Education and Adoption Bill

Debate between Lord Sutherland of Houndwood and Baroness Pinnock

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise for not being here in the Committee’s session last week. It was for medical reasons—and my experience has not filled me with either enthusiasm or confidence that importing wholesale from the health service will solve all our problems. However, there are some very good individual doctors in the system, which is why it works.

To go to the challenge put to the Minister about maintained schools from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, I spent this morning with seven head teachers from maintained primary schools in the most difficult areas of inner London. I have no doubt that they are doing a terrific job. I agree that there are some excellent maintained schools doing an excellent job. Some of them even refer to the good partnerships with local academies which they hope will develop. That is the other side of the picture.

However, I would make two or three quick comments. When I hear the expression “democratic accountability”, the philosopher in me wants to write three articles to try to clarify what that means. The Committee should not worry, for I am not going to try to do that now, but it is a shibboleth at times. At other times it is an important use of language, just as talk of human rights is, but sometimes it covers a multitude of uncertainties and unclarities. I do not deny that it is important but here, for example, we have to distinguish between accountability for financial systems and governance—one kind of accountability that is not necessarily for a public committee; I would rather have a high-powered team from PricewaterhouseCoopers or some such going in to inspect them and report back—and the separate form of accountability which is necessary for educational practice. Parents and teachers no doubt have important things to say but it must never be forgotten that at least half of those, possibly both, are interested parties.

I come to the nub of what I want to say. The problem that the Bill is facing up to is essentially a question of dealing with what has arisen in schools that are currently maintained under the local authority system. If that is so, just recreating it without modification will not do the job. We need more subtlety and sophistication in trying to face that problem, when it is there that the difficulties have arisen. The Committee may have dealt, as I gather it did at some length last week, with the definition of coasting. But if there are coasting schools, a number of them have arisen within a local authority and within the maintained system. So there are good, bad and coasting schools, all of them within the maintained sector. That is why I find it difficult simply to pick up a proposal that all you have to do is to spread the responsibility by having ways of taking on board an additional set of views, without a means of sharpening them.

To go back to my speech at Second Reading, there is a danger that we will simply bring in delaying tactics, which are the curse of the current system. I am still worried about the Bill having delays built into it in a way that I find unacceptable. That is why I am not—

[Baroness Pinnock]

Perhaps I may help out a bit. What I have proposed in the amendment has nothing to do with delaying anything. What it seeks to do is to find a way for local people to have a local voice about the schools that serve their community, be they maintained schools, schools in a multi-academy trust or single trust academies. All the amendment is about is creating an opportunity for an oversight of what goes on in a local community. It is not about decision-making, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, may have thought. If we follow the parallel of the local authority health scrutiny committees, it is not only about membership by local elected councillors. Those committees have a membership that is drawn widely from both those who are elected to serve their communities and those who have an interest or past professional experience in the health sector. Those people are drawn together to look at the health services in their area and come to some conclusions about them, as well as enabling local people to come forward with their concerns. So this is nothing to do with delaying or only having a committee. It is about enabling some sort of platform for local people to voice their concerns, or perhaps even their delight, at what is going on. I hope that that has clarified it a bit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

My Lords, I cannot but respond to the kind remarks of my noble friend. They were very generous. I could see the word “but” coming and it came. I want to say now, to retain what scintilla of reputation I have in Scotland, that I do not want the Scotsman tomorrow morning to report me as being against democracy. I believe in democracy. It is the least worst system but it works to the best possible effect. It is in Hansard so it must be true.

If there is a need for this tidying-up, I think the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Addington does it well. However, I will be interested to hear whether it is necessary. If it is, let us do it and get on with it. One of the things said quite a bit in this discussion is that by implication the government proposal is that there is only one way of changing schools, whereas local authorities have myriad wisdom. I am not sure that is true. I suspect that local authorities are more likely to be monolithic in their response to the need for change than the academy system which, if well regulated—I underline that—encourages variety and different forms of change. These different forms of change and development may well be necessary for the variety of schools in questions.

In terms of democratic accountability, if we say that academies are not the single way, we run the risk of returning to the local authority being the single way. What were they doing when schools started coasting? It is not an immediate process; it is slow progress. What were all these democratic institutions that we have—the local education authority, the director of education or equivalent and local councillors—doing? You ask who they can go to. They can go to the local councillor or to their MP.

[Baroness Pinnock]

I feel that I have to put the case for local councillors and their involvement in local education, since it is being not painted in the best possible light by my noble friend Lord Sutherland. I think that local management of schools came in about 25 years ago; I am looking around for some people who know better than I do. I have been chair of a large comprehensive secondary school in the maintained sector for a lot of that period. It is regarded as good by Ofsted, I am pleased to say, its value added is well over 1,000 and I hope we will continue to do well on the other scores of Progress 8 and all the rest. Its intake is below average nationally and locally. This is a local maintained school with local involvement where things can go right. I worry that our mindset seems to be that only local authorities can create good schools. I do not support that argument because it is plainly not supported by the facts. Equally, I do not support the argument that only academisation can do the same. That is not supported by the facts either.

The facts are that neither the structures of local authorities nor the structures of academies produce good schools. What produces good schools is something much more difficult than waving a magic wand and having a different structure. What creates good schools is good, outstanding leadership; a good cohort of leadership teams supporting the head teacher; a governing body that works well in supporting and challenging the school; and a local authority, or whatever the structure, that does the additional support improvement and provides professional training and development and all the rest of it. We know that that is what creates good schools and good opportunities for children in education, yet we insist on changing structures. But changing education structures does not achieve good schools—we know that.

A school in my own area—a leafy suburb school, as it happens—decided that it would become an academy. Within a year, it was in special measures and required improvement; that is the worst and the lowest possible rating. The school was good when it started, but in a year it went from being up here to being down there. Why? Because of the lack of the very factors that I have just described: failure of the head teacher; failure of the governing body; and no group to support it because it was outside local authority control. That is what we have to look at.

I am passionate about education and passionate about children getting a fair deal. Nowhere else are they going to get a fair deal, except through this route. Yet we insist on talking about structures. For goodness’ sake, let us talk about how we are going to deal with the national shortage of head teachers of any calibre, let alone outstanding ones. That would be a start.

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

I agree with the noble Baroness’s diagnosis of what makes a good school. That is true. Children, and the way that they are dealt with in the education process, are the focus of this—they have one education. I absolutely share the passion of the noble Baroness.

Structures will not fix it all, but structures have made a difference. The academy system has made differences that are very important and have improved the lot of many children. When the current chief inspector of Ofsted was put in place to be head of a failing school, my goodness, he turned it around. That was a structural point. Unless the powers are there to do that, that opportunity will be missing, and that is what we are talking about today.

In view of the passion expressed, I have to share again, as I did in my Second Reading speech, that I was involved in declaring the first failing school. It would have been useless to go to the parents, the governing body, the local authority or the local community; they all hated what was said truthfully. That is the other side of the coin.

Where I am still, if you like, swinging a bit in the breeze—this relates to a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Watson—is on the use of the word “must” in Clause 7(2). That does cause me some reservations and worry. Whether it will persist to Report that the Secretary of State “must” make an academy order, I do not know. Sometimes, and the point has been made, drafting in the right leadership and head teacher can help, especially in an emergency situation. My worry about the word “must” is that it may exclude the immediate action that has been taken in the past and could be taken now. Making an academy order and setting up sponsorship will take time, and sometimes the school in question has not got time. So I have that worry and am very interested to hear what will be said from the Government side on this. I will reserve my position on that one until Report.