Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Duke of Wellington

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[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.