Academies Bill [Lords]
Debate between Lord Coaker and John Redwood(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Vernon Coaker
Absolutely. The point that the Minister missed was that the Secretary of State has made great play of the fact that some schools will become academies not by Christmas or through the autumn, when the consultation is going to be by, but by September 2010; the whole reason we are rushing this Bill through is that the Secretary of State was telling us that all these schools were queuing up to become academies by September 2010. The Minister may have been saying in his intervention that a lot of schools signed up by 30 June, because the process takes three months, and they have therefore started the consultation. We do not know what that involves, but it carries on in August and can go on “through the autumn”—those were the Minister’s own words. So why are we rushing this legislation if the consultation can go on for longer? We could have slowed down a bit and improved the Bill, accepting some amendments that hon. Members have proposed. The Government would have thus achieved their objective with a much-improved Bill that would have allayed some of the concerns that have been raised, notwithstanding the fact that Labour Members would have opposed it in any case.
I hope that the Minister will tell us the exact number of schools that have applied, not the number that have expressed an interest—I hope he will give the exact number for primary schools and secondary schools. I know that this is not going to happen in special schools until 2011 and I cannot remember whether that is also the case for primary schools, but it certainly will happen in secondary schools. How many schools are actually applying? How many of that number does the Minister expect to open in September 2010? I hope he will outline for us exactly what consultation process those schools will be expected to have gone through and that he will explain to the Committee how the Department is ensuring that that has taken place, so that when the Secretary of State decides whether to give an academy order he can say, “These are the criteria I used.” The Committee deserves to know that, but we have so far been given no answer..
Mr Redwood
Can the shadow Minister explain why he thinks so many head teachers and governing bodies might want to drive something like this through against the wishes of the local community and parents or without bothering to find out what their views were? I would have thought that the first thing any head teacher would do when considering this would have been to ensure that they had support.
Vernon Coaker
What we are saying is that we are legislating for a process and we expect it to set out exactly what should happen. It is for the Government to determine what that process is. At the moment, they have no real idea about it. I also say to the right hon. Gentleman that what we are also trying to do—this is the point made by the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Mr Hancock)—is find out how many of the 1,000 schools that the press release says have applied will become academies in September. The Minister has failed last week and this to give a categorical answer to the question of how many academies the Department expects to open in September. I, too, will be interested to hear that answer.
Mr Redwood
I am sure that we will all be interested in that answer. However, the shadow Minister has given me no answer on the point that I asked. He is not saying that he knows of lots of head teachers and governing bodies foolish enough to try to drive this through against local opinion. Can he not understand that the whole idea of localism is that we need to trust these people more and give them more scope to act? They will decide how to consult and how widely they need to consult depending on the mood.
Vernon Coaker
But who will decide? It will be the head teacher and the governing body of the school. The right hon. Gentleman tells us not to worry because some consultation will take place, and he asks what head teacher would drive this through against local opposition. I just say to him that if parents—if all of them—are so important, why does the word “parents” not appear in the Bill? I ask him that to test him, because none of us can find a reference to them and I find that astonishing. He asks what head teacher would possibly go against the wishes of parents and against the wishes of anybody, but why is the word “parents”, which the right hon. Gentleman has just prayed in aid when he said that the Government were all for localism and for people empowering the local neighbourhood, not contained in this Bill? There may be one or two such references but I cannot find them.
Mr Redwood
Sometimes things are so obvious that when one trusts people they will do the obvious thing. Of course these people will want to carry the local parents with them because otherwise they will lose their school.
Academies Bill [Lords]
Debate between Lord Coaker and John Redwood(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Vernon Coaker
Of course we want freedoms extended to different schools where appropriate. However, if the hon. Gentleman reads the Children, Schools and Families Committee report, he will see that it talked about allowing the expansion of those freedoms within a managed context, not what is being proposed now, which is that these freedoms be extended to schools without any check on them or on how they use those freedoms. The proposals on the local authority role have caused huge disquiet across the country, and will have caused huge disquiet among the hon. Gentleman’s Conservative and Liberal colleagues. That is why I am pointing out the difference.
The Chair of the Select Committee is no longer in his place, but it would be interesting to know whether his Committee would have reached the same conclusion about the extension of freedoms to all schools if it had known that it would happen in a context in which the Secretary of State—either through a funding agreement or a direct grant—determined whether a school was operating effectively and conducting itself in an appropriate way. This applies to special schools, as provided for in the amendment, and to any other schools. I believe that the different context is crucial for understanding the conclusions that the Select Committee came to about how the academies programme was developing under the last Government in comparison with this Government’s programme. In the light of that difference, the Select Committee might well have reached different conclusions.
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Why is it that extra freedom is good for a badly performing school, while a school that is performing well cannot be trusted with that extra freedom? That does not make any sense.
Vernon Coaker
Of course outstanding schools can be trusted, but such schools have demonstrated that they already have all the freedom they need to be outstanding. Schools in areas of social deprivation or those suffering from educational underperformance should be allowed to operate in a way that, we hope, will raise standards. Evidence on whether or not the hoped-for and expected higher standards have been achieved is not as clear cut as one would like to imagine. I shall come on to deal with impact assessments in more detail later, but for any type of school, the impact assessments are quite wary about the evidence is terms of how much progress has been made in academies. All I am saying to the right hon. Gentleman—to be fair, he operates by trying to make policy on the basis of evidence—is that the evidence is mixed, so to plunge headlong into a massive expansion of academy freedoms without due regard to the evidence is not the right course of action for special schools or others.
Vernon Coaker
I give way to the right hon. Gentleman, who may want to come back to me on this point.
Mr Redwood
I am grateful. Is the hon. Gentleman now saying that Tony Blair’s experiment was wrong for schools in the poorly performing areas and that they should not have been made academies? Is that his position?
Vernon Coaker
No, that is a totally different scenario. I was not saying that at all. I was saying that to target academy freedoms in the first instance to schools in areas of educational underperformance and social disadvantage was exactly the right thing to do. My right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State agreed a large number of academies and it is clear that we would have gone on to establish more of them. What we are saying is that this model of academies is the right one. As for amendment 28—I want to stay in order, Mr Hoyle—extending the same model to special schools and primary schools without the evidence to back it up is a risk. A managed expansion would be fine, but this is a free-for-all. That is the difference. I understand that the right hon. Gentleman wants to improve educational achievement in an area, but our view is that this proposal creates an unnecessary risk. Allowing outstanding schools to expand through the academy system as the Bill sets out risks creating the two-tier education system that none of us wants.
Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Coaker and John Redwood(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Redwood
I am going to conclude, because many people wish to participate in this debate. Labour Members may want to be here until 3 o’clock in the morning, but they never used to when they were in the dock and did not allow us the time to debate these things properly.
The Budget is a necessary evil to clear up the mess inherited from the previous Government. This is a necessary task to instil confidence and to avoid interest rates going through the roof. Labour Members should look at what has happened in Ireland. Ireland had extremely big cuts—bigger, I am pleased to say, than those in this Budget. In the last quarter, the Irish economy started to grow extremely well, which is exactly what Labour Members are predicting cannot happen if one starts to get control of public spending.
I urge the Government and the whole public sector to work strongly together to ensure that these modest increases in cash spending translate into maintained and improved public services, as they can if we take the right action over pay rates, efficiency levels, improved process, investment in technology and so forth. I hope that we will get the banks working better by creating a more competitive environment so that we can then have the investment we need in the private sector to fill the gap and create the jobs. This is a doable task and a feasible profile, and it is backed by the independent forecaster. We need to be very sure that we are going to pump everything into that task, because recovery is what we all want.
Vernon Coaker (Gedling) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Has the Secretary of State for Education indicated to you any desire to come to this Chamber to explain the situation that has arisen? Following the points of order that were made by me and two of my hon. Friends, a further list of schools affected by the Building Schools for the Future cuts was published this afternoon. That third list reflects 22 errors from the first list, which means that a significant number of communities up and down the country have been affected by the chaotic statement about schools made yesterday by the Secretary of State. Are we to expect a fourth list, given that there are still some concerns that even the latest list may not be totally accurate? If not this evening, then tomorrow, we should expect the Secretary of State to come and explain what on earth is going on in respect of the cuts that are being made to a programme that is welcomed in communities up and down the country.