Academies Bill [HL]

Baroness Howells of St Davids Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howells of St Davids]

My Lords, having studied the Bill before us—thankfully, it is very short—I saw little that took into account community cohesion. It appears to say that academies are the answer to all the problems in our school community and that those who are not satisfied should set up their own schools, give local authorities the brush-off and go their own way. I sincerely hope that my understanding is not correct. Today I want to bring before you my concerns about the British Afro-Caribbean child, whose experience of the school system in the early days was less than satisfactory.

Most of the children coming into Britain then were sent to SEN schools. We are now at a point where black children, given the support suited to their needs, can and do succeed. However, many parents now feel that the battle almost won is about to recreate itself in what this Bill suggests and there is a fear that the struggle will begin again. I make it clear, once and for all, that education has always been accepted as the means of upward mobility. Research will show that from the day when the phonics of the alphabet were made available to the enslaved Africans, they have embraced education, looked within the system and more or less found solutions. It is now well known that black children achieve in schools at an equal rate to kids from other backgrounds.

The high standards set by the last Government were easily reached by black Caribbean children. What changed most of all was the need for the children to understand that the expectations for them were the same as those for white children—expectations that came from families but were reinforced by teachers, for which I thank them. My purpose today is to make it reasonably clear that there is a need to consider the deep-seated cultural and social differences that characterise black children in our attempt to educate, counsel and assist them in the UK system.

From the early 1960s, a variety of efforts have been directed towards the amelioration of the apparent problems, ostensibly a function of certain disadvantages suffered because of skin colour—but that is untrue. Research efforts of a bewildering variety have been designed and implemented to discover the reasons for the poor performance of such children as a group, using various measures to construe that a lack of intellectual and academic abilities could be a function of genetic disablement.

Parents took this as a condemnation of their children. The result was that we set up Saturday schools, run by black parents and black teachers. They showed that the black child is capable of achieving any standards that are set. We have now seen a great improvement among young boys. The major shortcomings in attempts to educate young black children, and the inability or unwillingness to come to grips with the deep-seated differences between them and white youngsters, meant that it was left to the black community to secure for its children a mixture of black and white teachers so that both black and white cultures were valued and recognised in their own right.

We know today that disadvantaged schooling is a real issue. Also, there is a recognition that the dominant culture, being lettered, needed to value the oral culture. That culture’s styles, thought processes, behavioural learning patterns, concept of time perceptions, morals, value systems, communications and assessment had to be understood by LEAs so that today we have black children achieving, in most cases, as well as their white counterparts.

Nothing in the Bill appears to recognise the steps that have been taken. I therefore ask the Minister how he sees the academies achieving the standards of community cohesion if, as the Bill suggests, schools could opt out of the control of local authorities and, at the same time, become foundations, which are then likely to separate communities still further. That is all that I want to add about the Bill at this time. I feel sure that the black community fears that the Bill, as set out, would set us on the road to segregation.