Academies Bill [Lords]

Charlotte Leslie Excerpts

Monday 19th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ed Balls]

I will put the hon. Lady out of her misery—I will just quote what she said:

“unless you give local authorities that power to plan and unless you actually make sure that there is money available...it’s just a gimmick”.

That is exactly what we have before us—just a gimmick, the very gimmick that she warned of. The right hon. Member for Yeovil said,

“strategic oversight of all state funded schools should be returned to Local Government.”

That is precisely the opposite of what this Bill does.

As for Building Schools for the Future, the deputy to the Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Brent Central, clearly wishes the world to know that she is very upset with the Secretary of State’s policy. Although she is not quite prepared to do that on the record, she arranged for friends to tell the newspapers that she is “privately seething”. The giants of the Liberal party will count her among their number for her bravery. The hon. Lady has a choice. She cannot sit on the fence any longer. Either she votes for the coalition or she stands up for the schools of Brent—that is her choice tonight.

Is not the truth about this whole business that during the past few weeks, the Secretary of State’s credibility has been completely shot to pieces? Even his own Back Benchers are now questioning his decision to rush this legislation on to the statute book and to cancel hundreds of new schools. The right hon. Gentleman is on a slippery slope. The Tory party’s shining intellectual, its greatest hope, has in the last fortnight been completely found out.

[Charlotte Leslie (Bristol North West) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Ed Balls]

No, I will not.

The eloquence that brought such prizes as a journalist has been reduced to a shambles, and this morning allegations were made of a giant BBC conspiracy. The Secretary of State should not be attacking the BBC; he should be listening to the anger of the thousands of parents, teachers and pupils around the country who have lost their chance of a new school. The fact is that when faced with the tough job of actually running a Department, he has in the past fortnight been totally exposed. When forced to make decisions, he is just not up to the job. He can make fancy speeches, but he cannot make policy. He can write good jokes, but he has exposed himself in the past fortnight as having terrible judgment.

The battle lines are now drawn for this Bill, which is the biggest threat to state education in 60 years. This is not just a question of policy; it is a question of values. Labour Members believe that every school should be able to succeed, not just some; we believe that every parent should have a chance of a good school, not just some; and we believe that every child matters, not just every other child. That is the shared moral purpose that drives those on the Labour Benches and it is why we will be voting for our reasoned amendment this evening. That is why the Liberal Democrats should join us in the Lobby. We should vote against this deeply divisive shambles of a Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Charlotte Leslie (Bristol North West) (Con)]

I shall try to be brief, as we keep being reminded that time is of the essence. I believe in quality, not length, when it comes to debate.

I understand the points made by Opposition Members, but I think we should recognise that we are discussing yet another reform of the education system because there is a problem. There is a two-tier system. Our schools have gone down the ranks in terms of international comparison, and the poorest in our society have borne the brunt. We have the biggest gap between private and state education anywhere in the world. As has already been pointed out today, only 45 of the 80,000 children receiving free school meals have gone to Oxbridge. That worries Members on this side of the House as well as Opposition Members. Another problem is that those who have money can buy into a good state school, and those who are ideologically opposed to private schools can spend the equivalent of private school fees by moving into the catchment area of a state school, often a faith school.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady said that our schools were performing less well on the OECD list. Does she accept that, using the same comparison earlier, the Secretary of State did not acknowledge that since the break-up of the Soviet Union a number of states have entered the system, and that the Soviet Union had a fairly good education system?

[Charlotte Leslie]

The right hon. Gentleman has made an interesting point, which I will take on board.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, but my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was talking about comparisons between 1999 and today. I just wanted to put that on the record.

[Charlotte Leslie]

My hon. Friend makes a point that I was not going to make for the sake of making progress in my comments, but I thank him very much for that clarification.

Some clarification is required in respect of the Bill as well. There is not some kind of compulsion whereby politicians are driving schools to claim these freedoms. The Bill simply seeks to lift the lid on the ambition, desire and passion that already exists, such as in outstanding schools whose head teachers have said to me, “Isn’t it amazing that if I was at a bad school I’d be able to get the freedoms I want to run my school, but we are just doing too well to have them?” The Bill removes that perverse incentive, and it enables parents and—to mention a group that we have not discussed enough in our debate—teachers to act: it enables parents and ideologically driven teachers who want to help the most vulnerable in our society by starting small schools, along the lines of the American charter schools, in those communities that most need them.

Many of the people who express an interest about this subject to me are those very teachers. They are the kinds of teachers who may be involved in Teach First and the Future Leaders programme. They are people who desperately want to improve the lot of those children who are on free school meals in the most deprived parts of our communities. It deserves a little more recognition in this debate that the Bill aims to lift the lid on passion, belief and desire that already exist to improve education. It is not about compulsion; that is not what we on these Benches are all about.

I understand the concern felt on the Opposition Benches that it is the good schools that will benefit from academy status. I would share those concerns if very substantial amounts of capital investment were to be going into those very good schools, but that is not the case. The good news is that there can be improvement without enormous injections of taxpayers’ money; after 13 years, that obviously comes as very good news to all Members. That improvement will allow good head teachers who lead outstanding schools to have the freedom to innovate, and also to offer their innovations to struggling schools. One aspect of the Bill that I particularly welcome is that it will not only encourage but require good schools that take on academy status to link up, not with outstanding schools as the shadow Secretary of State rather oddly implied, but with the weakest schools that most need that help. That point needs reiterating.

Another aspect of the Bill that should be highlighted is the fact that, for the first time, academy proprietors and sponsors will be subject to freedom of information legislation. Freedom of information has, of course, made the past year and a bit extremely rocky for this House, but, all in all, I think it is an extremely good thing and I am extremely pleased that that kind of public accountability will apply to academies and free schools so that we have a proper test of whether they are actually doing what we want and expect them to do.

I was around in the corridors of this House—although not as a Member, and nor, alas, in the corridors of power—when the Education and Inspections Act 2006 was making its progress as a Bill, and I remember that when the concept of trust schools was first floated there was a huge amount of sincere panic on the Labour Benches that that would open the floodgates and that it would be the end of the educational world and we would all be going to hell in a handcart because local authorities would not be able to control schools as they had previously. Now, four years on, has the world ended? No. Four years on, has trust status enabled Orchard school in my constituency to link up as a trust with the Bridge learning campus, which is driving very good improvements? Yes it has. Therefore, I say to Opposition Members that there was a lot of panic about the 2006 Act, and I also suspect that a lot of what is being said now is conjecture and expressions of fear about the liberation of forces that are not Government forces. I hope that alleviates some of the concerns among those on the Opposition Benches.

It is important not to see this Bill in isolation. We cannot solve everything through structural reform alone. It is certainly part of the equation, but we need to remember that there are far more measures in the coalition manifesto that tackle standards issues—and standards issues in respect of struggling, weak schools. If we were to see this Bill alone as the sole coalition offering on education, some of the concerns expressed by Opposition Members might carry more weight, but it does not stand alone. We also have reforms for improving discipline in struggling schools, which is one of the things that makes teaching in such schools so very difficult. Also, the pupil premium will send money directly to those children who most need it; of course there is work to be done on that, but that is what this House exists to do.

One development that I find particularly concerning, and scandalous, is that over the past 10 years pupil referral units have become repositories for children with special educational needs at the same time as special schools have been closed. I know no one wanted that to come about, but the House must address that tendency, and I hope the added responsibility for new academies to take care of children with SEN will improve the situation. I also hope that some of the measures we will be taking forward will look at pupil referral units alongside other society and voluntary organisations that can perform that function better.

[Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham, Ladywood) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady says the coalition is very concerned to remove disadvantage within our education system. If that is the case, why is it that under these proposals the first schools to become academies will be those that are already deemed to be outstanding?

[Charlotte Leslie]

As I have said, if this involved a huge capital investment going to those outstanding schools, I would not be standing here defending the Bill; instead, I would be pretty horrified. The point is, however, that schools that are outstanding have proved their worth; they know what they are doing and they are doing it well. It is a very easy and simple step to say to those head teachers who are doing well that, with measures of accountability, they should carry on and share their best practice. We would like such freedoms to be extended to all schools, but that has to be done within an accountable structure.

[Bill Esterson]

Does the hon. Lady agree that outstanding schools need help less than schools in lower categories? If she does, does she think it is right that it is outstanding schools that are getting the help, not the schools below those categories?

[Charlotte Leslie]

I will repeat what I said before—and also just note that it is interesting and very pleasing that the hon. Gentleman uses the word “help” in that that suggests that he agrees with Government Members that granting freedom to schools is in fact helpful. However, I repeat the point that this is not loading resources that could go to a school that is struggling onto a school that is not struggling. This is lifting the lid on ability, ambition, desire and aspiration that already exists, and enabling that to come out and flow into those schools that most need it. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, however.

I shall now conclude, as the House always hears enough of talking. A key point comes out of the idea that we can have improvement only through capital investment and rebranding. I have heard concerns that there will be an enormous amount of expenditure on rebranding those outstanding schools that become academies, but we are not going to do a rebranding exercise and then expect that alone to be the change and do nothing else. There will be no massive investment in a rebranding that does not actually effect change.

All in all, I welcome the Bill. It is real action—it is not money spent merely on rebranding—and it liberates the knowledge of professionals and also the desire of professionals to improve children’s lives and opportunities that I believe has been stifled for far too long.