Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Grocott

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

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I too have an amendment in this group, but first, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, I very much share his vision of taking local authorities to the point where they are advocates for parents. If we look back to the old days, that role was missing; they were advocates for schools, not parents. I remember local authorities that would pull a bad teacher out of a school and deliberately put him in another one because they were there to look after the teachers, not the parents. The logic of the direction we are going in is to have local authorities as the parents’ advocate and therefore, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said, to have some power in this—to have the ability to really shift rocks where they are in the way of parents.

My Amendment 58A is, like this grouping, an odd collection of bits and pieces. We have largely dealt with proposed new subsection 1 in earlier debates, but I have a real problem with the way academies handle admissions data at the moment. What used to be a coherent local authority booklet on how you could get into one school or another has now been reduced to a collection of “For information, apply to school” notices. There is no coherence. It gets really difficult and time consuming for a parent to get to understand what schools they might have access to, and that is really destructive to the power of parental choice and the point of having lots of different schools and admissions systems in the first place.

You absolutely ought to empower parents to make the best choice for their child. That ought to be the centre of the admissions system; it is not. I have failed to shift the DfE on this on many occasions. It is ridiculous. All schools have to do is, on a reasonable timescale, provide the local authority with their admissions data in a standard format—it has to exist in that format anyway, because there is a common system of handling admissions—and then allow the local authority to publish it.

The Bill is an opportunity to bring some sense back into the admissions data system and to remember why it is there, the point of parents choosing schools and the good that we used to argue came from doing that, rather than allowing this continued pointless, profitless inertia in the DfE to get in the way of parents’ interests. I appeal to my noble friend to pick up on this issue again but to do so from the point of view of doing best by children and parents.

Academies also need to get better at providing standardised information to parents, so that it gets easy for parents to compare one school with another. Destinations of children, examination results and the level of literacy and numeracy in the school are elements which it ought to be possible for a parent to look at in detail, beyond the Government’s performance tables. It ought to be easy. You do not need to make it easy for the sharp-elbowed middle classes; they do it anyway. They have the time and do the work. We want to make it easy for every parent, and that requires not asking parents to do the work, because a lot of parents do not have the time to get to the point where they really understand what is going on. We have to provide things in a standard way, so it is really important that we get the data and that there is an up-to-date Ofsted report—and ideally one for the multi-academy trust, where there is one, too—because that sort of data is easily comparable and digestible by any parent who is really putting their mind to it, which should be the point of those reports.

In a system where we have a lot of academies rather than local authority schools, I think we need to come back to a system that really centres its thinking on parents, how they make the choices and how they negotiate their relationships with schools, and to reinvent the local authority as a strong friend of parents in that context.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the fact that we are discussing admissions policy. It is not the principal object of the comments that I want to make but it is certainly at the heart of the unfairness of the system that operates in many parts of the country. I was shocked at the number of different admissions systems referred to by my noble friend Lord Adonis. As soon as you depart—as, I am afraid, we did quite a while ago now—from a common admissions system for the whole of a local authority area, you depart from a situation whereby there could be no question of schools poaching pupils by varying the system. The only way to get fairness across the system, with schools working together co-operatively and the whole community being served, is through a common admissions system, not sundry random ones.

We have all heard comments—not just anecdotal ones—about the questions sometimes asked when selecting pupils for schools. I have even heard questions asked about whether there is a suitable room at home in which a pupil can conduct their homework—an outrageous kind of selection policy—or whether, at 11, it can be guaranteed that the pupil will stay on until the sixth form, and other selective admissions questions.

Anyway, that is not my main purpose. What I really want to say in connection with this group of amendments is, essentially, “hear, hear” to what my noble friend Lord Hunt said. I find it very depressing that, after so many years, we are still debating the merits of grammar schools. I much prefer to couch the debate not in relation to those merits but to the merits of saying to an 11 year-old—indeed to the majority of 11 year-olds in a particular area—“You have failed.” We hear lots about the alleged advantages of going to a grammar school, but I have not read many books—I would like to have references to them if they exist—on the wonders of failing the 11-plus and the advantages that come from it.

For most people, if not everyone, of my generation and probably a good few who are younger, there was no option; we all took the 11-plus. Over half a century ago in my case, in an average road in an average part of Britain such as I lived in, we all played football and cricket together and then, some of us had passed and some had failed. To this day, I do not know why; it was random. They were the same people who played football, who I went to the pub with when I was a bit older, and who I played with in a rock group—that was a long time ago—about the same time as the Beatles, although they were more successful.

Some of us had passed and some had failed. If anyone thinks, well, they should just get over it, I can tell the Committee that, 50 years on, many people who failed the 11-plus never really got over it. It was a life-changing circumstance, a life-changing occurrence at the age of 11, which I find indefensible. It has got better in many ways as educationalists of all parties have got rid of grammar schools in many areas but, in areas where it persists, it has, if anything, got worse.

At least when I took the 11-plus there was no intensive coaching of 10 and 11-year-olds to try to get us through, but the nightmare reported by parents in Kent is that this is now the prerequisite; that is what you have to do. I do not want to get too anecdotal about this but I even know of parents who, due to a promotion, wanted to move their family to Kent but were initially dissuaded from doing so—they did it eventually—because they did not want to put their seven, eight or nine year-olds, as they were at the time, through the trauma of having to take the 11-plus. Again, in a family near me with four children, the three eldest passed and the fourth failed; we can just imagine what it does to a family when that kind of thing happens.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Grocott

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am puzzled about how the system proposed in the Bill produces good schools. I have spent the past 30 years involved with the Good Schools Guide. Schools die mostly because their governance goes wrong. Anything else you can put right, but the governors can take a school down irretrievably. To have a good governing body, you require motivation. You require people with real determination that the school will succeed, that it will get better. They have not got all the answers and they will look outside for them, they will listen and learn, talk to parents and work with outside experts to make things better.

In most cases, things turn out that way, but what we are producing here is a completely motiveless environment, and why is anyone going to want to run a MAT under those circumstances? What freedoms do they have left? What is left to them in terms of jurisdiction over the school? Why would anyone of any quality get involved with running a multi-academy trust? Would you really hang around just waiting to be beaten up by the Department for Education—or Ofsted, if it is allowed a part in multi-academy trusts? You have no ability to steer things, no ability to innovate, no ability to make things better or to show how good your pupils and your schemes can be. I remember this thing coming in. It was all about producing a system which would innovate and make itself better and which we could learn from; people would try new ideas. Things have not been perfect, but there have been a lot of good examples, and now we are going back to a system where none of this can happen. I am very puzzled.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, unusually for me—and, I think, for most Members—I came here simply to listen, not to speak. Most of us tend to be the other way around, I think. Really, it is not necessary to speak because, certainly from my perspective, my noble friend Lady Morris just said everything that needs to be said, and I shall follow her on this Bill wherever she decides to go. I thought she encapsulated the Bill when she said it is about building an entirely new school system—almost by accident, certainly not through deliberate, considered intent.

I have never been a fan of the academy system—I might as well put my cards on the table—and a key reason for this is that one of the many things I treasured as a local MP was the accountability of what we now call maintained schools. If parents whose children were at academies were not satisfied with what was happening at the academy there was very little that I could do or could advise them to do, whereas it was simple in the case of the ultimate democratic control which you had with what we now call maintained schools.

So far as it has any clear objectives—I agree with most of what has been said about that not being at all clear—the Bill seems to be trying to make it so that somehow or other we will now have accountability for every school in the country, and the accountability will consist of the Secretary of State for Education. That is accountability in name only; I would like to know the acronym for that. It is not accountability, for the reasons my noble friend gave. What would be the cost of the section within the Department for Education which had the responsibility for addressing complaints from any parent in any school in the country and making sure they got a speedy reply? It is a ridiculous concept.