Queen’s Speech

Lord Storey Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, in terms of my interest in children and young people, I say how much I welcome the upcoming modern slavery Bill and the financial support for childcare. I laud the meals service scheme for infants due to be introduced this autumn and the extension of free childcare for the most disadvantaged. As we have said on so many occasions in this Chamber, if we get it right for children in preschool and early years, it has the biggest impact on their learning and development. Not giving young children the environment for play, learning, exploring and imagination makes it an uphill struggle all the way through formal education.

That is not to say, of course, that it has to be done in a formal setting or outside the family. My guess is that there was a collective sigh of relief in schools that the Queen’s Speech contained no proposals directly affecting schools and schooling. The past 10 years or so have seen cataclysmic changes, with every aspect of education turned over from top to bottom—the schools curriculum, training, examinations, conditions of service, inspection regimes and financing assessment. The changes have been breathtaking and it is to the credit and marvel of our schools that they have risen to the challenge. I can find no other European country that has undergone the changes that we have. Surely we now need a long period of just letting schools and teachers get on with the job that they are best at doing. Would it not be good if there was some consensus that we stop playing political football with our schools?

We are having this debate against the background of what has been happening in some schools in Birmingham: the so-called Trojan horse. I want to reflect on the issue for a few moments; I know that we are going to have a ministerial Statement. First and foremost, we need to do all we can to protect the pupils in those schools from the situation in which they find themselves. Many of these young people will be facing exams in the next few weeks, and to have television vans and crews outside their school and headlines in newspapers cannot be good for the stability that they need.

Many of us will remember that local authorities used to have responsibility for schools. They were responsible to the Secretary of State and provided the intervention, mentoring on everything from curriculum development to CPD and support at interviews. Indeed, there would always have been an LEA representative at governing body meetings. These advisers and inspectors had their finger on the pulse of each and every school and I really wonder whether it was wise to allow that complete divorce of schools from their local authorities, and indeed their local communities. We have seen local authorities denuded of resources to support schools in the way that they did and academies become free of local accountability and part of large chains, often with as many schools as some of our smallest LAs had. In my view, we cannot micromanage schools from the centre but neither can some regional commissioners take on the role of day-to-day support that schools so desperately need.

During the past 10 years, we have also seen the number of faith schools increase considerably. I speak as someone who was head of a faith school for five years. The notion that you separate children by their religion has to be carefully considered. Faith schools bring a caring and mutually respective ethos but children need to understand the tolerance of a multicultural community. My own daughter went to a Jewish school. She developed not only an understanding of different faiths but lasting friendships with children from other faiths. Faith schools should never be allowed to develop religious indoctrination and it is hugely important that they encourage and allow children from faiths other than their own to be enrolled.

We need not only to ensure that we know locally the learning and cultural environment of each school, but to have a consistent approach to inspection. It must be right that all schools, irrespective of their type—whether they are public or private, LA or free school—have the same inspection regime. I am delighted that Ofsted wants to carry out all inspections, as the notion that certain types of school could use a private inspection provider was fraught with danger. I hope that no more will a school be allowed to use the same private provider if that private provider is reliant on the school for the contract, and thus potentially turns a blind eye to some unacceptable practices. Inspection standards for schools of impartiality and rigour must be for all.

It is also important that all schools, irrespective of their pedigree, have a broad and balanced curriculum and it surely cannot be right that some schools have an overprovision of faith matters at the expense of that. Ofsted is our only means of knowing what is really going on in schools and should put “broad and balanced” as the hallmark of any inspection regime. Furthermore, schools that are deemed outstanding should not be left for many years before they are visited again.

Finally, I want to raise—but we are out of time so I cannot and will sit down.