Academies Bill [HL]

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grey-Thompson]

My Lords, I support the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, wanted to speak in support of the amendment, but could not make the late hour for health reasons. I am therefore pleased to take her place, after taking her considerable briefing.

I share her concern about losing essential support for disabled children if we do not ensure that the Bill delivers an appropriate system to do the job. I am a member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Disability, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. The group has frequently been told that too many disabled children are not getting the specialist support that they need at school fully to engage with the curriculum. I am concerned that the Bill may have the unintended consequence of worsening this problem. I will give an example. The National Deaf Children's Society identified a case in the West Midlands in which a small all-through school became an academy. It admitted a disabled child who required significant levels of support. However, the academy had difficulty in funding this support as it took up a disproportionate amount of its special educational needs budget. As a small school working with one deaf child, the academy was unable to access the economies of scale that would have made the support for this child affordable.

On a more positive note, I am pleased to hear about Waltham Forest local authority, which decided to adopt a different funding model when a delegated structure similar to that proposed in the Bill failed to support the needs of disabled children. Now, a local special school receives its funding to operate an outreach service for all other local schools free of charge.

The lesson from Waltham Forest demonstrates how important it is to think through the impact of any changes to funding, especially for support services, before proceeding. I believe that this amendment helps us to do that and to avoid unnecessary damage to the education of disabled children. I urge the Minister to respond positively to it.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the amendment and apologise for not being present when the noble Baroness moved it. I know that, with his wife’s experience as a volunteer, the Minister is familiar with these issues. Recently I spoke to a teacher who had completed her first year working with teenagers with autism and she told me how exhausted she was. She had spent an outward bound weekend with them; they had been doing a school play the previous evening; and she had had to complete the school reports. She was utterly exhausted and told me how challenging these children could be. However, she said, “I love these children. It’s so satisfying to do this work”. We need to ensure that the professionals who work with these children get the best specialist support available. I share the concern raised by my noble friend Lord Low about the dangers of atomisation and fragmentation, and I know that the Minister will also very much bear that in mind. We all have to work in partnership if we are to achieve the best outcomes for these young people.

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in supporting the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, in this amendment. Yesterday, when we had a debate about numbers and needs, we raised some questions about the funding formula. We also spoke about the ready reckoner which the Government have produced and which is on their website.

Looking in more detail at the ready reckoner, they make it quite clear that home-to-school transport, educational psychology, SEN statementing and assessment, monitoring of SEN provision, parent partnerships, prosecution of parents for non-attendance, individually assigned SEN resources for pupils with rare conditions needing expensive tailored provision, and the provision of pupil referral units or other education for a pupil will all be paid for by retained funding by the local authority, but the other general support services—this is the issue with which we are concerned here—will fall under the part of the funding that will be dispersed among the schools, or certainly the academies. Looking at the list of what comes under the local authority central spend equivalent grant, which is the one that is going to be shared out among the schools, the services and costs that are funded from local authorities’ schools budgets include things such as museum and library services, the costs of the local authority statutory and regulatory duties, and so on. In other words, it would appear that the Government currently envisage that this funding should come not just from the dedicated schools grant but from general funding which comes out of council tax, plus some money from the Department for Communities and Local Government which goes towards, for example, the funding of museums and libraries and outdoor education services.

There are very real reasons to worry. Yesterday, I asked the Minister whether we were raising the expectation of many of these schools that they would receive rather more funding than they will actually get. Looking in detail at the advice given on the website, I think that there is more to it than that. Questions arise about whether this money comes within the schools budget. As I said, we are looking at the fair funding formula and the problems that dispersing this money will cause local authorities. It will give them very real problems in providing those support services because of the loss of economies of scale and so on.

I also endorse what the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, said about the problems of following through on complaints in relation to the YPLA. As she said, the Minister suggested that voluntary organisations might do the monitoring. That is a very unsatisfactory reply. I asked the Minister yesterday about the capabilities and capacity of the YPLA which is a new organisation that is only just off the ground. It is still finding its feet and I wonder whether it has the capacity, as the number of academies grows, to fulfil these functions. I press the Minister to think further about the proposals made by the noble Baroness.

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[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 44A. Your Lordships may recall—and I hope that I recall it correctly—the head teacher of a new academy school saying, “We didn’t need to build a playground for this school because we’re going to be working our students hard in the school premises”. I hope that the Minister will bear in mind, when he considers the issues of minimum standards, that children need to have a playground area. It is important in tackling obesity, in socialisation, and as a release from study so that the children can better concentrate on their work. Research indicates that the amount of time children have for play has been picked away at over the years, so I hope that he will keep in mind the importance of school play areas.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I shall be brief. As the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, know, I support a great deal of what they have said about design. The only question I have is on the Building Schools for the Future programme. Why are so many of those schools externally drab at best, and in some cases quite hideous? Given the apparent pause in school building, would it not be a good idea if that was used to ensure that, when building starts up again in a big way, as no doubt it will in the future, the external design of many of the buildings will be much better than the ones that have been erected in the past two or three years?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, it is a remarkable testimony to the drawing powers of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, on local government that at 11.08 in the evening, so many noble Lords are present to hear him speak. I should say that when he addressed these matters in Committee, it was also at a late hour. He has raised issues that are of great substance, and I hope that he might be tempted to bring an amendment back at Third Reading when we could have a proper debate about the role of local government in relation to education in prime time.

I believe that local authorities could have a positive role in the future. I read with interest the briefing produced by the Local Government Association, and they could have a useful and constructive role to play, post this Bill, in relation to academies. We had a good debate on SEN where I could see the positive role for local government. I come back to the Minister’s earlier comment that there is a clear tension in all these debates between wanting to let schools have much greater freedom, which many of us sign up to, and the risk that that involves. The Minister said that if you trust people, there will be times when things go wrong, and I think that that is right. The problem the Government face is that unless they have a local mechanism in place for dealing with these issues, they will come right back to Ministers. However much they set up other agencies or say, “It is nothing to do with us, it is a matter for individual schools”, I can tell him that in the end they will come back to Ministers. In that context, local authorities could play a constructive role and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, might allow us to have a wider debate on this next week.

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, I agree with the thrust of what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has said. He referred back—as did the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath—to our debate on the necessary expensive services to children with special educational needs and the need for a strategic commissioning of such services. There could be an important role for local authorities in that area in future. Like the noble Lord, I would encourage the Minister to set up some kind of forum with the local authority so that there is an ongoing communication with it. Each local authority will have a councillor responsible for the welfare of children within its area; why could there not be informal meetings in which new academies are introduced to such people? This would enable the doors of communication to be kept open?

As my noble friend Lady Howarth made clear, if we want children to succeed at school, we need to make sure that their welfare is catered for. It is important that social services work in partnership with schools. I am sorry to repeat it one more time, but head teachers keep on telling me about the value of social workers when they are connected with a school; or, if they do not have a social worker, how much they would like one attached to their school. It is important to keep these matters in mind and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for making this debate possible.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the debate in Committee underlined the importance which many noble Lords attach to the role of local authorities. There are some very important questions here and we do not pretend to have all of the answers. Both parties within the coalition are committed to the principle of localism, with decisions and accountability returned from London to local communities. We are clear that we no longer want to hear the Secretary of State for Education—as happened under the previous Secretary of State—announcing on the “Today” programme that he had just dismissed a head teacher in Carlisle. However, it would be only honest to admit that neither party in the coalition is yet clear what localism means in detail, in this sector and others, and what the balance between the role of local authorities and of more local communities, including parents and others, should be.

In his letter to council lead members sent on 26 May, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for education made it clear that the Government see strong local authorities as central to their plans to improve education. This Thursday, the Secretary of State will be speaking on this theme to the Local Government Association conference. He will confirm that we want to see local authorities acting as powerful champions of excellence, both in education and in wider children’s services, and that we want to see local government playing a strong strategic role, working with schools to drive up standards, supporting schools in working together to share expertise, and in promoting the spread of innovation for the benefit of all.

We want to see a smooth transition to the new school system and we are pursuing a genuine dialogue with local government and other partners to that end. We will therefore pursue further dialogue with representatives of local government about these and related issues over the coming weeks and months. It may be, as my noble friend Lord Greaves suggested, that the local authority develops more of a commissioning role along the lines envisioned by the party opposite in its 2005 White Paper. It may also be that some of the other ideas that he alludes to in his amendment should be explored further as part of the future shape of provision and the relationship between local authorities and schools. I assure my noble friend that the Secretary of State is committed to this dialogue; he will be pursuing it further on Thursday and will make a number of proposals as to how it should be taken further in the next weeks and months. I invite my noble friend Lord Greaves, with his considerable expertise in this field, and other noble Lords who have expressed interest, to help shape our thinking in this area so that we can, in time, come forward with the best possible proposals. On that basis, I urge my noble friend to withdraw the amendment.