Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

I begin by paying tribute to the Church of England for the outstanding work that it does in promoting academies. As the right reverend Prelate said, the Church of England is the largest single sponsor of academies. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool and I worked closely on the development of academies in Liverpool and the area around, and they are making marvellous progress, extending opportunity in an area that has not had it in the past.

This is my first opportunity in the House to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hill, on his appointment, which I do very warmly indeed. I should also say how glad I am that my noble friends Lady Royall and Lady Morgan are leading on this Bill for the Opposition. They bring a wealth of talent and experience to the task.

My noble friend Lady Morgan raised a number of policy issues about the extension of academies, which I shall leave the Minister to respond to. However, on the specific issue about the legal name that should be given to a certain category of school, I find myself in surprising agreement with the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. She and I are survivors from the interminable debates on the Education Act 2005, on which our views did not coincide all the time, particularly on the issue of academies. But she is right that, in terms of legal category, the schools to which the Bill proposes to accord that status have all the essential characteristics of existing academies.

I know that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet but, for two reasons, I do not support this amendment on the name that it gives to a legal category of schools. First, the schools which we are talking about in this Bill are academies in all their essential legal characteristics. They are managed independently of the local authority, on a contract with the Secretary of State that regulates a whole host of their policies and funding and which will be similar to that of existing academies. My noble friend says that academies are schools largely in deprived or challenging circumstances, and she is correct, although I need to point out to the House that that is not the exclusive preserve of academies. A number of entirely new schools have been set up as academies in very mixed social areas and a number of successful schools, including successful independent schools, have come into the state system by using the legal category of academies.

The legal status is clearly set out in Section 65 of the Education Act 2002, which is cast in similar terms to Clause 1. I emphasise the fact that the 2002 Act, which was passed by the last Government, does not specify that academies, in legal terms, can only be schools that pass a threshold either of deprivation or of low achievement. On the contrary, I invite Members of the Committee to look at Section 65, which says:

“The Secretary of State may enter into an agreement with any person under which … that person undertakes to establish and maintain, and to carry on or provide for the carrying on of, an independent school in England with the characteristics mentioned in subsection (2)”.

Those characteristics are that the school,

“has a curriculum satisfying the requirements of section 78 of the Education Act 2002”,

and that it,

“provides education for pupils of different abilities who are wholly or mainly drawn from the area in which the school is situated”.

Those provisions are almost identical to those in the Bill.

If there is no legal distinction between the schools that we are talking about in this Bill and those referred to under the Education Act 2002, is there another public policy reason for us to give a different label to certain schools within a similar legal category? I urge your Lordships not to do so. We already have an alphabet soup of different names for schools within the state system: community schools, foundation schools with a foundation, foundation schools without a foundation, voluntary aided schools, voluntary controlled schools, trust schools, city technology colleges, grammar schools, maintained special schools and non-maintained special schools. If the schools that we are talking about are academies, as they are in their essential legal characteristics, the right thing to do is to call them academies and not to add to the alphabet soup.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, paid tribute to the right reverend Prelates, so I shall pay tribute to him. He was a most excellent Schools Minister and was largely responsible for the success of the academies programme. As the Minister said, the party opposite has every right to be proud of what it achieved. I also praise the noble Lord for starting off his life as a Back-Bencher exactly as I hope he will continue, feeling free to disagree with his Front Bench. As my noble friend Lord Hill will discover, feeling free to criticise one’s own side when one feels that it is getting it wrong is the mark of respect that every Back-Bencher seeks to attain.

I feel that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, although she was in turn an excellent Minister, is getting it wrong. It was always inevitable that the academies programme, once it had proved itself and gained momentum, would be open to existing schools. The idea that schools have to fail in order to become academies is not tenable. The substance of the amendment is political phooey and should be disregarded.

The noble Baroness raised a number of points that I suspect I will agree with later—or at least I will share her concerns. This is a new phase for the academy movement and it raises questions which were left in abeyance when the academies were few and had strong sponsors but which need examining now. However, a change of name, with further confusion for parents and everybody else, is not required.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, at Second Reading many noble Lords pointed out that most parents want a good local school, whatever it is called, and that good schools depend on good leadership, good teachers and good classroom practice, none of which I see mentioned in the Bill. My noble friend made some interesting points about academies, as did the noble Lord, Lord Adonis—I quite agree with him about the alphabet soup of schools. However, this is not just discussion about a name.

I have never particularly liked the name “academy” for a school, despite my respect and affection for my noble friend Lord Adonis. To me, the term has always meant a Scottish secondary school, the garden where Plato taught or, as in the Brixton Academy, a nightclub. As I understand it, we are talking about names that have legal and constitutional significance. No doubt we will tease out some of these legal and constitutional issues, such as buildings, charitable status, admissions, inspection, employment, VAT regulations, freedom of information and data protection, throughout the passage of the Bill. My noble friend is right. If these apply to what are called direct maintained schools—in other words, if they have to obey the rules I have just mentioned—the name should be looked at again. Could the noble Lord please spell out—I am sure he will—the differences between the name “academies”, as referred to in the Bill, and other kinds of school which now exist, and tell us why the name should not be changed?

Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

Very often, if there is a good local school there will not be the creation of another school. If you have got a very good primary school that is satisfying the demands of the parents and children, you will not get another group of parents and teachers wishing to create a new primary school.

The noble Lord does not know how difficult it is to start a school. For the past three years I have been starting new schools—at first with Lord Dearing—the new university technical colleges. It is a hard row to hoe because many people do not want it. These are colleges for 14 to 18 year-olds—which is disruptive for an 11-to-18 system for a start—specialising in technological and academic subjects. When Ron and I started, local authorities were not very interested. They did not like them for all the reasons that the noble Lord gave: they hurt good schools. Now I find that local authorities are coming to my little team, saying, “We’d like one of those, please”. They have seen that it is a new model that they like; it is better. I do not believe for a moment that a good school is threatened—that is rubbish, if I may say so to the noble Lord. He should not get up; he has had his go. Only bad schools are threatened; that is the problem. I can tell the noble Lord that it takes enormous effort to get a school started—to get parents together, to get teachers together. Meetings do not happen. Who is the champion? Can they bring it together? Then we have a divisive curriculum. Then they have to find support and make it viable economically: they have to find a primary school for 150 pupils and a secondary school for 500 to 600 pupils. That is an enormous hurdle. All the hurdles that Members of this Committee have tried to put in the way of the new schools over the past few hours is nothing compared to the task that committed groups will have to take on. That is the reality of life. It requires enormous effort and a tremendous act of corporate activity. We should not try to hobble and hinder that activity too much.

I prefer working with local education authorities. For the schools that I am establishing, we talk first to the local education authorities. If you are creating 14-to-19 colleges, they have to accommodate the 11-to-14 pupils. They also have to accept that it is a very different body in their school organisation. But now I am finding that local authorities like it. It is novel; it is different; and it will be effective. It will be effective, because in every comprehensive at age 12, 13 and 14, you have a vast number of disengaged pupils who do not want to continue in their local comprehensive school. We are providing an alternative which the state system has not yet provided. It provided it back in the 1950s as technical schools, but they failed because they were skill by snobbery. That is why we get a university to sponsor each of our colleges.

I therefore say to Members who are anxious about all this disrupting our education system that the new academies, to the extent that they will exist in the future, will improve our education system. They will improve the standards; they will get the commitment of local people, which will be very energetic. Even the Liberal Party knows how difficult it is to get local people to do anything—even to vote for them occasionally. So let us imagine how difficult it is to get local people committed to establishing a new school. That is why the Government are trying to make it as easy as possible. We should not make it too difficult for them to do so. This is a very imaginative proposal by the Government and it should be welcomed. It will be welcomed first by the Liberal Party—obviously; it will be welcomed reluctantly by the Labour Party, just as it came to welcome the city technology colleges and the grant-maintained schools. It is only a question of time. It is still in the mode of fighting the last election. When it starts fighting the next election, it will begin to realise that what we are saying is really rather attractive, responsive to the needs of people and beneficial to the education of our country. I cannot wait for the day.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I do enjoy this coalition politics, but I think that my noble friends on my left are looking too much at institutions and too little at parents. They should think in terms instead of the interests of parents and the pupils. They are taking too static a view of the schools system. Schools are changing and jostling for places all the time. In a town with three or four secondary schools, the least popular may suddenly get a good new headmistress who makes a great difference and the school becomes popular again. Pupils flow to her away from the other schools. This is a naturally dynamic system which can easily absorb other levels of change. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, the Government have lots of levers to deal with any problems that develop as a result of change—we will come to that when we talk about inspections and how we watch the way which the system is going. We are talking about a change which results in parents being happier, pupils doing better and provision being much more closely aligned with the best interests of pupils and parents. Yes, there may be a few bumps in the road, but if we are careful as a Government, we will make sure that they do not hurt people. That must be the way we should go, rather than sticking with what we all agree is a system with a very large proportion of unsatisfactory, or at least sub-optimal, provision.

Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Low, has set out the case for reconsidering special educational needs, as this is a very important and complex issue. I am also pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, mentioned governance, and that my noble friend Lady Morgan talked about standards, which are key. I understand that some academies have been allowed to opt out of publishing data on pupils’ achievement, which we will no doubt talk about later.

Amendments 2 and 3, in the names of my noble friend Lady Morgan and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, respectively, deal with consulting governors. I am a governor of a primary school in Wandsworth, and I think that school governors are important people in all this. I know that some later amendments deal with consultation, but for now I want to talk about governing bodies.

I understand that academies are required to have only one elected parent member on their governing body, while the existing principle is that a third of governing bodies should be parents. Parent governors are crucial. I am a governor at a school in a deprived area of Wandsworth, which attracts parent governors who are very helpful and useful to the school. This is particularly important in early years institutions if they are to become academies. Parents on those bodies will be essential. If parents are not involved in the early years, the children and the school suffer. I should like to ask the Minister about consultation with governing bodies. How is the future governance of schools foreseen?

[Lord Lucas]

I apologise for the misprint in my Amendment 33. For the word “roles” noble Lords should read “rules” and they will get a greater, if not absolute, idea of the sense of it. I am concerned about how the governing bodies of these academies will be dealt with when they go wrong. They can get into a mess from time to time when they are captured by strong individuals with very particular ideas. They can become at odds with parents and heads, and can contribute to poor performance in the school. I understand what happens under current academies with sponsors. But in an academy without a sponsor, what process will be gone through to set the governing body back on the right path? Who complains to whom? Who reaches a judgment as to what is happening? Who takes action under what powers?

What general powers will parents have to set things right if they see things going wrong? I do not think that there are any contractual arrangements with parents. So, if a school is failing to provide education, what is the route for the parent to enforce the right to education for their child? Finally, at Second Reading, I asked whether we might be circulated with a model funding agreement. I have not seen that yet and I am keen to do so while we are discussing these matters.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, the debate so far has been extremely interesting. It started with a clear indication that we will go down the academy route for all schools. I supported that direction very strongly before the break. To add free schools, when clearly they all fall within the same family, does not make any sense. I was slightly surprised at the amendment which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, addressed, to replace “person” with “governing body”. No noble Lord has said one word about the governing body and its role.

I must declare an interest as president of the National Governors Association. Therefore, all these areas interest me quite a bit. Given all that and the rather confusing and conflicting view that noble Lords around the Chamber seem to have about whether governors and parent governors are a good or a bad thing, it would be extremely helpful if the Minister—to whom I also add my thanks because he gave up a lot of time before we even began debating this Bill—could indicate how important he thinks that the role of the governing body is. It will have a hugely important role in seeing that these new academies—however many of them there are—come to the conclusion that I think many of us would see as an important step in British education.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

We have two more days to debate these issues, and I am sure that we will come back to them. The answer to the noble Baroness’s question is, as much as it is possible, yes, of course.

Having concluded on Amendment 76, I urge the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, the noble Lords, Lord Greaves, Lord Lucas, Lord Northbourne and Lord Low, and the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, not to press their amendments.

[Lord Lucas]

I thank my noble friend for his reply and look forward to the model agreement, or the bits of it that we will get. Yes, charities do evolve, generally, a self-sustaining model for their governing body, but those that do not, die. Schools that do not either die, as many have this year, or the bursar very quickly puts other arrangements in place. It does not seem that those triggers are there for a straightforward maintained school with no sponsor. I shall return to this matter again in another context but, before the passing of the Bill, we need to know how we can stop schools getting into a real mess and how we can pick it up early and do something about it.

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin]

We have had a very helpful and full debate, and I thank the Minister for replying so comprehensively and in such a helpful way. To return to my earlier remarks, and picking up on the point that my noble friend Lord Adonis made, I think that it would be helpful—now that we know that free schools will be academies, and being in favour of reducing the alphabetti spaghetti, or soup, as the House was earlier—if the proposal forms for the free schools were called proposal forms for academies. We should get that clarity and consistency, so that those outside, who have not had the benefit of listening to the deliberations that we have had, can be clear about the relationship between new schools, free schools and academies. That would be very helpful.

Free Schools Policy

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, in particular for the work that she does for Future Leaders. On the issue of detail, that is work in progress and I shall keep her informed and posted. We made the announcement about the outline shape of the process on Friday, and we recognise that we have to provide this kind of detail. I shall keep her closely informed.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, can my noble friend give me comfort on two aspects? First, will he reassure me that the existence of surplus places in the vicinity of a proposed free school will not be a bar to the establishment of a free school? Secondly, can he tell me whether virtual schools may be established under this legislation—that is, schools which are to ordinary schools as the Open University is to universities?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I can certainly give my noble friend Lord Lucas the reassurance that he seeks on his first point. I shall need to write to him on the second point.

Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister to the Front Bench and I welcome this Bill. It has an excellent precedent. It was the child of my noble friend Lord Baker; it was excellently looked after by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in his long tenure; and somehow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, and others who did not feel the same way about it refrained from strangling the infant. Now it emerges to manhood at the point where it can be set free. I welcome the momentum that is embodied in the Bill and the feeling that we are going forward with speed and determination.

Letting excellent schools become academies is not a precipitate risk. We know what academies are. The schools that are being pitched into this can explore and innovate safely for a year or two and such regulation as is needed can catch up. They are already well governed and well operated institutions. I do not share the caution of my noble friend Lady Garden. I certainly do not share the ambition of the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, to turn every new aeroplane into a Bristol Brabazon, which, as noble Lords will remember, was designed with immense care by a big committee, had 10 engines and flew only once. There is a great deal to be said for getting things done with determination. It is one of the many things for which I admire my noble friend Lady Thatcher.

I have a strong conviction that innovation comes from below: one can see that all through life. The reason why we do not see it much in schools is that it has been suppressed for so long by regulation and the immense burdens put on schools of targets, paperwork and control. In the tenure of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, we had an education Bill that was supposed to allow schools to innovate, but all it said was that if you submit an immense application to the Department for Education you may be considered in due course and perhaps allowed to make small changes to the way in which you run a school. Where the previous Government had allowed bottom-up innovations to happen, such as the growth in academies and the excellent experiment of technical colleges launched by my noble friend Lord Baker, they worked. Where they tried to impose change from above, such as AS-levels and diplomas, they did not work. That is inevitable in a system such as education, as you cannot control 25,000-odd schools from the centre. A particular change is never right for all schools at the same time. You must have a system of evolution and adaptation rather than one of imposition if you want good ideas such as diplomas to flourish. Diplomas were an excellent idea, but they should have been allowed to evolve and adapt to schools, which would then have found out how they worked best. One would then have got a sensible system—as we still may, depending on what my Government decide to do with them.

Inevitably, as has been said by many of my noble friends, particularly those to my left, we shall not abandon our traditional inquisitorial attitude to the Government just because we happen to be part of it. There are many things that I wish to know about the Bill. In particular, I want to know how far the freedom to innovate goes and how much real freedom will be allowed to these schools. I very much hope that my noble friend will circulate to all of us who have taken an interest the model agreements and associated documents that doubtless are being sent to those thousands of schools that have made applications. They cannot possibly be dealt with by an à la carte system. There must be a standard procedure, which should be shared with us before Committee.

I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, and others that partnership will be an important part of the new educational landscape. It has been pioneered to effect by the previous Government. If we are not to have central control or control by local authorities, there must be a way for schools to get support and for good practice to spread. Of all the things that have been tried, that seems to work best in schools through partnership. I very much hope that that will be explored and strengthened in the Bill.

We need to be careful about the governance of the new academies. While there were only a couple of hundred of them and they were being looked after by association with reputable businesses and charities that could put in resources, expertise and understanding when things went wrong, and while they were quite thinly scattered or concentrated in areas where the current system had clearly failed, that, to my mind, was less of a worry. Now we are looking at a system where potentially, in the course of five years, quite a high proportion of our state schools could become academies, so we have to understand how governance will work. Governance is an imperfect matter—boards of governors go wrong. One can see that clearly in the private school system, where, as noble Lords may know, I spent a lot of my time as editor of the Good Schools Guide watching schools being destroyed by the idiocies of governing bodies.

How are we to deal with governance in academies—particularly those that convert from excellent schools—and how are we to preserve the interests of the local community? How, indeed, are we to approach quality control as a whole in a world of academies? I should very much like to learn from the examples of my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham, who says that he has his own inspectorate in his schools. How does that work? In what ways is it better and more efficient than Ofsted?

I can think of lots of ways in which Ofsted could be better and more efficient. It does not seem to be an organisation that demonstrably has its finger on the pulse of schools. It looks at them only every four years or so and does not provide a good service for parents. If there is a dodgy Ofsted report on a school, you hear nothing more for four or five years and, if it is a good school, you are not told whether it is going wrong. Ofsted does not seem to provide good value. It has a large number of immensely well paid executives, but I do not see that that level of spend is producing value for money. In general, I do not see Ofsted being supportive of schools. It simply seems to go in and be critical and not, as Her Majesty’s inspectorate used to do, provide good ideas, support and comfort to schools. Frankly, I think that a lot of cost could be cut out of that section of the department and that much better value could be obtained from the expenditure that remains. My noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby pointed out other areas where we could tackle costs, such as in the degree of central diktat and directive and in the level of imposition on schools—the sheer amount of effort in schools that has to be devoted to complying with these things and to watching what is going on. A great deal of money could be saved by reducing that.

We will inevitably come on to the matter of faith schools—a subject already covered by the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan of Huyton and Lady Murphy. In previous battles in this Chamber, we have extracted some hard-won concessions from the churches about inclusiveness—opening their schools to people of all faiths and none. The Church of England has very much led in that, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford said, but not all his schools are like that; some of them are not only religiously but intensely socially exclusive and the Church of England does not have the necessary degree of control over that. However, I know of schools of other faiths that are much less open to their communities. I think that we should try to move towards a situation where we welcome the ethos and value that faith schools bring to our children. Although I am not religious myself, I would happily send my children to faith schools. However, if we pay for them as state schools, they should be open to all. We should not see in the Bill a rowing back from the commitment to include the wider community in faith schools that we have extracted from the churches to date. Nor should we see an increase in sectarian teaching. There are Catholic schools that teach that Gandhi is burning in hell. Frankly, I do not think that we should fund that on the state.

The matter of special needs will clearly be important. I think that I disagree with everything that my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking said, so we shall clearly have some interesting arguments in Committee. There is a great deal to be said for inclusion for the right children, but we should not have compulsory inclusion for those who would be better served by special schools. I think that the incidence of special needs is about right at 20 per cent. It has come from a greater understanding of the variations in children. A lot of the increase has been due to specific learning difficulties and just represents an understanding that children can be very strong in some areas and very weak in others. That is a fundamental point and it requires schools to adapt their methods of teaching. We have also understood that there is a spread of autistic spectrum disorders and other things. It is all about helping schools to teach better, to understand their children, to understand how children in a school interact with one another and to produce better results from them.

I certainly do not agree with my noble friend Lord Baker that local education authorities should remain in charge of special educational needs. One of the features of the way in which schools, and certainly academies, developed under the previous Government was that they became much more co-operative with one another, forming their own groups. Windsor and Maidenhead—one of the smaller local authorities—runs a very good special needs service because it is big enough to have central expertise but small enough so that the people on the team are known by, and know, all the schools that they look after. In Slough, which is next door, the situation is horrible. I do not see why schools should not be able to opt into, or create for themselves, special educational needs services. That should not be beyond a group of schools co-operating together.

The handling of admissions will be important but, again, I do not share the caution of some people. I hope that we will move to a much more dynamic arrangement and abandon the rigidity of the current system. If academies admit from a much wider spread than the schools that they replace—that would follow the pattern of the academies that we have to date—schools in the leafy suburbs will be opened up to those in neighbouring areas of deprivation. There will be a lot more parental discomfort as a result of that and, in that case, local authorities will need to become the parents’ friend. They will need to make sure that there are suitable places—if necessary by pushing schools around a bit and saying, “Hang on. There are five kids living right next to you that you have to let in because there’s no other sensible place for them to go”. They will need to do battle with independent schools on behalf of parents. That really should be the role of the local education authority, as should dealing with special needs. Goodness—it would be a change if LEAs were to move from being seen as the enemy of parents, trying to prevent them from getting their children into schools, to being the friend of parents, trying to get their children into the schools that they should be in. That would be a much more natural and better relationship and it would be a better role for local education authorities.

The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, touched on freedom of information. I agree that we should not allow, through this Bill, a whole host of schools to pass out of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. This was highlighted in the Times Educational Supplement a week or two ago. Actually, the article itself was rubbish—the data that were said not to be available are available—but the principle that schools should not move out of the range of the Act was there.

I thought that perhaps the question of the curriculum and freedom from the national curriculum had gone in the coalition agreement. I thought that we believed in our pupils having an understanding of the world and of our history and who we are. The curriculum’s incorporation of Shakespeare, British history and an understanding of the world was important to us at that sort of level. Are we to abandon all control over that and allow it to become completely spotty or will there be some overriding continuity?

In the debates on this Bill and in those that follow, we will get deep into an argument on the role of government in education—central and local. I very much look forward to that. I do not share the pessimism of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley. We can move from a position where all levels of government have seen their role as control to one where they see their role as supporting.