Academies Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Lord Lucas

Monday 28th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

I should declare an interest, in that I run the Good Schools Guide and therefore spend an inordinate amount of my time inspecting schools, or rather causing schools to be inspected, and thus have a keen interest in the topic. Inspection is a crucial aspect of the Bill. We are considering schools that will be innovative, free schools. They will be newly founded, often with untried and untested combinations of people involved, with no established sponsors or with sponsors who are relatively new to the job. That will be at a time when there is considerable pressure on the central and local systems of support provided to schools.

The lesson that we have from the United States, as I am sure Rachel Wolf has told the Minister, is that charter schools succeed when they are properly regulated and inspected. If you think about it, it is obvious. If a school starts to go wrong, you can see it. If you can catch it reasonably early on, it is not too much work to put it right. If you let it go for a year or three, you will be in serious trouble.

We are also at a time when inspection itself is up for inspection. It is clear that this Government are reviewing the inspection regime in some detail and are prepared to make big changes—not surprisingly, if they want to cut the overall budget by 25 per cent. This is a good time to look at Ofsted and to ask: does it do what it is supposed to do; could we do better; could we do it for less?

Parents want, first, a regular report from Ofsted. The idea that you wait for four, five or six years between inspections is ridiculous. You want to know what is happening this year. You want to know that the school that you are about to commit your child to is still in good condition. Secondly, if Ofsted produces an adverse report, you want support. You want to feel that, whatever the problems at the school, they are now going to be gathered together and looked after. In both those aspects, Ofsted fails miserably. Most Ofsted reports are out of date. When Ofsted puts a school into special measures—this is my experience of the process, which has always been from the outside—parents spend a month or so in ignorance and, even then, when people start to react and be supportive, Ofsted just stands on the outside throwing rocks at the school, keeping on criticising, rather than being part of the support network.

Ofsted is also clearly not what schools want. Schools want support, advice and help in steering in the right direction. They want a constructive relationship with the people involved in inspecting the school. The most recent example of that that I can think of is the old FEFC inspections under our previous Government. They had that relationship with colleges. They would inspect regularly. Subject inspectors would be in and out of the college once or twice a year. Support and advice would be coming through the college. You worried about whether you might be ticked off for something, but the general relationship was supportive. You expected that the inspectors’ visit would, on the whole, be a constructive experience.

What the Government want out of Ofsted is value for the money that they are putting in. We are a long way short of that. After a fashion, we have an effective system of calling schools to account. Spreading good practice, knowing what is going on in schools and making sure that, say, PSHE is being properly taught, even though it is not being examined, are functions of the inspectorate. By and large, I do not have criticisms on that, except that it costs far too much to get there and does far too much damage to schools.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I am sympathetic to the noble Lord’s argument, but why does the word “interim” appear in this amendment? Should this not be consistently carried on, rather than being purely interim?

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I apologise if the wording of my amendment is not exact. It is merely there to bring up the subject of inspections and to make it clear that I want them to be regular, not just every five years or so.

There is a good model of how this could be done. Every year, we are retiring a few thousand headmasters and deputy headmasters who have immense experience and the ability to judge a school pretty rapidly—the good ones. They know how to read a school, how a school works and what to look for. They have the ability to be immensely supportive and they are not that expensive because they have pensions. They have a commitment to the job and all they want is a reasonable return for the effort that they are putting in. If we were to pay £300 a day, that might be a figure with some echoes—we do it for that. It should not surprise us that heads and others with a real vocation and dedication to helping other people are prepared to work and put in similar effort for a similar amount of money. You are not looking at a lot of money. You are looking at people whom parents and heads naturally trust. You are starting off on a pretty good basis if you are staffing your inspectorate with that sort of person.

These people could go once a year into every school—and I do say “every school”. What is the point of an inspectorate not visiting outstanding schools? How are inspectors ever going to learn what best practice is if they never go into the best schools? Part of the point of an inspectorate ought to be spreading good practice. They should be there to say, “This is what I saw the other day”, or, “Why don’t you talk to him or her about that because they seem to be getting it right?”. If all you are doing is going round the schools that are not performing well, all you can do is spread bad practice. To be an effective inspector, you need to be in touch with good practice and with what is going on in the world of good schools. A simple report to parents—a paragraph or so, to say that since the last inspection report things are progressing, this is particularly good, there is still a bit of trouble on that but, overall, we are happy—is what parents need to know that they can take a baseline from the previous Ofsted report, read through it, know that things have improved or are much as they were and take a reasonable decision. Most schools with a head who is open to ideas will benefit enormously from having someone such as that around.

Once schools have come to trust the system, you would find that they were asking for extra days. When I was a governor of a college under the old FEFC system, we were looking to have these people in more often. We would say, “We’re not doing what we should do in biology. Let’s get the biology man around to give us an extra bit of help there”. Schools, particularly primary schools, are little, isolated, lonely places. They want support and they want to have contact with people who can provide that support and good ideas. At the moment, all we have is the school improvement partner system, which is too low-level and local. We would do much better if we moved to making that part of the inspection system. I think that we could run that bit of the inspection system for about £10 million a year and have a report on every school, every year. Over and above that, you obviously need a full inspection system. Every now and again, you need to go in and do the whole works. Even if you are quite generous on the budget and say that you will spend 10 man-days on average every five years, that will cost you only £20 million or so. Then you have the central system over that.

There is an enormous obsession with data in the current central system. Collecting the data imposes immense burdens on schools. Teachers worry about measuring every aspect of every child’s performance because the school improvement partner or the inspector may pick them up on this or that, which is not constructive. You do not need to look at data on that level. Any mathematician will tell you that, apart from in pure mathematics, figures are always wrong. Figures do not provide value on their own; they provide value only in relation to what is happening on the ground. Inspections should be about the human aspect of schools: the quality of the teaching; the quality of the atmosphere; the staff; and the relationships in the school. They are things that numbers never throw any light on, although numbers can be useful in confirming what is happening.

If we were to budget £50 million a year for Ofsted as a whole, that would be enough. We could then perhaps devote another £50 million to the same organisation, perhaps, if it was running well and was focused on supporting schools that were having a hard time, bringing them round and making them straight—if it was picking up schools that had scored four and setting them right—which needs a lot of concentrated help and advice very fast. That would still be half the current budget, but it would provide about 10 times the value. I beg to move.

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[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, as another former Secretary of State, perhaps I may say how strongly I agree with what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, as well as by my noble friend Lady Sharp. I will be brief. First, like other noble Lords, I have first-hand knowledge of the fact that, in some cases, schools have decided not to accept a child with special educational needs—for example, one who is dyslexic, dyspraxic, deaf or blind—when they believe that that would lower their standing in the league tables. The league tables have been devastating in that way, by making it difficult often for an ambitious and able head teacher who values their position in the league tables to take such children. There is a danger, as my noble friend Lady Sharp said, that if you begin to regard the position of children with special educational needs, or children who are difficult, as somehow excluding them from being part of the academy, that academy will become still further removed from the problems of the whole of society. I feel strongly about this.

Perhaps I may refer to the interesting comments of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about Denmark. It is interesting also that the incidence of permanent exclusion in Scotland is proportionately a long way below that in England, because Scotland has chosen to go for short-term, temporary exclusions rather than for permanent exclusions that far too often condemn the child for the rest of their life to being outside society and often lead them straight on to being young offenders and things of that kind. I have a great deal of sympathy with what was said by both noble Lords. I hope that the Government will seriously consider a different kind of approach to children who are excluded.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, whom I congratulate on her open-mindedness on the issue, has indicated that partnerships play a large part in this. My noble friend Lady Sharp has seconded the view that they are crucial and significant. However, beyond that we must look at the whole situation of excluded children: why they are excluded, whether earlier intervention would save them from being excluded and whether temporary exclusions should be more common than permanent exclusions, with their devastating effect of taking the child almost altogether out of society.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I agree in many ways with what the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, has just said. We face a long-running problem of how to deal with kids who get themselves into a position where they need to be excluded from school. She said that the Scottish example is that schools retain ownership of these pupils. You cannot throw them away because they are still part of you. Even if they are not on the premises, the school has a commitment to help with their education.

That is one approach. Another might be through the use of the pupil premium, when we get that going. The kids will suddenly become much more valuable because they have been excluded. The resources to help them and deal with them will travel with them. Certainly, there is scope for free schools to innovate in this area. Many of the children’s homes that the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, talked about are privately run. The troublesome end of education has become increasingly well looked after by the private sector. There is a real opportunity. I do not expect to hear it today, but I hope for a commitment from my noble friend to deal with this. We have a chance, if we are sharp and inventive enough, to make real progress.

The problem raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, is rather more intractable. Imagine that I said to your Lordships, “Right, there are 800 of us or thereabouts. I will take £500 from one of you, but don’t worry, I will give each of you £1”. That is all very nice, as 799 of us will go and spend the pound and feel a bit better off, but someone will feel very upset when they get a bill for £500 and only have £1 to pay it with. That is the situation that we risk landing ourselves in with schools with low-incidence problems of any kind. If we do not operate this on a pool basis so that the school with the problem can find the funds, all the other schools that do not have the problem will have spent the money and we will be in trouble. Again, I am interested in how we will solve this in a world where not 200 but 2,000 schools are academies and the problem becomes much more obvious.

Academies Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Lord Lucas

Wednesday 23rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

I shall speak to my Amendments 31 and 34 in this very diverse group. Amendment 31 proposes that,

“substantial freedom is given to the school to innovate”.

When I am going round schools I notice how hidebound they are by the restrictions that are placed on them in trying new things. Although the previous Government introduced an ability to innovate, it was subject to applications in triplicate to the Secretary of State and an extraordinarily cumbersome procedure. I hope we will now see a pronouncement in favour of innovation. I suggest that where a school does innovate it is merely necessary to inform the Secretary of State that this has happened—this becomes a risk factor for Ofsted in its decision on when and where to inspect—and that there is a requirement on the school to keep proper records so that the benefits or otherwise of the innovation can be judged in subsequent years. The whole tenor should be in favour of innovation. There are many good and experienced teachers out there who are capable of doing a great deal of good for the system if we let them have a go.

On Amendment 34, one of the good things to come out of the past 13 years of government was an increasing interest in schools co-operating with each other. Neighbouring schools will always be a little at loggerheads, but there are good examples—both those induced by the Government and those that have occurred privately—of schools forming networks to share problems and good practice and generally to get together and get beyond the confines of what is possible within a school, particularly a primary school. I am thinking particularly of the transition from primary to secondary and how schools can work together. There have been some excellent examples of that and I would not like the process of becoming an academy to be seen as an excuse to be isolated and a star on your own. It ought to be a process of becoming more co-operative and more linked into schools generally.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments tabled by my noble friends Lady Garden and Lord Phillips of Sudbury and explain what is troubling me about academy orders.

Section 14 of the Education Act 2002 is incorporated into Clause 1(4), therefore enabling academies to be dealt with by what might be called the fast-track process of essentially calling into aid the powers given to the Secretary of State in that Act. The difference is that only very specific use was made of the power in Section 14; I do not think that it was intended to embrace a whole category of school in the way that will be possible under the Bill. My straightforward concern is that, where we are looking at the possibility of removing many statutory forms of consultation, virtually no restraint will be placed on the Secretary of State, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, said, and that he will be accountable to no one but himself. The combination of Section 14—the powers of the Secretary of State—being incorporated into the Bill with the fast-tracking of the academy orders means that an academy could be approved, or for that matter rejected, with the involvement of virtually no one but the Secretary of State. Within a democratic structure, that is not an acceptable way to go.

We must therefore look very closely at the amendments that have been tabled. They would bring academies back into the structure of the academy agreement—my noble friend Lady Garden referred to this—which would enable us to set conditions and requirements for the schools that have to be met under the academy agreement but that do not have to be met in the same way under an academy order.

I, too, would be very grateful for greater enlightenment from the Minister on what accountability there is in mind. For example, it might be possible to look at the report from the education department on the experience of academies, their standards, their meeting of the admissions orders and other requirements under the academy agreements. That would enable Parliament to debate how far those requirements and conditions had been met and to distinguish between the effects of academy orders and academy agreements.

Perhaps even more significant than the proposals that my noble friends and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, have put forward is the need for this Committee to look closely at the level of accountability for academies and at academy orders under the Bill.