Education and Adoption Bill (Ninth sitting)

Debate between Lord Brennan of Canton and John Pugh

Tuesday 14th July 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Kevin Brennan]

Yes. My hon. Friend again puts it more eloquently and accurately than I could have. There is a general concern about a lack of attention to pupils with special educational needs and disability needs in a lot of the Government’s thinking, not just with regard to the Bill and this particular provision but more broadly.

The Schools Minister answered written question No. 2637 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) on 22 June. We thank him for that answer, which stated that

“pupil referral units…will…not be eligible to be defined as coasting schools.”

It would, however, be possible to use secondary legislation under section 19 of the Education Act 1996 to include pupil referral units in the definition. The Minister said in Committee on 9 July, column 273, that he would consider extending the clause 7 duty to academise to pupil referral units using secondary legislation. We would welcome further clarity from the Minister on pupil referral units as well as his response to the remarks made by my hon. Friend in his intervention.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I am sorry to have to disagree with the hon. Member, because I have agreed with everything that he has said up to now, but there is another special problem with pupil referral units in so far as their population is very volatile; it changes all the time. A longitudinal assessment over three years might be quite hard to accomplish to help decide whether a school is coasting.

Education and Adoption Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Lord Brennan of Canton and John Pugh

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Kevin Brennan]

I suspect that the Minister might not be surprised if I say I beg to differ about exactly how precise this Bill is in what it does. I suspect that will form some part of our exchanges in the next few days.

Returning to the power that was taken in 2011 by the Secretary of State, ably represented in Committee at that time, as now, by his Schools Minister, presumably there has been a pressing need which explains why that power is no longer sufficient and why the Secretary of State now needs to take the power directly to issue the warning notices. If there was something terribly wrong about the way that local authorities work—issuing warning notices or failing to issue warning notices—Ministers would presumably have had to use the power that they took in the 2011 Act a lot; perhaps to issue dozens, maybe hundreds of warning notices since taking that power to direct local authorities to issue those notices.

What is the actual number of occasions that the Secretary of State has issued such directions since that power became available in November 2011? According to a written answer from the Minister for Children to my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) on 16 June this year, the Secretary of State has issued directions not on hundreds, or dozens of occasions or even double figures; the Secretary of State has issued directions to local authorities to issue warning notices on precisely four occasions in the last four years.

How can the Minister argue that there is a need so pressing for the Secretary of State to have to lay down primary legislation in order to issue orders directly herself when the Government are struggling to average one direction per year to local authorities since they took the power to direct local authorities to issue those warning notices?

The Opposition believe that Ministers should have to demonstrate that they need to acquire more power and are not just doing it to sound tough. If they really needed this power, surely there would have been many more occasions on which they would have chosen to direct local authorities to issue warning notices than there have been in the past four years since they took that power under the 2011 Act, which amended the Education and Inspections Act 2006. We will listen with interest to the Minister’s justification for taking that approach in the light of the coasting attitude to the need to issue directions to local authorities over the past four years.

Even if the Minister is unable to accept amendment 15 as we have drafted it—I understand that Ministers generally have an aversion to accepting any wording proposed by the Opposition—will he assure the Committee that any actions set out in warning notices by Ministers will be reasonable? What is his assessment of the example I gave of an academy warning notice required by Ministers? I do not argue with the prescriptions within that warning notice—they seem to be fairly standard proposals. Do Ministers seriously put forward the idea that they are the sorts of things that could reasonably be achieved in full during a one-month warning notice period?

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

Would it be helpful if the Minister told us how many warning notices—over and above four—have been given to academies?

[Kevin Brennan]

Yes. I apologise for not having that answer to hand myself. I am sure that if the Minister does not have that number before him or in his mind, he will—through the well-established process of parliamentary in-flight refuelling—be able to obtain that information by the time he gets to his feet.

Education and Adoption Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Lord Brennan of Canton and John Pugh

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Public Bill Committees

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I was going to say that it is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan, but we were both on the Crossrail Bill and I have to say that it was not a pleasure all the time.

I have something to add about the appeal mechanism. Although I think that amendment 19 is a little too heavy-handed to address the issue, I want to appeal to all Members to consider carefully the concept of appeal. With regard to governing bodies, in certain cases an appeal for them would be worthless because they can be part of the problem. I am sure that members of the Committee can think of poor governing bodies in their own areas that have very little to say in defence of poor results and performance. However, there is another side of the story and I would like to give an example from my neck of the woods.

I have in my constituency a single-form-entry primary school that fell below the standard for entirely comprehensible reasons. There were quite a lot of staff changes, which make a big difference in a single-form primary school, and the school also had intake changes produced by an increase in migrant workers. The governing body rapidly found itself trapped in a room with somebody who described themselves as a broker on behalf of the Government and said that the school must join an academy chain as soon as possible—with which, incidentally, the broker had some connection. I never knew there were such people called brokers, but there are indeed; I am simply recording what they do. I have heard many descriptions of what then went on. There was an extraordinarily abrasive and unpleasant conversation, in which the broker said that either the school must join the academy chain, or the head and the governing body—the full set—would be replaced.

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. Is he aware that some of those brokers, as revealed in parliamentary answers, were being paid up to £1,000 a day by the Department for Education to carry out the work that he is describing?

--- Later in debate ---

[John Pugh]

I have not finished describing it. A number of witnesses—people I have learned to trust—described the conversation as brutal and tantamount to bullying, and we are all against school bullying. Neither the head nor the governing body in that case was weak. They were saved at the last hurdle, because Ofsted produced a more favourable picture by bringing in objective data. The school is now thriving, and is part of the local education authority family. Had the broker got their way, it would have joined a chain, in which the nearest other school was 20 to 30 miles away. That example illustrates what can happen if some of the hurdles to what is called improvement are clipped away. Not only might there be a brutal, ineffectual intervention, but we might be endorsing a form of bullying, which we would all regret.

[Kevin Brennan]

I am sure we all want to confirm that we like the Minister. One of the reasons why I like him is because he welcomes the fact that when others disagree with him, they do so vigorously. He enjoys the cut and thrust of debate. We should not be misinterpreted as not liking him on a personal level.

My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak and the hon. Member for Southport have given practical illustrations of why it is important that there is a safeguard or appeal mechanism in these sorts of processes. This may have settled down a bit now, but during the early years of the coalition Government—I should point out that there were Liberal Democrat Ministers in the Department for Education—some of the activities being carried out by those mysterious academy brokers were extremely dubious. They turned up at schools and metaphorically took the headteacher for a walk in the woods with a rubber truncheon, with the express intention that, by the time they came back from that treatment, they would roll over to anything that was demanded of them—in particular, that they would join an academy chain, whether or not that was the right solution for the school. For doing that work, they were paid huge sums of public money—up to £1,000 a day—by the Government. It is right that a light should be continually shone on those sorts of activities.

In our view, clause 2 represents an unnecessary further step towards centralising control over the school system in the hands of Ministers. It does so in two ways. First, it gives the Secretary of State the power to issue a warning herself. That might seem a small step, because the difference between the Secretary of State telling a local authority to do something, which is what the 2006 and 2011 Acts set out, and doing it herself might seem modest, but it is significant. Previously, the Secretary of State had to channel warning notices through local authorities, thereby ensuring that they are engaged in the process and that schools do not receive mixed messages. The clause does not even contain any requirement for the Secretary of State to consult a local authority before issuing a warning. There is no requirement on her to inform herself properly about what has been going on, merely a right to insert herself into the process whenever she feels like it.

Education and Adoption Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Lord Brennan of Canton and John Pugh

Tuesday 30th June 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 35 I apologise for stopping you, but briefly, the Bill says “must” and that was the question I asked you earlier. It does not envisage an IEB as a possible tool to be used in those circumstances.

Sir Daniel Moynihan: No, but IEBs have often been used in those circumstances, so part of the success of the figures that we have just heard is that of IEBs on their way to delivering an academy solution. I know all academies are not successful and I am not claiming that they are, but not all treatments for any problem are successful and it does not mean that you should not have the treatment. In many cases, sponsored academies are doing an amazing job.

Richard Watts: One thing I would add is that local authorities face some bureaucratic hurdles in trying to place IEBs on schools that we think need some intervention. One of the changes to the Bill that we would like to see is to give local authorities the power to introduce IEBs without having to go through the process of applying to the Secretary of State, as that allows us to tackle problems more quickly.

Malcolm Trobe: Coming back to the original question, I would urge members of the Committee to look at the ASCL blueprint for a self-improving school system. We believe that school leaders are very committed to having a system in which there is school to school support, whether that be through federations, schools working together or through multi-academy trusts. The expertise to improve schools is within the profession itself and we believe that it is by schools working together that we will see a continuing improvement in our education system.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

Q 36 Following on from that, clearly the problem is coasting. Everybody wants the problem of coasting addressed. The only solution in the legislation is academisation. Apart from changing governance and headteacher, which often follows with academisation, what do academies have in their toolkit to address the problem of coasting that an LEA does not, and vice-versa? Councillor Watts, could you begin?

Richard Watts: My take is that actually governance status is not a very good indicator of any organisation’s capacity to change. There are some very good academy conversions—Harris is an extremely good chain—and there are some very poor academy conversions. Governance status is to my mind a distraction in all of this. There is a set of toolkits which are about getting outstanding leadership and teaching into schools, and any middle-tier organisation, be it an academy chain or a local authority, should have the powers to do that quickly and decisively. Primarily, good schools are made up of outstanding leaders, good teachers and a capacity to improve internally, working with partners. That is the only proven record across the piece of driving up schools.