Education Bill

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

I will speak to Lords amendments 18 and 19 on the duty of schools to co-operate.

It is important that we have a framework that delivers competition and choice in rural areas. There have been many examples of innovation in my constituency in which schools have co-operated to provide a better service across disparate and sparse rural areas. Methwold high school in my constituency operates a vertically integrated model with Hockwold primary school. It has been able to save on administration costs and to run the school more efficiently. It offers GCSEs in subjects such as maths to local adults, thereby lowering its costs and offering a wider service. It also collaborates with further education and higher education establishments to offer local people degrees and other qualifications that they would not normally be able to access in such a remote area.

Another school in my constituency, Swaffham Hamond’s high school, was regrettably unable to continue to offer A-levels last year due to the lack of local demand. Unfortunately, students from that school were obliged to travel for up to 45 minutes on local buses to go to King’s Lynn to study their A-level choices. Since then, a local collaboration programme has been developed with Dereham school, which has been able to offer its A-levels at Swaffham Hamond’s, ensuring that specialist teaching staff are used in the best way possible.

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[Richard Fuller]

I appreciate the incentive that my hon. Friend gives me to talk about local issues—there are examples in the borough of Bedford and more generally—but he recognises that the duty to co-operate involves questions such as the ownership of land and buildings. In addition, my local authority has a somewhat confused educational structure. There is a mix of two tier and three tier, and sometimes there is both in the same place at the same time. In those circumstances, when schools wish to pursue becoming an academy, there is potential for a difference of opinion on the best interests of children. A school being subject to a requirement to co-operate with the local authority on the basis of the local authority’s responsibilities does not facilitate the growing liberalisation of schools to determine their futures that we wish to see. There is potential for conflict, but I hope that those examples have helped my hon. Friend.

[Elizabeth Truss]

Does my hon. Friend agree that some local authorities, such as Norfolk county council, have taken a positive approach towards academies, and are helping schools to become academies and to link up? Local authorities can play a positive role if they have the right attitude towards what that role should be.

[Richard Fuller]

I appreciate my hon. Friend’s intervention, although with respect, I will stick tightly to the Lords amendments on this issue. She gives another example of how the duty on schools and local authorities to co-operate has evolved. Given that their noble Lords went so far in putting that duty back in the Bill, may I encourage the Minister and his ministerial colleagues to think further and more deeply about the evolving landscape and what that is likely to mean over the coming years?

I thank the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) for his comments about school admissions, which many of us share, and I thank the Minister for the changes that have been proposed or made. If we wish to see a substantial change and more liberalisation of schools in terms of where the authority lies, we should be aware that most families and parents want schools’ admissions policies to be clear and fair in their communities. That does not necessarily mean that they have to be uniform, although many of us would indeed hope to see uniform entrance policies, particularly with free schools, because that would reinforce the success of this new idea and new policy. I therefore very much welcome Lords amendments 20 and 21. I have listened to different points of view on free schools, and I know that support for this radical idea among Opposition Members has been “on again/off again”. Indeed, it would be interesting to know whether those on the Opposition Front Bench are “on” today or “off”.