Education and Adoption Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Nash]

The answer to the noble Lord’s question is that we are not saying that, obviously; but as we made clear ad nauseam the last time we were here, there have been 1,500 failing maintained schools converted to academies, many of them very recently, all of which have been performing badly, many of them for years, under local authority-maintained status.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

But it is also agreed that one in seven of the schools that converted from the maintained sector as excellent or outstanding stand-alone academies went on to require improvement or serious measures.

[Lord Nash]

We can bat around statistics on this for ever but, in fact, the converted academies are doing considerably better than local authority-maintained schools.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

If we are arguing about statistics, will the Minister accept that the one I gave was given in a reply from his department?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is talking about Ofsted grades; I am talking about exam results.

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[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

There are 778 approved sponsors and about 20% are waiting to be matched with schools. The noble Lord asked which schools may need sponsoring. The precise number will vary from year to year and will depend on Ofsted inspections and test and examination results. We anticipate that as many as 1,000 failing maintained schools could potentially become sponsored academies under the new measures.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

I think the issue about how long schools wait before they find a match with a sponsor is very important. I had heard anecdotally—so this is the Minister’s opportunity to put it on the record—that quite a number of schools are now known as orphan schools because they have been taken away from one sponsor and have not yet been given another one. Does the department have a target time in which an alternative or a first sponsor should be found? What is the department’s record on achieving that target?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

We look for a sponsoring match to happen as quickly as possible but one of the issues that this Bill is attempting to address is the delays caused by the very process that schools have to undergo at the moment.

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[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My question is not about that. Perhaps the Minister will write if she is not in a position to answer it now. It is not about the delay at the school end, it is about the delay at the department’s end in finding a suitable sponsor. Are there some schools—colloquially known as orphan schools—waiting for either an initial sponsor or a second sponsor? Also, does her department have a target time in which a sponsor must be found and what is the department’s record in reaching that target?

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[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I, too, support Amendment 17 and have great sympathy with the intentions behind Amendment 16, which I think raises the same question but addresses it from a different angle. Let us be clear: we all share the same ambitions of all schools being good schools and of action being taken if they are coasting or failing. Nobody is against that and sometimes it is important to restate that, because we get pushed to either extreme in arguing the points. So we are all on the same side in that, but the amendment tries to explore some of the options regarding what action should be taken. That is where the difference of opinion is—on the question of what to do, not on the need to take action. Therefore, we should try to resist accusing each other of not caring about kids in failing schools. That is not why we are in this business and why we are sitting in this Room.

The amendment picks out two or three weaknesses in the Bill. The first thing to do is to address failing and struggling academies in the same conversation and piece of legislation that address other schools. I cannot see that politically there is much wrong with that, and practically I am not sure why one structure should be excluded from the consideration. Therefore, I welcome the fact that what happens to failing academies is brought into this discussion. The only reason for excluding it from the discussion would be either if you believed that there was no such thing as a failing academy, which we know is not the case, or if you could honestly guarantee that merely moving it to another academy sponsor would always, in every single circumstance without any possible exception, be the solution. Even if you thought that, I do not know why you would want to put that in primary legislation, because if it is true now, it might not be true next term or the year after or the year after that. That is essentially what is being done in this part of the legislation. It is putting in primary legislation that either an academy will never fail or the solution will always be another sponsor. We are saying that the solution will sometimes be another sponsor but not always, so we should not leave out from primary legislation the option of taking a different course of action.

I think we also agree that an option might be school-to-school support. That might involve getting in good teachers from other schools to lead. Something that we have not taken up as a generic point is that schools need to belong. I believe in interdependence as much as independence for schools. The umbrella organisation under which a school lives, survives and is supported and which challenges the school is important. That is essentially what this argument is about. At the moment, we have two types of umbrellas: we have academy chains and multi-academy trusts—two phrases for the same thing—and we have local authorities. All we are saying here is that sometimes one will be the solution and sometimes it will be the other.

I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, who is far more experienced than anybody else in this Room in dealing with failing and underachieving schools. I hope he accepts that none of us—certainly not me and I think I can speak for all my colleagues on the Labour Bench—would justify a failing school being with a failing local authority. That would not make sense. The most important point that the noble Lord made was in his contribution to the first group of amendments. He said that you have to ask yourself: if a school is coasting, why has the local authority not taken action? Sometimes you will come to the conclusion that the school has not been well supported by the family of which it is a member and that it would be better off with another family. That is why the Labour Government put lots of schools into academy chains.

However, sometimes the solution is to do something about the local authority. I spent three years in the department doing something about local authorities and I shall pick out just three—Hackney, Islington and Liverpool, on all of which I led the interventions. The noble Lord will remember that they were all absolutely miserable local authorities and miserable families to belong to, but I do not think that any school now would not be proud to be part of Islington, Hackney or Liverpool. The irony is that every one of them had a different solution: Hackney’s was a trust; Islington was put with a not-for-profit partner; and Liverpool got new leadership at local authority level and is now doing well. So I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, does not think that, whatever this debate is about, the Labour Bench is excusing poor local authorities.

To be honest, it was the Labour Government who took action against poor local authorities because the Tories before us had not do so; no one had taken action by 1997. It was us who brought in the legislation and us who took the action. We have been around long enough to know that sometimes there are good local authorities where you would want to place a school. So should we really say that where you have a failing academy in a good local authority, we do not want a solution whereby it cannot be part of that local authority family of schools? Why can that not be one of the solutions? We are not saying that it must in all circumstances, but why can a failing academy in a good local authority not become part of that family of schools?

Although the amendment does not say so, I would also ask why it cannot become part of a multi-academy trust run by a maintained school. I was in the Lilian Baylis school last week with a Select Committee, and it was utterly outstanding—it was a joy to spend the morning there. However, it is not an academy, so it cannot set up a multi-academy trust. I do not know why you would deny a school neighbouring Lilian Baylis the right to belong to a multi-academy trust set up and led by Lilian Baylis, which is an outstanding and exceptional school. It is not allowed to do it until it becomes an academy. That is the nature of the discussion; it is not about whether to take action but about whether we are closing down options on doctrinaire grounds that would be better left open.

My last question has not been answered, so I take this opportunity to ask it. If Clause 7 goes ahead, it will place an awful lot more responsibility on regional schools commissioners. From my involvement in a number of regions, which are very large, I know that the commissioners are really stretched. I am not confident that they have the resources to do the jobs that are asked of them. If they get these additional responsibilities, will the Minister take this opportunity to let the Committee know what estimates he has made about what extra resources regional schools commissioners will have and what allocation of resources he will undertake?

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

I shall briefly respond, since I have been challenged on this—and that is good, because I respect my noble friend and what she has achieved over the years, not least in looking at local authorities. There is a separate question of how you deal with local authorities that are not performing; the Ofsted inspection of local authorities is one way of going about it. That is a very important question but the question today, in this Bill, is when you have notification from the DfE or wherever that a school is coasting and the evidence is all there, what you do tomorrow? The Bill suggests a route that has proven evidential foundations. No one is claiming that all academies are perfect; there are some real problems. On the other hand—this is where the point about local authorities comes in, and I want to clarify my own position here—I would not want to hand that school back to the local authority under which it developed the position of either coasting or failing. There has to be a route through that, which is what the Bill attempts to do. The local authority has all its democratic processes, education committees and the lot—they are all there. If the school was allowed to drift into coasting status, action is needed, and the last action I would recommend is to go back to the same local authority.

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[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I did not intend to intervene in this debate, except from my experience of trying to deal with schools that are failing. In my former constituency, I had a terrible case of failing schools on two occasions. My experience is that we have to face the fact that the time taken to put such schools right has been unbelievably long. The fact that that has been the case has put the Government into this position. Normally, I would have supported many of the arguments that have been made by the party opposite. I have lived through generations of children who have suffered because we could not take urgent action. I do not think that we should make these decisions without a real understanding of the history.

Listening to the debate, I want to say two things. First, I say to the noble Baroness that I do not think that law should set out a list of all the people who you might consult when you are consulting. It really is up to the people doing the consultation to decide who it should be. Of course it is true that people will naturally turn to a list which will not be dissimilar to that of the noble Baroness, but we have become very prescriptive about who would and would not be on the list. I can think of several other people who I would want to put on the list in particular places. For example, in the very bad situation that we were in in Felixstowe, I would want to put on the list discussion with local businesses about what they needed to give decent futures to the boys and girls in the schools that were so obviously failing. I could make a list that would be as credible as the one that the noble Baroness wants.

The trouble is that once you write a list like that, those who do not happen to be on it become kind of second-class citizens. However, I think that the noble Baroness would agree that by the time we put them, the church authorities, in circumstances in which that were appropriate for the school, and everyone else that we have talked about on the list, it would be as long as your arm. It seems to me very much better to have the formation presented by the Government. This was a good debate to have, but it would not progress our discussions to have that list.

Far more concerning are the comments made just now from the Opposition Front Bench. I listened with great care to the noble Lord as he put forward his case. I thought he was a little over the top in coming close to claiming that the Government were somehow dictating inappropriately and tying that up with almost everything else that the Government have done. Of course he does not like the Government; that is what he is there for. I have been in that position, and I know exactly what he is there for.

Let us be a little bit historically accurate. The truth is that local authorities for a very long time presided over a system where, when things went wrong, few things were done about it. We have all experienced that. I experienced it in a school in Leiston, where generations of children were disrupted because the local authority would not make the changes. That was a local authority whose political complexion I agreed with, so I am not making a party-political comment, I am making a comment about the historic facts of local authority control. It was very difficult to make serious changes. There was a curious belief that in this one aspect of life, the way things are done had to move at a very slow pace.

So it is quite understandable why the Government feel that there may well be an elongation of necessary steps. The reason that I am on the Government’s side is that, in the end, I am on the side of those children. I start with the children. Indeed, I remember having a very big argument with the secretary-general of the National Union of Teachers who had the effrontery to have over her stall at the Conservative Party conference the words, “Putting teachers first”. I said that that was not what she should be doing; she should be putting children first. The fact that she refused to accept that changed my views about the unionisation of teachers in a very direct way, and anybody who sees the annual teachers’ conferences will see the best advertisement for home schooling I have ever come across. There is a long history of this, and we have to break it. We have to break it for those children who will otherwise be trapped since so many schools are the unique opportunity that a child has. I am prepared to go a long way with the Minister, and I hope very much that we shall see this work. I am quite sure we can come back to it if it does not, but the one thing we cannot allow is a position in which children are condemned for long periods in failing schools. It is a risk worth taking.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

It is like being in Piccadilly Circus in this Room at the moment. I shall speak briefly to this group and particularly in favour of Amendment 20 which is exceptionally reasonable and rather mild. I share some of the concerns about tick-box consultation, asI did when I was a Minister. You put the list of people in, and it becomes too mechanical if you do not watch it because the essence of consulting is lost. However, I have some reservations about Amendment 19.

I understand where the Minister is coming from on this because I experienced the same thing. I have a memory of a school in Leeds where 2% of pupils got five As to Cs. I had parental demonstrations against me taking action to close it down. I also saw the most awful demonstrators every time I went to intervene in a local authority. There is a bit of me that thinks—I wonder whether the Minister could stop talking to the other Minister because it is really disconcerting; this is a Committee to discuss the Bill, not to sort out other shenanigans—that that is the nature of the job. That is democracy. We are not Russia or North Korea. The nature of the job is that sometimes you get what you think is the most unreasonable opposition and it drives you mad. You feel like you have had a bad day at the office, but you have to get up and go through it again the next day. That is the nature of being a Minister in a democratic institution.

Some of the examples that the Minister has given during the passage of the Bill about interventions, particularly those he gave in his Second Reading speech in the discussions about Pimlico Academy, would not be stopped by Amendment 20 because all it does is state that the Secretary of State must call a meeting with the parents of the children in the school to explain what she is about to do and that she must take into account what they say. It has nothing to do with the sort of disruptions I had and which the Minister referred to at Second Reading. That is life, and it has to be got on with. This is about consulting the parents.

The other thing I learnt in difficult situations of this sort is that it is easier if you take parents with you. This is massive change for a school and the parents worry. Change frightens us all, and by not explaining it to parents and asking their view, you run the risk of driving them into opposition. What are they hiding? What are they fearing? Why do they not want to hear my view? As the Minister’s view will not be there, there will be murmurs in the playground and at the school gate, which means that consultation will take place by rumour, fact and misfact. You are not going to stop parents talking about what is happening and you are not going to stop them expressing their view. They will go and get the placards and oppose an academy conversion, whereas in some cases an academy conversion might be exactly right. I ask the Minister to split off in his mind his experience, because we should not be writing legislation on the basis of one Minister’s personal experience, and that perfectly understandable annoying aggravation which is the nature of being a Minister in a democracy. Look at Amendment 20 and explain how, when you are bringing about massive change that affects a group of children and their parents, you can possibly explain to them that it is unreasonable to call a meeting, invite them to attend, explain what you are going to do, listen to what they say, and take their views into account.

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, the group of amendments including Amendment 19 proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and Amendments 20 and 22 proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Hunt, and the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, focus on the involvement of parents and others in decisions where schools are underperforming as well as in decisions about the conversion of schools which are performing well. I also hope to use this debate to reiterate why Clause 8 is so fundamental and should stand part of the Bill.

Why the new and strengthened intervention powers in the Bill apply only to local authority maintained schools and not to academies features again in Amendment 22. I hope that following our debates at the first Committee session and earlier today, many of which probed our approach to failing and coasting academies, noble Lords will be reassured that regional schools commissioners already take swift and effective action where an academy is not performing well.

The other main issue raised by Amendments 20 and 22 is the involvement of parents when a school is eligible for intervention and will either be required to become an academy by virtue of being a failing school, or may be subject to an academy order or other form of intervention where it is identified as coasting or has failed to comply with a warning notice. Looking first at schools which have failed and have been judged to be inadequate by Ofsted, as I have already said, we are clear in the Bill and in our manifesto that any failing school must become an academy with the support of a sponsor. It is illogical to retain consultation on whether a school should convert when our manifesto makes it so clear that that would be the outcome.

Clause 8 is also vitally important because we want transformation to take place from day one. As I said, the Bill will ensure that the academy conversion process for such schools will be as swift as possible, not delayed through debates about whether a school should become an academy or not. That is also why Clause 8 removes the requirement for consultation on whether a school should become an academy. Maura Regan, CEO of the Carmel Education Trust, a passionate woman who noble Lords heard from at last week’s event, summarises the case better than I can. She said that the difficulty with allowing a consultation or vote about whether a school should convert to academy status is that it is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. The adults’ perspective will largely always be skewed or biased. Moving swiftly to transform the school is about championing the interests of the child over and above many stakeholders not able or willing to grasp the long-term wider view. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, who made similar comments last week in Committee and to the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, who made similar comments in an earlier debate.

As I said at the outset, this is about putting children first. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, takes objection to the words “for too long the interests of adults have stood in the way of a child’s education in circumstances where a school is failing”, but sadly events prove that to be the case time and time again. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Deben for his very eloquent remarks. It seems that we have a fundamentally different sense of urgency on this side of the Committee compared with noble Lords on the other side. I have great respect for the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but it is as simple as that.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I cannot allow that to stand. I requested in the previous debate that we did not throw that kind of remark across. I hope that the Minister would wish to put on record that no one on this side does not have a sense of urgency. If the Minister is going to do nothing while a school is converted to an academy, then shame on him because other things can be done while a discussion, a meeting with parents, takes place. The school’s hands are not tied with regard to changing the head teacher, getting someone in to help, putting challenge in and doing other things rather than converting to an academy. He might end up disagreeing with us but I hope he will not rest on the argument that it is because we are prepared to sit on our backsides while children fail. That is not the case, and I think he knows that if he thinks about it carefully.

[Lord Nash]

I fully accept that on both sides of the House we want to put the interests of children first. Maybe we have a different approach to doing that. I have already described to the House that once a sponsor has been identified for a failing school, sponsors will be keen to engage with parents about their plans for the school, ensuring that parents understand what will happen next and have the opportunity to share their views on the sponsor’s approach. Widnes Academy is just such an example. The performance of the predecessor maintained school, West Bank Primary School, had declined and in May 2013 it was put into special measures by Ofsted. The Innovation Enterprise Academy, a high-performing local secondary academy, was named as the sponsor for the school, and its first action was to engage with parents, pupils and staff to seek their views about how the new academy should operate.