Academies Bill [HL]

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, if I may—I have some amendments in this group. I should like to speak to Amendments 98, 136 and 177. I also intend to speak to Amendment 137 along with Amendment 98, as they go together. I apologise that with all the toing and froing with the groupings this morning, I did not notice that Amendment 137 had not been included in this group. However, I believe that I am able to speak to it all the same.

The purpose of Amendments 98 and 137 is to probe the application of the school governance procedures regulations 2003 to a resolution by the school governors to apply for academy status. The current regulations provide for special procedures for important governing body decisions about the future of a school—particularly ones such as this, which would lead to a decision by the local authority to discontinue supporting the school. The special procedures currently include a requirement that the decision cannot be delegated to a committee or individual, and the chair cannot direct that a period of notice shorter than seven days be given for a governing body meeting. Indeed, in certain cases, a second governing body meeting must be held within 28 days to confirm the original decision.

Therefore, can the Minister confirm that a decision to apply for academy status cannot be delegated to an individual governor or even a small committee of governors? Will the regulations require the local authority or parents to be informed of the date when the governing body proposes to make a decision? Should not the regulations be amended to this end if they do not already do so?

Amendment 136 is a different way of dealing with the same matter. Clause 5(9) disapplies current legislation. Conversely, if we remove subsection (9), as Amendment 136 does, the current situation regarding consultation, safeguards and time periods and so on regarding who can make the decisions remains.

Amendment 177 would insert a new clause that would extend to academies a current duty on the governing bodies of maintained schools in England to promote community cohesion in the discharging of their functions. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, touched on this in the earlier debate on consultation. I well recall our debates during the passage of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, which introduced a duty on all maintained schools in England to promote community cohesion and on Ofsted to report on the contributions that they make in this area. Both these duties have now commenced.

Governing bodies of existing new Labour academies are not subject to the same duty to promote community cohesion as applies to maintained schools, despite our protestations, as I recall, when the Bill went through your Lordships’ House, yet from September 2008 their contribution to community cohesion has been reported on by Ofsted. I think it is vital that the new academies are also required to promote community cohesion, especially where they are located in areas where the community is very diverse. This is particularly important given the concerns that academies may increase social division and inequality, rather than reduce them, which of course is the intention of the programme. That is not how we want academies to be. They should be part of, and serve, the local community.

On the question of new 16 to 19 providers, mentioned by the noble Baroness on the opposition Benches, I think that if an academy extends the age range which it intends to serve beyond that which it had when it first applied to be an academy, there may very well be a case for having to go back to the Secretary of State to renegotiate the terms of the academy agreement. Can the Minister let me know whether that is the Government’s intention? It would be a major change in the academy’s provision and the original consultations would no longer be legitimate.

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I, too, have tabled amendments in this group—Amendments 116, 117, 119 and 129. Since this is the first time that I have spoken on this Bill, I welcome and congratulate the Minister on his position and the way in which he has hitherto dealt with the Bill. However, I cannot give the same welcome to the Bill itself. He needs to know that I have fairly fundamental objections to it, which may appear from time to time. It may have a rougher ride as we go forward.

It is true that I also had some reservations about the previous Government’s academies programme, contrary to the position of the Front Bench and other colleagues. However, it was very different—it was different in execution, although some would say that it was not that different in ambition. In execution, the Labour Government, with their fewer than 300 academies, recognised that there were failing schools, or at least schools that were underperforming in educational terms, and that there were areas of social deprivation, which was detrimentally affecting educational attainment. The Government used the academies as a way of compensating or intervening at the extreme end of special measures. That I can understand. In a sense, it was a comment on the failure of local authorities and the governing bodies that central government had to take them over. In general, I believe that the education of a community’s children ought to be the responsibility of the local authority elected for that community. It is only in very specialised and specialist cases that you would override that.

That is a political and an educational principle. It is an educational principle for reasons to which the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, has just referred. A change in the status and the relative resources and attention given to one school will have a knock-on effect on other schools. Sometimes it might be beneficial, but it will undoubtedly have a knock-on effect.

The record on Labour academies is mixed. Some have been very successful; some have improved, though it could be argued that they could have been improved by less drastic interventions; and some have failed or nearly failed. The case is not yet fully proven. To take away from local authorities the responsibility for educating their populations, which they have had for well over a century, is a very drastic move. In this short Bill we are changing the provision of education in this country.

This depends on initiatives being taken by the school and on the attitude of the Secretary of State to the application of the school. However, the ambition has been clearly laid out by the Minister and the Secretary of State. They want a large number of schools to opt out of local authority oversight. I say “oversight” and not “control” because local authorities have not managed schools for many years. They have supported schools and given them administrative support, help in specialist matters and special needs, and help in many other areas, but they have not managed the schools in the way which is sometimes implied by the criticism of the current system.

The Bill is taking a big step to remove the relationship between schools and the local authority. I appreciate that I am not going to be able to persuade the Government or the coalition—or at least most of the coalition—that this is the wrong way to go. But if we are to go down that road, it is essential to reassert the role of the local authority. We had a debate just before the break about consultation. I take some of the points from my noble friend Lord Adonis and others that to prescribe exact forms of consultation in primary legislation can lead you down difficult paths and that perhaps it is better covered by a code, guidance or, certainly, practice by the Secretary of State and those who are promoting academies and free schools.

The one bit of consultation that I do not believe you can escape is consultation with the local authority. The local authority might in some cases agree that it would be a good thing to have an academy. It would certainly have views on it and it would certainly have views that are informed by the impact on the rest of education in the area of its oversight. My first amendment is my ideal. Amendment 116 says that the local authorities should be consulted and should agree the proposals.

I appreciate that that is fairly close to cloud-cuckoo land, given the Government's intentions. In any case, if there was a disagreement between the local authorities and the Secretary of State, you would have to build in an arbitration process. I have therefore given the Government an alternative, which simply states that there is an obligation to consult the local authority.

Personally, I think that if that is not inserted in some form into the Bill, it will be greatly flawed. I suspect that it will make for a difficult ride in another place if local authorities are not written in, so I therefore strongly advise the Government that if they are to continue to go down that road, they ought at least to recognise the special role of local authorities in that respect.

I also take the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, before the break, but perhaps the obligation to consult ought to be not on the party proposing the school but on the Secretary of State him or herself. At the end of the day, the Secretary of State will have to make the judgment and explain to Parliament whether an effective consultation has taken place, so I place the responsibility not on the proposers but on the Secretary of State. That makes sense.

My Amendment 119 goes further to state—in a sense, with the same motivation as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips—that there should be an assessment of the effect of taking a prospective academy out of local authority oversight on the rest of the educational provision in the area. Where it differs from the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, and probably therefore avoids the objection of my noble friend Lord Adonis, is that it simply states that there should be an assessment. That assessment, or at least its conclusions, should probably be available publicly—although the amendment does not state that—but it still leaves the final judgment to the Secretary of State, whereas the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, would prescribe something that is difficult to define, as my noble friend said. Nevertheless, I think that the noble Lord and I are both on the same page here: before we move to approve an academy, an assessment needs to have been made as to the effect that will have on the total educational provision in the area.

I hope that the Government take some notice of the amendment. Personally, I find it very difficult that in the name of removing the burdens of red tape from head teachers and governing bodies, we move from a system of local authority oversight to one of centralised funding, centrally regulated. The red tape which has undoubtedly been imposed on the teaching profession by successive Governments over the past two or three decades has largely emanated from central government and their agencies, not from local government. The relationship with local government has been, by and large, constructive. We ought to maintain that. Even if we are going for change which some local authorities may approve of, there must be a vital role for local authorities in that process.

My final amendment simply gives some flexibility on timescale, so I will not go into it in great detail. The key point here is that local authorities must be present under the Bill to be consulted, engaged and involved, reflecting the impact of a decision on one school on the totality of education in their area.