Free Schools and Academies

Lord Moynihan of Chelsea Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Berridge. I thank my noble friend Lady Evans for securing this debate. I refer to my interests in the register—in particular, my chairmanship of Parents and Teachers for Excellence.

As my noble friend Lady Shephard asked, what problem are the Government trying to solve here? We all agree that everything important in this country starts with the imperative to give all our children a great education. The extraordinary improvement in national educational outcomes over the past 20-odd years is one of the few bright spots in our recent national history—apart from Brexit, of course. It started under Labour with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, recognising that one size does not fit all. Improvement in school results did not take hold until Michael Gove, then in the other place, took up these views and drove them through with the help of a co-operative Department for Education.

Bit by bit the successes came, resulting in changes to educational outcomes that now mean that many additional hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of adults are able to navigate society as literate, numerate citizens—many more than would have been the case if our previous educational results had still prevailed when over one in five failed to reach that standard.

As Policy Exchange has recently shown, and as other noble Lords have referred to, England’s performance in global PISA rankings has improved from 27th to 11th in maths, and from 25th to 13th in reading. Those two metrics are crucial, not all the many hundreds of other things that people want to be taught in schools.

How did this happen? It happened because of free schools that showed the path to academic excellence in so many ways, whether for Michaela, which many have mentioned, West London Free School or so many others, such as the ones my noble friend Lord Harris so eloquently referred to. Because of academisation, which gave freedom to schools to craft their own way to educate their own pupils, 17 of the top 20 English secondary schools, and 42 of the top 50, are academies or free schools. Poorly performing schools have been required to become academies and, in general, show rapid improvement as a result.

So I repeat: what are the Government up to here? Are they in the grip of doctrinaire fantasies? The facts are there to tell them what gives a child a good education: phonics, Shanghai maths, a knowledge-rich education and, of course, structured discipline. These are found in academies and free schools, and not so much in government-run maintained schools. Or is it that the Government are in hock to the unions, whose focus seems to have been more on conditions and pay for their members than on educational outcomes? If so, I respectfully point out that many academy chains pay their teachers above the pay scale.

The changes proposed by the Government bid fair to reverse many years of improvement in pupil results, and thus improvements in the lives of millions of this country’s future adults and in our economy and national life. These proposed changes would be tragic and arguably vindictive. I urge the Minister to persuade the Government to think again.