the one who originally moved this. I thank the Minister for his reply. I have to confess that my sympathies were rather more with Amendment 20 than with the amendment that I myself moved. This is clearly an issue that we are going to return to, but in the mean time I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Education and Adoption Bill
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Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
My Lords, I would like to add a few words. I have been very sympathetic with quite a lot of what has been said today. In particular, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, I think that we are all quite sympathetic with the notion of wanting to improve performance. Picking up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, the concept of a coasting school goes back to when the late Chris Woodhead was Chief Inspector of Schools in the 1990s. He was very concerned that bright pupils were not being pushed and stretched enough to achieve their potential. As we have it, the definition of both the floor and the progress measure does not pick up those bright pupils. It does not pick up grammar schools or the good comprehensives in the leafy suburbs such as Guildford, which do a good job but perhaps could do a better job. If we are looking at coasting schools, it is important that they perhaps are given a bit of a jolt as well as other schools.
I am very sympathetic with what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, says about progress being what we are actually looking at here, and that the floor standard should play a lesser part and the progress standard a better part. However, I recognise that at present it is quite difficult to measure progress standards, particularly in primary schools. I have great reservations about reintroducing key stage 1 tests but, equally, if it is left to teacher assessment, there is inevitably an element of subjectivity about it, which creates some difficulties.
The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, made a point about the regional schools commissioners, which at the moment have very few resources. They will be backed by the advisory board of heads. But one of our scarce resources is good leadership and governance in schools. I am sure all of us know of both primary and secondary schools that have spent a long time trying to find good heads and of those with gaps where a deputy has had to take over and run the school for a year or so. When Ofsted comes in, it then marks the school down on leadership and governance because of the very fact that it has not been able to find a head.
We have crippled the leadership training programme. The National College for Teaching and Leadership has been more or less wound up, although elements have been put into teacher training. Compared to the programmes that were run about seven years ago or so, what is available now is a very pale imitation. What we ought to be doing is making sure that every good deputy is sent off to do these programmes, which involve evening and weekend work and attending short courses. They were extraordinarily good and enabled us to generate a new cadre of heads about 10 years ago. They are now working their way through, but we are not doing enough to produce a new cadre of heads, and we are very short of them. I see great difficulty in both the proposals for regional schools commissioners to have these advisory groups of heads who will move into schools and, for that matter, the proposals that came the other day from the Secretary of State about creating a school leadership group and so forth to work in rural and coastal areas. Take these good heads away from their schools and their schools often sink. We know very well that there are difficulties if you do not have a head.
I come back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. I am currently a member of the Select Committee which is looking at social mobility and skills. There is no doubt whatever about what she said about social skills being so important and so valued. It worries me that there are secondary schools in this country that are so worried at the moment about their achievements in academic terms that they are scrapping PHSE. They consider it unnecessary, so the attention to social skills is just not there in the schools. I take on board what has been said about the need to have a broad-based curriculum and so forth, and it would be very nice if the regulations stressed that need as well as including the definition of coasting.
Finally, I would ask whether the Government intend to reply to the recommendations from the Delegated Powers Committee and the Constitution Committee. What will their response be?
Lord Lucas
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, reminds me that there are some very interesting variations within schools when it comes to progress. You get schools where the bright kids make no progress at all, and those where the SEN kids fall backwards while the general level of progress in the school is good. If we are to have a measure of what constitutes coasting, there must be scope for applying it to the school community as a whole and asking for some level of consistency in performance. Not doing well, for instance, by kids on free school meals but doing well by the rest, and on average being okay, is not where this measure should be at. There should be some sense that this is meant to be consistent across the whole school community and that schools should not be boosting one section of the school community and neglecting the rest.
I have a lot of sympathy with the arguments put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth. That a school should come out of the coasting definition by cutting back on breadth should be discouraged. I can see why it should not be in the definition of coasting, but narrowing down should not be a permissible way to get out of coasting. It is so depressing, going to schools that are narrowly focused on exams. I do not do it often, but it is a grim experience.
Lastly, I will say that someone has sent me a copy of Call Me Dave. If the noble Baroness would like to throw it on the bonfire in Lewes, she can take it.
Lord Nash
We should discuss this and I am very happy to do that. It is taken into account by Ofsted and will be taken into account by the regional schools commissioners. All good schools have a broad approach because they know how it pays back in academic results. However, in terms of having a metric which is clear and assessable, we believe that our approach is the correct one.
As my noble friend Lady Perry said, the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, was based on practical common sense. As a former chairman of Ofsted, chairman of the Future Leaders Trust and adviser to Ark, she is of course hugely experienced. Her practical experience—instead of theoretical analysis—was extremely helpful. I am grateful for her thoughts and her point that the definitions proposed in the amendments are just too complicated. She also made the point that good schools tend to provide a broad and balanced curriculum anyway. She is right that our new progress data are so much more robust, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said. I am also grateful for the noble Baroness’s comments about RSCs. We will be resourcing them up substantially over the next year, and I will be able to say more about this once the spending review has finished. I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s comments. As she said, Ofsted of course takes a lot of these issues into account.
The noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, commented on the importance of leadership. Ofsted focuses on this heavily, which is the reason why we reduced the Ofsted categories down to four, one of which is leadership. We focus on that substantially. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, also talked about the importance of leadership. I could not agree more. This is the most important issue facing us in schools, and we have an active programme of leadership in our schools. We are currently looking at all our leadership programmes to see whether they are fit for purpose, and have recently introduced a new leadership programme, the Future Leaders Trust MAT CEO course, for chief executives of MATs. We are very focused on making sure that our leadership training is adequate. We have had a lot of sessions with different regional schools commissioners, bringing in the top-performing MATs to explain to the newer MATs how they operate their organisations. There has been a huge amount of sharing of good practice.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight, made a number of comments. When he mentioned his involvement with TES, I was reminded that I had my first interview with TES last week. I am rather naive on the political front, as you know, and I made the mistake of saying that if we are to have enough schools in future, we would have to get away from the concept that they all had to be on one or two floors. That resulted in a headline—not in the noble Lord’s paper, but in another one—that I was advocating skyscraper schools. That shows how naive I am on these matters; I should stay away from journalists as much as possible.
We will be setting up a competition, called the Knight competition, for renaming RSCs, so that the noble Lord does not get confused with the Royal Shakespeare Company in future. It will apply to grammars, I assure him of that. This definition is very focused on schools that appear to be doing well but are in fact coasting. In fact, some of the original thinking behind this was aimed very much at those apparently high-performing schools. From 2016 onwards, the secondary coasting definition will be based on the new headline accountability measure. Over three years, it will be the only measure that we look at. It is very robust, and will measure the progress of all pupils in the school. That will include a grammar school with a high attaining cohort making less good progress than such pupils should be making.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
The Minister said that the programme is going to be very focused on high-performing schools. Can he tell us how that will be?
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
If I may say so, high-performing schools achieve the five A* to C grades perfectly easily and will do the EBacc perfectly easily. It is the progress measure that is going to be absolutely crucial here. What is really required is for more weight to be given to the progress measure than to the performance measure.
Lord Nash
The noble Baroness is completely right. I have not made myself clear. The progress measure comes in for the first time in 2016. The coasting definition is based over three years. Therefore, for the first year that the coasting definition applies, it can only have the progress measure in for one year, which is why we have these interim measures for 2014 and 2015. In 2018, however, it will all be entirely based on three years’ progress—so we will be entirely focused on progress in secondary schools.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, the Minister is already writing me a letter full of statistics, so I hope that he can include that matter. I am comfortable that he says that a grammar school will be eligible, but I would be very grateful if he could make it clear to me how, given the wording in the draft.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
Will the Minister send the letter round to everybody who has participated in the debate?
Lord Watson of Invergowrie
I have to say that a number of people I have spoken to were concerned by the Minister’s comment on Second Reading that,
“democracy can be suspended where it is in the interests of the children”.—[Official Report, 20/10/15; col. 634.]
In what other situations can it perhaps be suspended? The fact that it was a general commitment in a manifesto does not mean that parents should be disenfranchised in this way. It is indicative of a frankly rather authoritarian approach that the Government have begun to exhibit in not just this Bill but others currently going through Parliament. That is a worrying trend.
Amendments such as this should not be necessary in an education Bill in an advanced democracy, yet we find that they are. I warrant that the Minister will say again why he is unable to accept it. It is not a good enough reason to give that some people, in exercising their democratic rights, may slow down the process. We are dealing with a very important issue. Yes, of course, the education of children is important, and any day lost cannot be regained, to echo the Minister’s remarks on the previous group of amendments. Yes, that is true, but at the same time wider issues have to be considered on the behalf of children themselves. They cannot speak for themselves. Parents, governors and local authorities have views that should be fully taken into account. As the Bill stands, that will not happen. I believe that the Minister’s argument lacks any form of intellectual rigour because it undermines the hard-won and long-held democratic traditions of this country.
I have very real concerns about the curtailment of rights and responsibilities of governors in respect of the schools for which they have legal responsibility. Consultation with local stakeholders before a school is classified as coasting or becomes an academy is an essential part of community engagement—a concept that I believe the Government should embrace, not repel. I beg to move.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
My Lords, the amendment asks that the governing body informs the parents that the school has been notified that it is coasting. It is not asking for consultation, although, in effect, it probably presages or precedes a period when there will be consultation. That came out of our lengthy discussion on precisely what coasting means.
The Minister made it clear that there are different options when a school is told that it is under surveillance, in effect, as a possible coasting school. The regulations make it clear that there are various options at this point. One is that the school might be asked to academise, but it might also be asked to link up with a local school to get help from a successful head. The regional schools commissioner has a lot of discretion about what to do and he may send one of the platoon of head teachers on his advisory board to advise the school about what to do.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
My Lords, I have some sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said about teacher recruitment. A potential crisis is arising. I know that the Minister does not agree with that—we had a Question in the House the other day about precisely this issue.
I want to take the amendment at face value rather than preach about what is likely to happen with teacher recruitment. The amendment states:
“Prior to defining a school as coasting, the Secretary of State must undertake an investigation and report on the current level of teacher recruitment and retention in that particular school”.
That brings me back to the previous amendment, where I talked about how important it was that schools should build trust with parents and work in cohesion with them. I say again that a happy school is one where there is a stable staffing situation, without children being subjected to constant changes of teacher, sometimes halfway through a term, with supply staff brought in who have no knowledge of the young people whom they are teaching. Such teachers are often ineffective because they are coming in halfway through term and trying to pick up where other teachers have left off.
As I said earlier in relation to the first group of amendments, many underperforming schools are those which have suffered from a long interregnum in recruiting new head teachers. A new head who is finding their feet in a new school may be doing good things, but it takes time nevertheless to turn a school round. It requires at least a year, if not longer.
My reading of the regulations is that the regional schools commissioner must have discretion to look at the situation in which a school finds itself. It is not in a school’s interest, particularly where a new head is bedding down, to throw the whole thing into turmoil again by enforcing academisation, with a new senior management team, a new board of governors and so forth.
It seems useful in these circumstances to make it clear, perhaps in regulations rather than in the Bill, that the regional schools commissioner has discretion to look at teacher recruitment and retention. Teacher shortages still vary enormously from region to region and within regions. It is silly to require a new senior leadership team in a school which is coasting, as distinct from having positively failed, if it is going to be almost impossible to recruit a new senior leadership team. That is certainly true of parts of the south-east, where it is extremely difficult to get head teachers—I was talking about that earlier.
It would be very useful if we could have this spelled out in regulations. It need not necessarily be in the Bill, but there seems to be a lot of sense in it. In that sense, I support the amendment.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Watson, is right that the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers is crucial to achieving our goal of educational excellence everywhere. As I explained at Questions yesterday—the noble Lord may dispute the figures—the number of teachers in post is at an all-time high and the number of teachers leaving the profession remains low, with around three-quarters still in the profession after five years’ service.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, rightly said, there is an overall challenge, but in some areas of the country there is a struggle to attract, recruit and retain high-quality teachers. That is why we are actively supporting schools to take a leading role in the training of new teachers and have given schools greater flexibility to attract and retain good teachers through the pay system. It is also why the Secretary of State on Tuesday announced the creation of the National Teaching Service with the aim that by 2020 it will deploy 1,500 high-performing teachers and middle leaders into underperforming schools in areas that struggle to recruit. There are already many outstanding teachers and leaders working in challenging areas, but we know that more needs to be done to help them and we are committed to giving them support.
My noble friend was clear that when we are discussing coasting schools, regional schools commissioners will consider whether the school has the capacity to secure sufficient improvement without formal intervention. In some cases, a school which falls within the coasting definition may have a new head teacher, governor or leadership team who can demonstrate that they have an effective plan to raise standards sufficiently. In these cases, the school will be left to improve.
This amendment suggests that where a school fails to ensure that pupils reach their potential because there are retention and recruitment issues at the school it should not become eligible for intervention. We feel this is counterintuitive. These are the very schools that require additional support to address those problems in order to improve outcomes for their pupils. This Bill will provide that support. We have made clear in the Schools Causing Concern guidance, on which we are currently consulting, that RSCs will take a range of contextual factors into account when looking at coasting schools. They could include looking at teacher recruitment and retention. Where this is identified as an issue, the RSC will be able to work with the new National Teaching Service to bring teachers into the school to work alongside the existing teachers to make the improvements needed. Other measures, such as encouraging schools to participate in School Direct partnerships, which allow them to train and employ high-quality new teachers, might also be appropriate.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, raised several issues around School Direct, so I will cover some of them briefly. Completion and employment rates from teacher-led teacher training are higher than from university-led provision, but we agree that universities remain an important part. In fact, the move to school-led teacher training is helping to encourage collaboration because 70% of School Direct places are delivered by universities. As I said yesterday, a school-led system is not a university-excluded system. We want to see collaboration.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie
My Lords, we now move on to the question of performance standards and safety warning notices—in this case, specifically with reference to academy schools. The amendment would extend the power of local authorities to allow them the right—albeit one challenged under the clause—to issue performance standards and safety warning notices to an academy that they consider is underperforming.
The wording is drawn from existing provisions for giving warning notices to maintained schools. The only difference is that the local authority would need to ask the Secretary of State to intervene if the warning notice did not have the desired effect of bringing about improvement, but the academy would be required to comply and the power would apply to both existing and new academies.
The argument in the amendment turns on local versus national—or local versus regional, in the case of the regional schools commissioner, although she or he acts on behalf of the Secretary of State, of course. A local authority is much better placed to identify problems than a distant Minister or even a regional commissioner. Not only can it scrutinise data but it gets all the soft intelligence that comes through the local community, in whatever form that may take. Specifically, I would imagine that it would be from other schools, issues raised in MPs’ or councillors’ surgeries, the local media, information from social services, and health services, as well as issues with admissions or exclusions.
It is apparent that the Department for Education has huge difficulty in keeping tabs on the growing number of academies. The Public Accounts Committee laid that out very clearly in the previous Parliament, and I suggest that eight regional schools commissioners cannot properly scrutinise several hundred academies each as well as getting involved with maintained schools and promoting new conversions. It is reasonable to assume that any regional schools commissioner worth her or his salt will seek informally to source local intelligence, but that will be limited, and the amendment would allow such activity to be formalised. The key to the benefit of handing this task to local authorities lies simply in the first word of their title, because local knowledge is essential to enable intervention when necessary.
In addition, it would restore proper accountability to local communities. It would mean that the concerns of parents and residents could be taken up locally by a local authority that has the right to take the action necessary. It should be noted that this would not reduce the autonomy of academies. All the freedoms they currently have would continue to be in place, but this would provide a much more robust accountability system. Centralising accountability in the hands of the Secretary of State and her appointees is both undemocratic and ineffective, and the poor outcomes from many academies that have already been referred to demonstrate that.
At Second Reading, I invited the Minister to comment on the Ofsted inspection results up to June 2015. They demonstrated that of all schools inspected, the percentage of academies classified as inadequate was 3.4%, with the percentage of maintained schools classified as inadequate less than half that figure at 1.6%. I do not welcome any school, whether maintained school or academy, being classified as inadequate, but those are the figures produced by Ofsted. The evidence is clear: despite the fact that there are more pupils in the maintained sector, there are now more pupils in inadequate academies than there are in inadequate maintained schools. That surely should give the Minister pause for thought. I understand why the Minister would not like to deal with those facts, but having declined the opportunity to tell me and other noble Lords what that says about the panacea that academies are supposed to be, will he use his closing speech today to do so? Clearly, something is not working.
In the same way that we have argued for maintained schools and academies to be treated equally when it comes to coasting—or, indeed, outright failure—we believe that parity in respect of performance standards and warning notices is entirely appropriate. I beg to move.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
My Lords, this amendment picks up an issue which we Liberal Democrats have been worried about for some time: accountability for academy trusts and academy chains, and what happens when an academy is put into special measures or, as in this case, fails to make the progress that one would expect over the three-year period.
I know that the Minister will reel off statistics and examples of how good academies are and how much they achieve, but he must admit that, looking at the picture overall, now that we have academies of 10 years’ standing and many of four to five years’ standing, the record is that the probability of an academy not performing as well as we might expect is just as high as for local authority schools, and that the record of local authority intervention in turning around failing schools is just as good as academisation. In its statistics report, his own department shows the same range of performance across academy chains as with local authorities.
I know that the Minister will protest that local authorities do not intervene when they should and that this legislation is a necessary wake-up call to them. But if he is maintaining, as he does, that no child should have to put up with less than a good education for a year or so, it is only right that the principle should apply to academies as much as to local authority schools.
This clause is the mirror image of the one applying to maintained schools at the beginning of this Bill, explaining how the local authority, now the Secretary of State, can give a warning notice to an academy and requires, under new subsection (4B), those in charge of academies to take remedial action, and the local authority or the Secretary of State to do so if the academy fails to take that action. It also requires that the funding agreement should be amended appropriately.
I find myself very much in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on this issue. Now that we have got such a large number of academies, it seems extraordinary that we have to negotiate separate funding agreements with every single one. One of the reasons why we have education Bills and Acts is in order that all schools should obey the same set of regulations. It seems extraordinary that when you have thousands of schools having to obey the same set of regulations, you have to negotiate separate funding agreements. It is about time that the Government made up their mind on what they want to do. We have quite a lot of sympathy with the general principle of this amendment, which is that academies should be treated on a par with maintained schools.
Lord Nash
My Lords, I speak to Amendment 10 regarding the extension of local authority warning notices to academies. The amendment proposes that academies as well as maintained schools should be subject to performance standards and safety warning notices given by a local authority. They would be able to be given on the same grounds as they can already be given to maintained schools; that is, where pupil standards are unacceptably low and likely to remain so, where there has been a serious breakdown in management or governance that is prejudicing or likely to prejudice standards or performance, or where the safety of staff or pupils is threatened. The amendment provides for academy arrangements to include a duty on academy sponsors to comply with such a warning notice given by the local authority. This would apply retrospectively to academies that are already open.
While I completely understand the noble Lord’s intention to ensure that academies and maintained schools are all subject to a rigorous accountability framework, I can reassure the House that academy trusts are already answerable to regional schools commissioners via a different system based on funding agreements with the Secretary of State which apply the same grounds for action as are set out in this amendment; namely, underperformance, concerns about management or governance, or threats to safety. Academies are run by charitable companies, known as academy trusts, which enter into a contractual relationship with the Secretary of State through the signing of a funding agreement. It is this agreement that governs how an academy will operate and how the Secretary of State will hold it to account for its performance.
I assure the Committee that regional schools commissioners do hold academies to account against the grounds set out in their funding agreements. We have the power, via these funding agreements, to issue formal notices and can and do ultimately terminate funding agreements or bring about a change in sponsorship where the notices are not complied with, as we have done in 100 cases. The vast majority of the over 5,300 open academies and free schools perform well. In the small number where we have concerns, RSCs have already shown they can act quickly to bring about improvements.
Since September 2014 when RSCs first took up post they have issued 58 formal notices to academy and free school trusts, many of which will be based on exactly the same grounds that the noble Lords are proposing additionally to impose via this amendment; that is, 58 formal notices in just over a year, which can be contrasted with 51 local authorities, one-third of all local authorities, which since 2010 have not issued a single warning notice. I am afraid that I do not share the confidence of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, or the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, in local authorities in general, although I accept that there are many excellent ones out there.
Our experience of issuing warning notices to academies is that they are highly effective in driving up standards. One good example is Benjamin Adlard Primary School.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
If they are going to apply the same standards to academies, why is that not in the Bill?
Lord Watson of Invergowrie
I look forward to getting that briefing when I am able to attend. That would be helpful. But that sort of impression—that the local information required in situations like this is being made available—is not out and about at the moment. Perhaps that will change when we meet the regional schools commissioners.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I have the Ofsted figures here, which show that for all the maintained mainstream schools the percentage that was judged inadequate by Ofsted was 1.8%. Of the academy schools—the converters—which are on the whole the outstanding schools, the figure is 1.9%. For the sponsor-led academies, it is 12.1% and for free schools it is 5.8%. As I think I said in my Second Reading speech, that indicates that it was quite a high figure for the converter academy schools but, of course, they were being converted from being inadequate. That again holds up my argument that it takes time for any school to be turned around.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie
I thank the noble Baroness for those remarks. The Minister referred to the contractual relationship. This comes up continually and is a reason for the lack of transparency in academy trusts. Part of this is that if you try to look at the minutes of academy trust boards, often they do no more than list the decisions that were reached. There is no detail given to that or background information or dissent, if, indeed, there was any—simply the decisions that were reached. They are not particularly illuminating. I think the whole question of the contractual relationship between academy trusts and the department gives a sense that there is something to hide. I do not believe there should be anything to hide and there may not be but we do not know that because there is a lack of transparency. Part of the purpose of this amendment is to open up the way in which academies operate, particularly with regard to local issues and links with local authorities, which I think would be mutually beneficial. I hear what the Minister says. I am disappointed that we have not made some progress on this. But having had the issues aired, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
In relation to this amendment, while we have some sympathy with the notion that there should be an appeal when a warning notice is issued, we are by no means convinced that the First-tier Tribunal is the right place to go.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 13 and warning notice appeals. The Bill proposes that the governing body of an underperforming school should no longer be able to make representations to Ofsted about being given a warning notice. The amendment would restore an appeal route, although not the same route. The amendment would require the Secretary of State to make regulations that would allow a school to have a warning notice reviewed, or allow it to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal, which could then revoke the notice.
The amendment would not preclude the local authority or regional schools commissioner from issuing a revised notice to that school, but we believe that it oversteps the mark and builds into the process delays and arguments that are a distraction from the important business of getting the school to improve. Indeed, appeals to the First-tier Tribunal would lead to the clock stopping and months of delay ensuing while all avenues for appeal are exhausted. During this time, children will be in a school that is causing serious concern and they will not be given the education that they deserve.
To clarify, any complaints about the decision made by a regional schools commissioner may be directed to the schools commissioner. If a formal complaint is lodged, it will be dealt with in accordance with the department’s formal complaints procedure, which involves an independent officer, an official, investigating the complaint and making a recommendation. One formal complaint about a regional schools commissioner’s decision has been made so far and has been considered but no evidence was found to uphold it. Ultimately, the process for appealing a decision made by a regional schools commissioner is to apply for judicial review via the courts.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred to warning notices. Our figures indicate that we have issued 112 formal notices to underperforming institutions. Ninety- eight of these were issued to academies associated with 53 individual sponsors. We have also changed sponsor arrangements for 100 academies and free schools where there has been underperformance.
“5B (1) Where a school has been designated by order under section 69(4) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, the interim executive board shall be under a duty to secure that—
(a) the religion or religious denomination of the school is preserved and developed, and(b) the school is conducted in accordance with the school’s instrument of government (except in relation to the composition of the governing body) and the foundation’s governing documents, including, where appropriate, any trust deed relating to the school.(2) In exercising any powers under this Schedule, the Secretary of State shall comply with any agreement between the local authority and the appropriate diocesan authority, if any, and person or persons by whom the foundation governors are appointed, in relation to the membership and operation of the interim executive board.”
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
My Lords, Amendment 14 replicates the current agreements that local authorities and churches have about the membership of interim executive boards of church schools. This amendment has been put forward partly as a result of representations made to us by the Catholic Education Service, which is worried that powers that are now very rarely used by the Secretary of State will become much more widely used by the regional schools commissioners and that the regional schools commissioners may, unknowingly, cut across existing working practices with local authorities. In written evidence to the Commons Public Bill Committee, included in a briefing to us, it wrote:
“We are concerned that the powers given to the new RSCs may cut across existing working practice. Local authorities and Department for Education officials who currently make decisions about school support understand the dioceses’ legal duties to preserve and develop the Catholic character of their school … In particular we are concerned about new powers granted to RSCs under Section 5 of the Bill. Usually an IEB is put in place following discussion between the local authority and the diocese, with carefully considered agreements as to its operation, including in relation to its members. To do this the diocese and local authority agree a memorandum of understanding … This enables the school to continue to comply with its trust deed through a Church appointed majority on the IEB”.
Should the regional schools commissioners intervene and appoint their own members to an interim executive board without regard to the church-appointed majority, the Catholic Education Service says that the school might then cease to be a Catholic school. Once a school is no longer recognised as Catholic by the bishop, it is no longer complying with its own trust deed, presumably forcing the closure of the school that ultimately undermines the intention behind an interim executive board, which is to prevent the closure of the school, as well as to bring about the necessary improvements. I beg to move.
Lord Nash
If the noble Lord would let me finish, he would understand that these discussions are at a very early stage. We have just issued a draft of the memoranda of understanding and I believe that the churches are considering the detail. I will refer to this in more detail in a minute.
Under paragraphs 3(3), 10(2) and 13(2) of Schedule 6 to the Education and Inspections Act 2006, IEBs are already required to comply with the same duties that applied to the previous governing body, which includes any duty to comply with a trust deed. Members of a church or faith school’s IEB are therefore already bound to preserve and develop the school’s religious character. This is the case even where the new powers under Clause 5 of the Bill have been used to direct the local authority to appoint specific IEB members. The first part of the amendment is therefore unnecessary because it is simply restating a requirement that already exists in law.
Additionally, we are currently consulting on the revised Schools Causing Concern guidance, which describes how we propose that the new and strengthened powers in the Bill will work in practice. This includes how we propose IEBs will operate in practice, and it sets out the role and duties of an IEB. To avoid any further doubt on the matter raised in this amendment, we have specified in the guidance:
“Any obligations on the governing body in relation to maintaining the religious ethos of a school will also apply to the IEB”.
The second part of the amendment proposes that RSCs, where they are exercising the Clause 5 power to direct the local authority to alter the make-up of an IEB in a church or faith school, would be required to protect the continued involvement of the relevant diocese or faith body. That would mean that they would have to comply with an existing agreement between the local authority and the diocese about the membership and operation of the IEB. Such agreements between local authorities and dioceses about the membership and operation of IEBs are not required by legislation, nor are they legally binding. It would therefore be inappropriate to require RSCs to comply with such agreements through this amendment.
However, we are currently working with the churches to agree a memorandum of understanding. We are fully committed to agreeing these MoUs; it will enable dioceses and RSCs to work together for the benefit of pupils in church schools. In particular, we want to make sure that, as the draft MoU states:
“Where RSCs wish to exercise their power to establish an IEB to a church school, they must consult the diocese”.
We would expect the consultation to provide an opportunity for the diocese to nominate one or more IEB members and for RSCs to accept the diocese’s nomination, providing they agree that the proposed member has the capacity and skills required to fulfil their role on the IEB.
Where any IEB established by either the local authority or the RSC is established in a church school and the RSC has concerns about the capability of an IEB member to fulfil the role, the diocese will be asked if it wishes to nominate a replacement IEB member. Our expectation is that RSCs will accept such a nomination, provided they agree with the diocese’s assessment that the individual has the capacity and skills required to fulfil their role on the IEB.
Furthermore, the purpose of the power in Clause 5 is to enable the RSCs to intervene swiftly where they are not convinced that the IEB constituted by the local authority will secure necessary improvements in the school. Accepting the amendment proposed here would require RSCs to endorse an IEB whether they had confidence in it or not. That would undermine the purpose of the clause and may prevent RSCs from acting decisively to address underperformance.
In view of what I have said about making sure that we preserve the faith status of any church schools—which we are absolutely determined to ensure, and I am sure that we will be able to satisfy the churches on this—I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I am very grateful to the Minister for giving these assurances. I was fairly confident that in fact they would be in discussion with the churches about these issues and that some system would be found to relieve their fears. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Education and Adoption Bill
Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I declare an interest as the governor of a primary school in Guildford which is part of the TKAT academy chain and was taken over by that chain because it was in need of significant improvement.
As my noble friend Lord Addington said, this is a short but very important Bill. It carries forward the Government’s manifesto commitment to increase very significantly the number of our primary and secondary schools which are sponsored academies during this Parliament. It does so by adding to the Secretary of State’s power to intervene a new category for intervention in so-called “coasting schools”, and by what the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, described as removing the bureaucratic legal hurdles to speed up the process. The basic purpose of the Bill, as we have discussed, is to ensure that all children benefit from the very best quality of education available, and therefore to minimise the degree to which they experience poor-quality teaching and a poor-quality environment in their schools.
We need to recognise that many—indeed, the majority—of our schools are not failing. The number of schools that are failing is roughly between 2% and 3%; 80% of our schools are judged by Ofsted to be “Good” or “Outstanding”. The remaining 17% between the two is probably the category of school that is most likely to be regarded as coasting: those that need some improvement but not necessarily the significant improvements needed by the failing category.
All of us are behind the purpose of the Bill, which is to improve the quality of our schools, but, like the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, I question the presumption that this can be achieved by academisation. We should recognise that, of the 25,000 schools in this country, 4,600 are now academies and, of the 20,000-plus remaining state schools, only 275, 1.8%, were judged inadequate by Ofsted as of April 2015, whereas, of the 730 sponsored academies—where, generally speaking, failing schools such as the one of which I am a governor had been taken over by an academy—81, or 12.1%, were judged inadequate. It is of course true, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, that if you take over a failing school, it takes time to turn it around, and it is therefore not surprising to find that, among the sponsored academies, a higher proportion are judged to be failing.
There is a very useful briefing that the Commons Library produced before the Report stage of the Bill in the Commons which emphasises the ebb and flow of schools from one category to another. Schools judged inadequate, whether maintained or academies, are put in special measures, often with a new head and senior management team, and do improve while other schools drop down the league tables. As the noble Baroness noted, some of the conversion academies which were outstanding are now in special measures.
The briefing note follows through on the 559 schools judged inadequate in 2012; 239 of these became academies, but 294 remained as maintained schools, the large majority of which had seen their Ofsted rating improve. Of those, 159 were now rated good or outstanding. In other words—and, again, this has been stressed by a number of speakers—academisation is in itself no magic bullet. Maintained schools can turn things around just as well as academies, and it is arguable that, from the children’s point of view, not fiddling around with the structure and all the disturbance that this entails is better.
It does take time. Many experienced heads will tell you that it takes five years or more, as indeed the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, to move a school from inadequate to good or outstanding. We see this both in relation to the maintained schools and in relation to academies. There is, therefore, something of a question as to why the measures of intervention apply just to maintained schools. Why should maintained schools that are seen to be coasting be subject to intervention, whereas academies that are seen to be coasting are not? There is no intervention.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, mentioned, the really important issue is school leadership. We see time and again that a dynamic school leader can turn a school around and can lead the school to be outstanding over a very considerable period of time. Then they leave and sometimes the school falls down the league tables just because of that. It is, however, increasingly difficult to recruit head teachers. Many schools are having to re-advertise or use agency staff to fill gaps in their senior management team.
While it is acknowledged that some elements of leadership are innate, it is also well known that many techniques of leadership can be taught. Perhaps I should put it the other way round: they can be learned. I would like, therefore, to ask the Minister why—one of the key issues that really ought to have been addressed—the Government have withdrawn their support from the National College for Teaching and Leadership? It was doing a lot of extremely good work in producing a new cadre of leaders for our schools and training them extremely well. If we want to train a cadre of outstanding school leaders, this is precisely the sort of facility that we need to be nurturing.
Likewise, I think the need for well-qualified and experienced teachers is absolutely crucial to providing high-quality education. It is very distressing that something like 40% of our newly qualified teachers drop out within five years, even though some of them are very good teachers. Many people, talking about teachers, cite the stress as being a major obstacle. Again, one sees this particularly with the number of early retirements among teachers at the moment.
The Minister rightly says, as he said in answer to an Oral Question the other day, that the quality of our recruits is extremely good and that at present vacancy rates are very low. As everybody knows, however, the pressures on primary schools are immense at present, as a new baby boom works its way up the age groups. Have the Government got their head in the sand over this teacher recruitment crisis? Is enough being done to relieve the stress in the classroom? Is enough being done to promote CPD among teachers, to give them time off so that they can recharge their batteries? All this is extremely important, but the Bill, with its threats of yet more intervention and change, more disruption, actually helps to make matters worse rather than better.
I want to end by talking about the issue of power in the hands of the Secretary of State. Is it really necessary for more power to be transferred to the Secretary of State? As Liberal Democrats, our belief has been firmly that schools should serve their communities. All along, we have had reservations about academies—and, as the noble Baroness will know, we were not very keen on academies in the first place—because they have broken the link between the school and its community and set the school apart from other schools.
We on these Benches, however, believe that schools collaborating and helping each other is the best way forward. There are hints of this in the Secretary of State’s powers of intervention under Clause 4, where the Secretary of State can intervene to issue a warning notice, whereas Clause 7, which is, I think, the more drastic one, makes it a duty of the Secretary of State to intervene when a school is judged inadequate and requires significant improvements or special measures.
As is made clear, the Department for Education now recognises that it cannot manage all 4,600 academies and more and has delegated its responsibilities to these eight regional school commissioners. The regions, however, are large. The south-east region, in which I live, stretches from Dover to Milton Keynes, running through Kent, the two Sussexes, Surrey, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire. The regional schools commissions, even with their advisory committees of top heads, cannot know how schools fit into their local communities. Are they really up to the job of being able to judge when schools are coasting schools? Surely you need something that is more local, because local heads know perfectly well which schools are achieving and which are not achieving and are very happy, or have been very happy to collaborate with their colleagues and to help schools that need help.
Finally, I would like to pick up this point about the sheer remoteness of these regional schools commissioners. I think it is very unfortunate that the Government have chosen to drop both the requirement for consultation with the local communities—I might say that was a concession which we Liberal Democrats managed to get into the Academies Bill when we were part of the coalition Government—and the right to appeal to Ofsted. I noted the comment by the National Governors’ Association about the democratic deficit. It said:
“This Bill represents a further centralisation of decision making regarding our schools; it does not sit well with the Government’s rhetoric about school autonomy as it not only removes the right for parents to be consulted, but it will give the Secretary of State power to overrule the decisions of local decision makers, whether these are the school governing body or the local authority”.
Henry Stewart, co-founder of the campaigning organisation the Local Schools Network, criticised the proposals to require governing bodies and local authorities to facilitate academy conversion and co-operate with identified sponsors, saying that they mean that,
“governors no longer have a duty of care to their children and instead have a duty to implement government policy. … It’s an extraordinary attack on basic freedom of speech, and I think governors across the country will be outraged by it”.
As a governor, I am not completely outraged, but I am a bit perplexed by the Bill. As I have indicated, I have some very grave reservations about it.
Higher Education: Part-time and Mature Students
Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Sharp of Guildford
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to reverse the decline in the number of part-time and mature students at higher education institutions.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, the decline in part-time and mature students partly reflects dramatic improvements in the job market and the strength of our Government’s long-term economic plan. However, we are committed to helping those who wish to enter higher education. That is why for the first time we have made available non means-tested loans to cover part-time tuition fees. We are also investing in higher level apprenticeships, with 13,200 new starts in the nine months to April this year, compared with just 2,200 in 2010-11.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
My Lords, part-time education has traditionally been the route by which those in work have been able to upgrade their skills. We have seen this enormous drop of 55% in the number of part-time students—143,000 people dropping out of part-time education over the last four years since 2010-11. Given that we have an ageing population whom we expect to work ever longer hours, and that, as the CBI reports, there are already skill shortages, does the Minister agree that it is vital for us to retain this route whereby people can upgrade their skills—it is a far more flexible means than apprenticeships—and play a useful part in the economy?
Lord Nash
I agree that we are very keen to stimulate this sector and that is why we have introduced the loan scheme to which I referred. We had a very weak economy, which resulted in a number of employers not funding these schemes. We then had a dramatic turnaround and recovery in the economy, with the creation of 2.5 million new jobs in the private sector, which obviously has had an impact on people deciding what they want to do and what employers will fund. Of course, over 80% of students in part-time education are in work. We are very keen to stimulate demand in the sector. We have written to key players in the sector asking for their thoughts, and we are extremely open to ideas.
Schools: Arts Education
Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for introducing this timely and interesting debate on the arts in education. I declare an interest as a patron of Creative Skillset, the creative industries’ sector skills council.
On Tuesday this week, I had the privilege of attending a service at St Margaret’s for the Girls’ Schools Association where the school local to me in Guildford, St Catherine’s School, provided the choir for the service. It sang among other things an especially commissioned motet taken from excerpts from poems of Maya Angelou. It was both moving and beautiful. As the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, said, the children of those parents who can afford it have a very broad education. They often have a longer school day and highly specialist facilities, which provide them with an excellent and outstanding education in all areas, including the areas of the arts.
As far as state schools are concerned, I was cheered by reading the foreword provided by Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey to Cultural Education: A Summary of Programmes and Opportunities, published in July 2013—a very recent statement of the Government’s ambition is for arts education. It states:
“The arts are the highest form of human achievement. Through art we not only make sense of ourselves and the world, we also make our lives enchanted. Art allows us to celebrate our common humanity and communicate across boundaries. Artistic endeavour marks us out from the rest of nature as creators and celebrators of beauty. That is why no education can be complete, indeed no programme of education can even begin, without making the arts and creativity central to a child’s life … England’s many successful schools put culture at the heart of their curriculum and we want all schools to be able to emulate, indeed surpass, those which are currently outstanding … We will encourage more schools to offer a wider spread of creative subjects with a new accountability framework for secondary schools”.
Why, then, have we now had two speeches pointing out the drop in the number of GCSE arts subjects being taken, the very substantial fall in the number of teachers being trained in arts subjects, and the real decline in drama, dance and the graphic arts in our schools? It is not necessarily down to the national curriculum. As far as the national curriculum is concerned, the briefing paper we have received tells us very firmly:
“Arts subjects are compulsory in maintained schools in England until the age of 14. They are not compulsory national curriculum subjects after the age of 14, but all pupils in maintained schools in England have a statutory entitlement to be able to study an arts subject as part of their key stage 4 education”.
It is not the lack of the arts in the national curriculum, or even the lack of concern for the arts. It is, I think, an unintended consequence of the accountability measures that we now impose upon our schools.
Mention has already been made of the EBacc. The subjects that fall within the EBacc are English and maths, two sciences, history, geography and a modern foreign language or a classical language. I, for one, am very pleased, in some senses, that there is a broader education within the EBacc, but it is sad that the arts have been downgraded and not given the same status. I have to confess that I am very concerned indeed about what is happening with the arts in our primary schools, where emphasis on SATS in year 6 often drives the curriculum. Lots of very good primary schools get over it, but some that are less good are absolutely terrified by the need to get good SATS results and have narrowed down the primary school curriculum to the three Rs to too great an extent. We want to expand it but at the moment it is not expanding.
As we all know, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a dull girl. It is vital that we feed a love of creativity in to our young people. The development of their imaginations in primary schools comes from play, but too much of that play has gone out due to the emphasis on phonics and achieving the required standards in phonics at the age of five or six. There is too much testing and too much teaching to the test, pushing out the creative parts of the curriculum.
As everybody emphasises, the creative industries are now expanding faster than other industries. For many years people poured scorn on media studies, yet actually, as the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, mentioned, with the bringing together of computerisation and digital technologies and the arts technologies, institutes such as Arts University Bournemouth and Bath Spa University, which concentrate on these things, are finding it very easy to find jobs for their graduates. It is graduates in geography and history who often have difficulty in finding jobs.
Many times from these Benches I have called for more emphasis on maths and science education. I have been very much a champion of the STEM subjects because I have been very worried about the drop in the numbers of young people taking STEM subjects. However, I have also been somewhat critical of the narrowness of British, and particularly English, education, and the fact that at age 16 we have to narrow things down to three A-levels. This has led to a divide between the arts and the sciences. I would have liked to have seen us move in the direction of a broader curriculum for 16 to 18 year-olds—something equivalent to the international baccalaureate.
I therefore end with a plea not for STEM but for STEAM—science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. We want them all together. We want to provide a broad education for our young people—one which gives them the best foundation for moving forward in life.
Schools: Local Oversight
Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Nash
I am grateful to my noble friend for her comments. The overwhelming success of the programme is unarguable. Some 24% of free schools are rated outstanding, which makes them by far our highest performing group of schools; converter academies are far more likely to retain or increase their Ofsted rating at the next inspection; and sponsored academies are increasing their performance at a rate approximately twice that of other schools.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
Can the Minister please tell the House what are the responsibilities of the members of the local governing board when the academy chain has trustees who appoint the head?
Schools: Careers Guidance
Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Sharp of Guildford
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the statutory and non-statutory guidance issued in April, what steps they are taking to improve the quality of careers guidance in schools.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)
My Lords, in April the Government published the statutory guidance and non-statutory departmental advice on careers guidance. The House has not had the opportunity to debate the new statutory advice. Some was published the year before, but it has been superseded by this advice and I thought it was important that the House should have an opportunity to debate it.
The importance of good information, advice and guidance for young people in careers is obvious. Businesses are saying that they have 735,000 vacancies. In engineering alone, we have a shortfall of 87,000 engineers. Yet we know from survey evidence—and often also from personal experience—that many young people feel that they have had little, if any, useful advice on the complex choices that they have to make about, for example, their GCSE choices, whether to stay on at school and do A-levels, whether to pursue other opportunities, their choice of degree, or what to do when leaving university. It is too easy for our young people to follow the well trodden route through school whereby the teachers expect them to take GCSEs and go on to A-levels and, if they achieve well, to go on to university.
However, the choices before them get, if anything, more difficult and much more complex as time goes by, as the National Union of Students points out. They are now facing a situation in which A-level choices are decoupled from AS-levels. That makes it much tougher to decide precisely what they are going to do. They cannot put their toe in the water to see how they do and, if it does not work out, perhaps switch to another area. Modular exams and coursework assessment are also being phased out. The world is changing fast: jobs for life are gone.
Sir Steve Stewart, chairman of Careers England, gives two reasons why good-quality information, advice and guidance are necessary. One is,
“a moral-principle issue that, as a civilised nation, we should give our very best support to young people to help them make the very best decisions in life”.
The second is,
“simply the purely economic issue. As a nation we cannot afford to have too many of our young people in the wrong places doing the wrong things and not contributing”.
In order to put this Question into context, it is necessary to give a little background history. In 1974, local authorities were required to set up careers services for young people, to provide careers information, advice and guidance in schools, while the schools themselves provided background careers education. Background guidance was issued by Her Majesty’s Government and careers services were to be inspected by a dedicated careers service inspectorate.
That was changed in 1994, when local authority services were outsourced to a series of specialist service providers. In 2002, those providers were again reconstructed, together with youth services, to form the Connexions service, with which I think we are all very familiar, with a joint remit to provide youth support work, especially for the group not in employment, education or training—the NEET group—alongside careers guidance in schools. By the end of Labour’s term in office, in 2008-09, it had become clear that that joint remit was just not working and that careers guidance in schools had been marginalised. Ofsted, the CBI, the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, the Milburn report on social mobility, teachers, parents, social workers and the careers professionals themselves all admitted that the careers service in schools had more or less collapsed.
The Education Act 2011 brought a radical shift. In line with the coalition Government’s wish for schools to have more independence and autonomy, the responsibility for providing careers education, information, advice and guidance services was placed firmly with the schools themselves. The age range was extended in line with the raising of the participation age downwards to year eight and upwards to year 13. The duty of schools was to provide independent and impartial careers advice, which was to include information on a range of options available, including apprenticeships, and to provide face-to-face guidance for those for whom it was considered appropriate—especially for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Act came into effect in September 2012, and was supplemented by both statutory guidance and, a little later, by a practical guide detailing best practice.
At the same time, the Government set up the new National Careers Service, working in conjunction with the DWP, which was to provide adult careers guidance. The original aim was to provide an all-age service covering both young people and adults and, importantly, to provide continuing support for those in transition from education to jobs. In the event, school access to the National Careers Service has been limited to the use of its very good web-based information service and its telephone advice service. The irony is that we now have a rather good adult careers service, including face-to-face advice with qualified professionals, when in the past we had none; whereas provision has been largely lost for schools.
The arrangements came in for considerable criticism. For example, the House of Commons Education Select Committee, although acknowledging that Connexions itself had generally failed to provide the careers guidance needed, noted,
“a worrying deterioration in the overall … provision”,
and that the,
“quality, independence and impartiality of careers guidance offered to young people was a central concern”.
In particular, it found that far too few schools were taking their duties seriously. Vocational options were not being covered and, all too frequently, further education colleges were refused permission to explain or even distribute literature about their post-16 provision. Face-to-face guidance was available only to the few, while considerable reliance was placed on web-based services. Ofsted undertook a thematic review of the careers service, published in October 2013 under the title, Going in the Right Direction?, which noted:
“Very few of the schools visited knew how to provide a service effectively or had the skills and expertise needed to provide a comprehensive service. Few schools had purchased an adequate service from external sources”.
The CBI’s director-general, Sir John Cridland, described the careers service system in schools as being on “life support” in many areas as schools struggled with the statutory duty. He and Ofsted were particularly critical of the cutting back in years 10 and 11 of work experience provision.
In a response to those criticisms, Matthew Hancock issued a vision statement that in many senses underlies these new provisions, which provide for much more input from industry and have moved enthusiastically into what might be called a very radical change to develop real-world connections, with firm visits and work experience very much on the agenda, urging schools to link up with local businesses and inviting them into school to talk about what they do, using alumni who are enthusiastic and passionate about their career, to act as ambassadors to inspire and raise expectations. As required by the Act, the schools still have to ensure that their pupils get impartial and independent advice from external services, which should include face-to-face support. But it suggests that this comes from mentoring activities and employer linkage as much as careers guidance.
The question is whether this is enough. Will the new guidelines result in careers education in schools? I start by saying how much I welcome the emphasis on schools linking up with local employers and the recognition of the need to work with and for the local labour markets, seeking to enthuse pupils and raising their ambitions. Work of organisations such as Future First is admirable, and I am very proud that Guildford boasts one of the schools—St Peter’s Catholic School—that was regarded as an exemplar of what schools should do. But I still have some questions to raise.
I do not understand why the coalition Government have ignored the recommendations from Ofsted and the House of Commons Select Committee. These suggest that to provide effective careers advice and guidance, as St Peter’s does, they should implement a clear strategy for careers guidance; ensure that they make use of the National Careers Service resources, which are not well used at the moment; have well trained staff in charge of the area; use careers guidance professionals as well as employer networks; and foster links with local colleges and other trade professions.
On a point noted by the Select Committee, I am concerned that the £200 million provided for the Connexions services in the period 2009-10 has disappeared from view, and we no longer see that. Why have the Government been so resistant to including face-to-face guidance by qualified careers advisers? What has happened to the £200 million which, given the transfer of responsibilities, should have been available to help schools take on new careers responsibilities?