Education and Adoption Bill

Debate between Lord Addington and Baroness Morgan of Huyton

Thursday 5th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington]

I thank the noble Lord for his support and appreciate that even he cannot be in two places at once—although he does a very good impersonation of it at times.

Unless you broaden, much of the hyperbole we have been getting and that all political parties indulge in about making it a broader experience is going to be missed. The academic model is great but it is always quantifiable; there are always changes and caveats. If you miss those, effectively you are labelling somebody who has done the best they can as failing, coasting, not achieving—call it what you like. Unless you give us an idea about how you are going to take the rest of this out, you are ignoring the real function; that is, the socialising function. Sport, arts and further adult life, basically—what is your foundation for expanding on here? If we do not get some definition, and it would be much better to have something in the Bill or something that at least directly tells you where to find it—big letters, nice and clear; we are bears of very little brain, show us where and show us the process by which you are going to change this—you are actually going to cause more trouble than anything else.

I hope that when the noble Lord, Lord Nash, replies, he will have something that really goes to the heart of this. If he does not, I have this vision of lengthy litigation and squabbling as we try to readjust and go forward. We have to know what we are talking about.

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton (Lab)]

I also give my apologies, as I have to go to a charity reception at 3.40 pm and will not be able to stay later. It seems to me that we are in danger of making this rather too complicated, and I take issue with some of the amendments this afternoon. There has been an awful lot of noise about the definition, which has come rather late and has been a problem. The Minister’s letter is very helpful, but it would have been more helpful to have had it earlier. Nevertheless, it has made things much clearer.

All noble Lords who have dealt in one way or another with schools in various parts of the country know what coasting schools are: they are schools that kind of float along below the radar, and we have all had experience of them over the years. The interesting and the challenging thing is that this potentially will include a lot of schools around the country, which is something I will ask a question about later. They are the sort of schools that, superficially, often have very good exam and SAT results, but which, underneath that, are pretty unimpressive. We have never really put any focus on those schools.

Other schools of course may be doing brilliantly in terms of the entry levels of the pupils that they work with. Handled properly, this will allow us to praise the schools that are doing brilliantly with pupils and making extremely good progress. I speak with a very strong personal interest in this in a variety of ways, but particularly in terms of the work I am doing currently with Ark, which works with extremely disadvantaged communities. I would not want the sort of schools I work with to be let off the hook on pupil progress. The danger of including an awful lot of other stuff in the definition is that it would let schools off the hook again when it comes to making sure that we drive up standards for the most disadvantaged children around the country. I would be very concerned about that.

For schools to get good academic progress from their pupils, all of the things we have just talked about have to be included. I have been around an awful lot of schools in the last five years and have not seen many that deliver great progress without doing the arts and the range of other things that we are talking about. That is integral to a good school, and therefore I am a bit sceptical that we need to lay that all out again. The system now has a lot more data than it used to have, and there are a lot more data out there than used to be available. The encouraging thing is that we have the headline data, which all of us, in different ways, have had concerns about at times because it does not necessarily take account of progress. The key thing that has changed is that we now have good progress data for pupils, which we used not to have. In addition, we have Ofsted reports, although there is a problem with focusing too much on Ofsted reports, as I know from personal experience, in that sometimes they lag quite far behind; a school may not have been delivering in the period since the last Ofsted report. That can happen in particular with schools that have been outstanding for a long time and therefore have not been visited by inspectors for a considerable length of time.

I am very concerned about the idea of setting up another, completely separate set of quite complicated accountabilities. Although I understand the idea behind it from my colleagues here, there is a danger that if we start to take account of the curriculum, gender, sports, arts and so on, that creates extra pressure for a lot of head teachers and makes life more complicated and more stressful for them. I know from bitter experience that they are anxious enough about Ofsted inspections, so we have to be careful about adding to the complication.

If we were looking at only one year’s data, I would be really worried, because we all know you can have bad years or a cohort that does not perform. If we were only looking at progress for one year, I would be worried. But the combination of several years’ performance and, crucially, several years’ progress data is important and is a step forward.