Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the Minister on his innovative introductory speech—his first speech introducing a Bill. I have been taken aback at the prospect of taking part in a debate which has so far featured many people with knowledge, expertise and distinction in education which surpass mine. It has been a long time since I earned my crust as a teacher and most of my experience of education since then has been as a local politician, a governor and a parent. I wanted to take part in the debate because the Bill has great consequences for local democracy and local communities which go wider than simply the school system, important as that is.

It is a great privilege to follow the two former Secretaries of State for Education who I have most admired over the years—my noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley. I almost stood up and said, “I agree with nearly all of that; I have not much else to say”, after the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, sat down.

The basic problem with this legislation is that if there is an overwhelming view in the Government that the system of governance, control and management of schools—the system as a whole as opposed to individual schools—is to change, where is the vision of what the system will be like in five, 10 or 15 years’ time if the proposals the Government are putting forward come about? That is one of the important points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. If academies are to become the norm, the system of academies will have to change from what it is now and from what it is in the Bill. If every school in the country becomes an academy, it is horrendous to think that they will all be subject to control from Whitehall; that there will be no system of local involvement and local control and that local education authorities will disappear. A single national bureaucracy is not the way in which schools should be organised and managed.

I am surprised and have a little regret that this is the first Bill to be tabled by the coalition in this House. The Bill has certain commendable features—it is slim, it is short and is quite elegant in the way that it is written. This is unusual because the Bills we normally get here are fat and the opposite of elegant. However, the effect of its introduction will be more complex than is being suggested and may well be divisive. People have referred to the two-tier system but it may be more complicated than that; it has the potential to be divisive between the parties of the coalition. However, I am told that we can engage in constructive criticism and I shall do so. I shall be more constructively critical than I will be on other Bills, not least because these proposals do not feature in the agreed coalition programme. I find it slightly odd that it is the first Bill to be brought forward.

As this is Second Reading, I want to touch on one or two broad themes. The first concerns the idea of the big society. Like others, I have been trying to find out what the big society is, particularly since the coalition was formed and I thought we might have to do something about it along with the Conservatives. I still have not really found out what it is all about but I am still trying. No doubt we shall get some tuition about it in your Lordships’ House. It seems to be about devolution, decentralism and localism, to a large extent, and the involvement of local people and groups in their communities and societies. However, if you are devolving power and setting people free, who is it that you are setting free and who will be involved? Many of today’s contributions have pointed out that when it comes to involvement in basic decisions about which schools should become academies, quite large and important sections of local society seem to miss out. It does not seem sensible to legislate for the governance and control of schools without looking at the school in the context of its local community. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, said, schools need to be interconnected with communities. This is absolutely fundamental and we shall have to probe the issue in Committee.

There has been a vast amount of consultation, particularly in deprived areas, over the past decade or more, a great deal of which has fallen into disrepute because people have simply been consulted about the same things by different consultants year after year. However, consultation on real decisions about important local matters surely has to take place; it is almost inconceivable that there should not be a system of formal consultation and discussion with parents. However, this issue goes wider than parents. When decisions about institutions such as schools are made, the people taking those decisions—I take it this is all part of the big society—are taking them not only for the people in those schools at the time but they are taking them in trust for the future generations of children who will go to those schools. Therefore the wider community is just as important as the parents of the pupils who are at the school at the time the decisions are taken.

The question of the use of community facilities which schools or local education authorities own and control is crucial. For a long time there has been a great deal of talk about the need for the facilities that schools provide to be available to the wider community and not only to the school. This is very difficult to do because there are questions of cost, control, supervision and so on, but the best schools do it. Part of the raison d’être of new schools has been to provide facilities—sporting facilities, educational facilities, arts and so on—to the wider community. The question of whether this will be required of academies, how it can be guaranteed in the future if they are to become independent and how you can prevent them changing policy on this issue is very important and will have to be discussed.

This is particularly important in a small or medium-sized town which has one secondary school, or a village with one primary school, where the school is at the very heart of the community. Making decisions about the future of that school and how it is to be organised, run and controlled without the involvement of and discussion and debate with the wider community is not the way forward.

Many people have discussed the governance and accountability of schools. Accountability to governors is important and it is vital that parents and teachers continue to have a role on the governing body—and, I would argue, the local community as well—but accountability has to go further than the governing body. Very often, the nature of a school, particularly a smaller school, is such that the governing body is in a difficult position if it wants to intervene when things start to go wrong in the school. The head teacher, the leading governors and perhaps the whole governing body get very close. They do so for obvious and very good reasons, often because they are involved in doing important things in running the school. Schools bring in accountants and solicitors who work for free. Involving them when something is going seriously wrong is very difficult. It usually involves the intervention of the local education authority or the diocesan education authority. I can quote two examples from my own part of Lancashire where this has happened. The head teacher of the schools in question and, in one case, other senior staff, had to go because of what was going on in the school. It is very difficult if nobody who is reasonably local can intervene. Is that intervention possible if a large number of academy schools are directly responsible to bureaucrats in Whitehall, who are in many ways more bureaucratic than the local authority? If you talk to head teachers about the stream of directives, circulars, memoranda and advice that they get from above, you will learn that most of it comes from the centre; it does not come from the local education authority. Alternatively, it comes from the centre via the local education authority. If the coalition Government can dramatically reduce the amount of that sort of stuff—I was going to say “paperwork”, but most of it comes by e-mail nowadays—they will be doing schools a favour.

If more than half of a small education authority’s schools become academies, how can it manage to maintain its services to its existing local authority-maintained schools? It will have difficulty maintaining the services; it will certainly have difficulty maintaining its unit costs. Unit costs are bound in the short run to rise under those circumstances and keeping them under control will be very difficult.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, academies can and do succeed. They have had special talent in many cases; they have had extra funding in many cases; they have had the ability to focus on particular problems or subjects, or just to focus on their activity. They have been special schools, and if they had not succeeded it would have been quite extraordinary. They can do that because they are a minority that has had special attention and treatment. Whether that can be translated to a system where a large number of schools become academies is a big question.

There is a lot to talk about. The House of Lords is often said to be a Chamber of scrutiny and revision. This is a Bill where the House’s skill, ability and experience in scrutinising and revising will be absolutely necessary for it to become legislation which we can send to the Commons with confidence that it will actually work.