Free Schools and Academies

Baroness Finn Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to speak in this debate on academies and free schools and the transformation they have brought to England’s education system. I thank my noble friend Lady Evans for securing this debate and for her tireless work in championing educational excellence. She, along with many of my noble friends here today, was instrumental in a movement that shattered complacency, exposed failure and put pupils, not bureaucracies, at the heart of education. My noble friend was not only a director of the New Schools Network but the co-author of the 2009 Policy Exchange report which called for the rapid expansion of the academies programme.

For too long, schools in England were trapped in a system that served itself rather than the children in it. Parents had no choice; good teachers had no freedom; failing schools went unchallenged. That has changed over the last 25 years. The coalition Government expanded Labour’s academy programme, introduced free schools and gave schools the autonomy to raise standards, innovate and succeed. The results speak for themselves. England now has the best primary school readers in the western world. In maths, reading and science, we have soared up the international rankings, while Scotland and Wales, where autonomy was rejected, have fallen behind. In maths, England rose from 21st to seventh in the global PISA rankings; Wales stagnated at 27th. In reading, England climbed from 19th to ninth; Wales stayed at 28th. In science, England moved from 11th to ninth; Wales plummeted from 21st to 29th.

The success of free schools is even clearer. They are more likely to be oversubscribed, more likely to be located in the most deprived areas and more likely to send their students to top universities. Stellar free schools such as the London Academy of Excellence in Newham and Michaela in Brent are engines of aspiration and social mobility. None of this happened by accident. It happened because of vision, courage and persistence, because of the leadership of Michael Gove, the pioneering work of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and the determination of my noble friends Lord Hill, Lord Nash and Lord Agnew, who refused to accept that only the state could set up schools and fought off bitter opposition. It happened because of my noble friend Lord Baker, whose city technology colleges paved the way for the academies that followed. It happened because of my noble friend Lord Harris, who has done so much personally and directly to improve the lives of children in this country. Many honourable members in the other place, such as Dame Siobhain McDonagh, are among those who rightly champion the transformative impact of the Harris academies.

Yet this Government now seek to dismantle everything they have inherited. The schools Bill is a counterrevolution, a retreat into failure. It abolishes academies’ freedoms over teacher pay, forcing high-performing schools to pay their best teachers the same as their worst. It removes academies’ discretion over recruitment, making it harder to bring talented teachers into the profession. It scraps the requirement for failing schools to become academies, turning back to the failed system of local authority control. It abolishes freedom over the curriculum and seeks to dumb down the academic rigour injected by Michael Gove and Sir Nick Gibb by replacing it with one that reflects the issues and diversities of our society.

This is not reform but regression. The assault on excellence exemplified by the axing of the Latin excellence programme for state schools will narrow the horizons for working class children across the country. Many of the pupils who have benefited most have been the poorest in our society. For those who believe that schools need more centralisation and co-ordination, it is important to remember that helping hands from the Government, rather than leaving the running of schools to those who have a track record of excellence, can rapidly become strangulation. The tragedy is that, as a result of such a strangulation, it will be the most disadvantaged children who lose out.