Education: Academies and Free Schools

Lord Moynihan Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan]

My Lords, in speaking this evening I declare an interest as a patron of the Haberdashers’ Educational Foundation, and as a member of the Court of Assistants of the Haberdashers’ Company. The company has a deep and abiding relationship with education. To its academies it has brought educational experience, a strong and relevant brand, a long-term passion for education, a commitment to excellence and an apolitical approach, as evidenced by my fellow patron of the foundation, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis.

Its work is particularly important to me since it transformed Malory School, in my former constituency of Lewisham East, into an academy. Malory, now Knights Academy, went from being one of the worst failing schools in the country to the popular and successful academy it is today. It is, therefore, welcome that the aim of the academies programme was to challenge underachievement in the country’s poorest-performing schools. It was a development which had its roots in the earlier CTC programme, which was announced as long ago as 1986. While I was MP for the area, Hatcham College became a CTC after a long battle with Lewisham Council in 1991. Most of the original 15 CTCs have now converted to academy status.

The original purpose of the academies programme was to help struggling urban schools, as I have just mentioned. As noble Lords will recall, philanthropic sponsors promised £2 million and academies were given wide, necessary and welcome discretion over various aspects of the curriculum, admissions, teachers’ pay and conditions, independence from their local authority and, if necessary, multimillion-pound new buildings or refurbishments.

The Haberdashers’ Company first became involved in 2002. Hatcham College had for some time been seeking a partnership role with a local school, and at the same time Lewisham was looking for a sponsor to take over Malory School, whose GCSE results in 2004 were, as I have noted, the worst in the country. Conversion to an academy secured Malory government funding for a complete rebuild of the school.

Since 2007 both Hatcham, with its music specialism, and Knights, a specialist sports academy, have flourished. As my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking has alluded, sport is so important as a catalyst, capable of transforming many disenfranchised children into focused and successful young people. Hatcham College, due to its success as a CTC, was always oversubscribed, and remains one of the most successful academies in the country, with outstanding exam results at both GCSE and A-level, and with many students obtaining places at Russell group universities. In contrast, Malory School in the old days had a falling roll but, within one year of Knights Academy opening, the school was oversubscribed and in 2010 achieved an overall pass rate for all students, including in maths and English, of 40% at GCSE. I am delighted to say that many students now achieve places at university, as well as some significant sporting successes, both locally and nationally.

The Haberdashers’ Federation was innovative in being the first academies federation. The model, which has since been adopted elsewhere, was of an overarching single governing body made up of Haberdashers and Haberdasher nominees, parents, teachers and the local authority.

The success of Hatcham, Knights and the federation model pioneered by the governing body and SMT meant that the company was encouraged by the Department for Education to sponsor more academies. The company’s strategic vision, formulated by its education committee and endorsed by the court of assistants, was to provide “excellence in governance”. That meant that if the company was to be persuaded to open other academies, it would do so only if there were a Haberdashers’ school in the same area so that the skills of both the governing body and the SMT of the Haberdashers’ school could be brought to bear. If I could leave one key message with your Lordships this evening, it would be that excellence in governance is very important to the success of the academy and the pre-school programme.

The key differential between council-run schools and academies and free schools is that the latter can concentrate solely on the education of their pupils and operate responsively and quickly to ensure that the best education possible is made available to them. Therefore, important as independence in direction, the benefits of academy design, direct funding, reporting to central government, curriculum design and admissions are, independence in terms of governance and the freedom that comes with that is also critical.