Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath ExcerptsTuesday 12th July 2022
(2 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 35-I(b) Amendments for Report (Supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (12 Jul 2022)
“Funding for specialist education services for children and young people with sensory impairment(1) An English local authority must secure that provision of specialist education services to children and young people with sensory impairment and their parents is sufficient to facilitate the development of the child or young person with sensory impairment and to help him or her achieve the best possible educational and other outcomes.(2) Specialist education services include support to the parent of a child with sensory impairment, following the point of identification of any sensory impairment.(3) The Secretary of State must ensure that funding to local authorities for provision of services under this section is sufficient.(4) In discharging their duty under subsection (1), a local authority must have regard to the special educational needs and disability code of practice and any other guidance given from time to time by the Secretary of State.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to introduce a new duty for local authorities and the Secretary of State to ensure there is sufficient funding for specialist education services for children and young people with sensory impairments in line with the special educational needs and disability code of practice under the Children and Families Act 2014.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the National Deaf Children’s Society for its support on this amendment.
I said in Committee that the Bill requires improvements if the Government are to meet their ambitions around inclusion for children with SEND. I still feel that very much to be the case. It will also still need improvement if the Government are to reach the target that they have set for 90% of children to achieve expected outcomes in reading, writing and maths by 2030.
In Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, rightly highlighted the existing duties of local authorities to ensure that appropriate support is available to meet the needs of children and young people with sensory impairment, as they do for all children with special educational needs. We did not hear in Committee how those local authorities’ duties will fit with the changed educational landscape that the Bill and other changes in the schools White Paper and SEND Green Paper proposes.
Focusing on the flexibility that they have on how they use high-needs funding to meet those needs misses a vital point: around 78% of school-age deaf children are attending mainstream schools, and the vast majority of them do not have an education, health and care plan. The support for these children is not cast in stone in a legally binding EHCP. It is very much coming under local authorities’ general duties under the Children and Families Act 2014 and the SEND code of practice, for all children with special educational needs who do not meet the criteria for EHCPs. Those children without EHCPs do not automatically receive top-up funding from the high-needs funding allocation. The help that these children receive will be funded by a mix from within the school’s notional SEN budget and outside support services, which are usually provided and funded by the local authority.
With budgets stretched and higher needs funding having to provide for more EHCPs and more specialist claimants, it is this support to mainstream schools which has been cut back and sadly has resulted in them often being totally lacking. For instance, there has been a 17% decline in the number of teachers of the deaf since 2011, a trend which shows no signs of being turned around. We surely need to reverse that trend if the Government are going to meet the aims of inclusion and keep more SEND children in mainstream schools.
I think many will rightly view this new clause as very much part of a wider debate as to how we are going to ensure these services are delivered and who will pay for and provide the specialist roles, such as teachers of the deaf, who support schools, teachers and children. Nothing in the Bill, in the schools White Paper or in the SEND Green Paper protects or enhances these services which are critical for mainstream inclusion. That is why I feel a special duty is required for local authorities and the Secretary of State to ensure there is sufficient funding for specialist educational services for children and young people with sensory impairments.
The Special Educational Consortium supports the amendment because of its concerns about the funding of specialist support services for children and young people with a sensory impairment; 42 organisations have indicated their support for this amendment. The erosion of funding for specialist support services surely needs to be halted and services need to be restored to ensure that children get the support they need to enable them to learn and make good progress. I beg to move my amendment.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Morris of Bolton) (Con)
The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely, and I invite her to speak.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for a very full response. On my Amendment 62, I noted with interest what she had to say. There were two key points: first, that you do not need statutory change because local authorities already have existing duties and, secondly, that the issue about EHC plans can be overcome, because the additional funding is not dependent on those plans—I understand that. The problem we have is that, at the moment, local authorities are not really following the duties they are expected to carry out, mainly because they just do not have the resources to do it. One way or another, this must be tackled, and for parliamentarians, the law is the way we do this—through amendments like these. It is very frustrating if the response is, “You don’t need to change the law because local authorities already have the existing duties”, when we all know that local authorities are failing to provide the necessary support.
There was a fascinating debate on the other amendments. In a sense, I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said about this issue regarding the number of young people receiving anti-depressants, which is pretty frightening. I accept that it is unfair to place all responsibility on schools. This is rather like the police force; so many of its issues are mental health issues. Clearly we need the health service to step up to the plate. Again, the Minister referred to additional resources going in and an access target, but the NHS has an awfully long way to go to provide the kind of mental health support needed, particularly for young people. We all know the frustrations for parents and young people in getting access to NHS services and the long waits they often have to suffer. On the other hand, schools could be more sympathetic to parents when their children have mental health issues. On Monday, we will come back to the issues of school attendance and home-educated children. When you talk to parents, a recurring reason that they are home educating their children is because their children have mental health challenges to which the school is utterly unsympathetic. This is the issue we will continually come back to.
This will only be achieved through partnership. The noble Baroness, Lady Penn, knows all about the Health and Care Act and integrated care partnerships. I still think we need to get schools around that table to get a much more concerted approach at local level to resolve some of these very difficult issues; parents and children are often at the end of their tether in seeking support where it is not forthcoming. Having said that, I thought it was a really valuable debate and I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath ExcerptsTuesday 12th July 2022
(2 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 35-I(b) Amendments for Report (Supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (12 Jul 2022)
“(2A) In setting standards in relation to Academies in respect of subsection (2)(k), the Secretary of State must require that each Academy Trust, each Multi Academy Trust, and each Academy within a Multi Academy Trust, prepares and revises a strategic policy on parental and community engagement at least once every three years.”Member's explanatory statement
This is to make mandatory that every Academy must have a policy on parental and community engagement.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I wonder whether the Minister would like to speak.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank the noble Lord. With the leave of the House, I hope it will be helpful to your Lordships if I briefly explain the context for the Government’s position, as set out in my letter of 30 June. I have taken on board the concerns raised by your Lordships and the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform and Constitution Committees about Clauses 1 to 18, which is why the Government will be supporting amendments at this stage to remove them from the Bill. We will use the regulation and commissioning review to work closely with the sector to develop revised clauses to address the concerns raised and will bring them back in the other place. I confirm that we will not be bringing back the delegated power in Clause 3.
On the clauses relating to the academy standards, we will develop an approach that is more tightly defined so that we can provide Parliament and the sector with clarity on the scope of our plans to set standards for academy trusts. The Government believe that our approach to the intervention provisions is broadly right, but we intend to address the issues of proportionality and the right to representation raised in this House. Our policy intention behind these clauses is to move to a statutory framework fit for a fully trust-led system, which clearly defines the scope of the academy standards and enables a ladder of proportionate intervention at trust level.
I know your Lordships will rightly expect the opportunity to scrutinise the revised clauses thoroughly. First, a full day will be allowed for the first round of ping-pong when the Bill returns from the Commons. Secondly, the Companion to the Standing Orders has a process in place to allow the House to use Committee-stage rules of debate during ping-pong on the replacements to Clauses 1 to 18, allowing greater freedom of debate and more conversation about the amendments. Following that, the House will revert to normal ping-pong rules for the rest of the Bill.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My understanding is that we will have one day for the new clauses, which will be handled under what has been described to me as Committee-stage rules, and then the rest of the Bill will follow the normal ping-pong timings and time allocation.
Baroness Barran (Con)
If I may, I would like to respond to my noble friend’s other points. It is extremely important, given that our debate is a matter of public record in Hansard, that assertions that are made in the House are accurate. With the greatest respect to my noble friend, I am very happy to share with him—and it is on GOV. UK—the list of people who are on the expert panel. I am very happy to talk about—and will be in a few moments, I hope—the extremely extensive engagement that we plan for over the summer. I do not think it is helpful to assert things that are not accurate about how the Government are approaching this Bill in continuing to get it to a good place. I will take any time with any Member of the House to make sure that there is no confusion about how we are approaching this.
On the regulation of schools, these standards are about the regulation of trusts; they are trust standards, not school standards.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
If that is the case, I must have dozed off at some stage. Does it not say “Report be now received” on the Annunciator? I am sure the noble Baroness is right, but the procedure suggested by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, would have been perfect. During the passage of the Bill I considered several times recommitting sections of it to consider them, and to then go back to Report in the normal way. If we are now proceeding on Report, that opportunity has passed. We will be back to the situation where, if the Bill gets a Third Reading, we will need to do something much better for the way in which we consider a massive number of Commons amendments—unless of course we follow the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, which is to adjourn now and see if there is another way of dealing with it. I am afraid that the suggestion of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, will not function now.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, as I think we are debating my Amendment 1, it might be helpful if we carried on, because in order to withdraw the 18 clauses we need this debate to start and, I hope, come to a speedy conclusion. I want to say three things.
First, I thank the Minister for listening to the House and agreeing to support the withdrawal of the first 18 clauses of the Bill, which are the bulk of Part 1. We appreciate that she has listened. Secondly, it is clear that the usual channels will need to have further discussions between now and Third Reading, and that part of those discussions will be about whether the House lets the Bill have a Third Reading and about the procedure to be followed if the Bill comes back to us. By the way, I think it is going to be many months before it comes back, given that the noble Baroness’s review has to take place. I assume there has to be consultation and that instructions then have to be given to parliamentary counsel, and a whole new set of clauses has to be introduced in the Commons.
Thirdly, having listened to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and my friend the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, my experience is that, whatever the Companion says, the House can do what it wants to if it has been agreed as a sensible way to deal with a situation. At this stage, we should be content to leave it to the usual channels. If they have heard the voices of the House, at this point the Bill is unlikely to go through on Third Reading, unless there are sufficient guarantees that when the new amendments come back there is not just “a day”. Essentially, we should treat it as a Committee, go into Report and then it would go back. That is just my opinion, but it seems that we should now proceed.
I will obviously not press my Amendment 1 and will not speak to Amendments 2 and 3, to use the terminology as I understand it. But we should thank the Delegated Powers Committee and the scrutiny committee, along with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, the noble Lord, Lord Baker, the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and my noble friend Lady Chapman. What they have done in the Bill is to identify a real and growing problem of the Executive drafting legislation in such a way that the role of Parliament has been undermined. It is very important that this House has put down a marker to say that we will not accept Bills like this in the future. In many ways, that is even more important than the first 18 clauses.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, it has been a very interesting debate, and I am very grateful to the Minister because I think she very carefully set out the context for the work that the Government are now going to take forward in her wind-up speech.
I was very struck by the tension at the heart of what she said. She was seeking to reassure her noble friends behind her that academy freedoms were not under threat in the work that was being undertaken, but at the same time she used the words “fairness” and “consistency”. We need to say that the importance of these 18 clauses, particular Clauses 1 to 4, is that the Government in their White Paper signalled that all schools are to become academies. They will then move into multi-academy trusts. What we are talking about is the essential governance and accountability of all schools in England. That is why these clauses are so important.
I am not sure how long the work is going to take. I think it is going to take quite some time, and I think it is going to be quite some time before we see the Bill coming back to your Lordships’ House. The one thing I do know is that it will not be satisfactory for us to spend a day on this. We must enable ourselves to go through a procedure whereby we have a proper committee report and then we can send whatever we like, if we wish to, back to the Commons. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, very helpfully referred to the Companion and a particular reference point—I think it was paragraph 8.132. A clear message has been given to the usual channels to go away and discuss this so that, before Third Reading, there is clear understanding about how the House is to scrutinise the changes that are likely to be made in the House of Commons. I think the Front Benches on all sides of the House have taken that to heart.
I do not think we can take this any further today. We should allow the removal of these clauses. I think, once again, we should reflect that we are essentially talking about the future governance of all schools in England. That deserves thorough scrutiny. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, in the unavoidable absence of my noble friend Lady Blower I shall speak to Amendments 33, 34, 37, 38 and 41, which are in my name and that of my noble friend. They are concerned with the process by which a school becomes an academy or an academy trust joins a multi-academy trust, and they essentially seek to ensure early consultation with staff and parents before any hard decisions are made.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on his amendment because I had a similar amendment in Committee and I am very glad he has taken it up, and because it is rather wearying to listen to the litany of academy successes when we know that it is a very mixed picture and that there are many fine maintained schools. We also know that the Government’s decision is to move to full academisation. That is the context in which we are now debating these matters.
What has been so striking for me watching the academy movement is how secretive so many of the arrangements have been, with parents and staff excluded until after the key decisions have been made, and an absence of meaningful consultation. What happens is that a decision is made by a governing body, which consults on it and then agrees that its original decision was the right one. That is not proper consultation. I seek to say that parents and staff deserve to be talked to at the beginning about choices and fundamental challenges and to be very involved, rather than essentially having a decision handed down to them.
The National Governance Association, for which I have a great deal of admiration, has briefed that it is particularly concerned about Clause 29, which allows local authorities to apply for academy orders for its maintained schools without governing body consent. It thinks that governing bodies are best placed to understand their schools’ contact and to take good decisions about their future. However, sometimes governing bodies seem to find it impossible to take staff and parents into their confidence.
I draw the Minister’s attention to the situation at Holland Park School and its basically enforced move into the United Learning academy trust against the wishes of many parents and staff. In the last year, Holland Park School has been undergoing what can be described only as a turbulent transition to new leadership in the wake of the sudden departure of its head teacher and many of the school leaders and the consequent falling away of an evidently problematic management style. The replacement governance team failed to bring the staff on side and, as a result of continued failings in governance and leadership, recently received a poor Ofsted report. When I read it, I found that the report focused mainly on poor governance and leadership as opposed to the quality of teaching, where Ofsted acknowledged that teachers “have secure subject knowledge” and
“benefit from good-quality training that supports them in delivering the curriculum.”
The irony is that the failing governing body’s obsession with forcing the school into a large and geographically widespread trust is the one thing that is being taken forward by the regional schools commissioner, because under the rules she now has to make a decision about what happens to Holland Park. She has quickly decided to recommend that it joins the United Learning trust. That is now going out to consultation, but who can have any faith whatever that it is going to be a proper consultation when the commissioner has already said what her preference is?
That has been done despite the local authority supporting the locally preferred solution of a local multi-academy trust, with Holland Park School joining Kensington Aldridge Academy, by making a £1 million loan available to support that. The decision has been made despite the local Conservative MP, Felicity Buchan, issuing a public statement referring to
“a strong preference amongst parents, teachers, RBKC Council, the MP and the wider community”
for Holland Park to join a local MAT. That is a reflection of what has been happening up and down the country, where these decisions are made rather high-handedly and then put out to consultation, and the last people to be involved are the people who should be involved in the first place: the parents and teachers at the school.
The implication of what is now happening, with essentially all schools becoming academies, is that they are going to have to be placed in a much stronger governance structure. I think that is the reason why the Minister’s noble friends behind her look so worried. Whatever she says about “freedoms”, it is abundantly clear that we will now have a system where the Secretary of State is responsible to Parliament for all schools through the multi-academy trusts. As someone who has spent years and years wrestling with governance and accountability in the health service, and the tension between national direction and responsibility and local freedoms, I say that the Minister has a huge challenge when leading the governance review that we referred to in the last debate.
My amendments try to say to the Government, when going forward with academy status for all schools and then translation into multi-academy trusts, please let us have a much more open process by which those decisions should be made. Do not present teachers and staff with a decision that says, “We have decided to go with this multi-academy trust and we’re going to consult on it”. There should be much more open consultation; there should be much more debate about which MAT an academy trust should go into. Of course, I hope that this will form part of the review that she will undertake over the next few months.
The Duke of Wellington (CB)
My Lords, I speak to Amendment 42 in my name, and I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for signing it. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, also wanted to sign the amendment—unfortunately, she is not here today—but her email to the Bill office arrived a few moments too late. But to have two former Secretaries of State from different parties supporting the amendment demonstrates that this is in no way a party-political matter; it is a cross-party amendment.
It is, of course, a small amendment in that it applies only to a very limited number of specialist schools. The Bill in general affects thousands of schools, but at the moment I believe there are only about eight maths schools and a similar number of music and ballet schools in the music and dance programme. They are all centres of excellence; they take children purely on their talent in that specialisation. A high proportion of the children come from disadvantaged households and ethnic minorities. In the case of the maths schools, all the children get high grades at A-level and all go to leading universities. King’s Maths School, of which I am patron, recently celebrated being named by the Sunday Times state school of the decade. I was sorry that, in the end, the Minister was unable to come to that celebration. She would have seen how incredibly important it is to preserve that and other maths schools.
The music and dance school I know best is the Royal Ballet School where, for 10 years, my wife was chairman. I can tell you that all the students from there, on leaving the school, were offered places in leading ballet and dance companies both in the UK and abroad.
The point is that these specialist schools are really worth preserving. I put down a probing amendment in Committee and I have re-read this morning in Hansard the response from the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, on behalf of the Government. She said,
“it would be wrong to exclude any schools in the maintained sector with a music, dance or maths specialism from the benefits of being part of a strong trust.”—[Official Report, 15/6/22; col. 1607.]
I realise that this statement was meant to reassure me and others, but I must respectfully disagree with two presumptions in it. First, it is not at all clear that there would be any benefit for those schools to be part of a multi-academy trust. Secondly, it is also far from clear that multi-academy trusts are all strong.
“(2A) In section 105 (procedure for deciding whether grammar schools should retain selective admission arrangements) after subsection (9) insert—“(9A) Ballot regulations must provide for the ballot, the petition in subsection (3)(a), the registration of parents in subsection (4)(a) and connected purposes to use electronic communications alongside other forms of communications.””Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would make it so that the petition calling for a ballot, the registration of parents to participate in the ballot and the ballot itself can be carried out using electronic communications.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I return to the subject of grammar schools with two modest amendments, which I am sure the noble Baroness will wish to accept. I have always taken particular interest in grammar schools, having been brought up in an environment of selective education. This was compounded by direct experience of the failure of the Buckinghamshire education system through my eldest daughter, who had the misfortune to be living there for her secondary education and attending a secondary modern school. More generally, I recoil still at a system which essentially labels the majority of 11 year-olds as failures.
The move against grammar schools was supported hugely by parents when it happened. I was genuinely concerned when I saw Sir Graham Brady MP recently suggesting that, when this Bill goes back to the Commons, it should be amended to remove the statutory ban on new selective schools. We know he has received support from other Conservative Members of Parliament. I say to the Minister that if the Bill comes back amended in that way, we will fight it tooth and nail in your Lordships’ House, and will expect at least a day to debate it.
My two amendments are very modest and address issues relating to the 1998 legislation. It was introduced in good faith but, as time goes on, one sees that it needs to be improved, and this is what I am seeking to do here. I have some experience in this. In Birmingham, the local authority where I live, my wife was a leading member of the campaign to use the legislation to allow a ballot to remove selection from the eight grammar schools in the city. She and others discovered that, under the legislation, only parents in primary schools which have sent five or more children to grammar schools in the last three consecutive years were allowed to vote, thus denying parents in other schools the franchise.
Of course, the schools denied the franchise were predominantly schools with higher levels of free school meals, and those that got the franchise were in the most prosperous neighbourhoods. That is not surprising, as data shows that it is predominately middle-class children, whose parents have the money to pay for private tuition, who pass the grammar school exam. This is not a meritocracy, as is sometimes claimed by Conservative MPs, but a bought privilege for those with money.
In my two amendments, I first want to reduce the 20% of qualifying voters to 10%. That is the same as is required for the recall of an MP. It is not unreasonable to set the level there. When the legislation was introduced in 1998, we were run on paper as a country; we know the world has changed. So secondly, I am suggesting that we allow electronic communications in relation to regulations. I know from the meeting I had with the Minister this morning that, because of the academy grammar schools, there will be new regulations. I ask that this be considered as part of the revision of those regulations.
My other two amendments in this group, Amendments 102 and 103, are on a completely different matter. They are about strengthening the rights of parents and increasing the public accountability of schools. Given the development of the admissions system around academies, instead of what previously was a unified system where the local authority provided all the information and you went through the local authority system, a parent can often be faced with a multitude of applications to academies in their area. It can be very confusing. I propose a straightforward extension to the existing remit of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. I want to enable parents to seek an independent investigation into complaints about admissions to academies if they think their child has been wrongly denied access to their preferred choice of school. The other amendment proposes an equally practical, but perhaps even more important, extension to the rights of parents: the right to complain about what goes on within the school itself.
In Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, in response raised five points to justify rejecting those amendments: that there was a route for complaints through the independent Office of the Schools Adjudicator; that the School Admissions Code has improved the process for managing in-year admissions; that the Government will consult on a new statutory framework for pupil movements between schools and a back-up power to enable local authorities to direct an academy trust to admit a child; that every academy trust must have a published complaints procedure; and, finally, that her department provides a route for independent consideration of complaints about maladministration of appeals in relation to academy schools.
I am very grateful for the Minister’s full response but it does not go far enough. For instance, the Office of the Schools Adjudicator does not make decisions on individual complaints about the admissions appeal process. On the School Admissions Code, although the changes that were made are welcome, they do not in any way address the lack of independent redress for school admissions for academies and free schools or the underlying fragmentation of the admissions complaints system for parents. On the new statutory framework for pupil movements between schools, I would just say that powers of direction are not a substitute for parental access to an independent appeals and complaints process. Finally, on complaints directly to her department, my understanding is that her department focuses on whether a school has followed the complaints process, rather than carrying out a fresh investigation into the substantive matter complained about. I hope that the Minister will give some consideration to that.
All schools are going to become academies. The Minister’s previous arguments about wishing to maintain the freedom of academies has to be balanced with a proper accountability system. I wonder whether the review she is chairing might look at this. It seems to me that one key element of allowing academies to continue to have the freedoms that they enjoy is that there are some safeguards in the system. I would argue that having the Local Government Ombudsman as a backdrop would be one of the building blocks to allowing academies to continue to have their freedoms.
Having said that, I hope we can give these and other amendments a fair wind. I beg to move.
Lord Shipley (LD)
My Lords, my name appears on Amendments 47 and 106. I want briefly to say that I am very strongly in favour of all the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. Amendment 46, in particular, is very powerful, and I hope the Minister will think carefully about it.
I turn first to Amendment 47, which relates to the provision of school places by academies. There is a problem here which needs to be solved before it arises. Local authorities in England must have a power to direct academies in their area to admit individual pupils and to expand school places. As I said in Committee, the question that arises is around what happens when there are not enough school places for a local authority to fulfil its statutory duty—for example, if there is a new housing estate and school places have to be found for the children living there. Given that local authorities should in my view have some power over appeals, local authorities must have the power to be more directional than the Bill currently permits.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, we should all be grateful to the Minister for a very full response. I think it is disappointing in relation to the strategic role of local authorities. Local authorities need to be given confidence to take on an important role in relation to education and I hope that we will come back to this in future debates.
I am also disappointed by what the Minister said about Amendment 117 and the idea of a partnership board. I know from Birmingham and the work of my noble friend Lady Morris how important and valuable that has been. In the Health and Care Bill, which has just gone through, we legislated for integrated care partnerships, which are designed for health and care to bring people together in same way as my noble friend’s amendment sought to do in education. It is a pity that we have missed that opportunity.
On grammar schools, I note what the Minister has to say about the future regulations, for which I am grateful. It is quite extraordinary that she did not agree to reduce the threshold from 20% to 10%. I will not go any further seeing that my noble friend Lord Blunkett is in his place. On the ombudsman, I took what she said to mean that there is a glimmer of light that she will look at this at least in the context of the governance review and parents’ rights when they have concerns. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 31 withdrawn.
“(1A) If, in the event of future consultations on the direct national funding formula, the Secretary of State concludes that local authorities are best placed to determine and administer certain aspects of school funding allocations relating to the specific roles and duties of local authorities, or where local authorities have better access to information that would allow them to determine the funding more accurately, the Secretary of State may by regulations delegate responsibility for calculating and administering these aspects of funding to local authorities for schools within their area.”Member’s explanatory statement
In the event of a future consultation on the national funding formula concluding that local authorities would be best placed to determine and administer certain aspects of school funding, this amendment would enable the Secretary of State through regulations to delegate these powers to local authorities to effectively meet local education funding needs.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, my amendment is based on discussions with the Local Government Association—although, unlike almost every other noble Lord in your Lordships’ Chamber, I am not a vice-president of the LGA, despite years of endless work as a local government councillor.
My amendment, to which the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has kindly added his name, would enable the Secretary of State to lay regulations to delegate responsibility for calculating and administering aspects of school funding to local authorities, should future government consultations on the direct national funding formula conclude that local authorities would be best placed to do so. Concerns were raised in Committee about the Government’s plan to set more than 24,000 schools’ budgets centrally from Whitehall and remove input from local authorities. School funding is complex, and local education authorities that work closely with maintained schools are very well placed to understand the unique circumstances of each school.
The Government’s own fact sheet on the implementation of the direct national funding formula recognises that there may be some instances where the Government are not able to set school budget allocations at the national level—
“for example, where this is related to specific roles and duties of local authorities, or where local authorities have better access to information that would allow them to determine the funding more accurately.”
The document goes on to say that councils may be better placed to determine certain aspects of school funding, such as additional funding for PFI schools and funding for schools with growing or falling school rolls. The approach to those aspects of funding will be consulted on in the second-stage consultation on the direct national funding formula, which is set to close in September.
As schools’ local point of contact, naturally councils have access to local education data and can work more agilely to respond to changing local circumstances than can be done from the centre. None us should underestimate the huge work involved in having a national system of funding when you are dealing with thousands upon thousands of schools. I wonder at the Government’s nous in taking on that responsibility, but of course this change means that Ministers are accountable to this House and the other place for anything to do with school funding.
I hope the Government will reconsider this measure and that, when they come to consider the results of the second-stage consultation, they will see local authorities as being a partner in the whole funding of local schools. At the very least, if the Government’s ongoing consultation concludes that councils are indeed best placed to deliver certain aspects of school funding, surely the appropriate power should be delegated to councils in order to avoid causing schools unnecessary financial difficulties as the direct national funding formula is implemented. I beg to move.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for reminding me that I should declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
I have three amendments in this group. I think Amendment 59 is pretty self-explanatory: it would increase the pupil premium in 2023-24 by £160 per primary pupil and £127 per secondary pupil from 2022-23 levels, before pegging it to inflation. That is clear.
Amendment 60 is about alternative education. Members will have heard me going on about that for some time, but it really is important that we look at ensuring that when the most vulnerable pupils—often with special educational needs and often from poorer backgrounds—end up in alternative provision, the financing is transferred swiftly along with their education, health and care plans.
That brings me to Amendment 58, which is the one that I really want to concentrate on. This issue is important. Yesterday I sat in on the child vulnerability debate, which was as a result of the Public Services Committee report. During that debate, I heard our Minister say:
“As your Lordships have reflected, the real test of any society is how it treats those who are most vulnerable within it”.—[Official Report, 11/7/22; col. 1350.]
She went on to say, quite rightly, that the priority of her department is to support the most vulnerable children. Who could be more vulnerable than the 800,000 children that the Child Poverty Action Group has found live in relative poverty and do not qualify for a free school meal?
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a short but very interesting debate. On the issue of local authority involvement in the funding of schools, I note what the noble Baroness said about top-ups and the consultation which has identified some limited areas. I just think the Government should go further. I worry about the funding of every school in this country being directly from government, as the exclusive funder. I am convinced that there must be a stronger role for local authorities.
On the question of the pupil premium and free school meals, it has been a very telling debate. On the one hand we have the real experience of poverty, and the pressures in the economy making this even worse; on the other hand, we have Conservative candidates vying to be Prime Minister making fancy promises about tax cuts, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said. That will come only from cutting public expenditure or borrowing even more. No one can be in any doubt that we are in for not just austerity but austerity-plus-plus. I worry about the impact that this is going to have on our most vulnerable families. This has been a very good debate to illustrate that. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath ExcerptsMonday 27th June 2022
(2 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 1-VI Sixth marshalled list for Committee - (23 Jun 2022)
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I have two amendments in this group and support my noble friends Lady Chapman and Lady Morris in their Amendments 171H and 171U. I have seen at first hand the huge value of the Birmingham Education Partnership, which my noble friend Lady Morris has led, and the impact that it has had on schools. On this issue of who in education can talk to some of the other sectors, the Minister will know that my principal interest is in health. I have mentioned a couple of times, particularly in relation to mental health, the need for the education sector to have a strong voice around the table of the new integrated care partnerships and integrated care boards that the health service has now established. I do not know who in education in Birmingham will do that, unless we have my noble friend, and have the Government recognising that it has a very valuable role to play. I hope that the Minister will consider this between now and Report, whenever that is—perhaps she will say when Report will be, though I am not hopeful of that.
Turning to my Amendments 171T and 171W, earlier in Committee we had a lot of debate about academisation and the role of parents in schools. Many noble Lords referred to what I can only describe as the chaotic nature of the admissions system to secondary schools, particularly when it comes to academies, where parents are faced with multiple application forms and details of schools. This is bewildering to them and not in the best interests of children. My amendments are an opportunity to strengthen the rights of parents and to increase the public accountability of schools by setting out straightforward, practical changes, to simplify the confusing system of redress that is currently faced by parents and carers if they raise concerns about their child’s education. I am very grateful to my noble friends Lord Davies and Lady Blower for their support, and to my noble friend Lady Chapman for what she said in her introductory remarks, particularly in relation to the admissions system.
The changes that I am proposing can be delivered easily and at low cost, through the logical extensions to the existing remit of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. My noble friend Lady Morris has said that the principle is important and that who does it is a secondary consideration. I accept that, but the Local Government Ombudsman has an important role to play, having had a tried and tested mechanism to remedy public complaints and to improve local services for nearly 50 years. The ombudsman’s remit already includes many education and school-related matters.
My Amendment 171T would enable parents to seek an independent investigation into complaints about admissions to academies if they think that their child has been wrongly denied access to their preferred choice of school. Prior to the introduction of academies, parents had the right to bring complaints about defects in school admissions processes to the local ombudsman. Over many years, this has been a robust system. Indeed, the ombudsman published one of its regular reports just last week, highlighting shortcomings in the admissions process at a popular and oversubscribed school in Surrey. Its intervention resulted in a fresh appeal for the pupil involved and an undertaking from the school to review and improve its system for others in future. It is a practical, transparent and proportionate system that has been proven to work well for parents, pupils, and schools.
However, since the introduction of academies—and we are on a pathway to full academisation by 2030—the complaints process for school admissions has become increasingly disjointed. Although complaints about admissions to maintained and voluntary-aided schools continue to be investigated by the ombudsman, complaints about academy admissions must be addressed to the Education and Skills Funding Agency, a body which does not have the same powers, purpose or independence as the ombudsman. This means that, in practice, parents with concerns about one of their most important decisions regarding their child’s education are potentially faced with navigating two entirely different complaints systems through two entirely different bodies. This amendment will remove this needless complexity by bringing academy and free-school admissions within the single scope of the ombudsman, and we can restore the previous one-stop arrangements for parents and carers.
Amendment 171W proposes an equally practical but perhaps an even more important extension to the rights of parents and pupils: the right to complain about what goes on within the school itself. It is remarkable that schools are one of the only public services in this country for which there is no completely independent right of complaint and redress. People have a statutory right of access to an independent investigation into complaints about their local council, the police, the Armed Forces, the health service, universities, and central government departments, but not about schools.
There is an in-house schools investigation service that operates within the Minister’s department, and which looks at complaints about local authority-maintained schools. There is also a separate academy complaints service run by the ESFA. However, these services are limited in their scope. They are mainly responsible for checking whether schools have followed the required complaints procedure. They do not carry out a fresh investigation into the substance of the issue that was complained about. They do not come to an independent view on whether there has been fault, and they cannot provide a remedy for parents or pupils.
I am not critical of the staff who carry out the current arrangements. However, those arrangements fall a long way short of the rights and redress available in most comparable sectors. My amendment would provide a comprehensive and genuinely independent schools complaints service simply by extending the functions of the ombudsman. It is important to note that this is not a novel or untried proposition. This is a role that the Northern Ireland Public Services Ombudsman already performs with great success. It is a duty that was previously piloted by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman in England under the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009. Unfortunately, the 2010 election intervened, and the function was not implemented, but it was thoroughly tested at that time in schools across 14 local authority areas.
There is support from the Commons Education Committee for an extension to the ombudsman’s remit so that it might look more effectively at the support given in schools to children with special educational needs. If that is right, and if the committee is right, if it makes sense to extend that to SEND children, then surely it makes sense to extend it to all children in all schools, whatever category. I very much hope that the Minister can consider this.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
My Lords, I support these amendments, particularly Amendments 171T and 171W, to which I have added my name. The case has been set out extremely clearly by my noble friend Lord Hunt, but it is worth emphasising the logic of the proposed change.
To a parent faced with one of the most difficult decisions in relation to their child—choosing a secondary school—it is incumbent on us to make that process as simple and as clear as possible. Unfortunately, because of how the system has developed, that is currently not the case. We have the extraordinary circumstances that in some local authorities the appeals system for academies is run jointly with the local authority. A parent may have applied to a maintained school and to an academy and been dissatisfied with the result but then discover that there is one system of appeal for the maintained school and another system of appeal for the academy, which cannot make sense.
It is reasonable to propose that the ombudsman has considerable experience in the tried and tested process of reviewing problems with school choice. My noble friend said that who should do the job is not an issue of principle, but the ombudsman is there and has been doing this work. It would be wrong to make the system of appealing against school decisions out of line with the generality. If people have a complaint, they should know where to go and should not have the barrier of figuring out which is the appropriate appeal body. There is considerable justification for allocating it to the ombudsman but, if another proposal were to come forward from the Government, we would have to consider it seriously.
The point has been made that the ombudsman currently cannot make judgments on issues within the school gates: it can if it is a local authority issue but, if it is within the school gates, it has no right to pursue an issue on behalf of concerned parents. Again, this cannot make sense. This is a public service. We need a proper system of review by an independent body.
I spent a bit of time trying to discover the argument behind dropping the provision in the 2009 Act, which provided for the ombudsman. Could the Minister enlighten us and explain why it was taken out in the Education Act 2011? It appeared to be a case of the Minister wanting not to lose power to an ombudsman. On balance, I think that the Committee would prefer the ombudsman to make this sort of decision as opposed to it being a matter for the Minister. I am sure that parents would prefer to have an independent expert body looking at the issue, whether the ombudsman or some other body.
I strongly support the amendments and hope that the Minister can give a helpful response.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath ExcerptsMonday 20th June 2022
(2 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 1-V Fifth marshalled list for Committee - (20 Jun 2022)
Baroness Stroud (Con)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 171F, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, and to add my support for this group of amendments.
It is already well established in national and international law that parents have the right to raise their children and the duty to safeguard their well-being. It is also well established that this includes the obligation to ensure that their children receive a suitable education and that this is then underpinned by general presumption in law that, except in cases where there is substantial risk of serious harm, parents do act in the best interests of their children.
Further, under Article 13.3 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which the UK has ratified, it is also enshrined that parents have the prior right to choose the kind of education that their child will be given. Many parents chose to exercise this right by delegating the education of their children in certain subjects to more qualified teachers in schools in order to provide them with the best education possible. None the less, it is still their choice as parents to do so.
It follows, therefore, that to make this choice, as we have heard this afternoon, parents must be able to review all teaching materials, in order to make a fully informed decision about the education of their children. This must include third-party curriculum resources. Many schools choose to make use of a wide range of these third-party resources, some of which are extremely useful. However, as noble Lords are aware, there is increasing evidence from parents that schools are using third-party teaching materials which are often ideologically motivated and lack factual basis, particularly in relation to some relationships and sex education materials, as well as other contentious issues.
As we have heard this afternoon, even more concerning is that some of these materials are being withheld from parents. Amendment 171F seeks to maintain the right of parents to view all teaching materials, not just the curriculum lesson titles. Schools have a duty to provide these materials for parents to view and therefore this amendment is necessary in order to close that particular loophole in legislation.
In addition, it has long been communicated to parents that children learn best when they are supported at home by parents who are interested and involved. I can remember hours of testing my children on spellings, maths and history. If parents cannot view and understand the materials their children are being taught, they are hampered in their ability and responsibility to support their children in their education.
Parents should not only be allowed to view teaching materials but actively encouraged to read and engage with their child’s education and the materials being taught in schools. That is why, while I wholeheartedly agree with the amendment, there is one issue that I would encourage the noble Baroness to smooth over, perhaps by Report, should she bring the amendment back, which I very much hope she will. For parents to be able to engage fully with their child’s education, the material needs to be freely available to parents online or at home. The phrase “on the premises”, meaning on the school premises, is an unnecessary restriction. These third-party organisations are commissioned to provide a service, not to teach secret material.
Research has consistently shown that the impact of parental engagement in a child’s education has a far greater effect on the child’s educational success than the schooling itself. This is a trend found across the age range and social backgrounds. Parental engagement is particularly important when children start to engage in some of the personal and social issues in society. There are many examples of good practice in this area already in place in schools across the country, such as making the curriculum, teaching resources and guidance for parents available via parent portals. It would be fun to see some of this material taught on BBC Bitesize, for example.
As parents, we have a duty to ensure that our children are receiving a high-quality education, but in order to fulfil that duty, we must retain the right to engage with the material that our children are being taught in schools. With one tweak in mind, Amendment 171F has my full support.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I very much welcome this debate. First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for his intervention and the work of his Select Committee, which is invaluable to the House. He put to the Minister very stark choices that we face as a House when presented with the kind of Bill that the noble Baroness has brought before us. In essence, either we take those clauses out or we must see from the Government a new approach to the way we deal with secondary legislation. As the noble Lord suggested, either we must be able to amend such regulations—framework clause regulations, as he referred to it—when they come to us, or we must have a much more extensive system of scrutiny. Otherwise, the House will start to change the convention and reject secondary legislation, because we cannot allow Governments to steamroller through this type of legislation. I suspect we will see, time after time in this Session, the House becoming much more assertive about the way we are being treated.
I very much welcome Amendment 168, from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. I was tickled by the definition of democracy, which, in subsection (4)(d) of the proposed new clause, means to include
“decentralised decision-making, accountable at an appropriate level to the electorate”
and then comparing it to the Bill, which is taking powers away from local education authorities and giving it to either the Secretary of State or non-accountable academies. Ministers should certainly pay attention to the noble Lord’s amendment.
I strongly support my noble friend Lady Morris on Amendment 171F, and I say to the Minister that, if she thinks the wording is unacceptable and there may be some perverse incentives in it, I hope she will say that the department will make it absolutely clear to schools that parents must be able to see the materials we have been talking about—not to veto, because we need a partnership between the school, the teachers, the students and the parents—and she must come up with something firm. A lot of people have raised issues with her department and officials, and they have been mealy-mouthed in their approach and reluctant to say anything firm at all, but I think that time has passed.
Finally, on 10 June, the Children’s Commissioner published a blog in which she said she had been asked by the department to review the content of RSE, and that she has been specifically asked to look at
“How we can support schools to teach high quality RSE effectively and with confidence .. How teachers can feel fully equipped to teach these subjects well … How we can include the voice of children and young people in achieving the DfE’s aims for RSE more widely.”
That is to be welcomed. I have attempted to get a copy of the letter that the department sent to the commissioner, but the Library of the House has so far been unable to get a copy—I suspect it has not yet been written. I am surprised that it has nothing to say about parents and their involvement. Would the Minister look into this to see that the letter, when it finally goes to the commissioner, makes it clear that parents are seen to be a partner as well?
“Funding for specialist education services for children and young people with sensory impairment(1) An English local authority must secure that provision of specialist education services to children and young people with sensory impairment and their parents is sufficient to facilitate the development of the child or young person with sensory impairment and to help him or her achieve the best possible educational and other outcomes.(2) Specialist education services include support to the parent of a child with sensory impairment, following the point of identification of any sensory impairment.(3) The Secretary of State must ensure that funding to local authorities for provision of services under this section is sufficient.(4) In discharging their duty under subsection (1), a local authority must have regard to any guidance given from time to time by the Secretary of State.”Member's explanatory statement
Part 2 of the Schools Bill makes a number of changes to school and local education funding. This amendment seeks to introduce a new duty for local authorities and the Secretary of State to ensure there is sufficient funding for specialist education services for children and young people with sensory impairments.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I have two amendments in this group, Amendments 97 and 99. I also have Amendment 129, which is in a later group, for which I apologise that I will be unable to be present. I also support the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, in his Amendments 163, 164, 165 and 166. I pay tribute to him for his excellent and compelling report and recommendations about disabled students that was published earlier this year.
I make it clear that I support the Government’s ambition, through the schools White Paper and the Bill, that all schools should be welcoming and inclusive for all children, including those with special educational needs and disabilities. I also support the Government’s target for 90% of children to achieve expected outcomes in reading, writing and maths by 2030. But to achieve these goals for deaf children, it is particularly important that expert support is available from local specialist education services for children with sensory impairment. I pay tribute to the National Deaf Children’s Society for its work and its help in drafting these two amendments, and to the Special Educational Consortium for its work.
Part 2 of the Bill sets out a number of changes to schools and local education funding. One key area that is currently funded through local education funding is specialist education services for deaf children. These services are usually formed of small teams of peripatetic or visiting teachers of the deaf and other specialist staff. These teachers play a key role in ensuring that deaf children achieve good language outcomes, and as well as advising on and supporting the inclusion of deaf children in mainstream schools, their early intervention work with families of pre-school deaf children helps to ensure the best possible start in life for deaf children.
Despite the importance of this role, there has been a 17% decline in the number of teachers of the deaf since 2011. In addition, the National Deaf Children’s Society’s annual freedom of information request to local authorities shows that specialist education services continue to be under threat, from either cuts to budgets and staffing or local SEND reviews of provision. Parents also repeatedly say that services are not sufficiently funded to meet their children’s needs.
These specialist educational services for deaf children are usually commissioned by the local authority and funded through the high-needs block, but these services have no formal statutory basis so funding for their work is discretionary. The SEND Green Paper observes that a “vicious cycle” has emerged, where funding is moved away from early intervention and inclusion, so leading the system to not delivering for children, young people and families. It is my belief that specialist education services for deaf children and other low-incidence needs are a critical part of the solution to the problem, in helping to ensure that deaf children start primary school with good language, and ensuring that mainstream schools have access to specialist advice and support.
Improvements to the Bill are required if the Government are to meet their ambitions around inclusion for children with SEND. Indeed, it will also need improvement if the Government are to reach the target set for 90% of children to achieve expected outcomes in reading, writing and maths by 2030, as I said earlier. Looking at the results of deaf children and those with sensory impairments, who do not on the whole have a learning disability—so there is no reason why they should not achieve the same as hearing children—we see that, currently, they achieve an entire GCSE grade less than hearing pupils and have done so for at least six years in a row. Too few deaf children receive tailored or specialist careers advice that focuses on their needs and, as a result, many have limited expectations for what they can achieve.
There are many other examples of poor outcomes for deaf children, including in later life, so it is very important that we do more in our education system to get them started on a much firmer base and foundation. I would welcome a great deal of reassurance by the Government that they understand this and will be taking action to do it. I beg to move.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this group, and a particular pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. I not only thank him for his kind words about my report on the disabled students’ allowance but thoroughly and full-throatedly support his amendments, particularly Amendments 97 and 99 in this group. Everything that he said in relation to deaf and hard-of-hearing students was absolutely right and applicable to partially sighted and blind students and, indeed, all SEN and disabled young people in our education system. I will speak to Amendments 163 to 166 in my name, all of which largely come out of the review that I conducted earlier this year.
Amendment 163 deals with that horrific—shocking in the 21st century—educational attainment gap for our young people with special educational needs and disabilities. According to key stage 2 stats, at age 11, only 22% of SEN students are achieving the appropriate level in literacy and numeracy. At GCSE, they are achieving pretty much half of what their non-disabled counterparts are achieving. When one looks at the progression rate—that is, young people going into higher education—the rates are over 47.5% for non-disabled students, 20% for those with SEN, and 8% for those with an education, health and care plan. If we go further and look at those progressing to Russell group universities and the higher-tariff providers, it is 12% of non-disabled students, but only 3% of those with SEN, and 1% of those with an EHCP.
This is all about levelling up, or the lack thereof, and what needs to be done to close that educational attainment gap for our SEN and disabled young people. The amendment proposes a review into this, and indeed a plan, reviewed every year, until we close the educational attainment gap by the end of 2027.
Amendment 164 speaks directly to the disabled students’ allowance and what should be happening in our schools and colleges right now to promote it, so that our SEN and disabled young people can be aware of it and can know that higher education is a route for them where they will be supported and enabled to succeed and fulfil their potential. Only 29% of disabled people in higher education currently take advantage of the DSA. One of the main reasons cited for this low take-up was lack of knowledge or awareness of its existence. That is why this is recommendation 1 of my review. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that an information and awareness campaign in every school and college about the existence of the DSA and what it can do for our disabled young people would be a thoroughly good thing, and is very much supported by the Student Loans Company, among others?
Amendment 165 speaks to the idea of a passport that disabled people could carry through their education and higher education and, indeed, into their working lives, to cut through the bureaucracy of having to constantly declare what their disability is, what their needs are, how that impacts on their education, higher education and work experience, and what needs to be put in place.
It seems to me that all of this could be enabled through a passport, not least now in a digital real-time format, cutting bureaucracy and time at every beat point of the interaction that the young person would have with the state, and cutting costs. All too often, young people are asked to provide evidence, and they have to pay to get it from one part of the state—be it the NHS, a doctor or whatever—and present it to another part of the state to get a particular allowance. I believe a passport is overdue and would be beneficial to all concerned. I know there is an excellent pilot under way between higher education and access to work, but I believe that, if we are to gain all the benefits and lay out a seamless process for all our young people, it should run right through school and higher education and into work.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, this has been an interesting and useful debate. For me, the report by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, was very telling. As he said, taking his report and the amendments together would be very empowering for young people with SEN and disabilities. The Minister responded to each of the amendments and that is encouraging, but I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, hopes the Government will go further. I hope there can be further discussions.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for her support. Like my noble friend Lady Chapman, I found her speech moving and instructive. I am afraid that experience is all too common. I am sure all of us have experienced discussions with parents who have real problems when their children have illnesses and the school is not able to respond in the necessary way. As I have mentioned before, I think that, in the new arrangements in the health service—the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, will know about the integrated care partnerships—there must be an opportunity for the health service and schools within health ICS boundaries to talk together about how some of this can be resolved.
I noted what the Minister said about statutory guidance. She will know that the problem is that it is not working in some areas—the noble Lord, Lord Storey, talked about inconsistencies—so I am sure that her offer of a meeting with the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will be very welcome.
I turn to my amendments. I am struck by the poor outcomes for deaf people. Some 55% to 58% of deaf people are in employment, compared with 81% of non-disabled people. More generally, disabled people experience higher rates of unemployment and economic inactivity. I am convinced that part of the issue lies with schools and the need for more support of them. The Minister said on my Amendment 97 that local authorities are required to provide specialist support, but they are flexible on funding and, unfortunately, over the last few years that flexibility has not worked in deaf children’s favour.
I note what the Minister said about the school register on Amendment 99. That is very welcome, and I thank her for that assurance.
My noble friend Lady Chapman ended by saying she thought the Government could table amendments later on to meet some of these points and respond after the Green Paper. The Minister said that that was not possible, but I still think there are great opportunities to pause the Bill to allow her time to do so, and I hope the Government will think again about that. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath ExcerptsWednesday 15th June 2022
(2 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 1-III(b) Amendments for Committee (Supplementary to the Third Marshalled List) - (15 Jun 2022)
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend. I have added my name to her Amendments 60, 61 and 75. I have my own Amendment 62, and my Amendments 69 and 70 seek to amend Amendment 68 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on which my noble friend Lady Blower has already spoken.
I very much support what my noble friend said and could not help reflecting on the previous debate, where the argument was about the extent to which this legislation is forcing single academies to join multi-academy trusts. My view is that although the noble Baroness was explicit on this, we do not really need it, because the system is putting so much pressure on individual academies anyway. The combination of the government policy in the White Paper, the regulator, the regional apparatus and what people can see happening is putting tremendous pressure on those schools. I think that this is a really underhand way of doing it; if the Government have a policy, on this or on another Bill, they should be explicit.
The underhand way in which this is all being done reinforces the points we are making in this series of amendments about the importance of governing bodies. What seems to be happening is that all sorts of secretive talks take place between MATs and the heads of the schools that they want to take over, and left out of these discussions are the parents and staff of the individual schools. They are usually presented with a fait accompli. As my noble friend said, this formal consultation stuff is really an attempt to legitimise a decision that the system has clearly already made. Our amendment seeks to put this right.
In addition to the excellent National Governance Association submissions, the work by the LSE and by Professor West and colleagues, which has looked into the governance of academies in detail, is very striking. I draw the Minister’s attention to the recent instance of what I regard as high-handed action at Holland Park School. Since March, when staff and parents first learned of the governors’ plan to transfer the school to a MAT, they have been seeking dialogue with the governing body to negotiate the involvement of the entire school community in a transparent, accountable consultation. As Ministers know, the school has been through a great deal of turbulence resulting from management changes in the past year or so: the sudden departure of the new head, the imposition of a new governing body and the absence of much of the leadership team for quite lengthy periods. It has clearly been a challenge to maintain a sense of coherence and direction for the children on a day-to-day basis. I have met some of the teachers. I believe that they have worked hard to provide continuity for pupils, but that is put at risk by this kind of unilateral, opaque decision-making and poor communication from the governing body.
This is often reflected up and down the country. The absence of meaningful consultation in the MAT acquisition process is a common theme. There have been numerous examples of high-handed governors ignoring parents and teachers, who have then fought hard to stop the school being taken out of local authority control and turned into an academy or forced to join a multi-academy trust. Public meetings organised by parents and staff, with large attendance, often make it made abundantly clear to the governing body that the larger school community does not want to go down that path, but they are often dismissed by the people making the decisions. Parents, governors, staff and pupils have no official rights to detailed information on the reasons why their school might choose to academise under a particular trust, let alone to have their views taken into account in the process.
As Warwick Mansell has written, the academies policy sees all decision-making as a closed-loop process between central government and academy trusts, with no decision-maker answerable at a local level to the people who depend on the decisions. The comment often made from the Dispatch Box is that we will talk to the academy trust. Once again, we do not hear about maintained schools. Ministers constantly harp on about MATs and point to their achievements—which are many—but they do not point to their defects and they give the sense that maintained schools are second-class entities. I object to that.
The Government’s amendment reads:
“Before a maintained school in England is converted into an Academy following an application … the local authority must consult such persons as they think appropriate about whether the conversion should take place.”
So, as I read it, it is only after you have made the application decision that the consultation has to take place. My argument is that that is far too late. Once the conversion application has been made, effectively the decision has been taken. Asking the parents what they think about it then is, frankly, a waste of time. Seeing the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, here reminds me of health service consultations, which she will know about over many years: you make a decision and then you put out a consultation. My noble friend Lord Winston will also know about the way that the health service does consultations: you make the decision, you consult on it and then you reach the view that the original decision was right in the first place. For me, that is what the amendment is talking about.
Essentially, with the combination of our amendments we seek to ensure that a consultation must be comprehensive and in a timely fashion with the parents and staff of the school that is subject to the application. As my noble friend said, we are entitled to have it shown how the proposal will benefit children’s education and, most importantly, what alternatives have been considered. I do not think that is at all unreasonable. If the Government are asking us to believe that this is all going to happen by a process of gradual change rather than mandation, I would have thought they would welcome a proper process of parent and staff involvement.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 75, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, and I agree with pretty well everything that he said. I shall build on it with a practical example.
Amendment 75 says that consultation with parents and staff has to happen before the application to join a MAT. I entirely agree with what the noble Lord just said about the problems with the government amendment. Across many fields of government, not just the health service, the term “consultation” now has an extremely bad odour. That is something that really needs to change, or we need to find a new word or a different process that genuinely addresses the collection and exploration of views before a decision is made. That is not what people think of when you say “consultation” now, but that is the word in the amendment because that is the word we currently have.
I draw the Committee’s attention to the sad and traumatic case study of Moulsecoomb Primary School in Brighton, which is of course of particular interest to my noble friend Lady Jones. We have just seen first-choice applications to the school fall to their lowest level ever after the school was forced to become an academy despite considerable local community, family and parent resistance. Of course I wish the school all the best and very much hope that things work out for it, but we have to focus on what kind of disruption happens both to pupils and to a community if a decision is made that parents and the community are unhappy with. We have seen a number of pupils leave that school and a huge amount of time, energy and attention that might have gone into doing the best possible for the education of pupils going instead into resistance to an ideological decision being made. It is important that this whole set of amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, would make this a co-creation and co-production process, not an imposition.
Baroness Barran (Con)
The noble Lord’s point is a little broader than what we are talking about at the moment. With the free school applications that have come across my desk I have certainly tried to be very aware of, and sensitive to, the challenges they can pose. The noble Lord is also very well aware that, historically, there were areas where new free schools have been really important in raising standards. There is not a single answer.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I will take the opportunity of the Minister’s slight pause to ask her a question about my reading of her Amendment 68, which says:
“Before a maintained school in England is converted into an Academy following an application under section 3A (application for Academy order by local authority)”.
By the time the local authorities have made an application, that is, in effect, the decision. The point my noble friend and I were trying to make is that, surely, there should be mandatory consultation before the local authority makes the application.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I am glad that I have been promoted to be the noble Lord’s “noble friend”; things are looking up. I am very happy to take this offline with the noble Lord. It is just not case that the decision is made at that point, but I would be happy to meet with him and we can go through this in more detail, if that would be helpful.
Amendment 75 is concerned with existing stand-alone academies joining multi-academy trusts, which we discussed at length in the earlier group. The process by which an academy joins another trust is not set out in legislation; it is a matter for agreement between the two trusts and is subject to the approval of the regional director. I hope that noble Lords can forgive me for repeating myself. When considering any application for a stand-alone academy to join a MAT, the regional director will consider what stakeholder engagement has taken place, and the views expressed by stakeholders.
I do not believe that it is necessary or appropriate to provide for very specific consultation requirements in legislation. Stakeholder engagement is already embedded in the decision-making process. However, I agree that the process by which academies join trusts should be transparent—here, I am a little more optimistic about reassuring the noble Baroness, the noble Lord and other noble Lords opposite. As part of the regulatory review, which I have mentioned previously, we will consider the scope to clarify the arrangements for engaging with stakeholders when a stand-alone academy joins a multi-academy trust.
In the light of Amendment 68 in my name, and given these assurances, I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, to withdraw her Amendment 60, and that other noble Lords do not move their amendments. I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport, that I did not echo the birthday wishes, but I wish her a very happy birthday.
“School reserves and income raising(1) Where an academy or maintained school comes under the control of a Multi Academy Trust, the reserves of the school must be—(a) independently audited to arrive at an agreed level;(b) ring-fenced for the exclusive use of the school for the benefit of that school's pupils with any expenditures required to be agreed by the Local Governing Body of the school.(2) Where an academy or maintained school comes under the control of a Multi Academy Trust, any income generated by the school including the renting out of premises when under the control of the Multi Academy Trust must be used exclusively for the benefit of that school's pupils with expenditures required to be agreed by the Local Governing Body of the school.”Member's explanatory statement
The amendment is designed to ensure that where an academy or maintained school comes under the control of a Multi Academy Trust, the reserves and income generating activities of the school can only be used with the agreement of the Local Governing Body of the school exclusively for the benefit of that school's pupils.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, my Amendment 79 is part of a wider group dealing with funding of schools and provisions in the Bill for the nationally determined funding for schools in England. My amendment is rather narrow, but it introduces the subject of funding. My concern is the circumstance under which an academy or mainstream school comes under the control of a multi-academy trust, as there are questions about what happens to its reserves or income-generating activities. I want to see them essentially used, with the agreement of the local governing body of the school, exclusively for the benefit of that school’s pupils. I am very honoured to have an Opposition Front Bench amendment to my amendment, Amendment 79ZA, and I very much accept the principle of what my noble friend is proposing there.
The Local Government Association briefing has a lot of wisdom on the matter:
“At present, MATs can reallocate an uncapped proportion of funding from schools’ budgets within their MAT, with no requirement for transparency as to how this money is spent or the outcomes it delivers. … While we support MATs having a degree of flexibility over budgets within their trust to best meet schools and pupils needs, the lack of public transparency over their expenditure should be addressed to ensure public funding is delivering the best outcomes for pupils.”
I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, will speak in this group, but on the first day in Committee he said that there is a danger of a multi-academy trust removing a highly skilled governing body and the trust, to cover its own costs, would end up top-slicing the school’s budgets, making successful, smaller schools a little less viable.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I may have to write to the noble Lord on that. However, he will know that, through the Education and Skills Funding Agency—the ESFA—we already deal with payments to, as I think he said, roughly 10,000 schools. I would hope that the infrastructure that has been built to do that would allow scaling without having to increase staff in a direct proportion. However, I will write to him to clarify that.
Specifically regarding local authorities, there is a key interaction between schools and high-needs funding, which we are consulting on. The House will be aware that funding for high needs is increasing by £1 billion this year to a total of over £9 billion, which is an unprecedented investment in this area. Once we move to a direct national funding formula, local authorities will no longer calculate a local schools formula or transfer funding from the schools block to high needs. Clause 40 provides a new national-to-local budget reallocation mechanism from schools to high needs.
The Secretary of State will make final decisions to ensure national consistency, while still taking account of local circumstances. That could not occur if decision-making was left to 150 local authorities. Local authorities will still retain a key role in this process. They will initiate requests for funding transfers, setting out their rationale, and will consult with local schools. Overall, we think this strikes the right balance and aligns with the wider reforms in the recent SEND and AP Green Paper.
I hope that I have convinced your Lordships that the direct national funding formula will allow us fairly, consistently and transparently to fund schools on the basis of their needs. I ask the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, to withdraw his Amendment 79 and I hope that other noble Lords will not move theirs.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate which has ranged very far and wide. I put in only an innocent little amendment to talk about the reserves of schools going into an academy trust or multi-academy trust. It is the gentlest of amendments, which the Minister ruthlessly swept away, saying that it would stifle the innovation and leadership of the multi-academy trust. However, behind it was an issue of substance, which is that the integrity of a whole school and its leadership is very important, and having control over its own budget goes with that.
Obviously, we have a load of interesting amendments around the whole concept of fair funding of schools. The noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, spoke on rural schools. I totally agree with my noble friend Lord Davies; he might have mentioned Birmingham schools in his analysis of the issues that metropolitan schools face. My noble friend Lady Chapman, in looking at a region’s ranking in the index of multiple deprivation, sought to bring a holistic solution to the undoubted different issues and tensions that are faced.
I noted the Minister’s helpful comments. Whenever you have a funding formula, it is easier to shift money when you have real growth in the overall funding settlement. One of the problems we have at the moment has been the squeeze on school funding—my noble friend Lord Adonis made a telling intervention in our previous day in Committee. From my own experience, the health service has gone through its own funding formula. We had RAWP for many years, and then ACRA. It was all about the same issues of teeing up deprivation in rural and urban areas, age factors, and a population who are growing older. However, my goodness me, it was much easier to shift money when you had real growth in the system.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
If my noble friend will allow me to butt in with some figures, London Councils points out that, between 2017-18 and 2020-21, 84% of schools in inner London saw a real-terms decrease in per pupil funding, compared with 55% in the rest of the country.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend. The point is that, if we look at school funding going back to 2010, my goodness me, what a squeeze there has been between then and 2022.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My noble friend may know that the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is regarded as pretty authoritative on these things, has said that school spending per pupil in England fell by 9% in real terms between 2009-10 and 2019-20—the largest cut in over 40 years.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
There we have it. Is it not good to have noble friends to fully apprise me of the facts?
I sympathise with what the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said on transport costs for 16 to 18 year-olds. This is not an issue just in rural areas; at sixth-form schools in metropolitan areas, there is a huge movement of students. I know that, in Birmingham, there is an enormous movement of students, which can be costly.
I noted the noble Baroness’s comments about the EMA. I would gently say that it was a coalition Government decision to get rid of the EMA. I think that the EMA was one of the most brilliant initiatives—we still have it under a Labour Government in Wales—to encourage attendance at school. It is a great pity that it was removed.
I sympathise also with what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said on the impact of Covid.
On Amendments 92 and 93 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, I agree with him about the centralisation of powers. There is an issue around how bureaucracy responds to it but it is also about the span of political control. I do not want to go back over the first 18 clauses of the Bill but it is about putting the two together. There is a desire for the Secretary of State to control everything, including funding. The implication is that, in the end, Ministers are going to have to account for individual school performance here. I do not think that they have really taken that into account. The line of accountability, including for dosh, is clear now; Ministers have taken responsibility. In the end, they will find it very difficult to say, “I’m not going to get involved in that; it’s nothing to do with us”, because I am afraid that it will be to do with them. That is why it really is not good to have such central powers in an education system.
What an uplifting contribution from my noble friend Lord Knight. I have skimmed the Times commission’s report. It has some wonderful ideas. What struck me is how uplifting it is. It gave me a positive feeling about what education could do, which drags us away from the rather dreary, exam-focused situation that we now find ourselves in. I almost thought that year 6 pupils might be able to enjoy their last year, instead of having incessant pressure from those wretched SATs at the end of the year. My noble friend is also right about pupil councils. In many cases, before we moved to the new system, the Lords outreach programme allowed us to engage with student councils. I found it a fantastic experience. Having some money tied in with sustainability is a wonderful idea indeed.
Finally, the Minister was a bit dismissive of my noble friend Lady Chapman’s Amendment 79C, which would introduce a requirement to report on academy funding and performance. I think that that is a very good idea. I would tie that into the remarks from the noble Lord, Lord Deben, about transparency. I know the Minister says that this is all transparent but the process by which the funding formula is put together—it is the weightings that are so crucial—warrants greater transparency.
Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath ExcerptsMonday 13th June 2022
(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I have a lot of sympathy with the intervention from the Front Bench by my noble friend Lady Chapman around the unfortunate nature of the grouping of these amendments. I understand that there are reasons why technically the Government might want to bring forward amendments, and I accept that some poor drafting is being corrected by some of these amendments, but it is tricky. For example, there is no explanatory statement on Amendment 96, so without delving back into legislation it is difficult to prepare a view in advance or to understand anything to do with what the Government were proposing. That is really unfortunate.
Government Amendment 148 introduces a new criminal offence that is imprisonable, and with powers of entry for inspectors, by a technical amendment in Committee. These are quite big things. Given the explanation the Minister has given, I think I probably agree with the amendment, but at this stage it is difficult to form a considered view. When this Committee gets to considering independent educational institutions, which that amendment relates to, I hope we can be reminded by the Minister that we have already had some discussion of this new criminal offence around repeated operation of unregistered educational institutions.
There is a policy question around whether two years is the right notice period for secure 16-to-19 academies, as opposed to seven years, but I think the Minister has probably given a good enough answer.
I mostly rose following what the noble Lord, Lord Baker, had to say, which in a way felt a little outside the scope of these amendments, but I can see that there is a government amendment here on terminating an academy agreement and another about essentially including single-academy trusts in termination, so I think it is in the spirit of this group for the noble Lord, Lord Baker, to have mentioned this important issue about the independence of trustees. I am sure that most of your Lordships are trustees of some charity or other, or multiple charities, and so do not need reminding that pretty much the only thing you are asked to do as a trustee, first and foremost, is to put the charitable aims first, above anything else. There are then various other good governance and financial probity things you do, but the charitable aims are everything.
As academy trustees, we now find that we have a funding agreement with government, we are subject to direction from government, and we are now subject to being able to be removed by government, all within a statutory framework; the sense that there may be any kind of independence for trustees in that context, and that they are more than agents of the state, will be very difficult to sustain.
Should it not be appropriate for the Minister to reply instantly to what the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has said, it will be important for us to see some legal advice from government that the charitable status of academy trusts will not be threatened by the further encroachment of the Secretary of State in the operation of these organisations.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, following on from the comments of my friend the noble Lord, Lord Baker, the difficulty seems to be that we are discussing these matters in a vacuum. It will be very interesting to hear the Minister’s response to the point that the noble Lord raised. As I said on the first day in Committee, the Minister said at Second Reading that she was launching a review to
“establish the appropriate model and options for how best to regulate the English schools system”.—[Official Report, 23/5/22; col. 740.]
The question I put to her is this: how on earth can we deal with the substantive issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, if we simply do not know how these schools will be regulated in the future? If ever there were a case for pausing a Bill, this is it.
Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)
My Lords, I will make a couple of observations. First, I strongly agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight, about the grouping of the amendments today; it is so random as to be almost impossible to fathom or follow. I give the benefit of the doubt to whoever arranges these groups, but if the aim is to throw sand in our faces and make the job far harder then there will be trouble when we get to the voting stage.
I turn to a couple of specific amendments. On Amendment 30, my noble friend the Minister admits that this power exists already. The Academies Act has been in place for some 10 or 12 years; why are officials just working this out only now? How many other parts of the Bill have that issue? I think the answer is that a great many do.
Amendment 43 wants powers to terminate agreements with trusts, but, again, there is already the power to remove a school from a poorly performing trust on an Ofsted judgment of special measures. There have been plans and talk about extending that to what is called RRI—that is, two successive RI judgments. Why is that not being done? This does not need legislation as far as I am aware.
To sum up the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, we are discussing this in a most extraordinary vacuum. There has been no consultation on the Bill and we have had no sight of regulatory review, yet we are plunged into these incredibly technical, idiosyncratic clauses. All of us share the concern to improve children’s educational outcomes. That is why I maintain my position to seek to remove most of these clauses, so that the Government can step back and rethink.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I thank your Lordships for your contributions. I confess to being puzzled about the concerns on groupings, because those were agreed through the usual channels. Colleagues will obviously have heard the concerns expressed today, but we did go through the normal process and were not aware of some of the points raised.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, with the greatest respect, I say that the Government put those amendments into one group. Only movers of amendments can remove amendments from them so, as far as ordinary Members of the House of Lords are concerned, we were presented with a fait accompli about which we could do nothing.
Baroness Barran (Con)
As the noble Lord heard me say, this was agreed through the usual channels where we could have discussed that, had serious concerns been raised. The point has been heard loud and clear but I wanted to give the context. A number of points have been raised which I will aim to address, but I start by thanking the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol for her support on Amendment 40.
I turn to Amendments 76A and 76B tabled by the noble Lord, Lord German, and presented today by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, in relation to Amendment 76 in my name on secure schools. Regarding Amendment 76A, the Government remain open to considering any objection to the opening of a secure school. We expect that if the question were framed in this way, however, most local concerns about opening a secure school would focus on its custodial nature. These concerns may very well be valid. However, the secure school provider is not realistically able to address issues with the fundamental character of the school. Instead of consulting on whether a secure school should open, we propose that the provider must consult on how it should work with local partners. That, we hope, should ensure that the consultation is focused on issues that the provider is empowered to address.
Connected to this, Amendment 76B, which proposes to include local government in the consultation requirement, would not result in any material change. This is because the secure school provider must consult on how it will work with local partners, and the definition of local partners that we have used already includes any person
“whose functions are functions of a public nature”,
as set out in Section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998. The noble Baroness asked if there were any changes in relation to planning. There is clearly no intention to evade planning regulations. She also asked whether the position of the local authority had changed. Of course, more broadly, the position of local authorities will change, given that we intend to give them powers to set up multi-academy trusts, which they have not historically been able to do.
The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, raised concerns about the potential scope of the proposed education and childcare behaviour orders, while welcoming the principle behind them. I reassure her that while these orders have been designed to be broad in scope, their use will be focused. The court can exercise discretion to impose an order only if it considers it appropriate to do so, and it would be appropriate only for the purposes of protecting children from the risk of harm arising from a defendant re-committing an offence of conducting an unregistered independent educational institution.
We intend for these orders to prohibit activities taking place only in specified settings at specified times of the week, rather than them being a sweeping power. In sentencing, the courts must do so proportionately, so it is not our intention that these orders should prohibit someone working in a setting that is already subject to another regulatory regime. Other regulatory bodies, such as the Teaching Regulation Agency, may wish to take action against those found guilty of conducting an unregistered school but these orders are not designed to interfere with that work. Their aim is to prevent the behaviour which has led to some being prosecuted for conducting an unregistered school, not to interfere with someone’s activity beyond that.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
I was reminded earlier by the Minister that there was a debate on Clause 3—I remember it very vividly—on the previous day. In fact, that was when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, who is the Convenor of the Cross Benches, said it was outrageous and should be deleted from the Bill, but I do not remember an actual Motion being mentioned on Clause 3. I do not see Clause 3 mentioned in any of the amendments from 1 to 35. Clauses 1 and 2 were, and Clauses 1 and 4 were dealt with on Wednesday.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, with the greatest respect to the noble Lord—I very much agree with the thrust of what he has said—I actually did have a Clause 3 stand part notice, to which the noble Lord signed his name, so I think we did debate it. Our problem is that we want to debate it again, and when we come to the fifth group, we shall want to debate it again and again and again.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
Does the noble Lord wish to continue to discuss Clause 3 stand part?
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
That is where I part company with my noble friend, in that I am relatively comfortable with others managing the schools, but with that management being accountable to local authorities and part of that accountability being managing the admissions process for all the schools in their area.
Another problem I see in a minority of cases of those schools that are their own admissions authority is that they are trying to find ways to choose pupils: rather than parents choosing schools, it is schools choosing parents. That is strongly related to accountability. Accountability for public funding and for delivery of school services is really important and I do not want to dilute that in any way, but the danger is that we end up with schools trying to ensure that a standardised pupil comes in who their whole curriculum and way of operating fits, so that they have the best chance of success.
In that respect, I commend to your Lordships a book by Todd Rose, an academic at Harvard, called The End of Average, which begins with a great story of the US Air Force when it first introduced fast jets. They kept crashing and the air force did not understand why. It worked out that the reason was that they were all designed for a standard dimension of pilot, so the controls were in slightly awkward places and the split-second timing required for fast jets meant that a lot of them crashed. That is why we now have adjustable seats in our cars, so that we can adjust to the different dimensions of people. The danger I see is that, thanks to our system of accountability, we have that problem of standardisation, with schools trying to admit pupils of standard dimensions, so to speak.
I point your Lordships to a problem I have seen in the London Borough of Lambeth, where a multi-academy trust, the board of which I chair, has a secondary school academy called City Heights. We were approached earlier in this school year about reducing the pupil allocated number for City Heights. It was not a unilateral conversation: the local authority approached all the secondary schools in the area, because the predicted demand for school places was coming down and it needed to reduce the provision of school places across the borough. All the secondary schools agreed verbally, informally, that they would reduce their PAN proportionately to accommodate that reduction. What happened when, finally, the proposals were formalised and agreed? Two of those schools, which happen to be two of the more popular schools—two academy schools—increased their PAN so that they could get more money in and continue their story of success, but at the expense of all the other schools which had played ball and tried to do the right thing with the local authority. That kind of practice needs to be sorted out, and this is an opportunity to do so.
We see some problems about fair in-year access, where pupils need to get admitted into schools in-year. We see some social selection by schools that are their own admissions authorities: things such as very subtle boundary changes, where it is hard to spot what they have done, but they happen to have cut out a social housing estate or done something else that just makes it a little easier to select the standard pupil that they are designed for. There might be elaborate religious criteria, as I mentioned. There might be talk in their prospectus of these great school trips that everyone will be expected to contribute a load of money to. That is part of the social selection that can be the practice of admissions authorities that bothers me.
This amendment would lead to fairer admissions, provide more local compatibility with the 101 varieties of admissions arrangements going on within a local authority area, particularly primary feeders, and restore confidence among parents in our admission system where that small minority of schools which abuse it and try to choose parents are undermining that confidence and we need to put it right.
This group has a number of other amendments in it; I will not attempt to speak to them all. I am supportive of my noble friend Lord Hunt’s amendment on grammar schools. I will not anticipate his comments but, when thinking about what he might say, I was reminded of a wonderful passage in an interesting, really great book written by Tim Brighouse and Mick Waters, About Our Schools—it is a huge tome of a thing but I commend it to your Lordships—about some of the early private hospitals. They had criteria around what patients they would select, in essence, to make their job easier: if you could admit only patients who were not that sick, you would be a really successful hospital. Similarly, if you admit only pupils who are already pretty bright, your job is really straightforward, but it leaves the rest of the schools with a real problem that you then have pick up with the majority.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, the Clause 28 stand part notice is in my name. Because it is about grammar schools, I think it is right to have it in this group, in talking about admissions policies.
I very much empathised with my noble friend Lord Knight when he spoke about the traumas of year 6 for not only the children who have to take SATs but the parents who have to choose—or attempt to choose—a secondary school for their children. It was also interesting to hear about the parallel between private hospitals choosing their patients and schools choosing their pupils. Often, the difference between health and education is that, in the main, our best hospitals are based in urban areas, with some of the poorest people, serving them. In a sense, I am not sure that education has ever quite been able to pull off the support that the health service has often given to the poorest and most deprived people, imperfect though that may be.
Clause 28 is concerned with grammar schools and academies but it has prompted me to ask the Minister a wider question: what is the Government’s general policy in relation to grammar schools? We know that, in 2016, the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, said that she wanted to allow for an expansion in grammar schools. It was in the 2017 manifesto but nothing appeared in the Queen’s Speech; more recently, the Government have said that they do not want to see an expansion in the grammar school system. However, rumours and briefings often come out saying that, actually, the Government would like to see a change in policy.
We have already seen a number of so-called satellite grammar schools open or get under way. Basically, this is a back-door way of expanding the grammar school system. Satellite schools bear the same name as the host grammar school. They are often located several miles away. Eventually, of course, it will lead to two separate schools being established. We know that the county council in Kent seems determined to expand its selective schools despite all the evidence showing that the Kent system is a poor one in terms of overall outcomes for the whole of the student population. Grammar schools in Kent do nothing more than attain the results that you would expect if you selected for high attainment—hence my noble friend Lord Knight’s comment about schools choosing their pupils.
As Comprehensive Future has stated:
“What is there to stop any grammar school from creating a whole chain of satellites stretching from Northumberland to Land’s End?”
This is not an academic argument because there have been suggestions that the Bill could be amended by Conservative MPs when it goes to the Commons. The Evening Standard has reported that the Government refused to rule out lifting the current ban on new grammar schools, while the Telegraph has reported that the Government are open to expanding academic selection. Indeed, Chris Philp MP was quoted as referring to his plans to amend the Schools Bill to support new grammars. Can the Minister clarify the Government’s exact position?
I am afraid that I am old enough to have experienced the wretched old grammar/secondary modern system, and the 11-plus, which condemned so many children to be classified as failures at the age of 11 and to be sent to schools with fewer resources and less ambition. That is why the move to a comprehensive system was so popular. It is interesting that the movement started in some of the shire counties. I lived in Oxford, and Oxfordshire and Leicestershire were determined to get rid of grammar schools in the 1950s and 1960s because they did not want all their children to be branded as failures at the age of 11. In 1953 and 1957, Leicestershire started to experiment with comprehensive education, expanding it throughout the whole county in 1969. Oxfordshire started in 1955 and 1957, subsequently expanding throughout the whole county as well.
Why did parents support this? It is very simple. Those arguing for grammar schools present only the image of children passing the 11-plus and going to grammar schools, and their subsequent achievements. They do not refer to the large number of children—around 70% in Kent—who are told aged 11 that they are failures and then attend underresourced secondary moderns. There is plenty of research to show that in those areas with a grammar school system, achievement is lower. Look no further than Kent and Buckinghamshire. Grammar school systems continually and consistently undermine educational achievement. According to the DfE, in 2019, the GCSE pass rate was 11 points below the national average in Kent and five points below average in Buckinghamshire.
Claims that grammar schools give a foot up the ladder for poorer children have, again, been debunked comprehensively. Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that in the remaining grammar schools, the percentage of pupils from poor backgrounds is lower than ever: 2.7% are entitled to free meals, against 16% nationally. Once the pupil intake of grammar schools is taken into account, based on factors such as chronic poverty, ethnicity, home language, special educational needs and age in year group, Durham University analysis shows that grammar schools are no more or less effective than other schools.
Finally, the poorest children in Kent and Medway have a less than 10% chance of getting into grammar schools, while for children in the very richest neighbourhoods, it is over 50%—schools choosing their own pupils. I want the Minister to say that there is no intention of changing the policy with any amendments that any Conservative MP might seek to move in the Commons, although whether the Bill reaches the Commons is a question that we are all interested in. Assuming that it does eventually reach the Commons, I hope that the Government will say today that they will have no truck with that.
Lord Shipley (LD)
My Lords, my name is attached to Amendments 78 and, with my noble friend Lord Storey, Amendment 162.
Amendment 78 deals with the issue that we were discussing earlier about the provision of school places by academies. It says that the Secretary of State must, within six months of the Act being passed, make regulations which provide local authorities in England with the power to direct academies within their area to admit students or expand school places. An example of why that could be important would be a new housing development of some significance which alters the balance of pupil numbers in a particular geographical area. Broadly speaking, our amendment is very similar to that of the noble Lord, Lord Knight. He uses “guidance”; we use “direction”. It is also similar to Amendment 160, which will be spoken to shortly.
The problem is simply that councils have a statutory duty to ensure there is a local school place for every child who needs one, but they currently do not have the power to direct academy trusts to expand school places or to admit pupils. This amendment would introduce a new backstop power for local authorities to direct trusts to admit children as a safety net.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath ExcerptsWednesday 8th June 2022
(2 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 1-I(Rev)(a) Amendments for Committee (Supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (8 Jun 2022)
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I have not yet heard anything I disagree with, so I shall try to make some different points. This is an odd, strange Bill. On the face of it, there is not a lot in it; however, the issues it addresses are of prime importance. There is nothing more important than the future structure of our school system. Otherwise, we keep revisiting it and do not do the things we really want to.
A lot of us here, especially those of us who have had the honour of having ministerial responsibility, would like to take this opportunity to put the structures behind us and get on with what really makes the difference: what happens in the classroom and outside the school, and the relationship with a whole range of children’s services. On one level, I welcome this opportunity and the Government’s intention to sort out the structures, because I do not like the fragmented, dual system: it is a waste and builds up bureaucracy. There is so much good will to sort it out that I am not quite sure how the Government have managed to mess it up as much as they have.
I find two things odd about the Bill. One is the broad range of powers the Government are taking—the way they are trying to solve this problem. The second is that it is really difficult to table amendments to it. I had a discussion with my Front-Bench colleagues yesterday about the detail of some of the amendments tabled. I asked, “Why have you put that down?” They explained very clearly that that was the only way we could get the debate going. The Bill is not written with a sensible structure—a clear vision, objectives and a means to achieve them: the Government’s clear thinking—which, as my noble friend Lord Knight said, we could amend. All it says is that the Government will take powers on anything they want. It is really tough to amend that, because it does not give the criteria against which they will judge whether to take powers, or what they will do with the powers they take. There is nothing to amend because it is all about the future. That is why the report from the Delegated Powers Committee is critical. There is nothing to discuss because the Government are not saying what they will do.
Therefore, I come to the conclusion—I do not often say this, and I say it in a very mellow tone—that they really ought to withdraw the Bill and think again. That is not to score a political point. The Government’s wish to make this coherent is laudable, and I should like to be with them on that and to have a really good debate on the things we disagree on and on which we agree, but we cannot, given the structure of the Bill.
There is a risk that we will miss the enormity of the changes because of the breadth of the Bill and because it does not spell out what it is doing. I am not saying that that is deliberate—it may be, but I am giving the Government the benefit of the doubt. It talks about academies, but in reality we are talking about every single school in our country. If the proposals in the White Paper are enacted and every school becomes an academy, the Bill will make changes not just to the 47% or 48% of schools that are academies; it is a blueprint for every school in our country.
If you look at the White Paper, there seems to be a wish to have every school as an academy by 2030. I want something better than that. I want to know whether the Government are going to do anything if that does not happen naturally by 2030, because it is important that we know whether that is what we are talking about. I do not want anyone to have to revisit this legal structure in five or six years’ time; that would be a waste of effort.
We are not really talking about academies because, if you look at some of the examples given, the powers that are going to go the Secretary of State are absolutely with academies currently, not the Secretary of State. Although the Bill talks about
“powers in relation to Academies”
and it is claimed that all the Government are doing is putting in law what is in the agreement, with respect, that is not the case. Looking down the list—I had only a quick look; I did not do any checking—I spotted five things. I would suggest that the curriculum, the length of the school day, the appointment of staff, the remuneration of staff and the admissions code are all freedoms that were given to academies but are not available to maintained schools. I am not saying whether I think that is right or wrong, but this clause takes all those freedoms away from academies and gives them to the Secretary of State. So this is no longer about academies. You can use that word but it will not mean an academy in the way we have known it if this Bill becomes law.
The Bill will also affect maintained schools, but they will not be maintained schools in the way we have understood them if it becomes law. At the moment, maintained schools have a relationship with the local authority. They will not have that relationship if the Bill becomes law, but it does not say anything about what the local authority’s relationship with any of these schools will be. That is what I find confusing because, essentially, the Bill sets up a structure for a school system that is neither an academy nor a maintained school in the way we understand them, but a new type of school that is part of a nationalised school system, with all direction, powers and control coming from the Secretary of State, with the local authority having some involvement in special needs and the interests of children, and with the freedoms that were formerly given to academies no longer there.
I am not saying whether that is good or bad—in my view, some of it is good and some of it bad, and I want a debate—but this is no way to change the school system. These changes are enormous. They overturn the work of Michael Gove and other previous Conservative Ministers, as well as that of my noble friend Lord Adonis and other previous Labour Ministers. One of them is sitting behind me; I suspect that others will join in. So I say to the Minister on this set of amendments —my noble friend Lord Knight put it very well—that we want the debate as well. It would be better for our country and the system if the Minister took this Bill back, as we need pre-legislative scrutiny of it, and came back in due course with a structure that will enable us to debate all these things.
If we were to set up a school structure that is neither an academy nor maintained, I would be very happy about that. I would like to put those old rows and debates behind me. If we have not learned something from both those things over the past 20 years, we need our heads examining. We could spend two years thinking up a name for it—I do not mind—but I cannot do that with this Bill. It is not written in a way that makes it possible to amend it in that form. Yet it is no more and no less than an attempt to set up a blueprint for a brand new structure of schools in this country. I really do hope that the Minister will volunteer to do this in a different way.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, it is with some trepidation that I follow two such experts in education on these Benches. However, I see an uncanny parallel with what has happened in the health service, which I know a little about, and education. At about the same time that my noble friend Lord Adonis was proposing academies, in the then Department of Health we were proposing the creation of foundation trusts. The idea of NHS foundation trusts was to get out of the kind of micromanagement that the report today on the NHS talks about, and to give much more control locally, making those foundation trusts which were going to be the best performers much more accountable to local membership and to the population.
However, after the initial enthusiasm of my good friend Alan Milburn and the team of Ministers then, the normal centralising powers of the Department of Heath took over. Gradually, it has assumed more and more control again over those individual trusts. Now there is virtually no difference between a foundation trust and a non-foundation trust. Listening to my noble friends, I think that there is an uncanny parallel where essentially the Secretary of State for Education is giving himself the tools to have direct responsibility for each school within the system.
My ministerial experience of trying to run the NHS, where we had 300 bodies accountable to us, is that this will not end happily. Do Ministers realise that they will have to answer here for the performance of each individual school? Do they realise the enormity of that task? It then brings us to the problem that we have: that this Bill is ill timed because the department have not thought it through. Whatever our view on academies—there is a somewhat mixed view, on these Benches at least—there is general agreement that it is right for the Secretary of State to set some standards for our school system, and that there must be much more coherence in the system.
I was very struck by the pretty dispassionate report by the Institute for Government three or four months ago on academies, in which it makes the point that, with academies now making up almost 50% of all schools, we have a very inefficient dual system. Local authorities must still support a diminishing number of schools with declining resources, and the regulatory system for academies is incoherent, with financial regulations split from performance management and no single person or office in the system able to hold multi-academy trusts accountable for poor educational performance. The institute then says it is no wonder that far too many multi-academy trusts do not add value to the schools within their control.
The Minister referred at Second Reading to the accountability system and the ability of her department and its officials to hold the system to account. She said that Ministers were launching a review to establish the appropriate model and options for how best to regulate the English school system. Why on earth does she not do the review, see what the outcomes are, then bring legislation to your Lordships’ House and let us properly debate and seek to amend it? I urge her to listen to my noble friends and take this Bill back, or at least to pause it to allow for more work to be done and for us to have proper scrutiny of this vital legislation.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I am not suggesting that we debate whether Clauses 2 and 4 stand part of the Bill at this moment; they are out of sync. We cannot discuss them until we discuss Clause 1 under the next group of amendments.
As has already been mentioned, I and my noble friends Lord Agnew and Lord Nash—both Ministers who have had direct responsibility for failing schools, my noble friend Lord Agnew for two years—have concluded that all the clauses from Clause 1 to Clause 18 should not stand part. We consider that this is a constitutional Bill and an enormous grab for power by Whitehall. It is quite amazing. Some people in the Department for Education have wanted this for years but have now given in to their worst voices. We think that the powers that they have are totally unacceptable in dealing with the problems.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
Does the noble Lord recall that the last time this House intervened on a statutory instrument was in relation to working families’ tax credits? We moved an amendment to delay its introduction, which was passed, and of course that led to the Government withdrawing their proposal, but this House was threatened with abolition by the Government of the time.
Lord Addington (LD)
I do remember that, but as a hereditary Peer I am probably more familiar than the noble Lord with the threat of abolition. That whetted axe been swinging around my head for a good few years; I dodged it once.
There is this idea that Parliament should not interfere in this process because that is naughty and bad. I hope that the Government will at least allow us to have some process where this is discussed or to at least point out how this process of shining a little light—and indeed pouring a little water, if we may take a plant analogy—on these things will work. How will we know what we are getting?
On the other amendments in this group, I am learning not to prejudge the noble Lord, Lord Baker. The interesting thing about certain schools and establishments set up outside the system is why they are brought in. The noble Lord nods at me; I will take that as a win.
On the final clause stand part notice in this group and the reports of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and the Constitution Committee, I hope we can get a little further into those. I do not think I have ever been involved with a Bill which has had this type of reception. It is pretty appalling that the Government have done this. I therefore hope that the Minister will take this opportunity to tell us how the Government will make sure they know what is coming. If there is regulation and stuff that I have not seen where we can learn what is coming—it is not in the Bill—let us know where and point us in the right direction. Show us how it will be easily accessible and how we can have an informed debate that starts here and goes outside, and how it feeds in too. That, at the very least, is required if we continue to change the way the system works by regulation. I beg to move.
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 27A. This speech will be very short. The amendment is defensive because, if Clause 1 continues to be part of the Bill when it comes back on Report, I will have to move it again, but of course if it disappears this amendment will fall. The Government realised half way through preparing the Bill that by giving such powers to the Secretary of State which have no checks or balances in them and no requirements for consultation, a maverick Secretary of State could abolish grammar schools and selection and could intervene with religious schools with regard to the amount of worship that they have. I am shocked by that. The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, raised what would happen if we had Jacob Rees-Mogg as the Secretary of State for Education. I shudder at the prospect. Similarly, what would happen if you had a Corbynite Secretary of State? I shudder at that prospect as well, because the powers of direction are absolutely overwhelming.
Protections were introduced for grammar schools and faith schools because they were so different, and I think the schools I have been promoting are sufficiently different as well. University technical colleges are totally different from a normal school. Take, for example, their curriculum for 14 to 16. Our youngsters—the girls as well as the boys—will spend two days a week making things with their hands, designing things on computers, making projects which local employers bring in or visiting companies. That is totally different. A Secretary of State with these untrammelled powers could simply stop them doing that and therefore destroy the distinction of the school, so this is only a defensive amendment if the Government do not see sense.
I must congratulate the Minister on her reply. As she recognised, no one has spoken in full-hearted support of the Bill. The right reverend Prelate came close: he gave it a sort of half-blessing, but not a full one. Everyone else who has spoken was highly critical of it, so I hope this amendment will not be necessary when Clause 1 is withdrawn.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I have two clause stand part amendments, but also added my name to the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. Fleetingly, when I heard the noble Lord, Lord Baker, suggest that a Minister could, at the stroke of a pen, abolish grammar schools, I warmed towards Clauses 1 and 3, but, as he suggested earlier, leaving aside the educational issues and the future governance and oversight of academies, some constitutional issues are involved.
As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, we cannot ignore the reports of our own Select Committees. The Delegated Powers Committee was clear that it issued new guidance to departments following its report where it said that it
“expected that bills introduced in the current session would reflect the principles set out in our report and revised guidance”.
This was a Select Committee of Parliament informing departments how legislation needed to be drafted in future. It was not a suggestion; it was a report of a distinguished Select Committee setting out how departments needed to legislate in future. It said that the principles were,
“first, that primary legislation, and the powers conferred by it, should be drafted on the basis of the principles of parliamentary democracy (namely parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law and the accountability of the executive to Parliament); and, second, that the threshold between primary and delegated legislation should be founded on the principle that the principal aspects of policy should be on the face of a bill and only its detailed implementation left to delegation”—
through secondary legislation. This appears to have been totally ignored by the Minister and her department. Why is that, and what factors did her department take into account when sending instructions to parliamentary counsel? Had it even looked at the new guidance set by your Lordships’ Select Committee? I very much doubt it.
In its recent report, the Delegated Powers Committee said that
“it would be possible for the Bill to set out the standards that apply to academies coupled with a power to amend them where speed and necessity really did require this to be done by regulations”.
In its note to the committee, the department essentially said, first, that it might need to act quickly and therefore Parliament could not adapt if standards needed to be changed and, secondly, that it was all too technical and detailed for Parliament to consider. Frankly, as the committee says, those are ridiculous arguments, because there are any number of ways in which Parliament can deal with urgent matters quickly. The idea that we cannot deal with technical matters in legislation is shown to be ludicrous given the technical details that we have in Bills day after day. I refer the Minister to the Procurement Bill, which is going through your Lordships’ House at the moment. It is extremely technical in detail, but I have great confidence that your Lordships’ House will be up to dealing with it.
The Minister said in relation to Clause 1 that the Government are not aiming to restrict freedoms, but they cannot speak for future Secretaries of State. The other thing she said was, “Don’t worry, this is all going to be sorted out through regulations, of which Parliament has oversight”. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, asked, what can we do when we have regulations? We can have a debate for a maximum of two hours. We can make our points. We can pass a regret Motion, which has absolutely no effect. So I am afraid that that offer does not amount to very much.
Clause 3, which we have not yet discussed—I realise that there are amendments to it—is in a sense the most extraordinary use of a Henry VIII power. It allows a Minister to disapply any educational legislation from any school or other educational institution. It is the most remarkable, open-ended Henry VIII clause I have ever seen. As the Delegated Powers Committee said:
“It is not good enough to say that ministers, rather than Parliament, should be able to make law because ministers can be responsive to the needs of the academy trust system. So can Parliament.”
That ought to be Parliament’s role.
As noble Lords said in the debate on the previous group, this is a major structural educational reform. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is right: it is displacement activity because clearly the Government have not thought out what standards they want. They certainly do not know what structure of accountability they require in relation to academy trusts. That work has got to be done. Presumably, the department pulled something out. Departments always have legislative requirements. Every department always has a Bill up its sleeve—in the case of the Department of Health, in my experience, it always has three or four Bills up its sleeve—but it really is not good enough to say, “Everything will be all right. A lot of the standards are already there, we can bring a regulation and we are doing a review on the structure of governance”. We really cannot let this go.
I see that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, is here. He made a very telling intervention in the debate on the Queen’s Speech when he referred to the growing imbalance between Parliament and the Executive. He referred to the two Select Committees’ reports and concluded—I am at risk of quoting Judge to Judge—by asking
“what is the point of us being here if … we never do anything … except talk?”—[Official Report, 12/5/22; col. 130.]
He hinted that, the next time a Bill comes along with a Henry VIII clause, such as Clause 3, that has not been given careful explanation in advance, we should “chuck it out”. I do not think he expected such a Bill to come along three weeks after he made those remarks but, my goodness, the argument for chucking Clauses 1 and 3 out of the Bill is very persuasive.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for her response. I think that it merely illustrates how far apart we are on the appropriateness of the structure of this Bill that we cannot have a serious discussion about what the curriculum freedoms should be. It is entirely undefined, and the Government say, “We’ll just make it up as we go along in the next few months, and that is what you are allowing us to do if you pass this Bill”. That is where the serious discussions lie; we ought to be having discussions about how the curriculum works. That is the level of responsibility we ought to be taking in this House, and this Bill seeks to take that away from us and place it with the Executive. I am delighted that we have had such unanimity around the Committee on what we think of that as a process.
So far as these individual amendments are concerned, yes, I applaud the diversity, innovation and freedom which the academy structure has had. It will be a problem to move that into a national system, but it will not be impossible. We ought to look at it, because this Bill gives the Government the power to introduce a totally prescriptive national curriculum. They could say what every school was going to do at every moment of every day, and we would have no more right to intervene on that—
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. He has really illustrated the puzzle I have: the handbook is clearly working at the moment—we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, that interventions can take place in the case of maverick trusts—so why on earth not let that continue, allow the consultation with the sector on the future governance and accountability arrangements, and then bring a Bill in a year’s time when we can actually go through it in detail and scrutinise it effectively? We could also have a statement at the front saying, “This Bill is about the academisation of all schools”. Why not be explicit and say this up front in the legislation, if that is what the Government want to do? Why does it have to be done in this sort of underhand way, and before they have properly worked out with the sector how it is best done? I just do not get it.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I lend my support to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on Amendment 8 and to my noble friend on Amendment 37. This issue about the mental health of students and pupils is very important. I have no doubt that the Minister will argue that mental health is subsumed within “health”, and therefore that there is no need for this, but sometimes you do need to give absolute clarity to parts of society that mental health must be a greater priority than before, and this is a very useful way of doing it.
The Minister was involved in the passage of the Health and Care Act of blessed memory, which some of us were involved in. It struck me that when we were talking about the membership of ICPs and ICBs—integrated care partnerships and integrated care boards—I do not think we explicitly discussed whether the education sector would be around the table. Could the Minister look into whether there is some way of encouraging that the education sector is listened to? It seems rather like the police service in that it is being asked to pick up a lot of the issues that arise partly because our mental health services are so fragile at the moment, particularly for young people and adolescents, as we know. I do not wish to add more burden to heads and schools but this will bear thinking about. I hope there will be some collaboration between the Minister’s department and the Department of Health.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I will speak to the two amendments in this group that have my name on them, Amendments 9 and 11. Both deal with smaller aspects of this, although we have a big report coming through on special educational needs, in which I know the noble Baroness is active.
I would like to know where and how, in this envisaged system—or perhaps let us call it a wished-for system; let us not give it that degree of solidity—special educational needs will fit in. At the moment, if there is a priority that comes above them, they tend to get squashed going down. For instance, there is an ongoing row about systematic synthetic phonics, which is the preferred way to teach English but does not work that well for many dyslexics. In addition, people with attention deficit disorder do not like it; it is a different way of working. You therefore have to work smarter, or in a different way, to get the best results out of those groups in a basic interaction. There will be other examples; for instance, mathematics is also covered by this, because you have to have different learning patterns. Dyslexics like me have different learning processes in our heads, which work slightly differently from those of the majority of people.
That is not insurmountable; there are ways around it and lots have been found, but you have to do it. If you have one way of doing this, there will be problems for those groups who do not have those learning patterns. I was speaking only about small numbers there but maybe half of those with identified special educational needs would probably be covered by these groups already. There are others with more complex patterns. The Government will need to work differently. How will the recommendations of the review work through and counter other considerations? If the noble Baroness can give us some idea of the Government’s thinking at the moment, I will be grateful.
On extracurricular activity—I would say this, would I not?—the fact of the matter is that sport is one of the best ways of improving mental health. It releases all the right chemicals in your body. Basically, it is a chemical treatment for mental health—end of. It reduces stress and tension, as does the correct use of special educational needs support. If you have less to worry about, you are less stressed and less likely to experience a trigger point for a mental health condition. How will these things be worked in? What safeguards do activities have in these areas—and others, if the noble Baroness wishes to expand on that? Is Committee a discussion? We need an idea of how, when you have to work differently to get the best out of the system, you will do it to get to the positions and the approach coming through in the rest of the Bill. How is it working and how will you make those small changes? Some will be big structural ones.
Talking about extracurricular activities such as sport, music and drama, one of the big things the Government should do to make sure that people carry on doing those things is to link the activities within the school with those who do them outside on an amateur basis. There are very well-established models, some of which have worked and some of which have been removed but which worked quite well. How is this all working and how is it going forward? If the Minister could give us a little idea of the Government’s thinking on that, that would be helpful, if not for this Bill then certainly for future debates.
“(2A) In setting standards in relation to Academies in respect of subsection (2)(k), the Secretary of State must require that each Academy Trust, and Multi Academy Trust, has at least two parent trustees.”Member’s explanatory statement
This is to make mandatory a requirement that all Academy trusts have a minimum of two parent trustees.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, in moving my first amendment in this group, I must say that I agreed with the analysis of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, of some of the problems we are having in laying amendments to the Bill because of the lack of coherence. In a sense, we could sometimes be accused of being inconsistent, because we are concerned about the Secretary of State having these overweening powers but none the less there are areas in which we think there should be central direction. If only we had a structure that enabled us to put down proper amendments, we would know what the standards were and be able to see whether our ideas would be better in guidance or in a standard.
My series of amendments is about parental involvement; I argue that it ought to be one of the foundations on which all schools operate. I see it as part of a governance structure; you need requirements on all schools to operate in a certain way. I do not think this can just be left to multi-academy trusts to decide. I have no doubt whatever that the more parents who are involved in a school’s life, the better it is for the school and the outcomes for the children taught there.
The great organisation Parentkind, which is very much involved in encouraging parental involvement, feels that too often parents are left at the school gate and really not invited by schools to meaningfully participate in their children’s education. It has produced a wonderful blueprint for how parents can be more involved in their child’s school—attending consultation evenings, responding to surveys, volunteering their time and talents, including on the PTA, and helping in the classroom or becoming a governor or trustee. My amendments seek to introduce some of these elements to see whether I can get a positive response from the Government.
The first, Amendment 23, would ensure that in each academy trust and multi-academy trust there is a minimum of two parent trustees. They clearly play a vital role, and the governing body of every maintained school must be constituted with at least two parent governors. For academies—except those designated as religious—the position is more fluid. The department’s model articles of association give academy trusts almost complete flexibility to design the constitution of their board of trustees as they see fit. It has specified that the board must include at least two elected parent trustees. However, a MAT may alternatively include two elected parents on each local governing body. I fail to see why MATs should have that choice. Surely it should be a minimum requirement for parent trustees to be on the board of both the MAT and the local governing body, where there is one.
My Amendment 24 is more strategic. It aims to ensure that
“each Academy Trust, Multi Academy Trust, and each Academy within a Multi Academy Trust, prepares and revises a strategic policy on parental and community engagement at least once every three years.”
The importance of effective communication with parents and staff cannot be overestimated. Asking each trust and each academy within a MAT to prepare and revise
“a strategic policy on parental and community engagement at least once every three years”
would be very useful. As a starting point, Parentkind’s blueprint would be a very effective template.
My Amendment 25 puts forward the important principle that there should be a local governing body for every school within a MAT, on which at least two elected parents must sit, and with a clear scheme of delegation to ensure the local governing body is in the driving seat. At the moment, the MAT board can choose to delegate governance functions to LGBs or other committees that may relate to one or more than one academy.
Work published by the National Governance Association last September showed that only 87% of MAT trustees overall report having a local tier of governance for schools within the MAT. An LSE research paper points out that academies within MATs have no legal identity of their own. It is interesting to reflect on the situation that we now have with those academies within a MAT, when, in the original concept of academies, the stress was all on the freedom of that individual academy. It is almost as if we have moved the whole philosophy without there being any real parliamentary debate or scrutiny, and certainly no legislation.
Lord Nash (Con)
I do not doubt that, but it is unlikely that in a local authority you would have a person working in one organisation who could be developed thoroughly by that one organisation. You may have people in the local authority who know who their stars are, but they are all in different schools, so I would say that this method is even better.
The other area where multi-academy trusts can greatly help teachers is in their workload, by developing curriculum and teaching resources that teachers can use in the workplace. I am sure that in schools that the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, was involved in there was not a question of everybody doing what they liked but, sadly, if we go back in the school system many years, that was exactly what did happen all too often when every school—if not every classroom—was a little island. There was too much freedom and too many teachers were, frankly, having to develop their curriculum resources from scratch. That is a real challenge for young teachers. One great advantage is teacher development. There are the other advantages, but I would say, therefore, that a school that is outstanding may well have a greater chance of staying outstanding working in a multi-academy trust.
The Marshalled List says that this group has been marshalled additionally in relation to Clauses 5, 6 and 7, so I will now briefly talk about those clauses. I said earlier that I would comment on why a number of individual clauses were unnecessary. Clause 5—
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I am sorry to intervene, but is that right? I thought that the Questions that Clauses 5, 6 and 7 stand part were in a further group.
Baroness Penn (Con)
I believe that is currently group 9, which we would reach on a future day. Of course, future days’ groupings are finalised, before they take place, with those involved.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I thank all noble Lords for their amendments relating to trust governance structures, parental representation and engagement, and the definition of “parent” in the Bill.
Amendments 23, 24 and 25, in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, seek to secure the position of parental representation in the trust governance structures at both trust board and local level, and to have a strategic plan for parental and stakeholder engagement. Amendment 25, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, also seeks to mandate local governing bodies in all trusts. I would like to cover this point first by saying that the schools White Paper sets out the department’s view that all trusts should have local governance arrangements for their schools. To respond to the query from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, about how I was going to deal with this point, we have committed in the White Paper to working with the sector over the summer as the best way to implement this.
Moving on to the amendments pertaining to parental involvement, I reassure the House that it is already our position that all trusts should have a minimum of two parents in their governance structure, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, pointed out. Amendment 26 continues with a focus on parental engagement in the form of mandating all trusts and academies to have a parent council and specifying the composition, role and support required. Parental and community engagement serves an extremely important role and can have a large and positive impact on children’s learning, as we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman. An effective scheme of delegation should explain the trust’s parental and community engagement arrangements and how these feed into and inform governance at both trust and local level. The department’s Governance Handbook contains guidance for academy trusts on parental and community engagement.
However, as I said earlier, we believe that trusts are best placed to decide what engagement methods work best in the local context and—to pick up on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight—at different points in the evolution of an individual trust. In addition, the place of parents in the governance of trusts will fall within scope of the planned discussions with the sector about the local tier of governance announced in the schools White Paper, and I am sure that the House would not want to pre-empt the outcome of that discussion at this point.
Amendment 27, in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, seeks to ensure that all trusts clearly set out the delegation of powers to their local governing bodies, and that delegation should include ensuring clarity of vision, ethos and strategic direction of the school, holding executive leaders to account, financial performance and ensuring that local voices are heard.
Some of the responsibilities set out in the noble Lord’s amendment are core functions of the trust board as the accountable body of the trust, which the board may already choose to delegate to local governing bodies or choose to retain at board level. As such, there is a risk of duplication and some confusion.
Amendment 38, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Storey, introduces a clause similar, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, pointed out, to that of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, to mandate local governing bodies, while also including membership and specific powers of the local governing body.
I would like to address both amendments by referring to my previous comments that we will be holding discussions with the sector on local governance arrangements and that we do not want to pre-empt those discussions by introducing requirements concerning local governance arrangements at this point.
The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, have introduced Amendment 39 to mandate the establishment of an independent scheme of arbitration to resolve disputes between a multi-academy trust and the local governing bodies of individual academies within the trust. It is far from clear that it would be a proportionate and good use of public funds to set up a formal scheme, and we would want to discuss with the sector how local governance arrangements could be effective.
I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, for their Amendment 52, which seeks to ensure that references to “parents” in the Bill also include different kinds of legal guardian. We agree that this is an important point, and I am pleased to say that this is already captured within the Bill. The majority of references to “parent” in the Bill are in Parts 1 and 2. Clauses 31 and 46 state:
“Other words and expressions used in this Part have the same meanings as in the Education Act 1996, unless the context otherwise requires.”
I am therefore pleased to say that all references to “parent” in the Bill already include different kinds of legal guardian.
For the reasons set out above, I ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a very useful debate. Clearly, I agree with my noble friend that, with parental involvement in school governing bodies, there has perhaps not been a nirvana or golden age where it has always worked perfectly. School governance can be quirky; sometimes heads have far too much control and basically appoint their own governing body, and we have seen the problems that arise from that. However, I think there is a general consensus that getting parents involved in schools is a good thing per se. There are various mechanisms under which you can do that. Parent councils is a very good idea, and I would like to see that further encouraged. However, it is important to have statutory representation, if you like, of elected parent governors on the board of a maintained school or of an academy trust.
When it comes to multi-academy trusts, I still fail to see why it should be optional, in that if you have two parent governors on the multi-academy trust board, you do not then have to have the same representation on local governing bodies, and vice versa. That should be changed. Where you have a multi-academy trust, both the multi-academy trust board and the local governing body ought to have parent governors. However, I am sure that we will find a consensus on that on Report.
When it comes to the relationship between multi-academy trusts and local governing bodies where they are the individual trusts within a MAT, that is obviously a much more difficult issue where we do not have complete consensus. Here, the absence of a way forward for MATs is a big problem for us in trying to decide what is the best way through. In her response the noble Baroness said that obviously this is work that is taking place and that we must not pre-empt the outcome of discussions. I could not help thinking that, unfortunately, the Bill pre-empts the outcome of the discussions, which is why we are having this difficulty at the moment.
However, in principle, it is right that every local school has some kind of governance body. My noble friend Lady Blower is absolutely right: the local school needs ownership of the core decisions. I accept what she says about the need for interventions but, harking back to my health experience, I would say that we have boards until the cows come home but quick interventions can be made. It is really important that, when a parent goes to the school, they know that the people in charge are there, and that includes governance, as much as possible.
Also, we have to sort out this problem of what an academy trust does if it wants to leave a MAT. I heard the noble Lord, Lord Nash, arguing that an outstanding academy trust can go into a MAT and gain great advantage from it, but what happens if it is not going well? Can that outstanding trust leave? At the moment the answer is no, because it has no legal entity of its own to make that decision.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I know that it is unusual to intervene this way round, but just to clarify for the noble Lord, in the schools White Paper we said that we will consult on the exceptional circumstances in which a good school could request that the regulator agrees that it moves to a stronger trust.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I know, but I worry about the “exceptional circumstances” because I do not see why an individual school could not simply opt out if it wanted to, giving due notice. Perhaps we will come back to that on one of our later amendments.
Having said that, this has been a really good debate. I welcome the Minister’s constructive response and look forward to further discussions. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, this group is another trying to put safeguards around the Secretary of State’s powers to set academy standards. In the absence of proper parliamentary scrutiny mechanisms, industrious noble Lords have sought to add their own. My amendment would require the DfE to consult parents, teachers and governors on how the regulations are implemented and then allow sight and scrutiny of the use of the new powers by way of reporting and assessing the impact that use has had.
For such a sweeping change to a crucial area of social policy, we believe that this amendment is proportionate and only right to allow meaningful public scrutiny. If the Secretary of State is overreaching or, equally, not doing enough to intervene in a specific case, it would allow that to become public knowledge and the public, expert stakeholders and parent groups to make the case for change.
My Amendment 83 would subject to the affirmative procedure the Secretary of State’s power to give any person they choose responsibility to judge an academy’s compliance with standards. Such a large empowerment, with the potential to place all-important judgments with anyone that the Secretary of State wills is surely worth giving Parliament sight of, and anyone involved in the process of proper scrutiny and democratic accountability should have little problem agreeing to the amendments. I thus beg to move.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I strongly welcome my noble friend’s amendment. I, along with my noble friend Lady Blower, have a number of other amendments in this area.
I want to encourage the Minister to say something about this. Clearly, she has heard all our concerns about Clauses 1 and 3. I just want to suggest that one way through may be to consider the super-affirmative procedure for dealing with the issue of standards. We debated earlier the issue that even an affirmative instrument allows us only a debate. The advantage of the super-affirmative procedure is that it allows both Houses of Parliament opportunities to comment on proposals for secondary legislation and recommend amendments before orders for affirmative approval are brought forward in their final form. The idea of the super-affirmative procedure is that those orders are implemented in enactments where an exceptionally high degree of scrutiny is thought appropriate—for instance, for the scrutiny of certain items of delegated legislation made or proposed to be made under Henry VIII clauses.
Take my noble friend Lady Chapman’s earlier amendment, in which she sought to replicate the standards in relation to independent schools and said that, basically, this would give a much more explicit set of standards to work on. If you combine that with the super-affirmative procedure, you might achieve a greater and more effective way whereby Parliament could scrutinise what the Government seek to do. However, I really do not think that simply having regulations is the way to do it. I urge the Minister to consider this procedure as one way through, because it would give Parliament an opportunity to comment on the draft regulations and the department an opportunity to go away and consider it before coming back with the substantive order. In some ways, this would be a very good way to deal with some of the issues in this Bill.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I rise to speak briefly to Amendment 28 in the name of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, to which I have attached my name.
I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, just said. However, what particularly attracted me to this amendment was its reference to
“an annual report on the exercise of the powers … and … an annual impact assessment on the exercise of those powers.”
The Minister reassured us a number of times in our debates on earlier groups by saying that “it is not the intention of this Government” to do this or that. The annual review proposed by this amendment would ensure, whatever Government are in power, an assessment of how the law is being used. Given the current powers in that law, many Members who usually sit on the Benches opposite might think that this would be a good idea with a different Government in place.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath ExcerptsMonday 23rd May 2022
(2 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, what an extraordinary Bill this is. It is silent on so many of the pressing issues facing our school system. It is silent on the financial pressures in the early years sector. It is silent on the crumbling infrastructure, to which a number of noble Lords have referred. It is silent on the workforce pressures, particularly in secondary schools, where physics, maths, chemistry and modern foreign languages are facing severe problems. It is silent too on presenting any bold vision of educational outcomes or dealing with the issue described recently by Peter Hyman, co-founder of Rethinking Assessment. As he put it,
“After 11 years of schooling students are given a set of numbers as the sum total of what they have achieved, and for a third of students those numbers indicate that they have failed. Surely young people should leave school with a profile of what they can do (head, heart and hand) and what they are like … That is what employers are looking for and that is what matters in life.”
The Bill has nothing to say on any of these fundamental issues. On the face of it, its focus is on the governance and structure of academies, with one or two useful measures added on. However, the noble Lord, Lord Baker, put it so well when he said that, in reality, it is an extraordinary grabbing of power by the Secretary of State to essentially direct and intervene in the affairs of every school in the country. A number of noble Lords have welcomed the national formula for funding, but when you link Clause 1 with Clause 33, you are giving all the levers of power to one person, aided by an army of officials far removed from local schools.
Clause 1 is quite extraordinary. It sets out 20 examples of standards, ranging from the curriculum, to the nature and quality of education provision to be provided, governance structures, remuneration of staff and spending of money. All this is to be done via regulations with only limited parliamentary scrutiny and those are only examples; the Secretary of State can dream up any number of other standards he or she wishes to have and bung them through by another regulation. I hope we will examine this very carefully. If Ministers are insistent on going down this path, then they surely need to spell out in primary legislation exactly what standards they are going to impose on every school in the country. To leave it as vague as it is is simply not acceptable.
On academisation, I am the first to acknowledge the excellent work in many of our academies. However, I wish the Government could bring themselves, just once or twice, to acknowledge the good work in maintained schools. The noble Lord, Lord Nash, is not in his place. When he was Minister, we made very many efforts to get him to praise maintained schools. I hope the noble Baroness the Minister will do so in in her wind-up because she knows that the Government are slightly selective in the figures that they use to justify academisation, and I applaud the NEU’s recent exposure of this and its vindication.
On schools and academy schools, just as we are seeing aggrandisement of power at the centre, we are also seeing local schools lose power within a multi-academy trust. This is something I am concerned about. There is no doubt that the emergence of MATs has drastically reduced democratic accountability, and once subsumed into the MAT structure the voice, autonomy and legal identity individual schools are lost. Communities are locked out of the MAT system. We now have Ministers empowered to impose academisation and switch academies between different MATs without consultation. That cannot be right.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, mentioned the excellent research paper from the LSE by Professor Anne West and David Wolfe. They identified many of the current governance shortcomings in relation to academies within MATs. There are other shortcomings too. I refer to the work of the Public Accounts Committee on the annual accounts of academy trusts a couple of months ago. The issue of academy CEOs’ pay has been well documented, but the PAC complained very recently that the noble Baroness’s department does not have a handle on excessive pay within the sector. What are the Government going to do about that? The PAC also said that
“a lack of transparency in local academy financial information is harming parents’ ability to hold their local academy leaders and the DfE to account, for the services they provide to pupils or for their use of public funds.”
In the work the Government are taking forward, how will they ensure that, locally, parents and other interested citizens see the financial information for local academies, even when they are part of a multi-academy trust, in order for them to be able to monitor, judge and scrutinise the performance of those trusts? I hope we will get answers to this.
Professor Kathleen Stock: Resignation
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have, if any, to ask the Office for Students to undertake an investigation into the circumstances of the resignation of Professor Kathleen Stock from her post at the University of Sussex.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, the Office for Students informed the Department for Education on 11 November that it has decided to open an investigation into whether the University of Sussex has met its obligations on academic freedom and freedom of speech. No academic should have to fear for their personal safety, particularly as a consequence of expressing lawful views. This incident demonstrates why this Government are pressing ahead with legislation to promote and defend freedom of speech on campuses.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome that Answer. Professor Stock, a distinguished academic at Sussex University, essentially said that your biological sex cannot be changed by feelings of identity. For quite unexceptional remarks, she has been vilified by colleagues, abused by students, unsupported by her union and let down by the university, which was far too late to defend her. Academics in many other universities—women in particular—are facing similar abuse for gender-critical views. The noble Baroness referred to the forthcoming legislation, but does she agree that, however much legislation you have, you need confidence in our universities to show some strength in defending their academics? What are the Government going to do about that?
Baroness Barran (Con)
The noble Lord is absolutely right to condemn the abuse many academics—women in particular—have suffered recently. The Government are clear that any restriction of lawful speech and academic freedom goes against the fundamental principles of English higher education. The new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill will strengthen existing freedom of speech duties and address the gaps that exist within the current law, including the lack of a clear enforcement mechanism. That will bring with it clear consequences for providers and student unions that breach these new duties.
Schools: Examination Assessments
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the (1) credibility, and (2) integrity, of the assessment processes in schools for this summer’s A levels and GCSE examinations.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)
My Lords, parents and students can have confidence in the credibility and integrity of the grades awarded this summer. Teachers did an excellent job assessing students based on a range of evidence and were best placed to understand the content students had covered. The outcomes of the quality assurance process demonstrated the extent to which teachers took the process seriously and followed the guidance and training provided. These grades reflect students’ hard work in what was a hugely challenging year.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness to her new position and I am sure I speak for the whole House in paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for her work and her willingness to come to the House so often to talk about education matters.
I of course echo what the noble Baroness said about teachers and students and their achievements in the summer, but she will know that the overall increase in the level of grades was higher in private schools than in other schools. She will also know that the Sutton Trust has said that significantly more teachers in private schools than in comprehensive state schools came under pressure from parents to increase their child’s grades—this is not too long, my Lords. So, far from levelling up, the new style of internal assessment loaded the dice further against comprehensive school students when it comes to higher education and career prospects. What is the Minister going to do to ensure that, where assessments are used in the coming examination process, there will be a level playing field?
Baroness Barran (Con)
I do not accept the assertion that underpins the noble Lord’s question that there was not a level playing field. All types of schools and colleges, including independent schools, had to submit evidence of their students’ work to support grades. Exam boards set out very clear requirements for quality assurance and those quality assurance checks covered all types of schools and colleges. The department trusted teachers’ professional judgment and exam boards set clear guidance for centres on malpractice, including that centres should report instances of parental pressure to their awarding organisation.