Education Institutions: Autonomy and Accountability

Lord Bishop of Birmingham Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Birmingham]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to address the topic of autonomy and accountability in our educational institutions, particularly in our schools. As noble Lords can imagine, coming from Birmingham, this is a very pertinent topic. We are experiencing a perfect storm of anonymous allegations. Birmingham City Council is conducting various investigations, of which I am a part, into those allegations.

There is confusion among ordinary people between politics and process, about which the noble Baroness has been telling us and which the Government are promoting to achieve high standards. There is also confusion between faith and fear. These are softer, organic areas that need to be introduced and understood when we are trying to raise standards, achieve excellent exam results, and put in place a proper inspection regime. Of course, we all want our children to have an excellent education. We want high academic standards and high vocational standards for pupils for whom those are appropriate. We especially want good governance, and that is something we are all attending to at the moment.

In terms of our accountability and sense of autonomy, we also want a real and in-depth understanding of what it means to have an ethos in our schools—whether they be church or community schools, academies or free schools—of both diversity and unity. These are areas that local people care about deeply in trying to achieve the very best for their children.

You might want me to mention a wonderful biblical pattern of accountability and autonomy, where human beings in many faith traditions are expected to grow up to be responsible, engaged and fulfilled. In the Christian scriptures, if you turned to Matthew chapter 18, you would see the appropriate introduction about receiving the kingdom of heaven like a child, and the parable of the lost sheep, where so many people can go wrong and stray from a pattern that is set out for them. Then there is the command to forgive; not just once or twice but an infinite number, of 70 times seven. There is a culture of empathy and sympathy, but also a culture of real responsibility, and in the middle of that, there is a little teaching about accountability and how it might work in an ordinary community.

If your neighbour offends you, go and see them personally. If that does not work, take two or three trusted people with you and allow them to examine the controversy or problem. If that does not work, then bring the whole community together and examine the issue. If it is unresolvable, then there are harsh things to do. There are examination or inspection judgments. However, there is a pattern there which ordinary, local people can instinctively understand and which would allow us not only to have autonomy locally, but also to have responsibility where it truly lies, in those local communities: responsibility for education and unity, but also for rejoicing in diversity.

In our own Church of England in Birmingham, I should mention the expansion we have had in the academies programme which the Government have been promoting. This is something we have embraced and found to be very effective. However, to achieve the ambitions of the Government and the excellence we want for our children in a great variety of communities, we have formed a diocesan board of education trust, which publishes, for example, an academies accountability framework. Such a framework enables both support and challenge in our local schools. In other words, it expects responsibility and people to be accountable, but at the same time, where there is difficulty, they should have the appropriate support at the appropriate level.

This lays out clear requirements and expectations. It is a local framework of support and there is proper challenge within it. There is complete clarity about the improvement of tasks before the school, the resources that are available to tackle the tasks, clear lines of accountability to monitor and evaluate the pace and scale of the improvements required, and an appropriate balance between support, challenge, self-evaluation and external evaluation. In a church school, we would go further, to give a guarantee to parents, communities, pupils and staff about what are the various granular expectations that they would find in various areas to do with religious education, prayer and worship, spirituality, valuing of pupils, opportunities that there are at any good school, and what the school should undertake to achieve those values to do with ethos.

I am arguing today for accountability and autonomy, but in our experience, the way to make this succeed in all our schools is to make sure that there are proper, local and trusted arrangements: trusted by pupils, staff and parents, by the whole community and, of course, by the Secretary of State.