Academies Bill [Lords]

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Monday 19th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

It is certainly not our policy, and I am sorry that the headmaster of Woodberry Down has been told that. I shall write to him later or call him, or perhaps he, I and the right hon. Gentleman can have a cup of tea together, to ensure that that excellent school can become an academy by September if it wishes.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I set the right hon. Gentleman straight on one point? Yes, the former Children, Schools and Families Committee did recommend that all schools should have the same curriculum freedoms as academies, but it was never necessary to expand academy status to outstanding schools in order to do that. It was always under the control of central Government and the Department, not local authorities.

[Michael Gove]

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s point, but as a believer in freedom I believe not just that schools should have the chance to have greater freedom over the curriculum but that they should have other freedoms as well. I remember the former Member for South Dorset, who is now Lord Knight of Weymouth, making the point in debate here that academies also have freedoms on pay and conditions, and they need those freedoms to generate the improvement that has been such an attractive characteristic of the academies movement. I agree that the Department can disapply the national curriculum when specific schools apply, but I should like to see a wider range of freedoms.

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[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I suppose that one could describe this as the education, education, education moment for the new Government. They have not called it that, but this is their flagship piece of legislation. The dramatic difference is that in 1997 the new Labour Administration went straight for a policy that would help the most underprivileged children in our society. The academy programme that emerged later was targeted at the children in most need, at the poorest towns and cities and at schools that were underperforming badly.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the proof of the pudding is in the eating? In Hackney, six new city academies have been built or are being built, and 84% of pupils have gained five A to Cs in the one that has so far had results. Surely, that proves that the previous Government’s policy was a good one.

[Mr Sheerman]

I am trying to be even-handed, but I take my hon. Friend’s point. Over 13 years, the Labour Government built more new schools and more new colleges and renewed more educational facilities than any Government in the history of our country. That building programme is indisputable, whatever one thinks about BSF and whether if Labour had been returned, we would have had to tamp it down or ease it in over a much longer period. However, we can discuss that at another time.

The difference between what we did in 1997 and what is proposed in the Bill did not come out in the speech made by the Secretary of State. Why go for outstanding schools? What is the magic of the outstanding school? The right hon. Gentleman referred to the work of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, saying that we wanted to free things up. Yes, we produced three strong reports that recommended giving schools more control over the curriculum, taking away some of the testing and assessment and reducing the six levels of school accountability. We said all those things, but we did so in the spirit of their being particularly important for all schools, not just the outstanding ones.

I believe that the new Administration, like the previous one, want to do the best for every child in our country. We only have one chance for education and both sides of the House—all three parties—want at heart to identify the talent and potential of our children and push them as far as they can go. It is important that we start from that basis, because when we look, as I have done, having spent nearly 10 years as Chair of the Select Committee, over the past 20 or 30 years—a period that the Committee used to call “From Baker to Balls” or “From Butler to Balls”—we can see that there are many more continuities in education policy than we might think if we heard only rousing speeches from Front-Bench speakers on either side.

There is a great danger in the Bill. Every Government need to be able to deliver their policies, and I have never known a policy be delivered by a demoralised work force. One of the secrets of our success over the last 13 years was that gradually, with difficulty, we got the teachers on side, partly by paying them better than ever before, rewarding them and respecting them more. That was the secret of our success and I hope the new Government will continue it.

Another tremendous partnership is needed to deliver policy—with the people who work in local government. It is easy to say that they have only back-office functions or unnecessary core functions, and that somebody else could do things better. Over the years, I have visited schools and local authorities around the country and I found that the one thing most school leaders and most people in schools want is a good, supportive local authority that knows the system, supports schools, knows what the difficulties are and tries to do everything it can to make the education system a success across the piece. I am worried that the Bill will be atomising—there will be a direct relationship between a big central Department and schools, with no intermediary. The people who were the intermediaries—local government—have high skills and it would be sad if the Government wasted them.

[Charlotte Leslie]

The hon. Gentleman has put in a lot of work on education and has great expertise. On the point about demoralising the work force, in my work on education, where I may have more expertise, I have seen great demoralisation of head teachers and deputy heads because of the amount of bureaucracy they feel they have to do. The head teacher of Avonmouth primary school, where I am a governor, says that the burden of bureaucracy has become unbearable. Dealing with bureaucracy may be one of the main incentives for people to seek academy freedoms. Some of the work force have been demoralised by excessive bureaucracy and they may seek to alleviate it.

[Mr Sheerman]

I am afraid that I must disagree with the hon. Lady. I go into many schools, and one head will say, “I can’t do my job; I can’t cope; I can’t do anything, because of the amount of bureaucracy, red tape and all that,” yet in an almost exactly similar school, with a good leadership, the head will say, “Bureaucracy, red tape. We skip over that. We run the school for the children. And that all comes later, and we deal with it.” I am always suspicious, because I guarantee that the House will spend time over the next years introducing all sort of things—health and safety, child protection and child safety measures, and so on—and that we will end up with more bureaucracy in schools. We will gladly do both things at the same time.

[Dr Pugh]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Sheerman]

May I continue for the moment?

I worry about the speed at which the Bill is being considered and the fact that the debates in Committee will be constrained to three days. That makes the Bill look like a bit of panicky measure. A couple of interventions rather upset me. An hon. Gentleman—an old friend of mine—asked whether the policy was similar to that on grant-maintained status, as did another Back Bencher. I hope that the policy is not a reversion to that. If that is all that it is—a return to the old grant-maintained situation—I really believe that it is a backward step.

Let us put all this into perspective. Sometimes, even among colleagues in the Tea Room, I ask, “How many secondary schools do you think there are in England?” and they often get it wildly wrong. There are 3,500, and there are about 20,000 primary schools. Many people do not know that. How many academies did we aim for? Two hundred, rising to 400—between 5% and 6% of secondary schools have academy status. It was a pilot, which makes me wonder why it caused so much passion, even among Labour Members. Indeed, the shadow Secretary of State was very passionately against academies at one stage in his career, early in the days when I was Chairman of the Select Committee. Academies were an interesting and successful pilot. They have not been given enough time. On the freedoms that we gave academies, yes, schools should be able to have that status on licence if they meet the standard.

I want to pursue another point. I, too, believe that the most worrying part of the Bill is the bit about free schools. I can understand the argument for academies, and I know why the Government are doing this—I can understand all that—but the question of free schools worries me indeed, not because of the suggestion that, somehow, the private sector will insidiously come in and run our schools. The Labour Government used the private sector all the time in education. Of course, we have to do so, and it is a healthy relationship: the private sector is a very good partner. It delivers all sorts of things. We called it into a number of local authorities to sort things out when they failed. So let us view the private sector as part of the solution and the answer, rather than thinking that it will come in through the back door.

I am worried about a different feature of free schools. When Tony Blair was very keen on faith schools, those of us who looked at them were concerned about the way in which they were delivered too easily to people who just said, “I want a faith school,” because they happened to have a certain brand of religion or to be a certain kind of Muslim or Christian. Without great care, that way leads to a deal of disunity and the break-up of social cohesion in our towns and cities. I would hate free schools to lead to that break-up. Baroness Sharp put it very well in the other place when she said that every area has a community of schools and that, if the legislation breaks up that community, we will put ourselves in great danger of harming the unity of our communities.

Consultation with schools, pupils and parents is very important, but it is still very weak under the Bill. The more I look at the Bill, the more concerned I am. We take so much notice of the governors of a school at one moment in time, but the school will go on for another 50 or 100 years. The school that I went to is, I think, still going after 500 years. The fact is that asking the question of one small set of school governors today will bind in a whole community, and the school at the centre of the community. The community should have something to say about the future of education in that community.

All the work that I have done in education has led me to believe that we have to give schools a decent chance of teaching a representative bunch of kids from the community—not all the poorest, not all the richest, but a good blend. Sometimes one has to be brave in how one selects; sometimes one has to be very brave. People should read the Sutton Trust report on how to handle school admissions. The Committee that I chaired did some very good work on admissions, and the schools admissions scene has been transformed in the direction that we recommended. There will always be schools that are better than others, and envy about not being able to get into those better schools. The Sutton Trust is right: the only way to sort that out is to have a fair system of banding, and when there is high demand for school places, there should be admission by ballot.

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[Glenda Jackson]

I cannot afford the hon. Gentleman the same compliment that he afforded me regarding politeness. It is a pity that he could not listen to me with the attention that I have afforded to his colleagues during the debate, because I did not say that I knew nothing about education. I have completely forgotten the point that he was trying to make, but that is probably just as well. If he really wants me to go back into why I am so suspicious of what the Bill is doing, I shall do so. It is first because of the speed with which the Government are driving the Bill through the House and, secondly, because of the complete lack of consultation on the fundamental and major changes inherent in it. There is an illogicality in that regard, because we have heard much from the Government about their absolute commitment to localism and about enabling local people to make local decisions about what affects their local communities. That is the absolute bedrock of his party’s commitment.

[Mr Sheerman]

How does my hon. Friend square all this with the Prime Minister’s speech yesterday, in which he bragged about his commitment to the big society and inclusion?

[Glenda Jackson]

I must be entirely honest with my hon. Friend: I tend to avoid speeches by the Prime Minister. If you have heard one, you have heard them all. The Government are constantly arguing that localism is all and that local people must make the decisions about housing, the erection of wind farms, jobs and everything else, but on this central and essential issue—the education of all our children—that local dimension is, apparently, thrown out of the window. There is to be no consultation with the people who really matter.