Education Bill

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

My Lords, it is a privilege and, I have to say, a somewhat daunting challenge to respond from the opposition Benches to such a comprehensive debate with so many outstanding contributions from all sides of your Lordships’ House. It has been testimony to the commitment of noble Lords to the well-being of children and young people, and to our collective belief in the central importance of education in shaping their futures. That was particularly exemplified in the entertaining and insightful maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Edmiston. His speech was strong on positive values, with an evident commitment to helping young people achieve their potential. He clearly has an enormous contribution to make to the work of this House.

We all feel a great responsibility to do all that we can to secure the best possible prospects for the generations coming behind us, including children of all abilities, as the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, reminded us, but especially to enable children with the least advantages to gain the most from the opportunities our education system can provide. As the noble Lord, Lord Willis, from his wealth of experience maintains, this surely is the benchmark against which we should judge rigorously the measures in the Bill. Where we think that it is failing that test, we must seek to amend it.

There are some welcome provisions in the Bill. We are pleased to see the Government building on the entitlement for early-years education, for the under-fives, established by the Labour Government. I thank the Minister for his kind remarks in that regard. We progressively extended the entitlement to disadvantaged two year-olds and, of course, we support the principle of putting that on a statutory footing. However, we want to see the current entitlement for three and four year-olds in the Bill; a much more radical approach to ensuring maximum take-up, particularly from disadvantaged children; and assurances on the quality of provision, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, rightly demands.

We welcome the restrictions on the reporting of alleged offences by teachers up to the point of being charged, but will the Minister explain why the same restrictions should not apply to college lecturers and other school staff? We welcome the measures in the White Paper to build on the outstanding progress in the quality of teaching achieved over the past decade, some of which was just mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard. However, noble Lords have raised a number of serious concerns that we share and I will focus on four of those tonight.

The first is the shift in the Bill towards school autonomy and away from accountability. A strong strand throughout the Bill is the aim of increasing freedom for schools to make decisions across a wide range of issues such as excluding pupils, admissions, how they carry out searches and how they will provide careers guidance. However, the Government have been much less clear about how those freedoms will be balanced by strong accountability, particularly to parents. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, pointed out that parents are noticeable only by their absence from the Bill.

We are not opposed to the principle of more freedom for schools. However, the international research that the Minister himself referred to suggests that giving individual schools more freedom can lead to improved results, but only in the context of a system that is strong on accountability, collaboration and fairness—a comprehensive intake. While the Bill strengthens schools’ independence, it significantly weakens accountability, the potential for partnership and fair admissions. This selected and untested application of the international evidence is dangerous. It is an experiment, as my noble friend Lady Massey termed it.

Moreover, the greater freedoms for schools come at the expense of the rights and entitlements of children and parents, because the necessary checks and balances that should accompany those freedoms—the processes of natural justice—are being stripped out of the system. A child permanently excluded will no longer have access to an independent appeals panel with the authority to reinstate. The noble Lords, Lord Lingfield and Lord Lucas, both queried that, given the very small number of reinstatements.

The schools adjudicator’s power to enforce fair admissions will be restricted and, while the White Paper sets out a strategic role for local authorities to ensure fair access for every child, the Bill dismantles the apparatus for doing so. Is the Minister not concerned about the consequences of removing those reasonable checks and balances that ought to be the counterweight to greater school autonomy? Does he not agree that the Secretary of State, maybe with the best of intentions, has aligned himself too much to the providers—the schools—and not sufficiently with children, parents and local accountability?

The second issue concerns the shift towards central control and away from local determination. As well as diminishing the rights of individual parents and children, the Bill also sweeps away the collective views of parents, communities and local authorities in shaping their local schools. If a new school is required in an area now, the Bill presumes that it will be an academy, whatever the views of local people. My noble friend Lord Griffiths cautioned against the severing of links between schools and local authorities. The noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, outlined the role of councils in protecting parental choice and urged the Government to apply the principles of localism. However, despite the Localism Bill, the Education Bill, as we have heard, is taking more than 50 powers away from local or independent bodies and transferring them to the Secretary of State.

This is the most centralising Bill that I have seen in all my time in government. It will give the Secretary of State the power to close schools and colleges without consultation, instruct local authorities to issue warning notices to schools and instruct schools to discipline and dismiss teachers. It transfers to the Secretary of State the functions of the TDA and the General Teaching Council for England, the wisdom of which has been questioned by the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, and my noble friends Lord Puttnam and Lord Knight, who pointed to the damage to the professional reputation, development and recruitment of teachers. That therefore jeopardises the quality of teaching that the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, rightly pointed out is the most critical factor.

The Secretary of State will have the power to change the national curriculum, investigate complaints about individual teachers and keep an accurate register of teachers, although the Minister said in a letter to me today that the Government do not intend to keep such a register in the future, so I do not know how schools will undertake their recruitment. Has the Minister’s department got the capacity to fulfil these demands effectively? The evidence is not terribly good on that score. More fundamentally, does he really think that such centralisation is right in principle and feasible in practice?

This brings me to my third concern: the erosion of children’s rights and entitlements. The Bill’s proposals for both school autonomy and central control together significantly erode many of the reasonable rights and entitlements that children currently have and that many Lords have referred to tonight. Furthermore, the Bill directly abolishes the entitlement to diploma subjects—at the same time, let us remember, as advocating the English baccalaureate as the gold standard. There are no diploma or vocational subjects included in the English baccalaureate. The Bill will also abolish the apprenticeship guarantee. My noble friends Lord Layard, Lord Haskel and Lord Young have explained why that is such a retrograde step. Does the Minister agree that all these measures taken together and seen in the round send entirely the wrong message about the parity of esteem between academic and vocational subjects?

The proposals for career guidance are nothing short of a disaster at the moment. The careers service is crumbling as we speak because local authorities are cutting their service in anticipation of the Bill’s proposals. Schools are to be given the duty to provide independent advice to under-19s by whatever means they choose. There is no guidance from government, no common standard and no requirement for the face-to-face contact that we believe—I gather so did Mr Simon Hughes, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, in a speech this week—should be an entitlement for every pupil. I am pleased that my noble friend Lord Morris of Handsworth and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, also supported this. The children who will lose out if there is no face-to-face contact will of course be those who most need good careers advice: the youngsters without strong family support, children in care and those on free school meals.

The powers in the Bill relating to behaviour and discipline deserve particular scrutiny. They epitomise some aspects of the Secretary of State’s approach here, which is more concerned with headlines than substance. Ofsted reminds us that behaviour is outstanding or good in 89 per cent of primary and 70 per cent of secondary schools, but we on this side are in no doubt that schools should have the powers to deal effectively with bad behaviour when it occurs. The disruption caused by even a tiny minority can blight the school experience for the rest of the class. That is why the Labour Government brought in statutory powers to enforce discipline: the use of reasonable force, search, confiscation and so on, subject to reasonable safeguards.

The Bill removes those safeguards, which are no more than the reasonable requirements one would expect to accompany such strong powers. The Bill will enable a child to be searched by a teacher of the opposite sex, conducted without a second member of staff as a witness. A pupil can be detained after school without giving parents any prior notice at all, let alone 24 hours. Many noble Lords across the House, including the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, the noble Lord, Lord Low, and my noble friend Lord Parekh have expressed their concerns about the possible consequences of abolishing those safeguards.

Fourthly, many noble Lords across the House have expressed their concern about the regrettable absence in the Bill of any consideration of the accumulative effect of its proposals on the outcomes for vulnerable children. There are those with special educational needs or disability, looked-after children, those on free school meals and children whose life circumstances make it more difficult for them to make the best of their education without additional help and support— including Roma and Traveller children, referred to by my noble friend Lady Whitaker and the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, gave us a comprehensive analysis of the Bill as it will affect children with special educational needs or disability. Many of these proposals will adversely affect those children. Children with SEN are already over-represented in exclusions and those at school action plus are 20 times more likely to be permanently excluded. Surely the unchecked ability of schools to exclude will only increase that trend. Children in care and those with disabilities or from chaotic families already miss out in the admissions race. Disempowering the adjudicator will weaken their protection and the draft admission code fails to give them any priority in admissions.

It is the proposal to remove from schools the duty to co-operate with other children’s and health services that is the most worrying for the prospects of vulnerable children. As the noble Lord, Lord Low, pointed out, that appears to contradict directly the Government’s Green Paper on SEN disability, which envisages bringing together,

“the support on which children and their families rely across education, health and social care”.

The level of concern across the House, from the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Sharp, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and my noble friends Lord Touhig and Lady Morgan—as well as from the noble Lord, Lord Laming, who could not be here—mean that we will return in some detail to the matter in Committee.

The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about the importance of assessments is relevant here because to be effective those assessments need to be interdisciplinary and based on agencies working together. Can the Minister explain how the repeal of that duty will help the most vulnerable children?

Finally, let me make it clear that we are not opposed to the extension of academies, albeit the Government’s model is fundamentally different from ours, as my noble friends Lord Parekh and Lord Whitty pointed out. Our vision embraces diversity of schools, provided that there is a level playing field and within a collaborative, inclusive and accountable framework. My noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford and the noble Lords, Lord Sutherland and Lord Low, prompted us to look beyond the detailed provisions of this Bill and to ask what the Government’s vision is. What do they think the system will be in five or 10 years? How can we have a valid and incontestable set of data that will tell us whether it has improved?

My noble friend Lady Jones sketched out vividly at the start of this debate the spectre of the education system that we believe could emerge from this Government’s measures, with thousands of atomised academies cut loose from local councils and communities and other children’s services, free to do pretty much as they like—left to get on with it, as the Minister said—directly managed, or not, by the Department for Education, tied into private companies managing them in chains, in a sink or swim culture that could leave schools floundering and the children in them to fail. The danger is a two-tier system that will eventually emerge with disabled and disadvantaged children predominantly in the poorest schools.

We want to avoid that spectre becoming a reality. Therefore, we will seek changes to the Bill. The debate here tonight has demonstrated the commitments of Members across this House to ensuring the Bill reflects the best interests of all children and families. We are confident, given his deserved reputation for reasonableness, that the Minister will be genuinely open to constructive suggestions for its improvement.