Academies Bill [HL]

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I have two points about the funding of academies. I will speak particularly to Amendments 15 and 16, which were tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden.

Reflecting on the experience of grant-maintained schools, the Minister will accept that the perception of unfair funding, as much as the debated reality of the funding position, did a huge amount to undermine the reputation of those schools in the wider education system. To be fair, they did a large amount to discredit the reform. If the extension of academy status more widely, which I support, is to carry public confidence and confidence in the education world, it is vital not only that the funding arrangements for schools transferring to academy status are fair but that they are seen to be fair. The only way they are likely to be seen to be fair is if there is an independent validation process of the overall financial scheme by which the academies are to be funded.

The amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, are very interesting in that respect, in that she seeks to inject the National Audit Office into the validation of the arrangements for the funding of academies. I have considered very carefully her amendments. To require the National Audit Office to advise on each individual academy, given that we will be talking about a very large number, would be an extremely bureaucratic process that is not conducive to the public interest. However, it would be worth the Committee reflecting on—and the Minister giving us an initial reaction to considering further—whether the National Audit Office might play a role in validating the overall academy scheme in respect of funding. It could concern the principles of action by which the Government are allocating funds to academies, particularly when it comes to a number of the areas that the noble Baroness mentioned in respect of special educational needs funding, which, to be frank, will be contested by local authorities.

That view is given added force by the letter of 15 June 2010 which the noble Lord, Lord Hill, sent to Members of the Committee. He sets out in the annexe the arrangements for the allocation to academies of funding that otherwise, in respect of other schools, goes to local authorities for children with special educational needs. He states:

“Academies do receive a share of funding which is for: funding retained from the Schools Budget for centrally provided SEN support services; behaviour support services; licences and subscriptions …; therapies and other health related services; and education and welfare services”.

However, they currently,

“do not receive a share of local authorities funding in the following”—

very important—

“areas: educational psychology services; SEN administration, assessment and co-ordination; parent partnership services …; monitoring SEN provision; SEN transport”—

SEN transport is an extremely expensive item in local authority funding—

“support for inclusion between mainstream and special school; and pupil referral units, education out of schools and excluded pupils”.

Those also are very significant items of local authority spending, which have a huge impact on the budgets of individual schools.

It is not clear to me from the noble Lord’s letter what course the Government propose to take in respect of those important items of spending. Clearly, they will need to be considered case by case in some detail before a proper funding scheme can be put together in relation to the expanded number of academies that we are considering in this Bill.

The conclusion of that annexe has a wonderful sentence of the kind which I fear to say I signed off on so many times when I was a Minister, but to which the House should pay very great attention. It says:

“We want to work with local authorities on what these changes will mean for local authorities, and the important … role they have to play”.

Let us be clear—that means that we do not have the foggiest idea at the moment what the actual arrangements are that we are proposing, and a great deal of work will be needed before we will be in a position to give any detailed guidance on what that will mean. That further strengthens the case for having some independent process of assessment and reporting on the overall scheme for funding academies. Having the National Audit Office or some other independent body—although the National Audit Office is clearly eminently equipped for the work—giving independent validation to the overall scheme being used for academies, and advising Parliament that the scheme meets the commitments that the Government have given, that academies will be fairly funded in relation to other maintained schools, could be a very important element in ensuring that these arrangements command public confidence.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, it is apparent that academies will have more money in their fist, so to speak, than community schools. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has just made clear, an enormous amount of money can be withheld by the local authority, which will now come into the academies’ own purview for them to spend. The difficulty with having an outside agency to lay down frameworks or even to observe the frameworks is that there is enormous variety from one local authority to another in the amount that they hold back and the amount of these services—the noble Lord read them out—that they provide. Authorities such as the London Borough of Wandsworth, where I live, withhold less than 5 per cent from school budgets for their central services, whereas others withhold well over 20 per cent to provide centralised services. The inequality will be very apparent. I share the wish expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to have some way in which to demonstrate that fairness is being exercised and is being seen to be exercised, but it would be difficult to do that, given the huge disparity at present. Of course, it will be possible for schools, once they become academies, as they do now, to contract back with the local authority for some of these services, which will return that money to the local authority. However, in many cases—it is the case in Hackney, for example—very few of the academies do that.

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble friend Lord Hunt. I apologise to the Committee that I did not speak at Second Reading, so I shall keep my intervention short. There is a great desire on the part of the new coalition Government and the Secretary of State to free lots of schools, but there is a paradox in that that requires his dictatorial powers to free everybody—he will lay down what freedom means to everybody. Our task is to ensure that the Secretary of State makes it clear to us in the legislation in what sense he is not taking away powers from your Lordships and another place. We need to scrutinise that, because there are a lot of anxieties about the scale and ambition of this project and the haste with which it is being implemented. There is also a worry that there might be some unintended unfairness to schools left outside the academies field or to local authorities. It would be good if the Minister could make it clear that considerations of fairness and equity and not taking powers away from the legislature arbitrarily will be adhered to.

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I hope that that provides greater clarity about the government's intentions, particularly on the important matter of deficits, in the light of which I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

Before the noble Baroness speaks to my noble friend’s response, might the Government consider the arbitrary nature of the £100,000 cut-off for the deficit? For a very small primary school, £100,000 is a very high proportion of its total budget, whereas for a large secondary school it is a very small proportion. Would not a percentage of the budget be a better benchmark for an acceptable deficit than an arbitrary sum?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I will reflect on that. The point of the figure is to provide some benchmark. My noble friend Lady Perry is quite right to say that individual circumstances vary greatly from school to school, and each of those circumstances would need to be taken into account in forming a view as to what is a sensible sum. That figure has been included as a rule of thumb, but I take the point that one may need to exercise discretion.

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[Lord Goodhart]

My Lords, I can be very brief because I could not possibly improve on the speech made by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. She said everything that I was thinking and would have said less effectively. Therefore, I will just say that I strongly support Amendment 61, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. Children from other faiths should not be required to take part in collective worship, which is religion rather than education. If Muslim or Jewish parents want to send their child to a Christian school because it is the best, or the only convenient, school in their area, should they be unable to do so because they are unwilling to allow their child to attend Christian worship? Surely not: that would be entirely wrong. It is important that academies that are faith schools should not take steps that are likely to exclude the admission of students from another faith. Insisting on attendance at services would lead to the absence of members of another faith. Amendment 61 is of great importance and I hope that it will be accepted.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

I will speak briefly. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure the right Reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells on the subject of free schools. As I understand it, the original academies programme, instigated by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, allowed academies to be set up which were faith schools, and many have been. I do not think that free schools alter that position in any way and I hope that my noble friend can reassure us on that point.

[Lord Kilclooney]

My Lords, reference has been made to Scotland and Northern Ireland. I serve as a governor on the Armagh Protestant Board of Education. It is an Anglican foundation that controls the Royal School in Armagh and is chaired by the Archbishop of Armagh. It is 400 years old and was visited by Her Majesty the Queen this year to celebrate that anniversary. The majority of the pupils now are Church of Scotland Presbyterian, reflecting the population in Northern Ireland. However, we are getting an increasing number of Roman Catholic students from the Republic of Ireland who want a more liberal education.

I listened with great interest, the previous time the subject was raised, to the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for a 25 per cent intake of pupils of other denominations. The problem in Northern Ireland, which has been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is that if you have schools with pupils of only one religion, parents will come to live near that school and so the area will come to contain people of one religion. When a factory opens near the school, all the employees will be of one religion and you build up a sectarian division. We suffered from this in Northern Ireland, not through deliberate discrimination, but because, with the Roman Catholic system that we had, most of the people who went to a school were Roman Catholics, most of the houses were bought by Roman Catholics and most of the jobs in the neighbourhood went to Roman Catholics. Sometimes people in England thought it was deliberate discrimination, but it was not; it was a reflection of the education system that still exists in Northern Ireland. Much as I am a great supporter of faith schools, which have a great record—I very much admire the way that the Church of England administers schools in England—the idea of a 25 per cent intake of people of other religions should be encouraged.

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[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate, inevitably ranging over a lot of issues. I have been struck again and again by the firm agreement on the requirement for academies, in whatever form, to partner and to be the supporting school for schools in difficult situations that need that form of help. That is very important.

The other crucial thing is what has been put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. The two groupings of schools might not otherwise be considered to be within the scope of academies. I am tied up with some art schools and music schools and I know how difficult it is for them to get support from local authorities. Extra support and involvement in the academy status would be a good idea. I hope that I am wrong about the boarding school side of things. It is probably a bad idea to have too many children grouped in special needs circumstances. Certainly, to be in a school that can provide help, support and encouragement is excellent.

Above all, we must ask the Minister to work out a way in which he can satisfy us that, once the academy status is confirmed, these schools will partner deprived schools. On the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, a form of formal or informal monitoring after it has taken place might help as well, but we will need a report on how things are going.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, this is a hugely disparate group of amendments. We have covered a lot of topics and it has been difficult sometimes, despite the intelligence of Members of the Committee, to see any common thread in what has been discussed. I want to return to the issue raised by the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln. They deal with the absolutely key issue of the catchment area from where the academy will draw its pupils.

In recent years, I have been increasingly concerned over the whole issue of catchment areas, largely because we have seen that, where there is a good, strong school, parents who can afford to do so understandably—I do not blame them for it at all—cluster around the school and buy or rent houses in the area. There are even stories of parents being slightly economical with the truth in all sorts of interesting ways about where they live in order to claim that they are within the catchment area of a good school. Meanwhile, the schools most in need are in the most deprived areas. The people who live near those poor schools, often on local council estates, do not have the option of moving. They cannot buy their way into the catchment area of a good school.

This is one of the big issues for academies. I know that in Hackney the academies do not have catchment areas, but they do use banding and lotteries. I know that my noble friend Lord Lucas has an amendment—for various reasons, it is not in this group—that raises the issue of banding. I ask the Minister to think seriously about the issue of “wholly or mainly” in a local area and about the freedom which grammar schools have had since their inception and which grant-maintained schools had in their day—and which, as I say, many existing academies have taken—that allows them to go outside their area, maintaining the inclusiveness of the intake by means of banding but giving it a social mix or even a mix of talent.

[Lord Lucas]

I support entirely what my noble friend has just said. It is important, particularly when we are granting new freedoms to outstanding schools, that one of our ambitions for them is that they should reach out of the area immediately around them, which frequently has been colonised by people who can afford to buy houses in the area, to those who are not in that position. We will come to my amendment later. Perhaps I take a more active view than my noble friend, but I certainly would like it to be an ambition that all these schools should free themselves from geographical catchment areas that allow for their capture by financially mobile people. They should, at the least, be able to reach out and include those beyond the local area.

I also support the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in what he said about state boarding schools. They have a strong role to play and I would like to see an increasing role for them. As he says, most of them are excellent, but they are clearly not serving their local areas in any particular way. That also applies to religious schools. Existing schools such as the Jewish Free School have a wide catchment area and are excellent. I cannot see why they should be excluded just because their communities are widespread. They should not be geographically confined, particularly if new schools are following the 50 per cent rule. I do not see any damage arising from that. Again, historically we have supported dance, drama and music in specialist schools and I suspect that it would do our national pride a bit of good if we supported tennis. All in all, I come down to agreeing with the first amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I cannot see a function for subsection (6)(d) that could not reasonably and justly be dealt with in the ordinary discretion of the department.

Having agreed with noble Lords opposite, I take issue with my noble friend Lady Williams. If I start from the same premise as she did, I get to opposite conclusions. The community that my local primary school is part of is the village in which it is situated. The school is governed from Petersfield eight miles away, but that is an alien presence, not a local one. A primary school is very local, so one that has its roots in the local community is a much more local thing than one that is subject to the whims of the local authority, which has a lot of considerations other than the wishes of the local community. I see that as progress.

I spent part of my life running a small business, which felt like a primary school in that there were lots of things that I could not do myself. However, if I wanted to know about employment law, I subscribed £250 a year to a telephone service from Sage or someone else. I did not need a local authority to provide it for me. There will be lots of other providers of these services—indeed, there are many—and it is not like having to pay a City lawyer £500 an hour every time advice is needed. Services are built to be provided to small enterprises like primary schools.

However, I share my noble friend’s concern about how fragile primary schools are. The wrong head in a primary school can kill it in about two months, so I urge the Minister, when he comes to consider applications from primary schools, to make sure that they have strong heads and governing bodies and that they are committed to stay in place for some time. It may well be, over the long term, that a primary academy would be better as part of a wider federation of some kind, such as a group of primary schools, or as a school that is connected to a secondary school, as the existing primary academies are. That would provide the resources to deal with problems as they arise and which can so easily bowl over a small primary school.