Free Schools and Academies

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, we all expected a very high-quality debate this afternoon, and we certainly had the deep experience of many years reflected in your Lordships’ speeches. I thank my noble friend Lady Evans of Bowes Park for securing the debate and for her work in this field. As my noble friend said, we have had some transformational successes over the past 25 years, some brilliant innovations and, of course, some things that did not work, which either have been or should be learnt from and addressed—I would argue that the vast majority have been.

As we have heard, this debate is taking place against the backdrop of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which was considered in Committee in the other place today. I am not going to dwell on that Bill today—the Minister smiles—as there will be time for that when it comes to this place. However, I wanted to share with the Minister some genuine reflections that I hope she and her ministerial colleagues might consider, with an aim of looking to the challenges of the future in our schools system.

I shall start with the variation in results across our schools, both maintained and academies. In the same local authority, SATs results at the end of primary vary between individual schools by at least 20 percentage points in pretty much every local authority area, and in the most extreme cases by 40 percentage points. Some of this can be explained by differences in deprivation, but even adjusting for this there are huge differences in any given area. We know what we need to drive this down and narrow the gap, but I think that the job for the DfE is to try to unlock more of that best practice in our schools.

We tried to do some of this work when I was in government, and I know that my predecessors did the same. At the risk of losing the good will of the House, I will quote from the work we did on high-quality trust descriptions—I think officials in the Box may be running for the door at this point. When I joined the department, I asked colleagues what our definition of a good trust was. There was a long pause and the answer came, “This is not a Soviet model, Minister”. Of course it is not a Soviet model, but we should be clear what we think good looks like, so we worked with a number of the most successful trusts in the country and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and built on that best practice that delivers for disadvantaged children and those with special educational needs.

So, here goes. I appreciate that prose crafted by a committee is rarely elegant, but I will try to be brief. The first principle is that trusts should focus on a high-quality and inclusive education. They should create a culture in all schools that is motivating and ambitious for all, including disadvantaged children and children with SEND, so students can achieve their full potential. The second is a focus on school improvement, not just in cases of intervention but in all schools. The third relates to the workforce. The highest-performing trusts create a high-performing working culture for all their staff that promotes collaboration, aspiration and support, uses the flexibilities of the trust structure to create opportunities for staff, recognises the critical value of high-quality teaching and champions the profession.

We then went on to finance, looking at the effective use of resources, and finally, governance and leadership, where the trust’s strategy should be grounded in the needs of its schools, the communities they serve and the wider educational system. I was struck when I reread those—I used to know them off by heart—by how important a strong culture is in delivering great outcomes for our children. That is true in a maintained school and in our trust schools. So, since this is a schools debate, the first exam question for the Government is how they can encourage strong, positive cultures in our schools. Because, if we get that right, as trusts such as those we have heard about this afternoon have done at scale and in our most deprived communities, everything else follows. I really urge the Minister to press the schools she speaks to, to talk about what makes or breaks their culture.

The second exam question is how we build resilient schools for the future. All of us have met individual head teachers who are extraordinary and, luckily, those head teachers continue to exist. But we need resilience; we need to be confident that we have the capacity across the system to maintain the highest standards for every child, even when those head teachers retire. My noble friend Lord Nash was the first person who said to me that we really underestimate the potential benefits for the workforce if a trust is able to offer its staff a more conventional career path than is typically the case.

We need resilience in turnaround capacity, which, with a couple of specific exceptions, sits almost entirely in the trust sector. We also need resilience in future leadership, which is why we created the trust CEO leadership programme, which I think saw literally the single highest return on money that any Government could spend to drive good standards in our trusts. I hope the Minister can reassure me that it will be continued.

The third and final question that needs careful thought is that of choice for parents. The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, was too modest to say that Mossbourne Academy is 11 times oversubscribed. Parents are voting with their feet. We need choice for parents about the school that is best for their child, because we are not having a Soviet model in this country, and choice for teachers about where they want to teach. I understand very well the fiscal pressures if a school is not full, but there is a real risk that the Government’s narrative of consistency removes that choice and that inadvertently we do end up with a Soviet model that will be good for no one—not for children, not for staff and not for parents.

There is so much more that I could cover, including my concerns about the pressure that the Government risk placing on our schools with the combination of changes to Ofsted and to the curriculum, and now the changes proposed in the Bill. Honestly, if I was in the Minister’s shoes, time spent reflecting on what we have learned from academies and free schools and what the best maintained schools and trusts do in practice—and how to encourage a culture that drives those outcomes—would be time well spent. Academies and free schools do not have a monopoly on good ideas, but they have had the flexibility to implement them and room to innovate. I urge the Minister, along with other noble Lords, to think on how we can offer those flexibilities to every school, not just trusts and academies.

A school leader said to me this week that tone matters and that the tone he was hearing did not trust the sector, or our school and trust leaders, but rather focused on consistency. It genuinely does not help that such hostile comments about academies were made by the Prime Minister and across the Cabinet during the Labour election campaign. I know the Government say they want to keep schools innovating, but that is not what they are hearing. All schools need to hear that they are trusted to have the flexibility to do the right thing for the children in their care. If we want to recruit teachers and allow our schools to flourish, we have to focus on that. As the brilliant head teacher of Harris Westminster wrote recently on X, in a long thread that I commend to your Lordships about conditions for teachers, “Let’s talk less about making it easy and more about making it meaningful. That is why teachers go to work in the morning”.

Yesterday I was with the wonderful Denton Community College just outside Manchester, which has recently become part of the Northern Education Trust. The pupils are living proof of the difference that a great trust can make to a school and its community. I am really worried that, as many noble Lords have said, we will lose the progress that we have seen in recent years. My simple message to the Minister is: let us build on what is working, spread the freedoms that have driven such improvements in performance for our children across all our schools and think again about the Bill.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, on securing this important debate and thank noble Lords for the excellent contributions we have heard from across your Lordships’ House, drawing on a wide and long experience in education. Several noble Lords have suggested that I will find it difficult or unpleasant to respond to this debate, or that I may even become grumpy about my requirement to do so. Far from it—there is nothing I like to do more than to recognise and champion the achievements of great schools and trusts, as we have been doing this afternoon.

Many of your Lordships have referred to the reforms the Government are introducing through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. I am looking forward to debating the specifics of the Bill when it reaches us from the other place, not least because it will give us the opportunity to set right some of the misconceptions that I have heard during this afternoon’s debate. I am confident that we will get further with this Bill than the 2022 Schools Bill, in which the first clause contained so many restrictions on academies that they nearly ran out of the alphabet for the subsections, and the Government Benches, let alone the education system, could not reach a consensus. So let us move away from some of the more extreme comments that have been made about this Bill and on to a serious and informed consideration of what we can all do to ensure the highest standards in schools that will enable all children to achieve and thrive.

Let me be clear on this Government’s mission, which is to drive high and rising standards in all schools. Over the past few decades, before the pandemic, attainment improved in some areas. There is also a wide consensus on evidence-based approaches that have been proven effective, which some noble Lords referenced, including phonics, a knowledge-rich approach to the curriculum and ordered classrooms where children learn and thrive, as was identified by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. We are committed to building on what has worked, including the excellence and innovation from our best schools and trusts.

I agreed with almost all of the speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which was very measured. I do not think there is much difference between us, even if there is with some of the other comments in the debate. Part of that is because, before addressing further points made by noble Lords, I would like to be crystal clear that multi-academy trusts and free schools are partners and often leaders in delivering our mission. As many noble Lords have said, trusts and free schools have contributed, and continue to contribute, much to the richness of our school system. Labour is the proud parent of the academy movement, and I was there at, and soon after, the birth.

Since then, there have been some remarkable examples of existing schools being transformed and new free schools flourishing. The federation founded by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, is just one example of how the academies movement has made a real difference, and I commend him for the passion that he has shown today and for the work he has done to transform schools and the lives of children within them. Before Christmas, I was able to visit the Arrow Vale school, an academy in my former constituency of Redditch—a school where I started my teaching career—that had gone through tough times and is now part of a strong academy trust and is outstanding. Similarly, many free schools have achieved strong attainment, progress and Ofsted results.

Far from one of the charges that has been made, I am pleased that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State will be meeting with Katharine Birbalsingh to talk about the success of the Michaela school. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, knows how impressed I was by the UTC in Aston, when I was able to visit. We want this to continue; academies and free schools are here to stay. We want high-quality trusts to grow— in fact, we need only look at recent statistics, which show that this Government are currently supporting 781 conversions, a higher number than at any point since 2018.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, rightly argues that it is not the time to rest on our laurels and say that the job is done. Our system is not working well enough: a third of children leave primary school without fundamental reading, writing and maths skills. Dis-advantaged children are too often being failed and children with special educational needs and disabilities are left without the support they need to excel at school. Since the pandemic, average attainment is down, the gap for disadvantaged children has opened up and we have an absence crisis, with more than one in five children missing a day of school each fortnight, fuelled by fewer and fewer children feeling they belong at school. This needs to change.

High and rising standards must be the right of every child, delivered, as noble Lords have said, through excellent teaching and leadership, a high-quality curriculum and a system that removes the barriers to learning that hold too many children back, all underpinned by strong and clear accountability.

As many noble Lords have said, part of the success of high-quality trusts and free schools has been the flexibility to innovate, to change long-standing practices and to try something new—but these have been available only to academies. When the academies movement began, much of this innovation was experimental, even disruptive by design. But now, 20-plus years later, 60% of our schoolchildren are enrolled in academies, most in multi-academy trusts. We need to build a school system that builds on those successes—a system with a floor but no ceiling, enabling healthy competition for all schools, for the new disruptors and for the new innovators, so that we can promote and support innovation.

This is why we have introduced the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: to give every family the certainty that they will be able to access a good local school for their child where they can achieve and thrive, regardless of where they live. It is also why, through our wider reforms, we are designing a school system that supports and challenges all schools to deliver high standards for every child.

The national curriculum will benefit all children, based on high standards and shared knowledge. This will be a starting point for the innovation I mentioned, which will allow brilliant teachers to inspire their pupils. We will restore the principles established by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who, when the national curriculum was introduced 35 years ago, expected almost every state school, including grant-maintained schools, to deliver it—and I do not believe the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has ever been accused of being a proponent of classic socialism.

This national curriculum will be delivered by expert teachers, with all new teachers with or working towards qualified teacher status on a journey that allows them to grow, develop and transfer their qualifications as they move between schools. We hear the passionate and informed comments of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and others, about the range of people working within our schools. I would like to reassure the noble Lord that the requirement for qualified teacher status will not apply to any teacher who was recruited and commenced employment with a school or trust prior to the implementation of this measure. We want to work with trusts, such as Harris, to ensure that we are not undermining the excellent staff who are doing some of the specific and particular roles he talked about. We will work more on ensuring that this is the case.

We will deliver a minimum core pay offer for all teachers, while also enabling all state schools to create an attractive pay and conditions offer that attracts and retains the staff our children need. We will create a floor but no ceiling there as well. We know the challenges that schools face regarding recruitment and retention, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, outlined, and we want the innovation, excellence and flexibility that we have seen in the academy system to be available to all schools.

Pay and conditions are a crucial component of ensuring that teaching becomes a more attractive place for graduates and those seeking to combine work and family life. That is why my colleague the Schools Minister announced earlier this week that we have heard feedback from the sector that what this means for teachers’ pay and conditions could be clearer. That is why we are tabling an amendment to clarify the clauses on pay and conditions, which will set a floor on pay for all teachers in state schools. Academies will have to have due regard to the rest of the terms and conditions in the STPCD, but we will remit the School Teachers’ Review Body to build more flexibility, so that there is no ceiling on pay and conditions and so that all schools can benefit from flexibilities in that core role of recruiting and retaining the very best people into our teaching profession.

We have also heard noble Lords rightly identify the work that has been done across the system as schools collaborate, work with others and take control of those that are failing in order to drive improvement in our system. As I suggested earlier, we need to go further in terms of that improvement, and we are doing so to make that improvement better and faster, because we know that too many pupils are in schools which have not improved or improved enough in their current structure.

I am afraid that the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, is wrong: we are not scrapping sponsored conversion. We will continue to move schools that do not have the capacity to improve to strong trusts. However, under the previous Government, schools did not always get the support to improve when they needed it. Between September 2022 and September 2025, 40% of all schools in a category of concern took over a year to convert into sponsored academies, and 10% took more than two years. The previous Government attempted to address this problem by funding turnaround trusts, but the model was ineffective and those trusts took on only very small numbers of schools. We need more tools to ensure that improvement.

We are strengthening the tools that we have to give support and tackle failure with our new RISE teams. For schools which require more intensive support, we will draw on strong multi-academy trusts and other sources of capacity in the maintained sector to deploy those new RISE teams, which are led by experienced and successful senior school leaders who know how to improve schools and who have done it. They will work alongside struggling schools, including those stuck in a long-standing cycle of underperformance, to share their knowledge and bring the best of school improvement capacity to bear. They will have funds to help the schools implement the improvements they need. The names of the first tranche of these advisers will be announced shortly, but I can inform noble Lords that many of them come from the academies system that we are rightly celebrating today. We are confident that RISE will be effective, but we will not shy away from changing a school’s governance if there is no improvement.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, rightly raised the issue of those vulnerable children who are let down by our system. We need schools to collaborate in the wider community to ensure that the system delivers for every child across an area. That is why we are introducing new duties for schools and local authorities to co-operate on admissions and place planning to ensure that decisions reflect the needs of the community, especially in the placement of vulnerable children, and why we are providing in the Bill for local authorities to be able to direct that a pupil out of school who has a nominated school properly allocated to them is duly admitted. They already have that power with respect to local authority-maintained schools, and it does not make sense for local authorities to continue to need to ask the Secretary of State to make such a direction for academies; every day lost in a child’s education is one that they cannot get back. But that power will rightly come with appropriate protections to guard against misuse, which will include a clear and transparent route for academy trusts to appeal to the independent schools adjudicator where they disagree with a local authority direction notice.

Just as we are committed to growing strong trusts, we will continue to open pipeline free schools where they meet local need for places and offer value for money. But although we celebrate the good schools that have been created through the free schools programme, substantial funding has been allocated to new free schools, which has often created surplus capacity. This can result in poor value for money and can divert resources from much-needed work to improve the condition of existing schools and colleges. An NAO report in 2017 found that half the 113,500 places planned up to 2021 would create spare capacity. That is why my right honourable friend announced a review into mainstream free schools last October. We have engaged closely with trusts and other key partners to gather the latest evidence, and we will also take into account whether projects would provide a distinctive curriculum, for example at post-16 level, and any impact on existing local providers.

In thanking noble Lords for this debate, I also recognise that many noble Lords have paid tribute to the achievements of high-quality academies and free schools over many years. I am and the Government are happy to join them in that and want to build on that success.

This Government will build on what works and fix what does not, so that the system works for all children—levelling up, not down—with a core offer for all parents, with no ceiling on what staff and pupils can achieve and with higher and broader expectations for children. We are taking action to ensure that parents, wherever they live, will have a good school for their child and be confident, as all of us would wish, that they will achieve and thrive.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I listened very carefully to the Minister’s remarks and welcome many of them. We all violently agree on having the highest possible aspiration for our children; the question is how we get there. I will give one example of where we do not agree, after listening to other noble Lords with so much experience across the House in delivering education for our children. When we talk about flexibility, the Minister gives the example of giving the STRB more scope to offer flexibility. That is a centralisation of flexibility. Everything that we have heard is about centralising, whereas everything that we look at which is working is about trusting leaders in our schools and in our trusts to make those decisions about the flexibilities that they need for their children. I urge the Minister to listen not to me but to those behind me and across the House.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I do not believe that the noble Baroness is arguing for the end of the STRB. The STRB is responsible for setting that framework for pay and conditions and can be instructed in its remit to consider how to remove some of the inflexibilities that exist currently for academies but not for other schools. That is the intention of these proposals.