Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Under the changes proposed in the Bill—if I understood the noble Lord correctly.

I turn to Amendment 173 from my noble friend Lord Lucas. We would like the system of registration to be implemented as soon as possible to—I hope—reassure those parents who are doing a great job supporting their children at home. It will offer support to those parents who are struggling to provide education to their children at home, help safeguard those children who may be more vulnerable and not in school, and allow local authorities to better target their resources to those families who want or need support. We will take sufficient time prior to the registration system coming into force to ensure the registers work for everyone and that local authorities are clear on their support duty. Therefore, we do not feel it is helpful to set a strict implementation plan for the new support duty in the Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, raised Amendment 123. I hope he will be reassured that it is already a criminal offence knowingly to recruit someone to work in a regulated activity with children who has been barred from working with children.

The noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and my noble friend Lord Lucas brought forward Amendments 122C, 125 and 126A. A threshold set out in regulations will ensure that the duty to provide information targets only those providers that are used for a substantial proportion of a child’s education. I was not altogether surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, raised the issue of unregulated alternative provision. I know we are going to be debating it in more detail in a subsequent group, so I hope I can save my remarks on that for later.

There is also a power in new Section 436E(6) to make regulations creating specific exemptions to the requirement for providers to provide information, which could be used to exclude certain settings from scope. We will continue to engage with stakeholders on this. However, where providers are eligible, the duty will be vital in aiding identification of eligible children and ensuring the registration system is effective in safeguarding them from harm and promoting their education.

My noble friend—I mean my noble friend Lord Lucas; I have so many noble friends—referred to the importance of adequate funding. We are still in the process of determining what the minimum expectation on local authorities should be in terms of their new support duty. To ensure that it is as effective as possible, it is right that we undertake the necessary consideration and assessment of need, including how this can be achieved and the costs involved. We will engage closely with stakeholders on this prior to the statutory guidance being issued and we have also committed to undertake a new burdens assessment to identify the level of funding that may be required to support local authorities so that they can discharge their duty effectively and well. Therefore, I ask my noble friend Lord Lucas—

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

I have a very quick question before the Minister sits down. She talked about making sure that people have the relevant safeguarding qualifications and going through the process. Whose responsibility is that? Does the parent of a home-educated child have a legal duty to do the checking or does that power and responsibility lie with someone else? If it was a school, it would be the school’s responsibility. I am not sure whose responsibility this is.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I do not know the answer to the noble Baroness’s specific question, but I will get an answer and respond to her.

In closing, I ask my noble friend Lord Lucas to withdraw Amendment 114A and other noble Lords not to move the amendments in their names.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly on the issue raised by these amendments. I support the thrust of them, although I do not support all the details, particularly the one about Ofsted. I think that would not be an Ofsted role, but I agree that we need to have focus on it and that some organisation needs to give it.

My worry is that we are in the foothills of learning about what we should do with mental health in school. When I taught, which was many years ago now, it was never even discussed. It was not on our agenda, yet the children I taught in the inner city were just as likely to suffer from mental health problems as the generation that we have now. We are very much learning how to deal with this, which is worth bearing in mind.

I do not know what the answers are, but I think there is a problem and it is growing. In a way, it is becoming more evident to us because we did not analyse it in that way. Historically, we have always assumed that children did not suffer from mental health problems. It could be unhappiness at home, bad behaviour or whatever, but in schools we did not focus on mental health being a problem, except in the most extreme cases. Things are being done, but we really are in the foothills and we had such a long way to go before now.

There is the whole issue about CAMHS and its underfunding. It is a disgrace—we all know that. So much more needs to be done. I was interested in hearing from the Minister was about prevention work and the things that we can reasonably expect schools to do to head off people needing more acute services. The work I do in the Birmingham Education Partnership has had some success in this. We received a grant from the clinical commissioning group—so it was actually health money—about three or four years ago. We have rolled out a programme across the city now. I think it has been taken up by the DfE and is either closely aligned to, or has become part of, the DfE initiative, where it is getting mental health leads in schools.

All that is good, and I have seen the good work happening, but it is not universally successful. In Birmingham, where we have over 400 schools, we have put in extra money, resource and effort; we value this highly and prioritise it. After three or four years, however, we have still not rolled it out to every school, and we have only one person on this. This is a major problem. That is where my concerns are.

I will end up not disagreeing at all with what the Minister says about the initiative that has been launched for mental health leads, but it is not at the pace or speed that we need. We are starting from way behind if you look at any other area of school activity, be it phonics, numeracy, PE, sports or art. We have only just started on the journey of understanding what to do to support our young people with mental health difficulties. I should like to hear from the Minister what else is going to happen, and how they will build on the small seeds which have been slowly put into the ground and will take decades to help solve the problem.

If we are to get this right, we must have a picture that schools will not be staffed as they are at the moment. I worry that it is the teacher who has become the mental health lead. To be honest, if it is the physics teacher doing that, we need them in the physics lab teaching physics lessons. We cannot constantly take teachers away from the subjects we need them to teach to give them extra responsibilities to address important issues.

I know I am harking back a bit but, in the days of Every Child Matters and Sure Start, the aim that we made a start on when I was in the department was for a school to be staffed with people other than teachers. I remember visiting a school in the north-east, in Gateshead, where the secondary head proudly told me that just under 50% of his staff were teaching. The other 51% were not teaching: they were counsellors, mentors, assistants, lab assistants, careers advisers—all those other things. Unless you have that multitude of roles within the school, you cannot expect schools to be a key player in this; they just cannot do it. They can enable politicians to tick the box, make a speech and say, “I have done this”, but they will not be delivering effectively.

My vision would be to go back to the model of schools as bases where we can begin to support children’s mental health needs. The only way to do that adequately is to staff them with people who have the skills to do it. Of course, teachers have a role in that and we need mental health leads. I do not have a problem with that, but we cannot have nothing between the mental health lead and CAMHS. That is what we have at the moment: there is nothing in between, as far as a school is concerned. That is my worry.

It is a shame that Amendment 171Y was not spoken to as it is about testing eyesight. It is a great little amendment and it would be effective. I happened to work with some researchers once who did research in American kindergartens, the lowest schools in the system; they were experts in literacy and numeracy. They did eye tests on all five and six year-olds, and the number of children proven to need glasses at that point was unbelievable. They gave the kids a pair of glasses and kept a pair of glasses at the school—it was in a deprived area—and the attainment rate at the school rose significantly. No one had spotted that poor eyesight meant that the child did not know that they were missing out to some extent, especially children sitting at the back of classes. It is an important amendment, which would not need as much resource as mental health, but it would add to well-being and health. That would acknowledge the point that if we want to remove barriers to children’s learning, making sure they are mentally and physically well is a prerequisite for everything else.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I want to raise some qualms about this set of amendments. For different reasons, I find myself agreeing with the way the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, has just raised some issues.

I have spoken, on earlier amendments, about my concern about pathologising and medicalising all sorts of everyday experiences for children and adolescents. If we see the trials and tribulations of growing up— goodness knows, there are many of them—too much through the prism of mental health, we can contribute to children being anxious and worried about their own mental health. There is a kind of danger that we make children self-absorbed or unable to get over things and undermine their resilience. Important work has been done on this. One of my favourite books is The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education by Professors Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes, which was ahead of its time in worrying about some of these issues and raising them. There is a whole body of research on this work.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 171F in my name. Had I not had an amendment in this group, I would have risen to support the amendment to be addressed by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth. I very much support the gist of that amendment on citizenship, having worked with him on some of the committees. What it says makes absolute sense and I hope we will see progress with that idea as we take the Bill forward.

Amendment 171F is on something completely different. I do not think it is contentious. I hope that we will all agree that there is a problem that needs to be solved. I do not think for a minute that it has been deliberately created by Ministers or anyone else. I think it is a loophole, but a very big loophole, and the Bill is an ideal opportunity to address it.

We all would sign up to the idea that partnership between schools and parents is absolutely crucial. Whether we are mums, dads, grandparents or whatever, we all make speeches and know that partnership and the strength of it between the teacher, parent and child are crucial. It is possibly more crucial in some areas of the curriculum than in others: sex education, faith education and some aspects of history. That understanding about what is happening in the school is very important so that the parent can support the teacher and the teacher can support the parent, all in the interests of the child.

If we look at the Government’s guidance on relationships and sex education, it says that parents should have visibility of what is being taught to their children. That is the central core of what I have always thought was the case, both as a teacher and through my time in politics. I was therefore surprised to see a letter that a parent made available to me after she had gone to her child’s school to ask to see some of the curriculum papers that were being used in relationships and sex education. In this case the child was in key stage 2, the latter years of primary education. The head had written to the parent to say that he could not make the curriculum materials available to her because the organisation that was delivering that part of the curriculum said that it was exempt under Section 43(2) and Section 42 of the Freedom of Information Act.

In many areas of the curriculum, especially the contentious areas, schools look to outside bodies to bring in their expertise. We have already had a discussion in Committee on the importance of sometimes not necessarily using teachers with QTS but going to where there is specialist skill. This school had asked an organisation to come in and deliver sex and relationships education. But the organisation had said, “This is our intellectual property. It can’t be photocopied and shown to a third party.” The law allows it to claim that parents are a third party. That cannot be right. It does not matter whether they like the curriculum material or not. This particular bit of curriculum material was, I think, very contestable in terms of appropriateness for age. However, even if I thought it the best bit of teacher material I had ever seen, I would say it could not be right that a parent could not have access to it and see it. There are so many areas where a parent would want to know what is being taught to a child, and something needs to be done about this.

It is in the area of contested facts and difficult things to teach that schools are most likely to turn to outside organisations to help. They tend not to do that with maths and English and things like that, because they have the qualified staff in the school. It is for the areas that are difficult to teach, because they are contested, that outside organisations are particularly likely to be approached.

Whether we like it or not, we live at a time when there are lots of curriculum areas in which facts are not facts, and what we all assumed was appropriate to pass on to the next generation is now being contested. We have contested information and different views; as a society and a generation we are trying to work these things out. It is critical that giving ideas and words to the next generation is done with care, openness and the support of all the adults possible.

I very much hope that the Minister will be able to do two things when she responds to this amendment: first, to accept that there is a problem and, secondly, to say how it will be addressed before Report. I do not want—as was the position in the letter I read—the head to have to come between the parent and the outside provider. It was not fair for that head to have to write to the parent, with whom they would be having a longer-term relationship than that over the relationships and sex education lesson. We can all see that it potentially damaged the working relationship between the head and the parent.

Even if it were the case that the law could be got round, or it would have been possible for parent to see the material, or the outside provider need not have said that that should happen, we cannot make the head the go-between. We must have greater clarity. I do not think that this is intentional on anyone’s part. If this amendment is not appropriate, that is fine. We think it works but, if it is not appropriate—or perhaps I should say, if there is a better way of solving this problem—I know that everybody who supports this amendment will be delighted to discuss this with the Minister in the intervening weeks. I hope we can solve this problem.

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, I too have put my name to Amendment 171F because, as your Lordships have heard, it is important that parents should be able to discover what their children are being taught and, in particular, to see the materials. This has arisen because the commercial providers of materials have apparently tried to prevent parents getting access to those materials. They have met requests for information or to see the materials with the assertion that these are protected, and they can rely on an exemption under the Freedom of Information Act.

I find that surprising. The material has been, or will be, referred to in class to the children, perhaps with slides shown. I should have thought that any duty of confidence on the part of the school to the commercial provider has been waived by that disclosure in class, but so be it—the effect of the assertion is to put parents off and, as we have heard, it puts the schools in an embarrassing and awkward position. The parents and the schools are on the same side.

The issue is, of course, particularly sensitive where the subject matter is RSE—relationships and sex education—but it is not limited to that nowadays. History, economics and politics—a whole range of subjects—raise awkward and difficult matters in which there are strong differing philosophies and political views. It is very important that parents should know what is being taught and, in particular, whether their children are in fact being indoctrinated; things are not always the facts that they appear to be. The content must be accurate and balanced.

This amendment will give statutory force to a policy to which, we would argue, there can be no reasonable objection. In the case of RSE material, there is already statutory guidance, provided by the Government in 2019. I note that only the other day, on 17 June, my noble friend the Minister wrote to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. I quote one short passage, as follows:

“When schools choose resources and external provision for Relationships, Sex and Health Education and PSHE, we expect schools to consult with parents on these matters and to make reasonable decisions about the content of their curriculum. Schools should also ensure that when they engage parents, they provide examples of the resources they plan to use (for example, the books they will use in lessons).”


That seems to be the Government’s policy, and who could argue against it? If that is the policy, what possible objection could there be to having it reinforced by statute, which would meet the arguments put forward by certain providers?

In 2019 the Secretary of State wrote in the foreword to the statutory guidance:

“We are clear that parents and carers are the prime educators for children on many of these matters. Schools complement and reinforce this role and have told us that they see building on what pupils learn at home as an important part of delivering a good education.”


The guidance says in paragraph 13:

“All schools must have in place a written policy for Relationships Education and RSE”,


and in paragraph 24, under the heading “Use of materials”:

“Schools should also ensure that, when they consult with parents, they provide examples of the resources that they plan to use as this can be reassuring for parents and enables them to continue the conversations started in class at home.”


Who could argue with that? It is common sense and uncontroversial. However, as we have heard, parents are not always getting the access to which they are already entitled and should be getting. We have heard about the school that obviously felt on the spot because the provider did not want them to see the material. The provider wrote that the material was exempt and that the placing of the copies of the actual documents in the public domain by inspection or copying is not justified. What on earth does that mean? How can it be right not to put a copy in the public domain or show it to the parents?

So there we are. We suggest that the amendment strikes a reasonable compromise. It would not require schools to copy all the materials, some of which might be quite lengthy, but would allow people simply to go into a school and see what is there. That would spare schools the burden of copying. The amendment is necessary and reasonable. Without it, it appears that parents will not be assured that, without recourse to litigation, they can see what their children are taught. I commend the amendment to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Just to be clear, the Oak National Academy, as my noble friend may know, was set up during the pandemic to provide online resources. It continues to make those resources available to any parent or child who wishes to use them and to teachers who want high-quality curriculum resources to teach in a physical setting.

Furthermore, the statutory guidance for relationships and sex education is clear that schools must have a written policy in place for these subjects and must consult parents. My noble friend Lord Sandhurst referenced our guidance in this regard: schools should provide examples of the resources they plan to use when they consult to reassure parents and enable them to continue the conversation started in class when their children are at home. I think those are exactly the points your Lordships raised this afternoon.

The department has published guidance to support school engagement with parents and leaflets for schools to provide to parents when communicating about their teaching of these subjects. As was referenced, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State has asked the Children’s Commissioner to look at the RSE curriculum to complement the work that the department is already doing to improve the consistency and quality of RSE teaching, to make sure that children are being taught well and that we have equipped teachers with the right tools to teach these sensitive and difficult subjects well.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is an incredibly disappointing reply. My worry is that I do not know whether the Minister has offered all she is going to offer. This is not about using Oak National Academy resources rather than those of an outside organisation. It is not about how to communicate with parents. The amendment has nothing to do with that. I am quite sure that the Government have a lot of good ideas on advising schools about how to communicate with parents. This was very specifically about schools using materials from outside bodies, which save them work and having to rewrite the curriculum in line with what the Government want them to do—but, by law, they are not permitted to show parents these materials. I hope the Minister will forgive me if she was about to address that point, but I do not want her to sit down before doing so and I am a little worried by the tone of the response so far.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am sorry; the last thing I want to do is worry the noble Baroness. I am not sure that I will be able to reassure her entirely, but I was coming to this point. Specifically on the intellectual property loophole, which I understand is the point the noble Baroness raised, if she would be agreeable, it would be helpful to meet and go through some of the examples. We would like to be confident that the law is being interpreted correctly and, without seeing the examples, it is difficult for us to establish that. If the noble Baroness agrees, we could look at this in more detail.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I understand the noble Baroness’s point and I do not think I said for a second that I thought the Committee was suggesting that parents should have a veto. If I may, I will take this point away and write to your Lordships on it.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

The department and the head teachers the Minister has spoken to have chosen to go down a dangerous avenue on this. If the issue is to stop parents being vexatious and demanding too much of schools in asking for materials, they can do that now with almost all the curriculum materials that are taught in schools and they do not. The only ones they cannot see are these in the most contentious areas of the curriculum. I am not worried about parents being vexatious and asking for all the curriculum materials; that is not what happens at the moment. I am not sure how there can be any justification for the one area where, by law, you cannot see the teaching materials happening to be the area where parents would have most concern about curriculum content.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

All I was trying to say to the noble Baroness is that I think there are two steps in this. First, is the intellectual property law being applied correctly and, secondly, how does that then translate? I think we have to answer the first question first, but I will undertake to give a full answer to the House when we have a chance to look at this in more detail. If your Lordships have specific examples, it would be extremely helpful to share them with us so that we get a broad sense of the issue.

With that, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, to withdraw Amendment 91 and other noble Lords not to move their amendments.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I will intervene briefly. I apologise that I have been away and therefore unable to participate in debates on the Bill as much as I would have wanted to. I start by declaring my interest as still being a member of Cumbria County Council.

I agree with quite a bit, but not all, of what my noble friend Lord Davies of Brixton has just said. I am personally not against academies and academy chains; I think they have brought fresh thinking into the education system. The problem is how to regulate them. My impression is that the Bill is adopting far too centralised an approach.

The essence of the point I want to make is that it is my impression that, in my own authority, the schools forum approach, allowing the per capita payment to be flexed, has worked well. It has worked well in two respects, and I hope the noble Baroness might address this. I have great respect for her and her concern for education, and I hope she might reflect on these points.

First, in an area that is a mixture of big towns and lots of rural village schools, the formula can be flexed to help keep open village schools that serve important local needs. This is particularly true in areas where there are big distances, such as Cumbria.

Secondly, there is a problem when a school gets into difficulty. Schools can get into difficulty quite quickly, particularly if there is a change of head or something like that, and it does not work out well. In an area where there is no shortage of school places and parents have a lot of choice—this applies particularly at secondary level—you then get into the situation where parents can choose to take their children out and put them into other schools in the area if they think a particular school is not doing well.

You cannot turn that situation around—perhaps the noble Baroness agrees with me—by having to cut teachers as a result of school income declining. Somehow, we have to get better leadership into the school, and I am sure that this is what an academy chain would want to do. The formula has to reflect that possibility. How is that going to happen? I fully support the amendment from my noble friends on the Opposition Front Bench.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak on this issue; I will do so very briefly. It is really important, and it is a shame that it is so late in the evening. I am in two minds about it: I can see where the Minister is coming from but my views, on the whole, accord with those of my noble friend Lord Liddle, who has just spoken.

The point I want to make, and I would ask for the Minister’s observations on it, is this. When I was doing her job, I remember when I learned that my decision on how the money should be allocated was not replicated in the local authority. I was a bit cross about it: here we are taking decisions about this, we send the money out to the local authorities and, blow me down, they change it around. I then realised that we just had to live with it—that was democracy, and that was making sure there was some local flexibility. However, I can remember feeling irritated by it. We lived with it because we were not as centralised as this Government intend to be.

My worry about this is not that it is trying to remedy the wrong that was referred to earlier on this evening—that 20 local authorities do not pass on the funding to small schools in rural areas when it leaves the department. It does not look like that to me, although I do not doubt that she is concerned. The way it looks to me is that this Bill is about giving power to the Secretary of State over every school and over everything. The minute the Government do that they have to control all the money. It seems to me that is the order: if the Government were not taking all the powers to control every school and everything they do, they would be able to be more flexible with the money, because that flexibility with the money would go with the flexibility given to the school. Because the Government are taking all the power to control all schools over all things, it looks as though they have thought, “The only way we can do that is to control every penny as well. We have to have that lever.” That is what worries me. If you put it together with what is happening in initial teacher training, it is the last brick in the wall of an absolute top-down, very heavily controlled nationalised school system. I would really like the Minister’s observations on that.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Baroness Barran) (Con)]

My Lords, I will start by setting out the principles of Clause 33, in response to the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, to oppose the question that the clause stand part of the Bill. I am thankful for the opportunity to debate the role of Clause 33 and this part of the Bill more broadly. This measure implements the direct national funding formula and, as I said in response to the third group, delivers on our long-standing commitment to achieve fair funding for schools. We received wide-ranging support from the sector for this vision of how we fund schools in our consultation last year, and we heard your Lordships’ views on the importance of not only holding consultations but listening to them.

A single national funding formula, replacing the current 150 local arrangements, will make funding for schools simpler, fairer and more transparent. It will allow the sector, and your Lordships in this place, to hold the department to account for school funding. This measure outlines the framework of roles and responsibilities for the new funding system. The reforms set out in this part of the Bill have been developed carefully, in extensive consultation with stakeholders, to ensure we reflect the needs of pupils and schools in the fairest and most consistent way.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies, talked about how well the system had worked previously, but when I look at the data for funding per pupil from 2017—I think this was something the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, also touched on earlier—for Brent and Lincolnshire, both of which had 12% of children on free school meals, the funding per pupil was £5,523 in Brent and £4,305 in Lincolnshire. Similarly, there were big differences in a number of other areas, not only London boroughs. For example, Blackpool and Manchester, at that time, had 25% of children on free school meals and there was about £800 higher funding per pupil in Manchester than there was in Blackpool. I hope the noble Lord will acknowledge that is hard to see as either transparent or apparently fair.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Wednesday 15th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Duke of Wellington (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 60A and I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for countersigning it. It is a probing amendment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, who I am pleased to see is in her place, said so correctly last week in Committee, this is a very difficult Bill to amend. My amendment was the only way I could find to stimulate a discussion on the point that I raise in the amendment. What is absolutely clear from the debates at Second Reading and the two days of Committee so far is that this Bill gives very great powers to the Secretary of State over any school that receives funding from the taxpayer. The concern that I and others have is how a number of very specialist schools will be treated in future.

I realise that there are many matters in the White Paper that are not included in the Bill and will probably be in another Bill in the future or in regulations. However, it is stated government policy, as I understand it, that all schools should become academies and all academies should, by 2030, join multi-academy trusts. I am particularly interested in two types of schools which may not fit into this standardised structure. As I said at Second Reading, I am a patron of the King’s Maths School. There are four maths schools in England and two more will be launched next year. They are all sponsored by universities and have impressive statistics for numbers of girl students, percentages of students from ethnic minorities and numbers on free school meals, and all the students get into leading universities.

These schools have been a huge success, both academically and socially, and we should have more of them. However, their success comes from their direct and close relationship with the sponsoring university.

I am very grateful to the Minister for two discussions that I have had with her on this matter. As I understand it, the Government’s view is that putting a maths school in a multi-academy trust would spread some of this academic excellence around a number of other schools, but I suggest to the Minister that this is not what they maths schools were created for. The country needs, and the Government at that moment—Michael Gove, I think it was—recognised, that we need many more mathematicians and others who wish to study engineering at university. All students at these maths schools do A-levels in maths, further maths and usually physics as well. The ethos of the schools leads to high levels of achievement. If they were to join multi-academy trusts they would certainly lose this ethos and are likely to cease performing at this excellent level.

I therefore ask the Minister to confirm that these maths schools will not be forced, either by the Secretary of State or any other authority, local or otherwise, to join a multi-academy trust without the consent of the governing body and the sponsoring university. These schools have a very special status and an amazing track record.

The other schools referred to in my amendment are the music and dance schools. Of course, they are very different from maths schools. Here I declare an interest, as my wife was, for 10 years, chairman of the Royal Ballet School. There are, I believe, eight schools within the music and dance programme. They are independent but receive taxpayer support under the music and dance scheme. The students are all selected for their talent. They come from diverse backgrounds, and many are from very low-income households. The graduates go on to perform in orchestras and dance in ballet companies all over the world. These schools must retain their independence and they will always need considerable taxpayer support.

The powers being vested in the Secretary of State through the Bill are so great that I hope to receive from the Minister an assurance that these very special and specialist schools will be allowed to retain their present status and will not, by future regulation, be forced into a multi-academy trust. They must remain independent. They must continue to receive taxpayer support directly from the Department for Education.

The Bill appears to be changing, very substantially, the structure of education in England. There may be many schools—more than the ones I have referred to—that will not fit in to the new Department for Education standard structure. My amendment simply seeks to protect the independence of two particular types of school, and I hope the Minister can allay my concerns and give reassurance to specialist schools.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the arguments just made by the noble Duke about maths schools. I am not sure what the Minister will say—maybe she will solve the problem. I am not arguing that they need to be more independent than any others; the argument about the MAT is about the nature of the partnership the school is going into. I value partnerships—they are really important—but I can see the argument that maths schools need different partnerships from other secondary comprehensive schools that might go into MATs.

This is because we are not likely to have a whole host of these maths schools throughout the country. They are few in number, a bit like the music and ballet schools. Whatever you think of them, their aim is to take the most able children in that subject and support them to reach as high a level as possible. We will never aim to have thousands of them, so I worry that, if you make their key partnership in future—if you do not want them to stand by themselves—to be part of a MAT, you give the ownership of that scarce resource to that MAT. Just as we have competition between stand-alone schools, I am absolutely certain, because it exists at the moment, that we will have competition between MATs. They will not all share their resources; they will compete with each other. That is what they are doing now and will do in future. I am just not confident that the competitive environment in which MATs exist—trying to get more kids and the best results—will lead to them sharing the special skills in the maths schools in the way they should.

The maths schools have a different set of partnerships. Unlike the MATs, they have very good relationships with universities and business. Progress-wise, they look up. So I am not fearful that they will fall prey to the problems of standing alone. I do not think they stand alone; they have a different set of relationships in their partnership. To take them out of that partnership and make them a legal part of the ownership of one MAT would make it far more difficult for them to share their skill across a geographical area. I can just bet which MAT they will end up going into—the one that already has the most high-performing children, because it will think that it can use them better than anyone else.

Go for the partnership, as they already have existing ones, but be really wary of treating them the same as any other academy, as they were never set up in that way. I hope that complements what the noble Duke said about independence; the nature of the partnership needs a great deal of thought.

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham’s amendments, so ably spoken to by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester. I do not have an awful lot of experience of academies; we do not have them in Wales. I suppose we are a bit old-fashioned, but the system seems to work quite well. However, I have nothing against them. They were introduced by the Government of which I used to be a member and I wish them well.

It is particularly important that church and state schools should have the same opportunities as academies. There is no reason in this wide world why a Church of England school or a Roman Catholic school—I am a Catholic—should not have the same opportunities as a state school. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester rightly referred to the fact that, in England, one in three schools is a church school. Ten per cent of all schools in England are Catholic schools, and 850,000 pupils go to them. Both Church of England and Catholic schools do a tremendous job in very deprived areas all over England—and, indeed, although it does not apply in this debate, in Wales.

There is a very strong case for ensuring that church schools have equal status in the Bill; handbooks and various bits of guidance from the Department for Education are okay, but they are not enough. If there is to be proper equality between church schools and state schools, that has to be recognised in law. Those issues revolve around governance structures, appointments, religious education and collective worship. I know that the Catholic authorities, all dioceses in England and the Catholic Education Service warmly support the amendments spoken to by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester, as I do. I wish them well.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

The Minister said at the start of her summing up—and it was about the 20th time she had said it—that she had heard the concerns of Members, would reflect on them and would come back. To be honest, unless she gives us some indication as to when she is going to come back and what she is going to say, we are going to have this at every turn. The noble Viscount who has just spoken is right. My noble friend asked about this with the first amendment—and, since the statement at the end of the first day in Committee, I am sure that she has reflected on the views of the House. What conclusions did she come to? Is she able to tell us now? If not, when will she be able to tell us? Then we could perhaps use the time available to us much more constructively.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Tempting as it is to take power into my hands and give the noble Baroness the answer straightaway, she knows very well that this is something we need to agree more broadly within the department. As soon as that is done, of course I look forward—that is an understatement—to updating the House.

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[The Lord Bishop of Bristol]

My Lords, I shall speak against Amendment 35A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight. The amendment—for obvious reasons, given what he has said today—does not account for voluntary, aided and foundation schools. This is not a recent provision; they have always acted as their own admission authorities as maintained schools. As set out in the School Admissions Code, academies with a religious designation must also consult the diocese and the board of education and have regard to the advice of the diocese.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the thrust of the arguments from the noble Lords who have led this debate. I shall make one or two points that perhaps have not yet come out strongly. The freedom to set their own admissions arrangements was given to academies when they first started. To be honest, I think that was a huge mistake. In local areas, it caused terrible animosity between the academies and the other maintained schools. That is part of the rift and the bad feeling that exist in many communities. I do not know many schools that, in setting their own admissions criteria, have sought to prioritise the poorest and most challenging children, those who have been excluded from more schools than anyone else, those without supportive parents and those without a room to work in at home—that is not how choosing your own admissions criteria actually works.

This is not the schools’ fault but, in terms of judging schools by how well they do academically, our whole system incentivises schools to have admissions criteria that get those children who are most likely to do well academically. If we were to change the accountability mechanisms so that we had as our most important accountability measure how much you can do for the poorest 5% of children in your city, we would have a different system, but that is not the way it runs.

However, I also blame schools. I was a teacher for 18 years. At the heart of it, I have always believed that the job of a professional teacher is to teach the children who end up in front of you on any given day—not to pick and choose; not to reject and throw away; not to say, “It’s easier to teach you than you”, but to do your best with the skills you have with the children in front of you. I taught in a school that was very challenging, and as a teacher the greatest rewards come from the progress you make with the children who are furthest behind when you start—but that is not the way the system works. There have been too many examples of academies that have used their ability to have their own admissions arrangements to select the children, or the parents, that will put them highest in the accountability stakes.

If you are a school that is undersubscribed, this argument does not matter to you. If you cannot get enough kids through the door for your published admissions number, then none of this matters. It matters only if you are a school that is oversubscribed, because only when it gets to oversubscription do the criteria for admissions come into effect. So think that through: if you are a school that is undersubscribed and not attracting children, so not getting the money, you have to take whoever no one else wants. Therefore, you do not improve, you do not get as many children, you do not get the money and again, you do not improve. That is the cycle that happens: undersubscribed schools do not attract children and therefore find it very difficult to improve.

Looking back, when the academies started under the Labour Government they were addressing the needs of those schools in the most challenging areas. In truth, what happened was that if you gave them a new building, a new head and a committed sponsor, they still did not have a cross-section of students coming through their doors. The idea at that stage, in giving them some power over admissions arrangements, was to try to get a better social mix. I can sort of see that, but it has gone way out of kilter with how it should be. In 2010, the minute the vision was that every school should become an academy, that just did not make sense.

I say to my noble friend Lord Hunt that where schools differ from hospitals is that who you treat in one hospital does not usually have an impact on the neighbouring hospital or another in the outer ring of the city. But schools are interrelated: who you choose to admit has an effect on every other school in your locality as it is an interrelated business, so it is very important that we do not have schools competing with each other in any geographical area for the bright kids. It has to work across such an area, for two reasons.

First, successful schools will always manage to attract children who, quite frankly, are easier to get the high results with—I would not say they are easier to teach. That has an effect on other schools and creates that bad feeling, so it is interrelated. The way you choose to admit pupils has an effect on other schools in your locality. I do not mind what they do, whether they band or have feeder schools, or measure it in yards from the school. What I do mind is that all schools in a local authority area ought to do the same. If you want a social mix, you can band right across the local authority area. I am not sure I like that but I do not have a problem with it because the behaviour of one school will not badly affect the performance of another.

In Birmingham, however, the minute you let over 400 schools set their own admissions arrangements there was chaos. It meant that they do not match each other. Some people of a faith with a child of a certain ability live in a place where they cannot get them into their local school because they do not live close enough, or into a faith school because they are not of the right faith. Neither does their child have the right ability to get selected in the banding arrangements, so where do they go? They go to the school that still has places left. That is not choice, but it happens in areas where there are a lot of schools that are allowed to have separate admission arrangements.

In supporting very much the amendments put forward, my plea is that it has to make sense across a geographical area. That means you cannot allow schools within the same area to have different admissions arrangements from other schools within it. I think the local authority should manage that, and that there is nothing wrong in all the schools getting together with a local authority, the parents and the primary schools to decide what those criteria should be within a national framework set down by government. But at some point they have to come to an agreement, because education is about a social as well as an academic experience. Your social experience is, in part, the children who are around you in your school—and that matters.

To be honest, that is why parents go to so much effort to exercise choice over where they want their child to go. It is not just for the academic experience but for the social experience—again, it is different with a hospital. That social experience will be right for all children, or as good as we can make it for them, only if we have some camaraderie within a geographical area so that people sit down with the same admissions arrangements. Having done that, teachers should do what they do: get on with teaching the children in front of them, not spending time on trying to get a different bunch of children in their classrooms because they think it gives them a better chance of success.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I have a quick comment. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for his history lesson. During the period he mentioned, Rutland had the unfortunate experience of being part of Leicestershire. Had grammar schools still existed then, I can only look back and wonder what my own education—with no money for tutoring—would have been if the local school in the market town had been left as a secondary modern.

I have a specific question on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, about the backstop power, which I was surprised to see included in, I think, the White Paper. What is the timing of that? At the moment, we know that some boroughs are under extraordinary pressure. When we nationally decide, for instance, to admit tens of thousands of families from Hong Kong—which is a great policy—we create extraordinary influxes of children into particular areas. I was just reading a Manchester Evening News article about the pressures Trafford Council is under at the moment, having had an extraordinary influx of Hong Kong Chinese families into the area. This has unusual ripples in Trafford, where there are grammar schools within the borough.

What would the timing of this be? At the moment, we have local authorities which cannot have any effect on admissions, particularly in those secondary schools that are academies. There is a proposal for a backstop power. This was also before we admitted tens of thousands of Ukrainian families into this country. If in the consultation it is decided not to have the backstop power—I recognise the view from those in the academies sector on local authorities’ admission policies—is there not a case for some emergency power in a situation when tens of thousands of families come into an area? You need different admissions arrangements because you have to think about the cohesion of the area locally. If you have an influx of families, families who have lived in an area for many years find that they cannot get their children into the schools they want. There are also the unpredictable ripples of selection in an area. Can my noble friend the Minister outline the timing of this, because there are boroughs under pressure today?

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[Lord Nash (Con)]

I support my noble friend. I say to the noble Lords, Lord Knight and Lord Blunkett, that if a teacher has been teaching in the private sector for 20 years and is well qualified in their subject—through university and through practising it for 20 years—are we really going to make them take a course for nine months, at the end of which there are no exams, so that they are qualified to teach? I think we need to be a little more flexible about this.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

Just to add to that, I think there are—or there used to be—ways for teachers moving from the independent sector to the state sector which were far less than nine months.

I take the point about a subject like IT. I absolutely agree with the amendment: teaching is a profession, and all the evidence internationally shows that the better qualified the teacher, the better the achievement for students. That is what this is all about. But if the problem is that, in a fast-moving world, there are a set of skills such as IT that people need to come into education to deliver, there needs to be another way of meeting that need and getting those people in rather than saying to the whole of the school system that teachers do not have to have a qualification. This is not being used to get people with specialist IT skills into schools to help children. It is being used by headteachers and schools where they cannot get staff with qualifications in front of children in classrooms, so they go for those without qualifications.

Although I share with the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, the wish to get the latest skills into the classroom without making people do a year-long PGCE, we just need a bit more creative thinking in order to make that happen. It cannot be that we go back to a profession that not only is not a graduate-level profession but is not a qualified profession at all. The message that gives is something that none of us who are committed to the education of children ought to support.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

It is a real pleasure to follow my noble friend. She is absolutely right: this is about profession.

My Lords, we asked to de-group this amendment from that of my noble friend Lord Knight, because it is such an important issue and deserves its own debate. Our Amendment 36 would remove the exemption teachers in academies have from needing to have QTS but gives a grace period until September 2024 to give schools and teachers sufficient time to adjust. We felt that this is a sensible way forward. The amendment redresses the opt-out given by former Prime Minister David Cameron and Secretary of State Michael Gove when they removed that need for academies to have QTS in 2012.

Since that time, there has been a decade where children and young people have been taught in academies by unqualified staff. We would assert that in recognition of the preparation teachers have to undergo, the term “teacher” should be reserved solely for use by those with QTS and that a person in training—or indeed, a specialist or person qualified in IT—should have a different designation. This amendment would ensure that, in future, all pupils in every school were taught by a qualified teacher.

When I was looking at the background to the debate today, I looked at what the Sutton Trust had said. It is a research institution that fights for social mobility so that every young person—no matter who their parents are, what school they go to or where they live—has the chance to succeed in life. In its seminal report, What Makes Great Teaching?, it said that the quality of the teacher is the most important factor in academic and non-academic attainment. We have heard from other noble Lords previously in Committee about the importance of leadership and a justification of the enormously inflated salaries enjoyed by heads within academy trusts, but the Sutton Trust research firmly places the attainment factor in the hands of the teacher in the classroom. Those of us in your Lordships’ House who have had the privilege—indeed, it is a privilege—to work in this profession would no doubt agree.

The research defined effective teaching as that which leads to improved student achievement and focused on six common components that should be considered when assessing teaching quality. First is pedagogical content knowledge. As well as a strong understanding of the material being taught, teachers must also understand the ways students think about the content, be able to evaluate the thinking behind students’ own methods and identify their common misconceptions. These are all areas covered in training teachers towards QTS. It is not just about having the knowledge and content of the subject itself; you have to have knowledge and understanding of how children learn in order to convey that knowledge. The research further identified the quality of instruction, classroom climate, classroom management—which I was very good at, as your Lordships might guess—teacher beliefs and professional behaviours, all of which impact on the quality of education.

I also looked at research by the University of Oxford’s Nuffield College from 2019, which found that pupils are more likely to be taught by unqualified teachers in academies than in maintained schools. It concluded that this widens class-based inequality because schools with more pupils from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to hire more teachers without QTS, and that in secondary schools

“this relationship in academies is almost double that in LA-maintained schools, revealing a role for academies in widening class-based inequality in access to qualified teachers”—

which seems like levelling down, rather than levelling up.

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In particular, Clause 7 allows the Secretary of State to direct a trust to appoint additional directors—for example, to remedy a specific weakness. It also allows the Secretary of State to replace an entire trust board with a board of interim trustees. We heard a number of noble Lords express concerns about this. The Bill also provides for trustees appointed in this way to be remunerated, although our general expectation is that academy trustees will continue to act on a voluntary basis.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

May I seek some clarification on that point? Will the payment of trustees and the interim executive board be the same for maintained schools? There is a parallel situation there, where a governing body of a maintained school is not strong and an interim executive board is put in place. Are the Government proposing that they be paid as well in the intervening period?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I will come back to the noble Baroness on that point. I do not have the answers to hand but I will write to her.

We believe that there will be circumstances where it is right to remunerate trustees who have the particular skills and experience required to tackle the most serious failings in governance and management. These powers offer an alternative to terminating the funding agreement, which could be costly and disruptive to children’s education.

We would expect any additional directors and members of interim trust boards to be drawn from our strongest trusts, in line with our aspiration for a trust-led system. If noble Lords have colleagues who are trustees, or are trustees themselves and wish to discuss this further, I am happy to undertake to meet and explore this point.

My noble friends expressed concerns that these powers could be used in a heavy-handed way, such as terminating a trust’s master funding agreement on the basis of a single breach. As I have explained, the intention behind these measures is to create a more nuanced framework for intervention which avoids resorting to the threat of termination, while ensuring that weaknesses can be addressed. Any Secretary of State is bound by common-law requirements of proportionality. This means that they would terminate a funding agreement only on the basis of a material breach. Moreover, except in very limited circumstances—for example, where a trust is insolvent—the Secretary of State may terminate a funding agreement only after exhausting other options.

In general, the Bill provides for termination only where a trust has not addressed concerns raised through an earlier intervention, whether a compliance direction, a notice to improve or a termination warning notice. I agree that there should be proper scrutiny of how the Secretary of State, through regional directors, exercises any powers of intervention in academies and trusts. The Government’s recent schools White Paper announced a plan for a review of regulation. I assure the Committee and my noble friend behind me that, as part of that review, we will—

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I have not yet heard anything I disagree with, so I shall try to make some different points. This is an odd, strange Bill. On the face of it, there is not a lot in it; however, the issues it addresses are of prime importance. There is nothing more important than the future structure of our school system. Otherwise, we keep revisiting it and do not do the things we really want to.

A lot of us here, especially those of us who have had the honour of having ministerial responsibility, would like to take this opportunity to put the structures behind us and get on with what really makes the difference: what happens in the classroom and outside the school, and the relationship with a whole range of children’s services. On one level, I welcome this opportunity and the Government’s intention to sort out the structures, because I do not like the fragmented, dual system: it is a waste and builds up bureaucracy. There is so much good will to sort it out that I am not quite sure how the Government have managed to mess it up as much as they have.

I find two things odd about the Bill. One is the broad range of powers the Government are taking—the way they are trying to solve this problem. The second is that it is really difficult to table amendments to it. I had a discussion with my Front-Bench colleagues yesterday about the detail of some of the amendments tabled. I asked, “Why have you put that down?” They explained very clearly that that was the only way we could get the debate going. The Bill is not written with a sensible structure—a clear vision, objectives and a means to achieve them: the Government’s clear thinking—which, as my noble friend Lord Knight said, we could amend. All it says is that the Government will take powers on anything they want. It is really tough to amend that, because it does not give the criteria against which they will judge whether to take powers, or what they will do with the powers they take. There is nothing to amend because it is all about the future. That is why the report from the Delegated Powers Committee is critical. There is nothing to discuss because the Government are not saying what they will do.

Therefore, I come to the conclusion—I do not often say this, and I say it in a very mellow tone—that they really ought to withdraw the Bill and think again. That is not to score a political point. The Government’s wish to make this coherent is laudable, and I should like to be with them on that and to have a really good debate on the things we disagree on and on which we agree, but we cannot, given the structure of the Bill.

There is a risk that we will miss the enormity of the changes because of the breadth of the Bill and because it does not spell out what it is doing. I am not saying that that is deliberate—it may be, but I am giving the Government the benefit of the doubt. It talks about academies, but in reality we are talking about every single school in our country. If the proposals in the White Paper are enacted and every school becomes an academy, the Bill will make changes not just to the 47% or 48% of schools that are academies; it is a blueprint for every school in our country.

If you look at the White Paper, there seems to be a wish to have every school as an academy by 2030. I want something better than that. I want to know whether the Government are going to do anything if that does not happen naturally by 2030, because it is important that we know whether that is what we are talking about. I do not want anyone to have to revisit this legal structure in five or six years’ time; that would be a waste of effort.

We are not really talking about academies because, if you look at some of the examples given, the powers that are going to go the Secretary of State are absolutely with academies currently, not the Secretary of State. Although the Bill talks about

“powers in relation to Academies”

and it is claimed that all the Government are doing is putting in law what is in the agreement, with respect, that is not the case. Looking down the list—I had only a quick look; I did not do any checking—I spotted five things. I would suggest that the curriculum, the length of the school day, the appointment of staff, the remuneration of staff and the admissions code are all freedoms that were given to academies but are not available to maintained schools. I am not saying whether I think that is right or wrong, but this clause takes all those freedoms away from academies and gives them to the Secretary of State. So this is no longer about academies. You can use that word but it will not mean an academy in the way we have known it if this Bill becomes law.

The Bill will also affect maintained schools, but they will not be maintained schools in the way we have understood them if it becomes law. At the moment, maintained schools have a relationship with the local authority. They will not have that relationship if the Bill becomes law, but it does not say anything about what the local authority’s relationship with any of these schools will be. That is what I find confusing because, essentially, the Bill sets up a structure for a school system that is neither an academy nor a maintained school in the way we understand them, but a new type of school that is part of a nationalised school system, with all direction, powers and control coming from the Secretary of State, with the local authority having some involvement in special needs and the interests of children, and with the freedoms that were formerly given to academies no longer there.

I am not saying whether that is good or bad—in my view, some of it is good and some of it bad, and I want a debate—but this is no way to change the school system. These changes are enormous. They overturn the work of Michael Gove and other previous Conservative Ministers, as well as that of my noble friend Lord Adonis and other previous Labour Ministers. One of them is sitting behind me; I suspect that others will join in. So I say to the Minister on this set of amendments —my noble friend Lord Knight put it very well—that we want the debate as well. It would be better for our country and the system if the Minister took this Bill back, as we need pre-legislative scrutiny of it, and came back in due course with a structure that will enable us to debate all these things.

If we were to set up a school structure that is neither an academy nor maintained, I would be very happy about that. I would like to put those old rows and debates behind me. If we have not learned something from both those things over the past 20 years, we need our heads examining. We could spend two years thinking up a name for it—I do not mind—but I cannot do that with this Bill. It is not written in a way that makes it possible to amend it in that form. Yet it is no more and no less than an attempt to set up a blueprint for a brand new structure of schools in this country. I really do hope that the Minister will volunteer to do this in a different way.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is with some trepidation that I follow two such experts in education on these Benches. However, I see an uncanny parallel with what has happened in the health service, which I know a little about, and education. At about the same time that my noble friend Lord Adonis was proposing academies, in the then Department of Health we were proposing the creation of foundation trusts. The idea of NHS foundation trusts was to get out of the kind of micromanagement that the report today on the NHS talks about, and to give much more control locally, making those foundation trusts which were going to be the best performers much more accountable to local membership and to the population.

However, after the initial enthusiasm of my good friend Alan Milburn and the team of Ministers then, the normal centralising powers of the Department of Heath took over. Gradually, it has assumed more and more control again over those individual trusts. Now there is virtually no difference between a foundation trust and a non-foundation trust. Listening to my noble friends, I think that there is an uncanny parallel where essentially the Secretary of State for Education is giving himself the tools to have direct responsibility for each school within the system.

My ministerial experience of trying to run the NHS, where we had 300 bodies accountable to us, is that this will not end happily. Do Ministers realise that they will have to answer here for the performance of each individual school? Do they realise the enormity of that task? It then brings us to the problem that we have: that this Bill is ill timed because the department have not thought it through. Whatever our view on academies—there is a somewhat mixed view, on these Benches at least—there is general agreement that it is right for the Secretary of State to set some standards for our school system, and that there must be much more coherence in the system.

I was very struck by the pretty dispassionate report by the Institute for Government three or four months ago on academies, in which it makes the point that, with academies now making up almost 50% of all schools, we have a very inefficient dual system. Local authorities must still support a diminishing number of schools with declining resources, and the regulatory system for academies is incoherent, with financial regulations split from performance management and no single person or office in the system able to hold multi-academy trusts accountable for poor educational performance. The institute then says it is no wonder that far too many multi-academy trusts do not add value to the schools within their control.

The Minister referred at Second Reading to the accountability system and the ability of her department and its officials to hold the system to account. She said that Ministers were launching a review to establish the appropriate model and options for how best to regulate the English school system. Why on earth does she not do the review, see what the outcomes are, then bring legislation to your Lordships’ House and let us properly debate and seek to amend it? I urge her to listen to my noble friends and take this Bill back, or at least to pause it to allow for more work to be done and for us to have proper scrutiny of this vital legislation.

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[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, may not be in the slightest bit surprised by this Bill. The argument can go rather wider. It has been said that the Bill has not been carefully thought out. I am not so sure. I think it has been thought out. We know that we have an Administration who wish to take more power, as has just been said, and wish to be free to do things whenever they want to do them without very much scrutiny.

It has also been said that the Bill lacks any educational philosophy. I am sure that is right. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, made that point. We are up against the fact that you believe that education is either some sort of mechanical means to an end, which can be controlled by a Secretary of State assuming some sort of godlike position, or an end in itself. None of us knows how to get it completely right; hardly any of us knows how to get it even partially right. Therefore, the best thing is to decentralise it and, as many noble Lords have said, to recruit the best people you can into the teaching profession and the governance of schools and let them get on with it.

My father was Secretary of State twice. He used to come home and say, “My problem is that I can’t recruit enough good people to be teachers.” Therefore, maybe the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, is also right: we should put more resources into education.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a specific question about Clause 1(6). It is odd to say that a standard may not be set about determining whether academy grammar schools should retain selective admission arrangements. When I first read that, I understood it as an assurance to grammar schools with selective admission arrangements that this was not an intention to change them, in the same way that there is an assurance to faith schools in the same clause. However, I want reassurance that this would not prevent any future Government changing the law if they wished to abolish selective education.

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for something he said in his speech that helped me understand why I am more half-hearted in my support than others. I hope he will forgive me if I misquote him, but he implied that there had been no thought about areas that could be badly affected, including faith schools, until later. Actually, the Secretary of State and the Minister have been incredibly helpful and supportive in discussions with us about some of the later clauses. The department recognised that there are growing issues connected with voluntary-aided and voluntary-controlled schools and the move to MATs, which need to be dealt with and must be dealt with by legislation. Our experience has been of working behind the scenes with Ministers and officials in a very positive and helpful manner. That perhaps explains why we approach it more positively. Therefore, I say thank you and completely support the noble Lord’s Amendment 27A on the same basis—that these schools should have the protections.

However, picking up the concerns I expressed earlier about the overreach of the Secretary of State’s powers proposed here, I support the thrust and purpose of Amendment 2. The period is possibly too long but that is debatable. It is a proposal that helps to protect. It enables others from the sector to engage with us and for us all to express our opinions about proposed regulations, so that those regulations can be properly debated, the report can come back and the regulations can be amended. Amendment 2 is a really helpful proposal in principle, to assist with the restriction of the Secretary of State’s power.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I apologise for missing some of the earlier speeches; the ones I heard were very helpful. I support this group of amendments because it emphasises the question of freedoms. The one thing I had agreed with the Government on in the past—there has not been very much—was the emphasis on the kind of freedoms schools would have, which is why I am completely bemused by what has happened with this Bill.

The other very important thing has been raised in other comments, which I would like the Minister to take away. If you tell anyone outside this place that there is a Schools Bill and you are talking about schools, interestingly enough they say, “What are the Government proposing for schools? What is the educational vision?” I have talked to teachers, parents and sixth-formers and they say, “What’s the vision?” I have read it all and I say, “There is none, other than that the Secretary of State will decide that later on.” Because there is no vision, these amendments really matter as they give a certain amount of freedom to people who might have some vision, even if I am not convinced that the Bill has it. I was glad to see these amendments.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will make a very brief intervention. I struggle with the whole issue of the curriculum. I basically agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. When I look at many schools, there is not the time in the week for them to do the things that—as the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, just said—might need to be done in the school and community context. The school week is overcrowded and does not leave sufficient flexibility for teachers to use their professional judgment about what needs to be covered. I understand that.

I suppose it is my age—I do not know—but I have always welcomed the entitlement of the child that the national curriculum brought about in the day of the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I was teaching when the noble Lord, Lord Baker, introduced the national curriculum. My kids in an inner-city school got a better deal because we, as teachers, were made to teach them things that, to be honest, we had assumed they were not able to learn. That is a whole history of education to go into.

I find it quite difficult still to balance the entitlement the national curriculum gave to children to learn a broad and balanced curriculum, and still would. I worry that freedom on the curriculum means that a school will choose not to teach music, science or Shakespeare. When you have the relationship of all schools to the Secretary of State, I struggle to be really confident that the DfE, Ministers or civil servants could intervene if a child was being denied that access to a broad and balanced curriculum.

I have never quite worked out how it resolves. It is always the same; in most schools it works well, and they get it right, but we need to protect the right of every child to all the subjects in the national curriculum and all those experiences we think they need. I am asking the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in his response, to reflect on how his amendment would ensure that balance and that the protection of the child’s entitlement will be kept.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I think that we are at risk of having a really interesting debate about the substance of what a child should learn in school, which the Bill does not actually allow us very easily to do. The benefit of what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is proposing is that he is very clear where he is coming from, why he is doing it and what he is seeking to achieve. There is a philosophical underpinning of the amendments that he is proposing, so at least we have something to hold on to when we either agree or disagree with him.

Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part one
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest in connection with Birmingham Education Partnership, to which I may refer at different stages of the Bill. I want to begin—as many of us have done—by welcoming the provisions on the register of children not educated in school, and the extension on inspection. That is to put on record my appreciation to my noble friend Lord Soley, whose Private Member’s Bill—a few years ago I think—laid the groundwork for the measures which we see today. I want to recognise that, and the very close way in which the Minister’s officials work with my noble friend Lord Soley and the group supporting him, so that we are where we are today.

I know that I have worked with my noble friend Lord Blunkett for many years, and I think we get on quite well, but I have now found that he is reading my mind, as I am addressing almost exactly Part 1, which are the measures that he addressed. I am going to try to find different words to say more or less the same thing, but to extend it in some places.

This is important. It is very tempting to look back and say, “I told you so; I said 10 years ago that it would go wrong, and it has gone wrong, and doesn’t that make me feel good?” I do not want to spend more than 30 seconds doing that, but the reason why it is important is that where we are now is part of a story—a narrative—and we will not get the future right unless we understand how we got to the point that we are at.

Quite honestly, this Bill could be called the 2022 academies (abolition) Bill, because if those of us who were around at the time think back to that Bill, we will recall that we were promised that we would be a nation of independent, autonomous schools, free from the control of local government and charged with innovating and raising standards in response to the market. Right at the front of this would be free schools that were thinking the unthinkable.

That has not happened; it is not a description, a decade on, of the school system facing us now. That train has hit the buffers. In its main parts, this Bill tries to remedy the faults that were created by the coalition Government in the years following their election. It does so in two ways: it tries to remedy the legal fault in individual schools, which are academies, and in the school system, which is the multi-academy trust.

There are many good academies, but they are no more successful than any other type of school. MATs are good, but have not proved to be that vision of a school system that will serve all children well and raise standards across the board. At this stage, I want to look at the approaches to both those problems that the Bill outlines.

The proposals in the Bill on academies are incredibly tight. If we look down the list of powers that the Secretary of State is taking for himself, we see that they cover absolutely everything—from governors to the length of the day, the term and the curriculum. Anybody—I look at the noble Lord, Lord Nash—who went through that Bill and served in the department in those days knows that that was not the vision that the academies programme set out to achieve. This Bill is dealing with the failures of past policies.

Like my noble friend Lord Blunkett, I do not mind that. I am probably too much of a centralist—if you have no levers, you cannot implement change. However, I question why the Government and the civil servants are best placed to lay down those standards. There is nothing that recognises expertise, experience and good will at local stages. I worry about that and will want to return to it in Committee.

What worries me most is the multi-academy trusts, and I think that is because we have not really explored them as much as we should. I am in favour of multi-academy trusts; they have always been the godsend of pretty awful legislation in 2010. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, in making that his life’s work in the department—to try to get away from fragmentation to partnership and working together. So I am in favour of them, but there are risks, and the lack of autonomy for schools within a multi-academy trust now is immense. In fact, the Bill makes all academies maintained schools and gives them all the restrictions that apply to maintained schools but leaves them with the name academy. Make no mistake: that is what the Bill does, and it deserves some thought. As much as I like MATs, I am worried about the even greater lack of autonomy and ability to express their own character that schools within a multi-academy trust will get. They are even told about pedagogical approaches, let alone the character of the school. I worry about that.

I also worry that there is no evidence on MATs, because the Government did not let Ofsted inspect them—no body of evidence on MATs has been built up. The Minister said on previous occasions that, as the phrase goes, MATs make good schools. That is not true. Good schools make good MATs. It is a very subtle reversal of what we think. Our challenge is to look at what makes a good school and replicate that; not what makes a good MAT and replicate that. We have no evidence on that, but we have evidence on what makes a good school.

I have very much welcomed MATs over the past years, partly because they are the only show in town, but they are not the only way of forming partnerships. Has the Minister looked at clusters and federations? Has she looked at the possibility of getting small MATs to work together, rather than pushing them all into MAT sizes of whatever the Bill says?

I would really like some reassurances on how the Minister has come to this conclusion. If we are going for partnerships and interdependence rather than independence, where is the evidence that MATs are the way? The real problem is this: a decade ago, her predecessor said that there was only one way to raising schools and that that was academies. They were wrong. I think the Minister has the best of intentions, so I do not want her to say that MATs are the only way to partnerships. I do not know enough at the moment to know that that is true, and I suspect that it might not be. Those are some of the issues that I very much look forward to discussing as the Bill passes its stages.

Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 4th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this Bill, which is a very good use of a Private Member’s Bill, and I congratulate Mark Jenkinson on introducing it and for the work he did in the House of Commons. I also thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on how he introduced it. I want to broadly support it—there is absolutely nothing there with which I disagree—but it gives us the opportunity to discuss a few issues and that is what I want to do.

First, I probably ought to declare an interest. In my work with the Birmingham Education Partnership, we have a contract with the Careers & Enterprise Company. I wish that to be noted.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, may be interested to know that in Birmingham, it is the school-led Birmingham Education Partnership that has the contract with the CEC, not the LEP. When he is looking at future ways of delivering, he may wish to reflect on that and I would be very happy to discuss it with him—and, indeed, the Minister—if that was appropriate.

I want to talk about two areas. First, part of the legislation includes academies—big congratulations to Mark Jenkinson on achieving that. I cannot remember how many times I have tried to include academies in other legislation. I was always told that it was not needed because it was part of the funding agreement. I see this not only as important in the light of the careers education Bill, but—as far as I can remember—it is the first time the Government have made the move and said yes, academies can be affected and influenced by the legislation as well. I have never quite understood why, if you are a child who goes to an academy, you should be denied something that Parliament thinks is good to teach children. This is a really good move and I welcome it.

The main point I wish to make concerns the substance of what might happen now that we have got careers education and guidance going into year 7, which is undoubtedly a good thing. This House has a good record of discussing careers education. We have discussed it in its own right and as part of legislation many times. I worry about the same thing every time we discuss it and that is what I want to address: we are at risk of seeing careers education as merely providing information and widening the horizons of young people. This is absolutely vital. You cannot decide to be something if you do not know it exists. The more you see it, the more you talk about it and the more you talk to people who do that job, the more likely you are to be motivated to try to achieve it. That is where our discussions tend to stop. With respect, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned it and I do not disagree at all, but my own experience as a teacher and a person teaches me that it is not all that needs to happen if we are to achieve what we want to achieve.

Really, there are three parts and we ignore the last two. First, the children need the information. Secondly, they then need to make a decision that it might be for them—and that is so difficult. I look at my own life and there are lots of times when I have had the information, but I have not been able to work out the decision in a way that has been the right way forward. I taught children like that; it was not that they lacked the information, but they lacked the skills to align it to their strengths and weaknesses and then make the decision. The third part is that even if you make the decision that that is what you want to do, taking that first step to do it is really tough. How many times have we wanted to do something, known it is the right thing, but not known how or not been confident enough to take that first step along the road to achieving it? I think of children who do not have a lot of support at home and come from areas of significant deprivation: of course they need their horizons broadening. But it is at those next two steps where they often fall back. They have not got the skills, or they are not helped to make an effective decision, and when they do make the decision, they need someone by their side to give them the confidence to start the journey to try to achieve their dreams.

I am not for a minute saying that is not in the Bill, but I worry that when we talk about this aspect of education, we concentrate a lot on giving children the opportunity to see more people in jobs they may want to do and then leave them floundering because we do not help them with the skills to make the decision and the confidence to move forward.

On the whole, however, I again congratulate Mark Jenkinson and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and I very much hope that this will become a part of our national curriculum.

Higher Education Reform

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I apologise to the House if I was not completely clear in my earlier answer. I hoped and intended to refer to both the quality of jobs and the further education opportunities. Absolutely, our R&D is critical for the future of the country, and the quality of our thinking and debate, which I know the noble Baroness supports profoundly, is also really important. This is not just about jobs. But equally, I was made aware of six computing courses where the dropout rate is over 40%. Is that not something we should look at, compared with other courses where the dropout rate is much lower?

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

I understand why the Government want to make sure that students have the skills they need to manage the course, but there has been a lot of concern caused by the minimum eligibility requirements. Can the Minister confirm that the important thing is that the students have the skills they need to do the course, not that they have GCSE English or maths at level 4? The two things are not the same.

Secondly, successive policy papers from this Government have undermined the creative sector within universities. They have very much encouraged, and I agree with it, maths, science and engineering. I notice that humanities get a mention in this Statement; that is the first time for a long time. But in this policy document, what is there that will nurture and help to progress the creative industries in our universities, which are very much wanted by the economy and employers?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

In relation to the point about skills, on one level, of course, I cannot disagree—I never enjoy disagreeing with the noble Baroness. Of course, people should have the skills they need to access their degree. However, in the majority of cases, if not the vast majority, English and/or maths at GCSE level may well be necessary for the course that they are aiming to do. I stress that this is a consultation; we genuinely have not taken a view on it. There has been a great deal of focus in the media, in the other place and in your Lordships’ House tonight on the GCSE requirement. We will also be consulting on whether one should reintroduce a minimum A-level requirement. But our focus on foundation degrees and on additional opportunities to achieve the levels in English and maths are also part of how we will make sure that this happens.

Initial Teacher Training

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I thank and congratulate my noble friend Lady Donaghy on bringing forward this debate. It is a big issue and the changes that the Government are proposing are worthy of more debate and consideration than they have given us the opportunity of in this House and the other place. This is an important debate.

Nothing in education is as important as teacher training and retention. If one does not have good-quality teachers teaching effectively, none of one’s other aims, ambitions and aspirations gets anywhere. This issue is crucial. The Government are right to look at how we can improve teacher training. It is not perfect and I would not stand here and argue that everything that has happened in the past should be maintained. I also agree with the point that they put forward that we ought to move to evidence-based practice. I am a great admirer of the Education Endowment Foundation; I count myself as one of its biggest supporters.

I am therefore with the Government on looking at the issue. However, I have significant concerns and criticisms of how they have handled it and where we are now. Essentially, this is a fragile system. I cannot think of any other of the great professions—teaching is a great profession—that has to train its practitioners in 38 weeks, 28 of which must be in a school. In any other profession that one cares to look at, training takes more than a year—perhaps four, five or six years. Teaching has to do it in 38 weeks and that makes the system fragile. At the core of this issue is the partnership between higher education institutions and schools. Both are essential.



My biggest concern is that the Government have managed, throughout this set of reforms and their previous announcements over the last few years, to give the impression that higher education does not have a significant contribution to make to the training of teachers. Both are important. Schools are crucial—students must be in schools to learn from best practice, to practise and hone their skills and to be familiar with working with children—but they also need experience of higher education. Teaching is not a technical job; it is a craft, in a way, but it is also more than that. Like any other profession, it has a history and an intellectual and academic background. Where we have got to now and how we got here due to the changes that happened in the past are crucial questions if you are going to be an effective teacher and take us forward.

The biggest problem with the plans put forward by the Government is that they give the impression that we need to train student teachers in what the evidence says is effective pedagogy at this moment in time. There is one promise you can make: that evidence will not be the same in 10 years’, five years’ or even one year’s time. Students should know what is best practice now and should be trained and educated in what pedagogical practice is proven to work, but they also have to have the background, skills and attitudes so that they can critique it and know where those ideas have come from, because they are the people who will develop the next best practice in pedagogy. Their research, their ability to evaluate their own practice and their understanding of how we got here and how we need to move forward require a set of skills that go beyond craft training. I do not object to students learning what evidence shows is good pedagogy at the moment—I am a great believer that pedagogy is all-important—but to bring through a generation of teachers who do not have that wider intellectual and economic academic underpinning to take us forward to the next stage of development is very remiss.

If we have learned one thing from the pandemic, it is that the context in which children live and learn has an impact on how well they do. Everyone knows now that the children’s social and home background affects the way that they learn, their emotional well-being determines how well they will do at school, and their psychological state of being has an influence on how effective teachers can be with them. All that learning about those academic disciplines must be part of teacher training.

Something else that universities can offer are links with other university departments. How good would it be if departments of universities that look at health, sociology or psychology could input into teacher training? I am not saying that that is more important than learning in the classroom, nor that it should be instead of learning about how to keep order in a classroom, but I am saying that for any teacher to be a full professional they must do both. When I look at the Government’s proposals, I cannot see that there is any valuing of those things that I think universities can do more effectively than schools.

We have to remember that these two key partners in educating students to be teachers could both drop out and we could not do anything about it. Schools do not have to train teachers; it is not part of their core business, in a way, and they could decide that they have other priorities. Universities do not have to offer PGCE programmes and could choose to make more money by offering courses of a different nature. The most worrying aspect is that these reforms have brought about a risk regarding the future involvement of both parties. First, for schools, capacity, recovering from the pandemic, helping children to catch up and all that they have to do in terms of providing mentors and getting the early-years framework off the ground could lead to too many of them saying, “We’ve got enough on our plate. We’re not going to do the teacher training bit.”

Secondly, universities and higher education are feeling undervalued. Some of this nation’s greatest universities are about to drop out of teacher training because they do not feel that their interests are valued or that the way they want to do things is acknowledged by the Government. They are not going to offer a course that has so little flexibility for them that they feel they are betraying the way that they approach education—and none of those people actually make much money out of teacher training.

I share the Minister’s and the Government’s ambition to get this right and to do better, but this approach is not perfect and there are real risks. I invite a more open approach with the partners—before we have gone too far and lost too much.