Free Schools and Academies

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this has been something of a trip down memory lane, because I think just about every single Education Minister of the previous Conservative Government who is in this House has spoken in this debate. I had my run-ins with all of them, and occasionally came round to alliance with all of them—at least on one or two occasions. I would hope that they keep an open mind about the Bill that is coming up, because I do not see it being quite the destroyer that they are talking about; it is just talking about a limitation of expansion. What they are saying seems a little more in the vein of a moment when academisation would be for every school. The Conservative Government then looked around and said, “Wait a minute”, under pressure from a variety of, often, Conservative local authorities saying, “Our local maintained schools are pretty good”. Indeed, they are, according to the stats.

So let us just take a deep breath. I hope that the Minister will be able to assure this House that we are not going to get rid of successful schools. Academisation has had one or two problems. I give you two words: “off rolling”. If you look at the general amount of attention paid to this before the pandemic, with papers published in the House of Commons, you can see what was happening with a group of children. You had a situation where any child who would not pass an exam and was a potential liability was shunted to the side. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, standing in the Moses Room and saying, “This is something we must crack down on”. He got my eternal respect for that—he is a man who displayed great integrity at that Dispatch Box.

Let us just take a deep breath. There is also the fact that we have a system with lots of children not in education. We can put it all down to the pandemic, but the actual thrust was there beforehand. I know that the previous Government tried—Henry VIII powers and the House of Lords do not go well together; I hope the current Government remember that. I also hope that they take on this fact and make sure that we have a registration of what is going on outside. At the moment, there is a subclass of child who is not getting an education; we do not know what is happening to them.

On special educational needs, I draw the House’s attention to my declared interests, although to this audience I think it might be a little bit of a waste of time. We have a situation that does not work for special educational needs—unless you happen to be a lawyer being paid to get people through the appeals process. It is a definition of failure if ever there were one.

We need to make sure that in the Bill that is coming up—basically, this is the warm-up bout before the Second Reading, or something like that—we get something that is better. I hope that parliamentary pressure, and the considerable wisdom such as has been spoken in this debate, is brought to bear on the right targets. The noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, ran up the standard for good parliamentary monitoring, and I hope that we can all match her, because we want to make this work a little better. There have been things about the current academy system that work, but there are things that clearly have not worked that well. There are people who have been left behind—people who are a liability to the status of a school. If we have the great hand that says, “Yes, you have failed; you will do another process”, there is clearly a cost to that. I hope that we can look at that when we go through the Bill.

Academies have their good points and their bad. They are not perfect. They may have improved in certain places, but there are people who have been left behind. There may be a child who has special educational needs and who will not pass their exams, but why are they not welcome? Why will they not be taken on? That is the situation: the great growth of people who are being home-educated. Can we make sure that we look at this when we go through the Bill? Without that, we will be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Let us make sure that we look at the whole situation. I hope that the Government do not damage what successes there have been. They have been hard won and we have paid a high price for them, but I hope we can get through.

I look forward to what the Minister will say. I remember, a few months ago when the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, was about to speak on another aspect of education—I think it was the limitations of Progress 8, and everybody had been against it—I said that I wished her well in her speech but did not envy the task. I think the Minister is in the same position today.