Academies Bill [HL]
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, in Committee and on Report, we had interesting discussions on the role of governors. Over the past 10 to 30 years, we have seen governing bodies take on major new responsibilities. The governors have given a great deal of time and I am sure that noble Lords will acknowledge that we should be grateful to them for their contribution and work.
Academy status will bring even more responsibilities to those governing bodies, and we on this side think it important that parent governors play a full role in their deliberation. In Committee and on Report, we debated the proportion of parent governors who ought to be on a governing body. However, in the course of the debate on Report, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford, asked for an assurance that however many parent governors there will be on a governing body, they should be elected by the parents of students at the school.
On Report, the Minister promised to look into this point and my amendment presents an opportunity for him to respond to it. I beg to move.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, my noble friend knows how very much we, too, believe in the importance of parent governors. The Minister was kind enough to send us the model funding agreement, but he will be aware that annexe A, which is the memorandum and articles of the academy trust, was not attached to it. The previous model, from the previous Administration, required at least one parent governor to be elected. Can the Minister confirm that that will be in the model when it is published? As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said, the Minister confirmed in response to a question from my noble friend Lady Sharp at col. 260 on 7 July that there will be elections for parent governors. I hope that he will be able to confirm that further today.
However, the Labour amendment is not helpful to new academies as it does not allow a parent to be appointed in the run-up to the opening of a new academy, as did the previous articles. That would be a very desirable time to have a parent governor, while the new school is taking shape, but the amendment would not allow for that. I do not know whether the noble Lord has taken that into account.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, it will not surprise your Lordships to know that I fully support the amendment, and would be grateful for the additional reassurance asked for by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley: that, at least in the old academies, as it were, there will be elections. Sadly, I remain unconvinced that we do not need to specify a number of parent governors to be represented on the board, which was the whole purpose of my previous amendments. I will not go into that again, because we are on Third Reading, but I would love to have more reassurance from the Minister.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, I, too, support this amendment, as I have done on previous occasions. It is sad indeed that the Minister has not yet been able fully to satisfy our concerns. Disabled children and those with SEN often need specialist support to ensure that they achieve positive learning outcomes. These services are crucial for pupils with a wide range of disabilities and have a unique role to play in the education of children with low incident disabilities such as blindness, partial sight and hearing impairments.
Specialist support services are not focused solely on the delivery of the curriculum. They also provide much-needed training and skills to support independent living, and examples of some of those specialist services give a clear view. I cite the teaching of Braille and of British sign language, independent living training to enable independent personal care skills and home skills, mobility instruction and pre-employment support. Local authorities have traditionally provided specialist support services to all schools, using funds retained from school budgets to ensure adequate provision throughout their areas. There are strong concerns that, as academies move out of local authority control, so will their revenue, reducing the amount available overall to specialist support services and relying on academies to commission the services they require. I hope that while the Bill is still with us, we will have further assurances from the Minister. Otherwise, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, said, the issue will come up again in the other place.
Baroness Walmsley
There are indeed many complex issues to be further explored and I am sure that this will be done in another place. This morning I briefed my honourable friend Dan Rogerson MP, who will be handling the Bill on behalf of these Benches in another place, beginning on Monday.
One of the complex issues, for example, is that the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins—the spirit of which we certainly support—does not explain how the money retained centrally can transfer to the academies. Is it the expectation that a local authority will make the provision in an academy? Can the Minister confirm whether a local authority will have physical access to an academy to ensure that provision for low incidence SEN pupils is satisfactory? After all, it is being asked to pay directly for that provision.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
In the conversation that the noble Baroness had with her group in the other place, was it discussed whether any amendments will be allowed by the Government? Given the tight timetable of Second Reading and Committee stage on the Floor of the other place in the same week, it looks as though the Government want to get this Bill on the statute book before the Recess; therefore there will be no amendment because there would not be time for it to come back here.
Baroness Walmsley
I understand the point that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is making, but I did not discuss that matter with my honourable friend. After all, the procedure at the other end is not a matter for a Member of this House; it is entirely for the other end.
On statementing, the general duty on local authorities to ensure that appropriate children are statemented is not within the scope of the SEN obligations. It is a discretionary matter for academies as to whether they put forward children for statementing. Therefore, on one view, children in academies might be disadvantaged; on the other hand, the likelihood is that academies might overpresent children for assessment for statements—but this, of course, has its own problems.
That the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, has felt it necessary to table this amendment again highlights the fact that many noble Lords are still not satisfied that the mechanism is fair and transparent for calculating how much extra funding goes to the academies and how much will remain with the local authorities to enable them properly to carry out their duties in relation to the children in maintained schools.
In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, accepted that these arrangements must be seen to be fair and undertook to,
“reflect on the underlying principle of making sure that there is transparency and trust in these arrangements”.—[Official Report, 23/6/10; col. 1333.]
The ready reckoner on the department website has a lot to answer for and the funding mechanisms are clearly a work in progress. We have suggested that someone needs to take an independent view that these arrangements are fair to children in and out of academies. However, because of the rules on Third Reading, we were not allowed to table amendments containing further ideas on how this might be done.
We are not convinced that the YPLA is up to the job and remain concerned about this matter. As I said earlier, we have briefed our colleagues in another place, who will now have the opportunity to explore these issues further. The Government have time to get this right and we on these Benches hope that they will do so.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough
I was not in the House when the Bill was presented, but I wish to raise an issue on this important amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins. Since 1979 and the Warnock report, Governments of all persuasions have committed themselves to the principle of inclusive education, of allowing children with mild and complex special needs to be taught with their able peers within mainstream schools. Will the Minister say whether the Bill recognises that the small number of SEN children who appear in mainstream schools, and who will appear in some of the academies, may be refused entry simply because the school does not have access to adequate facilities to make provision for those children? They have specific needs that require funding. I hope that my noble friend will respond appropriately when he replies to the amendment.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
My Lords, I am surprised and sad that the amendment has come back at Third Reading in this form. Like many other noble Lords, I have engaged in a lot of discussions with a lot of schools that have for some weeks been engaged in the process of moving to academy status. The normal procedure that they have described almost universally—with slight variations, although they have all consulted—is that the head of the school first talks the proposal through with the staff to get the feeling from inside the school. What head is going to go ahead with a change to the school’s status such as this without taking her or his staff with them? That scenario is unthinkable. Then there is a lot of discussion between the governing body and the head. After that, the governing body goes out to talk to parents.
Almost all these schools have had meetings with parents to explain what academy status would mean and why they want to move ahead. The church schools have consulted the diocesan board and the church; there have been long discussions and many of the diocesan boards have had extensive consultations with their schools and, in many cases, with each other. There is a huge amount of consultation and it is unthinkable—absolutely unthinkable—that any school, any head teacher, any group of staff or any governing body would want to press ahead in some sort of secretive way without making sure that they were taking the staff, the parents and the local community with them. That is the way schools operate.
Once again, there is an arrogance in this House that we are the only people with good intentions. Just 20 minutes ago we were talking about those excellent governors and our faith in them. Why can we not trust the people who run our schools and education services to behave in a sensible and honourable way? That is how they have always behaved. The schools that I have talked to—I am sure many noble Lords have had the same kinds of conversation—have behaved in that way. To be prescriptive, to write down as a rule that we are consulting only because it is the law, would be alien to the way in which good schools operate—and only good schools will come this way.
I am equally certain that, when we move past the stage of the first Ofsted excellent schools wanting to become academies and move to some schools that may be more questionable, the Secretary of State and the civil servants in the department will closely question them as to the nature of the consultation they have had as part of due diligence. The amendment is unnecessary, arrogant and plain rude to the people in the education service that we all support. I very much hope that the noble Lord will withdraw it.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, we on these Benches are second to no one in our enthusiasm for proposing the most widespread appropriate consultation on a matter such as this which is so important to every school. That is why we were so pleased that the Minister brought forward the amendment on Report to put into the Bill the consultation that had been lacking in the original Bill. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, and her predecessors, has convinced us on numerous occasions of the dangers of lists and of being prescriptive as to who you should talk to about this, that and the other.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
My Lords, does the noble Lady agree that we are still convincing those on the other side of the Chamber of the dangers of lists? The right honourable Secretary of State for Education is experiencing a very difficult time with lists at the moment. We stand firm on that position.
Baroness Walmsley
The noble Baroness is very quick on her feet this afternoon but that is not the sort of list we are talking about. The list in Amendment 3 is dangerous because it probably leaves somebody out. In an individual school’s case, there may well be somebody who is appropriate to consult but who is not in the list. There are times when you have to trust schools. You have to trust what was in the Government’s amendment on Report, which is now in the Bill, that appropriate consultation must take place. Matters such as this will have widespread publicity within a local area, and any organisation that believes it is an appropriate group within the terms of the previous amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hill, but has not been consulted will certainly jump up and down and shout about the matter, making sure that the governors of the school know its view on whether the school should go ahead.
I remind the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that a school does not become an academy until the point of conversion. Although I personally strongly encourage schools to consult at the earliest appropriate moment, as I have already encouraged them to do in this Chamber, it must be done according to what we have in the Bill now, before conversion. That is vital.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
My Lords, I have learnt so much about conversion in the process of this Bill. I have learnt about the noble Baroness’s conversion to the benefits of the academy model promoted by those on these Benches and now by the party opposite, too.
We come back to what the Minister has talked about through our deliberations: the need to get the balance right between central prescription and local innovation, and the need to trust schools. Nobody in their right mind would think it a good idea for anyone in central government to be rude to schools or to put themselves in a position where they have to apologise individually to them. That is something that all of us around the Chamber take seriously.
Listening to my noble friend Lord Whitty proposing his amendment, I thought that what he said was very reasonable. At the heart of what he is asserting is the need for good guidance for schools. We are talking about potentially large numbers of sometimes quite small schools having to go through a process, and about giving them the right kind of support and guidance. I looked at the guidance that is available on the Department for Education's website. Consultation does not feature very strongly in that; it does not even get its own little blue box in the summary of the conversion process.
On Report, the Minister said that the Government were,
“amending our advice to converting schools on the department's website to include guidance on good consultation practice. We will discuss with an applying school as part of the conversion process what arrangements it has made for consultation”.—[Official Report, 7/7/10; col. 309.]
I would be happy if the Minister would explain whether the advice on the website has been updated since Report. We are in a very fast-moving process and if the Government are committed to providing full and proper advice and guidance to schools on consultation, that needs to happen quickly. The advice that schools get from the website about the communication that they should have with the local authority suggests that they should simply ask it to prepare for them details for the transfer of land—deeds and such. That is the context in which a conversation with the local authority is suggested.
There are good, simple suggestions on the website about how schools might consult parents, such as sending a letter to them explaining the proposals and perhaps meeting them. However, I am concerned that the only communication with the local authority should be to ask the local authority,
“to gather land ownership and land registration documentation and information”.
Surely there is a lot more that the school would want to talk to its local authority about. Will the Minister update that guidance, and soon?
Baroness Walmsley
I would love to hear what was said a few minutes ago. We are very much in favour of consultation on this side of the House.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
The noble Lord will know that academies have been used to replace failing schools, so there is a fundamental difference in the policy reflected in this Bill. We are being asked to agree arrangements for academies to convert from outstanding schools and, in this case, we are discussing additional schools. There are one or two additional schools for which my noble friend sitting next to me, or I as the Minister responsible, might have been able to find the additional money. That is why I keep asking the Minister whether he has some revenue funding that he has not told us about and whether he has agreement from the Treasury. In these straitened times that is unlikely, so it is most likely that it will come from other schools in the local authority area.
Is the Minister aware that following the unfortunate Building Schools for the Future announcement, there is a considerable appetite among local authorities to take legal action against his department when things are rushed out without working through the details? That is what is happening because of the unexplained desire to get the Bill on the statute book this month.
I know that I have asked the Minister a lot of questions, and he may want to write to me with some of the answers. Since I raised it in this Chamber last week, I would be most grateful if he could explain in his summing up how revenue funding will work for these additional schools, and why the Bill does not provide for consultation with local authorities and school forums.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I, too, welcome Amendments 6 and 7, and I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Hill, has responded to the persuasion and effective blandishments of my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury on this matter.
I have a question on proposed new subsection (4) in Amendment 6, which states:
“For the purposes of subsection (3)(a) a school does not replace a maintained school if it provides education for pupils of a wider range of ages than the maintained school”.
Will the Minister explain that, because it is not covered by the letter which he wrote about the government amendments of 9 July 2010? I think it means that it excludes from consideration as an additional school an academy that decides to establish, for example, a sixth form that did not exist before. I would not want this part of the Minister’s amendment to work as a loophole that would allow schools covering substantially the same age range, but with a little tweak at one end or the other, to be established without the Secretary of State having the very serious job of considering the impact on other good schools in the area.
Lord Bates
Briefly, I support my noble friend and place on record a slight disagreement on the amendment from this perspective: I am rather pleased that the wording is retained—that an additional school should consult with such persons as appropriate. It is fair to say that there is potentially a different view. I believe that it is a philosophical point about how we do government. It is about whether we want to go back to the day, which has been tried before, when we have Bills that run to 250 pages. They are so prescriptive about what everyone has to do, and people respond to that simply by taking a tick-box approach to everything—“Have I spoken to them? Have I spoken to them?”. They never bother to contemplate and absorb the issues. There is an attempt by the new coalition Government to do things differently. They are saying, “We are prepared to trust people and introduce legislation which is not prescriptive but is simply enabling people. If your school has been judged outstanding by Ofsted, clearly you are doing a good job and we trust you to do the right thing in the right way. If you are a new school and you have support for that, you have greater authority and we want to trust you”. That message needs to come across so I urge the Minister not to concede any further ground on this amendment. I think that it is fair enough as it stands.
Baroness Walmsley
I do not want the noble Lord to get away with the idea that I do not support these amendments. I simply asked the Minister a question about subsection (4) of the proposed new clause.
Lord Bates
Let me correct that for the record in Hansard. There was no suggestion of that at all.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
I am grateful to the Minister and to the Secretary of State in another place for the consideration and care that they have given to the whole issue of accountability. The Bill has improved considerably as a result of discussions in this House. We have had long discussions about the issue of consultation and governing bodies, and the net effect of this has been that we have a much more accountable and responsible structure in the Bill than we had when it began. For that, and for their willingness to listen, I thank them both.
At an earlier stage in the Bill, when my noble friends Lord Phillips of Sudbury and Lady Walmsley were very concerned about issues of accountability, we came up with the proposal that there should be an annual report to Parliament, and it is still highly appropriate to hold on to that. It is correct that the Government should have accepted this amendment and I thank them for their help in drafting it.
The purpose of the amendment is to enable not only the Select Committee but Parliament itself to consider what is, after all, a major experiment in education. There will be many aspects of that major experiment that people will want to look at. What happens to the quality of schooling, the movement of teachers and school leadership? What happens to the heads and governing bodies? There will be many more questions. So it is appropriate that a wider body than even a Select Committee should be brought into this discussion. One of the important issues here is going to be that the basis on which statistics are laid down in the annual reports should be broadly comparable with those in other related reports. My noble friend Lord Phillips will say more about that.
I shall point to two things in particular that are crucial in this report that we hope will be made available on an annual basis from this year onwards. The first of those is to track the effects of the removal of a great deal of what one might describe as “micromanagement” from the schools. Many of us on this side of the House, and many of us in the coalition, have been concerned about the levels of micromanagement in schools, and we believe that there is likely to be a more innovative approach and a greater deal of discretion for teachers if this experiment succeeds as the Government clearly intend it to do. On the other hand, there is a valid question that hangs in the sky: might we be moving towards a two-tier system of education? The initial applications are a little troubling in that respect. For example, counties such as Surrey and Hertfordshire appear to be responding at a rate of around 10 per cent of the secondary schools that might be applicable to become academies, whereas areas such as Middlesbrough, Knowsley and other poorer parts of northern England do not seem to be caught up with excitement at the idea of academies and are therefore not applying in large numbers to join.
There is another, related factor. So far, the schools that have applied appear, from the London School of Economics study which has been published in the past couple of days, to be atypically low in terms of free school meals and youngsters with special educational needs. These things will need very close observation, discussion and scrutiny. An annual report will be crucial in making that happen.
Again, I thank the Ministers on behalf of my noble friends and me for the consideration that they have given to this issue. I hope that this—which will, in its way, be something of an experiment—will turn out to be a very useful, radical new proposal in managing government and making it more accountable to Parliament than ever before. I beg to move.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I added my name to this amendment, which I strongly commend to the House. I share my noble friend’s concern about the analysis of the socio-demographic groups of the children in the schools that have shown initial interest in this experiment. I hope that the attraction of the programme will spread more widely among the schools in this country if individual schools find it the best option for them.
I am delighted that the amendment is not too prescriptive. Noble Lords have mentioned in the course of our debates many groups about which they have concerns. An opportunity for a vigorous debate every year in Parliament about, for example, the impact of the programme on children with special needs, children in public care, children who are themselves carers, children in primary schools and children with the major deprivations that concern us all will be a very good contribution to the further development of the programme. It is important that Parliament has a vigorous and widespread debate about the progress of this programme.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
My Lords, I, too, support the amendment. It is very important that if it is agreed, or if the Minister agrees to a similar amendment, it is enacted. It has been drawn to my attention that we have, in the various education Acts that we have passed in the past 10 years or so, quite frequently suggested that there should be an annual report. However, very few annual reports have appeared or been presented to Parliament. In particular, it was drawn to my attention that Section 38 of the Education Act 2002, “Communication with schools”, relates to a point that my noble friend Lady Williams raised about micromanagement. We were in the process of trying to limit the micromanagement of schools. That particular section requires an annual report, listing all the documents sent by the Secretary of State to governing bodies, to be laid before Parliament. I cannot find any evidence that such a report has ever been made, let alone laid before Parliament or discussed here. Perhaps I should have chased this up earlier. According to Hansard, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, who was the relevant Minister at the time, said:
“I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, who pushed and prodded us to the point that we have reached”.—[Official Report, 23/7/02; col. 249.]
I feel that, to some extent, I should have chased this report more than I have, but it makes the point that if we wish for an annual report, we should receive one and it should be considered before Parliament.
Baroness Morgan of Huyton
I have a question for the mover of the amendment. While I am not unsympathetic to this amendment, because in a sense it reflects some of our conversations in Committee and on Report, I am not clear whether it suggests a parallel process of monitoring that goes into all academies in the future. If it does, I am unconvinced that the department at present is able or ready to do that. I do not think we have seen much evidence recently of sufficient numbers of civil servants with time on their hands with the capacity to go into schools and produce a whole set of parallel reports. I would have thought a more sensible approach would be to look to Ofsted to see whether it could do some specific work on the new section of academies that otherwise are not going to be reported on regularly. While I have nothing against the spirit of the amendment, I am rather doubtful about setting up a parallel process with a group of schools that is not being applied to other schools.
Baroness Walmsley
I hope the House will allow me to say on behalf of the mover, since clarification has been required, that the analysis by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, of the amendment is a misreading of its intention.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
Well, another Morgan rises. This is a very interesting amendment. It has prompted quite a fascinating debate at the end of the passage of this Bill. For me the question is: what do we really want this annual report to look at? Is it the free- market, free school experiment in which we replicate the experience of Sweden so we can see by evaluating the impact on standards, as they did in Sweden, how standards fell markedly, or the expansion of the Labour Government’s very successful academy programme and how the coalition Government have learnt from that and further driven up standards based on our expertise and experience? There are lots of different ways of looking at this report.
I am very much in favour of ensuring that we have the data to evaluate the impact of government policy, that they are properly scrutinised and that Parliament has the opportunity to debate the outcome of that work. What would most interest me is a commitment from the Minister that we will debate this policy of expanding or morphing Labour’s academy programme to encompass outstanding schools and its impact, and have some hard data to back up the debate. We are having a conversation around this House that will carry on for some years. It would be good if that were to be supported by hard data. In the past, we have also had real concerns about the impact on children with disabilities and special educational needs, and on children in care. The ability to shine a light on the impact of the policy on their experiences and outcomes would also be of help. I am therefore sure that if that means we are actually going to do something with the data, I would support that. If there are annual reports that have not been published but should have been, I am sure that they are in the process of being compiled and we will see them coming on stream very shortly.
Education: History
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, as I said, I am not at all certain that they have been asked to take part in the review. It may well be that they have not. I cannot say any more than that at this stage.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, given the global nature of our economy and the multicultural nature of our society, would it not be appropriate to allow schools the freedom to use their discretion, if they so wish, to teach children not just about the history of the UK but some of the history of our major trading partners and of the mother countries of many of their pupils, as understanding our customers and our roots is very important for children?
Lord Hill of Oareford
I agree with my noble friend. It seems to me that, in teaching history, one certainly wants to give our children a sense of Britain’s history and the broad sweep and chronological development of our history over time. However, I agree with her very much that we also want our children to have a sense of the wider world, particularly as Britain changes and develops. It is important that that balance is struck.
Academies Bill [HL]
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Walmsley
“( ) to comply with the law on pupil exclusions and behaviour partnerships as set out in EA 2002, EIA 2006 and ASCLA 2009”
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 48 and 50 in my name. Amendment 6 asks for academies to comply with the law as laid down in the Education Act 2002, the Education and Inspections Act 2006 and the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009. I know that it sounds a bit silly to ask schools to comply with the law, but there is a reason for tabling this amendment. The current law on exclusions and behaviour partnerships is found in these three Acts. Some related legislation is to be found elsewhere: attendance and short-stay schools in the Education Act 1996, parenting orders in the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003, et cetera.
Of late, academies have been included in legislation as it applies to maintained schools. My intention in tabling the amendments is to ask the Minister to make a clear statement about what does and does not apply to academies, and what will be included in the model funding agreement. I regret that I have not had time to scrutinise all of the 41 pages of the document sent to me yesterday just before our sitting.
Amendments 48 and 50 seek to include the new academies in the two areas of the law relating to exclusions and behaviour which do not currently include academies. Amendment 48 seeks to amend Section 52 of the Education Act 2002 and would include academies in the law on pupil exclusions. Section 52 enables a head teacher to exclude a pupil on disciplinary grounds for a fixed term or permanently. However, the majority of the section is taken up with providing for arrangements to appeal against exclusions.
The model funding agreement sent to us yesterday contains in annexe D a clear statement that parental appeals against exclusion from an academy are not to be treated in the same way as appeals against maintained school exclusions. This runs counter to my Amendment 48, which was tabled before I had seen the model funding agreement. For an academy, annexe D states:
“Any appeal panel will be impartial, constituted in accordance with the Secretary of State’s guidance and any decision of such a panel will be binding on the academy trust”.
The Secretary of State’s guidance has not yet been published so we do not know whether or not it is acceptable. The published guidance, School Discipline and Pupil-behaviour Policies: Guidance for Schools, dated April 2010, is clear: it states that it does not apply to academies.
There are issues of equality and human rights compliance here. Removing a place at a school is clearly a human rights issue as a person,
“shall not be denied education”.
If academy appeal rights are just about following guidance—or not, as the case may be—how does the state know whether an academy’s appeal arrangements are Human Rights Act-compliant? Who will check up on it?
The footnote states that parents can seek a judicial review of both the procedure and the outcome of any appeal arrangement. However, judicial review is not a parent-friendly form of redress. Most parents would run a mile from it, even if they understood what it meant; I probably would myself. At least a maintained school has access to the local government ombudsman on grounds of maladministration, although not necessarily on all aspects of the appeal, but the parents of a child at an academy will not have that. We need the issue clarified.
Amendment 50 seeks to add academies to the Education and Inspections Act 2006, and requires the governing bodies of academies to have a disciplinary policy and the head teacher to have a behaviour policy. All these matters arise from Sir Alan Steer’s review of behaviour and discipline and have been generally welcomed by schools.
On 28 June this year, in Hansard at col. 1573, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, referred to the provision in the ASCL Act 2009 when she was trying to make excuses for the high number of exclusions from the original academies under Labour. I do not agree with her that we need to accept that academies, by definition, will have a greater number of exclusions than other schools. I know many schools in difficult circumstances that have difficult pupils, but they see it as their duty to deal with these problems within the school. It is a matter of good leadership and marshalling all the resources to hand, including the voluntary sector on occasions.
However, the noble Baroness reminded us that all schools, including academies, will have to work in partnership on behaviour and attendance from 1 September this year unless the law is changed. There is a statutory requirement to this effect in Section 248 of the ASCL Act 2009 which is due to commence on that date. The section requires co-operation by all secondary schools, including academies, to promote good behaviour and discipline on the part of pupils, reduce persistent absence and report to the local children’s trust board once every 12-month period. We welcomed that move by the Labour Government when the legislation came through the House.
My amendments ask the Minister whether there is any intention to change the law to exclude academies from these measures and which of the current laws—in particular, the appeal arrangements in Section 52 of the Education Act 2002—will apply. I ask also about the rumour that legislation or guidance will be introduced to allow schools to exclude a child without the usual minimum of 24 hours’ notice to the parents. I am not sure where this came from, but it would be impossible for a working single parent to respond to this. In the interests of the safety of the child and the sanity of the single parent, for whom life is hard enough, I hope that my noble friend will be able to dispel this rumour. I beg to move.
Lord Hill of Oareford
I believe that I apologised yesterday to the noble Lord for the lack of notice and do so again. I think I am right in saying that those letters were circulated at an earlier date, but if I am wrong I will put that right.
Regarding the placement of challenging pupils, including those who have been excluded, which I know is a matter of concern across the House, academies are required through their funding agreements to participate in in-year fair access protocols, which ensure that all schools in a local area take their fair share of hard-to-place pupils, including those who have previously been excluded. Academies are equal partners in those arrangements. The requirements envisaged by Amendment 48 in relation to the decision-making process surrounding an exclusion are already part of academy funding agreements and the departmental guidance is very clear about who can exclude a pupil, and in what circumstances the decision to exclude needs to be reviewed by the governing body.
Amendment 50 would require academies to follow the law and guidance on developing and implementing their behaviour policies. Academies are independent schools and are therefore covered by the Education (Independent School Standards) (England) Regulations 2003. These state that an academy must have in place, and must implement effectively, a policy on promoting good behaviour that outlines what sanctions will be taken in the event of any misbehaviour.
As for the specific questions raised by my noble friend Lady Walmsley, we accept that academies are obliged to follow the Human Rights Act and, if they were not following it, we would expect the YPLA as the academies’ monitoring body to identify that. As for exclusions, academies are treated in the same way; the main difference from maintained schools is that the academy trust, rather than the local authority, is the body responsible for setting up an appeal.
The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, did not speak to the amendments on teacher quality, and there was an amendment that was to have been spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. I confirm for the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, the point that I made earlier, on which, fortunately, I was right. The annexes on exclusions were circulated on the second day of Committee, on 23 June; I should be happy to dig them out and circulate them again.
I hope that that provides some assurance on exclusions on the overall points. My noble friend Lady Walmsley made some specific points; if I have not responded to them, I shall follow them up with her separately outside the House or in writing. On a general point, which links to some of the discussion that we had yesterday, I hope that the suggestion that there should be an annual report to Parliament on the whole of academies policy will provide some further reassurance to noble Lords that these important issues relating to the development of policy will be kept firmly under review. I hope that that picks up on some of the points made by my noble friend Lady Walmsley. I ask her in light of that to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend for his reply and to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his support. I am very much reassured by his very clear statement that academies will have to comply with the law and with guidance as it is already laid down and that the annexe to which he referred will be included in the funding agreement. I got a copy of the annexe somewhat earlier than I got a copy of the whole funding agreement model, which I received only yesterday; that was why I was able to quote from it. I have not yet carefully scrutinised the rest of the funding agreement.
I am grateful to the Minister for stating again that academies will have to comply with the Human Rights Act. I am sure that not only the YPLA will be watching to make quite sure that they do so. If they follow the legal requirements introduced by the previous Government and the guidance that still stands, there should not be problems about exclusions. I am also comforted by the fact that we will have the opportunity every year to see whether the figures for exclusions in academies of both kinds—both the ones from failing schools and those from outstanding schools—have risen at all. If there are any discrepancies that we feel are inappropriate, we will have the opportunity in Parliament to have a look at that. I know that my noble friend was not prepared for my comment on the 24 hours’ notice, so I look forward to his letter about that issue. I am very much reassured by many aspects of his reply and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I have Amendments 32 and 32B in this very mixed group of amendments about selection, religion and admissions. The Minister has been very clear about the duty of academies to comply with the admissions code so, as with the previous group of amendments, I accept that it does not need to be in the Bill. I presume that it will be in the funding agreement.
Amendment 32 was laid after our discussion in Committee about selection. While I accept in general my noble friend’s assurance that,
“The Bill does not allow for any increase in selection by ability in the state-funded sector”—[Official Report, 28/6/10; col. 1563],
it occurred to me that if a selective school became an academy and then expanded the number on its roll, that would mean more actual children in the area being selected by ability. So I laid this amendment to say that such expansion should not increase the number of children in the relevant area who are selected by ability. However, I accept that this duty would be difficult for an individual school to achieve, especially when I went back and read what the Minister reminded us about the ability of selective maintained schools that are not academies to expand by 25 per cent within the normal admissions consultation. In the light of that, I think that what I am asking for in my amendment would be pretty well impossible. Therefore, I am using the amendment to ask my noble friend who would have the responsibility of watching out for a large expansion of selection by ability among schools both inside and outside the control of a local authority when a lot of new academies are created, given that some of them will be former selective schools that are opting out.
Amendment 32B was originally laid in Committee as Amendment 135. I do not believe that the Minister addressed the matter in his reply, but I forgive him because, as he does today, he had several topics to deal with in the grouping. I believe that these ridiculous groupings have arisen because of the minimal time that we have had between Committee and Report; noble Lords have not had enough time to scrutinise the draft groupings and to make some sense out of them. Amendment 32B would require the governing body of a school with a religious character, if it converts to an academy, to use the fresh start as an opportunity to look at its religious character and to decide whether it wishes to change it. Since the school was first set up, there may have been a big change in the demographics and cultural mix of the catchment area. That may lead a governing body to consider whether it wishes to join together with another faith, or more than one, or to make a larger percentage of its intake inclusive of people of other faiths or none. It would not prevent those governors from making no change at all, but it would give them an opportunity specifically to consider their duty to promote community cohesion and to make a change. It would not interfere with their discretion to make their own decision in any way; it is not prescriptive at all. I commend it to the Minister.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, in this group I have Amendment 10A, which follows on from the discussion in Committee about the effects of Clause 1(6)(d). My noble friend Lord Hill said that paragraph (d) would not prevent an academy from reaching out to areas that were not in its immediate vicinity in order to broaden its intake. It would not prevent a grammar school that became an academy from maintaining its current and typically wide catchment area. Also, to take it even further, it would not prevent an academy from being or becoming a boarding school. I asked my noble friend what, under those circumstances, the paragraph would prevent that the Government wish to prevent. He has not replied, so I presume that there is nothing and that therefore the paragraph has no function. That is my reason for returning to the matter on Report.
On the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, the crucial bit of the model academy funding agreement appears to me to be clause 12(c). Reading that, I do not see what in the agreement—although, like my noble friend Lady Walmsley, I have not parsed it as carefully as I might—updates the requirement as the general admissions requirements change. It seems to me that an academy that was created tomorrow would be for ever stuck with today’s admissions arrangements, even if we improved them in a year’s time. I do not see what in the model funding agreement rolls the requirements forward. That would also apply to SEN requirements and other matters that are dealt with in clause 12. I would be grateful if my noble friend could give me some comfort about what keeps academies current.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I heartily agree with the vast majority of what has just been said by the noble Baronesses. The House knows my view that good quality teaching in PSHE should be the right of all children under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The knowledge and skills covered by the phrase, "Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education", cover all the important things that prepare children for life beyond and within the school, whether they are future rocket scientists or future waste disposal operatives. They are all human beings and deserve our help and support to lead a happy and fulfilled life. That is what PSHE does. It goes far wider than just sex and relationship education, important though that is.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, has mentioned, evidence has shown that schools which do PSHE well also benefit from improved behaviour and learning in other subjects. They are happier schools containing happier, safer and more confident children, which is what I want to see. My ambition within this coalition is to use my passion about this matter and the new influence that I hope I have among both my noble friends and my honourable friends to bring about a step change in the quality and quantity of this sort of learning for all children in all schools.
I am already working with the PSHE Association and others to produce a brief which I will submit to Ministers for the forthcoming curriculum review. It will go far beyond this amendment in two ways. First, it will cover all schools and not just academies. Secondly, it will contain many of the best elements, which, by the way, found support from all around the House, of the original version of Clauses 11 to 13 in the Children, Schools and Families Bill, which were so altered immediately prior to the general election.
That measure, which was deleted from the Bill, listed the areas of learning to be covered but, very importantly, also listed a set of principles that should underpin the teaching. These were, first, that the information taught should be accurate and balanced; secondly, that it should be taught in a way that is appropriate to the age of the pupils concerned and their religious and cultural background and reflect a reasonable range of religious, cultural and other perspectives; and thirdly, PSHE should be taught in a way that promotes equality, encourages acceptance of diversity and emphasises the importance of rights and responsibilities.
In complying with these principles, the school would by definition have to work closely with parents and communities, which is right and proper. These principles are fundamental to delivering the rights that I believe all children have and I know that the noble Baronesses, Lady Massey and Lady Gould, agree with me about that. I congratulate the former Labour Government on putting together something that is so right. I give credit also to those who have worked so hard outside this House, some since the 1960s, to obtain these rights for all children. I am a mere newcomer to this campaign.
However, if we have come so far, we need to get this matter right and I very much regret that I find the simple amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, wanting in all respects about the principles that I have just listed. I realise why she has made it so simple, but this is not a simple matter. I believe that the earlier approach of the former Labour Government, following extensive consultation, was better. That is what I will seek from within the coalition to achieve for all children and that is why I cannot support this amendment, although I support the aim of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey.
I would ask her not to press this amendment, but to work with me to influence the coalition Government in their curriculum review. We would not be starting from scratch. We already have a very good model, but, in a matter as sensitive as this, we must take all parts of the community with us. This would give us an opportunity to do that.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
My Lords, I follow my noble friend Lady Walmsley with great warmth. What she has said is very dear to my heart and I agree with everything. There are very strong feelings about the content of any part of the curriculum. After all, the curriculum is the heritage of knowledge and skills that we pass on to each generation. Everyone has their own strong feelings about what that should be. PSHE arouses particularly strong feelings because it deals with so many of the very sensitive areas of our personal and social lives.
As has been abundantly clear in what my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, have said, PSHE is already widely established in our education system. It is taught in virtually every school and there is already a large cadre of several thousand teachers who have registered themselves as qualified to teach the subject. I commend the enormously good work being done by so many of those teachers in dealing with what are difficult issues, often with difficult pupils at often difficult stages of their lives. They make a huge success of this teaching.
I have two real objections to trying to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in making this a single curriculum requirement for academies. First, in recent years I have met many teachers dealing with PSHE in, as I have said, difficult classes. They fit what they teach across the areas and how they teach it—whether it be drugs, health, obesity, sex or personal relationships, ethical or civic issues and so on—to the particular class in their particular school with its own particular mix of young people. Schools vary enormously. Some have sophisticated children and others have children who are unsophisticated. Some have children who, by the age of 11, 12 or 13, have alas already engaged in the kind of personal relationships we would rather they were not engaged in, including sexual relationships. The teacher’s skill lies in fitting what they say and how they deal with these issues to their particular class. In my view, that is where PSHE should remain—with the school and the individual teacher deciding what and how it should be taught.
The second reason why I am astonished the noble Baroness has put her amendment in this way is because this would be the only required part of the curriculum and it would only apply to the academies. If this amendment were agreed, PSHE would be a curriculum requirement for academies but not for other schools, and it would be the only part of the academies curriculum that would be a requirement. To me, that is bizarre. People in this House and certainly, I am sure, in the wider world outside would argue just as strongly for other bits of the curriculum to be made mandatory. Surely an important aspect of academies is that they will be free of a national curriculum and able to tailor what they teach and how they teach it within a broad and balanced framework for their particular pupils.
I would ask the noble Baroness not to press her amendment, and if she does, I would ask the House not to support her.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, this has been a fascinating and enlightening debate. I think that we are all actually on the same side; we just have different ways of approaching the issue.
I am aware of the curriculum review, but I have been aware of curriculum reviews on this subject for the past 10 years. We have gone over this ground, and in doing so I am also aware of the needs of children who may well be suffering because they do not have this education in their curriculum. Young people tell us what they need, and they certainly tell us that they need personal, social and health education.
I shall respond briefly to points that have been made. I put this amendment in here because the Bill is here, and because I shall continue to put it in any Bill that I can to try to get personal, social and health education in the curriculum.
It is a simple amendment because it is a complex subject. We have explored all possible areas connected with PSHE, today and previously. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, mentioned the five principles put in place by the Labour Government, and they are still there for reference. I was surprised; I just reread the noble Baroness’s speech at wash-up stage, and at that point she wanted no delay, she wanted to get on with it and she was anxious that PSHE should be part of the national curriculum. I support her.
Much work has been done already—
Baroness Walmsley
If the noble Baroness will permit me, I say to her that I still think that, but I have to convince my Government of the case, not just the former Government.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, I, too, intend to convince this Government of the case.
I know that much work has been done on this already. I believe that schools are ready to take this on, and it would improve their chances if PSHE were a compulsory subject. I have in my hand 10 reasons why there is no need to delay, written by the Personal, Social and Health Education Association. Noble Lords will be relieved to hear that I am not going to read out the whole document, but one section says that we have had just a year and half since Jim Knight, now the noble Lord, Lord Knight, announced the last government’s intention to make it statutory, “it” being PSHE, and that most schools will have been gearing up for statutory status during that time. It says that PSHE is not a new subject; it has been taught in schools and been allocated curriculum and staffing resources for many years. I think that might respond wisely to something that the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, said.
If we pass the amendment today—I intend to divide the House—it will send a clear message to the Government and to all parties that the welfare of children is at stake here. If a large number of people support this amendment, it will be a key message to the Government that this is an important subject that we do not take lightly. Let us go on from here and incorporate PSHE into all schools, through different Bills. Let us go through a curriculum review, but let us influence that review as best we can by showing today that we think this is an important subject that deserves our attention and our commitment. I wish to divide the House.
Baroness Walmsley
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, Amendment 10 arises from our debate in Committee about the impact of the new legislation on the early years. The Bill remains ambiguous about the care and education of young children and needs specifically to reference the Childcare Act 2006, which establishes the EYFS framework in law. The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that young children in academies are guaranteed the same balanced, age-appropriate and play-based standard of care and education under the early years foundation stage as children in maintained and independent schools.
In Committee the Minister said:
“I would suggest that the amendment is unnecessary because academies are already required, under the Childcare Act 2006, to provide the early years foundation stage. That is spelled out explicitly in their funding agreement. This stage is more than just a curriculum, as it covers much broader outcomes for very young children, including issues such as social skills”.—[Official Report, 28/6/10; col. 1570.]
The Early Childhood Forum, which has been briefing me on this matter, very much welcomes the Minister’s positive statements about the EYFS. I also welcome Minister of State Sarah Teather’s announcement a few days ago that the early years foundation stage is to be reviewed. I called for this in my speech in Committee, though I do not think her announcement was simply in response to my speech. I am delighted that the Minister stated that it is the Government’s intention that academies should implement the EYFS. However, I am still concerned that the Bill makes no reference at all to the EYFS, and that furthermore the Childcare Act 2006, to which the Minister referred, contains no reference to academies. This seems to leave an ambiguity in the law that could be easily rectified via this amendment.
Academies do not have to follow the national curriculum for primary and secondary schools. The only reference in the Bill to the curriculum is to Section 78 of the Education Act 2002, which has no application to the education of those aged under five, since the Childcare Act 2006 amended the Education Act before it and removed any reference to nursery education. The Childcare Act 2006 establishes the EYFS as the framework for the care and education of children from birth until the 31 August after their fifth birthday, and which all those registered on the early years register and maintained, approved, non-maintained, independent and special schools must deliver. Under the law, all these providers must meet the legal welfare, learning and development requirements as set out in Section 40 of the Childcare Act 2006 and its associated regulations.
Existing academies are not referenced at all in the Childcare Act 2006. This is an understandable omission as, although there are a number of all-through academies providing education for three to 18 year-olds, until now academy status was available only to secondary schools. The Bill extends academies to many more young children and therefore needs to be unambiguous about the approach to be taken to their education and care. It is clearly not the Government’s intention to exempt academies from implementation of the EYFS. The Early Childhood Forum is concerned that academies do not fall into any of the categories of school referenced in the Childcare Act 2006. It has tried to clarify this matter with officials but they have not replied to its phone calls. Perhaps they were in purdah, pending the Minister’s statement the other day about the review of the early years foundation stage. However, it would be helpful to know the Government’s understanding of where academies fit in the framework of that Act. Perhaps this might have been sorted out if officials had responded to the Early Childhood Forum. I may not have needed, in that case, to table this amendment. It would also be helpful to know how many of the current all-through academies provide education for under-fives and whether they all currently implement the early years foundation stage as they should.
There is some confusion about whether the Government consider academies to be independent schools in law. Clause 1 refers to academies as “independent”, but it also sets out that they are to be funded directly by public money through the Secretary of State. The Independent Schools Council membership criteria determine independence through the individual school’s inspection regime, with members having to be inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate. However, academies—as far as they are to be inspected at all—will be under Ofsted. Noble Lords can perhaps see the confusion.
The early years foundation stage is based on the best evidence that we have from research and experience of what is most effective in helping children to develop physically, intellectually, emotionally and socially. The amendment would create parity and balance in this new legislation that matches the reference to Section 78 of the Education Act 2002 on the curriculum for those aged over five in Clause 1. I urge the Minister to accept it or to explain very clearly why it is unnecessary. If he accepts that there is a problem in the Bill and its relationship with the Childcare Act, I hope he will not ask us to wait for the pending early years foundation stage review. This would mean that primary academies and the young children in their care would be left in limbo and outside the current main framework until then. If the outcome of the review is a fundamental change, the Childcare Act would need to be amended in any case, and the legislation on academies would be resolved alongside that for all the other types of school. I beg to move.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
My Lords, I added my name to this amendment. From listening to the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, I think I have had exactly the same briefing as her. I simply wish to say “ditto”.
I am slightly concerned that in some things we need to rush ahead with, and in others to hang back from, reviews. It is very important for the Early Childhood Forum and the incredibly important organisations that make up the forum to have the kind of reassurances that the noble Baroness is looking for. The early years foundation stage was a very important step forward. The previous Government initiated it, and it has been well received. It is important that we build on the work of the early years specialists. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, when I first joined the House of Lords, we did not receive any briefings on anything. That situation has been transformed in the 15 years I have been here so that now, on a Bill such as this, we are deluged with briefings, which are often extremely useful.
On behalf of the Minister and the department, I apologise for unreturned phone calls. I offer, if it is helpful, a meeting with the Minister and officials to discuss this question further. On the specific issue, I reassure the noble Baroness that all schools providing for under-threes’ education are required under the Childcare Act to register with Ofsted and to deliver the early years foundation stage. This includes independent schools and therefore also includes academies. Section 40 sets out the duty to deliver the early years foundation stage. That is the key element. This already applies to academies in the same way as it does to other schools.
Reference has already been made to the review to be carried out by Dame Clare Tickell, chief executive of Action for Children, which will report to my honourable friend Sarah Teather in spring 2011. The review will be open and will look at the foundations that should be in place to protect young children’s welfare and support their development and learning. It will also consider throughout how to reduce burdens on providers as the experience of the past three years is that the requirements of the early years foundation stage have increased the workload on many of those who work with young children, and so taken time away from children. We do not intend a fundamental change but we do intend to review the way in which the Act works in practice. I hope that that is sufficient assurance. I again apologise if phone calls have not been returned. With those assurances, I hope that my noble friend will feel able to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
I thank the Minister for his reply and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, for her support. The noble Lord says that academies will have to deliver the early years foundation stage. However, it does not say that in the Bill. The difficulty has arisen because of uncertainty about the independent status—or not—of academies. According to independent schools, the definition of “independent” is a school that is inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate. However, that does not apply to the schools that we are discussing. Nevertheless, the Minister could not have been clearer on that matter. I suspect that the Early Childhood Forum will very much welcome a meeting with officials to set its mind totally at rest. It will probably be satisfied with the clarity of the Minister’s reply, but I think that it will take advantage of the invitation anyway. I wait to hear what it says to me when that meeting has taken place. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Academies Bill [HL]
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, we see a bit of a dilemma. In order to give individual schools more authority over their affairs through academy status, the Secretary of State is having to take powers to himself to authorise that. Clearly, that approach has been used before, but with power goes accountability. There is a gap. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that in some way the Secretary of State needs to be more accountable to Parliament for the responsibilities that he will discharge.
In Committee, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, we debated a number of amendments tabled by Members on this side of the House, which, in retrospect, were probably too detailed and would have required many hundreds of statutory instruments coming to your Lordships’ House and the other place. The noble Lord has come forward with a more sensible approach, which deals with the principles of the granting of academy status and allows Parliament to debate the criteria. As the Secretary of State will be given considerable powers in this area, it is right for Parliament to ask for greater parliamentary scrutiny. I certainly think that the noble Lord has got it right.
How quickly the party opposite has warmed to Executive power. For how many years have we heard noble Lords from both parties opposite ask for more parliamentary scrutiny? I find it surprising that the Government are not able to respond on this matter. Surely what the noble Lord suggests is not too much to ask.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I, too, support the amendments in the names of my noble friends. I remind the House that we have already today—and, indeed, in our debates yesterday—come up with several examples of things that could legitimately be included in the annual report. Yesterday, we talked about the effect on primary schools; today, we have talked about the effect on young people with special educational needs and young people leaving care. To that, you could add achievement in exam results and all kinds of other issues. The amendment is not prescriptive in any way, but it is as well to bear in mind the sorts of subjects that Parliament may wish to consider in holding the Government to account when asking questions about such a report. This is a valuable proposal.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, I support this suggestion. There will be considerable power at the centre and a need for parliamentary accountability. The approach proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and spelt out in more detail by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, is one that I certainly find acceptable.
Lord Whitty
I accept that it is a little long, although I did warn the House, but it is actually only the 12th minute and this is an education Bill. I beg to move.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, in his Amendment 25 the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, replicates probing amendments that were tabled by at least three Members of this House in Committee and about which we had long discussions. As a result, the Government have come back with a very sensible amendment, accepting our feeling that we should insist that schools consult the most appropriate people. The words,
“such persons as they think appropriate”,
are particularly right in the light of what I have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. He suggested that we should list the future pupils of a school as being appropriate to consult. How far in the future are we talking about? What about children in the womb or the parents of children who may at some stage go to that school but who may have moved 50 miles away by the time the child is born? That is nonsense. To list the various organisations and groups of people who should be consulted is the sort of thing that the noble Lord’s own Front Bench resisted on many occasions.
Lord Adonis
The nonsense that I see in the amendments before us is subsection (3) in government Amendment 30, which, as my noble friend rightly says, allows there to be consultation after the order, in respect of which the consultation should have taken place, has been made. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is very anxious that we all shut up and do not speak. I have been very frugal in my interventions on Report. I was anxious not to have to make such a speech, but I badly need to hear the justification of the noble Lord, Lord Hill, for government Amendment 30, particularly subsection (3). How does he justify a requirement for consultation to be permissible after the event to which the consultation refers? We need to hear that before we know whether this needs a longer debate in which further views will be expressed. Perhaps the noble Baroness will give her view on whether she thinks it is adequate for consultation to take place after the event to which it applies.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I will come to my Amendment 31 in just a moment. I strongly suspect that the Minister’s answer to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is that the academy order is permissive. It does not force the school to become an academy; it is permission for it to do so. The school becomes an academy only when it converts. I suspect that will be the answer, but my noble friend will speak for himself. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that it is desirable that the school consults all the right people before it even applies. I very much suspect that all those groups who feel themselves to be appropriate consultees—
Baroness Thornton
Does the noble Baroness think that there should be a consultation before a school becomes an academy or not?
Baroness Walmsley
Indeed I do, which is why I have tabled my little tweaking amendment in the hope of persuading my noble friend that a school should consult before it applies to become an academy. Once it knows the shape of the proposed school, the terms of the academy funding agreement, and—particularly in the light of what my noble friend Lady Sharp said about schools’ expectations of that extra money being somewhat inflated—how much money it will get, it is highly desirable that a school should then go back to appropriate consultees and say, “These are the terms under which we will become an academy if we decide to go ahead. This is the extra amount of money that we will get and this is what we have to do with it. Are you still sure that this is the right way to go about it?”. That is why I have put my little tweak into my noble friend’s very welcome amendment about consultation. It is desirable, but if he suggests that it is another thing on which we should not prescribe, I would be happy to accept that.
For the record, however, I urge schools that are thinking of applying to consult widely. I am confident that any group of people who feel that they are an appropriate group under the terms of this amendment but have not been consulted will certainly kick up an awful fuss. I ask the Minister to consider in particular that the pupils of the school themselves and the local authority would, in normal circumstances, fall into the category of,
“such persons as they think appropriate”.
That would give me considerable comfort in supporting Amendment 30 without my Amendment 31.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for this interesting debate. The Minister’s position appears to be that his Amendment 30 stands. He has not told us whether he is accepting the noble Baroness’s Amendment 31, which would make his amendment slightly more acceptable with regard to the governing body’s responsibilities. I am being told that he has quite clearly rejected it.
Baroness Walmsley
My understanding, as the person who spoke to Amendment 31, is that my noble friend has said that he does not wish to accept it. My view is that it is desirable but not essential and I shall not be moving it.
Lord Whitty
That clarifies that matter, and it underlines my position in one sense. I do not believe that the Minister has gone far enough to persuade us not to pursue this matter, in that his amendment does not go far enough. It allows for consultation to take place only right at the end of the process, whatever is on his website in terms of guidance, which is no doubt desirable but not statutory or regulatorily required. It does not cover the Secretary of State’s responsibilities and nor, as the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said, does it explicitly cover the situation relating to free schools. Therefore, it is deficient, and I ask the Minister to consider coming forward at Third Reading with a more comprehensive amendment on consultation. The rules of procedure do not allow him to answer that but it seems to me that I ought to allow him the opportunity so to do.
I shall not press my Amendment 25 on the grounds that to some extent I accept that it is too prescriptive. I think that my Amendment 28, which would require discussion with the local authority, could be taken care of by the Minister coming back with a more comprehensive amendment. My noble friend Lady Royall will no doubt decide whether to move Amendment 26, which is not as prescriptive but does deal with the central issues of timing and widespread consultation.
At this time of night I am not going to win a vote, although I consider that I have won the argument. I think that the Minister needs at least the flexibility to consider everything that has been said and to come back with a better amendment at Third Reading—one which does not include lists of people but which allows some flexibility in the process and clearly imposes on both the Secretary of State and the governing body a degree of consultation. I hope that he will hear what I say in that regard. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Academies Bill [HL]
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The Lord Bishop of Lincoln
My Lords, I also support the amendment for two reasons. First, building on the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, we are anxious that church schools should be part of a network of choice to those for whom a faith school or an alternative could be their choice. That demands a degree of planning and the amendment would ensure that the Secretary of State took account of a range of possibilities when considering the provision of schools in an area. Secondly, one of our concerns about the Bill in general is the removal of the local authority interest in ensuring a degree of overview or strategic planning. The amendment at least goes some way towards mitigating the consequences of that omission.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I support the amendment, although I did not get round to adding my name to it, for which I apologise to my noble friend. The amendment is one of the best that we see on Report because it evolved from an amendment—I think Amendment 4—that my noble friend tabled in Committee. The Minister pointed out that, if my noble friend’s initial amendment were carried, no academy could be formed if there was to be any effect on any school in the local area, whether good or bad. My noble friend’s amendment has evolved to enable the Secretary of State to take into account whether any good local schools will be adversely affected by the creation of a new academy.
My noble friend’s amendment is particularly important given that government Amendment 30, which is about consultation, refers only to existing schools converting into academies and not to brand-new schools. When a brand-new school is introduced, the local community will have to rely on the common sense of the Secretary of State to make sure that that school does not take all the pupils from other perfectly good schools in the locality.
My noble friend’s amendment comes out of his experience in Suffolk, which I think he mentioned in Committee. I, too, have been approached by one of my honourable friends in another place, Mr Don Foster, the Member of Parliament for Bath. He has had similar problems with an academy that was created under the Labour Government and is having an effect on very good schools locally. Of course, we must not underestimate the effect of the view that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. A new school, which seems to offer something novel, especially if it has a shiny new building, could well take pupils from other schools that really do not deserve to lose them. The amendment would give the Secretary of State the discretion that he requires, in the Bill, so that we can all be reassured that he will take these matters into consideration when looking at an application.
Baroness Morris of Yardley
My Lords, I support the amendment. The point has been well made by noble Lords on both sides of the House that there needs to be an element of planning. I suppose that it is for the Minister to make a decision about whether his Government spend money on surplus places or on building schools for the future. It is interesting that one day there is no money for the Building Schools for the Future programme and the very next day, from the same department, there is money to fund surplus places. Surplus places cost money and do not contribute to standards.
I want to raise a slightly different point, which I do not think has been mentioned so far. I should like an assurance that the Minister understands the impact of a new school on another school that might already be doing a good job of raising standards. I start from the premise that it is not only academies that will raise standards; many good schools that do not have academy status are already on the journey of turning round underperformance. They are in a fragile state but are improving—going from failing and underperforming to being successful does not happen overnight. During that important period, when they have good leadership and are changing their reputation within the community, and when parents are understandably nervous but are restoring their confidence in those improving schools, they need a bit of protection. I worry that if an academy opens with a blaze of glory, with new money from the Building Schools for the Future programme, as was indicated yesterday, that will undermine the progress that the school makes.
I am not in the business of defending failing schools—I have done my share of closing failing schools and replacing them with either maintained community schools or, indeed, academies. However, I am in the business of trying to support and nurture schools that have put in a lot of effort and are now improving. Quite honestly, if surplus places are built into a local system, it will not be the schools that are already strong and successful that are damaged but those that have already had a lot of state intervention and support and are on the journey to becoming good schools. I should like to hear the Minister’s comments on that aspect of the amendment. It is an excellent amendment and I look forward to supporting it.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Geddes)
My Lords, to the best of my knowledge, the amendment proposed is on page 1, line 8.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I support my noble friend’s remarks. The Minister will, I hope, recall that I asked him in a private meeting last week about the ready reckoner on the department’s website. I pointed out that our colleagues in York told us that if several schools in York applied to become academies, they would get more money than the whole of York local authority for the same services. Have the Minister and his officials had the opportunity to check the ready reckoner? When local authorities find themselves in situations like this, some of them will be left thinking that they will not just be left with no money, but that they will be left with a negative amount. I am sure that the Minister does not intend that. Therefore, I wonder if he can explain.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I shall speak also to my Amendments 5 and 7. Primary schools are always a matter of particular interest and certainly were to your Lordships when we discussed them in Committee. A number of concerns were expressed on this side and other sides of the House about the potential rapid conversion of hundreds of primary schools to academy status. I make it clear that my raising these matters is not born out of any objection to allowing the freedoms being granted to existing academies to be extended to primary schools; more, they come from some very practical considerations, stemming often from their relative size and community location of those schools.
In Committee, my noble friend Lady Royall raised a number of important points about the implications of the Bill for primary schools. She referred to the comparatively small size of many primary schools and to their potentially increased overheads. She said that the resources for shared services could be swallowed up by the extra administrative costs that would have to be borne one way or another. My noble friend also warned that many primary schools would have less capacity to budget and plan for the future. Other noble Lords also made those points in our debate.
Today's earlier discussion on the financial arrangements and the uncertainties there are at the moment reinforce that point. Thinking of primary schools and of the limited managerial capacity that one often finds in those schools, one can only worry at the burden that is likely to be placed on the head teacher and the governing body, and the responsibility that is likely to be put on them.
My understanding from local authorities is that the most dependent group of schools that rely on their advice and support are primary schools. The vast majority of their schools are community schools. They will not have had even the experience of being foundation schools in managing the enormous range of responsibilities that would come with academy status. There is a real issue of capacity here. We know that most secondary schools employ a range of staff to deal with the increased administrative requirements placed on them. Often, in many primary schools, there is only one school secretary and the head teacher. One also has to think in terms of public finance and the appropriate monitoring and spending of those moneys
There are also some real practical issues. What would happen, for instance, if a primary school developed a serious structural fault or there were fires on school premises? The normal first port of call for primary schools at the moment is the local authority, which would step in. My understanding is that once a school becomes an academy, Department for Education advice states that it would expect schools facing such problems to take out loans. But could some of the smaller primary schools really be able to take that risk and afford the repayments, even if they could get a loan in the first place?
We know that most primary schools depend on the local authority to pick up the cost of redundancies, employment tribunals and legal costs associated with challenges over accidents and similar incidents. Would smaller primary schools even be able to find the cost of insurance to cover this, when the department's own website states that for most schools the cost of insuring would be “between £60,000 and £100,000”? Add to that the cost of purchasing legal and personal advice commercially.
There is another concern about the immediate conversion of primary schools to academy status. A great deal of work has been done over the years in managing the process of transition from an early years setting to the first year of primary school. I hope that the review of the early years foundation stage announced by the Government will not reverse that very good work. But the reality is that the overlapping responsibilities between early years settings and the children's trusts—the abolition of which would cause concern on this side of the House—raise concerns about the number of childcare and early years settings sited with primary schools which, if they then move to academy status, could have major consequences. The problem is that we have so far seen little evidence that any serious thought has been given to those consequences.
I know that the Minister is being extremely helpful in our debate, but I was disappointed with his response. He acknowledged the importance of the matters that have been raised and said that he understood some of the concerns. He said that he was committed to thinking through the practicalities raised by noble Lords in Committee. But in the end, he gave no comfort to those of us who think that the practicalities ought to be dealt with first before primary schools become academies.
Our Amendments 3, 5 and 7 seek to remove primary-only schools from the Bill entirely. This is done for reasons of practicality. Of course, if the Government are determined to find a way in which to make the academy programme applicable to primary schools, why do they not do some preparatory work, look at the issues and return with proposals at a later date? They have undertaken to bring at least one other education Bill during this Session of Parliament. Surely, that would give them time to prepare some fully worked-through proposals.
I know that the other amendments in this group seek variously to delay the introduction of primary academies, which would obviously give the sector and the noble Lord’s department time to work through some of those issues. We would certainly support those amendments, should our own amendments not succeed.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I think that the noble Lord meant to refer to Amendments 3, 4 and 7, because I now speak to Amendment 5, which is in my name.
We on these Benches do not favour a complete ban on primary schools. However, as the Minister knows, we have considerable concerns as we feel that the issue of primary schools should be approached with considerable caution and careful thought. I leave my noble friend Lady Williams to speak to Amendments 22A and 24, which set out our ideas, briefly referred to just now. Amendment 5 paves the way for one of those measures, which is to allow schools to apply as groups. Clause 1(5) says:
“The undertakings are … to establish and maintain an independent school in England which … has characteristics that include those in subsection (6)”,
and so on. My amendment would change that to say that,
“the undertakings are … to establish and maintain an independent school or group of schools in England”.
It is a very small amendment, but it paves the way to the idea that my noble friend Lady Williams will address in a moment that we should perhaps encourage primary schools to apply as a group or federation rather than a single school.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, as the Minister knows, we have given careful thought to the whole issue of primary schools, and I am grateful for what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, had to say about it, with which I very much agree. Primary schools have about them a number of characteristics that are simply nothing like as typical of secondary schools. Many of them are relatively small schools in rural areas, and 25 per cent of the population of primary school children in England and Wales attend 75 per cent of the number of schools. In other words, there are a great many very small schools in small towns in rural areas, which no less than 25 per cent of all our schoolchildren attend between the primary school ages. Secondly, of this group of schools no less than one-third are either church voluntary or church-controlled schools, mainly Anglican but some Roman Catholic and others of other denominations. That is a factor about primary schools that is far more significant than would be the case with secondary schools.
Furthermore, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, implied—and we have tried to indicate on this side of the House that we share his view—primary schools are often at the heart of the community, the centre of civic life and the place where people meet to discuss things, where they feel themselves drawn to support the school. At a time when schools will need more support—among other ways, financially—that is a very crucial asset that should not be easily put at risk. I suspect that many noble Lords other than myself spend a certain amount of time attending school fetes and competitions and this and that, which all help to contribute some money to the financial needs of the school.
In addition, as briefly said by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, primary schools are peculiarly dependent on local authority support, whether for SEN, management issues, financial issues or simply to deal with a very difficult governor or parent. As chairman of the judges of the Teaching Awards, which I declare as an interest, I have repeatedly been approached by primary school heads who talk about the support of their local authority and say how important it has been to them. That is not something that I have tried to elicit from them; it is something that they freely mention themselves, over and again. That is even truer if the school is small, isolated or on its own.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Geddes)
I call the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, to move Amendment 6.
Baroness Walmsley
I am sorry, but I thought that we would now move on to the next business.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
I am sure that the Government will help us, but I think we are now stopping our discussions on this Bill.
Education: Funding
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Walmsley
I thank my noble friend for repeating the Statement. I should like to ask him first about Teach First. He will be aware that, under Labour, many schools in deprived areas did not have properly qualified teachers in the STEM subjects, which include science, technology and engineering. Can he say anything about the distribution of the new teachers in Teach First, some of whom will by their nature have qualifications in those subjects? Will he prioritise those schools in deprived areas that have suffered from the lack of properly qualified teachers in those subjects? Can he say something about the resources available for training these new recruits to the teaching profession, who will know all about their own subject but will not know too much about teaching in the first instance? I am aware that they have a foreshortened programme of teacher training, but there will be a lot more of them and we need to be reassured that appropriate funding is available to do that training.
On Building Schools for the Future, the Minister has made it clear how much it has cost schools and local authorities already to become involved in this overbureaucratic process. When the coalition Government have brought this country’s economic situation under control, will those schools that have already spent a lot of money and time, but have suffered from the freeze that he has just announced, be at the front of the queue when we are able to get back to normal business?
Finally, when talking about quangos, will Partnerships for Schools be closed down?
Lord Hill of Oareford
The role of Partnership for Schools will be considered as part of the review that we have announced. We plan to roll out Teach First to areas of the country that it has previously not reached and go to primary schools, which I am sure my noble friend will particularly welcome given her interest in the teaching of young children. I take her point about the importance of training for STEM subjects, for which there is a particular problem in finding teachers. I know that the previous Government worked hard on that. It is a problem faced by all Governments and I hope that Teach First will help.
As for whether the disappointed schools that were a long way down in the process would be first in the queue, the answer to all those questions is inevitably dependent on the comprehensive spending review in the autumn and how much capital the department ends up with. It would be wrong of me to presume on the outcome of that, but those are factors that the department will take into account when making future capital allocations.
Academies Bill [HL]
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Layard
My Lords, I strongly support the two amendments in this group. In the past 40 years, there have been four surveys of the mental health of 15 year-olds in Britain. These show that the number of young people suffering from emotional and behavioural problems is twice as high now as it was 40 years ago. That is a shocking fact. It is terrible for young people and for the rest of us. We are talking about the health not only of young people, but also of the society that is affected by their behaviour. If we take into account the extraordinary costs for young people and for adults of the problems of young people not knowing how to live, we cannot turn our backs on the emotional and behavioural aspects of their education. We have been moving towards a disastrous situation in which our schools have increasingly become exam factories—factories for helping people to earn a living, not to learn how to live.
It is possible to teach people how to live. This can be done not only through the school’s ethos, which is extremely important—as has rightly been stressed, this could be the most important thing—but also through structured teaching of life skills. We already know a lot about how to do this, and we are learning more. For example, the Penn Resilience Programme, now used in 30 schools in this country, has been shown to reduce teenage depression markedly, and to increase school attendance, with emotional and behavioural consequences. Many other equally effective programmes cover areas such as developing altruism, learning about healthy living and avoiding risky behaviour, learning about mental health and learning about parenting—there are programmes that teach young people how to be parents, and others that cover nearly all the topics in the QCA’s excellent programme of study for personal and social well-being.
There is also plenty of evidence of the effectiveness of sex education. For example, one striking case is the comparison between our country and the Netherlands, where sex and relationship education, including parenting, begins in primary schools. There, the teenage pregnancy rate is one-fifth of the rate in this county. Therefore, we have plenty of evidence on which to proceed.
These are difficult subjects to teach and that is why I am enormously worried about the coalition Government’s approach of leaving them to individual schools. If they are difficult to teach, the most obvious thing to do is to have a concerted programme of teacher training. That can be done only at the national level but, as many speakers have already said, it will not happen unless there is a clear statement that education in life skills is a key element in the complete education of every child.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I speak on this matter in a personal capacity and I absolutely support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. I also support much of the spirit behind the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, although I think that it is a bit too late to provide sex and relationships education to 14 year-olds, given the hundreds of girls under the age of 14 who get pregnant every year. Good PSHE includes all the information that young people need to lead an ordinary but successful life, or even an extraordinary life. It is not academic but what are schools doing if not preparing young people for the lives that they will lead when they leave and, indeed, the lives that they lead while they are still at school?
Much has been said this afternoon about the importance of teaching about parenting, and I absolutely agree. Noble Lords may have heard about the programme in which school nurses give out baby dolls to young women. These dolls scream in the middle of the night, they need burping, they need their nappy changing and they need feeding regularly. I recently heard about one school nurse who gave out a batch of these dolls and when they came back at the end of the week most of the young girls said, “Oh my goodness. I couldn’t possibly”, apart from one who said, “It was wonderful. I can’t wait to get pregnant”, so it does not always work.
Over the years, I have said a good deal on this subject in your Lordships’ House, so, in an effort not to repeat myself, I did some new front-line research last week with two teenagers who are doing work experience in Parliament. One told me about a girl in her sister’s class at school who at the age of 13 had a one year-old baby. Both of them said that they have to go to PSHE lessons but to quote one of them, “We don’t do anything”, and to quote the other, “We watch a lot of videos”. One said, “We had a lesson on drugs recently and they just said, ‘Don’t do drugs. Drugs are bad’. It was useless”. She also told me that she did not have any sex education until she was 17 and that they do not teach about contraception or abortion in their Catholic school except in RE, where they say, “Don’t do it; it’s a sin”.
That is just not good enough. I realise that this is a very small sample of hearsay evidence but it lines up with what I have heard from many other teenagers over the years. It tell me that, first, teachers are not properly trained to deliver PSHE; secondly, teachers are not confident to teach PSHE, and that is why they rely so much on videos; thirdly, the quality of PSHE varies immensely and is very poor in some places; and, fourthly, some children are not receiving the information to which they are entitled and which protects their well-being.
The only way to deal with all those things is to make the subject part of the national curriculum in maintained schools and mandatory in academies and all other schools that do not have to follow the rest of the national curriculum. All establishments which educate children and young people have a duty to have regard to their well-being. However, they cannot do that successfully if they do not give them the information that they need to live a happy life. Young girls’ life chances are being severely affected because they may not have the information or the self-confidence to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and often the state has to pick up the bill in the interests of the young girl and, in particular, her baby. Unless children have information about the dangers of tobacco, alcohol and drugs, they may unwittingly become addicted at great cost to themselves and the country before they can turn round.
Much has been said about teacher training and, as usual, my noble friend Lady Williams has put her finger on it. Fully trained teachers cannot be produced in an instant, but her suggestion that the Government should show their intention to make the subject mandatory, given sufficient time to undertake the training of new teachers in initial teacher training or CPD for existing teachers, would be a solution to that problem. The noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said that often the subject is given to Joe Bloggs the geography teacher. In my experience, it was given to Jill Bloggs the biology teacher or, in my case, Joan Walmsley the biology teacher. I taught it but I was not properly trained and I did not have the necessary confidence. I did my best but it was a very long time ago and the problem is that that is still happening.
I know that the Government are to have a curriculum review, which will be an opportunity to look very carefully at what we teach our children in schools. We need to give them the tools for life and not just academic qualifications for work. We must redress the damage that was done before the election when this measure very nearly got into legislation, but was prevented by the vagaries of our parliamentary procedures. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me that this subject will be considered during the curriculum review.
Lord Howarth of Newport
It could be argued that there is no more important element of the curriculum than PSHE. The previous Government were certainly right to propose that it should be a statutory foundation subject. There is a public, societal interest in children being educated in these areas. Moreover, I believe that it is the inescapable responsibility of Government to ensure that that happens because only the Government can ensure that all children receive education in these areas; only the Government can establish a norm; and only the Government can promote best practice across every school.
Education about relationships and sex is, of course, a very important private and parental responsibility and should be respected as such, but it cannot be the responsibility of parents alone. By definition relationships involve two people and, indeed, two families. Ignorance in sexual matters is dangerous to others. Children need support and education. They grow up in an erotically charged environment, where advertising and entertainment sexualise almost every kind of transaction; and the internet opens the window to a host of sexual possibilities regardless of who receives the messages. I am afraid that it is commonplace in our culture for human beings to be objectified, exploited and even brutalised sexually. Inescapably, children and young people witness that. If there is an age of innocence, it is all too short. For that reason and because of earlier puberty, it is essential that sex and relationship education is introduced at primary level although, of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, said, it should be age-appropriate.
There are powerful peer pressures to experiment and to take risks, and those are stronger than the social codes that seek to protect young people from precocious sexual experiences. Children and young people are vulnerable and, therefore, they need help from an early age to understand this environment and to start to establish their own secure and confident individuality. They need education about relationships—not preachy education but education that may well be imparted through the study of literature and drama, for example. They need to learn that good relationships are characterised by respect for the other person, by sensitivity and by love. They also need to learn about the physiological facts of reproduction, the practicalities of birth control and how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. They need to be taught those matters with no euphemisms and no evasion: sexually transmitted diseases may kill. Some families are not willing to teach that to their children and some families do not know how. Therefore, it is unacceptable to leave sex education to families as a private responsibility. I believe that religious objections, for example to teaching about contraception, have to be overruled.
Baroness Walmsley
“( ) if the school provides nursery or primary education, its curriculum for children under five years old is the Early Years Foundation Stage;”
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 53 and 54 in the same group. Amendment 52 probes the Government’s intentions with regard to the education and care of young children in nursery and reception classes in primary and all-through academy schools. It also seeks commitment from my noble friend the Minister that academies will be expected to provide the balance, age-appropriateness and play base of the early years foundation stage to very young children.
Many children under five are now in primary schools' nursery and reception classes and it is essential that their teachers are qualified and experienced in the early years. The early years foundation stage—which I shall call the EYFS, although that is not that much shorter—provides much needed unity of principle and purpose across the range of settings. It offers a single framework to ensure quality, equality of opportunity and safeguarding. There is a real commitment among early-years professionals to this agenda.
The EYFS was introduced in the Childcare Act 2006 and has been a statutory requirement for all providers of education and care to zero to five year-olds since September 2008. It provides a clear statutory framework and standards, and although it is relatively new, its ideas, standards and approach are not. It has grown out of a long tradition of providing education and care for babies and young children under five years old and attempts for the first time to ensure that, wherever children are educated and cared for, they and their families can expect the same standard of education and care. I give credit to the previous Government for its introduction. Although I feel that it is time to renew it in the light of experience, as it is too prescriptive, it is generally a good thing and should be adhered to by all providing education to this age group.
Academies do not have to follow the national curriculum for primary and secondary schools, but it is not clear what the intention is in relation to under-five year-olds in nursery and reception classes. Perhaps I may ask my noble friend the Minister the following questions. How many of the current all-through academies provide education for under-fives and, of those, how many follow the early years foundation stage? Is it the Government’s expectation that primary academies should follow the early years foundation stage for under-fives? How will the Government ensure that under-fives receive age-appropriate, play-based education in primary academies?
Amendment 53 probes the Government’s intentions for inspection of new academies in relation to education for young children under the early years foundation stage. The Secretary of State has indicated his intention to grant academy status automatically to schools deemed to be outstanding by Ofsted, alongside an intention generally to exempt those outstanding schools-turned-academies from further inspections. However, in relation to the EYFS and provision for under-fives, I am particularly concerned about removing academies from the inspection framework, given that inspection under the EYFS is relatively new and that the main driver behind the EYFS is to improve quality and standards in early childhood education and care. I am also concerned that the emphasis on engagement with parents in the current inspection framework may be lost, with detrimental effects on some schools’ commitment to engage with all parents, which is so important at nursery age.
Under the law, all providers of education and care to under-fives must be registered on the early years register of providers and must meet the legal welfare, learning and development requirements as set out in Section 40 of the Childcare Act 2006 and associated regulations in order to remain registered.
However, schools providing for children aged three to five are exempt from the register, and EYFS provision is inspected within the main schools inspection framework. Maintained, independent and non-maintained special schools are required to be registered only in respect of any provision they offer for children below the age of three, in recognition of the need for extra safeguards for the youngest and most vulnerable children. Can my noble friend explain how young children’s welfare, safeguarding, learning and development will be quality-assured in academy schools?
Perhaps I may draw one related matter to the Minister’s attention. If there is a problem in the early years setting, there is currently a practice of the proprietors deregistering it and opening it up again as a different business, thereby expunging the history of the problematic incident and making it impossible for Ofsted to inspect whether the failings that led to it have been corrected. Indeed, some places have been reregistered several times. I give as an example the case of a nursery in Chigwell, where the two year-old daughter of Mrs Shatl Malin was accidentally hanged in the playhouse where she had been unattended for 20 minutes. The proprietors have reregistered the setting, and the parents have therefore no closure or explanation and no assurances that no such thing can ever happen again. While we have the opportunity in this Bill, I should like to ensure that no academy offering early years education can walk through this loophole by deregistering.
On Amendment 54, one of the best aspects of recent workforce development is the importance of an integrated approach to working with children and families. This is exemplified in the children’s centre model. Again, I give credit to the previous Government for introducing this way of working. In children’s centres, children under five years old and their families can receive seamless integrated services and information. These services vary according to centre, but may be very wide and serve the real needs of families. Indeed, the coalition Government intend to locate a lot more health visitors in them, which I support. I would not want the independence of academies to pull children out of the integrated structures developed under the Every Child Matters agenda, which all parties supported. This is particularly relevant in relation to safeguarding issues. Will my noble friend the Minister clarify what support will be available to academies in developing safeguarding policies and in their implementation? What connections will academies have to children’s trusts and local safeguarding children boards and what impact will there be on children’s centres and extended services where they are co-located with primary schools wanting to apply for academy status? I beg to move.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I support the thrust of the noble Baroness’s amendments. Having visited several nurseries in the course of the Childcare Bill and followed the debates about the early years foundation stage, I believe that it is vital to have good-quality early years care. There is a real challenge in achieving that in this country; we start so far behind the Scandinavians. We have not had a strategy until recently in this area. Many of those working in it are poorly educated and poorly paid young women, and there is often a very high turnover of staff. The settings in schools may be different to that general picture, but I ask noble Lords to put themselves into the shoes of a three year-old being cared for by a woman who then goes—then another one comes and goes, and another one comes. That is a very black picture. I am sure that it is not generally the case, but there is that danger.
The early years foundation stage really helps in setting out clearly what the expectation should be and what these children should receive. In particular, every child in the nursery should have a key person. That should be the person who makes the relationship with the parent of the child and follows that child, changes the nappies and looks after that child. Others will have to take their place from time to time but, rather than the child being passed around from person to person, there is someone there with a particular special relationship with that child. That is an easy thing to lose if there are lots of poorly trained and poorly supported people and there is a high turnover of staff. Given the vulnerability of the children and the challenges to the sector, I would appreciate the reassurance of the Minister that this clear framework for practice in this area will be applied to those children in future.
Baroness Walmsley
I thank the Minister for his reply and other Members of the Committee for their contributions. I am gratified that he is able to tell me that Amendment 52 is unnecessary, because the early years foundation stage will be taught. I will have to go away and look again at the detail of that. On Amendment 53, I am not quite clear what the Minister was saying. He said that some settings will be required to register and are already, and that some will not. I wonder whether he would be kind enough to write to me and clarify that, because I did not quite understand the reasons—perhaps he did not really go into them—why some do not need to register and will not. If they are to provide the education for that age group, I would have thought that they all had to be treated the same, because it really is important that the standard is kept up. That is what particularly concerns me.
Concerning the Sure Start centres, my noble friend suggested that they should be looked at on a case-by-case basis. I would have thought that those current centres are so proud of their reputation—and jealous to guard it—that if they felt that in applying to become an academy they would lose that multi-agency, multi-professional ethos, they simply would not apply. I certainly hope that they would not, anyway. I will have to look rather carefully at my noble friend’s reply to see whether I need to probe him any further, but I would be grateful if he could write a more detailed response on my Amendment 53 and put a copy in the Library, because I really did not quite understand it. However, in the mean time I beg to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 52 withdrawn.
Amendments 53 to 60 not moved.
Amendment 60A
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
My Lords, I shall briefly give the coalition Government another opportunity to think again about the events that took place during the wash-up. The Committee will be well aware of the Labour Government’s commitment to deliver for parents and pupils a guarantee around the quality and style of education delivered to them through our schools around the country, so we now turn to the amendments in relation to the pupil-parent guarantee for academies.
Amendments 60A and 170A would restore the guarantees that we on this side of the Committee aimed to provide for pupils and parents. Those guarantees were, sadly, blocked by the Conservative Party during the negotiations between our two parties on the legislation outstanding before Parliament in the run-up to the last election. Those guarantees would have given pupils and parents assurances of a decent education whatever school they attended, so that every local school would be a good school, delivering minimum standards for all.
We set it out in statute that the guarantees should include: catch-up support in the three Rs for primary school pupils or for those starting secondary school who fall behind, which would have included one-to-one tuition and small group work; online information for parents on their child’s behaviour, progress and attainment; a named personal tutor for every secondary school pupil; guarantees on school behaviour through home-school agreements; the right to learn triple sciences at GCSE; a guarantee of regular sport and exercise; and the opportunity for every primary school pupil to learn a musical instrument—on which, if the Minister wants to see that as my contribution toward Amendment 68, then in the interests of time I am happy if he wants to come back to me on musical tuition in his response here.
This is about giving parents and pupils the information and the awareness of what they can expect from their school system, so that no child should miss out and so that every school should be a good school. Now, we have heard a great deal from the coalition Government about the desire to empower parents and to give more power to communities. Of course, we very much want that, so I will be very interested to hear how the noble Lord can build on the work that we did in government to make sure that the best really is on offer for all our children in our schools.
Baroness Walmsley
The noble Baroness invites my noble friend to return to the days of an old new Labour Government; I do not agree with her. Actually, we did not agree with her at the time. We spoke against these pupil-parent guarantees as being motherhood and apple pie without any legal levers at all, so she will not be surprised to learn that we do not support her amendment.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
My Lords, of course I listened with great interest to the noble Lord’s contribution. The pupil and parent guarantees were actually about empowering parents and pupils so that they can ensure that, in partnership with their schools and their local authority or academy trust, they can get the things that they need for their children. It is about looking at the education service that this country provides from a bottom-up perspective—looking at it from the point of view of the parent and child and of what goes on in the classroom. If we think back to Second Reading, how chastened might the coalition Government perhaps have felt when my noble friend Lady Morris criticised them for focusing so much on structure? Here we have a chance for them, just for a moment, to think about one-to-one tuition, for example. What has happened to one-to-one tuition? We have gone from a situation where the Government were committed to guaranteeing it in statute, with a process through local government—
Baroness Walmsley
Will the noble Baroness be patient until the pupil premium comes along?
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
I cannot wait for the opportunity to discuss the pupil premium. There we have a real chance to see how the grand words will unfold into real benefits for pupils in schools. That is what I am interested in and what the pupil guarantee was all about. That is what this focus on structure and structural tinkering leaves wanting, which is what I am concerned about. I am very interested to debate how the pupil premium will work. An awful lot rests on what the pupil premium delivers—not just for disadvantaged pupils in this country, but for the coalition Government. I am happy at this stage to withdraw my amendment and I look forward to the debate continuing.
Academies Bill [HL]
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Walmsley
“( ) Academy arrangements must include terms imposed for the purpose of securing that—
(a) the school’s food policy and catering service promote pupils’ physical and mental health and ability to learn, and(b) all food provided by the school meets the nutrient-based standards for primary and secondary schools currently in place for maintained schools.”
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 76B, which brings us to a subject that is most appropriate for the slot straight after dinner—school food. The purpose of the amendment is to ensure that pupils in the new academies are entitled to the high standards of school food to which most schools have now risen, with the help of the School Food Trust, the Soil Association and others. We have to thank Jamie Oliver and the previous Government for an enormous increase in the quality and high standards of school food these days. If a great many schools wish to become academies, it is important that we do not lose that benefit for thousands of their pupils. There are now mandatory standards in place for the quality of food served in schools in England. The implementation of food and nutritional standards in primary and secondary schools in 2008, for primaries, and 2009, for secondaries, has seen great improvement in the quality of food served.
There are five good reasons why we need this amendment. First, school food is important for pupils' health and learning. A recent report from Ofsted has confirmed that. Secondly, good quality school food improves children's behaviour and performance. The School Food Trust's School Lunch and Learning Behaviour in Primary Schools research, published in July 2009, shows that children were over three times more likely to concentrate and be alert in the classroom when changes were made to the food and dining room. The School Lunch and Learning Behaviour in Secondary Schools research of July 2009 shows the same benefit for secondary pupils. The School Food Trust research has shown that school meals are now consistently more nutritious than packed lunches. This is of particular concern for children from lower-income families, whose lunches contained more fat, salt and sugar and less fruit and vegetables than children from wealthier backgrounds because, unfortunately, empty calories are cheaper. An affordable school meal service can help to close the gap between rich and poor.
Thirdly, school food is important to help our children maintain a healthy weight and get the nutrients they need to be healthy. School food sets a standard for food quality, encourages healthy eating habits, and raises awareness of the link between diet and health. In England, nearly a quarter of adults and about one in 10 children are now obese, with a further 20 to 25 per cent of children overweight. Research by the Government’s Foresight programme suggests that if current trends continue, some 40 per cent of Britons will be obese by 2025 and, by 2050, Britain could be a mainly obese society. I think that we all know that obesity increases a person’s chances of suffering from many serious health conditions affecting their quality of life and ability to earn.
The fourth reason is that standards at school should set a model for the food outside the school day. A good school meal service can help all children make healthy choices outside school as well as inside it. School cooking and gardening clubs teach healthy eating skills to young people and families to use at home. The skills learnt at cooking clubs increase the intake of nutritionally balanced food, while research from the recent Year of Food and Farming showed that children were more likely to eat fruit and vegetables that they had grown themselves—and so am I.
Fifthly, an Ofsted report just published shows that a good school food policy that promotes a “whole community” approach to food and food culture is as important as a high-quality catering service. It certainly does a whole lot for community cohesion and the enjoyment of our multicultural communities. If academies want to improve their children’s lives and learning, they need to pay attention to their food policy. I beg to move.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I support this amendment and I certainly think that the issue of helping children to enjoy wholesome, nutritious food in schools is very important. As the noble Baroness has already pointed out, the issue of obesity in young people is a problem that has been growing over a number of years. She mentioned the risk of the potential epidemic in diabetes and, indeed, other health problems. I have a certain degree of interest in this because I launched our Government’s fresh fruit scheme for schools—it seems many years ago now—in Wolverhampton. That scheme has worked well and, as the noble Baroness suggested, we have seen major improvements in the quality of school meals. It is important that this is not dissipated with the development of academies as proposed in the Bill.
I realise that the Minister may argue that the approach taken by the noble Baroness is, in a sense, trying to micromanage schools. Underlying our debates so far on the Bill is the clear tension running through between the desirability to give individual schools as much autonomy as possible and, on the other hand, the recognition that there has to be some kind of national underpinning. The debates on special educational needs and, indeed, our recent debate on exclusions are examples of that. The question before us is whether nutrition ought to be one of those matters where some kind of national leadership or guidance is necessary. I am persuaded that it is. The issue raised by the noble Baroness about the health of our young people is so serious that we have to look to schools to do their bit to help, and the approach that she has taken is one that we could support.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)
My Lords, before replying specifically on the amendment, perhaps I may make a clarification arising from an earlier debate. Earlier, in the extremely good debate on PSHE, I said that the independent school standards which apply to academies also contained a requirement to teach personal, social and health education. I am afraid that I was misinformed on that point and I apologise to the Committee. It may be helpful if I provide a little clarification. The independent school standards require the promotion of self-knowledge, self-esteem and confidence; enabling pupils to distinguish right from wrong; and encouraging them to take responsibility for their actions and contribute to the community. All academies do, however, have to have regard to the Secretary of State’s guidance on sex and relationships education. I apologise again for that earlier error. We know from that debate that there are important issues to be picked up on PHSE as part of the broader curriculum review, and I look forward to discussing those with noble Lords in due course.
On the specific amendment to do with school food, and full of my bangers and mash from the Home Room, I realise how important an issue this is for schools. I certainly agree with my noble friend about the importance of good diet and physical health—points also made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, with his work on promoting fruit. We take this seriously. Schools converting to academies will already have been providing healthy, balanced meals that meet the current nutritional regulatory standards. We have no reason to believe that they will stop doing so on conversion or that new schools will not do so either. I am not aware of any evidence that existing academies feed their pupils less well than a maintained school. We would certainly hope and expect in every way that they would continue to feed them as well. They are under a duty to act reasonably in the interests of all their pupils.
We believe that parents will demand the high standard of food that is increasingly being maintained. I pay tribute to the work that has been done in recent years to improve the quality of school food. I have heard from head teachers about the importance of good diet and how it improves behaviour and learning. We expect that parents will demand that that should continue. As an aside, pupils who currently receive free school meals will continue to receive such meals from academies. That will continue to be a requirement of the funding agreement. While I very much agree with my noble friend about the importance of this, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was correct in surmising that we feel that, in this balance between prescription and trust, this does not need to be set out in the legislation, important though it is. I invite my noble friend to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
I thank the Minister for his reply and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his support. I am not aware of any evidence that the existing academies feed their children any worse than other schools. I am not suggesting at all that that happens. I am reassured by the Minister pointing out that schools that convert will adhere to the current nutritional standards. He suggests that there is no reason why they should change, but there is pressure to do so—children like to have chips more than once a week. There have been situations where parents were, perhaps unwisely, pushing pork pies through the bars of the school gates when these nutritional standards first came in. There are pressures to change.
I hope that the future of the School Food Trust, which has been so instrumental in improving the quality of school food and the skills of school cooks, can be assured. I understand that money is tight and the coalition Government will be looking for ways to save money, but I hope that a small sum could be found to make sure that the School Food Trust continues to exist. It has done excellent work in transferring best practice and helping to improve the quality of cooking in schools. It is not just cooking but the whole curriculum involvement in the school agenda in relation to food. Its website is wonderful, with many good examples of creative schools, catering managers and cooks sharing their good ideas with each other. It is the School Food Trust that does that. The Soil Association has also done some extremely good work, and I hope it will be able to continue to do so.
The health and weight of children varies enormously from one school to another. I know that what I am going to say is anecdotal. Recently, a young woman did work experience with me. She attends two secondary schools. One of her courses is in one school and the rest are in another. When we discussed this matter, she said, “It really is odd. At my main school, all the children are slim. At the other school I go to for one of my courses, they are all fat”. I asked her whether she had noticed any difference in the provision of food in the two schools and she said that she had not. But she was aware that in her main school where all the children are slim, years ago boxes of crisps used to be piled high. There were vending machines selling every kind of chocolate and fizzy drink that you could wish for, and chips were on the menu every day. All that has been swept away as a result of the new agenda on high nutritional standards in school food. I asked the girl to send me any evidence that she discovered as regards a difference between the approaches to food in the two schools, but I have not received any such evidence. It would be very nice to be able to say that there is a clear reason for the obesity in one school and not in the other, but I do not have that.
There is a lot of evidence that the quality and nutritional standards of food affect children’s behaviour, learning, social skills, cultural awareness and all the rest of the agenda of which we are all very much in favour. I hope that if we cannot ensure that academies stick to the standards we have the moment, at the very least, we should ensure the future of the School Food Trust in order to disseminate best practice across all schools. I shall then be somewhat reassured. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I have Amendment 82 in this group. I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, said about the importance of parent governors. My amendment differs from hers only in that I have specified a range of numbers of parent governors, including a minimum, rather than a percentage, because schools can become tied up in knots if the percentage is calculated to include a fraction of a governor. We would not want a set of legs without the brain. The range that I have specified caters for very small primary schools and larger secondary schools. In both cases, the elected parent governors are an important factor in the governance of schools and fulfil the coalition commitment to involve parents more in the education of their children.
The composition of the governing bodies of maintained schools, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, said, is set out in the School Governance (Constitution) (England) Regulations 2007, but academies are not covered by any such regulations. Their governance arrangements can vary widely, depending on the views of the proprietor. In any case, it is vital that on the principal governing body, the board of the academy, or whatever it is called, there is proper representation of parents, staff and the local authority—all of whom have a vital and obvious interest in the good management of the school as part of the local community. My amendment also includes a requirement to have as governors two members of staff, one of whom must be a teacher, and a member of the local authority. Of course, if one of the academy partners—one of the sponsors—is the local authority, one would expect it to have representation on the board anyway. However, all academies should have this.
We have heard from many noble Lords that what makes a good school is not its legal status or how it gets its funding, but the quality of teaching within its walls. I agree, but the staff must feel that they are an integral part of the school, including of its governance. That is why it should be not just good practice but an essential requirement that staff are represented on the governing body.
The Secretary of State has also made it clear that the new academies will have a robust relationship with the local authority. Part of achieving that will be to have at least one member of that authority on the governing board. I am not talking about a majority or even a large number, because it is intended that the school should be autonomous and free from the local authority; but it will be easier for academies to be seen as serving the local community, which they will have to do, if local authorities are represented on their boards.
I was distressed when the previous Government introduced academies with a requirement only to have one parent governor on the board. That is not enough, and I hope that this Government will put it right.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, I will intervene briefly, partly because I was the Minister who introduced the Taylor report, which laid down a requirement that school governors should include representatives of the staff, of the non-teaching staff, of parents and representatives of the local authority, roughly in the order of a quarter each. It was one of the more successful education reforms, for reasons eloquently set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, and also because deep within the sense of the school was a feeling of it being owned by, and part of, the local community. That was where the significance of parent governors came in. The parent governor often shared the same income and problems of living as the community, and spoke for the community in a way that governors appointed by the proprietor or the agency simply could not do.
Secondly, it is vital to have some representatives from the staff on the governing body, so that they speak as part of the entity of the school and not simply as representatives of a staff union or association: they become part of the body and success of the school. As regards non-staff governors, anyone who knows the extraordinary record of teaching assistants—I thank the previous Government for this—will know that, particularly with respect to children with special educational needs, their role has been crucial and can be represented only by a governor who represents the non-academic staff of a school.
It puzzles me—I hope that the Minister will think hard about this—that a Government committed to the idea of decentralisation, of the big society and of involving far more citizens in building and creating that society, should dream of going back to a situation where we have just one elected parent governor in an academy. One reason for this was that it was felt that in the very deprived communities from which the early academies sprang, they would find it difficult to find more than one parent governor, because so many husbands and wives would be working all day long and would find it very difficult to attend governing body meetings. The much more privileged group that we are likely to see now coming into the world of academies of outstanding schools will certainly find it easier to produce governors, but that is no reason to move away from the principle that in every school—whether the community is deprived or not—there should be a clear commitment to the school by the community. I plead with the Government to reconsider the mistaken decision to cut down the governing body and its composition to just one, at a time when we should try to rebuild and strengthen relationships between parents, schools and the community. It is clear from the coalition agreement that the Government are committed to this.
I will leave this hanging in the air: will the Minister consider ways in which we can bring back the community and its parents to the support of, and involvement with, the school? What was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and by my respected and distinguished noble friend Lady Walmsley, suggests that this is something well worth thinking about.
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, I agree with everyone who has spoken about the importance of parents being involved in schools’ governing bodies. I completely accept that the Government’s position that there should be at least one parent governor will not be acceptable to the noble Baroness, Lady Howe. However, I start by stressing the words “at least”, because it is easy to elide “at least one” into “one”. That, in part, is my response to the argument made by my noble friend Lady Williams, to which I listened carefully, about the big society and decentralisation. A perfectly proper argument is that a school, which is a very local form of organisation, knows best the kind of governors whom it needs for a properly balanced governing body, and it should be flexible in choosing the right people for that governing body. That is not to say that my assumption is that governing bodies in academies will tend to consist of only one parent governor.
The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, gave an extremely good, common-sense answer to some of the concerns that have been raised: the governing body of any converting maintained school will determine the composition of the governing body of the new academy trust. With a converting academy, those people who know how the governing body has worked with the membership that is currently set out will make the decision. It is likely that they will draw on that experience and take it into account when choosing the membership of the new governing body.
Although it is certainly extremely important to have a broad representation on the governing body of academies, we do not think that it is right to prescribe a 25 per cent minimum. We want academies to be able to choose and to do what they think is right in their particular circumstances.
I say in response to my noble friend Lady Sharp that my understanding is that the arrangements for the election of parent governors will be set out in the articles of association, which will make it clear that the election of parent governors should be by the parents of pupils attending the academy, so there is an elective element. They will be appointed to the governing body of the academy trust.
Amendment 82 would also have the effect of introducing more prescriptive arrangements for the numbers of parent, staff and local authority governors. Again, the Government’s view is that academies should certainly be free to choose a governing body that has representation from staff and from local authorities. We are proposing that in the academy governance model there should be a maximum of two staff governors, but it is true, as has been pointed out, that we propose that academies do not have to have those particular categories unless they choose to.
I know that that will not satisfy all Members of the Committee, but the Government consider this principle of flexibility to be extremely important and we want academies to be autonomous groups. We certainly urge, in the strongest terms, the benefits of having parent governors—I am very clear about their benefit—but we are not keen to go down the prescriptive route. Therefore, I urge the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
Before the noble Baroness does so, perhaps I could say a word about my amendment in the group. I was a little surprised to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, backing these amendments, given that it was the Labour Government who reduced the number of parent governors to one, to be appointed by the proprietor in the old-style academies. The excuse of the noble Lord for that change of heart appears to be his claim that these schools will be set up without consultation. Perhaps the noble Lord was not in the Chamber last week when the Minister accepted that a high degree of consultation with all appropriate groups was extremely desirable and that he would come back to us on Report with some suggestion about how he would ensure that that best practice is put in place. We welcomed that.
The Minister suggested that under the arrangements for the new academies a single parent governor, as the minimum, would be elected. That is different from the situation that applied with the academies as set up by the Labour Government. Indeed, it is a step in the right direction, but I suggest to my noble friend that it is not enough. He suggests that, on the basis of localism, the school should decide how many parent governors to have and whether it should have two staff members. I accept that, as he says, it is suggested that they should have two staff members, but they are not obliged to have them as a minimum. I also accept that the school is probably the most localist level one can get, but the proprietor may not be local; the proprietor may be a chain and failing schools will still have to have a proprietor. I therefore suggest to my noble friend that, if the proprietor is not local, it is not a piece of local decision-making if he decides that he does not wish to have two members of staff on the board of governors or more than one elected parent governor.
I remain of the view that it is good for the school, good for the education of the children and good for the link between the school and its community to have the kind of situation that I have suggested in my amendment. It is also helpful to the school in fulfilling its duty in relation to community cohesion. If we put a duty on schools, it is important that we give them the levers to fulfil it and I think that this is one of them.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
I do not want to disagree with the noble Baroness, as I agree with the substantive points that she makes in relation to her amendment, but I want to respond to her comments. First, we will wait for Report to hear the Government’s response to the point about consultation, but the fact is that it is not in the Bill. I want assurances that it will not be some fly-by-night consultation but will allow ample time for people concerned to have their say and for that to be considered. On the way in which parent governors are treated under this Bill and under the previous Government’s approach to academies, I, too, drew the distinction that there were specific reasons relating to the situation in which the first academies were created that will not apply where hundreds of academies are being created. However, on the substantive point, I very much share her concerns.
Baroness Whitaker
My Lords, I will try to race through this. I apologise for not signalling the subject at Second Reading, which I could not come to. It was, however, trailed in the Statement on free schools. I was grateful for the insight into government thinking which the Minister provided then.
Amendment 175, in my name, is predicated on one overarching fact—that the design of school buildings is fundamental to their purpose; and that a well designed school building, as well as keeping initial and recurring costs down and being environmentally sustainable, contributes materially and significantly to the educational success of the school. In the new Westminster Academy we can see even wider social achievements, including not only the educational results of a drop in truancy and a big rise in attainment, but also a drop in crime around the school. There is nothing in the Bill about the role of design; nor, as far as I can see, is it in the remit of the very interesting New Schools Network, about which the Minister wrote to us. Design was not directly included in the statutory remit of the original academies either, but they were to be created as part of a framework which insists on design criteria.
Design is not an amateur matter. We may all think we know a good design when we see one, but it is not just a matter of good taste. It is a matter of functionality, and of buildings or other objects which achieve a purpose. As regards school buildings, the standards—the modern ones in the Building Schools for the Future programme of the last Government—are well accepted. I entirely agreed with the Minister when he said in the Statement on free schools, in answer to my question, that the building regulations need a fresh look. I am referring not to this ancient corpus of law but to the up-to-date and innovative standards of our excellent new schools. If academies are to be built or put in refurbished buildings outside this framework, unless the sponsors have access to or understanding of school design skills, the children who study there will be deprived. Money will be wasted. I am sure that the noble Lord opposite does not want academy students to be let down in this way.
Listeners to the “Today” programme on 18 June will have heard new sponsors of academies being grilled about how even to get their building up in the first place. Procurement and construction are complex processes, requiring expertise and negotiation. If good design is not part of the process from the beginning, it invariably loses out and so then do the students, not least those with disabilities. My amendment would ensure that the appointed person in the regulations in Schedule 1—usually, no doubt, the sponsor—has a duty to find out what the appropriate design standards are and apply them. As I said, the standards exist. They could of course be adapted to allow for a range of educational models and school ethoi. This would work very well if the Government continued with the client design adviser system, another successful innovation.
I do not think that we should allow our children’s education to be vulnerable to the vagaries and variations in expertise of groups of people who may have clear ideas about the teaching culture they want to set up but no acquaintance with design. I beg to move.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, about the importance of design. There is such a thing as a dysfunctional building. Schools are buildings around which large numbers of children have to be moved every day. It is very important that they are well designed for that purpose, as well as for concentration and calm contemplation of the lessons. If the buildings magnify sound, they will not be very good for that purpose.
I am also concerned about the green credentials of schools. Will the Minister say something about the design standards in relation to the use of energy and water, and the disposal of waste and all those issues? I have often suggested that schools are ideal places for ground-source heating. They have large tarmac playgrounds under which you can put the pipes. It really is important because in the future energy will be even more expensive than it is now and we will all have to pay for it.
I recently went to an academy school where in order to switch the lights off at night the caretaker had to go to the top of the building. However, he was forced to leave the lights on all night because health and safety would not allow him to come down the stairs in the dark. That new, purpose-built academy building was ablaze all night. It was a disgrace and I hope that we will avoid that sort of thing.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Whitaker and I have stood shoulder to shoulder in campaigns for good design in recent years and I am happy to join her in the field tonight. It is too much, no doubt, to ask that the magnificent £50 billion Building Schools for the Future programme should be continued, but it is essential that design standards should not be dropped in the school building that does continue. Presumably that will mainly be the construction of academies. Do the Government intend still to provide some funding to support the creation of fine new academy buildings, as their predecessor did? Will the Government at least maintain minimum design standards?
This matters very much. Children and staff in schools, like everyone else, should work in a good built environment. The benefits of that for their morale, spirit and performance are marked. Good design is practical and works better. Well designed schools, like well designed hospitals, hospices, railway stations and magistrates’ courts, are statements about the values we hold as a society, our attachment to civic values and the public realm and our commitment to sustainability, an important point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. There are important symbolisms in good design.
Good design is an expression of national self respect. It is a manifestation of the respect we have for our community. There is a noble tradition of design of school buildings and it is one which we must not lose. Our Victorian and Edwardian forebears took it as axiomatic that a school should be a proud statement on behalf of the community in its design. The school building programme launched after the Second World War by Ellen Wilkinson, as Secretary of State, led to a commitment in a number of local education authorities to good design in a modern idiom. The schools designed in Hertfordshire for the local education authority by Stirrat Johnson-Marshall were celebrated. He was an architect who was described as,
“Socratic in manner of discussion and intolerant of formality in any guise”,
which, I think, means that he sought to find out what people thought, to elicit their best ideas and to develop his designs accordingly, as good architects do. Equally, later in Hampshire, the schools designed by Colin Stansfield Smith were celebrated, and the local education authorities which committed themselves to a programme of high-quality design in school building were strongly and admirably supported by the ministry’s architecture and buildings department.
More recently, under the previous Government, we had the Building Schools for the Future programme. I shall mention two schools that were jewels in that programme. The Mossbourne Academy in Hackney was built in an area known as “murder mile” because of the gangland killings there. It replaced Hackney Downs comprehensive, a school which had gone so far down in the world that the tabloids described it as the worst comprehensive in England. The school reopened in 2004 in buildings designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership. The first intake of the new school consisted of children, nearly half of whom were eligible for free school meals and 30 per cent had special educational needs. They took their GCSEs in 2009 and achieved some of the best state school results in the country. The Mossbourne Academy topped the league tables in value added. That was, above all, due to the leadership of Sir Michael Wilshaw and first-rate teaching by his colleagues, but design, they acknowledge, was also an important factor—as was the case at the Westminster Academy, which my noble friend and I visited earlier this year. There, the architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris were awarded the RIBA Sorrell Foundation Schools Award. This is an opportunity for this House to pay tribute to Sir John Sorrell and his wife Frances for their extraordinary generosity and creativity in their support through their foundation for good school design. The design of the Westminster Academy is beautiful and clever. As my noble friend said, the results in the new school soared by comparison with the results in the old school because pupils were treated with respect through design, and thus learnt to treat their school and neighbourhood with respect. The head teacher and her staff above all deserve the credit, but she insists that the quality and nature of the design of the school were crucial in making possible the curricular flexibility which, in turn, was key to the motivation and success of that school.
The Government want to impose the minimum bureaucratic burden on academies, and that is right. Good design cannot be promoted by regulation, but bad design can be averted. I hope that the Government will keep the minimum design standards that the DCSF pioneered in the public sector. I hope also that the Government will keep the engagement of CABE, which is not a quango to cull. It mobilises at negligible cost talented and expert people to illuminate and promote good practice in design. Here the leadership of Ministers is needed and, as elsewhere in education, leadership, aspiration and ambition are the magical ingredients. Only the best should be good enough for our schoolchildren, their teachers and the staff in our schools. We can afford the best. Good design costs no more than bad design. It is simply a matter of doing the job well. Indeed, good design costs less over the lifetime of the building.
Academies Bill [HL]
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Massey of Darwen
Again, perhaps I may come to that in a moment. I have talked about the public purse and principles. Do we really want in any of our major cities, side by side, a Church of England school, a Roman Catholic school, a Muslim school, a Hindu school, or any other variety of faith school? What is the price for community cohesion or a balanced curriculum? What is the price for a discussion of different values in society? These are some of the principles to which I am referring.
On admissions and on a potential expansion of faith schools, I can do no better than recommend reading the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, during the passage of the Education and Inspections Bill in 2006. He happens to be in his place—and this is not a plot. The noble Lord was a Conservative Secretary of State for Education and is, I believe, an Anglican. His made warnings as regards faith schools with reference to the “shape of our society”, “isolated communities” and,
“the fine line between religious teaching and indoctrination”.—[Official Report, 30/10/06; col. 108.]
All his words I think are worth heeding.
I wonder whether the right reverend Prelate has foreseen the consequences of his amendments. Are we to have restrictions on admissions and staffing for every type of religious school? This would be a detriment to pupils and a disadvantage for staff. Again, this is one of the principles about which I was talking. Surely pupils in a school should have the advantage of the best teachers from whatever faith or no faith. Someone serving school meals or doing administration needs to be able to do just that. Yet sadly I have heard of several cases where staff have been dismissed or not promoted because they are of a different faith from the school. No academy should be able to discriminate with regard to admissions and employment.
Further, which maintained schools are referred to in this amendment? If it is a voluntary aided school, it may allow for more discrimination than is presently allowed. Voluntary aided schools have a wide remit to discriminate against teaching and other staff. Academies must surely apply a genuine occupational requirement to posts because they are private businesses and not public schools in law. Independent schools with a religious character are able to show preference in connection with the appointment, remuneration and promotion of their staff on the basis of religion or belief, and of course they can also discriminate on pupil admissions. Voluntary controlled faith schools, about 40 per cent of faith schools in England and Wales, do not have these powers to discriminate. However, when they become independent academies with a religious character, I assume that they will be able to discriminate, which refers back to my previous amendment.
In a Question for Written Answer tabled on 16 June, the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, asked Her Majesty’s Government how they will,
“facilitate inclusive admissions policies in as many [faith] schools as possible”.
The noble Lord, Lord Hill, replied:
“The department has strong and productive working relationships with all faith groups founded on respect for the high quality education they have provided for many years”.
He went on to say:
“To support our new expansion of the academies programme we have made it clear that existing faith schools that convert to become academies will retain the ability to set their own admissions criteria and may continue to use faith-based criteria in line with the admissions code”.—[Official Report, 16/6/10; col. WA124.]
I think that we are in dangerous territory here. First, some faith schools which could be set up are completely untried in relation to quality and procedures. I accept that Church of England, Roman Catholic and Jewish schools mainly have a good track record, but not always. How long-standing are the records of other faith schools? Will they be able to make things up as they go along?
The statement made by the Minister earlier this month that I have just repeated makes it clear that religious discrimination is here to stay, going against what was implied in the coalition agreement, which recommends inclusive admissions policies. State-funded faith schools that discriminate in their admissions divide communities and may go on to do so even more—along religious, socio-economic and often ethnic lines, creating huge social problems now and in the future. I hope that there will be more discussion of these issues before we rush into unknown territory.
Baroness Walmsley
I have two amendments in this group, Amendments 134 and 135. Their purpose is to allow schools to change their religious designation if they wish and to prevent new faith schools appearing merely as a consequence of this legislation. Noble Lords will know that I have considerable reservations about faiths running schools. However, if we must have faith schools, they should be set up only in response to need and the requirement of parents to have their children educated in their faith. It should not be in any way accidental.
During our meeting, the Secretary of State made it clear that the purpose of this legislation was not specifically to create a lot of new faith schools, although of course we accept that many current faith schools may wish to become academies. That is why Amendment 134 inserts the word “only” so that the protection of the current faith designation applies only if the school is already a faith school. Amendment 135 goes on to require the governing body to pass a specific resolution to have the school maintain its religious character. This requires it either to reaffirm the religious character of the school or, if it wishes, to decide to make a change. For example, a Church of England school could become a multi-faith school, or a Roman Catholic school could add some other religion to its current designation; or it may become an all-inclusive academy. This might apply to the many primary schools referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in her speech just now.
We heard on Monday from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool about the joint Church of England/Roman Catholic schools in Liverpool. These multi-faith schools are welcome, bringing together as they do children from different faith households. This can only be good for community cohesion. My amendment would make it possible for schools to decide to go along this route at the point of their conversion, if I can use an appropriate word, to an academy.
Lord Northbourne
I greatly respect the position of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, with regard to the Humanist Association and the humanist view of the world, but does she not accept that that also is a faith? It is a world view which certain people take—and they may well be right—but I do not see why it should be treated differently from any other faith. I wonder whether the right reverend Prelate agrees.
Academies Bill [HL]
Baroness Walmsley Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Rix
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 75 in my name. The possibility of charging is apparent in this clause. The Minister will be aware that children with SEN have additional needs that sometimes require additional resources. It is the responsibility of the school and local authority to meet those needs. I would be extremely concerned if there were moves to charge parents for special education provision. I do not believe that it is the intention of the legislation to charge pupils with SEN, but I would welcome clarification on this point.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I tabled Amendment 67 in this group. It probes a specific point about how local authorities will continue to fulfil their statutory duty under the Childcare Act 2006 to ensure that there are sufficient free places for every three and four year-old whose parents want one. Local authorities are also responsible, in consultation with local delivery partners, for determining the rate at which providers will be funded for delivering the free nursery places, and for the arrangements for making associated payments. Since April 2004, all three and four year-olds have been entitled to a free part-time early-education place. Free places can be provided by a variety of providers in the maintained, private, voluntary and independent sectors, including preschools, playgroups and registered childminder networks. Local authorities must have regard to the comprehensive statutory guidance set out in the code of practice when making arrangements for the provision of free early-education places. Parents are not required to contribute towards the free early-education entitlement, but may be charged fees for any additional childcare services that may exceed the free part-time early- education place. The number of hours available each week is currently 12.5, which will go up to 15 in September.
Since 2006-07, the funding for under-fives provision has been provided through the dedicated schools grant to all types of provider, including private, voluntary and independent providers. The direct schools grant is a ring-fenced grant for education purposes, but local authorities retain autonomy over how they allocate their spending across the age range to make most effective use of resources at local level. In a recent parliamentary Statement, the Minister for Children, my honourable friend Sarah Teather MP, committed the Government to the extension of the free entitlement to early education, as planned, for three and four year-olds to 15 hours from September and to 20,000 of the most disadvantaged two year-olds—something that I particularly welcome. The amendment seeks clarity about how that will be achieved through the primary academy schools proposed in the Bill. Can the Minister give me some reassurances about this? We do not want academies that make provision for children under compulsory school age, as well as for those of compulsory school age, to charge by the back door.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 50 in my name. I declare an interest as a trustee of TACT, a charitable provider of fostering and adoption placement in the UK, with offices in England, Wales and Scotland; and of the Michael Sieff Foundation, a child welfare charity. The purpose of the amendment is to ensure that there is not the least doubt that looked-after children will be given first priority in admissions to the new academies.
Perhaps I may say again to the Minister that I was very grateful to him for the helpful meeting on SEN that he organised. I was grateful at that meeting that he acknowledged the concern regarding the different treatment of admissions for looked-after children by academies. He described it as small; but it is significant, and I hope that he will accept that. Perhaps I may briefly remind noble Lords that the previous Government gave first priority in admissions to looked-after children in legislation enacted in February 2009. Grant-maintained schools must prioritise these children. However, in the same regulations, academies are only directed that they “should” prioritise these children. There has been considerable concern about this distinction, which has been greatly increased with the advent of this Bill and the prospect, highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, of many more academies, and many of the best performing schools becoming academies.
I apologise for repeating a couple of statistics from Second Reading. A large percentage—28 per cent—of our prison population have experienced care. In 2008, only 7 per cent of looked-after children gained five GCSEs with grades A* to C, compared with 49.8 per cent of the general population. When an offender is given an education, their offending can reduce dramatically. The National Grid Transco programme reduces reoffending rates from 70 per cent to 7 per cent. We are seeing improved outcomes for looked-after children and children in care thanks to the previous Government’s efforts. Improvements in attainment have been modest, but at last they have begun tracking the improvement in the general population. The number of care leavers entering university has increased by 900 per cent. It was 1 per cent and I have recently been advised that it is 9 per cent. It is still far below the level for the general population but it is an important step in the right direction. I hope that the Minister will agree that now is not the time to weaken our efforts on behalf of these children.
I am most grateful to the Secretary of State, Michael Gove MP, for his decision to continue the investment in social work begun by the previous Government—in particular, the setting up of a social work college on a par with the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal College of Nursing. I am also most thankful for his decision to appoint Dr Munro to review the bureaucratic burden on social work. I am more grateful than I can say for the Secretary of State’s commitment to supporting and developing social work. These children need the best social workers and the best schools appropriate to their needs.
In the past, these children have been put last. They have been disregarded in their families, as my noble friend said, and too often they have been disregarded in the care system. I hope that today the Minister can remove any shred of doubt that he will put them first.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, we, too, believe that it is important that children and parents choose schools and not the other way round. In speaking to my Amendment 51, I welcome the fact that the Secretary of State has stated that the code for school admissions will apply to academies. We felt that we needed to table this amendment to probe how the codes—please note that it is the plural—for school admissions will apply to academies. There are two codes: one deals with the setting of admissions criteria and the role of the school adjudicator, and the other deals with how parents can appeal against a refusal to admit their child.
Currently, academies are required to comply with the codes “as far as possible” as part of their agreement with the Secretary of State. The codes were not written for the academy sector but for maintained schools. One additional thing that the amendment requires is that parents and the local authority are able to appeal to the adjudicator about admission arrangements. Currently, parents can appeal only to the Secretary of State but that can really only be done after the admission arrangements have been agreed between the academy and the Secretary of State when the arrangements are published. An admission authority—be it a local authority or a school governing body—has to publish, at the school and in a local newspaper, any proposed changes to admission arrangements and allow objections. If the admission authority confirms the change, the parent can appeal to the adjudicator, if he or she wishes to do so.
What is really required here is a single admission system for all publicly funded schools. Having two admission systems, which will still be the case if academies are required to comply with the code only where they can, is not really good enough. Academy status will have perceived benefits on admissions for grammar schools. They will no longer be subject to the rules on parental ballots when changing their admission arrangements. However, if we are to rely on the Minister’s words in his letter to Peers that,
“no non-selective school would be able to become selective”—
words which are very welcome—that would rule out the current ability of a maintained school to select 10 per cent of pupils on the basis of aptitude in music, arts and sport. Can the Minister clarify the Government’s intention on that point while we are discussing admission codes?
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I should like to speak to Amendments 84 and 85. Noble Lords will be glad to hear that I do not intend to speak to them at anything like the length that I spoke to Amendment 83. Many of the same arguments might be deployed and they both deal with the question of parity between academies and maintained schools.
Amendment 84 seeks the application of the admissions legal framework to academies as though they were maintained schools, and Amendment 85 is the same form of amendment, except that it relates to the exclusions legal framework. They are both essentially probing amendments designed to find out how far the Government see the two frameworks applying to academies as if they were maintained schools—in other words, whether the intention is to achieve parity in respect of these two frameworks as much as it is the intention to achieve parity in relation to special educational needs.
Lord Hill of Oareford
Perhaps I could follow that matter up in writing with the noble Earl outside the Chamber and we can pursue it.
One of the issues concerning admissions and exclusions, as has been explained, is the important principle that academy principals have to be free to manage their schools. Therefore, we believe that all schools, including academies, should have the ability to do that. However, parents also need to have guarantees that their children will be treated fairly, so we will ensure that academies are required, through their funding agreements, to comply with the admissions and appeals codes and with guidance on behaviour and exclusions in just the same way as maintained schools.
I note the remarks made by my noble friend Lord Lucas, endorsed by my noble friend Lady Perry, about banding. As he has conceded, that is not an issue specifically to do with this Bill. I know that he has strong views on it. I need to learn more about it and I would be extremely happy to be educated by my noble friend.
Amendments 28, 50 and 51, 84 and 169 would all require the Secretary of State to ensure that academies complied with the school admissions code as if they were maintained schools. Amendment 84 would require them to run their admissions appeals processes as if they were maintained schools. As I have explained, we believe that we achieve that through their compliance with the admissions code and the admissions appeals code. We will make sure that they have to continue to do that.
Baroness Walmsley
Will it be the Secretary of State who ensures that they do or will it be the YPLA?
Lord Hill of Oareford
I will write to my noble friend about that. The ultimate responsibility is with the Secretary of State. I am not 100 per cent certain whether the YPLA is responsible for enforcing it; I believe that it is, but I will write to confirm that. Equally, on Amendment 85, academies are required by their funding agreements to act in accordance with the law on exclusions and to have regard to the Secretary of State’s guidance on exclusions as if the academy were a maintained school.
My noble friend Lady Walmsley raised one or two other points. As she correctly pointed out, there are two codes. Both codes are applied to academies through their funding agreements and that will continue to be the case. I hope that that provides some reassurance to noble Lords and I invite the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.