Education: Academies

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with my noble friend that rural schools face certain pressures. We are absolutely determined that no school—particularly rural schools—will be left behind. Our national funding formula will, for the first time, provide many rural schools with more support than it has in the past. We are proposing both a lump sum and a sparsity factor for rural schools. As I said, we will have a fund of £10 million to help them explore the academisation. We will have people working with them and will do all we can to help them. We believe that rural schools working together may be able to afford, for instance, a language teacher, which on their own they would be unable to do. On my noble friend’s second point, we accept that where we have underperformance—wherever it is, whether in the local authority or elsewhere—we must have powers to intervene.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister made it fairly clear that although the element of compulsion has been removed at least from the rhetoric for the time being, it is still the determination of this Government to encourage, by whatever means, all schools to become academies. Building on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, when he said that a poorly performing multi-academy trust is no better than a poorly performing local authority, can the Minister say why the Government are so bent on creating this new monoculture? A well-performing academy trust is obviously a very fine thing and we all like to see schools succeed, but some local authorities are also succeeding and are creating and supporting schools that are doing well. Should we not celebrate that success as well as the success of academies?

I shall follow on from the question asked by my noble friend on the Front Bench. The issue of autonomy for schools—much vaunted in the progress of this Government’s determination to encourage academies—is surely diluted in multi-academy trusts where there is, of course, one leadership team. The degree of autonomy that then resides with the individual school must by definition be reduced. Is that really what the Minister has in mind?

[Lord Nash]

As I have said, I accept that there are multi-academy trusts that are not performing, but we have ambitions to bring them up to the standards of those that clearly demonstrate that this model works. As far as a monoculture is concerned, we would say that we have much more diversity in the academy trust structure than under a local authority structure, whereby a school is stuck in one local authority because of a geographical accident. An academy can choose to convert, maybe on its own or as part of a small local cluster, or as part of a larger group. Of course, there are high-performing local authorities, and we encourage them to spin out and form multi-academy trusts, which some are discussing at the moment, or to subcontract out their school improvement activities.

As far as autonomy of individual schools is concerned, we have said a lot about how we would expect schools in multi-academy trusts to work together in local clusters. We think that is absolutely essential to their being intimately involved with their community. Ultimately, we are concerned with standards and pupils ahead of everything else.