Education Bill

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction to the Bill. He has done the best that he can to enthuse us but the Bill is heavy with structural change and light on what really matters—the delivery of high standards in every school for every child. At least the Minister did not fall into the trap of his boss, Michael Gove, who took his reputation for exaggeration to new heights in the Commons debate when he said:

“This Bill provides an historic opportunity for this country. It will help to guarantee every child a high quality education, which will equip them for the technological, economic, social and cultural challenges of the next century”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/2/2011; col. 180.]

Regrettably the Bill does not meet any of those lofty aspirations. At a time when the debate going on in the country is about how to drive up academic standards, how to ensure that every child has a chance to excel and how to distribute resources fairly to compensate for deprivation, the Bill fails to meet the challenge. Instead, it seeks to redefine the relationship between schools, parents and local communities, diminishing accountability and dismantling the procedures that ensure fairness and equity. As such, there is plenty in the Bill to give us cause for concern.

This does not mean that we are opposed to all the clauses in the Bill. We can support a number of them and others we hope to clarify by amendment in Committee. I will say a little more on that shortly. I hope your Lordships and perhaps even the Minister will recognise that there is something slightly obsessive about a Secretary of State who produces a Bill that gives him more than 50 additional powers. It is an irony that, at the same time as we are debating the Localism Bill, this Bill is moving in the opposite direction, taking decisions away from parents, communities and elected local authorities and centralising them in a department ill-prepared for the raft of new responsibilities coming its way.

On this issue, as perhaps on many others in the Bill, I hope that we might have a common cause with noble Lords on the Liberal Democrat Benches as I see in their election manifesto that they were committed to,

“introduce an Education Freedom Act banning politicians from getting involved in the day-to-day running of schools”.

Not surprisingly, that did not make it into the coalition agreement. Am I the only person to suspect that when something goes wrong, as things inevitably do, and his department is held responsible for a bad decision or a failure to act on the new responsibilities, the Secretary of State will be noticeably absent? Either by then he will have been conveniently reshuffled into another department or he will just expect the Minister opposite to take to the airwaves to explain away the error once again. We are not happy about the centralisation of power. We will scrutinise these clauses with particular care and measure them against a simple yardstick of whether they are in the interests of pupils, parents, professionals and local communities.

As I mentioned earlier, there are some clauses in the Bill that deserve our support. We welcome the extension of free early years provision for disadvantaged two year-olds. We will in due course seek firmer guarantees that the provisions in the Bill cannot subsequently be watered down, but you would expect the party that introduced the universal entitlement for three and four year-olds to approve its extension.

We also welcome the clauses that give teachers anonymity when accusations are made against them. We all know examples of good teachers whose lives have been blighted and their careers damaged when false allegations are made against them. It has on occasions been used as a cynical tool of revenge by some pupils and it is absolutely right that teachers have the right to anonymity until allegations have been investigated and formal charges brought. However, we fail to understand why the Government have so far failed to follow the logic of their own arguments in this regard in extending the provisions to all school staff and those working in further education and the youth sector, who are equally vulnerable.

We will also support practical measures to give teachers more power to intervene in bad behaviour in the classroom. However, we remain concerned that the specific additional search powers in this Bill are not matched by the appropriate safeguards. Moreover, there is a danger that the new measures could be simply symbolic. I read with interest the oral evidence given by head teachers to the Education Bill Committee in the other place. They struggled to find examples of where these additional powers would be useful and the teachers’ unions reported that their members would be very reluctant to use them. Nevertheless, we will welcome alternative proposals that send a clear message to pupils that bad behaviour will not be tolerated.

The Bill is guilty of sending mixed messages to the teaching profession. On the one hand, it wants to strengthen their authority in the classroom while, on the other hand, it waters down their professional status through the abolition of the General Teaching Council for England. So far, the Government have failed to produce a credible position on this. We believe that there is still a need for a regulator with a degree of independence in this sector. Surely, the sensible approach would be to learn the best practice from other professional bodies and work with the teachers’ associations to find a better method of setting standards, regulating entry to the profession, maintaining a comprehensive register and managing teacher discipline.

What message does it send to parents and teachers about the importance of professional standards when the Government make it clear that free schools will not be required to employ qualified teachers? Surely, parents should be able to choose the best school for their child, safe in the knowledge that all publicly funded schools will employ teachers with relevant training and qualifications?

Equally, if we are committed to driving up standards in schools, what justification can there be for the abolition of the School Support Staff Negotiating Body? This organisation was halfway through producing job profiles for support staff which would have recognised their important contribution to children's learning experience in schools. It was a welcome development that school leaders and teachers alike have supported, so I hope that in Committee we will be able to persuade the Minister to reconsider that decision.

I do not intend to rehearse all the arguments around the clauses today, but I would like to highlight some areas of particular concern. First, the Bill dilutes parents' rights over school admissions. This is a massively sensitive subject and will continue to be so as long as parents detect that there are schools of varying quality in their area. The Bill abolishes local admissions forums and waters down the capacity of the schools adjudicator to intervene to ensure fair play. The new draft admissions code, published after the Bill had received its Third Reading in the other place, would allow grammar schools to expand beyond their current physical capacity, leading to a potential expansion of selection in the state school system. A weakened admissions system means less power for parents to ensure their child can go to the school they choose. A weaker system also risks unfairness going unchallenged.

Secondly, we support the Government’s aim to establish an all-age careers service by April 2012. However, the lack of a transition plan from the existing careers service providers, compounded by the impact of local authority cuts, means that most of the staffing and expertise will be lost before the new service has had a chance to establish itself. As the ASCL has said,

“More than 2 million young people aged 16 to 19 could lose out on valuable careers advice while the government overhauls the national careers advice service, at a time when young people’s unemployment is reaching record highs”.

There is a real danger that, in this vacuum, careers advice will end up being provided online or collectively, whereas we believe that young people need personalised, ongoing, face-to-face advice that is tailored to their individual skills and interests. They also need real choice between academic and vocational training, including access to good-quality apprenticeships.

Finally, this Bill rewrites the Academies Act passed last summer at breakneck speed and without adequate scrutiny in the other place. As a result, only one of its original 14 sections has escaped being replaced or amended. The model created by the previous Government to use academies to turn around failing schools in deprived areas has now been turned on its head. The resemblance between the old and the new is in name only; now, every school will be encouraged to become an academy.

The Bill could mean that by 2015 we would have an all-academy world: 20,000 schools, each with its own admissions policy, all being judged on the prescriptive English baccalaureate that is geared towards the top 30 per cent of children. Schools will have a clear incentive to admit the most able students and, with a weakened adjudicator and greater competition between schools, back-door selection becomes more likely. Such a world could be a dangerous place for less academic children or those with special needs.

In this new world, the role of elected local authorities in planning schools and services is marginalised. The strategic role envisaged for them in the education White Paper is abandoned. They will have no significant role and scarce resources to co-ordinate provision, whereas we believe that local people and local communities should be in the driving seat in determining what is best for their children’s education.

I said at the outset that this Bill ducked many of the key arguments about education today. While it is true that those do not appear in the Bill, it is also true that there are potentially profound consequences arising from the restructuring of education services being pursued by the Secretary of State. The expansion of academies, each with its own budget, will create a vast new marketplace for schools to buy services that have previously been provided without charge by local authorities. New private providers of education services are already moving into that void. No doubt some services will be able to be procured more cheaply, but schools will also be under pressure to save on the cost of expensive services for those who have special needs or require learning support.

No doubt the Government will argue that the pupil premium will help offset some of those additional costs. However, can we be sure that the money involved will compensate for the complexities of trying to provide an education service in a deprived area? What will be the consequence of the private sector supplying those support services? Can we be sure that they will be properly regulated and that schools will be protected from market failure?

What of the management of these academies? It is hard to imagine how the Secretary of State thinks he is going individually to manage thousands of academies, so it is rather convenient for him that they are already forming themselves into chains and federations. Instead of managing individual schools, he could ultimately manage contracts of large private providers—some no doubt bigger than the democratic local authorities they seek to replace. Those providers currently make a virtue of their charitable status being not-for-profit, but can we be confident that that protection will continue? Could we one day be facing the educational equivalent of Southern Cross, with all the challenges of maintaining continuity of education in the school system that could result?

When we scrutinise the Bill, we will be looking at the detail of the clauses as written, but we will also be mindful of the potential consequences of a market-dominated education system and what it means for the school system as a whole. We will put forward measures to ensure that the right checks and balances keep children’s interests paramount. We will aim to place the rights and priorities of pupils, parents, professionals and the public at the heart of the Bill, and reassert the right of communities to determine their children’s education. We hope very much that, in the course of the discussions, we can make common cause with noble Lords across the House, perhaps including the Minister, to strengthen the Bill on this basis. We look forward to the remainder of the debate today.