Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Bristol]

My Lords, I speak in place of my colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who unfortunately cannot be present today. I declare his interest as chair of the National Society.

I rise briefly to welcome Amendment 40 in this group, which offers real clarity on the issue. We welcome the recognition it shows that the religious body must be involved in giving an interim trustee notice to the proprietor of an academy school with a religious character. We are grateful for the Minister’s continued work on this and hope this might provide a little encouragement at this point.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

35A: Schedule 1, page 88, line 28, at end insert—
“33A In section 88(1)(a) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, after “in relation to” insert “an Academy or”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This is to make academies subject to the guidance from local authorities on admissions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, Schedule 1 applies the maintained school legislation to academies, as set out in the controversial Clause 3 that we have just been discussing. My amendment seeks to make academies subject to guidance from local authorities on admissions, so that they are the same as maintained schools. Here I probably part company with some of my new allies on the Benches opposite in my vision for academies, but so be it.

The starting point for me in thinking about this is my vision for local authorities in respect of the provision of education and schooling. I see the fundamental role of local authorities as safeguarding children’s interests in the area in which they have jurisdiction, rather than the interests of the schools that they might run. If we are going to move to every school becoming part of a strong multi-academy trust, as is the direction of travel and the Government’s intent, then they will not be operating schools. It is important to avoid that conflict of interest.

When my noble friend Lord Adonis first began the academies programme, as I recall, the arguments I was making in his defence in the other place concerned the notion that, in some cases, there are local authorities which are operating—and have been operating for generations—schools that are failing. There was a fundamental problem for them in calling out their own failure, which is part of why I am very nervous about the direction of travel, with the Secretary of State running all the schools in the country. The Secretary of State might ultimately become nervous about calling out the failures of all the schools they are responsible for.

If the local authority is to become the guardian of the interests of the children in its area, it is right that it should become accountable for fair local admissions for parents. In an environment where every school is an academy, every academy school should be subject to guidance from the local authority on admissions. My noble friend Lord Adonis just talked about the 101 varieties of admission arrangements. Nerdy people like me might understand them, but this is a real problem for parents, particularly parents of year 6 children.

Year 6 begins with parents starting to get their head around what school their child will go into year 7 at. They then have to grapple with banded admissions over here, some kind of attainment test over there, schools that are not that popular where you can get in if you just put them on the list, and schools that are popular and that attempt some kind of fair admissions. Then there are schools that have some faith-based admissions, and there is then the question of whether you have to go to church, the synagogue, the temple or whatever on a regular basis to be allowed into those schools; in some cases you might and in some you might not. It is deeply confusing for parents. I like the idea that they would hold their local council representatives responsible for making that process somewhat easier. I see that my noble friend wants to say something.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I am itching to say something, because what I am hearing my noble friend describe is that the best system we can envisage for the management of our schools is for them to be locally managed with a common admission policy across a group of schools in an area. That is the system that has been slowly dismantled, it has to be said, by the development of academies.

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I will happily arrange that conversation. There are two points I would make to my noble friend. The first is that the information is publicly available, albeit maybe not in the format that he thinks is most usable. The second comes back to the new collaborative standard requiring trusts to work collaboratively with local authorities, which will encourage better co-operation. I hope that will be a positive move in his eyes.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful that we have been able to have an hour and 20 minutes to discuss admissions. Given that the Government’s policy is that all schools should become academies, it is an uncertain area and it is really important that we have taken a bit of time to debate it.

I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Triesman already has a victory under his belt. I think my noble friend Lord Hunt is pretty close to a victory: we noted the words that the Bill as it currently stands will not enable the opening of new grammar schools and that it is not government policy for new grammar schools to be created without a parental ballot. Let us just hope that this government policy remains sound as the Bill proceeds through both Houses. There were some really powerful speeches, as ever, from my noble friend Lady Morris in particular, my noble friends Lord Triesman and Lady Blower—those are just the ones around me—and others.

I say to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol that it was not my intention at all to interfere with the admission arrangements for voluntary aided schools. I am scarred from my time as Schools Minister from a moment when we heard the shadow Secretary of State, a young David Cameron, say that we might want to loosen up admission arrangements for faith schools. So the then Secretary of State, Alan Johnson, and myself announced that maybe that was a good idea and we then had priests preaching against us on Sunday and MPs in the Division Lobbies beating us up, saying, “We are going to lose the next election if you go ahead with this” and we performed a very delicate U-turn. I really did not want to go anywhere near interfering with the admission arrangements of voluntary aided schools.

I say to my noble friend Lord Grocott, in connection to his comment about the 11-plus, that my dad was one of four sons in Kettering who all took the 11-plus. He passed; his youngest brother, Hugh, passed; the middle two brothers failed. The two who passed joined the professions, one as an accountant, the other as a banker; the two middle ones took much lower-skilled work and both emigrated, one to Canada and one to Australia. Those two remained close; the two who passed the 11-plus remained close; but in my view, the 11-plus created a schism in our family, and that is part of my very deep opposition to selection and grammar schools.

My noble friend Lady Morris talked about the chaos of admissions, and that undoubtedly advantages middle-class parents. They can navigate the criteria; they can navigate what order to put schools in—what is your second or third choice, but you will only get looked at if it is your first choice, and you have to be quite sophisticated to work out the order you put things down. Then there are appeals. When I was an MP, I occasionally had constituents who came to see me wanting help with an admissions appeal in the summer, and they were never the more disadvantaged constituents in my area; they were only ever the more articulate ones. We really need to get this right if we want a school system that deals with entrenched disadvantage.

Having listened carefully to what the Minister had to say from the Dispatch Box, I will be pleased if, subject to the conversation we are having about Clauses 1 to 18, we get to a point where she introduces a collaboration standard. I would welcome that. I encourage the Government to go further and show us what their vision is for local authorities across the piece. She came close to that in some of her comments, but I would like to see, in the context of schooling, the Government’s vision for the role of local authorities, MATs, individual schools, and the Secretary of State. Publish that so that we can all see it before Report and can then make our judgment about whether they have it right. That would really help us, and then we might have some agreement about the future of admissions for all our schools. I am happy to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 35A withdrawn.

Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

35B: Schedule 1, page 88, line 33, leave out paragraph 35 and insert—
“35 In section 127 (guidance), in subsection (2)(b), at the end insert “, including Academies”.”Member's explanatory statement
The effect is to require academies to employ qualified teachers and to be subject to the Secretary of State guidance on teacher pay and conditions that applies to maintained schools.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I find myself leading on a whole series of groups: it is slightly challenging, jumping around. This one is about teachers, qualified teacher status and teachers’ pay. It amends Schedule 1, which is about the use of other education legislation, as set out in Clause 3. This would require academies to employ qualified teachers and be subject to Secretary of State guidance on teachers’ pay and conditions as they apply to maintained schools currently. Again, this goes very much to the question: if every school is going to be an academy, what is our vision for teachers, for teaching and for teachers’ pay and conditions?

We know from the evidence—it is really well documented—that good schools are good because they have high teacher quality, and teaching and learning are well led. In a way, it is like Governments—great Ministers well led by the Prime Minister; that is what a good Government might look like one day. If we agree with that evidence around teacher quality, and if we believe in the Government’s reforms of initial teacher training, the early careers framework and national professional qualifications, then we must think that the Government’s emphasis on all that is important and will raise quality. I have some arguments about the reforms of initial teacher training, but the Government are consistent in saying that the reason they want to reform initial teacher training, the reason they want to introduce the early careers framework and have done so, and the reason they have the series of professional qualifications is to raise teacher quality. They must believe in the qualification of teachers to have all that.

In the context of all schools becoming academies, I think parents would be really surprised if they found that this then meant that all schools were no longer subject to having to employ qualified teachers. It would be quite a surprise if that was in the newspapers or wherever it is they get their news. Parents expect their children to be taught by qualified teachers, and mostly that is the case. The vast majority of academies want to employ qualified teachers and do so, so I do not really understand why we would not translate, as we move maintained schools into becoming academies, the requirement that they should employ qualified teachers as well. Of course it is also true that maintained schools can employ unqualified teachers as instructors, so they still have that get-out if they really need it. Indeed, a very long time ago, I worked as an instructor at a sixth-form college in Basingstoke. For me, it is tricky, and I would be interested in any argument that came from others as to why we would not want qualified teachers in our schools.

Then I would argue, as I have sought to do with this amendment by replacing the get-out—on employing qualified teachers—with saying that academies should abide by national pay and conditions, that we should have a coherent labour market for all our teachers, the largest single profession in the world. A coherent labour market for them, working in publicly funded schools, would mean a consistent arrangement for pay and conditions so that they can plan their own careers and are not trapped in a single MAT employer that would have its own career structure and pay structure for them. They would be able to move about and develop their career and professional expertise on the basis of something that is predictable around the country.

For me, this is a no-brainer. I devote a huge amount of my time, pro-bono, to the academies movement, but this is something we need to get right. We should have a very clear policy of having qualified teachers, based on national pay and conditions. I beg to move.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

I imagine it will come as no surprise that I support my noble friend Lord Knight. It seems to me that high teacher quality is obviously a critical issue in making sure that we have a well-functioning and successful education system. One of the problems by which we have been beset is that there is no coherence at the moment to the way pay and conditions work across the country—that is, across England.

At Second Reading I probably mentioned that if you are a female teacher, one of the difficulties you have in seeking to move is that you will have no idea what the arrangements are for maternity leave and maternity pay from one employer to another. While I entirely accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Nash—who is not in his place at the moment—that multi-academy trusts do seek to have a career structure within themselves, there are many reasons why individual teachers might choose to move, not just within the MAT but to a completely different part of the country. Of course, that might still be part of the same MAT, but that they might choose to move out of the MAT. Being able to have a predictable set of conditions and a predictable pay arrangement is critical.

One thing that has been noticeable over the years is that pay has become much less predictable because MATs have different arrangements. It is not so possible for teachers to be on permanent contracts and to know, for example, that they are in a position to get a mortgage. I imagine most noble Lords would believe that home ownership is something to which a teacher should reasonably be able to aspire, but in many cases it absolutely is not. A national, coherent set of pay and conditions therefore seems perfectly reasonable. I would add that that should be done on the basis of sectoral collective bargaining, but that is not in the amendment. I just like saying “sectoral collective bargaining” because it is the right way for us to run the system. I note, for example, that in Iceland there is no minimum wage because all wages in all sectors are based on sectoral collective bargaining—and that is not uncommon in other countries, too.

Finally, on the question of QTS, before I came into this House one of the things that I did was to work with colleagues in the European region of Education International, the global union federation for all education unions. The European region does not just cover the EU countries; it takes in a significant geographical area beyond that. When the arrangements came in that meant people could teach in England without QTS, it was a single thing that my colleagues in many other countries—including Scotland—were absolutely astounded should be happening in this country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 35B and 36, which amend Schedule 1. Schedule 1 extends certain provisions in maintained school legislation which currently apply to academies through funding agreements to academies directly.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, for Amendment 35B. He is seeking to require academies to employ qualified teachers and to be subject to the Secretary of State’s guidance on teacher pay and conditions that applies to maintained schools. However, the provisions in Schedule 1 that the amendment changes relate specifically to special schools and the removal of the power for the Secretary of State to prescribe that special academies employ qualified teachers. The amendment would not have the effect that the noble Lord is seeking to achieve.

However, it is clear that the intended purpose of this amendment and Amendment 36, which is about removing the exemption that academies have for teachers to have qualified teacher status, would provide for a restriction to a core tenet of the academy system, namely that, with the exception of special academies, all academy trusts have the freedom to employ those they believe are suitably qualified to teach in their academies and that all academy trusts can make decisions about pay and conditions of service in their academies.

The academy standards regulations will reflect existing requirements in the funding agreements, including those relating to enrolment in the Teachers’ Pension Scheme or the Local Government Pension Scheme. I have heard the fears expressed about a future Government using these regulations to undermine the freedoms that enable academy trusts to collaborate, innovate and organise themselves to deliver the best outcomes for their pupils, and I am carefully reflecting on those concerns.

On teacher pay and conditions, although all academy trusts have the freedom to set their own pay structure and conditions of service for teachers, we believe the vast majority follow some, if not all, of the guidance in the school teachers’ pay and conditions document. We believe it is right that academies continue to benefit from this freedom because it allows heads and trust leaders to have the flexibility to respond to their local context to support recruitment and retention of teachers. I am reminded of the phrase used by the noble Lord. I do not want to misquote him, but he spoke very powerfully on the first day of Committee about how important and attractive it was to trust our leaders, and that is exactly where these freedoms fall.

Academy trusts are also allowed the freedom to make their own decisions about who they believe is suitably qualified to teach pupils in their academies. However, most schools, including academies, understand the importance of well-trained teachers and choose to employ teachers who have undertaken initial teacher training and gained qualified teacher status. I agree very much with the sentiment expressed by my noble friend Lord Agnew in relation to the quality of the qualification as opposed to just the qualification in its own right. I am slightly baffled at your Lordships’ focus on this, as 96.9% of teachers in academy schools held QTS in November 2021, compared to 97.7% in maintained schools, so there is less than a percentage point difference between the two. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, seemed to suggest that there are examples where it might be much higher. If that is the case, perhaps she would be very kind and share them with us, so that we can look into that.

The intention behind the amendment is to place additional requirements on academy trusts that would undermine the discretion and flexibility at the front line that fundamental academy freedoms give to heads and MAT leaders. That is not the intention of this Bill. On that basis, I would be grateful if the noble Lord would withdraw Amendment 35B and if the noble Baronesses would not move Amendment 36.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful again for this half-hour debate and for the Minister’s reply. It is important that we have a vision for the whole system, now that we are moving to a single system, and perhaps this is something we will continue to reflect on.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, for his comments. The core of the argument for having a single national pay and conditions arrangement for teaching relates to the difficulty of recruiting people into the profession. It is a critical profession for the future of our country and any society, and we must make sure that we recruit the finest people to be teachers—as one of their careers. These days, we are going to live longer and work longer. I am not saying that you necessarily have to do 40 or 50 years as a teacher, but would it not be great if, for one career, people wanted to be a teacher? It is easier to recruit people if they know that they have a predictable pay progression with a predictable, quality pension at the end of it, as part of their public service—as part of the motivation and the vocation around becoming a teacher.

I hear and respect very much what the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash, say about the output and the nature of the different routes into the profession. There is of course the assessment-only route. People who have been working for 20 years in the private sector or who are coming in from industry could perhaps have some brief training in some of the pedagogic or behaviour management elements that my noble friend on the Front Bench talked about and can then be assessed against the standards that are set around what we require from qualified teachers. They do not have to go through training; they can just be assessed against those standards. One of the things I pioneered when I was working at TES, with the TES Institute, was a route through the assessment-only process.

I am happy to withdraw this amendment. I hope this brief debate has given us cause and a pause to reflect on what kind of system we want for the teaching profession in the context of every school being an academy.

Amendment 35B withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

39A: Clause 5, page 5, line 11, leave out “satisfied” and insert “the Chief Inspector has given notice that an inspection of the Academy proprietor’s operations and educational provision has identified”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, along with the amendment to Clause 6, page 6, line 11, in the name of Lord Knight of Weymouth, is designed to require Ofsted to inspect multi academy trusts and restrict the use of the Secretary of State intervention powers to when an inspection has revealed the need for such powers to be used.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise yet again. This substantial group is about intervention and termination powers. Most of the group is made up of stand part debates on a series of clauses. My amendments are about a level of accountability for the Secretary of State around the use of powers. The clauses we will be thinking about in this group relate to the power for the Secretary of State to give compliance directions, give a notice to improve to an academy provider, impose directors on the trust and then, if none of that works, terminate both the single academy agreements and the master agreements, perhaps after seven years’ notice by mutual consent or if the academies are perceived to be failing, if the trust becomes insolvent, after failure to address concerns or after warning notices. That is what the set of clauses that we are about to debate is all about. They are substantial and, in my judgment, overweening, and that is why I have also signed up to the stand part debates in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Agnew, Lord Nash and Lord Baker.

My problem at its heart is the sense that the Secretary of State becomes judge, jury and executioner. The Secretary of State is taking powers, essentially, I think in reality, through a network of regional directors, as they are now called, and officials appointed on a regional basis. They will be monitoring the performance of academies across anything and everything they do and will then be suggesting to academies that do not do what they want that they have this huge range of powers and will make them do as they are told. I am mindful of the discussion we had earlier, what the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said and the advice from Stone King about how that might impinge on the independence of the trustees of multi-academy trusts. I was grateful to hear the Minister’s reassurance that the Government have been given legal advice that it will not, but I still have concerns.

My amendments would add in Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, and once it has made a judgment about a multi-academy trust—yes, my amendment says that Ofsted should now inspect multi-academy trusts as a whole, not just the individual academies—that can act as a trigger; it is acting as the judge or jury and the Secretary of State can then act as the executioner. An independent party will have been able to have a look at it, and one would assume that Ofsted, in coming up with its framework for how to inspect multi-academy trusts, would be informed by the academy standards that eventually, in one form or another, we think will be in place.

I would anticipate that the MAT inspection would look at the educational quality and safeguarding and governance arrangements and ensure they were sound, and at the trust’s compliance with various regulations, including financial. When that judgment is passed, action can be taken. All my amendment seeks to do, whether perfectly or imperfectly, is to introduce that.

In thinking about the stand part debates, of course there are questions about some of these clauses. Clause 6, which provides the power to give notice to improve, as I interpret it, reflects the academy agreement academy by academy, rather than the master agreement with the whole academy trust. Clause 6(4) includes the phrase “make representations”. I should be interested to know to whom—one assumes the Secretary of State. In a world where every one of 25,000 schools is an academy, one assumes that they will not all be failing at once. Let us say that the figure is 1%, if we are generous, which is 250 schools at once making representations. In reality, they will be made not to the Secretary of State but to the regional directors. I should be interested to know how the Minister sees the representations process working, because it is as close to some sense of appeal as we have in the clause. Subsection 5 says that the Secretary of State “may make regulations”. Will those regulations be one by one, school by school? Perhaps that gives a little bit of power to Parliament, but I should be interested in some clarification of that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is right about getting Ofsted into multi-academy trusts. It would make a great difference to how parents are able to interact with the eventual system. Parents need the level of information and reassurance that will come from an Ofsted report, and I hope it would be done in a way that, as others have suggested, is very much focused on the educational aspects, which is where Ofsted’s expertise lies.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I am grateful for those last comments, and that I do not have to speak for six minutes before I get my food while others discuss the national food strategy.

I am pleased to hear that, all being well, on Wednesday the Minister will be able to come and give us a little more information about the Government’s intentions, which is really important. It is also helpful that she was able to give us a vague timescale of “in the coming weeks” on the regulatory review. If on Wednesday she was able to give a little more detail on that timescale, I think the whole sector would be really grateful in terms of understanding the sequence of how things are likely to play out on all this.

The Minister talked about the blunt powers in agreements that she is looking to replace with a more nuanced and consistent response through the series of sequences, yet many of us are worried that the nature of the Bill, as written at the moment, will still be heavy-handed. If only all current Secretaries of State paid attention to their common-law responsibility to proportionality, I think we would all be a lot happier in this place.

The issues around paying and governance are issues to reflect on. All those many years ago, when I was Schools Minister responsible for academies, among other things, I commissioned some work around governance but it never really got anywhere. There may well be reasons why we want the ability to bring in people with a much more professional approach who therefore might be paid, but we need a really full debate around that. The people who give of their time voluntarily to be school governors, multi-academy trust trustees, ambassadors for local schools, et cetera, do so willingly, and we have to be really cautious about interfering with that by offering to pay even a few.

We look forward to hearing more on Wednesday. I do not think the Committee is persuaded about these clauses as they stand. I am sure the comments from my Front Bench about what will happen if we do not get a good response are being listened to by Ministers, but I am happy to withdraw my amendment.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for carefully explaining the Government’s justification for doing this. She is in a difficult and unenviable position, but I do not think anybody could have handled it better.

What the Government need is time to think about this and to reflect on what is needed. I am fairly clear what they are getting at, and it is a very narrow thing they want to do. I do not think that can be covered by tinkering with the existing 18 clauses, quite frankly. It will mean a redraft and new clauses, so I very much recommend what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said on the screen: we should gain time. That is to say that Report on the Bill should take place in the autumn, not in July. The Government really have to reflect carefully and define their targets more precisely than they have, so that solutions can be given. My three friends and I would be able to help and co-operate with that as much as possible. I very much hope that on Wednesday my noble friend will be able to say that Report will be done in the autumn.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I think I support everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, said. I am not a signatory to any of the amendments in this group, but I am fully supportive and have other, broadly similar, amendments in other places.

I agreed with the noble Baroness when she said that she expects that Clause 1 will not leave this House intact. She must be right. Clause 1 is very poorly drafted and requires amendments. It may be that it should be removed entirely from the Bill. I find it very strange to have primary legislation that gives such widespread and unnecessary powers to the Secretary of State. As the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, said, Clause 1 suggests examples of matters about which standards “may” be set. Those words are far too loose. What is to happen, for example, if the Secretary of State decides not to set any standards at all, given the use of the word “may”? Surely standards must be set. After all, independent schools have standards to meet, which are those set out in Section 94 of the Education and Skills Act 2008.

Unless the Minister can show good reason, it would seem wise for the Government to support the principles underlying the amendments in this group. Surely the Government should accept that intervention by a Secretary of State on everyday matters would be centralist, divisive and quite impossible to manage. Defining standards is one thing; permitting interference by the Secretary of State is quite another. The job of Ministers is to give the legislation that the Government are proposing clarity of intent. This clause fails on that count because it places in the Bill unnecessary powers, unnecessary doubt and unnecessary interference in day-to-day matters in schools right across the country by a single person.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I remind the Committee of my interests in respect of education in the register; in particular, I chair the trust board of the E-ACT multi-academy trust. This group is clearly about the open-ended powers that the Secretary of State is seeking to take in the Bill. I fully support what has already been said by both speakers, particularly from my Front Bench. In the end, this group goes to the heart of the conundrum of the Bill.

I have just come back from a glorious week in Orkney, basking in the glorious biodiversity of that part of our country. To go back to how we are to deal with this, if the Government’s policy, as set out in the White Paper, is for all schools to become part of a multi-academy trust—I think “strong multi-academy trust” is the phrase—first, do I agree with that? That is the direction of travel and I shall not argue with it. I then turn to how we will make that work. I also agree with what I think is the outcome that the Government are trying to achieve, which is a rationalisation away from a multiplicity of legal agreements with different academy proprietors, and something much easier than having to then have officials go around and try to renegotiate individual agreements one by one every time we want a change of policy. We therefore have to put something in statute that overrides those agreements; I think that is what Clause 2 is all about.

Incidentally, I would be interested if the Minister could circulate to us any advice she has had about why the Bill is not hybrid. Of course, the private interests of those academy proprietors are different from each other because of all those different sorts of legal agreements, and we are seeking through a public Bill to be able to interfere with various sorts of private interests. That might make the Bill hybrid and it would help the Committee if any advice that the Minister has had on hybridity was circulated for us.

However, when I think about those legal agreements, I then think about a culture of stable-horse regulation, which those of us who have been Ministers are all familiar with: there is an outcry about something that has gone wrong in an academy somewhere, or in some schools, so you then have quickly to try to fix it so that every subsequent legal agreement does not allow that thing to happen again. That is one reason why the legal agreements keep changing. However, I think that then means that the Government have said, “Okay, what are all the things covered in all the legal agreements that we currently have with all the various academy trusts? We’ll put them all into Clause 1(2) and that kind of covers everything.” They should, rather, have taken a breath and said, “Okay. What do we really need to regulate in the form of standards for these academies?” and not just to gold-plate all that stable-horse regulation. Any approach to good regulation and re-regulation would avoid repeating and gold-plating the mission creep that we have seen, which is now resulting in these highly draconian powers that the Secretary of State proposes to take in the Bill.

I come to my first recommendation to the Government, mindful of the letter that we have all had from the Chief Whips and Convenor to remind us that Committee is a conversation. We are having a conversation and this is also the closest thing we have to pre-legislative scrutiny, because the Bill is a Lords starter. In listening to the conversation, I suggest politely to the Minister and to the department that they listen to the debate that we have had and, in particular, listen to the noble Lords, Lord Nash, Lord Baker and Lord Agnew. We have not heard from them yet, but their amendments make it look as though they are saying, “Just scrap it all and start again.” My first choice would be for the Government to listen to this effective pre-legislative scrutiny—it is the closest thing we have to it—say, “Maybe we’ve got this kind of wrong”, take the summer, think about it and come back in the autumn on Report with a whole new set of clauses to achieve what the Government are trying to achieve, which I kind of agree with in terms of outcome. However, if they do not want to do that, we have all these other amendments with really good ideas that we can have a conversation about now.

When I think about what I want to say in the context of those amendments, I go back to what I was thinking about in Orkney and what I would do if we wanted every school to be an academy. I want to hang on to the independence that was there when my noble friend Lord Adonis first started the academies movement back in the day, particularly around curriculum. It is fair to say that we have not seen that much use of curriculum freedoms, but we have seen a bit. I would like to see more use of curriculum freedoms to get a better balance around the social, emotional and physical development of children, as well as their cognitive development, just as an example. However, I am happy to have a system where we build trust in school leaders and in teachers to make decisions about their local context and local community and the pupils and the parents they serve, to find the right curriculum mix for their own community.

There is independence and then a limited number of standards. I have put my name to Amendment 6 in the name of my noble friend, which repeats the standards set for independent schools. That is a logical and rational approach to setting standards that has a read-across to other independent schools. Those standards should then be inspected. We have an Office for Standards in Education—Ofsted—which should inspect against those standards at a MAT level. I am interested in ideas about whether we stop routine inspection at a school level and just inspect at a MAT level unless parents trigger an inspection at an individual school level. There is something interesting there to have a conversation about.

Then, of course, because we are spending a lot of public money, schools must be accountable. It is not just about the money but about setting children up to succeed in life. That accountability should be local to local authorities and parents, regional—I have tabled an amendment with some ideas about holding regional schools commissioners to account for the work that they are going to do under the Bill—and national. We have some systems here for the Secretary of State, but Parliament does not have a big enough role in the Bill as it is currently set up, which is why I support the use in some cases of the super-affirmative procedure that some of my noble friends are suggesting.

Fundamentally, we must build this on the basis of trust in teachers. That is why I have tabled amendments on teachers’ pay and conditions applying to teachers in academies, and on removing some of the academies’ independence in how they employ teachers. I do not expect anyone to agree with me on all of that, but that is my starter for 10 in trying to approach and think about this. In the end, this is my encouragement to the Government: take this opportunity to listen to what people around the House, with our expertise and experience, are saying. Do not come back on Report before the Summer Recess; take the time and grab that opportunity to get this right, because if the direction of travel is for every school to be in a multi-academy trust, we must get it right. At the moment, the Government have got it horribly wrong and I do not think they will get the agreement of this House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to add one thought to the debate. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, the Bill is setting out a brand-new structure for schools in this country. What is unclear is what that structure will be. What is the dynamic or philosophy, or even the structure that lies behind this proposed new system of school education? It has been nominated as academies—it has their name attached to it. I am a doubter about academies. We could have an interesting debate, probably more on this side, about their role and what they have achieved. Because it was raised by my noble friend Lord Young, I have to say that I find his reference to failing schools in London, with the implication that there was a mass failure of schools there, offensive. However, I am not going to debate that today.

What is before us today on the structure is not about academies at all. Multi-academy trusts are, in fact, the antithesis of academies as originally envisaged. These are large, bureaucratic, non-local, geographically distributed organisations, with no local involvement other than as a toothless add-on. We will try to do our best later on to build in local and teacher involvement. I would argue for school-student involvement in the way that they are run, but these will be big organisations and the dynamic will be for them to become even bigger. They will be big, bureaucratic organisations which are effectively under the thumb of the Secretary of State. Is that the schools system that we want? I certainly do not think it is.

As a final thought, we saw research this week from the Institute of Education showing that the one thing multi-academy trusts do not do is to rescue failing schools. Its evidence showed that they had no impact on rescuing failing primary schools and very little on rescuing secondary schools. So I am incensed, in part, by the failure to recognise the role that local authorities should still play in governing our education system.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I did not want to stand up again, but I need to respond quickly to my noble friend, just to defend the record of some multi-academy trusts. In doing so, I do not want to attack any local authorities. Local authorities do and have done a great job. Some individual schools were being failed when the first academies were set up by my noble friend Lord Adonis, and it was the right thing to do to intervene after generations of failure. But just within the multi-academy trust that I am so lucky to chair, I refer my noble friend to an Ofsted report that has just been published about DSLV, which is an all-through school in Daventry. It has gone from being in a very poor state to having an excellent report that we received this week. I could point to a number, just to say that there is a balance to the argument. I hope that he is willing to listen to it, in the same way that I am willing to listen to the argument around local authorities in London and elsewhere.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I draw to your Lordships’ attention my relevant interest in the register as the deputy chairman of the Inspiration academy trust.

Although I have been here for nearly five years, this is my first experience of dealing with legislation as a Back-Bencher and I am completely flummoxed by the process. The Bill has been introduced with no consultation with the sector and there has been a promise of a regulatory review that has not even begun, so it has landed like a lump of kryptonite among all of us who are trying to educate children in the system. That is why I have asked my noble friend the Minister to just step back and kill off these 18 clauses so that there can be some proper reflection.

When we have such a backlog of legislation, I find it extraordinary that we are going to waste days and days grinding through pointless clauses. I defer to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and so on about all the constitutional stuff, but I know how much this country needs to legislate on important things, and I am going to have to go through the 20 paragraphs of Clause 1(2) and explain why none of that stuff is necessary. In the education system we all know that it is not necessary. If it needs to be clarified, fair enough, but in my two years as Academies Minister I used the Academies Financial Handbook. Every year I amended it; I consulted the sector and we basically squeezed out the mavericks that my noble friend Lord Baker refers to.

A few days ago we had a bizarre conversation with our noble friend the Minister and her officials. I asked how many there are left—I knew there were problems. They said 1%. We are going to spend days going through this for 1%, without having had any consultation and without any regulatory framework in place. I do not understand that, so I urge the Minister, however uncomfortable it might be in the short term, to back off and reconsider. I understand that it might need a write-round, but take the hit early because this is going to be very messy. I think there is enormous consensus across the Chamber today. We have at least three previous Academies Ministers and a previous Secretary of State for Education. We all come at it from different perspectives, but we share one overriding objective: to improve the quality of education. I hope the Minister will listen.

There are really only four things that the Government, sitting in their ivory tower, should worry about: good governance, sound financial management, good educational outcome and the highest level of safeguarding. That is where they should start. The Government have four organs to achieve those things: bureaucrats sitting here in Whitehall; the regional school directors—although they have just been renamed—out in the field; the ESFA, which is the financial organisation that oversees the financial capacity of the academies; and Ofsted. We have to mesh those together and show the sector how they should work. That should be the starting point.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

Given the noble Lord’s relatively recent experience as Academies Minister, can he clarify, using those four things, how he would have gone about dealing with the 1% that is the basis of our having to legislate, as the Government would put it?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

That is a very good question. I can tell the noble Lord candidly that when I arrived in that post in September 2017 it was more than 1%. In my first few weeks in office, I was probably getting three or four cases a month of maverick trusts on the brink of failure financially and basically, as my noble friend Lord Baker said, putting a gun to my head for a financial bailout. By the time I left, we had virtually eliminated that. I did it through what was then called the Academies Financial Handbook—it is now the Academy Trust Handbook—by absolutely binding the ESFA tightly together with the RSCs, so that whenever they met a MAT or a single-academy trust, the two people were in the room. I bang on about the money because if you get the money right, you have the resources to educate properly. That is how I have always managed the process, and we achieved it.

I accept that there are different views of Ofsted and that Ofsted is not perfect, but one thing about Ofsted is that the brand value across the sector is very strong. People respect it—they might resent it—but there is a mechanism to appeal if you get a report you do not agree with. Everyone in the sector largely accepts that it is the arbiter of good education.

When I left, the ESFA was an extremely effective organisation; it knew where the money was. I know that noble Lords opposite me do not all agree with academies, but the financial reporting and transparency of the academy programme is infinitely greater than those of local authority schools. An academy trust closes its books on 31 August. It has to file audited accounts in four months, by 31 December; ordinary companies have nine months to do that. That is not a requirement in the local authority schools and it provides huge scrutiny. You pick up the warning signals. If those accounts are not filed on 31 December, I used to get a weekly report on who was late and how late they were, and went after them. If they were late filing their accounts, you knew there were problems. By the time I left, we had got that down to a very small number.

I do not want to bang on about all this detail in this Chamber—it is not fair on noble Lords. I just want the Government to back off on this. There are some important things in this Bill—the homework and home schooling stuff—which are absolutely vital. I saw that agony when I was here, in my noble friend’s place, when we had a Private Member’s Bill and it was suffocated. This is a huge problem, getting worse all the time. Let us get that sorted out. This is a crucial problem, not to be sorted out in a rush. My noble friend has been bounced; the Bill Office has just said, “You’re the first cab in the rank in this new Session, get on with it,” and she has not had the time to do the job properly.

I am going to stop here, but I want to thank my noble friend the Minister. I think that she has been given an impossible job; she is bending over backwards to listen to everybody here, and I want to extend my courtesy to her and say that I will do anything I can to help.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I want briefly to respond to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about his amendments being detailed and therefore not echoing the feeling of the debate we have had so far. On the contrary, it absolutely gets to the heart of the problem. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, in the last group, about the detailed work he had to fulfil as Minister in his role of managing academies as a whole and failing and problematic academies specifically.

The amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, go in the other direction and say that academies should be able to retain their personal freedoms. The difficulty is that the Bill does not give us any sense of the Government’s direction on academies. It is absolutely summed up by those two contradictions. It is important and this is the place in the Bill. I may not agree with all the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, but I am very grateful that he has laid them because it makes something very clear to me: the Government do not understand what they are trying to achieve.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I follow those welcome comments from the noble Baroness. This conversation—the closest thing we get to pre-legislative scrutiny—ought to give us the opportunity to guide Ministers in their reflections, which we all urge them to have and hope they will have, on what we think is important and less important; what there must be standards about, if we are to agree that; and what we should leave to academies. That is what the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the next group are helping to do. They are opportunities for noble Lords to flag things they think are sufficiently important that the Secretary of State should have a view on them on behalf of the country.

I too will not get into the whys and wherefores of curriculum freedoms, leadership and management or the length of the school day. I happen to broadly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and it is not unusual that we find ourselves in broadly the same place on such things. However, I echo what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said. It is awkward, unsatisfactory and goes back to what my noble friend Lady Morris said earlier; this is a difficult Bill for us to deal with at this stage.

The substantive point I want to make to the Minister at this stage is for when the Government are thinking about time for Report and how we deal with it. It will be quite Committee-ish in how we deal with things—assuming they come back with something substantive and different which shows that they have listened to us. We are going to have to have the opportunity to properly debate what we hope will be much more of an educational vision that they will set out for us. We can then put down amendments on it and discuss in the normal way on Report.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

May I very briefly add to that? This is not just a matter for the Government; it is also a matter for the Chief Whip in the timetabling of Report. We had exactly this problem with the Health and Care Bill. We suddenly discovered a lot of detail on Report which should have been visible to us in Committee. As a result, Report took much longer, and the House sat until 1 am or 2 am on certain days. I hope the usual channels are looking at the detail of this because it will affect Report stage.

--- Later in debate ---

I understand that you cannot always get everyone to agree with you. My noble friend Lady Morris gave her example, but the example that I can remember is when the Labour Government introduced the literacy and numeracy hour. Not everyone was thrilled about this; it was seen as a bit too interfering and too prescriptive, but the Government at the time were clear why they thought it was the right thing. They had to go out and justify it, look for evidence and say that it was about addressing a very fundamental problem that we had with standards of numeracy and literacy at the time in our primary schools. They went ahead and, in the end, those measures got broad support from teachers and parents. That would be a much better approach.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

Reflecting on the debate that we have had, it occurs to me that, effectively, in announcing that all schools will become academies, it is an announcement of the end of the national curriculum. What my noble friend has just described in respect of the literacy and numeracy hour was an up-front policy and up-front announcement—it was something about which there could be a consultation, discussion and debate. There has been no press release saying that the Government’s wish is to abolish the national curriculum, yet that is what we must have in mind as we debate this Bill.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Is it? I would like to know the answer to that question, because it is not clear whether that is the Government’s intention or not. Were the Government to come forward to say that it is what they plan to do and that they want freedom such that there is no national curriculum as we would recognise it now, then we could have a really big argument about that. We would involve school leaders and parents and look back over the successes and failings of the national curriculum; I very much agree with what my noble friend Lady Morris said about an entitlement to education, particularly around music and literature.

The fact is that we do not know. The Government’s intention is not being shared with us. We may be imagining and fearing the worst, and fearing intentions that do not exist, but the Government are asking a hell of a lot for us to accept on trust an assurance from the Dispatch Box here that there is no current intention to do certain things. Really, what we ought to expect, and what families expect, is much more information about is going to happen on the ground and in the classroom. That is what people are really interested in.

I take it that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, will not press his amendments, so we do not need to get into whether we would support them individually, but I just flag this issue about the lack of effort that the Government have made to engage with leaders in the sector. It is really damaging and is destroying some of the confidence that leaders have in the department at this point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash (Con)]

Then I will defer to the noble Lord, Lord Knight.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

Only if the noble Lord has finished; I do not mean to interrupt.

This is a really important debate on a very important set of amendments. They are essentially about two issues: parental involvement in the running of schools at a local level and whether every academy should have a local governing body. I see the two as being slightly different issues.

I support Amendment 23, and I probably support Amendments 24 and 26 as well. In thinking about this, I thought it might be worth telling the story of two multi-academy trusts. I know about one only through an article in Schools Week, so I therefore do not claim to really know anything about it at all and can only repeat what I have read. The other is the academy trust that I chair.

The Anglian Learning academy trust won the National Governance Association award for outstanding governance this year. I understand that it has 14 schools and its CEO, Jon Culpin, talks about empowering local governing bodies, not fearing them. His approach is that every academy in the trust has a local governing body, and it works very well. My understanding from reading about it is that the MAT board very much looks after the core operational side of the business—the finances and the schools’ capital—to take that burden away from the school business managers and heads. The heads then lead the teaching and learning on a school-by-school basis in conjunction with their local governing body. That works very successfully for them, by and large.

In one or two cases, they have had to essentially impose interim executive bodies as a MAT board because they have not been able to appoint local governing bodies, they have struggled to recruit, or there has been a problem. By and large, that has worked very well for them, and that sense of being really clear about where the MAT board adds value, and where a local governing body adds value, is important when thinking about this relationship and this issue around local governing bodies. Of course, parents would have been represented on every one of those 14 local governing bodies.

Long before I was involved in E-ACT, the previous CEO but one inherited the situation where a significant majority of our 28 schools were failing and were in low Ofsted categories—I think that maybe 25% were not. It was in a pretty poor state, academically as well as financially. I am sure that it was bleeping very largely on the radar of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, when he was the Academies Minister at the time. At that point, it had local governing bodies in each of the schools. However, the decision was made by the then CEO to remove all those local governing bodies because he had to make a lot of difficult decisions very quickly to turn around the finances of the organisation and the educational performance of the schools. As a result, we currently have no local governing bodies and I am effectively—in legal terms—the chair of governors of 28 schools. That is quite a considerable pro bono burden on my time, as counsel any Members of your Lordships’ House who are thinking of doing this. I get all sorts of letters from Ofsted and the department on all sorts of things about which, frankly, it is very difficult for me to know exactly what is going on, because they are about individual schools. I do not think that this situation is ideal either.

We have local ambassador groups in each of the 28 schools. The latest version of the academies handbook is encouraging us further around parental involvement and hearing from every one of those local ambassador groups if we do not have parental trustees on the trust board. I perceive quite an encouragement from the department for us to do that. In the next round of recruiting trustees, I am very keen that we should recruit parental trustees. This is why, in the end, I support Amendment 23 and have put my name to it. This is probably an issue for the articles of association—the department can then advise us on how they should be updated—rather than standards in the Bill. Nevertheless, that is a technicality, and it has allowed us to have this debate.

One of the other problems that exists when you have a large, geographically dispersed MAT, like this one, is that the trust board cannot possibly know all the details about what is happening in all 28 of those schools and communities. Therefore, it must delegate quite a lot of governance function to the executive leadership team, and there is a danger that they are then marking their own homework on some of the decisions they are making. That is another difficulty and tension within the system as it is currently constructed.

One of the things we are doing in my particular MAT is commissioning an independent external review of governance to see how we can resolve some of these tensions. I hope that we can do this. I do not want to anticipate how that will end up, but I want to ensure that we end up with better local intelligence at a board level about what is going on, so that we are cognisant of the culture and the views of parents. When I last visited our two academies in Sheffield, I had a great meeting with our ambassador groups; they are all parents, and I had great feedback and input from them around what was going on in those two schools. In the end, however, I do not think it is quite enough.

Does that mean that I think that we should impose local governing bodies on every single school, even though I agree that it is perfectly reasonable to have two trustees who are parents on the main trust board? If they were local governing bodies, they would have to have two parental trustees on each one, so to aggregate that up to two out of 28 does not seem unreasonable. However, I do not, in the end, agree that we should impose local governing bodies in every case. There are circumstances, such as the one that happened at E-ACT some time ago, where we might want to be able to impose things while we turn things around and sort problems out, and then, hopefully, have the maturity and the reflection to decide, “Okay, we now have everything running well”—as, by and large, we do at E-ACT—“and now might be the time for us to re-empower schools and re-empower governance at a local level.” However, I am not sure that a blanket approach is appropriate. It is appropriate for the MAT board and the central MAT team, particularly around the educational activity in schools, to have more of an attitude that they are servants of the schools and not the masters of the schools—culturally, that is better—but there are other operational aspects where we want to be the masters, because in the end we can move resources around and sort things out. It is going to be different on a case-by-case basis.

So, in the end, my counsel to your Lordships is not to go with the imposition of every academy having to have a local governing body, but to ensure that we have better parental representation across the piece than we might have at the moment.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. I have just one narrow point I wish to add. One thing that is lacking and to me seems essential is some reference to school students and their participation in the governance of their schools. To me, the case for those over voting age is unanswerable: they can vote in a national election, but they have no right to participate in the governance of the institution to which they belong. Given that the Labour Party’s policy is, I think, votes at 16, I would make the case that school students from age 16 should have a statutory right to participate in governance. I would even suggest that there is some scope for clear guidance to involve even younger children. I believe that there is some interesting work done in many primary schools now where the children are involved. Unfortunately, I missed the boat on making this specific point in an amendment, but I am sure that this issue that will return on Report and I hope that, at that stage, some reference to school students could be included.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part one
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I listened to what my noble friend Lady Morris said about following our noble friend Lord Blunkett and, very strangely, I find myself in exactly the same position with the noble Lord, Lord Baker. It is quite odd.

I should remind the House of my interests in the register as an owner of Suklaa, which is an education consultancy, and in particular as chair of the trust board for E-ACT, a multi-academy trust of 28 schools around the country.

I say at the outset that I am happy with the measures in the Bill around attendance, the regulation of independent educational institutions, teacher misconduct and the home-school register. I join noble Lords who paid tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, who unfortunately could not be with us today. I may be persuaded on the national funding formula as well. I remember, as a Dorset MP, consistent concern about how my political opponents in county hall were not passing on through the schools forum the amount of money that the more deprived schools in my consistency needed because they were spreading it evenly across the shire county.

However, like other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Baker, I have real concerns about Part 1 in respect of academy standards and regulation. The Government are trying to solve the right problem: the problem around academy agreements and the multitude of contracts between the Secretary of State and the academies and how confusing that is, the inability of Parliament to be able to easily legislate around what happens in academies, and the use of the academy handbook. For that to be regularised is the right problem for us to solve. However, the solution is jaw-dropping: making the Secretary of State effectively the chief education officer for 25,000 schools, and what is being proposed around standards, intervention and termination.

I understand that, if you are in the centre, you see when there are failures and you want to be able to use all those powers, but the problem—I say this quietly as far as my Front Bench is concerned but ask government Ministers to listen—is that, even if they think they will use these powers only when they need to and in the best possible taste, what about future Secretaries of State? They will not be in office for ever. Do they really want to give future Secretaries of State the power to do what on earth they like to schools in this country? That is what this Bill allows them to do. I do not think they really want that, or that the system that will implement this has the capacity to do so well.

The reality is that regional schools commissioners will have teams of officials who in the end will be going out to multi-academy trusts and telling them what to do. I like to think that they will all be of the calibre needed to be able to do that but, in the end, I am afraid that I do not believe it. Unfortunately, when the Bill talks about academy proprietors, it is silent on the difference between members and trustees. I want to be able to explore that in Committee because there are some real differences, for example around termination.

I did a bit of rough maths. If every school were to become part of a MAT, with 10 schools in a MAT and 10 trustees in each MAT, that would mean 25,000 trustees you have to be able to recruit. We have to work out whether a system in which you are dictated to on everything you have to do is the right environment for people to want to be trustees; I would question that. I see this as potentially the end of innovation in schools and the end of academy freedom. In particular, I ask the Minister whether this is the end of the curriculum freedoms that academies want to be able to enjoy.

This Bill doubles down on the direction of travel of the last 12 years, as my noble friend Lady Morris said. It is not empathetic. Will it help to recruit more and better MAT trustees? Will it help to get us more and better school leaders and teachers? It is understandable from the centre, but not in terms of incentivising us to be involved in the system. As others have said, we need a Bill that sets out a different vision for schools. There is a growing consensus for change in this country. The Government’s targets for education by 2030 will not be met unless we do things differently.

The noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, talked about mental health and well-being, as others have done. I read this weekend that 420,000 children are being treated every month in this country for mental health issues. That is a crisis. Josh MacAlister’s report on children’s social care and the need for a family health service in schools is out today. We need to be putting children first and designing a school system. It is a universal service for children that should think properly about how we help children, especially the most vulnerable, to have the breadth of knowledge, of skills and of behaviours that they need to thrive, emotionally, socially, environmentally and economically. Then, with that vision, I think we can all go forward together in this House.

Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

3rd reading
Friday 4th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

That the Bill do now pass.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass, and in doing so I thank noble Lords on all sides, Jamie Agombar from Teach the Future, Ann Finlayson from SEEd and members of Peers for the Planet for their support. There are many outside organisations, both environmental and educational, which have met with me, discussed this and given great encouragement. Finally, I thank Darren Jones MP, who has agreed to take this forward in the other place.

I hope that the Bill encourages the Government to build on the consultation the Secretary of State launched at COP 26 on 5 November, and to firm up on the direction of travel set out in that strategy by moving from a voluntarist approach to something that has rather more teeth. I hope they can embrace that as this is debated in the other place.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, can I just say a word before my own Front Bench responds? I congratulate my noble friend on this legislative endeavour and, crucially, the debate it has initiated both in this House and across the education sector. Citizenship education would be enhanced if we were able to add to the existing curriculum, as my noble friend Lord Knight indicated, this critical issue for the future.

Given the geopolitics of the moment—the crisis facing Ukraine, the energy issues that reverberate from that conflict and the Russian action against a sovereign country—it is absolutely crucial that we have in our schools and colleges the necessary education, enthusiasm and commitment to ensure that we get this right for the future.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, for highlighting this very important issue. While the Government agree with the sentiment of the Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, just suggested, they do not believe that amending the curriculum is the right way to encourage pupils to learn about a sustainable environment. The subjects of citizenship, science and geography all include content on sustainability and the environment, and schools have the autonomy to go into as much depth on these subjects as they see fit.

We are taking action to support schools to develop further pupil knowledge and skills in relation to these very important issues. Our draft sustainability and climate change strategy, which we announced at COP 26, set out two new initiatives: the national education nature park and the climate leaders award. Together, these schemes will build on knowledge gained in the classroom to provide practical opportunities for all pupils to learn more about nature and biodiversity, develop key digital skills that are essential components to solving climate change and be empowered to take positive action. Alongside this, teachers will have access to improved training in climate education, including a primary science module curriculum, science CPD and free access to high-quality resources. We have engaged widely and plan to publish the final strategy in April.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friends Lord Blunkett and Lord Watson—particularly my noble friend Lord Blunkett, who is the father of citizenship in our schools. I think my noble friend Lord Watson’s comments about the views of young people that autonomy is not delivering are shared by teachers. If the Minister, or her colleague Robin Walker, had the appetite and the time to meet with me and Darren Jones before the Bill goes to the other place, we would be very grateful.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Either I or, even better, my honourable friend in the other place would be delighted to meet with the noble Lord.

Education (Environment and Sustainable Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 3rd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to move the little amendment in my name and, since the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, has also signed up to it, I can cut my speech down from one hour to no more than 45 minutes. I hope that I will not be too patronising in delivering it. This is a simple amendment. Clause 1(4) of the Bill—which I support—as it stands at the moment, states:

“The Secretary of State must give guidance about the provision of education”.


After “must”, I wish to insert the words “by regulations” —because, if one looks slightly further on, the proposed subsection (3) in Clause 1(4) says:

“The governing body of a maintained secondary school must have regard to guidance under this section.”


I am moving this amendment in a private capacity but—for the next couple of weeks, in any case—I am the chair of the Delegated Powers Committee, which looked at the Bill, as it looks at all Private Members’ Bills. We do not change our guidance for private Members any more than we do for the Government. When we look at Bills, our normal rule is that, where guidance is advisory, we suggest that it should be laid before Parliament but does not have to be debated—it does not need the negative or the affirmative procedure. But when it is guidance that one “must have regard to”—as we increasingly see from government these days—we say that, in effect, it is almost mandatory, and there are legal consequences for the person or body if they do not have regard to it.

In our report, we say:

“Although a duty to have regard to statutory guidance does not imply a duty to follow it in … all respects, we have in recent years observed that a person or body required by statute to have regard to guidance will normally be expected to follow it and will in practice normally do so unless there are cogent reasons for not doing so. And yet this guidance is subject to no parliamentary scrutiny at all.”


We are therefore suggesting that the Secretary of State makes the guidance by way of regulations that are subject to the negative procedure. That is not a heavy burden on the Secretary of State or the department. As we know, most negative-procedure SIs go through on the nod; they are very seldom debated or prayed against. I cannot imagine any side of the House wishing to pray against guidance in this regard, but the power exists there, if the House wishes to exercise it in certain circumstances.

I will give noble Lords one more minute of technical stuff. How would this actually take effect, when I am only inserting the words “by regulations”? I am advised by our lawyers that the guidance would in fact be covered by Section 210 of the Education Act 2002, which provides that:

“Subject to subsections (5) and (6), a statutory instrument which contains any order or regulations made under this Act by the Secretary of State and is not subject to the requirement … that a draft of the instrument be laid before and approved by a resolution of each House … is subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament.”


Merely putting in the words “by regulations” would mean that any guidance that the Secretary of State produces on this measure in future would be caught by that provision and subject to the negative procedure. In essence, that is it.

I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, for signing up to the amendment. I do not think that we will have a highly contentious debate for the rest of the afternoon.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, although it is my Bill, I thought that I could probably take advantage of Committee and speak twice. But I take this advantage to outline why I am in support of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in his very helpful amendment. When I put together the original wording, I stole it from the Act that he quoted, and I perhaps could have paid more close attention to Parliament’s role. I am very grateful to the Delegated Powers Committee for its report and consideration.

The noble Lord was kind enough to send me an email on Wednesday. When I received it, it was with a little trepidation as to what he might have to say about how he would proceed today. It was of huge reassurance when he said that his amendment is not a re-emergence of the old Eric Forth and David Maclean “wreck a Private Member’s Bill on a Friday” scenario. I am grateful for the noble Lord’s support for the Bill and for the way in which he has gone about this.

One reason for wanting to speak early in the discussion of this amendment is to have an opportunity to ask the Minister a couple of things for her to consider in her response. I think the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, agrees that there is sometimes a danger of it feeling as though the Department for Education, because it makes a lot of regulations, is reluctant to go down the road of guidance being in the regulatory form. My question to the Minister is: is there a good reason why we should not have this sort of guidance in regulation, as opposed to a good reason why, because it is important?

This is also an opportunity for me to ask the Minister whether the announcement made by the Secretary of State on 5 November, in the context of COP 26 in Glasgow, changes the Government’s position as we heard it at Second Reading. We had a different set of Ministers then and a slightly different situation. The Secretary of State made his announcement in the foreword to the document that he has then consulted upon. He said:

“Education is critical to fighting climate change. We have both the responsibility and privilege of educating and preparing young people for a changing world—ensuring they are equipped with the right knowledge, understanding and skills to meet their biggest challenge head on.”


It was almost as if he had been listening to the Second Reading debate. I was so encouraged to read the consultation document and hear what he had to say, and to see that there is an emphasis on climate education, green skills, the education estate and the supply chain. Indeed, I loved the idea of the national education nature park and the climate leaders awards, which are part of what Secretary of State is proposing.

Can we push the department that little bit further on the climate education side of things, so that we get this guidance and ensure that there is more than just a voluntary approach from our schools to delivering climate and sustainability education, which is what the Bill would do? Also recently—I think it was last week or the week before—we had Nadia Whittome introducing her own Private Member’s Bill on this subject. The subject is not going to go away, so I strongly encourage the new ministerial team to give it their own encouragement. It might not be now; I would be really delighted to meet the Minister to discuss whether we can do anything with this Bill to get it into the national curriculum. However, I want to hear from her whether there has been any slight shift in her position.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a short, precise and extremely welcome Bill, improved by the helpful amendment presented today. I am pleased to tell noble Lords that the National Education Union—the largest education union in Europe, with 450,000 members —welcomes the Bill and the amendment.

The climate emergency is of course the existential threat to the future of all our children and young people. It is certainly the case that educators have a role to play in helping children address the threat by enabling them, as was said at Second Reading, to understand the climate emergency and ecological issues, and to think critically about how they can play their part as we seek a more sustainable way of life.

To demonstrate enthusiasm for teaching about the climate emergency and sustainability, the National Education Union worked with other organisations, including Teach the Future, to promote Climate Learning Month, which overlaps October and November, ahead of COP 26. Despite the high-quality resources produced, not all schools, and therefore not all children and young people, accessed them.

The Bill, particularly with the amendment, would ensure that all those educated in maintained schools would have access to this important area of learning. Alas, those educated in academies and free schools are not required to follow the national curriculum. However, Robin Walker, the Schools Minister, speaking on this in another place, said that

“I want us to do more to educate our children about the costs of environmental degradation and what we are doing to solve that, both now and in the future. Not only do our children deserve to inherit a healthy world, but they also need to be educated so that they are … prepared to live in a world affected by climate change, so that they may live sustainably and continue to fight the effects of climate change.”—[Official Report, Commons, 27/10/21; col. 146WH.]

I therefore hope that Her Majesty’s Government will not only support the Bill but press upon all schools the benefit of this aspect of learning. Of course, I hope that the Government will will the means to ensure that educators are themselves properly educated and trained to ensure high-quality teaching on this important issue.

Finally, it is the case that climate and sustainability issues are covered in the current curriculum—as has been said, they are covered in science and geography—but the magnitude of the climate emergency requires the holistic approach to content and skills development outlined in my noble friend Lord Knight’s Bill. The brevity of this speech should not be taken to imply anything less than my wholehearted support for the Bill and this amendment.

Initial Teacher Training

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by paying tribute to the excellent opening by my noble friend Lady Donaghy and commending my noble friend Lady Morris on her excellent contribution, joined by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and others: it was a really good start to the debate. I remind your Lordships of my education interests as recorded in the register. In particular, I chair the E-ACT multi-academy trust board, I am an adviser to Nord Anglia Education, and an occasional client is my former employer Tes Global, where I co-founded the Tes Institute, now the fifth largest qualifier of teachers in England. I also recently led the inquiry into initial teacher training by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Teaching Profession, of which I am vice-chair.

The inquiry was triggered by the market review chaired by Ian Bauckham. We received evidence from teacher training providers, both school-centred and universities, from schools, the College of Teachers and the teaching unions. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkham, that I do not totally agree with his view on teaching unions; my experience is that when you work with teaching unions as proper stakeholders, you can achieve quite a lot alongside them. We titled the report of the all-party group, If It Ain’t Broke, Handle with Care. This reflected the lack of evidence to support the assertion from the then schools minister, Nick Gibb, that there was an urgent problem that needed solving. In fact, the biggest problem was the threat to teacher supply created if the outcome of this review were implemented.

I spent the first three days of this week in long meetings reviewing the performance of the 28 schools in the E-ACT group. Across the board, one of the biggest challenges we face is recruiting enough teachers, especially in shortage subjects such as maths. The majority of schools are not fully staffed, meaning more use of agency staff than we want and some roles having to be re-advertised because of a poor response. This is important context for the suggestion that we can just jettison a number of ITT providers in pursuit of the clear agenda of centralised control, dressed up as re-accreditation. The very idea that universities such as Oxford and Cambridge might follow through with the threat to walk away from training teachers if these proposals are implemented demonstrates what a pickle the department has got itself into. And it is not just the elite universities: the MillionPlus group is just as animated, as are the school-centred ITT providers. Some of these may be small in scale, but they provide important training opportunities in remote areas that universities struggle to reach.

The combined effect of some of these providers being excluded by re-accreditation, or walking away because of the threat to academic freedom and an uneconomic model, could be catastrophic. This country is short of teachers. The spike in numbers applying to train at the beginning of the pandemic was short-lived. If transitioning to a new system disrupts the supply of new trainees, then there are serious consequences for our schools and for the life chances of our children. I remind your Lordships that this is not just about the delivery of training: as others have said, there are problems now with there not being enough placements for trainees in schools. Losing existing providers means losing established partnerships and their school placements.

The new two-year induction that started nationally this September in the form of the early career framework is delivering some good quality—that is the feedback from the schools I am accountable for. However, it is resource-hungry for schools, particularly in mentoring capacity. This, in turn, makes it harder for ITT placement, because of capacity constraint, particularly if the review’s understandable emphasis on mentoring is implemented. I met the chair of the market review a couple of times and respect him and his view. I understand his desire to collect the best evidence of what works in ITT and to impose that on everyone. However, I believe that it leads us into standardised, uniform approaches to training that imply that teaching is a craft skill and, if everyone did the same thing, it would work for all types of teachers working with all types of pupils.

That goes to the heart of the problem. These proposed changes are not about building teacher professionalism. They are not showing trust in the profession—just the opposite. If we want better, more experienced teachers, we need to recruit more into teaching and then retain them. That means leaning in to their intrinsic motivation to be teachers. If my friend Sharath Jeevan is right in his new book, that means focusing on purpose, autonomy and expertise. If we erode professional autonomy, we erode motivation. Successive Governments have done that—I hold up my hand—but it is now time to reverse that.

We should be working with a diversity of providers of ITT. The Government should abandon the market review and the unnecessary expense of the Institute of Teaching. We should respect the training providers’ professionalism and let them decide how best to train teachers. Then we should use Ofsted to regulate the quality against the agreed standards for qualified teacher status—regulate the outcome, not the input. We should then properly resource teachers, at every stage of their careers, to have time to observe each other and engage in professional dialogue and development. Perhaps those that are crammed into teaching through successful schemes such as Teach First should be given time, relatively early in their careers, to have a sabbatical period in universities reflecting on practice and acquiring the academic, theoretical underpinning they missed due to their acceleration into the classroom. In doing so, we may retain more of those excellent teachers in our schools.

Teaching is the most important of professions; it shapes our future. We should nurture it, respect it as a profession and resist those who seek to use a Whitehall sledgehammer to crack a problem that does not really exist. Please, handle with care.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th October 2021 Lords Chamber

The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, raised points regarding the role of independent training providers. I would like to reassure him that the Government absolutely recognise the importance of an inclusive and collaborative relationship with ITPs. Placing duties on them, alongside colleges and higher education institutions, recognises absolutely that they are an important provider, and we hope this will support greater collaborative working.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

What the Minister said about the net-zero strategy and the Skills and Productivity Board was really reassuring, but how does that work connect directly to local skills improvement plans, so that we can be sure that there is join-up?

Schools: Funding

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, let me start by reminding your Lordships of my education interests in the register, particularly as one of the chief officers of TES. I thank my noble friend Lady Morris not only for instigating this debate, but for the passion and clarity with which she opened it.

Our schools are struggling, particularly our secondary schools. Four statistics tell the story. We have heard the Institute for Fiscal Studies statistic about an 8% real-terms cut over the last eight years. At TES we have done the calculations as a result of the surge in pupil numbers coming through secondary, and predict that in 2024, this country will be 47,000 secondary school teachers short of what it needs to maintain current pupil-teacher ratios. This week, NHS Digital published statistics which tell us that one in five of 17 to 19 year-old girls in this country self-harm or attempt suicide. An Opinium survey for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Inclusive Growth found that 56% of teachers believe that our school system is no longer fit for purpose. I happen to agree.

What is going on? I commend to your Lordships the BBC2 series “School”, which you can catch up with on iPlayer. It is slightly depressing but insightful. In it we see a head teacher, James Pope, struggling to improve standards at Marlwood secondary school, a rural comprehensive in south Gloucestershire that has been put into special measures by Ofsted, while simultaneously being expected to cut nearly £1 million from his annual budget.

Austerity is biting. Funding reductions mean that schools, as the OECD tells us, are employing younger, cheaper teachers, who are often less resilient. More are now leaving the profession than are joining it; I see from today’s statistical first release that initial teacher training recruitment targets at secondary level were missed again for the sixth consecutive year. What then happens is that reduced local authority support, especially for special educational needs, as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, talked about, creates more problems. Those problems often start with an increase in low-level disruption in the classroom, which grows. Teacher stress then grows and, with that, illness; the Education Support Partnership reports that one-third of teachers in this country have mental health problems. That increases the numbers off sick and the need for more expensive short-term supply teachers and, as a result, behaviour gets worse and learning falls. Teachers start to leave as their workload increases because they are left to do the planning and paperwork that supply teachers do not have to do, and as they struggle, the behaviour management problems grow.

As teachers leave, the school tries to recruit in the normal way to fill the vacancies, using the usual vacancy service, but finds that the candidates looking for jobs are not there. The school then re-advertises if there is time, or it may have to go to an expensive headhunter. In 2016, PwC reported that the cost of recruiting teachers is rising as recruitment agencies capitalise on the perceived shortage of candidates. Their market share has risen to 25%, at a cost of 65% of school recruitment budgets. If the headhunter fails, the school may ultimately have to get a long-term supply teacher at great cost, and often poor quality. This creates further pressure on budgets, with the promise of free recruitment services delivering a bitter reality, because the candidates are not looking. As a result, the school suffers declining teacher quality, results suffer, the high-stakes accountability system kicks in, followed by parental choice and a collapse in budgets, and the end of the head teacher’s career. This is the spiral of decline, and school and local authority funding cuts are often at the heart of that story.

We currently see a burning platform of rising pupil rolls coming out of primary into secondary—there will be 500,000 extra secondary school pupils by 2025. There will be fewer secondary teachers; if we are to fill all the maths teacher vacancies with people studying maths at university, we would need to persuade 40% of all maths undergraduates to become teachers, which is impossible. We have a narrowing curriculum, with less subject choice. The 20% cut in sixth-form funding, which my noble friend Lady Morris talked about, is cutting the number of subjects available at sixth form, but I am increasingly worried about this fetishisation of the academic over the applied, because we are training young people to be outperformed by machines.

If we train young people just to recall knowledge in tests—machines do that better; they are really good at it—computers will take their jobs. We have to remember what it is like for a young person growing up in this country. They are over-tested; they are looking forward to a debt of £50,000 if they choose to go to university, just at a time when employers such as AXA—an insurance company I was talking to someone about today—have done away with graduate recruitment. AXA prefers to source people earlier and train and develop them to meet its individual needs. It is not alone: Apple, Google, Cosco, Starbucks—all these companies, according to Glassdoor, are phasing out graduate-only recruitment because they want more diversity in their workforce.

The payback on going to university, in exchange for that debt, is starting to diminish. Young people are worried about robots taking the jobs they hope to get if they are successful at university. Their qualifications are starting to be dismissed by employers. No wonder we are facing a mental health crisis among our young people. What most parents want from schools is for their children to achieve according to the cultural norm, to be happy—parents do not want a battle to get them out from under the duvet every morning—and to be able to make a meaningful contribution at the end of the educational journey. That vision for parents is being rapidly eroded by a school system that is not fit for purpose. We have a funding crisis but, as my noble friend Lady Morris said, there is also a lack of hope about that on the horizon. But this is an opportunity for us to build consensus for change in our school system, and for a new paradigm for education. We could even call it a national education service.

We could cut testing. It is estimated that in this country we spend around £2 billion per year on testing in our schools. Let us just say we halve that: £1 billion could go a long way in helping with some of these problems. We should trust teachers more to shape a curriculum that engages young people and uses testing for formative rather than summative purposes as assessment for learning. More applied learning could be inserted on top of a foundation of knowledge and core skills in the curriculum. A more diverse 14 to 19 curriculum could be created, perhaps by abolishing GCSEs at 16 and ending the national curriculum at 14 to free up the years from 14 to 19 for a much more engaging curriculum experience. We should welcome back teachers in creative and applied subjects, so that they can properly develop the whole child; we should reconnect teachers with their vocation, so that they stay in and, at the same time, equip learners to find their vocation in time.

All this should be underpinned by proper resources, focused on learning and child development, not on testing and accountability. I look forward to the Minister’s reply. I look forward also to hearing from the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and I salute her for having made sure that the Minister is not quite so lonely on his Bench.

Schools Update: National Funding Formula

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

Well, it is true that we are the first Government who have actually done this. It is not easy and I pay tribute to the officials in the Department for Education. They tell me that they have been working on this for at least 10 years, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Knight, knows, and are personally delighted that it has happened.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government and particularly the officials on bringing this forward. I certainly remember commissioning a review of the funding formula back when I announced one, about 10 years ago. Unfortunately it felt as if politics, with things such as general elections and changes in government, got in the way of implementing the outcome of that review. These things happen. I am particularly pleased to see sparsity issues recognised in this announcement.

My question relates to a welcome guarantee, if I heard the Minister correctly, of a real-terms, per-head increase of at least 0.5% next year and 1% the year after. That is important. However, I am also mindful of this week’s report from the National Audit Office regarding the recruitment and retention of teachers—and I remind the House of my interest in respect of my work at TES. At paragraph 2.2, the report states:

“To meet the increasing need for teachers, particularly in secondary schools, the Department for Education … and schools will need to improve teacher recruitment and retention. We reported in February 2016 that the Department has not met its overall target for filling teacher training places in each of the past four years. It has since missed the target for a fifth year”.


As the department reflects on that, particularly given that this week we have seen the pay cap go for the police, is it possible that it might reflect that the pay cap for teachers needs to be lifted? If so, will the department then ensure that the Treasury funds that rather than it coming out of the money announced in this funding formula? I would hate to campaign to raise the pay cap for teachers but then see the ensuing problems as schools scramble to try to fund 0.5% from what, certainly in some of the urban areas, will be quite a limited extra amount of money.

[Lord Nash]

The noble Lord makes some very good points about teacher recruitment and retention. Of course we have a strong economy with very high levels of employment and very low levels of unemployment which impacts on the ability to recruit teachers. We are doing a huge amount of work on improving our recruitment approach, which is a much more regionally focused approach to look at where we particularly need to recruit teachers. There is no doubt that the work of a number of our multi-academy trusts in career development, CPD and teacher retention will help teacher retention.

The independent School Teachers’ Review Body has recommended teacher pay increases. We have listened carefully to what it recommended and accepted the recommendations. We continue to work closely with schools to help them manage their finances.

English Baccalaureate: Creative and Technical Subjects

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Viscount on his maths. I also congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this important debate and on the excellent way in which she has introduced it. I remind your Lordships of my interests in respect of my employment as the chief education adviser at TES.

This debate goes right to the heart of what we think the vision for schooling in this country and the curriculum should be. I have ringing in my ears the voices of a discussion that I hosted this morning. Andreas Schleicher, the head of education at the OECD, led that stimulation for us. He talked about the exponential change going on across sectors throughout the world, particularly in the world of work, largely driven by technology. There is massive change everywhere except in education, where not a lot changes generation by generation. He said he thought that there was a risk of schooling becoming obsolescent in our digital age.

This debate goes to the heart of whether we think that schooling is about churning out children whom we define as “educated”—as being familiar with a canon of knowledge that they have an ability to recall at will at small desks in large sports halls in June, and whether, in turn, their ability to perform in those exams can work as a sort of academic sift. We have a system designed around sifting, rather than developing, people so that they can then go to university—probably 40% of them and, if we were ambitious in my day, perhaps 50%.

However, I question whether that is still valid. The person who will be babysitting in our home on Sunday is a very bright 20 year-old with excellent A-levels. She is now in the Civil Service and has worked in the private office of a Cabinet Minister and, post the Brexit referendum, she worked for the Department for International Trade on trade negotiations. She now has another excellent job, while her friends from school are saddling themselves with huge amounts of debt and are looking jealously at her career progression. The assumptions about a sifting system to get us into a university system that is starting to creak need to be challenged.

At the same time, that system obviously fails around 40% of young people who miss the sift. They do not get the five A* to C equivalents at GCSE. They are pushed through an accountability system that is getting tighter and tighter around test recall, and they are turned off learning in the way that the noble Baroness described. Yet what they really need for their future in the workforce is a love of learning, because they will be cycling through multiple careers.

The person who has just refitted our bathroom is an excellent plasterer, electrician and plumber, and his tiling is superb. He is a Bulgarian who fully qualified as a veterinary surgeon. He is not going to continue with his building skills because his wife, who is a lawyer in Moscow, is not allowed a visa to come to live in this country, so he is moving to Moscow to set up two internet businesses with a Chinese partner. That will be his third career, and he is not unusual in this world. We do not have an education system that prepares people to reinvent themselves in the way that we need them to do.

Instead, that 40% who are turned off by the system are channelled into work-related learning. Why is not everybody channelled into work-related learning? We have heard how important the creative sector, the manufacturing sector and the technical sectors are to around a third of our economy, yet the higher-performing people have no learning relevant to work; it is all about relevance to going to university.

The noble Baroness talked about design and technology and the fact that in the last seven years there has been a 43% drop in GCSE entries in those subjects. The device on which I have the notes for my speech was designed, along with all the other Apple products, by a British hero, Sir Jony Ive. His dad was a design and technology Ofsted inspector. A Christmas treat for Jony was to work in the labs in his dad’s school during the holidays, and Jony did a degree at what was Newcastle Polytechnic. He has changed the world through design and technology. This country has a rich tradition in design and technology, yet we do not have room for it in the curriculum in many of our schools. We need young people to be confident in the human skills of empathy and of getting wisdom from reflection through the creative subjects in particular, and they need to have the resilience to deal with the changes that are coming thick and fast in our society.

Today, Andreas Schleicher talked about a curriculum that is a mile wide and an inch deep. I worry about just extending the EBacc into some more subjects, because I worry about the level of prescription to which we already require our teachers to adhere. Then, at 16, we go all of a sudden from width into great depth, which, compared with what happens internationally, is very unusual.

We will also be creating a binary choice for children when the T-levels come in in 2020. They will have to decide at the age of 16 whether they are going to be academic or technical. Incidentally, I do not know how the T-levels will work against apprenticeships, with employers being asked to take on work experience people for T-levels or for more directly vocational qualifications. I would love the Minister to tell us how that middle route will be any better than or different from the diplomas which I was responsible for steering through and which ended up not really taking off because of a change of Government. I do not know whether, having got their kids into a great school at 11, parents will be aspirational to allow them to leave at the age of 16 to go to college to pursue a middle-level qualification that is not quite vocational and not quite academic.

Instead, I would love to see us collapse a lot of the curriculum, free up the 14 to 19 phase, get rid of GCSEs at 16 altogether and have a free run at it, embracing UTCs and studio schools. I would love us to have some public examinations at 14 to test the recall of a broad and balanced curriculum, but then to free up and trust teachers to build their professionalism and collaborate, as we see them doing in Shanghai and Singapore. Teachers there are trying to learn from what we used to do with creativity. Then, we can not only give employers, with their increasing frustrations, what they want from a schooling system but we can give our young people the best possible chance to live fulfilling lives and make a meaningful contribution to our society.