Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part two
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I declare my position as vice-president of the Local Government Association. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and to speak after my noble friend Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb, who covered particularly the issues that home educators have with this Bill. I will cover in our division of labour all other aspects of the Bill, but there are two in particular that I want to focus on today.

When I looked at the Bill, and particularly its provisions on multi-academy trusts, a Denis Healey principle came to mind. It has been labelled “the first law of holes”: when you are in one, stop digging.

The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, reflecting a view shared by many other noble Lords, said that this is a “mouse of a Bill”, one that fails comprehensively to offer new ideas, new approaches, to tackle the enormous, seemingly overwhelming challenges faced by young people today in a society that is so failing them. Rather, I would say that it is a mole of a Bill. The Government are blindly digging in deeper on a failed policy, a policy that demonstrably does not even deliver what seems to be the one thing the Government are focused on: better exam results in a narrow handful of subjects. It also seems weirdly out of step with what you might think of as Conservative philosophies: more bureaucracy, lack of local control and lack of local democracy.

It is also a policy that you would think, given the problems of corruption in government spending that the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, has so strongly spoken out on in other contexts, the Government might be having second thoughts about. The controls handed to the Secretary of State mean that he will have extreme oversight over what multi-academy trusts do. I note that the extremely valuable briefing from the LSE points out that “related party transactions”—business arrangements between a MAT and a body that is associated with its governance—were worth £120 million in 2015. I know that the Minister may say that steps have been taken to crack down on that, but what if these powers are all handed to the Secretary of State?

But the issues here are bigger, much bigger, than merely money. They are about what schools are. They are not, or they should not be, sausage machines to shove out identikit pupils all around the country with the best possible exam results. They should be integral parts of communities, not just contributing to the education of the young but building strong ties across all ages. MATs do not require local governance, oversight and involvement at any level, but even if they do have some kind of community involvement in governance, they may well be spread across the country, hundreds of kilometres apart. How will local parents and citizens want to contribute, want to get involved and feel it is their school when they have no say?

One phrase in Clause 53 of the Bill that really struck me is where it talks about a

“proprietor of a school in England”.

“Proprietor”, the dictionary tells me, is the owner of a business or the holder of a property. That is a legal definition, but what does it say about the Government’s idea of what a MAT is? We have seen so many sweeping privatisations, and we have failed to recognise that schools are another area where we have lost so much public control and ownership.

Another aspect of the MAT model is striking. I go to an unsigned Department for Education blog, dated 14 October 2021, which, in justifying the government stance, says that MATs

“enable the strongest leaders to take responsibility for supporting more schools”.

So, again, we encounter a profoundly “un-Green” but, more importantly, a profoundly unsuccessful model of leadership. One person blazes the trail and shows the way, and everyone else trudges along behind following the directions of that one person. Instead, why not draw on the talents, abilities, skills and energy of the many—teachers, parents, communities and indeed pupils—to collectively shape their local school? As the LSE suggests, why not restore each school as an individual entity and, if you really want to keep MATs, allow schools to opt in and out as they like. That is not to decry the power of networks, but it would mean schools voluntarily—ideally groups of local schools—joining together and working together. A forced model is not a community; it is a bureaucratic, top-down imposition.

My second point is about mental health. The lack of provisions in this Bill, given our epidemic of mental ill-health, is striking. On 29 March, I asked the Minister about the UK having the unhappiest children in Europe. Her answer was entirely about exam results allegedly delivering better chances for children. Does she really think that deeply unhappy children, or children with mental illness, anxiety or depression or who are self-harming, can really be expected to attain the exam results that she and the Government crave?

I want to ask the Minister two direct questions. Is she prepared to consult two excellent organisations addressing issues around the push in this Bill to focus on attendance and force pupils into school despite the challenges it may present to their health and well-being? These organisations are Square Peg and Not Fine in School; I ask the Minister whether she will listen to what they have to say: that attendance and attainment cannot be at the expense of a child’s mental health and emotional well-being.

My second question is: what have the Government done to listen to pupils in drawing up this Bill? What consultation with young people has there been on its provisions?