Oral Answers to Questions

David Ward Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Absolutely; I very much enjoyed visiting the Wirral just two weeks ago, and I will do anything I can to work with the hon. Lady to help the children and teachers in that school.

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

I wonder whether the Secretary of State read the article in The Times Educational Supplement last week which challenged the PISA evidence about the relationship between greater autonomy and educational improvement.

[Michael Gove]

I have not caught up with last week’s Times Educational Supplement, but I enjoy reading it and I will look at that article. The evidence from PISA—both the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) and I agree on this—is very powerful in favour of greater autonomy for schools, but I shall look at any critique of that evidence in order to weigh it appropriately.

Kings Science Academy (Bradford)

David Ward Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

It is good to be here before you, Dr McCrea, and the Minister. I initiated this debate and I was lucky to secure it, so it is only fair that I should be able to say what its focus is. It is important to say that because it is not about free schools and academies in general. We have had such debates, so it is not for or against such schools, but about one particular school: Kings science academy. I am not interested in what has been done in the last year or so to improve things at the school or the achievement of pupils, the quality of teaching, the behaviour of pupils, or the leadership and management. I am passionately interested in all those things because I care about Bradford, but that is not what this debate is about.

I am interested in what seems to be the collusion between the so-called benefactor, Alan Lewis, the currently suspended principal, and the Department for Education. I am interested in the DFE’s role in allowing a rich Tory vice-chair to become even richer to the tune of millions of pounds of public money, and how it allowed an inexperienced young man to become principal of the school and to remain in control long after the DFE knew he had admitted that fraud had occurred in his school. How could that be?

I would like the Minister to prove me wrong in what I believe has occurred and the preferential, favourable treatment received by Mr Lewis by ending the speculation and making public the options, analysis and appraisals of nine alternative sites. If they were available, we could see whether there was a rigorous process in place.

I also want to see the evidence that the near £300,000 per year rent is not far in excess of what Mr Lewis could reasonably have expected to get from the partially tenanted and largely derelict site—I have given the Minister three photographs from before it was developed, and I can give more. What evidence is there that Mr Lewis has not made excessive profits from the school that now stands on that site? The Minister has the pictures before him. I believe that the school was only ever going to be built on that particular site—neither the principal nor, certainly, Alan Lewis would have been interested had it been anywhere else. Prove me wrong, please, but the DFE failed in its duty to ensure that a fair and robust options appraisal took place, and I have evidence to suggest that it did not take place.

As for the personal involvement of Mr Lewis in the running of the school, there is this big debate about “was he or wasn’t he” chair of the governors. How on earth can the DFE have mistakenly believed that a vice-chair of the Conservative party was chairman of governors at a free school for 12 months? How can the Department have been confused about that? I had a letter from Mr Lewis as recently as December 2013, signed by himself, in which he states:

“I was never chair of the governing body of the academy.”

Yet I have a copy of an e-mail to the Department, which has been amended by Mr Lewis to show him as chair of the governing body and not simply as someone involved in some way in the school.

I also have evidence that Mr Lewis was involved in the financial management of the school. In the same letter from him, however, he states that

“at no time have I ever had responsibility for the financial management of the academy.”

Yet I have a letter from the DFE in which the financial arrangements of the school have Mr Lewis not only as one of many involved, but as the person who should receive financial reports. He was the key individual who was receiving the reports, even though, to repeat his own words:

“at no time have I ever had responsibility for the financial management of the academy.”

The e-mail clearly shows, set out as an action point, that the monthly financial reports were to be given directly to him.

The truth is that Mr Lewis was personally and heavily involved in the school, right from the very beginning, but he now wants to distance himself from any involvement during a period in which he knows that fraud took place. Moreover, at the same time, negotiations were taking place about the rent for the property that he owned.

A second point, on the principal, involves the internal audit investigation team report endorsing the findings of the earlier Education Funding Agency report and of the report by the accountants, Crowe Clark Whitehill, in August 2012. Will the Minister please tell me whether the CCW report was seen by the DFE? I have to tell him that I think it was, but I want some evidence that it was and for when it was seen. The IAIT report states that the principal admitted that fabrication of invoices had taken place, so even if the DFE did not see the CCW report in August of 2012, at the very least it must have known about it from the audit team at the beginning of 2013. The DFE knew about the fraud, which had been admitted by the principal, but it took no action whatever to remove him from the school.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State said to me during a recent exchange in the main Chamber that

“Mr Lewis is receiving for the property an appropriately guaranteed market rent—less than he was receiving for it beforehand.”—[Official Report, 6 January 2014; Vol. 573, c. 16.]

One of the architects involved in preparing the free school bid has said to me that he finds that statement is a

“very difficult to believe” Statement.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree?

[Mr Ward]

We need clear evidence, because we are now receiving at best evasive responses to the questions that many of us have been asking. At worst, hiding behind the ongoing police inquiry, we have received no response whatever. To be honest, the evasiveness of some of the responses has been disrespectful to Members of this House. We need answers—all the speculation can then disappear.

We know how serious things were in the school, and that the audit reports identify not only the fraud, but all the nepotism and other financial irregularities that were taking place. I repeat that all of that was known by the DFE, but no action was taken at all. We are not talking about a young and inexperienced man, but about a dishonest and disreputable character, and yet, with all that information, the DFE was content to let the principal remain in place.

I hope that the Minister can prove me wrong, because I have a number of serious allegations about the DFE itself. If I am right, the independence of the civil service must be in doubt. Will the Minister please put to bed some of the suspicion about the DFE by helping us? The Department has failed in its public duty to expose what it knew to be malpractice and criminal activity—it held information back and covered up the situation. We cannot have the freedom extended to free schools including freedom from public accountability.

On the reporting of an admitted crime to the police, I am still not satisfied. We have asked oodles of questions, but I am still not satisfied that the DFE acted as it should have. There will always be suspicion of a cover-up until the Minister carries out a full investigation into what happened.

The first phase of the launch of the Kings school was praised by the Prime Minister and described in the press as closest to David Cameron’s vision of what a free school should be. We know the background, but when the whole scandal broke, the DFE said that it was for the school itself to decide whether the issue was a disciplinary one. How on earth can an organisation highlighted in an audit report as responsible be the organisation responsible for looking at itself and dealing with its own disciplinary issues? It beggars belief. A Government audit uncovers misconduct so serious that it needs to be passed to the police for criminal investigation, and yet the DFE feels that it is for the school itself to decide whether the issue is a disciplinary one.

When at last the Department decided that matters could not be contained within the school, it finally referred it to Action Fraud. We are asked to believe that Action Fraud botched up the recording of the fraud on 25 April. Even if we believed that to be true, we know that the DFE then did nothing about ensuring that a crime was investigated until 5 September, when it sent an exploratory e-mail to ask what was going on.

On 5 September, the DFE knew that its April report had been erroneously recorded as an information report. It was told by Action Fraud:

“If more information related to your report becomes available your report will be re-assessed to determine its viability for investigation.”

The Department knew that on 5 September, but did nothing. Why was the audit report not sent directly to the police at that time?

[Mr Gerry Sutcliffe (Bradford South) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the work he has been doing on this case, which has affected the credibility of some of the free schools in Bradford—notwithstanding the fact that there are some good ones. We had to get the information about when the police were informed from the police themselves, not from the DFE. We were asking questions, either written questions or questions on the Floor of the House, to try to get answers, yet answers we got none—except when we contacted the police.

[Mr Ward]

When we asked the police in e-mails what they had received, they said that they had received nothing. Despite what the DFE said, they did not receive the reports.

As for the questions we have been asking, there are simply too many discrepancies between the answers to parliamentary questions and the other evidence available to us. The Department made its original report on 25 April 2013: that is when the matter was reported—so we are told—to Action Fraud. Let us not forget that that is eight months after the CCW report. If the DFE had seen that report at that point, why was it not made public?

[George Galloway (Bradford West) (Respect)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate, but I congratulate him more on the excellent forensic speech that he is making. The more he speaks, the more I am bound to ask whether he agrees that it is already obvious that the nub of this question is that Alan Lewis is a very senior member of the Conservative party, and so for party political reasons the Secretary of State for Education simply could not come clean on this matter with the people of Bradford and with the Members of this House.

[Mr Ward]

That is an excellent point. We have to ask why. There must have been a justification for the cover-up. It can be one of only two things. It is either because free schools are such a flagship policy for the Conservative party that it could not afford the embarrassment or because of Alan Lewis’s involvement and his association with the Tory party. If there are any other reasons, I cannot think of them.

I will make the point again about deception—I cannot use any other word, really. As I said, the Department’s original report was made on 25 April 2013, a long time after it knew about the matter. We are told that Action Fraud inadvertently logged the report as an information-only report, and subsequently apologised for that error. But how did that occur? If, as the Department claimed, information on fabricated invoices was submitted to the National Fraud Investigation Bureau, how could that be? Unless there was just a passing reference in a short telephone call, it is hard to believe that the correct message could not have got through. How could it have been logged as an information-only report if the audit report had been made available? In that case, the reaction could have been nothing other than a decision that the matter required a criminal investigation and needed to be dealt with quickly.

The Minister must be interested to learn the answer to those questions himself. In answer to a parliamentary question, the Department said:

“Action Fraud notified the Department on 1 November”.—[Official Report, 6 January 2014; Vol. 573, c. 98W.]

Action Fraud notified the Department of its mistake in classifying the report on 1 November, but—as we know thanks to a freedom of information request by John Roberts—on 5 September the Department had received a communication from Action Fraud saying:

“Thank you for your email to Action Fraud concerning your Information Report.”

That was received seven weeks before the Department says it was notified that the report had been wrongly classified as an information-only report. In those seven weeks, it did nothing.

In a parliamentary answer, the Department said that it had contacted Action Fraud on 5 September and

“in response Action Fraud stated that the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau had assessed the case but determined that there was not enough information to progress the case further.”—[Official Report, 6 November 2013; Vol. 570, c. 229W.]

End of story, it seems—the police had looked at the matter and there was nothing to do. But the truth is that the e-mail from Action Fraud to the Department on 5 September told the DFE not only that the report had been wrongly classified as an information-only report, but that more information would lead to the report being

“re-assessed to determine its viability for investigation.”

Even if we believe that it was through some error back in April that the report was inadvertently misclassified, on 5 September the Department was told not only that it was a report that could lead to an investigation—something it claimed subsequently to have been told on 1 November—but that if it gave additional information the matter could be turned into a crime investigation.

Of the three parties to this situation I have mentioned, who do I blame most? Is it a businessman who wants to make a lot of money and sees a quick opportunity provided by a political party with which he is closely associated? Is it a young man who is, I think, idealistic but is also egotistical, and is led on by politicians and senior civil servants to believe that for him the normal rules of integrity, honesty and propriety simply do not have to apply? Or is it the Department for Education, which became a Government agent of change and forgot that the basic rules of public accountability and scrutiny in the spending of millions of pounds of public money must always take precedence over the desire to support its political masters?

The real surprise is not that, eventually and thankfully, we have been made aware of what has happened via the whistleblowers, but that there were not more whistleblowers earlier—people within the Department, who were looking at what was going on and saying, “This is just not right.” That is the real problem. I have been to the Department recently and seen the whole floor that has been taken over by the academies and free school organisation within the DFE. The massive shift that has taken place has also, I believe, brought about a cultural change in the Department. The policy has become such an important driver and part of the Government’s strategy that anything goes.

The big unanswered question is, if the Department could behave in this way once, with this particular school, how many other academies and free schools has it supported in a similar manner? Unfortunately, unless we get some answers we will have to wait until another whistleblower comes forward to find out.

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr McCrea.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) for securing this debate and for his persistence in ensuring that this important issue is debated properly in the House and scrutinised properly. I say that not just out of the courtesy that is normal on these occasions; it is quite right that he should ask questions about a serious issue that deserves to be looked at seriously.

I will take my hon. Friend’s hint and will not, as sometimes happens on these occasions, fill the first 75% of my speech with general comments. I will come very quickly to a lot of the matters he raised and will try to address them as far as I can. But since he mentioned some issues about the accountability of free schools, I will briefly say a couple of things on that matter, before going through each of the points that he made.

Most free schools are popular with parents and are delivering strong discipline and teaching across the country. As they are brand-new schools there is, quite rightly, greater contact and oversight with open free schools than with other academies—until their first successful Ofsted inspection, at least. After that, they are subject to the same monitoring arrangements as other academies.

[Mr Ward]

The Minister has already started to give answers in the way I expected. I am talking about Kings—I am not interested in any other free school or any other academy. I want to know about what happened in that school and what will be done about it.

[Mr Laws]

I am trying to address that. I am going to speak briefly, and then I will come straight to my hon. Friend’s points. He mentioned free school accountability in his speech, and it is right to say something on that, briefly and without taking up precious time. I promise him that I will address the issues that he raised.

The approach I was outlining means that in term 1, visits are arranged by the education adviser and the Education Funding Agency. In year 2, the first Ofsted section 5 report becomes available. All free schools provide budget forecasts, financial management and governance self-assessments and externally audited financial statements.

I will now turn, in the time that we have, to the matters raised by my hon. Friend that are specific to the case of the Kings science academy. He said he feared that I would hide behind—I think those were his words—the fact that there is a criminal investigation. There are some things that I cannot touch on in this speech because they are subject to a criminal investigation, and we all understand the constraints that that imposes on us all. Subject to that, however, I will try to be as open as I can.

The Kings science academy opened in September 2011. The Education Funding Agency had already planned a full financial management and governance review at the academy which would look at aspects such as financial and other internal controls, when it received allegations about practices at the school in October 2012, some of which related to possible financial irregularity. Those allegations were included in the EFA’s financial management and governance review, as my hon. Friend is aware. The EFA carried out its financial management and governance review in December 2012. It looked in detail at all aspects of governance, including the chair’s position, financial controls and conflicts of interest. Following the usual procedures, the EFA sent the draft report, showing the inadequacy of the financial management and controls, to the academy in January 2013 so that the academy could correct any inaccuracies. Thereafter, the EFA sent the final report in February 2013, which confirmed the assessment of “inadequate” and requested the academy’s response to the findings and recommendations in the report.

The findings of the EFA’s review led to a further investigation, as my hon. Friend knows, by the Department’s internal audit investigations team. The Department’s investigators began their on-site work at Kings science academy on 24 January 2013. The investigation team sent its report to Kings science academy at the beginning of April to allow for the correction of any inadequacies. John Bowers became the new acting chair of the academy in March 2013, and he tightened control by, among other things, assuming the important role of accounting officer for the academy in April of that year. The EFA also received the academy’s improvement plans at the beginning of April in response to the findings of the financial management and evaluation report. Both the EFA and the Department’s investigation team continued contact with Mr Bowers to monitor progress in responding to both reports. We remain grateful to the new chair for the real efforts that he has made to address some of the issues that are now public.

In line with our zero tolerance of fraud in all schools—free schools, academies and maintained schools—we reported the evidence of possible fraud to Action Fraud at the earliest opportunity on 25 April 2013. I will return to cover that aspect of the case, which my hon. Friend has mentioned, in more detail in a second. Because both the financial management and governance review and the investigation found serious failings in financial management, the Secretary of State issued a warning notice in May 2013 requiring the full recovery of relevant funds and confirmation that Kings science academy would respond to the findings in both reports.

In June 2013, the EFA confirmed that Kings science academy’s new finance policy provided a firm basis for establishing proper internal controls at the school, and we wrote to the academy in July 2013 recognising the progress it had made and confirming that the report of the internal audit investigation team would be published. That is in line with our policy to publish investigation reports, which is clearly set out in the “Academies Financial Handbook”. We had planned to wait before publishing the investigation report until the disciplinary processes had been completed, but we decided that it was right to publish when the investigation report was leaked in the media.

[Mr Ward]

I understand all that. A report had been produced by the audit team in January, which was finally published a little after that, so a report was available in which the principal of the school admitted that fraud had taken place. Does the Minister think it was right that the principal was allowed to continue to go in to work each day?

[Mr Laws]

I will come directly to that point in a moment. The EFA’s financial management and governance report and the Secretary of State’s warning notice have also now been published. We insisted that Kings science academy address identified failings urgently. While its internal evidence gathering continued, we confirmed the repayment sum at £76,933. We also sought confirmation that the disciplinary process was being taken forward. It is right that the relevant funding is being recovered from the academy in full, as it always will be if an academy or free school is unable to demonstrate that funding has been used for its intended purpose.

We believe that the Kings science academy, under the leadership of Mr Bowers, is making steady progress to address the weaknesses found in financial management and governance. That increased confidence is not just a result of the monitoring visits carried out by the EFA. We have evidence from KSA’s externally audited accounts for 2012-13, which were received on time, unqualified, and report the auditor’s comments on improvements in financial control and governance.

Let me turn now to the reporting of evidence to the police. The administrative error made by Action Fraud, which wrongly categorised the Department’s evidence in April as an information report rather than a crime, is deeply regrettable, as my hon. Friend made clear. Significantly, Action Fraud has apologised for the error. We do not believe that there is any fault with the way in which the report was made by the Department.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Ward Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

As has already been made clear, this is not a cut that will disproportionately affect those from the backgrounds mentioned by the hon. Gentleman.

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

12. What steps his Department has taken in relation to the principal of Kings science academy in Bradford following the conclusions of his Department’s audit report.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove)]

Responsibility for a principal’s performance rests of course with the governing body of an academy, not the Department for Education. One thing I should say is that, as the hon. Gentleman will be aware, there is an ongoing police investigation, which I have to be careful not to prejudice.

[Mr Ward]

That is disappointing, because of course the head of a maintained school would have been on his bike long ago. May I ask the Secretary of State about a comment made by a spokesperson for Alan Lewis who said:

“At no time has Mr Lewis had responsibility for the financial management or governance of the academy”?

If, as I have been told, the report by the auditors recommended to the school by Mr Lewis was presented directly to him and amended as a result of his comments, does the Secretary of State agree that that provides evidence of involvement in both financial management and governance within the school?

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question, and for the dogged and persistent way in which he has sought to ensure that we can improve the situation at Kings science academy. I would say that Mr Lewis was responsible for commissioning a report, to which the hon. Gentleman quite rightly draws attention, that has played a part in helping to ensure that Kings science academy moved from a difficult position to a better one, but I must stress that I do not want to say anything that might prejudice an ongoing police report.

Child Care

David Ward Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to the many colleagues across the House, especially so many male colleagues, who have spoken in this important debate. This is my first outing at the Dispatch Box, and I am absolutely delighted to be winding up on an issue of such importance to so many families across the country.

Labour has a proud record on child care. It was the Labour Government who put child care on the political map and oversaw a revolution in child care provision. My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) gave a passionate account of our record. Ensuring that we have good, affordable and flexible child care is critical not only for families facing a cost of living crisis, but for the economy as a whole, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) rightly said.

Unfortunately, things are going backwards under this Government. They are presiding over a child care crunch and failing to support families in work. Under this Government we have seen a child care triple whammy of rising costs, falling places and cuts in support to help parents. Since 2010 the number of child care places has fallen by over 35,000, including 2,423 fewer childminders on the Minister’s watch, all at a time when a rising birth rate is putting greater demand on the system. The failure to supply enough places is impacting on costs for families. The problem of insufficient child care supply is hurting the economy and making balancing work and family life a nightmare for parents.

Many Members have spoken about cuts to their local Sure Start centre. The Government’s own figures show that there are now 578 fewer centres than there were in 2010. That figure is calculated from the Government’s own publicly available records, and I must say that it resonates much more with what we hear is happening on the ground. Let us take the Prime Minister’s back yard as an example. Of the 44 centres in Oxfordshire, 37 are due to close. He once famously said that he would back Sure Start, but for many in his constituency that is yet another broken promise.

I agree with the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom)—I have a great deal of respect for her and for the work she has done on early intervention—that the issue is not just about the fabric of the buildings; it is also about capacity. I wonder whether Ministers can tell us what progress is being made in increasing the number of health visitors by 4,200 by 2015, which is critical in delivering the Sure Start model.

The crisis in places is leading to price hikes that are making it increasingly unsustainable for parents to make ends meet, as the very powerful account from my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) made clear.

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

Is the hon. Lady aware that Naomi Eisenstadt, who can be regarded as the mother of Sure Start, told the Education Committee that there were too many Sure Start centres and that phase 3 was spreading them far too thinly?

[Lucy Powell]

I was not aware of her comments, but I completely disagree. As hon. Members have said, this is a very popular service that people raise with us on the doorstep, unlike many other Government policies.

Free Schools

David Ward Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) on securing this important debate, which has identified the need for a pause for thought on the due diligence processes that apply prior to the opening of free schools. I will talk about the case that I know best, the Kings science academy, which is relevant to today’s debate because The Daily Telegraph hailed it in September 2011 as coming closest to the Prime Minister’s vision of what a free school should be.

Many would agree—I certainly do—with greater freedoms for our publicly funded schools around the curriculum, staffing, opening hours, holidays and so on. Those would be generally acceptable to many people across the political divide; many of us are up for it. However, what else would the Minister deem acceptable in the name of freedom? How far can schools go?

At the Kings science academy, a principal with no experience even as a deputy, let alone a head teacher, was appointed without an interview. Is that acceptable to the Minister? Prior to the new build, £460,000 was invested in temporary accommodation at an old school of which the principal’s father was a trustee. Is that acceptable? Insurance was paid on the school—a temporary provision—to an insurance company set up by a trust of which the principal’s father was a trustee. Is that acceptable? The principal himself was shown to be a director of that insurance company, although he claimed that that was a mistake. Is that acceptable?

A benefactor—more correctly referred to by the hon. Member for Gateshead as a beneficiary—called Alan Lewis, who happens to be a vice-chairman of the Conservative party, provided a site containing warehouses that were largely derelict and empty, but then received £10 million-worth of public money to build the new school. We have now heard that he will receive £6 million over a 20-year period, after which the building reverts back to his sole ownership. That same person, at the time of the negotiations on the lease payments on the new building, was chair of the governing body. Is that acceptable to the Minister?

An accountants’ report in the summer of 2012—the accountants brought in were those of, guess who, Alan Lewis—identified widespread financial irregularities dating back as long ago as the period before the school’s opening, but the Education Funding Agency did not send in the external assurance team until a scheduled visit took place in December 2012. It waited for a scheduled visit! Is that acceptable to the Minister?

[Bill Esterson]

The hon. Gentleman is describing a disgraceful and worsening litany of what has happened at the school in his constituency. Is there a way of providing oversight that would avoid all those terrible things that he is describing?

[Mr Ward]

My great concern is that the oversight is not wanted, because were it in place, it would ask the awkward questions that people do not want to answer. We do not see what we do not look for.

An internal audit investigation team at the beginning of 2013 concurred with the accountants’ report—by now six months old—and identified fraudulent claims for Department for Education funding; the appointment, without interview, of the principal’s mother, father and sister as school staff; payments to the principal of pension contributions due to the Teachers’ Pensions agency, claimed from the DFE; and much more. Yet the principal was not suspended. Is that acceptable to the Minister?

Thanks to John Roberts at the Yorkshire Post, we know that the DFE is blaming an administrative error for the failure of the police to investigate, when only a week before the Department had claimed that the police had decided not to investigate. Is that acceptable? When told by the police that they did not have enough information to proceed with an investigation, the DFE failed to send them the full and damning audit report. Is that acceptable? We were told that the police did not get the audit report, because they did not ask for it. The audit report, available in May 2013, was not published until 25 October, just before the broadcasting of a critical “Newsnight” investigation into the school. Is that acceptable?

When the DFE was questioned about what action it intended to take following the publication of the report, the Department replied that—wait for it—the school had launched its own investigation and that any disciplinary action was a matter for the school. Is that acceptable? In answering that particular question, will the Minister bear in mind that the principal’s brother is on the disciplinary committee?

My questions are not rhetorical; they require answers. Are those things acceptable? Is that the level we have fallen to in terms of accountability? Finally, if all those things are acceptable in the name of freedom, will the Minister tell me just how corrupt a free school has to be to be unacceptable?

How many more schools are like the one I have been talking about? Are we talking about the tip of an iceberg? Earlier, the hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) talked about a wonderful school with great governance arrangements, but, in truth, how do we know? We know clearly from the Kings science academy that when matters were wrong and wrongdoing was taking place day in, day out, they did not come to public attention. We simply do not know the answer to the question of how many more such schools there are, but it makes you think, doesn’t it?

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

We have had an interesting debate, on which I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns), who told us about his 30 years as a councillor—he must have been elected to the council at the age of 14 or so. He certainly kicked off the debate extremely well. It was important that he drew to the attention of the House the ROTA report, which itself could be the subject of another debate on free schools and their approach to equality issues. We also had a good contribution from the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh), who spoke in his usual philosophical fashion. He trotted round the arguments on free schools and highlighted some important incidents of which he has been made aware.

My hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) made a powerful plea for fair treatment of and fair comment on the schools in his east Durham area, and he cited the Secretary of State on their smell of defeat. The Secretary of State is an extraordinary man in many ways, but he must have an exceptional sense of smell if, having never visited those schools, he can detect the smell of defeat about them. That says everything.

Finally, we had a contribution from the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward), who should be congratulated on the manner in which he has attempted, in the face of great difficulties, to expose the scandals at Kings science academy in Bradford. I saw him on his local media pointing out that some of the people whom the Secretary of State had approved to run the school and to spend millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money were not only not fit to run a school, but not fit to run a bath—to use his inimitable phrase. His contribution this morning made the case absolutely clear, and I will say more about that later.

I welcome the children’s Minister, who is one of the nicest people in the Government, as is his Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), but we want to know where the Minister for Schools is. It would have been better had he come along today, to listen not only to my colleagues and me, but to his own Liberal Democrat colleagues on the policy for which he is responsible in the Commons at least.

I have noticed recently that in parliamentary answers—written answers as well—the children’s Minister is deployed as a kind of human shield for the Minister for Schools to answer questions about some subjects, including the free schools policy. I hope that that will not become a trend, but I guess it is understandable, given that he is being asked to defend what my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), the shadow Education Secretary, has described as a

“dangerous ideological experiment which has been allowed to run completely out of control”.

The hon. Member for Bradford East gave us a fine example of the manner in which this is out of control. He is right of course, because we have lots of schools with—despite what the hon. Member for Southport said—unqualified teachers written into them as a kind of policy, but also with unqualified leaders. Furthermore, schools are being built where there are already surplus places and with a dangerous lack of oversight and transparency, as we have heard this morning, but that is exactly what the Government planned.

It is no accident that we are hearing more examples of head teachers resigning—another one resigned yesterday, at the IES Breckland free school, following the resignation of the 27-year-old unqualified head at the Pimlico primary free school founded by Lord Nash, a Government Minister. We are hearing more examples of disastrous teaching, such as at the Al-Madinah free school, and allegations of financial fraud, at Al-Madinah and, as we have heard, at Kings science academy in Bradford. There is also an ongoing investigation into the Barnfield Federation in Luton, and we want a guarantee from the Minister that there will not be a cover-up this time—the report of the Department’s investigation should be printed immediately on completion, rather than being sat on until “Newsnight” gets a leaked copy, as happened in the case of Kings science academy.

The reason I say that this is what the Government planned is because they told us that they expected the policy to result in this kind of failure. The hand-picked adviser to the Secretary of State is Mr Dominic Cummings, who was brought into Government against the ethical objections of Andy Coulson and whom the Secretary of State has described as one of his “heroes”. Mr Cummings said in a recent 250-page memo that this kind of fraud and failure was an integral part of the free schools policy design. He said that some free schools

“will fail and have predictable disasters from disastrous teaching to financial fraud.”

There we have it: the lack of oversight is not an accident, as the hon. Member for Bradford East pointed out; it is part of the design of this ideological experiment. According to the Government, a bit of failure is fine, if there are unqualified teachers, and some financial fraud is okay: in the long run, presumably, some good schools will emerge from the carnage of the experiment. The fact that pupils’ education is disrupted along the way—as with the Al-Madinah free school, which had to close for a week—is presumably just collateral damage and a price worth paying.

The adviser to the Secretary of State has told us that we should expect failure and fraud. Clearly, he is right. At least he is being honest: all we have had from the rest of the Department is delay and obfuscation when it has been questioned about all this. Much of that is because Ministers are hopelessly conflicted about the policy. How can a Minister be both a promoter of free schools and an adjudicator on them? That is the situation now. How can the Secretary of State be both propagandist for his free schools experimental policy and overseer of that policy at the same time? He is responsible for all of these schools. He is like Dr Frankenstein: he is in love with his own creation and cannot see the dangers even when the evidence is staring him right in the face.

Just last night we heard further revelations about the Al-Madinah free school on “Channel 4 News”. Perhaps today we will finally get some action and Lord Nash might for a day be able to forget that he is a free school promoter and remember that he is a Government Minister with responsibility for the proper use of taxpayers’ money. Ofsted described that school as “dysfunctional” and rated it “inadequate” in every category, with unqualified teachers who lacked proper training. Now there are new allegations of financial irregularities over the letting of contracts. Will the Minister confirm—he may need some in-flight refuelling to answer the question—whether Department for Education Ministers or officials received from Derbyshire police correspondence relating to the funders of the Al-Madinah free school before it was opened? If so, will he commit to publishing that correspondence?

Let me turn to Kings science academy in Bradford, which opened in 2011, as the hon. Member for Bradford East pointed out, and, as he said, the patron or beneficiary of the school is Alan Lewis, who is a vice-chairman of the Conservative party. The school was built on Mr Lewis’s company land, and as we have heard, he stands to make £6 million in rent over the course of a 20-year agreement.

On 25 October, nearly six months—certainly over five months—since its completion, the Department published a redacted report from a financial investigation that it had carried out at Kings science academy only after whistleblowing from within the school. The way in which the Department redacted the report is interesting. Mr Lewis’s name was redacted, despite the fact that the financial arrangements are in the public domain. Even the name of the head teacher of the school was redacted in the version that the Department released. We have to wonder why it was necessary to redact the name of the head teacher—or principal, as he calls himself—and the name of Mr Lewis when that information is in the public domain; perhaps the Minister can explain.

The Department rushed out the report—that might explain the clumsy redaction— hours before “Newsnight”, which had already received a leaked draft copy, was due to go on air with the story. The report found a whole host of financial irregularities, including an admission by someone at the school that it had submitted fabricated invoices to claim money from the DFE as part of its set-up grant, and identified £86,000 of that grant that had not been spent by the school for the purpose for which it was intended. The report recommended that those matters should be passed on to the police for investigation. As has been pointed out, on 25 October, the Department said that the matter had been reported to the police

“who decided no further action was necessary.”

That seems odd to me. After all, invoices had been fabricated: why did that not result in proper criminal action?

The DFE’s initial version of events was that it reported the matter to Action Fraud on 25 April, and followed that up in September when it was told that the police had decided to take no further action. However, once all this became public—only because of the “Newsnight” investigation—West Yorkshire police contacted the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau to ask about the case and were told that there had been an administrative error that meant that the matter had been passed on to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau as being for information rather than as a report of a potential crime. Five days after the DFE report was made public, West Yorkshire police put out this statement:

“The Department for Education reported the matter to Action Fraud…on April 25, 2013. It was recorded as an information only case not as a crime. This was not sent to West Yorkshire Police either as information or for investigation. The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau has now assessed the report in line with nationally agreed protocols and have today sent it for investigation by West Yorkshire Police.”

That is where we are now, and we know that people are being interviewed, but the matter was not passed on properly to the police for more than five months.

The Department says that in September it contacted Action Fraud to ask for an update and was told by the police that there was nothing more to be done. Why at that stage did the Department not ask more questions? Why did it not dig and find out that there had been an administrative error? We need to understand why it did not do so.

It has now emerged that the Department for Education did not even submit the report to Action Fraud. It simply made a telephone call to the helpline. I have a copy of the Action Fraud web page for its helpline, which says:

“We provide a central point of contact for information about fraud and financially motivated internet crime. If you’ve been scammed, ripped off or conned, there is something you can do about it.”

Presumably the Secretary of State and his officials believed that they might have been scammed, ripped off or conned by the management of Kings science academy—who are all still in place, by the way—which is why they rang the Action Fraud helpline to report the matter. The website goes on to say:

“Report fraud to us and receive a police crime reference number.”

Will the Minister tell us the police crime reference number that his Department was given by Action Fraud when it dialled 0300 123 2040 to report that it believed it had been scammed, ripped off or conned by Kings science academy?

[Mr Ward]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that West Yorkshire police have no record at all of the call being received on 25 April?

[Kevin Brennan]

I am grateful that the hon. Gentleman has put that on the record, because when I rang the Action Fraud helpline last night to check, it said that calls are recorded. The Minister should be able to obtain from the Home Office a recording of the telephone call from the Secretary of State or one of his Ministers or officials to Action Fraud in April to report the crime and find out when they were given the police crime reference number. We will be interested to hear that.

The public deserve to know exactly what was said when the Department for Education reported the matter to Action Fraud, which led it to regard it as only “information”. What was said when it told the Department that the police were taking no further action, and how was it able to make that statement? How did Action Fraud obtain an update from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau without the administrative error coming to light? In the meantime, the principal is still in post at the school, and the Department says it gave the school a financial notice to improve, but that notice has never been published. Will the Minister publish it?

The Department said that the school is carrying out an internal investigation and that any disciplinary action is a matter for the school. How can the Department defend that position? In what other walk of public life would that be acceptable? It is worth remembering that none of this was in the public domain before the report was leaked. It is a murky business, and it would be better if the Government published the records of all their dealings in relation to this now, otherwise they will face the drip, drip of revelations as the details inevitably leak out.

All these problems and this example are a product of the policy design. Everyone in the Chamber wants innovative schools with appropriate autonomy to provide the best possible education for the children in their constituencies. That is a value that we all share, but it is irresponsible to design a policy with the expectation that failure is inevitable—that is what the Secretary of State and special advisers have done—and with no proper oversight of the spending of public money and the impact of the policy on the young people in the care of those schools. There are more scandals to come. As the Minister knows, his Department is currently investigating other cases. Why does he not come clean, answer the questions and admit that it is time to have proper oversight of these schools?

Qualified Teachers

David Ward Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Metcalfe]

Yes, those are important skills, but they are not the only skills that one needs to be able to impart knowledge.

We all have examples of inspirational teachers who have made a difference to our lives. Mine is my fourth-year junior school teacher, Mrs Chapman, at Staples Road county primary. She was an inspiration and I am still in touch with her. However, there are other inspirational people who have shaped our lives, given us an alternative perspective, encouraged us to aim higher or showed us a world that we never knew existed. Those people have something to offer to our education system.

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

How would the hon. Gentleman feel if he turned up at the airport and was told that they did not have a qualified pilot, but they had somebody who was passionate about flying and was really quite good at it?

[Stephen Metcalfe]

Many of the teachers who do not have qualified teacher status are the most outstanding teachers around. It is for schools, head teachers and Ofsted—those who are in the know—to assess the individuals about whom we are talking. They should not be disqualified just because they do not have the relevant piece of paper. We exclude those people at our peril.

Do not get me wrong: QTS is an important and valuable qualification that most teachers should have achieved or be striving for. We are trying to free schools from the burden of bureaucracy. As I said, the best person to assess who is the right person to be teaching in their school and delivering an education that best meets the local needs is the head teacher. We need to move away from command and control from the centre. That should include the opportunity of involving excellent teachers who do not have QTS.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

This debate is about freedoms, and the wider context is that the Deputy Prime Minister has referred to teachers other than qualified teachers. The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), the Chair of the Education Committee, who has left the Chamber, spoke of the need for evidence. The Committee has received no evidence in support of free schools or academies—it does not exist, although experts have been to see the Committee. That greater freedoms necessarily lead to improved performance is an ideological belief, but the evidence does not currently exist.

The Secretary of State is relaxed about the freedom to have unqualified teachers in classrooms, but other freedoms that have been extended to free schools and academies could have much more serious consequences. An internal audit investigation team at the Kings science academy has shown how far that can go. The school is free to have unqualified teachers, but it is also free to appoint a principal with no real management or leadership experience, let alone qualifications. It is free to have unqualified teachers, but it is also free to access £460,000 to pay for temporary accommodation in a former independent school, of which the principal’s father was a trustee. No wonder the school is happy about employing non-qualified teachers. The principal was also free to employ his mother, his sister and his father. I do not know whether they teach, but they were employed without any interviews or applications being required.

Yes we should trust head teachers, but should we trust them to that extent? Should we trust them to take on suppliers and contractors with no contracts and no procurement process, to fabricate—that is a euphemism—and make out false invoices? Should they be free to do that? Should they be free to access £10 million of Government funding to refurbish a derelict mill owned by the vice-chairman of the Conservative party? It costs about £5 a square foot for warehousing in a mill in Bradford, but that property company, owned by the vice-chairman of the Tory party, is getting £300,000 a year for leasing that building for 20 years, after which the building will revert to the property company. Should head teachers be free to defraud the Department for Education and HMRC by false claims about pupil numbers, about rent paid to a property company owned—surprise, surprise—by the vice-chairman of the Conservative party, and about tax payments?

The issue is the culture that is in place. That principal was in a situation in which the normal rules do not apply. We are told that there are mechanisms and checks in place to deal with such problems, but when the chaotic and dysfunctional governance arrangements were highlighted, guess who was responsible for dealing with disciplinary action? We are told in a press release from the Department:

“Any necessary disciplinary action is a matter for the school.”

I do not trust it to deal with the problems and sort them out.

The main problem with this whole policy—I opposed academies under Labour and I oppose academies and free schools under this lot—is that the criteria for success are not about raising educational attainment. The criterion for the success of this policy is how many academies and free schools there are. It is claimed that it is a success because there are so many. So when an application is made, the due diligence that we would expect, and that we have a right to insist upon in terms of public accountability, flies out of the window.

The Deputy Prime Minister is right: children have a right to be taught by a qualified teacher. But there are other rights. As taxpayers, we have a right to robust and rigorous due diligence before these schools are opened. This is not about freedom; it is about the privilege of being exempt from public accountability—these are freedoms too far.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

On the understanding that he will speak for two minutes, I call Chris Williamson.

Manufacturing and SMEs

David Ward Excerpts

Wednesday 4th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

I will do my best to finish within five minutes or so, Dr McCrea.

Bradford is promoting itself as a producer city, but the truth is that it never ceased to be one. It sits alongside many other northern cities, including places such as Carlisle, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson) on calling the debate; indeed, I thank him for doing so, because we cannot have enough debates on this subject, which is crucial not only to local communities, but the national economy.

As I said, Bradford never really stopped being a producer city. It suffered dreadfully in the 1980s recession, which almost decimated the city. Bradford did not always focus on textiles; it was, of course, the wool capital of the world, and it was a fabulously wealthy place. However, its manufacturing and engineering were devastated in the 1980s.

None the less, Bradford is still a producer city. Although we still lost 15,000, or 40%, of our manufacturing jobs during the 60-odd consecutive quarters of growth from 1998 to 2008—the golden years, in many ways—Bradford still exists, and it is a cruel rumour that Bradford is no longer a producer city. Some 1,200 manufacturing SMEs still provide employment for 15,000 people in the Bradford district.

With others, I recently set up the all-party group on textile manufacturing, because it is important to tell people that manufacturing, and particularly textile manufacturing in places such as Bradford, still exist, and spinning, weaving and scouring continue on a massive scale. There are no longer 2,000 people coming out of Salt’s mill or Lister’s mill, but many small businesses, particularly in the manufacturing and engineering industries, continue to thrive.

I wanted to speak in the debate because of two contrasting stories picked up in this week’s Yorkshire Post. The first concerns manufacturing. There is a really good story to tell across the whole Yorkshire region. The purchasing managers index for the latest quarter is 57.2, which is a staggeringly good figure. The previous figure—55—was thought to be really good. Fifty is what separates growth from decline; at 50-plus, however, we are talking about exceptional performance, so this is a really good story.

The paper carried out a survey, which tells us that employment has increased for the fourth month running, while output has risen at the fastest pace since July 1994. In addition, the paper included a Barclays survey showing not only that there is growth in output and employment, but that businesses have a real intention to invest for the future, with 54% planning to increase investment over the next 12 months. Some 63% plan to invest in new machinery, 62% plan to invest in new product development and 42% plan to invest in furniture, fixtures and fittings, and buildings. That is all really good news.

What, though, are the contrasting stories? On the same day, the Yorkshire Post included an article headed, “Optimism dims in the small business sector”. According to the article, a survey of 500 UK firms showed that most small businesses

“were still having problems accessing finance despite the introduction of lending schemes.”

A further article in the same paper, on the same day, was headed, “Funding plan still failing to help SMEs”. It says that although the Bank of England lent £1.6 billion through its funding for lending scheme in the last quarter, which is really good news, the bad news is that lending to SMEs continued to fall, shrinking by a net £583 million. The article continues:

“The scheme was revamped in April in a bid to boost the flow of credit to small businesses. But bank loans to SMEs shrunk 2 per cent during the quarter on a year earlier.”

Those are the two contrasting stories. We are all really excited about one, which is about the renaissance in manufacturing. That renaissance is taking place not just in certain sectors or certain parts of the country, but across the piece. It is showing itself strongly in domestic output, customer numbers and exports; that is the good news story. The worrying factor is that that is not getting through to our small manufacturing and engineering businesses, and they are still struggling. Despite Government schemes to provide finance for those businesses, they are waiting, their energy is pent up and they are ready to explode, but they are being held back by a lack of finance. The money is there, but it is clearly going to the bigger companies, which can always access finance from other sources. The companies that critically need the finance to enable them to carry out the investment intentions I mentioned are simply being denied it. Whatever the reasons for that, we need to crack this nut if these companies are to achieve their full potential and we are to carry out the rebalancing of the economy we are all so desperate to achieve.

Education Act 1996 (Travelling Families)

David Ward Excerpts

Tuesday 18th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Richard Graham]

It is fair to say that the educational achievements of all communities vary from place to place. Showmen are a community spread across the whole of the United Kingdom in 10 different regions. I do not have precise statistics for their educational achievements. It is one of the issues that I will mention before finishing my speech, if the hon. Gentleman will allow me to, but he is right to raise the question.

Over the past few months I have created an online petition which has attracted almost 4,000 signatures, all opposing a repeal of section 444(6), and innumerable, often moving e-mails from around the country. I hope the Minister will not mind if I quote briefly from a handful of them. This is from James Breeze:

“Being a showman was a massive complement to my formal education. Can you think of a more stimulating environment for a child to live in? How things work? The value of service? The value of money? Social interactions? The list is endless.”

He goes on to talk about his nine GCSEs at A to C level, four A-levels, a 2:1 degree from Durham university and postgraduate diploma from Leeds Metropolitan university. He is now working in a significant role in a multinational company, managing a large team. He comments:

“This reinforces my view that a showman’s life combined with education as it is now gives the best life skills.”

In similar vein, Morgan Robinson comments in an e-mail:

“I come from a travelling showman background and as such have had to spend many weeks away from school in the summer months…I never fell behind, and in some circumstances, I was actually ahead by the time I got back to school!”

He lists his A-levels and GCSEs, and his chemistry degree course at the university of Warwick. He says:

“My hopes for after my degree is to get a job as an intellectual property lawyer”.

There are several such e-mails. I shall finish them with e-mails from two sisters based in Gloucester, Zoe and Olivia Sheldon. Zoe wrote:

“As a young showperson I have relied on this Act”—

section 444(6)—

“all of my school life. From the age of 4 my parents removed me from my base school…to travel with the fair for 6 months of the year.”

She continues:

“I was successful in gaining a place at Ribston Hall Grammar School for girls at the age of 11 and went on to achieve 11 GCSEs A* to C grades. My sister Olivia, also a student at Ribston, is now studying with the open university to achieve an English degree.”

Zoe finishes:

“The education of young showpeople is reliant on this Act and its abolition would result in the needless break-up of showmen families and cause a loss in the traditional showmen culture as it would force showmen children to be brought up outside of the showman way of life.”

Zoe’s older sister Olivia wrote:

“my sister and I are not isolated cases. I have several cousins and friends who completed/are undertaking University Degrees after having a similar educational background to mine. Among the Showman Community we are hearing more and more news of great educational achievements…Travelling Funfares can move vast distances to get to their next event and are sometimes only in a town for a couple of days, making the suggestion of registering at a different school at each location inconceivable and even detrimental to the education of Showpeople…such an education was imposed on some elder relatives of mine who found it ‘confusing’ as different schools were doing different subjects at different times. The end result was a poor education.”

She goes on to comment about the importance of forming long-term friendships at one school—people who know showpeople’s children when they come back from their travelling.

I met one or two of their older relations on Alney island, who described to me what it was like moving from school to school, in one case being forced to sit in the corner with a book while everyone else was learning. I cannot believe that that is what the Minister would wish to see among our children today.

I am conscious that time is moving on and we all wish to hear from the Minister. I also had a moving letter from Charlotte Barltrop, who worked in a circus for 10 years before getting a degree in theatre and professional practice at the university of Coventry. She now runs her own business teaching circus skills. She wrote:

“All my achievements wouldn’t have been possible if…I was not educated as a child and…was not able to travel whilst gaining this early education. The skills I learned as a child, both in and out of the classroom, are what has enabled me to have such an amazing career”.

I believe that the Minister’s response to the consultation will be published before long, but not, I hope, before she and the Minister for Schools, who shares responsibility for the response, consider carefully the case for the following constructive suggestions. First, we should make arrangements to measure the education results of different showmen groups as a separate entity from the GRT community on which the consultation has been based. Secondly, I encourage the Minister for Schools to meet me and others, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), interested in the case of the showmen, and to visit Kingsholm primary school in Gloucester to see how achievement and remote learning can be combined. Thirdly, and above all, we should exempt the travelling showmen and circus communities from any repeal of section 444(6). That would be a pragmatic, practical and appropriate way to ensure that the lives of some 24,000 travelling showpeople are not unintentionally and dramatically damaged by the Minister’s admirable focus on driving up educational results.

I am grateful to the guild, its representatives, the other associations, my own constituents, and many around the country who have committed their time to sending e-mails and messages of support and information.

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Richard Graham]

I am sorry, but I have very little time left.

Not least, I am grateful to Lisa Deakin Stevens, the family of Matthew Stevens and many others, supported by the Westgate councillors. They have all contributed to my speech this evening, and I look forward to a sympathetic response from my hon. Friend the Minister, in the knowledge that she cannot pre-empt her response to the consultation, but in the belief that this debate may influence her response, and that she will see that what I have raised is a good cause for a valued community.

Apprenticeships

David Ward Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

The average unemployed person, especially young people who are seriously looking for employment, will not give a jot who should claim credit for rejuvenating apprenticeships. All parties should pat themselves on the back for trying to rejuvenate apprenticeships, which had almost disappeared. Wherever credit should lie, the fact that this initiative is being developed at pace is welcome.

Where did we go wrong? Over the past 20 or 30 years we failed to deal with huge structural issues in the labour market. Immigration played some part, especially in communities with rising young populations, but many businesses tell me they would have gone bust without immigrants, particularly over the past 10 years. Structural change to the labour market is important in a place such as Bradford. In the good years, 1998 to 2008, we lost 40%—15,000—of our manufacturing jobs. Hon. Members need only think what opportunities could have been offered for apprenticeships.

We are all aware of the tale of educational under-attainment from which we have suffered for many years. I worked in a university for about 20 years and always felt that the 50% target was absurd. It was not matched by an equivalent increase in funding, and the unit cost dropped. It became too easy to go to university, and when I started work in the 1980s there was no one in the class who did not want to be there, but by the time I left many young people were there simply because they did not know where else to be—it was a deferred decision. The most difficult thing I faced in dealing with admissions in the summer was my awareness of the huge attrition rate in the autumn as students drifted into other things and did not stay on the course. Those changes required fundamental changes to be made to the apprenticeships programme and they are now being made.

The briefing of the Association of Colleges to the Education Committee’s inquiry into careers guidance, which has been referred to by other Members, contained the statistic that

“only 7% of pupils are able to name apprenticeships as a post-GCSE qualification.”

That is simply not good enough. The report proposes changes.

The proportion of students who stayed on to the sixth form and went on to university became a means of comparing secondary schools. Bradford only has sixth forms; there are no sixth-form colleges. Schools wanted to have a very high proportion of young people who stayed on into the sixth form and went on to university and were in no mood to advise them to go down another route.

Ralf Dahrendorf’s book on life chances, which was published in the 1970s, had a profound impact on my views. It spoke of the need to create alternatives and possibilities for young people so that they could lead a fulfilled life. Apprenticeships offer something other than the route that young people are told is the only route that they should pursue. As we have said many times before, we reached the position where somebody who did not go to university was regarded as a failure. We cannot have that culture and it desperately needs to change.

There are many things that we need to do. The expansion of apprenticeship places has happened at such a pace that problems with quality are inevitable. That was identified by the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee. However, we are on a journey and are not there yet.

Clear evidence has been produced by organisations such as the Prince’s Trust of inequality in the apprenticeship places that are offered. Young people are disproportionately disadvantaged, as has been mentioned, as are those from black and minority ethnic communities. That is shown clearly in the statistics.

The growth of apprenticeships has been very well received in Bradford. I have one of the most deprived constituencies with one of the highest levels of youth unemployment. However, we are managing to get more than 1,000 people in my constituency and 5,000 people across the Bradford district into apprenticeships each year. That is extremely good news.

We are not there by a long way, but we are heading in the right direction—a direction that has been desperately needed for a long time.

Forced Conversion of Schools to Academies

David Ward Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

Thank you for calling me to speak, Mrs Main. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (John Pugh) for initiating the debate.

It is not too much of a secret, certainly in some quarters, that I am not a great fan of academies. I opposed them under the previous Government, and I oppose the academy regime under this Government. Within a few months of coming into the House of Commons, I voted against the Academies Bill. That was for a couple of reasons. First, many supporters of academies, who want to push for academy status, are seeking to control admissions. For them, it is about who goes into the school, not what goes on in the school.

In a private meeting with the Secretary of State, I said, “You should be far more radical and make every school an academy in terms of some of the freedoms that are proposed.” However, for those who support academies, and who are pushing for them, that would not really work, because the secret of academies is that some schools are academies and some are not. Alongside freedoms in relation to conditions of service and so on, there would need to be some control over admissions, which would defeat the purpose of going to academy status for many sponsors, and the same applies to free schools.

I am opposed to the academies also because there is an overemphasis on the impact that the structure will have on raising achievement and attainment in schools. It is interesting that many of the new academies have not taken up some of the new freedoms: they have taken the money and stayed, rather than taking the money and running with the new freedoms. Another reason for my opposition is that I always want, as Stephen Covey said, to

“Begin with the end in mind.”

If something works, generally speaking it is okay. I do not feel that there are too many strong, politically different issues or matters of principle. Most of them are about what works in a situation, with some fundamental underpinning of values. I am not clear where the evidence is for academies. In a sitting of the Education Committee a few weeks ago, I asked the Secretary of State whether he believed in evidence-based policy and he said that he very much does, but I do not see any evidence for that.

The success of the academies project seems—my hon. Friend the Member for Southport referred to this—to be judged by how many academies there are. That has almost become an end in itself. There has been much talk about needing to convert. A school is in a particular situation, and the idea of need is always introduced; but it does not mean the school will benefit from a conversion. The evidence base is not there. The idea is that the school needs to convert because it meets the criteria; but it is the Secretary of State who sets the criteria. It is like saying, “I will decide when it is raining, and I will decide what to wear in the rain.” He is doing the same, because he is saying, “I will decide the criteria and whether they have been met.” That is the same idea as, “There is a need to put on a coat when it is raining; it is raining so we need to put a coat on.” The false logic behind the whole academies programme is: “An intervention is needed and an academy is an intervention, so you need an academy.” It is all false logic. Using a coat when it rains is an intervention, but it is not the only form of intervention and there is no evidence that that intervention is the one that would work.

There are all sorts of interventions, which could include setting up an academy—but where is the evidence? Local authority support would be a possibility: many authorities are not, as has been suggested, dreadful, and are effective at providing support. The intervention may be a new head for the existing school. It may be an integrated post-inspection plan, or an interim executive board to turn the school around. There is evidence to show that all those interventions work in certain circumstances. They all have an evidence base, but there is no evidence that the academy structure works. It is false logic.

In my constituency in Bradford, there are two schools that are going through intervention academy conversions. My two sons went to one of those schools many years ago. If someone went to a local estate agency 10 or 15 years ago, the window would have adverts stating that properties were close to the school. The school was one of the largest and most successful in the Bradford district and it was why people moved into that area, but it has had a difficult time. It was not so long ago that the head teacher of that school, before retirement, was the executive head of another school that was failing and has now become successful. I was chair of governors at a school that was in special measures, and it became the first secondary school in Bradford to be rated as outstanding. All that was done without academy status and on the basis of interventions by an extremely good head teacher, who was able, through a new management team, to turn the school around.

In Bradford, a secondary partnership has been established. The whole principle behind it has been to offer support to other schools and negate the need for academy conversions. The partnership was formed about 18 months ago and all 28 secondary schools from the district are involved and pay an annual subscription to join. It involves developing a rigorous system of performance review. It will provide effective school-to-school support and deliver school-led professional development. Those schools do not need to be academies. There are other ways forward that do not require a change to a school’s structure.

Ideology has been mentioned a few times, but I do not think that is the issue. It is about ego. All schools can be improved, but it takes time and requires hard work. It is not glamorous and a slog is involved. It takes 18 months to two years to get the right people in place to turn a school around, but where is the glamour in that for a Secretary of State who needs to be seen to do dramatic things? Where is the glamour in that hard graft that happens day in, day out up and down the country in turning around schools that need to improve?

The problem is that that egocentric project comes with a cost. The House of Commons Library briefing shows the actual cost involved in investing in the schools and bribing them to take up academy status, as well as the opportunity cost of the money that is not available for other schools. It is frankly sickening to see schools in Bradford unable to afford basic repairs while a bottomless pit of money appears to be available to support the free schools and academies programme. That programme is a costly distraction—devoid of evidence—from the principal concern of an authority, which is to raise educational achievement and attainment through the well-established methods that already exist for turning schools around and providing the quality education that pupils need and deserve.