Education Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Perry of Southwark

Tuesday 4th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

I beg to move Amendment 146 and speak to Amendment 147A. My objective is to nudge the Government gently in the direction of common sense and fairness in these two amendments. One of the effects of the Government’s policies over the last year or two, particularly with regard to the Office for Fair Access, which looks set to reduce the number of students going from high-performing English schools to Oxford and Cambridge by about 500 a year, and as an effect of the fees increase, has seen a very considerable rise in interest in the prospect of going to university overseas.

At the cheaper level, it costs about a couple of thousand pounds plus living expenses to get a very decent university education in the Netherlands. That is becoming an increasingly popular destination, notably for the leafier end of the state school system. I thoroughly recommend Maastricht as a university, begging the pardon of my more sensitive colleagues on these Benches. It is actually a very fine and innovative university, and for those parents who would intend anyway to repay their children’s debt, and not leave them with that hanging over them, it represents a very considerable saving.

To have our children going abroad anyway is probably quite a good thing for this country, and over the long term it should increase our understanding of the world outside our shores, and bring us added understanding, if not prosperity. At the higher end, principally affected by the changes being made in OFFA, we are seeing very substantial increases in numbers of students interested in going to the United States. The rate of application is up by about 30 per cent this year. Fees in the US are extremely substantial. There are some good scholarships available. Some of the brighter state comprehensives have been picking up one or two of them, and long may that continue. However, a lot of this outflow will be children who have gone to independent schools, whose parents see that they have the qualifications that would formerly have taken them to top universities, but who have now been squeezed out—so they are off to America, Canada, Australia or, indeed, China. You can get to some very high-ranking universities in Hong Kong for not much more than the cost of a British degree. Indeed, one of them is a subsidiary of Nottingham University. So you can pay to go to a British university overseas. It seems a bit daft to me that our own universities, which are strapped for cash enough as it is, should see this flow of students going out to pay high fees overseas and not be able to bring them back and have those fees for themselves. Why should we deny our universities that benefit? Why should our students find that the only universities in the world that they cannot pay a fee for are our own universities and why should our universities find that a natural flow of students is denied to them? So I hope, while not expecting any immediate comfort today, that the Government will think along those lines.

I would like to see some progress today on Amendment 147A. It has long been the practice of universities, when students were largely funded by the Government, to rob Peter to pay Paul—to take money that was notionally allocated to students studying humanities degrees and use it to fund courses being pursued by those studying science degrees, in particular. That is all very well when it is just reallocating government money, but when you are taking money that a student has invested themselves and transferring it away from that student to some other student’s course, I think that that becomes morally indefensible. I would very much like to see any such activity done openly and with a proper disclosure of what a student is receiving in return for their fees and where the money is being spent by the university. Then a student who is looking to go on what has been traditionally a rather underprovided course with few contact hours can see whether or not they are being offered a reasonable bargain in return for their £9,000 a year. I beg to move.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My name is also on Amendment 146 and I very much support what my noble friend has said. I shall add one or two other arguments to the powerful arguments that he has already made.

My noble friend said that losing some of our good students to go abroad for their studies might be a good thing. Yes, it would be good for a few. International education, whether at undergraduate or graduate level, is a well established tradition among the brighter and best students, and that is a good thing. But it is a very foolish country that stands aside and watches a very large number of its brightest and best students being lost, particularly since those who go to the United States tend to stay. There are good statistics showing this. We lose some of our best talent if we allow them to go and finish their undergraduate and postgraduate study there and then be snapped up by American companies.

The other argument that has always seemed to me quite powerful is that we have and recognise in this country, without much debate, that we have private schools as well as state schools. We know perfectly well the way in which private school fees have been accelerating in recent years. Many parents are now paying £12,000 or £13,000 per year for day schools, if they are lucky—some more than that—and, for boarding schools, at least double that. It has always seemed very strange that those same parents whose children go on to higher education are suddenly released from what many of us see as the burden of school fees to a very much reduced sum of money. I have many times dwelt with friends on one anecdote from my time as head of a Cambridge college. One of my fresher students came bouncing up to me in the first week of term and said, “Oh, come and look at what my daddy has given me as a present for coming up to university”. It was a brand new BMW 7 Series, which would have accounted for at least three years of fees at £9,000 a year plus, or her maintenance. I thought, yes, Daddy is celebrating because he does not have to pay your very high school fees any longer. I am sure that my college and university could have done with that money and made good use of it.

It seems quite extraordinary that we do not allow parents—who could very well afford to continue to pay the fees—simply to opt their children out of the entire loans company system and, therefore, to have their children treated like overseas students, where the university can set their fees and they are outwith the quota for those eligible for loans. Putting these very bright students off-quota and giving them the encouragement and opportunity to go to our best universities would be to their benefit and hugely to the benefit of the country. Therefore, I wholly hope that the Government will seriously consider this possibility of having private students who would be off-quota but who of course would have exactly the same entry requirements as those who are eligible for loans. As my noble friend says, we do not expect an answer today. This is not a backdoor route for people to buy their way into higher education. Their access arrangements and entry requirements would have to be exactly the same. But it would enable us to keep some of those very bright young people here in British universities.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Perry of Southwark

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 114. I entirely support Clause 39. It is absolutely right that academies and other schools that are exempt should be given freedom from full Ofsted inspection. I have severe reservations about whether Ofsted’s regime in the past has been proven to do anything to improve standards in schools. In fact, the contrary appears to have been the case. We have to hope, of course, that Ofsted in its revised form will be a more positive experience. Nevertheless, it is right that these schools should be exempt from routine Ofsted inspection. However, as my noble friend has already said, academic standards can slip, but long before academic standards begin to show a decline in a way that can be identified, it is possible for a school to begin—usually because there is a change of head—to decline in terms of standards of discipline and staff morale. Therefore, the overall ethos of the school begins to change and, within two or three years, that will certainly begin to be reflected in the academic results and standards.

The proposal in Amendment 114 may be a little leftfield. It proposes that, instead of having a full inspection regularly, a school should have somebody assigned to it who just keeps an eye on it. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, suggested that this amendment brought about something like a school improvement partner, but that is not what is envisaged at all. This person would not have a role in helping the school to improve or develop; they would simply be a friendly eye, popping in two or three times over the year—at least once a term—just to ensure that the high standards that had been present before were maintained. If there is any question or doubt, this would be the early warning system; if the “visitor”, as the amendment calls this person, had reason to believe that things were beginning to go wrong, he or she would be able to trigger a full inspection by Ofsted.

I am sure that all of us in this Room with our tremendous experience of schools have seen schools change very quickly when there is a change of head. I have certainly seen schools that were very good begin to deteriorate in a couple of terms, when a weak head moved in—and, vice versa, a school that has been weak in the past can suddenly begin to pick up very fast when a good head moves in. Assuming that it is the case in some schools that they go down in standards, I believe that it would be very important to have someone keep an eye on that, rather than wait the two or three years before it begins to appear in the standards of achievement. I do not need to remind the Committee that these are children’s lives; they do not have a second chance. If the school’s standards begin to decline, down the line their success and achievements will also go down. So I very much hope that my noble friend will at least look sympathetically on this idea.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I take a more radical view than my noble friend, although if her amendment was accepted a lot of my worries would be dealt with. The Government are making a great mistake in going down this route. It is not that I like Ofsted—I do not like the old-style Ofsted; a lot needs to be improved about it. But going in this direction is going to cause considerable problems down the road.

Schools that are rated outstanding often do not stay outstanding. Quite a high proportion of them drift downwards. This is entirely natural, with changes in the staff and in tempo and other changes that mean that a school loses its grip on the excellence that it once had. Perhaps it was lucky to get a grade 1 in the first place and has just slipped back to its natural place in grade 2. Unless you have some contact with the school, you absolutely do not know that that is happening.

One of the main grouses that I have with Ofsted at the moment is that it is very late to pick up changes. Ofsted will pile into a school and put it in special measures when, if it had caught it a couple of years earlier, it would have meant a minor change of course. I can think of an excellent secondary school in Manchester that was dumped into special measures when it got a head who was being experimental and trying all sorts of things and forgetting to look after the basic management of the school. It was a very easy thing for an experienced head to pick up; if someone had just come in, as my noble friend Lady Perry suggests, and had a look at the school, they would have sensed that immediately.

I do not share the confidence of my colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches that these things get picked up by parents, since parents are by and large terribly loyal to their schools. They do not talk to outside people or to Ofsted. There may be a flow of information round the local circuit, but it does not get out of that; no one complains. Often, there will be a flow of propaganda from the school that what it is doing is right and that the course it is taking is the best one. Even if it is experimental and there are some worries about it at the moment, it will all work out. Parents are inclined to accept that and an outside expert eye can make all the difference. At the moment, Ofsted is deficient in that it does not look at schools often enough and this causes much greater problems than there ought to be. If we get to a position where Ofsted does not see schools at all, we will start to have serious problems going unchecked, to the point where the rot is so bad that the fruit falls off the tree and the educational lives of a great many pupils are seriously damaged.

Beyond that, we are considering opening up the curriculum so that a great deal of what a secondary school, in particular, does will be down to that school. So we will start not to know what a school is doing and whether it is doing well unless someone tells us what is going on. How will we know that PSHE in a school is being done properly, or what is being done, or what is being taught? We will rely entirely on what the school chooses to tell us. If it is a good school doing the right thing, fine—that will be all right—but how will we know if that is the case?

The proposals in this clause, as they are now, will fail schools, fail children and fail parents and the information they should have. We should seriously look to do something about this.

Education Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Perry of Southwark

Monday 18th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, that phrase comes from the admissions criteria for Ampleforth, which is a well known Catholic school, where it works extremely well. Parents who want to send their children to a Catholic school should accept that it is a Catholic school and that it will educate its children in the Catholic religion. I send my children to an Anglican school. I am not religious myself, but I entirely accept that my child is being brought up within the context of school as an Anglican. I value that tradition of education. Again, it is perhaps an illustration of the conditions in the west of Scotland that such a thing is inconceivable to the noble Lord. For me, it is just ordinary. I beg to move.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, my name is also to Amendment 138. For me, these two paragraphs together describe the ideal nature of a faith school when it has the freedom of being an academy. Subsection (1) makes the point that a faith school should not in any way have admission criteria that insist that all children shall have some kind of allegiance to the faith of that school. We have all heard stories about parents suddenly turning up at a church in the last few months before their application to a school that happens to be the best school in the area and a faith school. That is unfortunate; it distorts what should be an open choice by parents of a good school that has a particular ethos. Subsection (1) is inclusive and says that faith schools would be inclusive. Around half the children they took would share a commitment to their faith, but the other half could be of any faith or no faith.

I strongly believe in subsection (2). Exactly as my noble friend Lord Lucas said, if parents have chosen a Catholic school, an Anglican school, a Jewish school or a Muslim school for their children, they must respect the traditions of that faith. It is not a secular school; it is a school of that faith. They should be included in the general ethos of the school and pay tribute to the customs within it that reflect its faith. My experience and that of noble Lords who spoke earlier reinforce this; parents of other faiths welcome the ethos of a Christian school, and perhaps parents of other faiths will welcome the ethos of a Muslim or a Jewish school as well.

Parents are looking for a school with strong values, and if those values are based on faith, the parents will accept that. The success of faith schools has been widely demonstrated by their popularity and their academic success.

Academies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Perry of Southwark

Monday 28th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I apologise if the wording of my amendment is not exact. It is merely there to bring up the subject of inspections and to make it clear that I want them to be regular, not just every five years or so.

There is a good model of how this could be done. Every year, we are retiring a few thousand headmasters and deputy headmasters who have immense experience and the ability to judge a school pretty rapidly—the good ones. They know how to read a school, how a school works and what to look for. They have the ability to be immensely supportive and they are not that expensive because they have pensions. They have a commitment to the job and all they want is a reasonable return for the effort that they are putting in. If we were to pay £300 a day, that might be a figure with some echoes—we do it for that. It should not surprise us that heads and others with a real vocation and dedication to helping other people are prepared to work and put in similar effort for a similar amount of money. You are not looking at a lot of money. You are looking at people whom parents and heads naturally trust. You are starting off on a pretty good basis if you are staffing your inspectorate with that sort of person.

These people could go once a year into every school—and I do say “every school”. What is the point of an inspectorate not visiting outstanding schools? How are inspectors ever going to learn what best practice is if they never go into the best schools? Part of the point of an inspectorate ought to be spreading good practice. They should be there to say, “This is what I saw the other day”, or, “Why don’t you talk to him or her about that because they seem to be getting it right?”. If all you are doing is going round the schools that are not performing well, all you can do is spread bad practice. To be an effective inspector, you need to be in touch with good practice and with what is going on in the world of good schools. A simple report to parents—a paragraph or so, to say that since the last inspection report things are progressing, this is particularly good, there is still a bit of trouble on that but, overall, we are happy—is what parents need to know that they can take a baseline from the previous Ofsted report, read through it, know that things have improved or are much as they were and take a reasonable decision. Most schools with a head who is open to ideas will benefit enormously from having someone such as that around.

Once schools have come to trust the system, you would find that they were asking for extra days. When I was a governor of a college under the old FEFC system, we were looking to have these people in more often. We would say, “We’re not doing what we should do in biology. Let’s get the biology man around to give us an extra bit of help there”. Schools, particularly primary schools, are little, isolated, lonely places. They want support and they want to have contact with people who can provide that support and good ideas. At the moment, all we have is the school improvement partner system, which is too low-level and local. We would do much better if we moved to making that part of the inspection system. I think that we could run that bit of the inspection system for about £10 million a year and have a report on every school, every year. Over and above that, you obviously need a full inspection system. Every now and again, you need to go in and do the whole works. Even if you are quite generous on the budget and say that you will spend 10 man-days on average every five years, that will cost you only £20 million or so. Then you have the central system over that.

There is an enormous obsession with data in the current central system. Collecting the data imposes immense burdens on schools. Teachers worry about measuring every aspect of every child’s performance because the school improvement partner or the inspector may pick them up on this or that, which is not constructive. You do not need to look at data on that level. Any mathematician will tell you that, apart from in pure mathematics, figures are always wrong. Figures do not provide value on their own; they provide value only in relation to what is happening on the ground. Inspections should be about the human aspect of schools: the quality of the teaching; the quality of the atmosphere; the staff; and the relationships in the school. They are things that numbers never throw any light on, although numbers can be useful in confirming what is happening.

If we were to budget £50 million a year for Ofsted as a whole, that would be enough. We could then perhaps devote another £50 million to the same organisation, perhaps, if it was running well and was focused on supporting schools that were having a hard time, bringing them round and making them straight—if it was picking up schools that had scored four and setting them right—which needs a lot of concentrated help and advice very fast. That would still be half the current budget, but it would provide about 10 times the value. I beg to move.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

I support much of what my noble friend has said. It is desperately important to have proper monitoring of what is going on in these new and very innovative schools and to have feedback, not only to the schools—I will come to what my noble friend said about the positive nature of the feedback that is needed, which I agree with him about—but also to the Secretary of State. Ministers need to know how well the experiment is going and what adjustments are needed from time to time.

I wholly agree with my noble friend that the current Ofsted system is not what is needed and not what we are asking for. It seems to have put everything into one rather unsatisfactory basket. Ofsted inspects for health and safety issues and can fail a school on the height of its security fence. That is not the professional judgment of educational experts. The people who should be doing the assessment of the school’s success and innovation should be people who were successful professional teachers who know what they are talking about. Popping in to see whether health and safety rules are being obeyed or whether security is being maintained is not what an educationalist should be doing. There should be a firm and distinct line between that kind of inspection and the professional judgments that my noble friend so well described.

It is important that we have a cadre of people who are constantly in touch with schools. I say to my noble friend that we need more than simply a once-a-year report. Somebody should keep in touch with the school on a fairly regular basis and go in from time to time to be a shoulder on which the head can—one hopes not cry—pour out her or his ideas, thoughts and problems when they arise, and provide wisdom and judgment. As my noble friend said, they also need to be a sounding board so that the Secretary of State and Ministers can understand what is really happening in these innovative and exciting academies.

Academies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Perry of Southwark

Wednesday 23rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, this is a hugely disparate group of amendments. We have covered a lot of topics and it has been difficult sometimes, despite the intelligence of Members of the Committee, to see any common thread in what has been discussed. I want to return to the issue raised by the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln. They deal with the absolutely key issue of the catchment area from where the academy will draw its pupils.

In recent years, I have been increasingly concerned over the whole issue of catchment areas, largely because we have seen that, where there is a good, strong school, parents who can afford to do so understandably—I do not blame them for it at all—cluster around the school and buy or rent houses in the area. There are even stories of parents being slightly economical with the truth in all sorts of interesting ways about where they live in order to claim that they are within the catchment area of a good school. Meanwhile, the schools most in need are in the most deprived areas. The people who live near those poor schools, often on local council estates, do not have the option of moving. They cannot buy their way into the catchment area of a good school.

This is one of the big issues for academies. I know that in Hackney the academies do not have catchment areas, but they do use banding and lotteries. I know that my noble friend Lord Lucas has an amendment—for various reasons, it is not in this group—that raises the issue of banding. I ask the Minister to think seriously about the issue of “wholly or mainly” in a local area and about the freedom which grammar schools have had since their inception and which grant-maintained schools had in their day—and which, as I say, many existing academies have taken—that allows them to go outside their area, maintaining the inclusiveness of the intake by means of banding but giving it a social mix or even a mix of talent.

[Lord Lucas]

I support entirely what my noble friend has just said. It is important, particularly when we are granting new freedoms to outstanding schools, that one of our ambitions for them is that they should reach out of the area immediately around them, which frequently has been colonised by people who can afford to buy houses in the area, to those who are not in that position. We will come to my amendment later. Perhaps I take a more active view than my noble friend, but I certainly would like it to be an ambition that all these schools should free themselves from geographical catchment areas that allow for their capture by financially mobile people. They should, at the least, be able to reach out and include those beyond the local area.

I also support the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in what he said about state boarding schools. They have a strong role to play and I would like to see an increasing role for them. As he says, most of them are excellent, but they are clearly not serving their local areas in any particular way. That also applies to religious schools. Existing schools such as the Jewish Free School have a wide catchment area and are excellent. I cannot see why they should be excluded just because their communities are widespread. They should not be geographically confined, particularly if new schools are following the 50 per cent rule. I do not see any damage arising from that. Again, historically we have supported dance, drama and music in specialist schools and I suspect that it would do our national pride a bit of good if we supported tennis. All in all, I come down to agreeing with the first amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I cannot see a function for subsection (6)(d) that could not reasonably and justly be dealt with in the ordinary discretion of the department.

Having agreed with noble Lords opposite, I take issue with my noble friend Lady Williams. If I start from the same premise as she did, I get to opposite conclusions. The community that my local primary school is part of is the village in which it is situated. The school is governed from Petersfield eight miles away, but that is an alien presence, not a local one. A primary school is very local, so one that has its roots in the local community is a much more local thing than one that is subject to the whims of the local authority, which has a lot of considerations other than the wishes of the local community. I see that as progress.

I spent part of my life running a small business, which felt like a primary school in that there were lots of things that I could not do myself. However, if I wanted to know about employment law, I subscribed £250 a year to a telephone service from Sage or someone else. I did not need a local authority to provide it for me. There will be lots of other providers of these services—indeed, there are many—and it is not like having to pay a City lawyer £500 an hour every time advice is needed. Services are built to be provided to small enterprises like primary schools.

However, I share my noble friend’s concern about how fragile primary schools are. The wrong head in a primary school can kill it in about two months, so I urge the Minister, when he comes to consider applications from primary schools, to make sure that they have strong heads and governing bodies and that they are committed to stay in place for some time. It may well be, over the long term, that a primary academy would be better as part of a wider federation of some kind, such as a group of primary schools, or as a school that is connected to a secondary school, as the existing primary academies are. That would provide the resources to deal with problems as they arise and which can so easily bowl over a small primary school.