Education and Adoption Bill (Eighth sitting)

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Gibb]

No. There are many examples where the Secretary of State has removed academies from chains. For example, the E-ACT and AET chains have both had their academy rebrokered into other academy chains. There is scope for doing that. I am talking about the provisions about leaving a federation that do not apply to academies leaving an academy chain.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Will the Minister confirm that, if a school wants to leave, it cannot? The examples he gave were of chains in trouble, which had to be broken up because there were very real concerns from the centre. If an individual school wants to leave, I cannot think of a single example where that has been possible. In fact such schools have less freedom, not more, than they had in the maintained system. Will the Minister confirm that is the case?

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[Mr Gibb]

No doubt one would see similar disparities across the system.

The hon. Gentleman keeps asking about a like-for-like comparison. The Department has published detailed analysis comparing the performance of sponsored academies and similar maintained schools. Analysis published in 2012 and 2013 showed sponsored academies performing at a faster rate than maintained schools with similar prior attainment, levels of deprivation and pupil starting points. Last week, the NFER published data comparing the 2014 GCSE performance of academies open for two to four years with those of matched maintained schools. It found that the percentage of pupils achieving five or more A* to C GCSEs in sponsored academies was 2.9 percentage points higher than in similar local authority schools. With that statistic, I hope to have put this debate to rest once and for all.

[Bill Esterson]

Far from it. The Minister accepted the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak about children with disabilities and SEN not making the same progress as other children, whether in academies or elsewhere. That is surely why the amendment is so important. There must be a proper review of children with the greatest needs before any changes are made.

[Mr Gibb]

We are against not analysis but delays to academisation. This kind of well-intentioned proposition can and probably would lead to delays, which we believe damage children with special educational needs as much as, if not more than, children without special needs.

[Bill Esterson]

The Minister says that he does not want delays to academisation. Ofsted finally published today its report from three months ago about the Collaborative Academies Trust. One of its concerns was the failure to close the gap between the most disadvantaged children and everyone else. Does that not show that the rush to academisation is the problem? We need this kind of amendment in the Bill so that there is a proper review, especially for the most disadvantaged children.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gibb]

Yes, that is right, because Bristol’s oversight of that particular school, of which it would have had oversight for decades, would have been proven not to be effective. We are not prepared to tolerate or risk a further decade of unsuccessful oversight. We are looking at underperformance. Where regional schools commissioners see high performance in schools, they are simply not interested in using their resources to intervene. That is the system to which we are moving.

[Bill Esterson]

I was pleased to hear the Minister praise a local authority for the quality of its support—I have not heard him do that often—but if Bristol or another local authority is doing a good job and an academy in that area is classed as category 4, would the Minister consider allowing the local authority to take over from the existing sponsor? The process seems to be moving in one direction only.

[Mr Gibb]

The school will have changed into an academy x months ago from that local authority. The local authority will have had the chance to improve the school but did not succeed, so the school then became a sponsored academy. If it fails, the wrong answer would be to send it back to the local authority. The right answer is either to ensure that the multi-academy trust is developing an effective school improvement service or to move the school to a new sponsor.

[Bill Esterson]

The Minister has forgotten what has been happening for the past few years. A large number of “good” or “outstanding” schools have been converted into academies. In fact, for a time, they were allowed to convert only if they were “good” or “outstanding”. If those schools end up in category 4, the logic of the Minister’s argument suggests that a good local authority should be able to take them over.

[Mr Gibb]

Those schools will have converted voluntarily and many still stand alone. Collaborating with other academies is the long-term answer even for stand-alone academies. That is happening. We now have 400 or 500 sponsored academies, many of which started life as “good” or “outstanding” schools. When a converter academy goes into special measures, we would expect it to collaborate and be taken over by a successful sponsor, because, as Ofsted said in its annual report at the end of last year,

“sponsor-led academies have had a positive and sustained impact on attainment in challenging areas”.

It is because of judgments such as that, and because of the experience of the academies movement, that we are determined that that must be the right approach to dealing with failure.

Turning to two of the points made by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak, I can confirm that the technical answer I gave him regarding education, health and care plans is correct. Also, he said in an intervention that clause 7 has stripped us of all flexibility in all circumstances, but that is incorrect. Clause 12 gives the Secretary of State a power in certain exceptional circumstances to revoke an academy order made under proposed new section 4(A1) or section 4(1)(b) of the Academies Act 2010. The Secretary of State has the flexibility in some circumstances to revoke her own order, but we will discuss those rarefied circumstances when considering clause 12.

Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.