Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Chapman of Darlington Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of a multi-academy trust, Future Academies, and a trustee of the Education Policy Institute. I am no expert on parliamentary procedure and will not comment on the discussions on it so far, but I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on listening to the concerns expressed across your Lordships’ House and by the sector, and on her approach. I will reserve judgment on any clauses that come back in whatever way until I see them, but I am delighted that my noble friend and her department will now engage widely with the sector and others. I also endorse her and my noble friend Lord Baker’s point that there are other very important parts of this Bill; for instance, on children missing from education, home education and illegal settings, which are long overdue for legislation.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, having listened to everything that has been said, it is very tempting to rub salt in the wound, but I will resist.

We are of course pleased that the Government have agreed to withdraw Clauses 1 to 18, but note that they had no other option. At first, we wondered how this had happened. I now do not think that this was just poor drafting; I think that the Government did not know what they intended to do with this Bill. I think there was a legislative slot marked “Schools Bill” and this Bill was tabled. It should never have been tabled as it was.

Things have been said about what might have happened had this Bill been presented in the Commons. Obviously, none of us knows. I like to think that that would not have happened, because someone would have seen its deficiencies and intercepted it. All the problems we have managed to surface through our deliberations—the lack of plan, the lack of vision and there being none of the pre-legislative scrutiny that ought to have taken place and which will now take place half way through the Bill’s progress, over the summer—would have been exposed.

It is very sad that we have come to this because, as the Minister rightly reminds us, there are parts of the Bill—those looking at children not in school and illegal schools—whose implementation may be delayed, as it is not clear that we will get this Bill back as quickly as we might have done had it not been presented in the way it was. Quite a lot of work will now have to take place. It has obviously been an appalling process. It is heartening to know that noble Lords are not used to being treated this way and that we should not expect this from the Government in future.

Some colleagues have referred to Amendment 5 tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Wilcox. To be clear, we did not table this imagining that it would be a favourite of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, or anyone else. The point was to demonstrate that the Government could have proceeded in another way. We will not push it to a vote, but it was tabled to show that you can go about these things in a much better way. There could and should have been much more clarity on what the Government wanted to do.

It is worth taking this opportunity to speak a little about this amendment—I will not go on—to make it clear where these Benches stand on some of the issues of substance that have come before us. It is important that we do that because, although the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and I have found common cause through the passage of this Bill so far, we have done so for very different reasons. It is important that we are upfront and clear about that—he would expect nothing different from me.

The first and most important line in the amendment is:

“Following the completion of the Academies Regulatory and Commissioning Review”.

Nothing should have been tabled along these lines until that review was complete. I welcome the fact that the Government now share that view; it is a shame that we have had to do it in the way that we have.

I want to highlight six points that we on these Benches feel are quite important and that we need clarity on so that we know where we stand. The first is the way that academies handle complaints. Then there are the minimum qualifications required by teaching staff; you will see that this amendment complements other amendments that we have tabled around complaints, admissions and qualified teacher status. We have included adherence to national agreements achieved thorough negotiating bodies for minimum standards of pay, terms and conditions of employment, trade union recognition, adherence to the national curriculum, and, importantly, a duty to co-operate with the local authority on school admissions.

That is where these Benches are coming from on this issue. We understand that that will be very different from where other noble Lords might be coming from, but we are not having a big row among ourselves on these issues. It pleases me no end to say that that is going to be the problem of the Minister when she devises her new clauses for us to consider, perhaps later in the year.

It is clearly not satisfactory that the Government intend to come back to us with these new clauses without us having had the opportunity to debate and vote on them in the way that we would have done had this process been a more normal one. Let us see what the usual channels come up with when they consider that point; it is a point that has been very well made, and one that everyone understands. It is very unfortunate that we have got to the situation that we have, but we are interested to hear about what the Minister wants to do over the summer, using the time that she has, to consult and engage with the relevant stakeholders.

I worry that, again, this is going to be rushed. The idea that some sort of consensus will emerge at the end of it is probably unrealistic. With a likely change of Secretary of State, we just do not know, from what the Minister has said in the past, where we are going to be led with this. It would be helpful if she could talk to us about the people who are going to be involved, the finer points of that process and what she expects. If we are right, and the Government did not know what they intended when they tabled this Bill and need to go through that process now, it is unlikely that the Minister at this point knows what the outcome is going to be, otherwise that is what would have been tabled in the first place. The more she could say about that at this stage, the better.

We will not be pressing our Amendment 5 to a vote, but it is really important that the House is clear where these Benches are coming from and how we would have approached this issue.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend the Minister for listening, I think she has had a torrid time over the last six weeks, and has done it with great courtesy and patience. I am delighted that she is leading on the removal of these first 18 clauses. I am anxious for the Minister to reassure us, as many other Peers have said, that we will see properly the outcome of the regulatory review that has just been kicked off, because that always was putting the cart before the horse. We need to understand exactly what the Government have in mind, and to make sure that it is proportional and specific.

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There are other functions clearly shown in Amendment 106, but this issue of local authority powers is not going away. It is not just about powers; it is about responsibilities and the expectations of people who live in local authority areas. They will not understand why powers have been taken from their local authority. I am very supportive of all the amendments in this group and I hope the Minister is prepared to say some helpful things when she sums up.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hunt on his Amendments 31 and 32. He explained them very well, so I will not delay the House by repeating what he said. He made some sensible suggestions, born out of experience, and it would be good if we could explore these ideas further. I hope that, when the Bill comes back in the autumn or early next year, the amendments we may see on grammar schools are more in line with those tabled by my noble friend Lord Hunt than those that Sir Graham Brady seems to support in the other place.

We have tabled amendments concerning the handling of complaints too. They could be considered part of the process over the summer. Our Amendment 47 would give local authorities power over aspects of admissions, which is very important in a wholly academised system. The world is changing and the Government want all schools to be in MATs before too long. With that in mind, we need to rethink admissions and, as my noble friend Lord Hunt said, parents’ right to make complaints.

This sits alongside our Amendment 116, which seeks to prevent some of the sharp practices that disadvantage some children under current arrangements. I note what the Minister said earlier in response to the first group on this issue, but we are firm in our belief that this is the best way to manage admissions fairly—through local authorities. She said she would be engaged in a conversation about that with local government and we look forward to hearing the outcome of that discussion. We feel that, if local authorities take that honest broker role on behalf of parents, they will not have a vested interest in the decisions. They will be fair and in some way separate from the schools. That is quite an important change. My understanding is that local authorities will be willing and enthusiastic to undertake that role.

Our Amendment 117 again refers to partnerships. We had a good discussion on this in Committee and the Minister accepted the case we were making in good spirit. I hope she continues to develop this approach through her deliberations over the summer, because I was quite encouraged by her response in Committee.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank noble Lords for their contributions to the debate. I will start with Amendments 31 and 32 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, which seek to require electronic communications and voting to be permitted during petitions and ballots to remove selection and to make it easier to initiate a ballot. As he explained, these amendments aim to make it easier for those who are opposed to grammar schools to ballot for the removal of selection.

We want to strike a balance between protecting the selective status of grammar schools on the one hand, and the right of parents to vote to remove selection on the other. We will review the grammar school ballot regulations once the Bill comes into force to ensure that they properly cover ballots for academies that are designated as grammar schools. I assure the noble Lord that we will consider his suggestion in respect of electronic communications in this context. However, we do not think that the level of procedural detail set out in Amendment 31 would be suitable in the Bill.

I do not agree that the threshold for calling a ballot should be lowered from 20% to 10% of eligible parents in favour, as Amendment 32 proposes. As we discussed earlier, conducting a ballot can have a significant financial cost, so it is important for those who petition for one to show that they have sufficient support. I hope the noble Lord joins me in being pleased that tutoring is no longer the preserve of middle-class parents and their children. With our national tutoring programme, we are rightly targeting children in areas of deprivation to make sure they also have access to that support.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, for Amendments 47 and 116. Local authorities have a key role in our education system. Existing legislation places a duty on local authorities to ensure that every child has a school place. Freedom to set school admission arrangements is therefore limited and rightly constrained by the statutory framework set by the School Admissions Code and admissions law, which applies to all admissions authorities, including academy trusts. This requires that admission arrangements are fair, clear and objective.

Removing this freedom from academy trusts and making local authorities the admission authorities is a step too far, as it would prevent school leaders from making the decisions most appropriate for their school community. Instead, the schools White Paper committed to tackle the concerns directly. As I said in response to the first group of amendments, and repeat given its relevance to these amendments, in the schools White Paper we committed to consult on powers for local authorities to address the exact issues that noble Lords raised—namely, to direct an academy to admit a child or to object to the schools adjudicator where a trust could admit more pupils but will not add places and there is no other suitable option.

We also committed to consult on local authorities co-ordinating all applications for admissions, including in-year, and to work with the sector to develop options to reform how oversubscription criteria are set, in order to ensure greater fairness. I reiterate those commitments today. We think it right that the Secretary of State continues to support local authorities to deliver these duties and that we encourage collaboration. Our commitments in the schools White Paper will deliver that. It is important that we wait to hear sector views through our consultation.

I will speak next to Amendment 46 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, alongside Amendments 102 and 103 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. Unsurprisingly, our reasons for resisting the amendments have not changed significantly. First, we believe that there is a route for anyone to complain about the admission arrangements of a school—not about specific cases, as the noble Lord pointed out—whether it is an academy or a maintained school. That complaint route is to the independent Schools Adjudicator. That includes concerns that the oversubscription criteria to be used by the school to allocate places are unfair. The adjudicator’s decisions are binding and enforceable.

Secondly, where parents want to complain about the decision not to offer their child a place, they have the right to bring an admissions appeal to an independent appeal panel, regardless of whether the school is an academy or a maintained school. Thirdly, parents have a right to raise a maladministration complaint where they are concerned that their independent appeal was not properly conducted. These complaints are considered by different bodies—by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman in the case of maintained schools and by the department in the case of academies—but both the department and the LGSCO would ask the appeal panel to re-run the appeal if they found it was maladministered. On that basis, the Government are satisfied that there are clear, fast, effective and independent routes in place to deal with admissions complaints. However, the regulatory and commissioning review creates an opportunity to consider the routes of challenge and appeal available in relation to academies, including for parents, which I think is the point that the noble Baroness was referring to.

Amendment 103, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has a similar purpose in mind. The provision of independent scrutiny for academy complaints is an integral element of the requirements already in place for academy trusts. Where a parent has exhausted an academy’s complaints process and has concerns about whether the academy followed the correct process, they can raise their concern with the Department for Education. Where the case falls within the department’s remit, the department will assess whether the academy has handled the complaint correctly. If the complaint is upheld, the department may ask the academy to reconsider the complaint.

I now turn to Amendment 106, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Storey. We considered in Committee a version of this amendment seeking to codify the role of the local authority for all state schools in its area. I have already set out the Government’s position on the matter of local authorities being given the admission authority role. There is existing legislation making local authorities responsible for a number of duties covered in this amendment and so further legislation is unnecessary to achieve those particular aims. They include duties: to provide suitable education for children who would not otherwise receive one, including as a result of exclusion; to identify children and young people in their area who have special educational needs or disabilities; and to work with other agencies to ensure that support is available to meet their needs.

It is important to consider local authorities’ duties for children, particularly those who are vulnerable, in the wider reform context, including as part of our responses to the consultation on the SEND and alternative provision Green Paper and our children’s social care implementation strategy. It is important that we wait to hear sector views through consultation. Ofsted already considers the rate and patterns of exclusion and takes action. Where it finds evidence of off-rolling, it is always included in the inspection report and can lead to the school’s leadership being judged inadequate.

We are also considering recommendations set out in the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care and the national child safeguarding panel’s report into the terrible deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson on the role of education in issues such as child protection and providing family help. We intend to respond to those later this year in our detailed implementation strategy.

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[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I want to add a comment about a recent report by the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust and the University of Bristol, published a few days ago. It pointed out that over 4 million households, or one in six families, are in very serious financial difficulty now. The Child Poverty Action Group has identified some 800,000 children in poverty who do not qualify for free school meals.

The cost of giving free school meals to families on universal credit is around £500 million to £550 million a year. This is a very serious issue, as my noble friend Lord Storey and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham have identified. At a cost of £550 million, it would mean that a large number of children are able to have a hot meal every day they are at school. That seems to me to be a basic need that can be fulfilled by the Government very quickly.

As we know, we are heading into a very difficult few months because the uprating of benefits will not apply until April of next year, based on September’s figures for CPI. I hope the Minister will say something about how poor families and children in poverty are to be assisted by the Government over the next few months. The amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Storey is a way of the Government delivering a more equal and fair society.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

First, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hunt on his amendment in this group. I see it as a safeguard, if you like, against the system not delivering as the Government anticipate. The Secretary of State could deal with the situation without having to come back to this House and, I suggest, it would be in the Government’s interest to consider this amendment positively.

Should the Government choose to adopt the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, especially Amendments 58 and 59, they would have our wholehearted support. Noble Lords should not be surprised, of course, that the Labour Party takes this view. We lifted 1 million children out of poverty when we were last in government; we introduced the minimum wage and Sure Start; we introduced the first universal free childcare offer and oversaw significant increases in education and spending. This is at the heart of who we are.

This is an urgent and widespread problem. In the north-east, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham said, a third of children are already on free school meals, so I know all too well how valuable a free meal is to families. Alternative proposals have been made; for example, providing a free school meal for children in families earning less than £20,000. In Labour-run Wales, reception-age children will get a free school meal from September, with all primary schoolchildren receiving them by 2024.

We are concerned, too, about hunger during the school holidays. Currently, the holiday activity fund benefits only around a third of children on free school meals. I had hoped to discuss this with the relevant Minister last week, but he resigned instead. However, we are concerned about this and while some good evaluation has been done of the holiday activity fund, the fact that we are missing two-thirds of children on free school meals indicates that there is more work to do on why more children are not accessing it. While it is an attempt to improve the situation, it is just not working widely enough.

I say this to the Government: whoever emerges as Prime Minister in a few weeks’ time, he or she will have to bring forward urgent measures to support hard-pressed families. Labour has argued for increases in the early years pupil premium and a recovery action plan, but it is important that we go much further. It is important, too, that we do not make spending commitments without having identified the source of the funding tonight. We are working on how best to do this, so that stigma and holiday provision are tackled as well, because we need to act.

Families are struggling to afford the basics and with inflation, energy costs and food prices all increasing, the situation is just getting worse and worse. I put on record my sincere thanks—thank goodness they are there—to all those schools, teachers, charities and voluntary organisations that are saving lives by doing such amazing work in communities up and down the country. They are trying the best they can to fill this gap.

From our position, the Opposition can only hope that the Government bring forward measures quickly, as the Labour Party has done in Wales. If they do, we will support them.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I start by responding to Amendment 57 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on the importance of local flexibility within the direct national funding formula. The legislative framework in Part 2 of the Bill already allows for local authorities to determine and administer certain aspects of school funding. Clause 37 will require local authorities to determine supplementary allocations for each of their local schools if the Secretary of State provides for this in regulations. In practice, this means that schools will be able to receive top-ups to their budget, calculated by the local authority, in addition to the department’s national funding formula. This provides flexibility for local authorities to retain a role in the allocation of funding.