Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend. I have added my name to her Amendments 60, 61 and 75. I have my own Amendment 62, and my Amendments 69 and 70 seek to amend Amendment 68 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on which my noble friend Lady Blower has already spoken.

I very much support what my noble friend said and could not help reflecting on the previous debate, where the argument was about the extent to which this legislation is forcing single academies to join multi-academy trusts. My view is that although the noble Baroness was explicit on this, we do not really need it, because the system is putting so much pressure on individual academies anyway. The combination of the government policy in the White Paper, the regulator, the regional apparatus and what people can see happening is putting tremendous pressure on those schools. I think that this is a really underhand way of doing it; if the Government have a policy, on this or on another Bill, they should be explicit.

The underhand way in which this is all being done reinforces the points we are making in this series of amendments about the importance of governing bodies. What seems to be happening is that all sorts of secretive talks take place between MATs and the heads of the schools that they want to take over, and left out of these discussions are the parents and staff of the individual schools. They are usually presented with a fait accompli. As my noble friend said, this formal consultation stuff is really an attempt to legitimise a decision that the system has clearly already made. Our amendment seeks to put this right.

In addition to the excellent National Governance Association submissions, the work by the LSE and by Professor West and colleagues, which has looked into the governance of academies in detail, is very striking. I draw the Minister’s attention to the recent instance of what I regard as high-handed action at Holland Park School. Since March, when staff and parents first learned of the governors’ plan to transfer the school to a MAT, they have been seeking dialogue with the governing body to negotiate the involvement of the entire school community in a transparent, accountable consultation. As Ministers know, the school has been through a great deal of turbulence resulting from management changes in the past year or so: the sudden departure of the new head, the imposition of a new governing body and the absence of much of the leadership team for quite lengthy periods. It has clearly been a challenge to maintain a sense of coherence and direction for the children on a day-to-day basis. I have met some of the teachers. I believe that they have worked hard to provide continuity for pupils, but that is put at risk by this kind of unilateral, opaque decision-making and poor communication from the governing body.

This is often reflected up and down the country. The absence of meaningful consultation in the MAT acquisition process is a common theme. There have been numerous examples of high-handed governors ignoring parents and teachers, who have then fought hard to stop the school being taken out of local authority control and turned into an academy or forced to join a multi-academy trust. Public meetings organised by parents and staff, with large attendance, often make it made abundantly clear to the governing body that the larger school community does not want to go down that path, but they are often dismissed by the people making the decisions. Parents, governors, staff and pupils have no official rights to detailed information on the reasons why their school might choose to academise under a particular trust, let alone to have their views taken into account in the process.

As Warwick Mansell has written, the academies policy sees all decision-making as a closed-loop process between central government and academy trusts, with no decision-maker answerable at a local level to the people who depend on the decisions. The comment often made from the Dispatch Box is that we will talk to the academy trust. Once again, we do not hear about maintained schools. Ministers constantly harp on about MATs and point to their achievements—which are many—but they do not point to their defects and they give the sense that maintained schools are second-class entities. I object to that.

The Government’s amendment reads:

“Before a maintained school in England is converted into an Academy following an application … the local authority must consult such persons as they think appropriate about whether the conversion should take place.”


So, as I read it, it is only after you have made the application decision that the consultation has to take place. My argument is that that is far too late. Once the conversion application has been made, effectively the decision has been taken. Asking the parents what they think about it then is, frankly, a waste of time. Seeing the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, here reminds me of health service consultations, which she will know about over many years: you make a decision and then you put out a consultation. My noble friend Lord Winston will also know about the way that the health service does consultations: you make the decision, you consult on it and then you reach the view that the original decision was right in the first place. For me, that is what the amendment is talking about.

Essentially, with the combination of our amendments we seek to ensure that a consultation must be comprehensive and in a timely fashion with the parents and staff of the school that is subject to the application. As my noble friend said, we are entitled to have it shown how the proposal will benefit children’s education and, most importantly, what alternatives have been considered. I do not think that is at all unreasonable. If the Government are asking us to believe that this is all going to happen by a process of gradual change rather than mandation, I would have thought they would welcome a proper process of parent and staff involvement.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 75, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, and I agree with pretty well everything that he said. I shall build on it with a practical example.

Amendment 75 says that consultation with parents and staff has to happen before the application to join a MAT. I entirely agree with what the noble Lord just said about the problems with the government amendment. Across many fields of government, not just the health service, the term “consultation” now has an extremely bad odour. That is something that really needs to change, or we need to find a new word or a different process that genuinely addresses the collection and exploration of views before a decision is made. That is not what people think of when you say “consultation” now, but that is the word in the amendment because that is the word we currently have.

I draw the Committee’s attention to the sad and traumatic case study of Moulsecoomb Primary School in Brighton, which is of course of particular interest to my noble friend Lady Jones. We have just seen first-choice applications to the school fall to their lowest level ever after the school was forced to become an academy despite considerable local community, family and parent resistance. Of course I wish the school all the best and very much hope that things work out for it, but we have to focus on what kind of disruption happens both to pupils and to a community if a decision is made that parents and the community are unhappy with. We have seen a number of pupils leave that school and a huge amount of time, energy and attention that might have gone into doing the best possible for the education of pupils going instead into resistance to an ideological decision being made. It is important that this whole set of amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, would make this a co-creation and co-production process, not an imposition.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I cannot resist making one general observation about the whole debate on these amendments. In winding up the previous debate, the Minister said that the strength of multi-academy trusts is that schools are stronger together. Talk about rediscovering the wheel; the whole argument of those of us who have been unhappy about so many aspects of academisation is precisely that we could see the strength of schools together in a community with local democratic control. I suppose that if you wait long enough these things come around again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I feel I must leap to my feet and say what a great pleasure it is to follow the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and his brilliant systems-thinking amendment. He described it as a “hobby horse”. It is a hobby horse that has been exercised before in the House, up to peak condition. He has groomed it, curried it and it is in beautiful condition and perfectly presented to your Lordships’ House. It is a hobby horse that would enable the Government to leap out of the silos in which they so often find themselves trapped. As the noble Lord outlined, it joins up thinking that addresses the legal target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 and all the other environmental targets the Government have set themselves in the Environment Act, but also issues of mental health, well-being, empowering pupils and involving them in democracy and society in their communities.

The noble Lord’s amendment is a step towards active involvement that crosses over all the relevant departments, which makes it hard not just for this Government but any Government to deal with, but it is a neat way of addressing the issue. As the noble Lord said, it is at the moment set at a very modest cost level. It could be enhanced but this is at least a start. I know that many of the young climate strikers I have met in recent years out on the streets and outside their schools would embrace and love this. If the Government really want to get them saying, “Well done the Government!”, this is a way they could do so.

I hope I am not speaking out of turn here, but I happen to know that the Minister, in a previous role, found that citizens assemblies worked very well in making decisions. This is the citizens assembly, the participative democracy, model that the Minister herself saw working in a different context, applied to her current portfolio—and what a wonderful piece of joined-up government that would be.

I must not forget to speak to the amendment. I had not spotted the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth; otherwise, I would have signed it. I will be keen to support it on Report if he is happy with that. I did sign Amendment 85, which is about the funding formula for rural schools. We have already heard some very strong arguments for this, but I want to pick up the point about data made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. I was looking at—and because I like to show my sources, I have just tweeted for anyone who is interested—a 2019 study from the Centre for Education and Youth, which looked at the links between deprivation, location, particularly rural location, and attainment and pupil progress in secondary schools. It showed that there is a stronger link in rural areas than in urban areas, in terms of both attainment and progress, particularly in secondary schools.

A noble Lord, I have forgotten which, said that this House and the Government are London-centric and Westminster-focused. We tend to think of the countryside as bucolic, and there are many lovely, wealthy areas of countryside, but there are also areas of extreme deprivation. I am thinking of schools I have visited in Cumbria and in North Norfolk where we are not giving pupils the kind of chance they should be given. This is a modest amendment, but it would at least ensure that these issues are considered.