Education: Funding
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
On the noble Baroness’s first point, the Secretary of State said what he did about academies because the kind of schools that are in the academies programme from the previous Government, which we want to try to continue to support, are by definition focused in the areas of greatest need and deprivation. In looking at those, he will not give any blanket position but will review them on a case-by-case basis to consider as fairly as he can those individual circumstances.
On funding more generally, I suspect that those are decisions that will be taken by the Treasury, so I doubt that I can give any sensible undertaking at all.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, after the Minister’s excoriation of the bureaucracy surrounding the Building Schools for the Future programme, I cannot help observing that the Government appear to have commissioned five people to undertake an independent review of school building. Be that as it may, I welcome the initiative to extend the Teach First programme. Another area where the previous Government took a valuable initiative was in the development of educational leadership. What are the coalition Government’s plans for the future of the National College for the Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services?
Lord Hill of Oareford
On the first point, five does not seem to be a completely outrageous number. In the composition of the review membership, we have a fairly broad spectrum of people with a range of perspectives which we hope will help us to find cheaper ways of delivering capital. On the second point, I know that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has spoken recently at the national college and I think that he is positive about the work that it does. As I have already said again today, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Low, about the work of the previous Government in encouraging national leaders. That was a successful programme on which there is much one would want to build.
Academies Bill [HL]
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, I have just one query. I am grateful, as everyone is, for the time the Minister has already given to this whole area—we have had a whole session on it—and I am enthusiastic about the variety that will be available through the plans under the Bill. However, I am slightly worried that the overall cost might go up if the local authority is less involved in the whole set-up. It might contract out some of its provision. It might do that now, but it might need to do even more than that. Is that likely to put up the cost of meeting the special needs that really must be met if we are to do our duty by those with them, as we all want to do?
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, Amendment 83 proposes that Part IV of the Education Act 1996 applies to academies as it does to maintained schools. Part IV contains what is commonly known as the SEN framework, which makes provision for pupils with special educational needs and covers the assessment and statementing process, admissions, the delivery of services, the need to have regard to the SEN code of practice, and so on. The exclusion and disciplining of pupils with SEN are dealt with elsewhere in educational legislation and are the subject of later amendments.
On Monday, we debated amendments that sought to ensure that academies’ funding agreements contained all the requirements that Part IV of the Education Act 1996 lays on maintained schools in relation to pupils with SEN. The Minister very helpfully agreed to consider how best to achieve parity between academies and maintained schools, and to come back with proposals on Report. I must apologise to him and to the Committee that I could not stay for his reply on Monday on account of needing to attend a function elsewhere, but I read his reply in Hansard and found it most helpful. I thank him and ask him to accept that no discourtesy was intended.
We discussed those amendments then simply because they came up earlier in the Bill, but their scope was somewhat narrower than that of Amendment 83. They provided simply that funding agreements should incorporate Part IV of the Education Act 1996. Amendment 83 would provide that the requirements of Part IV are applied to academies as a matter of law and not simply as part of the contractual arrangement between the academy and the Secretary of State by which academies are governed.
The SEN framework in Part IV of the Education Act 1996 was developed with cross-party consensus. It makes provision for meeting the needs and providing support for children with SEN and disabilities, and gives parents a legal right to ensure that their children’s SEN are met. We know that the Minister is committed to ensuring that academies are subject to the full range of responsibilities in relation to children with SEN that maintained schools are under, but he believes that this can be brought about by contractual agreement. A better and altogether simpler way would be to provide that the requirements of Part IV are applied to academies as a matter of course, and as a matter of law rather than of contract. I suggest that for five reasons. First, it would ensure consistency across all academies. Secondly, it could ensure more comprehensive coverage of the rights and duties in Part IV.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, we, too, believe that it is important that children and parents choose schools and not the other way round. In speaking to my Amendment 51, I welcome the fact that the Secretary of State has stated that the code for school admissions will apply to academies. We felt that we needed to table this amendment to probe how the codes—please note that it is the plural—for school admissions will apply to academies. There are two codes: one deals with the setting of admissions criteria and the role of the school adjudicator, and the other deals with how parents can appeal against a refusal to admit their child.
Currently, academies are required to comply with the codes “as far as possible” as part of their agreement with the Secretary of State. The codes were not written for the academy sector but for maintained schools. One additional thing that the amendment requires is that parents and the local authority are able to appeal to the adjudicator about admission arrangements. Currently, parents can appeal only to the Secretary of State but that can really only be done after the admission arrangements have been agreed between the academy and the Secretary of State when the arrangements are published. An admission authority—be it a local authority or a school governing body—has to publish, at the school and in a local newspaper, any proposed changes to admission arrangements and allow objections. If the admission authority confirms the change, the parent can appeal to the adjudicator, if he or she wishes to do so.
What is really required here is a single admission system for all publicly funded schools. Having two admission systems, which will still be the case if academies are required to comply with the code only where they can, is not really good enough. Academy status will have perceived benefits on admissions for grammar schools. They will no longer be subject to the rules on parental ballots when changing their admission arrangements. However, if we are to rely on the Minister’s words in his letter to Peers that,
“no non-selective school would be able to become selective”—
words which are very welcome—that would rule out the current ability of a maintained school to select 10 per cent of pupils on the basis of aptitude in music, arts and sport. Can the Minister clarify the Government’s intention on that point while we are discussing admission codes?
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I should like to speak to Amendments 84 and 85. Noble Lords will be glad to hear that I do not intend to speak to them at anything like the length that I spoke to Amendment 83. Many of the same arguments might be deployed and they both deal with the question of parity between academies and maintained schools.
Amendment 84 seeks the application of the admissions legal framework to academies as though they were maintained schools, and Amendment 85 is the same form of amendment, except that it relates to the exclusions legal framework. They are both essentially probing amendments designed to find out how far the Government see the two frameworks applying to academies as if they were maintained schools—in other words, whether the intention is to achieve parity in respect of these two frameworks as much as it is the intention to achieve parity in relation to special educational needs.
Lord Lucas
Amendment 36, which is in my name, expresses an ambition which I understand, having listened to the Minister, is clearly beyond the scope of anything that will be put into the Bill. I none the less hope that he will agree with me that it should be our ambition that outstanding schools which become academies, as they have the opportunity to expand, will look to bring in children from way beyond their geographical catchment area—to extend that excellence to those parts of their surroundings that are not blessed with outstanding schools but are blessed with children who require additional attention and the best possible environment. That should be part of our ambition, as it has been part of the history of the academies programme to look first at those who are disadvantaged.
Academies Bill [HL]
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Adonis
I hope the Minister will be able to confirm that entirely new schools can be set up, and indeed are set up at the moment, as academies. So, to the extent that that is true, free schools can be set up at the moment under existing academy legislation. I warmly welcome the suggestion made by my noble friend Lady Morgan that free schools should be called academies. I hope that the Minister is able to accept that suggestion, which my noble friend makes with great generosity of spirit, to make clear that we have a much more uniform nomenclature available. I am very keen to see all categories of schools that have the legal characteristics of academies called academies.
Lord Low of Dalston
I shall speak to Amendments 13 and 76, which are tabled in my name. When we debated the Bill at Second Reading, there was widespread concern throughout the House that academies should have obligations to meet the needs of pupils with special educational needs that are no less rigorous than those which apply to maintained schools. The Minister was very clear that he was fully committed to this, and I am grateful to him for the trouble he has taken in meeting Peers with these concerns and also in writing to provide assurance that that is what the Bill achieves. However, there are still areas that remain unclear, where the commitment could do with being spelled out more fully or where gaps in the obligations to which academies are subject need to be plugged. These amendments are directed at remedying these deficiencies.
Amendment 13 is a probing amendment with two purposes: first, to ascertain whether academies receiving academy financial assistance will be required to have funding agreements in place; and, secondly, to ascertain whether meeting the needs of children with special educational needs and disabilities will be included as a standard requirement within arrangements for academy financial assistance, just as it currently is in funding agreements.
Currently, academies are principally accountable through and governed by funding agreements signed with the Secretary of State. Clause 1(2)(b) introduces a new form of funding for academies—
“arrangements for academy financial assistance”.
These are not found in the original academies legislation. Arrangements for academy financial assistance are a form of direct funding from the Secretary of State granted through powers conferred by Section 14 of the Education Act 2002. Arrangements for academy financial assistance are an alternative to funding through an academy agreement so that it appears possible that, where arrangements for academy financial assistance are put in place, an academy may not be required to have a funding agreement.
While it is possible to have reservations regarding the scope and effectiveness of funding agreements as accountability mechanisms, there has none the less been clarity in funding agreements signed after 2007 that academies should have regard to the SEN code of practice and use their best endeavours to ensure that special educational needs are met. There are concerns that this new form of academy funding—arrangements for academy financial assistance—will bypass the safeguards contained in funding agreements in relation to SEN provision. This amendment gives the Minister an opportunity to make the position clear and to reassure us that academies receiving academy financial assistance will be required to have funding agreements, and that meeting the needs of children with SEN and disabilities will be included as a standard requirement within arrangements for academy financial assistance.
Academies Bill [HL]
Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I warmly welcome the Minister to his new position. I spoke on Wednesday, not Thursday, last week, so I did not have a chance to do so on that occasion but I am glad to have the opportunity now. I am afraid that I heard only the last half of his maiden speech, but I read it all and agree with everyone else that it represented a most auspicious beginning in this House. I am sure that we shall all enjoy working with him.
It is possible to have more than one view of our education system—it depends on what you choose to look at. This was graphically illustrated when we debated the previous Government’s Children, Schools and Families Bill in this House last March. On the one hand, the then Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, could claim that we had the highest ever standards of education in this country. She pointed to the increased capital investment, the 4,000 new, rebuilt or significantly refurbished schools, more than 40,000 more teachers than in 1997 and more than 20,000 support staff.
On the other hand, the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, for the Opposition, made great play of the fact that 40 per cent of pupils leave primary school without being able to read, write or add up properly; half of all pupils do not get five good GCSEs, including English and maths; and every day more than 300 children are suspended from school for assaulting another child. On Thursday, the Minister described this state of affairs as unacceptable and referred to the fact that the UK has fallen from eighth to 24th in maths, from seventh to 17th in reading and from fourth to 14th in science. In his speech introducing the Bill to the House this afternoon, he gave further evidence of ways in which the education that we provide in our schools is not coming up to scratch. A major extension of academies is therefore the Government’s prescription but I very much welcome the non-dogmatic way in which the Minister introduced it.
In the debate last Thursday, the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, described herself as “deeply suspicious” of the Government’s expanded academies programme. I do not know whether I would go as far as that; I would rather describe myself as agnostic. The local authority system has a proud tradition and provides a framework within which consistency can at least be aspired to. With the proliferation of academies, there are understandable worries about the development of a two-tier system, although I suppose that the more academies there are, the less risk there is of that happening. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, said in the Guardian recently, the coalition may underestimate the role of state action in promoting equality. I think that the evidence on academies is equivocal and that the jury is still out on how effective they are, but this is the Government’s approach. We must hope that having a greater diversity of institutions will help to drive up standards and we must work to make academies as fit for purpose as we can.
The Academies Bill is largely about the process that has to be gone through to establish academy status. As such, it contains relatively little about how an academy has to conduct itself. According to Clause 1(6), it must give an undertaking to provide a,
“balanced and broadly based curriculum”,
and,
“education for pupils of different abilities”.
According to Clause 1(5), it must be organised,
“to make special educational provision for pupils with special educational needs”.
However, there is nothing about how the academy is supposed to do that, and it is to this omission that I wish to direct the rest of my remarks. In other words, the question that I wish to address is how the Bill can be disability-proofed and what we need to do to make it fit for purpose to meet the needs of pupils with special educational needs. I should declare my interest in these matters as a vice-president of the Royal National Institute of Blind People.
Twenty-one per cent of children have some form of special educational need. The latest evidence shows that the overall percentage of pupils with special educational needs across academies is 33 per cent—considerably more than the average for England as a whole, which stood at 18 per cent—and that 12 per cent of children with special education needs achieve five GCSEs at A* to C level, compared with 57 per cent of their peers. These statistics vividly demonstrate that a key test of the Government’s academies policy will be how they improve outcomes and experiences for children with special educational needs.
The coalition Government’s commitment that all new academies will operate a fair and non-selective admissions policy, as well as Clause 1(5), is a positive sign that the Government believe that addressing the needs of children with special educational needs and disabilities should be a priority for academies. However, as presently drafted, the Bill does not go far enough or into sufficient detail as to how academies are supposed to do this. Academies do not have the same duty to use their best endeavours to meet the needs of children with special educational needs—a duty which Section 317 of the Education Act 1996 places on maintained schools. There is a lack of clarity as to whether the special educational needs code of practice must be followed.
The most obvious way of remedying this deficiency would be to require that Part IV of the Education Act 1996 should apply to academies as it does to maintained schools. This contains what is commonly known as the SEN framework, which makes provision, so far as pupils with special educational needs are concerned, for the assessment and statementing process, admissions, delivery, the need to have regard to the SEN code of practice and so on. Exclusions and discipline, as they relate to pupils with SEN, are dealt with elsewhere in education legislation. As we go through the Bill, I shall seek amendments to ensure that the SEN framework applies to academies as it does to maintained schools.
Organisations representing disabled people and the field of special education have a number of other concerns about the Bill. They feel that there is a lack of accountability in the arrangements of existing academies. Funding agreements can be inaccessible to parents and cannot be used to obtain a remedy if there is a problem. Those organisations want parents to have a strong voice in the new system, whereby they can work with academies to ensure that their children get the right support, the challenging curriculum and the positive outcomes that they deserve. The SEN framework in current legislation gives parents the means to ensure that their child’s SEN are met. These principles remain valid. Academies are independent schools that are funded directly by the Secretary of State and are accountable mainly through the funding agreement, rather than the education Acts.
This raises important questions about how academies will be accountable to parents of children with SEN and disabilities. Empowering parents to engage with their child’s education is key to driving up standards and is something which the Government should wish to foster. I am sure that the intention behind the academies programme is not to reduce the role of parents in relation to their child’s education; however, there remains the problem that, even where the statements contained in a funding agreement are clear, they do not offer parents the same right to redress and protection that is offered by the current legislation. Here again we need to import into the academies framework the protection for the parent’s voice contained in the current legislation.
There are concerns, too, about what will be the effect of weakening LEAs, which is bound to be the result of a great expansion of academies. Local authorities currently offer a range of specialist support services for low-incidence special educational needs, such as hearing and visual impairments. Schools cannot be expected to have that specialist expertise to address every individual need, so the ability to access external services is critical. As schools increasingly receive funding direct from central government and local authority education functions are reduced, it is critical that this specialist expertise in SEN and disability is not lost.
A body with an overview of local need, such as an LEA, is able to plan services that, due to low demand, an open market would be unlikely to be able to provide at a reasonable cost. It may prove significantly more expensive for schools to commission these specialist services on a case-by-case basis—always assuming that the expertise is not lost in transition as the LEAs wind down their role and academies gear up for meeting special educational needs. That is what happened in the transition to local management of schools some 20 years ago, and we need to learn the lessons of that experience. I would welcome the Minister's clarification of the Government's view on how the strategic role of local authorities is to be maintained and what alternative ways of commissioning specialist support services are envisaged if local authorities no longer provide them.
Finally, there are a number of other, more detailed requirements applying to maintained schools that benefit children with special educational needs and disabilities, some of which do not apply to academies. Examples of those requirements include the following. Maintained schools are required to ensure that their special educational needs co-ordinator, or SENCO, is a qualified teacher. Maintained schools are required to participate in behaviour and attendance partnerships, which seek to reduce the number of children with special educational needs who are permanently excluded from school. Also, the Local Government Ombudsman can consider the actions of maintained schools that are failing to make provision for pupils with statements.
Those are just some of the aspects of the special education legislation that is intended to protect the interests of the most vulnerable children in our school system—children with special educational needs. These aspects are present in current legislation but are signally absent from the Academies Bill. Along with organisations that are versed in the field of special education, I shall be anxious to seek substantial amendment of the Bill in order to ensure that the protections that exist in current legislation for children with special educational needs are imported into the academies legislation.