Free Schools: Educational Standards

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for making this important debate possible, for his work in this area over so many years and for opening this debate in the way he did. I also pay tribute to him as vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Looked After Children and Care Leavers, and for his most important work when he took through the Children and Families Bill five years ago. He introduced or accepted an amendment—I think he introduced it—that placed a duty on local authorities to allow young people in local authority foster care to remain with their foster carers until the age of 21, where both the young person and the foster carer wished to do so. It is very moving when I speak to foster parents who are so pleased they can keep on looking after their young person until the age of 20 or 21. Scotland and Wales then chose to follow. At the time there was a clamour that the same thing was not done for children’s homes, but in his report on children’s homes last year, Sir Martin Narey introduced the notion of staying close, so that now children’s homes are developing a similar model to allow their care leavers to stay close to their home. I pay tribute to the noble Lord for this important work.

I declare my interest as a trustee of a mental health service for adolescents and the of the child welfare charity, the Michael Sieff Foundation. I join in celebrating the academic attainments achieved at so many academies, particularly the academy that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, kindly arranged for me to visit: the King Solomon Academy in Paddington Green, north central London. It is part of Ark Schools, a multi-academy trust. It is in an area of high deprivation, with many families living on low incomes, many immigrant families and many families living in social housing. The King Solomon Academy has a focus on depth before breadth, with a strong emphasis on English and mathematics. In December 2008 and December 2009, Ofsted rated the school as outstanding. In 2015, the school was rated as the best non-selective secondary school in England, according to the Department of Education GCSE league tables. When one walks in the door, one reads an inscription on the wall along the lines of, “We expect all our pupils to go to university”. It is an academy, not a free school. I am afraid I can speak only from my experience, but I hope it is helpful to the discussion.

When I visited, I found the 28 year-old Head, Max Haimendorf, a graduate of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, enthusiastic and inspiring; he was one of the first Teach First programme cohort. An acquaintance spoke to me of the extraordinary dedication of one of the school’s teachers, whom he knew well and said that sitting observing an English class, he saw that all the pupils were concentrating on what their teacher was saying and that as they listened, they clicked their fingers, an expression of their excitement at learning, encouraged by their calm and assured teacher. In a science class, he spoke to one of the BAME pupils, a girl—by far the majority of pupils were from that background. She spoke of how much she enjoyed her education, how her family were thoroughly involved by the school in her education and of the extra-curricular activities that she enjoyed: the theatrical performances and the symphony orchestra. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for that that experience, which stays with me vividly to this day.

However, when we speak about educational attainment in free schools, we must also ask ourselves at what cost this comes to children who are not in academies or free schools, or who do not fit in with the culture of these schools. I think this has come up in previous discussions. I was pleased to hear the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, talk so strongly about ensuring equity in these schools. Most of the young people going to an academy were the children of immigrants who had great aspirations for them, but what about those children who are not from those kinds of backgrounds? What about Traveller children, looked-after children and children from families who have been failed by the system for generations? Professor Sonia Blandford, chief executive of the charity Achievement for All, points out that about one-fifth of our children are being left behind. She grew up in a low-income family and she was the first person in her family to go to university. Her charity is widely respected and effectively supports many schools. She points out that free schools cost the Government £57,000 per annum per pupil with any form of needs, which is about £30,000 above other pupils. That seems an extraordinary difference. I am sorry not to have written to the Minister, but maybe he can confirm or challenge that figure.

We know that high-quality early years education provides an invaluable boost for vulnerable children, yet the best provision, maintained nursery schools—schools that receive supplementary funding because they provide a qualified head teacher, qualified teachers and a qualified special educational needs co-ordinator—are struggling to find the £59 million a year they need to survive. It appears that there are favourite children in the system, a favourite model, and others may be losing out as a consequence. I urge the Government to be more even-handed in their approach and to take the following steps to make our education system more inclusive and effective.

First, I urge both the Government and the Opposition to avoid any further revolution in our education system. Revolutions are always tempting but they seldom deliver on their promise. They tend to detract from the most important tasks. Secondly, I urge the Minister to embrace the most important tasks, which are recruiting and retaining the best people in education, offering excellent continual professional development to those in posts and ensuring the most disadvantaged children and young people benefit from the best teachers. We hear that it is often the case in the new free schools that those who are the most challenged and disadvantaged are getting the best experience. I know there are currently funding pressures, but it is troubling to read that last year continuing professional development funding in both secondary and primary schools significantly reduced.

Thirdly—and relatedly—the Government should make Ofsted less punitive and more supportive in its approach. The best-performing nations do not have an inspection system as punitive as ours; they have more supportive ones. I ask the Minister to look at Lucy Crehan’s book on education and the highest performing PISA nations. I warmly welcome the commitment from the previous Education Secretary to reform Ofsted, and I hope that is being sustained. The anxiety that Ofsted currently creates drives good teachers and head teachers out of the profession. They are put off by a limited regime where the primary focus of the school is Ofsted, not the children or the best way to help them learn.

My time is up. I am grateful for the opportunity to raise these concerns and to join in celebrating the achievements of the free schools—which I recognise—but there are complexities in this area. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

Off-rolling is dealt with in the report by Edward Timpson which will be released quite soon—I think in the next few weeks. I will make sure that the noble Lord gets a copy of it. It certainly addresses all the issues that the noble Lord raises. One point that it makes is that academies are no more aggressive in off-rolling than anybody else in the system. I acknowledge that it is a problem. When I was running my trust, for any permanent exclusion I always said to a head teacher that they had to telephone me personally and told them, “This is a professional failure on your part”. We need to be much more rigorous, but I can assure noble Lords that the practice is widespread also among local authority schools. It is a complicated issue, because there is whole range of categories that a school can use when it shunts a child out of the door. For example, category B is sending a child home to work, although it really wants to get rid of the child. It is a very complicated area, but I will send the noble Lord the report as soon as it is available.

The application window for Wave 13 closed on 5 November. We received 124 applications. A rich collection of potential schools is proposed by a range of groups with a variety of expertise, both new providers and experienced multi-academy trusts. We are assessing those proposals and will announce the results later in the spring.

To answer the concerns raised by my noble friends Lord O’Shaughnessy and Lord Hill, we are planning a further wave, Wave 14, which will continue to put free schools into the areas of most need. Innovation remains key. I can reassure the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that free schools are different because they start with a different ethos. They have the same legal basis as an academy, but having set up four myself—as I mentioned to the noble Lord, Lord Watson—I know that they are quite different.

A further 55 special and 14 AP free schools are in the pipeline. Last summer we launched a special and AP free schools wave. By the deadline in October we had received 65 bids from local authorities, setting out their case for why a special or AP free school would benefit their area. Early this year we will launch a competition to select trusts in the areas with the strongest case for a free school.

My noble friend Lord Polak asked about the religious designation of special schools. He is right that they cannot have a specific designation, but they can acknowledge the religious impetus behind their application by registering themselves as having a faith ethos.

Beyond this, the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, raised some important general points, in particular about recognising the importance of teachers. I echo the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and others, that that is the key to a good education. We have accepted in full the STRB’s recommendation of a 3.5% uplift in the minimum and maximum of the main pay range—one of the largest increases in 10 years. Last year we published a workload reduction toolkit, and we continue to work extensively with the unions and Ofsted to challenge and remove unhelpful practices that create this unnecessary workload. For me that is the most important issue: most teachers do not feel underpaid but do feel that they are put upon with a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy. That is one of my priorities.

We are also working with Ofsted to produce a new inspection framework. A consultation document will be issued in the next few weeks. The framework challenges the senior leadership teams, during inspections, on the workload that they are imposing on their teachers.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, raised the issue of structures versus standards.

[The Earl of Listowel]

I welcome what the Minister says about workload, but my strong sense, gained from many people working in the field, is that the emphasis on Ofsted, and the threat that a head teacher may lose their job—and career—over a negative Ofsted report, is too harsh. We need to challenge people but also to get the balance right. I am, therefore, not completely reassured by what the Minister has just said about the framework.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Earl is right in saying that in this country Ofsted seems to command more influence in the sector than happens in other countries. This is a cultural issue, and one of the first things my Secretary of State did when he arrived last year was to produce a video that showed him and the Ofsted chief inspector on a panel trying to slaughter some of the myths about inspection outcomes and so on. It is a cultural issue that we will not be able to deal with overnight. However, I accept his concern.

I am conscious that I am running out of time. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, is correct: we have cancelled some projects during the pre-opening process. In my view this demonstrates our rigour in ensuring that the quality bar is kept high. The point made by the noble Baroness about good governance is also correct. As the noble Lord, Lord Nash, said, however, 50% more free schools have achieved “outstanding” judgments than the average in the state school system—so something must be going right.

Of course, along the way not everything has gone right, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, among other noble Lords, mentioned. We have closed some 13 free schools, seven UTCs and 21 studio schools, and where failures occur we take swift and decisive action. I agree with my noble friend Lord Popat that we cannot shy away from failure and that we should address it and learn lessons from it.

I finish by quoting the motto of the academy trust of my noble friend Lord Nash: “Libertas Per Cultum”—freedom through education. Education provides the stepping-stone to improving people’s lives. Free schools play an increasing role in that work.