Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend. The point is that, if we look at school funding going back to 2010, my goodness me, what a squeeze there has been between then and 2022.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My noble friend may know that the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is regarded as pretty authoritative on these things, has said that school spending per pupil in England fell by 9% in real terms between 2009-10 and 2019-20—the largest cut in over 40 years.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

There we have it. Is it not good to have noble friends to fully apprise me of the facts?

I sympathise with what the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, said on transport costs for 16 to 18 year-olds. This is not an issue just in rural areas; at sixth-form schools in metropolitan areas, there is a huge movement of students. I know that, in Birmingham, there is an enormous movement of students, which can be costly.

I noted the noble Baroness’s comments about the EMA. I would gently say that it was a coalition Government decision to get rid of the EMA. I think that the EMA was one of the most brilliant initiatives—we still have it under a Labour Government in Wales—to encourage attendance at school. It is a great pity that it was removed.

I sympathise also with what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said on the impact of Covid.

On Amendments 92 and 93 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, I agree with him about the centralisation of powers. There is an issue around how bureaucracy responds to it but it is also about the span of political control. I do not want to go back over the first 18 clauses of the Bill but it is about putting the two together. There is a desire for the Secretary of State to control everything, including funding. The implication is that, in the end, Ministers are going to have to account for individual school performance here. I do not think that they have really taken that into account. The line of accountability, including for dosh, is clear now; Ministers have taken responsibility. In the end, they will find it very difficult to say, “I’m not going to get involved in that; it’s nothing to do with us”, because I am afraid that it will be to do with them. That is why it really is not good to have such central powers in an education system.

What an uplifting contribution from my noble friend Lord Knight. I have skimmed the Times commission’s report. It has some wonderful ideas. What struck me is how uplifting it is. It gave me a positive feeling about what education could do, which drags us away from the rather dreary, exam-focused situation that we now find ourselves in. I almost thought that year 6 pupils might be able to enjoy their last year, instead of having incessant pressure from those wretched SATs at the end of the year. My noble friend is also right about pupil councils. In many cases, before we moved to the new system, the Lords outreach programme allowed us to engage with student councils. I found it a fantastic experience. Having some money tied in with sustainability is a wonderful idea indeed.

Finally, the Minister was a bit dismissive of my noble friend Lady Chapman’s Amendment 79C, which would introduce a requirement to report on academy funding and performance. I think that that is a very good idea. I would tie that into the remarks from the noble Lord, Lord Deben, about transparency. I know the Minister says that this is all transparent but the process by which the funding formula is put together—it is the weightings that are so crucial—warrants greater transparency.

Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath

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

[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 ---

[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.

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

I am most grateful to the noble Earl and his helpful intervention.

Under the national minimum wage legislation, there is no minimum statutory level of overtime. Under that legislation, you have an entitlement to 28 days’ paid holiday as opposed to 31 days under the Agricultural Wages Board. There is also a maximum of 38 days for workers working more than six days a week under the Agricultural Wages Board, with no additional entitlement under minimum wage legislation. In terms of rest breaks, under the Agricultural Wages Board you are entitled to not less than 30 minutes where the daily working time is more than five and a half hours, whereas under the minimum wage legislation—

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

Will my noble friend give way? I remind him of some of the evidence that came from the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery. The manager wrote in to say that he supports the abolition of the AWB and that “overtime rates are ridiculous”. Does that not give a clue to how some people in the industry will act if the AWB protections are abolished?

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

The noble Lord makes a good point. He quotes evidence and I do not need to add to it.

I could go on to help the noble Earl. The final point, which I think is most striking, is the entitlement to paid sick leave and the level of sick pay received. Under the Agricultural Wages Board, all workers, whether or not they are paid the minimum, are entitled to 13 to 26 weeks on full pay after one year’s continuous employment, after which statutory sick pay applies. Under minimum wage legislation, statutory sick pay—currently £85.85 a week—applies where a worker has been sick for at least four days or more and has average earnings of more than the lower earnings limit, which is now £107 a week.