Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th June 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington]

156: After Clause 65, insert the following new Clause—
“School land and buildingsThe Secretary of State must, within one year of this Act being passed, report on—(a) the condition of all school land and buildings, and (b) the amount of capital investment that would be required to provide all pupils with access to key amenities, including but not limited to computer provision, sports fields, and science and technology laboratories.”

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, it is good to be back here; I hope we can finish the last three groups this evening. I am moving our Amendment 156 on “school land and buildings”. We are very worried about what happened to the state of school buildings following the scrapping of Building Schools for the Future by the coalition Government in 2010. It is telling that a very recent former Minister has also felt the need to table what we think is a very reasonable amendment on this issue. There is clearly growing concern across your Lordships’ House and across the sector more widely.

Our amendment seeks to compel the Secretary of State to

“report on … the condition of all school land and buildings, and … the amount of capital investment that would be required to provide all pupils with access to key amenities”.

We think that, unless we require the Government to report on the condition of the school estate, the Treasury will not recognise the scale of the problem. This is probably what has landed us in the state we are in now.

My noble friend Lady Wilcox was hoping to be here this evening to speak to this. She was very keen for us to highlight the work being done in Wales on school buildings. I am very keen that the Minister should understand exactly what is happening in Wales and to know what my noble friend would have talked about if she were here. In Wales, there is a programme called 21st Century Schools, which is a collaboration between the Welsh Government and local government. It is a significant, long-term and strategic capital investment programme that has created 170 new schools or colleges so far in its first phase, with a further 43 projects already approved for the second phase, which will create schools of the right type and size and in the right place. It ensures the effective and efficient use of educational estate by the wider community.

Unfortunately, the Government’s own analysis of England’s school buildings shows that some are “a risk to life” and “crumbling”, according to internal government documents leaked to the Observer. According to the House of Commons Library, spending generally followed a downward trend between 2009-10 and 2013-14; in the years since, it has fluctuated. Overall, between 2009-10 and 2021-22, capital spending has declined by 25% in cash terms and by 29% after adjusting for inflation. We could do a lot worse than refer directly to the emails that were leaked on this issue. I will quote from an email, which is quite startling, from Department for Education officials to No. 10:

“School buildings: the deteriorating condition of the school estate continues to be a risk, with condition funding flat for FY 2022-23, some sites a risk-to-life, too many costly and energy-inefficient repairs rather than rebuilds, and rebuild demand x3 supply.”


This was on 4 April this year. Under the same heading of “Risks and opportunities”, the official repeats the warning that some school sites are a “risk to life”. The second email says:

“We would like to increase the scale of school rebuilding.”


I hope that noble Lords can see why we are quite so concerned about this issue and felt the need to table this amendment, which we hope will assist the Minister in making the case, which I am sure she can see, to her colleagues in the Treasury. If this correspondence is to be believed, and is supported by others working in schools, then it is something that we all need to be concerned about. I ask her what she is able to do and to commit today to help to alleviate some of the concerns raised. I beg to move.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

It might be most helpful to the Committee if I come back to my noble friend. She is right to insist to have this point discussed on public record but it would be more useful to take a real example that we can quantify in some way.

On Amendment 167 in the names of my noble friend Lord Moynihan, the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, we absolutely recognise the importance of defibrillators. That is why our guidance for building new schools has included the provision of defibrillators since 2019. As noble Lords referred to, we have also worked with NHS England to establish a framework for schools to purchase defibrillators at a reduced rate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for his update on the latest in defibrillator technology, and I would of course be delighted to meet with the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and colleagues.

I was touched by the reference of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, to the tragic death of Oliver King; a friend of my children died in a school local to us, so I am all too aware of the tragedy involved in such cases. I am pleased that the Secretary of State has committed to working with the Oliver King Foundation to ensure that all schools have access to defibrillators. We are currently working on options to deliver these life-saving devices, and I look forward to being able to update noble Lords on that before too long.

I am told, for your Lordships’ benefit, that there is a defibrillator in Black Rod’s box, so we are all now informed.

I therefore ask the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, to withdraw her Amendment 156 and ask other noble Lords not to move the amendments in their names.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I am very pleased to hear what the Minister has just said about defibrillators. I was waiting to hear what noble Lords said on that amendment before responding, and I have to say that the case is overwhelming, given the tragic cases of Oliver King and a young person who was a friend of the Minister’s family, as she said. It is very strange that whether these devices are accessible to you largely depends on when your school was built. That does not seem to make any sense. They are not expensive and the benefits are incredible. I am encouraged by the Minister’s last sentence about wanting to come back to us, I hope on Report, with something more on that.

On the amendments on school land and buildings, I think I followed what the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, was arguing. Had she not tabled her amendment, that issue probably would not have come to the attention of noble Lords. Again, we need to hear what the Minister has to say on that. If she is intending to write to the noble Baroness, could that letter be shared so that we can all appreciate and understand how the Government intend to answer that question?

On the amendment I tabled alongside my noble friend Lady Wilcox, we remain concerned about the condition of school buildings. I understand the points made from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench about BSF, but I gently point out that if you were a governor at a school who had put a lot of time and effort into their BSF bid—as I did at the time—and then had that cancelled, you would much rather have what the noble Lord describes as a less than gold-plated building to learn in than what we were presented with: a leaky, cold, not particularly safe building that dated back to the 1970s. I would have bitten Michael Gove’s hand off at the time to get that bid agreed. It was not as if BSF was replaced with something less bureaucratic, which I can accept may have been needed. That did not happen and the investment was not forthcoming. I understand that the Minister does not want to comment on leaked documents, but we find ourselves now in a situation where, as a parent, you read that there is great concern that buildings are deemed a risk to life. That is something we need to continue to press Ministers on and may well return to on Report. I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 156 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington]

171H: After Clause 65, insert the following new Clause—
“Education partnership boards(1) Within two years of the passing of this Act, local authorities must begin to work with schools within their area of authority to establish an education partnership organisation for every local authority in England.(2) Education partnership organisations may offer services including—(a) promoting the needs and strengths of schools in their area,(b) supporting at-risk schools,(c) brokering support with external professionals, (d) offering specialised events, and(e) facilitating collaboration and partnerships between schools.”

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Our Amendment 171H would require the Government to ask local authorities to work with schools in their area to establish an education partnership organisation. I want to say a little about why that is a good idea in the context of all our schools becoming academies. Partnerships are an excellent way to support schools and to tackle some of the area-wide issues that are difficult for schools to address by themselves. This could include music, theatre or sport; brokering support with external providers; sharing facilities; or, in the spirit of the Bill, doing anything else they can come up with when they get around to thinking about it. Our amendment is very similar to that tabled by my noble friend Lady Morris. I am sure she will share her experience with the Birmingham Education Partnership and the benefits that has brought to children in Birmingham.

The thinking behind this approach is that it takes a village—or a town or a city—to raise a child. The whole community has a stake in making sure that we do the best job possible to support and encourage our young people. My experience of this approach comes from chairing the Darlington Children’s Trust, where we were very keen on partnerships to tackle the trickiest issues. We would apply this approach to just about anything, including long-term health concerns, growing older, anti-social behaviour and school exclusions. We think that anything that needs a joined-up, place-based approach is best tackled with multidisciplinary partnership thinking.

Now that local authorities have a much-diminished role in education, with youth services and early intervention and prevention unrecognisably altered for the worse, we need an approach that encourages public services and schools to pull together—to agree priorities, share strategies and even pool budgets to support children and young people. All the secondary schools in Darlington are academies and, although they no longer have to do it, there is definitely a culture of collaboration. However, that is being increasingly tested the more time moves on and as some join MATs based in other parts of the country.

My amendment and that tabled by my noble friend Lady Morris would be a helpful step in the right direction. Her amendment would enable partnerships to bid for resources and be part of the school system, which is an incredibly good idea and something that we would like to see encouraged in other areas of the country. If the Government take the view that these partnerships should be a coming together of the willing, as opposed to compelling organisations to work together—I can kind of see an argument for that—they could at least be more proactive in encouraging them to work more closely together. It might be that we want to discuss ways that this could be achieved.

The noble Lords, Lord Davies of Brixton and Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, have tabled amendments to extend the role of the Local Government Ombudsman. We particularly support this in relation to admissions, where parents are relatively powerless to challenge in any meaningful way. We think that there should be an independent process; that would be incredibly helpful.

I do not have a strong view whether that should be through the Local Government Ombudsman: there might be other locally based, more user-friendly ways to approach it, but I absolutely agree with my noble friends Lord Hunt and Lord Davies that with so many schools now academies, it is not fair to deny parents the ability to challenge decisions through an independent process. I beg to move.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

I shall speak to Amendment 171U in my name in this group. I support the other three amendments, but I shall not comment on those that have not yet been moved. I declare my interest as the chair and a trustee of the Birmingham Education Partnership and a member of the Association of Education Partnerships. I also acknowledge that the Minister has already given me and my colleagues some time to discuss this issue, for which we are grateful, but I have come back in this setting because some legislative change could help the work we do.

I emphasise the differences between this amendment and that just moved. I do not have a problem with children’s trusts: if they develop in that way, that is great and they can be a partnership for all services, but my thinking and experience has been of partnerships for school improvement, hence my amendment today, but I am not against taking that wider to the children’s trust idea. The problem my amendment solves is this. The thrust of the Bill into multi-academy trusts is an acknowledgement that schools need to work together: isolated schools are free to fail as well as free to thrive. In schools that are working together, you add capacity to the system.

At the moment, in any geographical area, we have church schools, maintained schools, academies and schools in multi-academy trusts—in one area or beyond. Even if every school in a group is a member of a family, the problem is still not solved because there are still gaps between the groups. Whereas we worried about the fragmentation of individual schools going it alone, even when every school was in a multi-academy trust in 2010, they could fall between the cracks of different groups in any geographical area. At the moment, the problem is worse, because some schools are in multi-academy trusts and some are still maintained, some are still relating to the regional schools commissioner, some to the local authority and some to the diocese.

In an area as big as Birmingham, with more than 400 schools—and it is not the biggest local authority area in the country—that fragmentation is writ large, even if no school is a stand-alone school unconnected to anybody else. Even if we get everybody into a multi-academy trust by 2030, we will still have the gaps between the trusts. That is a problem, in my mind. It is a built-in weakness of the system, in two ways.

Schools have responsibility, first and foremost, for the children in their school. That is what teachers get up and go to work for, and that is where their prime responsibility lies. I have always thought that every teacher accepts a second responsibility, and that is for the children in the area where they teach. They want their children to be best, but they do not want them to be best at the expense of the failure of children in the neighbouring school. They want to accept both those professional responsibilities: primarily, to the children in the school but, secondarily, to the children in their area.

I taught in a Coventry school. If someone asks, “What were you?”, I say, “A teacher in a Coventry school.” It meant something to me. I was educated in a school in Manchester, and that means something to me. That notion of place defined, in part, my experience as a pupil and defined, in a larger part, my experience as a teacher. We have knocked that out of the system.

Even if we get where the Government want us to go, where everyone is in a multi-academy trust, we will have solved the problem of isolated schools but there will be nothing at all that acknowledges place. Who holds the ring for education in Birmingham as a common good, a common endeavour? That is so important: it is what pupils, parents and teachers feel. All the partnership does is act as an umbrella under which every school can come together to recognise their joint endeavour as delivering a local education service. That is not being part of the local education authority; it is an acknowledgement that they, together, deliver the local education service—call it what you want.

Nothing in any of this legislation will allow that to happen. I am aware of more than 30 geographical areas—usually based on a local authority, because that makes sense to people—where schools have, by their own will, because they know it is needed, formed a partnership to deliver their second professional responsibility, which is to act in the interests of every child in that area. You can say, “That’s great: get on with it, go and do a good job, you do not need government to tell you what to do or give you permission to do it”, and indeed you do not and indeed they will. What is missing is a government acknowledgement that they are a player in the system. That is the important thing.

I can give a number of examples. The Government will put out a request for a bid or initiative, ask for volunteers or seek partnerships, but they only do so with the multi-academy trusts, which means that the partnership cannot collectively, on behalf of all its members, bid for the money, try to be a partner or try to be a player in the game. They have to read between the lines to make sure their local area is not deprived of resources.

That is what is missing. I look to the Government to say, “Yes, there is a need in our education system to acknowledge place and deliver for it, and that schools want responsibility for that that goes beyond the children in their class—they want to accept the wider responsibility for children in the area.” At the moment, as we know, every measurement—every accountability structure—militates against that happening. Even in the bidding arrangements, MAT has to bid against MAT in Birmingham for resource for Birmingham children. That does not make sense. Why would you want one MAT to fragment and bid against another to get resource for Birmingham children? If the partnership could bid and the bid go through the MAT—the partnership is no more than the MATs, it is no more than all the groups within the city of Birmingham—that would focus on school improvement and acknowledge the notion of place.

I very much take the point made by my noble friend Lady Chapman about working with other organisations. If a museum in a geographical area, a sports club, the local orchestra, the drama club or a local employer wants to work with the school, because of the demise of the local authority, there is no one to whom they can go to make those links. They end up either just finding a school and working with it because it is easier—that is great, but no one else gets a look in—or they give up because there is no one door through which they can go to say, “I am now working with all the schools in Coventry”. Partnerships are a one-stop shop for any of those essential partners in educating our children to knock on the door to say, “I want to work with Darlington schools.” We could say, “Right, we are the place that can make the introduction.”

For lots of reasons—and now in particular because the system is fragmented, but even when it is as the Government want it to be; I have my own views on that, but I am not going into them now—there is still the need to work in partnership, to recognise place and to mind the gaps between smaller groups that have been reconstructed into local authority areas.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am sure that the noble Baroness would not allow me to get away with prejudging the findings of the regulatory review. In all seriousness, the point of the review is to engage intensively with the sector and partners. I was going to invite her to meet to talk about some of these points in more detail as the review progresses. The review will also develop not just the collaborative standard that both noble Baronesses pointed towards but the area-based approach to commissioning, which we articulated in the guidance we released in May on implementing school system reform.

I also point to the work done by the Confederation of School Trusts, which represents many in the sector. It has done a lot of work on public benefit and civic duty, which speaks to the spirit of what is behind both noble Baronesses’ amendments and which we support very strongly. Although we continue to emphasise the importance of local partnerships, we do not believe it is for government to mandate a particular form in every area, and we believe that local partners are best placed to determine the arrangements that are right for their areas.

I now turn to Amendments 171T and 171W, both tabled in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, which seek to extend the role of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman to include complaints about academy admissions. There is already a strong and effective route for complaints by anyone, including parents, about academy admission arrangements, including oversubscription criteria, through the independent Office of the Schools Adjudicator, whose decisions are binding and enforceable. Forgive me: I am not sure I heard the noble Lord refer to that, but we believe that system works very well.

Where an individual child is refused a place at a school they have applied to, the parent always has the right to an independent appeal. We made changes to the School Admissions Code last year to improve the process for managing in-year admissions and to improve the effectiveness of the fair access protocols, the mechanism to find places for vulnerable and unplaced children in-year. The local authority can direct a maintained school to admit a child and the Secretary of State has the power to direct an academy to admit a child. Looking forward, the schools White Paper confirmed that the Government will consult on a new statutory framework for pupil movements between schools and a back-up power to enable local authorities to direct an academy trust to admit a child. More broadly, there is a requirement that every academy trust has a published complaints procedure and, in turn, that this must include an opportunity for the complaint to be heard by a panel containing members not involved in the subject of the complaint and one person not involved in the management or running of the school.

As noble Lords have rightly said, it is important that parents have access to a strong and effective appeals process. The department currently provides a route for independent consideration of complaints about maladministration of appeals in relation to academy schools. To put this in perspective, we received 374 complaints about maladministration by independent appeal panels between 1 April and 31 December 2020. Of these, 123 complaints were in scope and were considered further. However, that is a tiny number compared to the total number of appeals that year, which was 41,000 for academies and maintained schools. We are aware that the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has made proposal in its triennial review, similar to the one supported by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, that it should include maladministration of academy appeals. We are considering its proposals and will publish a response in due course. Therefore, we believe that there are sufficient measures in place for academy complaints and that these amendments are not necessary. I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, to withdraw Amendment 171H and other noble Lords not to move theirs.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I am very grateful to the Minister for her response. The amendments that my noble friend Lady Morris and I tabled are different, but they come from the same place, if I may put it like that. My experience is more about getting anyone who has any interest whatever in the life of young people in a particular place together, and I found that useful, but I completely understand and support the idea of getting a focus on school improvement. There is a lot to be said for that and it is pleasing that the Government are, I think, starting to recognise the value that brings and the need to allow for a place-based approach. Children live in a particular area and a particular community, and it is a problem when schools do not work together.

As an example, we had a problem with transition between primary and secondary school. We were able to get all the schools to work together and to agree that they would have one week that primary schoolchildren spent in their secondary school and the secondary schoolkids spent at work experience or in their sixth form or FE college nearby. Everyone did it together, it made life a lot easier and it made the experience far more beneficial for the children involved. There are practical things but it needs somebody to hold the ring and to organise and broker that agreement. If you do not have that, these things just do not get done. That is all we are trying to get at.

The other thing it does is to make head teachers and subject leaders, and perhaps a PHSE group in primary schools, accountable to one another. That is so valuable. My noble friend Lady Morris said that she felt she was a teacher in Coventry and had a responsibility to that place in which she had an identity. Mutual accountability brings out the best in school leaders. We are very pleased to hear that the Government are looking at it. I will go away and have a look at the things the Minister referred to, but I wonder whether the approach she outlined is strong or energetic enough to inspire that collaboration at a local level everywhere that needs it. It is interesting that EIAs will be asked to work on that. I would have thought that if it is beneficial to areas with that kind of problem, it would be beneficial to areas that fall just outside the criteria for them. I cannot think of a place that would not benefit from having school leaders and others working together.

On the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, we need to look at the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, but having said what I said initially and having listened to my noble friend make an incredibly good case, perhaps I have to look again at my experience of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, at how user-friendly or not it might be and at whether there is something that could be done quite straightforwardly along the lines outlined by my noble friend that would improve the situation. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 171H withdrawn.

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[Lord Storey (LD)]

These amendments are hugely important. There is a rhyme, is there not?

“Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words can never harm me.”


But how wrong that is. Words are very harmful and are often used by bullies. However, it is not just the person being bullied who needs support; it is also the bully themselves. Many of the bullies have real problems, and we must not forget that.

Secondly, we have made tremendous strides on bullying issues at schools. I pay tribute to the work that schools have done over the past decade or so on the issue of bullying there. I was quite shocked when my noble friend Lady Brinton said that many—or some— schools still do not have anti-bullying policies, as I thought they were a requirement. I thought that this was one of the things Ofsted looks at when it inspects schools, particularly for safeguarding reasons. My noble friend Lord Addington is absolutely right that it should be part of teacher training—it is not because of time constraints—as dealing with incidents of bullying is quite a complex issue. Teachers need to feel supported and equipped to be able to deal with it.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Watson, for putting down his probing amendment on oracy in schools. I think that we have forgotten the importance of oracy or the spoken word. I always remember my education tutor saying to us that the three most important things for developing children in the early years were good toilet training, play, and talking and speaking. Our national curriculum and SATs do not give teachers the time and space they should have to develop the spoken word.

Many schools do things as part of the school day. Remember how we used to have children reading aloud? When I go into schools, if you suggest that children should read aloud, people look at you as though you are a bit barmy. We should go back to some of those practices, such as school class assemblies where children can perform and talk in front of their peers; school drama productions are really good for that too. There is a whole list of things we can do but, looking back, I just get the feeling that we were so focused on the literacy hour and all its ingredients that the spoken word—oracy—was somehow sidelined and lost. No doubt the Minister will give us chapter and verse in her reply about all the things we are doing but I want all those things to happen in every school; I get the feeling that that is not the case.

To reiterate what the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, there are four things. We want to raise the status and priority of spoken language in education. We want to equip teachers in schools to develop their students’ spoken language. We want to make children’s spoken language a key pillar of education recovery after Covid, which we will hear about in a minute. We want to ensure that children with speech, language and communication needs are adequately supported, as in the point that my noble friend Lady Brinton made.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

First, I want to say a few words about Amendment 171J in the name of my noble friends Lord Watson of Invergowrie and Lady Blower. It is such an important amendment because it highlights the need for the Government to report on the level of spoken language and communication ability in academies, independent schools and maintained schools. I do not know whether I need to declare an interest but my husband is a former director of campaigns at the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, so I am very familiar with some of the issues.

My noble friend Lord Watson did a fantastic job of explaining why this issue matters. I pay tribute to his work, not just on this amendment but in this area more generally. He made the case very powerfully and both his amendments raise a vital issue. We would like to see it properly considered by the Government and look forward to the Minister’s response. We are hopeful that she can say something positive.

Amendments 171N, 171O and 171Q, in the names of my noble friend Lady Whitaker and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, would require the reporting and recording of bullying based on protected characteristics, the provision of information to parents and the sharing of that information in the interests of the welfare of the child. We support my noble friend and the noble Baroness in their amendments and feel that they would assist us in tracking what is going on and enabling us to do something about it. Their amendments would go a long way to help address and prevent bullying, especially that directed against minority groups and particularly, as they said, the GRT community. That is probably now the least well recognised form of racism that we see, sadly, in schools.

Our Amendment 171L would require the Government to consult on and launch a children’s recovery plan, including breakfast clubs, music and drama, small group tutoring and other measures that I will not bore the Committee by reading out; they are all there in the amendment. So far, the catch-up measures that the Government have introduced have either not worked in the places where they are needed most, such as the tutoring programme in the north of England, or have been so far short of the scale of intervention needed that they have resulted, as my noble friend Lord Watson said, in the resignation of the expert brought in to advise the Government.