Education and Adoption Bill

Catherine West Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend makes a very valuable point about accountability procedures, and that is certainly something we will look to take forward in Committee.

We are happy to debate those clauses and other issues in Committee, but glaring deficiencies elsewhere necessitate our reasoned amendment: the shoddy, slapdash incomplete proposed legislation placed before the House today is unworthy of a Second Reading. When the first word of the first clause on the first page of the Bill—“coasting”—is yet to be defined by the Government, they are showing an extraordinary discourtesy to this House. Such is the extension of the Secretary of State’s powers over schools deemed to be “coasting” that I would have thought they knew what they were talking about. Today, for all the lofty principles, we still have no workable legal definition.

As it stands, “coasting” could mean anything: Ofsted results, progress data, attainment scores. In fact, it could just as easily relate to any passing whim of the Secretary of State. Too many children swinging on chairs? Coasting. Too many kids studying the humanities, of which we know the Secretary of State disapproves? Coasting. Too many teenagers aspiring to apprenticeships? Coasting. We just do not know what the answer is, but what we do know is that this is no way in which to approach the serious job of reforming our schools system.

I fear that there will be a confrontation between what the Department for Education regards as coasting and what Ofsted regards as a good school. If Ofsted has classified a school as good and the Department says that it is coasting, where does that leave the schools inspector?

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

The definition of “coasting” is not the only thing that is missing from the Bill. A number of other things are missing from it, including references to addressing the teacher recruitment crisis or the school places crisis. Moreover, the Bill makes hardly any mention of parents, although those two issues are very much on their minds. Why do two out of five newly qualified teachers leave the profession within five years, and why are parents of three and four-year-olds so anxious about school places?

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

I recommend to the hon. Lady the very good debate we had on this matter in Westminster Hall just before the end of the previous Parliament. I spoke for the Opposition and said we absolutely support fairer funding. If she would like to consult that debate—it is not the subject under discussion today—she will see our position in more detail.

We have had a very good debate. I will deal principally with the education part of the Bill, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) dealt with the clauses on adoption, but there are a few points in relation to adoption that I would like to put on the record. I understand that the solution put forward in the Bill is extremely similar to the one the Government withdrew last year when the measures were put in front of the House of Lords. If I am wrong about that, I am sure the Minister will correct us in Committee, but it does seem that this is perhaps a second bite of the cherry. We will be interested to know from Ministers, if that is the case, why they have come back with this having withdrawn similar proposals extremely recently.

We are concerned about the impact on small specialist agencies and we are also worried about those children who may not be suitable for adoption. I am disappointed that the Bill has so little to say about special guardianship, kinship care, grandparents and long-term fostering. We will want to take up those issues in Committee.



I hope that Members on both sides of the House agree that, fundamentally, all of us—heads, teachers, support staff, governors, parents and even politicians—want the best for our children. I was going to say “politicians, and even parents”, because parents’ rights have been rubbed out by the Bill, but I decided against that in favour of trying to try to establish a point of consensus at the outset of my speech. If all of us want the best for our children, however, why do the Government consistently pursue paths that are not based on evidence of what is best for our children’s education? We have reached an extraordinary state of affairs. A Bill that was cobbled together during the two weeks after the election has been presented as if it were the answer to all the educational problems in the country, although it patently is not. As the Education Committee said earlier this year,

“the Government should stop exaggerating”.

The Bill has been so rushed and so inadequately drafted that it does not even provide a definition of its central term. Its first clause, on page 1, permits intervention in “Coasting schools”. We agree with the proposition that everyone should seek to tackle underperformance in schools, even schools that may be superficially performing well. Indeed, we championed it in government through, for example, the London Challenge and national challenge programmes. We introduced sponsored academies because we saw them as one way in which entrenched under- performance could be tackled, although not the only way. However, the Government have included the word “coasting” in the Bill without being able to tell anyone what it means. They have not been able to supply draft regulations to explain it in time for this debate, and I understand that they have now announced, through the usual channels, that they will not be able to supply such regulations in time for the start of the Committee stage. Perhaps we should rename this the Adoption and Education Bill, given that Ministers will have to deal with it back to front in Committee owing to their inability to provide a definition of “coasting” in time.

This is no way in which to make law that affects the education of millions of children throughout the country. A Bill should not be introduced when the Government cannot even explain or give a definition of its central term. I am reminded of a scene in the film “The Wrong Trousers”, starring Wallace and Gromit, when Gromit has to lay the track when the train is already racing along apace. If the Government cannot define “coasting” at the point when we are debating the Bill in the Chamber, they obviously deserve their own “inadequate” rating.

Why does the Bill have nothing to say about academies? Everyone who is involved in education knows that a school is a school, and that its success is built not on the nameplate on the sign outside, but on the quality of the leadership and teaching within. If the answer to turning around a failing school is always to make it an academy, what is the answer to turning around a failing academy? As the Secretary of State acknowledged recently, there are many of them—145, at the latest count—including IES Breckland, which is managed by a for-profit provider, and which has been deemed inadequate for more than a year without its sponsor being removed. So much for the right hon. Lady’s statement that

“a day spent in special measures is a day too long where a child’s education is concerned.”

That is not the case, it would seem, when the child attends an academy that is run by a favoured foreign edu-business. A fundamental flaw at the heart of the Government’s approach is that they do not even entertain that question in the Bill.

Why do the Government not listen to the Conservative councillor David Simmonds, the chairman of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board? He recently said:

“Hundreds of schools, often in disadvantaged areas, are being turned around thanks to the intervention of local councils.

It’s clear that strong leadership, outstanding classroom teaching and effective support staff and governors are the crucial factors in transforming standards in struggling schools.

We want to see bureaucratic barriers that have for a long time prevented councils from intervening swept away…We need to ensure that we focus our resources on ensuring there are enough outstanding school leaders, rather than on structures and legal status, as it is this which makes the difference we all want to see.”

That sounds to me like common sense from a Conservative councillor at the sharp end trying to deliver a quality local education, rather than the proclamations of remote Conservative Ministers who take their cue from right-wing think tanks and policy wonks with an ideological axe to grind.

[Catherine West]

Does my hon. Friend agree that Councillor Simmonds has also added to the debate about school places, particularly in London, where he is a representative? So many parents raise with us daily, in surgeries and emails, their worries about their three and four-year-olds. Indeed, we also need to be predicting that when they turn 13 there will be a secondary school crisis.

[Kevin Brennan]

I agree with that and say to my hon. Friend that teacher recruitment and the problem she raises are serious lacunas in the Bill.

The comments I cited sound like common sense from a Conservative councillor because this Bill is not only severely undercooked, but breathtakingly illiberal and in direct opposition to the Government’s professed desire to devolve power to communities. Let us be clear about this: the Bill seeks not only to extend the power of the state, as exercised by the Secretary of State, who is not even listening, to impose its will locally, but to remove the ability of local communities to object to, or even to make representations against, the exercise of that state power. We can see that she does not like to listen because she will not listen to local communities or even to the debate in this House. It is said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but what of power wielded by the state without even the right to make representations against its use, which in addition creates a duty to conform, comply, co-operate and promote the exercise of that state power? How have we reached a state of affairs in Conservative education policy where that is regarded as democratically acceptable? It would seem that not only does the Prime Minister not know the meaning of the words “Magna Carta”, as we saw on David Letterman’s TV show, but, as Tony Hancock might have put it, the poor Hungarian peasant girl did after all “die in vain”.

This is a horrible little Bill in so far as it extends to education. It is more of an election slogan than a piece of genuine education statute, written in a rush, out of a need to do something rather than the need to do the right thing. It could be so different: we could be recognising that real school improvement is based on the sort of approach taken by Sir David Brailsford, who took the Great Britain Olympic cycling team to such great heights. It could have been based on teamwork, collaboration, and a passion for excellence, success and the accumulation of marginal gains, not on a fetish with structures and policies that are unfounded in evidence. Perhaps we could have an educational equivalent of NICE—the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence—and have a national institute for clear evidence in education policy, which would put a stop to the educational quackery of Ministers, which leads to the empty “exaggeration” so heavily criticised earlier this year by the Education Committee. Then, perhaps, we could agree with a vision based on that insight I mentioned at the outset, which is that deep down we all want the best for our children.

We should therefore have a vision where we promote partnership and collaboration to raise standards, with an inspection system where quality inspectors provide challenge and support, rather than having low-quality private contractors. We could have a system where standards trump structures and where every child matters. Despite the claim in the explanatory notes that the Bill intends

“to improve education for all children”,

those in coasting or failing academies are ignored by the Bill. We could have a vision where: parents are listened to; teachers are trusted; school admissions are made fairer; special needs are taken seriously; genuine social mobility is promoted; more than the one pathway to success—GCSE, A-level and then university—is valued and promoted; more than data matter; and exams are not used as a tool to narrow education but as an instrument to accredit broad and balanced learning. We could have a system that believes in more than teaching to the test.

To be an educator or a teacher is an incredible privilege. It is one that I was fortunate enough to enjoy for many years. It is a very hard job. It is much harder, believe it or not, than being a Member of Parliament, and it is so much more than what is envisaged in this dreary Bill. To be a legislator is also a privilege, and we can do much better than this.