Grammar Schools

Lord James of Blackheath Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord James of Blackheath (Con)]

My Lords, I should start by declaring a particular interest. Until today, I thought that I was the only Member of your Lordships’ House who had failed the 11-plus. I now acknowledge that I am not and that I share that experience with another.

I want to make a couple of points about failing the 11-plus because it brings lasting shame and humiliation on the life of those who suffer it in a way that makes it virtually impossible to get past it and get on with anything else in your life ever again. To my father, it did not matter. He was a church orphan and said, “You don’t need education. I got where I am today without it, so you don’t need it, either”. To my mother it was shame beyond belief in terms of a social slide down the scale because her family had had two bishops and two Victoria Crosses in the previous 45 years, and never thought of having an 11-plus failure to put with that roll of honour.

I say, bring on more grammar schools if indeed you wish to have them, but please can we have a more proactive policy on what to do with the failures? I think that there is a category of failure that needs to be addressed because it is so serious that pupils in it should not be let loose without some special help. That is my great plea to you all.

I failed the 11-plus for one very simple reason—I could not read. It is very hard to pass an exam if you cannot read the exam paper. I could not read because we were bombed out in 1941, went to Chichester where there was no first school education at all, came back to London in 1945 and I was sent to a school that had been bombed, was overrun with rats and mice and had a cat in every classroom. I had a cat allergy that closed my eyes within five minutes of entering the classroom every day—so I could not read. Nobody did anything about that until they realised when I failed the exam that there was a problem. The people who then started to move on it—God bless them—were in Lewisham Borough Council, of whom we have a distinguished Member usually sitting on the Front Bench here. He thinks that I am paranoid about the behaviour of Lewisham councillors but I am paranoid only because they were clearly out to get me—and very nearly succeeded.

My father had a very difficult time coming back out of the Army. He got an officer’s rank and did not want to go back to his old career in the kitchen. He managed to find some local education connections for me, one of which was a private school which would take me for £18 a term, which was something like 60% of his salary in 1948. So it was a very generous move on his part. The schoolmaster who owned the place was a victim of the trenches in the First World War, and he was running a crammer for foreign students; we were the first school in England to take German students after the war. He had a special class for very backward children, which I certainly qualified to join, but he would not take anyone on until he had interviewed them first. He sat me down and said, “I see on the notes about you that you like to play chess”. I said, “Yes”. He said, “Will you play me?” I said, “Yes, sir”. So we sat down and he said, “Ten seconds a move”—and he lasted 12 minutes, by which time he said, “There’s nothing wrong with you, I’ll take you”.

At this point, Woolwich borough council decided that this was still quite unacceptable and sent me to three secondary modern schools to be interviewed, all of which said, “He’ll slow everybody down—we can’t possibly have him”. This is my major concern with all this. Things get out of hand because people in official positions think that they must react in different ways. We must have a better code of practice for what to do about the children who are victims of failure. They then proceeded to serve a notice on my family to the extent that I was going to be deported to Australia. They started that process; they even went to court to get a court order for it. We got a young barrister—I think that it was about the first case that he had ever handled—who was still wearing his RAF uniform when he came in. My mother was always convinced that that was what convinced the lady magistrate; he looked so handsome that she had to let him win his case. It was overturned, so I did not go to Australia—but it was a very close-run thing.

Now, 70-odd years later, I have been chairman of 12 public companies and bodies and have somehow or other found my way into your Lordships’ House. I am 79 years old, so my comeback policy has probably hit the buffers and is not going to go any further—but I am satisfied with what I have got. One thing I leave with your Lordships is that we should please concentrate on what to do with the failures. It is not the clever-clogs who get to the grammar schools who worry me; they will be all right anyway. It is the failures we need to worry about. Let us have a proper policy for them and make that work.

Academies Bill [HL]

Lord James of Blackheath Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, I support very strongly the arguments made by my noble friend Lord Greaves on removing primaries from the present list of schools that can become academies. I will very quickly provide a few additional arguments in support of his well-argued speech.

First, primary schools are in many ways the fundamental building blocks of community throughout the country. Sometimes they are Church of England primary schools, sometimes they are not, but in almost every town or village where they exist that is what they are seen to be by the populations of those areas. They are therefore not only educational institutions; in many ways, they are crucial social institutions that help to hold communities together. In fact, more and more, the local primary school is at the heart of whether a village survives as a village or becomes in effect another suburb.

Secondly—my noble friend Lord Greaves implied this, but I want to underpin his arguments—primary schools are heavily dependent on local authority advice services, whether in relation to special educational needs, staff relationships or legal matters. They very often simply cannot afford to buy in advice or get advice from a private source because they are too small, as my noble friend argued, and often too isolated to be able to master that advice. However, they need it, and, for a very small primary school, getting that advice can make disproportionate demands on the school budget. Primary schools simply cannot sustain these services easily—and special educational needs are one of the most central—if the local authority advice services disappear. One question for the Minister is this: if one gets to the point at which those advisory services are mostly disappearing because such a large proportion of the schools that are served by them have chosen to become academies, will he look at the possibility of some sort of residual advisory service for small schools that simply cannot afford to sustain such advice themselves?

In addition, primary schools often require assistance on matters such as appeals and dealing with children who, for one reason or another, have disciplinary problems and are likely to be excluded. It is too much to ask primary school heads too often to take difficult decisions that require legal advice on their own—a position in which some primary school heads find themselves.

Thirdly, primary schools could suffer from a talent drain if they had to battle against a small, or perhaps even substantial, number of primary school academies in which, say, teachers of mathematics or teachers with special abilities with SEN children are very much in demand. In that case, primary schools would come at the very bottom of the pecking order.

Last of all, primary schools—at least in my view—require the support of their local community to a greater extent than secondary schools do, so the argument for having governing bodies that sustain and include members of the local community is particularly strong.

What does that add up to? As my noble friend has argued, it adds up to treating primary schools at least as a more distant case for becoming academies than secondary schools are treated. It would be very easy to disrupt the primary school system if one is not careful, and, once a proportion of primary schools become academies, it begins to become virtually impossible to decide strategically how to meet the needs of all children in an area. I therefore suggest to the Minister that serious consideration should be given to the possibility of considering primary schools at a later stage and to permitting a few primary schools to go ahead with becoming academies as part of a pilot scheme. If the new politics means anything, it means that we must be able to look at experiments without insisting that they are universalised before we know whether they work. For the reasons that I have given, the argument for considering primary schools at a later stage, if at any stage, should be made very strongly in our discussions, because they are different, they are dependent on the local authority, they are central to their local communities and they are in a different position from that of secondary schools.

[Lord James of Blackheath]

I interject on behalf of the SEN pupils of boarding schools with a word of caution, and I speak, as I have said before, as probably the House’s only representative of SEN students in my day. In one term alone, there were eight suicides from a student base of 45 at a boarding school for SEN children in 1947. This was a good school, and there was no abuse—indeed, the teachers showed very great kindness and consideration—but it is very dangerous to take struggling young people away and put them together in a school in which they have to cope with their recognition of their total inability to study effectively and have no home life at the same time. Please do not put SEN children into public boarding schools.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 26, 27, 56, 57, 99, 103, 109, 111 and 120—a veritable alphabet soup of amendments.

The Government propose that outstanding schools that convert to academies should take under their wing another school that is struggling and that should receive support. This is an excellent idea, but there is no actual provision for this in the Bill. The Secretary of State has made it clear that he will in most cases wait until after conversion to put the arrangements into place, but I suggest that there might be some advantages in being a little more up front about this issue. I welcome Amendment 25 in the name of my noble friend Lady Morgan of Huyton in this respect.

Amendment 26 prevents changes causing untold disruption to sixth forms and colleges in the community, which I believe could be an unintended consequence of the changes. Amendment 27 deals with another seemingly unintended consequence of the legislation. Under the Government’s proposals, academies will be allowed to expand at will and will be able to include sixth-form colleges and primary schools. A school converting to an academy at, say, primary school level could in theory grow until it becomes an all-through academy for pupils from the age of five to 18, but the local authority and the local community will have had no say in the issue.

There could be serious consequences. For instance, a faith primary school could expand into a secondary school, or a grammar school could expand into primary education. Without proper public consultation, the balance of, for example, faith schools and non-faith schools in a given community could be transformed. We would not want such an unintended consequence. The Bill also erodes the ability of local authorities to plan by giving secondary schools, for example, the right to establish a primary class without the need to consult anyone. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, pointed out, primary schools are often much smaller than secondary schools. They have much less capacity to budget, to plan for the future, to have in-house services for SEN provision or to have other key shared services.

In principle, there is no reason why primary school children cannot attend an autonomous school. Under the previous Government, all-through academies happened and they were successful. But, like the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, I wonder whether the academy model is the right model for primary schools right now, as it will necessitate a considerable increase in overheads for primary schools. The resources for shared services could be swallowed up by extra administration, which could have severe consequences for the wider welfare of primary school children in those communities. Amendments 99, 109 and 120 effectively ask the Government to think again about that issue and to think about a framework which might involve more collaboration, as has been mentioned, for primary schools and secondary schools. We think that that might be more appropriate. Therefore, we are thinking along the same lines.

Amendments 103 and 111 deal with what could be seen as a fundamental issue, a problem, at the heart of the Bill. The current academies programme targets areas of inadequate educational attainment and opportunity. Most academies replace existing weak or underperforming schools. Others are brand new schools in areas which need the extra school places. Academies were a key element of the national challenge. They took us to a position where only one in 12 schools fell below the 30 per cent grade A to C benchmark, which half of the schools failed under previous Governments. But I am glad to say that things improved.

Part of the real benefits of the academies programme under the Labour Government was that outside expertise was harnessed for the good of turning around failing schools and it was important to acknowledge a role for innovation. For this reason, academies were obliged to follow the national curriculum in only core subjects such as English, maths, science and information technology. The schools were also taken out of existing local authority control and given the funding for shared services, as we have discussed previously. This was so that they could use the funding to deliver the services, which many, by definition, would have had more need for than other schools, because they were often in the most deprived areas with the most overlapping problems.

Academies have had a higher incidence of pupils with English as an additional language compared to other state-funded schools. Investigating the state of play as regards pupil profile admissions and exclusions, the report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers says that the proportion of children eligible for free school meals in academies has declined at a faster rate than in other schools, with a drop of nearly 6 per cent. The PWC report also shows that the absolute number of pupils on free school meals has risen compared to their predecessor schools. We can see that the fall in proportion does not mean that free school meal numbers have declined but that more children are attending school, as well as more from other backgrounds. Of course, that is a good thing and shows that the schools are getting a genuinely comprehensive intake, which we welcome. Many predecessor schools sadly had unrepresentative intakes. But the PWC report indicates a story of sink schools with a high proportion of children on free school meals attracting a much broader intake to much more successful schools.

By contrast, the Government propose to implement a reform which is aimed at improvements for 20 per cent of schools already rated outstanding by Ofsted. Of course, these schools are likely to have fewer children on free school means attending. There is a real risk that by giving advantages to the strongest and not to the weakest, we entrench rather than erode the inequalities in the education system in this country. That is why it is so important that these excellent schools work strongly with the schools in the most disadvantaged areas, which is precisely why I welcome Amendment 125 in the name of my noble friend. It is important that we deal with this issue up front and I would like to make it explicit in the legislation.

Academies Bill [HL]

Lord James of Blackheath Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord James of Blackheath]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hill, to his new task and wish him well with this very welcome Bill. I look forward to it unfolding its various stages.

I come to this debate today out of what the Americans would call “left field”—not a political left field, this side of the House will be pleased to hear. Rather, it is a definition of the direction of the game being changed for a moment by an unexpected move. I hope that I might provide that. I love the idea of these academies. I only wish that I could have gone to one, but that would have been a long time ago and, in any event, I know that I would not have got in; I would have been classified as a special needs child and I would not have got into the system at all. My special need was that I was classified as mentally retarded. I have no argument with that assessment at all. I have made no secret of it since I came to your Lordships’ House. It causes me no grief now and I came to terms with it many years ago. What concerns me are the many children in this country today in a similar category who will also never get to an academy and how they can be motivated to set their eyes on a horizon worth aiming for, for the enrichment of their lives, which is otherwise a difficult issue in the present circumstances. This should engage the political parties of all persuasions in this House and should not be an exclusive issue for one.

We have a problem in this country that is beginning to look to me like a replication of the circumstances that gave rise to the difficulties experienced by my generation during and after the Second World War, when I began my educational progress. I am 73 years old. My first vivid memory is of five minutes past 10 on the morning of 20 May 1940. I was just short of my third birthday at the time and my mother had just cleared away the breakfast—bear with me, this is relevant. She cleared away the breakfast and put the radio on to what should have been “Housewives’ Choice”, or something of that sort. Instead, it was Alvar Liddell in his darkest, most sepulchral tones, announcing that France had capitulated and that we were now on our own. Immediately, the BBC announced that it would suspend services for the rest of the day until the Prime Minister could speak, but that it would repeat the message of the capitulation every five minutes and, meanwhile, between each message, it would play what it said was Purcell’s trumpet voluntary. It was not, but the BBC thought that it was.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

Mentally retarded?

[Lord James of Blackheath]

I did not know it at the time, my Lords, but found out in rather changed circumstances many years later. The BBC ended up playing this damned tune every five minutes the whole day, but my mother would not switch off the wireless because she wanted to hear when the Prime Minister came on. So we listened to it. That has been very much in my mind in the past month, because of the celebrations of the Dunkirk deliverance. However, we knew nothing of that at the time; all we knew was that France had fallen. We did not know that operation Dunkirk was going on at that time or that 380,000 soldiers were coming back to help the defence. My mother was convinced that the Germans would be there for tea, and she did not have any apple strudel. I suspect that they would have wanted something other than that, but that was her problem at the time. We had this terrible phase of two weeks or so of misery before we had an army back; had we but known it, in another four months we would have the victory of the Battle of Britain to announce.

So we got through the war, more or less. We had three times the ritual of the little orange envelope being delivered, starting off with the words, “The War Office regrets to advise”—but that happened in every family. The war ended, really on VJ Day not VE Day. On that day we learnt for the first time the terrible power of the atomic bomb. From that moment on we knew, as a generation, that we were doomed. There was no point in working—why bother with school? We had no hope whatever, which was how we were brought up for many years to come. We also had the threat of the great red horde flooding across Europe. Berlin was going to fall—the Berlin air lift was a waste of time and was never going to succeed. When it did, we had to wait to see whether we could survive the Korean War and the yellow horde coming from the other direction, so we had no hope anywhere. Who was bothering to sit their exams with any serious intent, or to pass anything? We did not, so I got sent to a school for what would today be called special needs. We really were special needs, but we were not quite as stupid as we might have been thought: of the 22 boys in the class that I was sent to, two played for England at chess within 10 years of the class being formed.

In the fullness of time, one went on from there and—hoping for the best—I got an Oxford entrance place. I could not go, because I had to put up a guarantee of £1,500 to get there—to pass “Go”—and I had not got £1,500. But I went to a better university: Ford Motor Company. My 10 years at Ford were better than what any university in the world could have done for me. Ford even paid me to be there. That brings up a big demotivating point that politicians need to think of today: you have to let the young people who succeed receive some of the benefits of their success. There came a day when I got a huge promotion and my salary went up from £8,000 to £10,000. When I went home and worked it out that evening, I realised that thanks to Mr Wilson and his colleagues I was going to receive £160 a year out of my extra £2,000. It was not enough to start a mortgage for a house or anything, but I calculated that at least it would pay for three tickets a month to see Maria Callas, Schwarzkopf and all the rest of them at Covent Garden for £5.25—five guineas, as they called it in those days. The money went to a good purpose, but it did not advance my way of life.

Around me, all sorts of things were happening. The Teddy boys came on the scene. They gave way to the beatniks and the beatniks gave way to the hippies. Why? These were the remnants of my generation, who had no motivation and no thrust for what to do with their lives, all because the education system had failed to do anything with them when it could have done. Now I see a similar pattern emerging. At that time, we were frightened out of our wits by the atomic and nuclear threat and the prospect of communist overrun. We have exactly the same factors today, only all children today believe that there is no point in working on because global warming will destroy everything in their lives—they are frightened out of their wits about it. Also, they believe that the world economy has been destroyed and has no prospect of recovery, so there is no point in them working to take a role in it. We have to get the political sights up. With all due respect, the right reverend Prelates at the end of these Benches have a role to play as well, in reminding children that God has given us everything with which to support ourselves and have a good life, provided that we use it and take God’s strength with us to do it. It is time that the churches all got together behind that with a much bigger voice.

I ask that we do something very positive and think in terms of how we motivate and take with us the people who will not go to the academies and who will have special needs arising not out of being stupid but out of the complete lack of any inspiration or motivation on which they can draw, because of their depression due to the circumstances around them.

As a postscript, I shall pick up on the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, to me about Purcell and the trumpet voluntary. When I was picking the music for my wedding, I chose that my wife should enter the church to the sound of the same piece of music and was informed by the organist at St Paul’s, where we were getting married, that it was not by Purcell, but was Jeremiah Clarke’s march for the Prince of Denmark. Then my wife asked me why I had chosen it. I said, “I wanted to get rid from my mind the association I have between it and the fall of France”. She said, “You think marrying me is comparable to a disaster like the fall of France?”. I said, “Good gracious, no—I just want a happy event to replace the terrible association I have with it”. She said, “I knew about this—I guessed that was the reason—and I’ve got one for you too. When France fell, Hitler had all the cricket fields in every corner of France dug up to make cabbage patches and he banned cricket in all its forms. That is what we should take into our marriage—no cricket matches on television, no test matches, and you are never to wear the tie of that dreadful, miserable cricket club”, by which she meant the MCC. So she naturally got the last word.

This is a splendid Bill. It will do well for the clever ones who get there, but please can we not forget the non-clever ones who have their lives to lead and who will make a big contribution to the economy of this country in time to come if we look after them properly?