Teachers: Academies and Free Schools

Baroness Finn Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finn (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on securing this important debate and laying out the issues so clearly. I should also say how daunted I am to be speaking in the same debate as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, who is a hugely distinguished former Education Secretary.

I am both honoured and amazed to be here today as a Member of your Lordships’ House. It is an enormous honour to have a voice in this Chamber and to contribute to its deliberations. The House plays a crucial reflective role in legislation. I have learned, from personal experience of the recent Trade Union Act, that legislation leaves this House in a far better place than it started.

My thanks go to noble Lords on all sides of the House for their kind advice and for making me feel so welcome. I also thank all the officials of the House. They have tolerated my appalling sense of geography and ignorance of the rules with good humour and unfailing politeness. I have been incredibly fortunate in having the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, as my mentor and thank him for his bravery in taking me on. I am especially indebted to my supporters, my noble friends Lord Howell of Guildford and Lord Maude of Horsham. Both have played an important part in my life. My noble friend Lord Howell and his wife gave me shelter when I first came down from university, and it was a privilege to play a part in my noble friend Lord Maude’s revolutionary reforms in the Cabinet Office. Like the good Conservative that he is, he taught me always to question the status quo—although he might now regret urging me to be more assertive.

I am amazed because my story starts far from this House. My father’s family defected from communist Czechoslovakia. My mother brought us up in her native Swansea, a wonderful city whose name I now proudly bear. I hope to add my voice to make a reality of the Swansea tidal lagoon. Using ground-breaking technology, this innovative project will provide sustainable energy and bring much-needed investment and regeneration to this part of Wales.

My journey owes everything to education. Low academic attainment and low aspiration were issues raised in a recent report on why so few Welsh youngsters were applying to Oxford and Cambridge universities. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, my Swansea comprehensive bucked this trend and got 10 to 15 pupils a year into Oxbridge. Many, including the economist Sir Andrew Dilnot and the writer Russell T Davies, reached the top of their professions. These results were down to some outstanding teachers; and one in particular, Iris Williams, made it her job to get as many of us as possible to apply to Oxbridge from a part of Swansea where there was no such tradition.

We were all Iris’s children and owe her a great debt. As one former pupil recalls, “Big hair, big character. She stood out and stood up for academic excellence”. Iris believed that her “children” were as good as anyone else and raised our level of aspiration and taught us to value education as a means of opening up opportunities and freedoms. She got to know admissions tutors, introduced lunch-time lectures, matched candidates to colleges and personally drove pupils to visit them. She mentored us and broke down the obstacles. Life chances are not about levelling down but creating the spaces and removing the barriers. We did not get into the best universities because they lowered their high standards to meet arbitrary quotas. We knew that we had passed on our merits.

Many years later, when seeking to increase diversity in public appointments, my noble friend Lord Maude and I applied the same principle of removing barriers rather than setting artificial targets. Working with an exceptional civil servant, Sue Gray, we examined the reasons why women too rarely secured such appointments and sought to tackle the underlying issues. We removed arcane jargon from application forms, emphasised ability as well as long experience, held events to broaden the range of capable candidates, and found people to mentor them. The results have been outstanding—the percentage of new appointments to women leapt to over 45% last year, compared with 36% five years ago. We applied the same ruthless focus backed up by rigorous research when tackling the diversity deficit in the Civil Service. The research examined the underlying problems in the Civil Service’s culture to ensure that the core principle of recruitment and promotion on merit was not compromised by patronage and a narrow focus on quotas and targets.

I have no idea what formal qualifications were held by the teachers who set me on the journey that has brought me to your Lordships’ House. I do know that what sets them apart, like all great teachers, is a passion for their academic subject; an insistence on excellence; empathy with the boys and girls in their charge; and a determination to raise their eyes to the far horizon and to believe that nothing is beyond their reach.