Academies Bill [Lords]

Ben Gummer Excerpts

Monday 19th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

The hon. Lady made that point to the Minister in his introductory remarks and he said that it was up to the headmaster of any school that wishes for academy status to consult the community about it. That is exactly what is happening in one school in my constituency, which was taken into an academy as introduced by Labour Members. It is consulting widely and of its own volition—and very successfully.

[Glenda Jackson]

With respect to the hon. Gentleman, if I heard the Secretary of State correctly, and if I remember the changes being made by the Bill, it says not that they must, but that they should engage with poorly achieving schools. It is much too broadly drafted for there to be any real input at all—for a high-achieving school to make the widest possible contribution to its local community. I am not saying that high-achieving schools are not doing that already—certainly, academies in some areas do—but what the Government propose will set up a barrier that will be driven, as we all know because we are all human beings who see it all the time, by parents. Schools will be in the position of selecting not pupils but parents, and those parents will be selecting them.

The idea that there is an equivalency in education between the voices of parents simply is not true. A colleague of the hon. Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) raised an issue that we all know about—people who have enough money to buy themselves into the catchment area of a school they wish their children to attend. In many instances, that practice excludes the children of people who were born and raised in the area and whose parents and grandparents were born and raised there. That happens a great deal in my constituency.

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[Mr Hunt]

That is a very good question. It has taken me so long to get the information out of the Department for Education that it relates only to the whole maintained sector. Our next stage is to pursue those questions locally. Of course, as the hon. Gentleman indicates, the data are influenced by the fact that, given the achievement gap in English schools, poorer students are disproportionately entered for equivalent qualifications at GCSE level. Academies, which have served lower-income cohorts to date, have mirrored that scenario, but that is surely the challenge that academies should take up.

We do not want the soft bigotry of low expectations, with academy league tables benefiting at the expense of pupil learning. That two-tier education fails to give some of our poorest communities the education that they deserve. Sadly, certain academies have accentuated that trend. As independent schools, they are exempt from the curriculum and, to date, have not had to reveal the details of their results beyond the basic percentage of their pupils who pass five-plus GCSEs or the equivalent.

I refuse to accept that that trend of teaching is inevitable. In my constituency, the Mitchell business and enterprise college on the Bentilee estate—for which my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) did so much good work in his time as a Minister and where youth unemployment is high and household income low—continues to offer rigorous academic subjects to all its pupils, not least because that is what business wants. Genuine vocational training requires a solid academic foundation up to the age of 16—a view espoused by employers in vocational areas of work. So it is of great value that amendments passed in the other place now ensure that academies are subject to freedom of information legislation, but there seems little change in the Bill to ensure that as many academies as possible deliver the broad curriculum that provides a stimulating learning environment. In many cases, freedom for academies has produced a narrowing of the curriculum options.

[Ben Gummer]

I am fascinated by the hon. Gentleman’s destruction of the policy supported by Labour Members for so many years. Given his firm disapproval of the independence of academies, I am interested to know whether he would recommend that the school that he attended should submit itself to the authority of the local authority, as he clearly wishes to pursue that line for other schools?

[Mr Hunt]

To be honest, I did not quite follow the hon. Gentleman’s line. The point that was pursued by Labour Members when we were in government is that standards in teaching and academic qualifications matter, and if academies produce league table inflation at the cost of the education of their pupils, that is to no one’s benefit. The worry is that, with greater freedoms, there is a narrowing of curriculum options, which is what the statistics have proved.

I have no ideological opposition to academies. In many situations, they are refreshing, innovative and provide the aspirational step change in low-income communities that can transform the life chances of many young people. I am proud of the Labour Government’s achievements in that regard, but we need greater transparency. What we need in the Bill is an understanding that there can be no more equivalence at the cost of academic rigour, as that is to the cost of the educational life chances of our young people. That is what we are dealing with. We want a tailoring of the curriculum in many cases, so that teachers have control, and can teach to the needs of young people and pursue vocational and academic topics, but we need clarity, accountability and transparency about these issues.

This is about more than league tables and data sets; it is about studying and learning skills and—dare I say it?—enjoyment. Too many schools and academies are denying that to some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country by not allowing the full academic curriculum. We must not make economic deprivation a licence for intellectual deprivation.

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[Gavin Barwell]

That is a helpful clarification and answers some of the points that have been made by Labour Members suggesting a bias in favour of outstanding schools.

The shadow Secretary of State tried to give the impression that the entire system of state education was being ripped up. If he really believed that, it is strange that we have not seen more Labour Members in the Chamber during this debate. He tried to claim that the Bill was a perversion of the Labour party’s approach to academies. In an earlier intervention, I cited remarks by Tony Blair on 24 October 2005, when he said:

“We want every school to be able quickly and easily to become a self-governing independent…school”.

What the Government are doing may be a departure from what the previous Secretary of State was doing, but it certainly is not a departure from what the Labour Government under Tony Blair were planning to do. Indeed, the Government are fulfilling the promise that he made.

The shadow Secretary of State’s main objection was that the proposals would create a two-tier system, but some of my hon. Friends have already made the point that that is what we have at the moment. Some schools are academies and some are not. If parents have the money to move into the catchment area of a good school, their children will get a good education. If parents are locked into a particular area by lack of money, they have to put up with the school in that area. There is huge so-called social segregation in our schools. One school has just 4.2% of families on income-related benefits, but at the other end of the spectrum there are schools with nearly 70% of families on income-related benefits.

The shadow Secretary of State claimed that the Bill would widen the gap—that somehow allowing outstanding, good and satisfactory schools to get better is a bad thing. That is the classic Labour argument of trying to hold the good down in order to narrow the gap. Surely what we should do is try to get everybody to improve. The Secretary of State confirmed that these schools will partner with a good school, and that is an important element. I would not want a free-for-all. I want to see schools collaborating and working together. Even when it comes to outstanding or good schools, there are too many parents who do not have confidence in those schools and choose to move out of the area or to the independent sector, and we want those schools to improve. We want parents to have confidence in their local schools, but they can have concerns even about some of the schools that we class as good or outstanding. The Government’s policy on the pupil premium should give schools an incentive to take pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.

My final point in response to Labour Members is that they seem to lack confidence in the teachers and parents of children from deprived areas. In my experience, the vast majority of teachers are motivated by the desire to help the least well-off kids. Rather than hearing a lot of publicity about parents setting up these new free schools, I hope that we will see teacher groups going into some of my most deprived communities and using this legislation to drive up standards in those areas.

[Ben Gummer]

On free schools, is it not the case that Sweden has a couple of thousand people in the independent sector, while here the figure for children in the independent sector is a rather shameful 7%? Surely a good result of the free school policy would be to bring that number down and bring more people back into the state sector.

[Gavin Barwell]

I agree with my hon. Friend.

I should like to address a couple of questions to the Minister. First, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), who has now left the Chamber, made some good points about the importance of academic qualifications, although they were rather at odds with the record of the Labour Government. I understand that the Government have now accepted an amendment in the Lords to ensure that academies are counted as public bodies under freedom of information legislation. I believe that there is an issue in relation to the impact on local councils. May we have more clarity on what areas of council spending will not be devolved down to academies?

The Secretary of State spoke earlier about the role of local authorities. My own council often finds itself defending schools that are not performing particularly well. I would much rather that local authorities were the champion of parents in their area and stood up for higher standards, rather than making the case for schools that were underperforming.

On consultation, we do not want a bureaucratic arrangement that is going to slow the process down. Like my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), I am keen to see progress made quickly. However, it is important to have consultation, and not just with parents in the school in question. When we try to change things in schools, we often find that the existing parents might have one view, while parents in the community around the school who are unhappy with the school might have a completely different one.

The Bill places before us this fundamental question: what is the best way to raise standards in our schools? I particularly admired the comments of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), the former Chairman of the Select Committee. In complete contrast to the shadow Secretary of State’s political speech, he recognised that Members on both sides of the House have a passion for driving up education standards, and that we simply disagree about the best way to do it. That is a reasonable disagreement that should be aired and debated in the Chamber, and we should not imply that some people simply do not care about the issue.

The fundamental question is what is the best way to raise school standards. The previous Government believed that the best way was by driving standards from the top down. Indeed, in the debate in the other place, Opposition Members were clear that the improvements made by academies were the result of their getting all the Government attention. They almost suggested that it was the Department for Education that was responsible for those improvements.

Our belief is that the best way to drive up standards is to allow a choice of schools. There should be some surplus places to allow people to choose, and we must give schools freedom so that they can differentiate and offer parents different things. Different children might well benefit from different styles of education. We should empower parents in that way and give them that choice. That bottom-up approach is the way to drive up standards, not the top-down approach of the previous Government. It is with great pleasure that I speak in favour of the Bill, which I believe will make a profound difference to parents and children across our country.