Academies Bill [Lords]

Lord Brady of Altrincham Excerpts

Monday 19th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Brady (Altrincham and Sale West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), the former Select Committee Chairman, who rightly gave full credit to Members on both sides of the House for our commitment to furthering the interests of all children and ensuring the best in education. He raised concerns about the free schools policy, of which I am a strong advocate. I join my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in having visited a KIPP—knowledge is power programme—academy in a very deprived neighbourhood in Washington DC, where I saw tremendous educational outcomes. It was one of the most exciting schools that I have ever visited. I want that kind of provision and flexibility opened up in this country, so that people have access to decent state schools, particularly people in communities that are too often deprived of any such schools. That is one of the most exciting parts of the Bill.

I am delighted to support the widening of the academies programme. Again, I have form on that issue, on which I am entirely consistent. Perhaps it is a great vice of mine, in politics, to be consistent. The former Secretary of State criticised the involvement of the private sector, but he, as the former Select Committee Chairman pointed out, presided over the involvement of the private sector in school provision and in local education authority provision. I am entirely relaxed about the involvement of the private sector, where it is appropriate.

More fundamentally than that, I have always taken the view that good, well-led schools benefit most if they have the maximum freedom and liberty to flourish, without excessive bureaucratic intervention. One of the main reasons why I take that view is that I represent a constituency that has possibly the best state schools in the country, and nearly all the secondary schools were grant-maintained prior to the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. I sat on the Committee that considered that Bill, and strongly opposed the Government’s efforts to remove grant-maintained status.

There was a bit of banter earlier about the qualities of grant-maintained schools. My experience locally was that they very much worked together. They took great pride in co-operating and built exactly the community of schooling and education to which Members on both sides of the House referred, but they did so because they wanted to, and because they saw that as part of what would bring greater success to their school, and better educational outcomes for the whole community. I have always supported that. Now I find that the enthusiasm in my constituency, in secondary schools in particular, for the possibility of academy status is precisely because so many of them have a positive experience of grant-maintained status and would very much like to see returned at least the freedoms that they enjoyed under it.

Having sat through the proceedings of the School Standards and Framework Bill and served on its Standing Committee and those of other education Bills in previous Parliaments, I was pleased when the previous Government eventually saw the error of their ways. Having removed some freedoms from grant-maintained schools and moved on to foundation schools, which were more restrictive, they wanted to build on the academies model precisely because they started to understand that greater freedom, fewer restrictions and less bureaucracy for those schools would be the way for them to continue to raise standards.

The notion that one can create independent state-funded schools is very radical, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State rightly chided the Opposition for being conservative in their response to the Bill. We are being radical: we are pushing forward measures that will not only free schools to become more successful, but start to break down the barriers—some have referred to it as apartheid in the education system—between the state and independent sectors. I would certainly welcome more independent schools choosing to enter the state sector as academies.

[Glenda Jackson]

Is it really a radical policy? Surely the Government are proposing to take us back to the bad old days of grammar schools and secondary schools. That will be the next step, because the new academies will have their own admissions policies, and they will enforce them through an entrance examination. Do we really want to go back to that?

[Mr Brady]

If only the hon. Lady were right. I am sure she knows that I would very much like to go back to exactly that system, because we have it in my constituency, and that, I suspect, is why the schools in Trafford are better than those in her constituency. However, that is probably a debate for another day.

Today, we have the questions of consistency and of real belief in what was proposed by the previous Government and is now proposed by this Government. I was the shadow Schools Minister at the time of the legislation that became the Education Act 2002, and at that point I was pleased that we, the then Opposition, looked at the Government’s proposals in an entirely open-minded way, saw the benefits of the academies model being offered and welcomed it. In our critique and scrutiny of the then Government, we urged them to go further, to have the courage of their convictions and to ensure that more schools could benefit from the freedoms on offer. In that regard, the removal of the requirement for a sponsor is an important step forward.

[Dr Pugh]

The hon. Gentleman is making an interesting contribution, but he used the expression “educational apartheid”. Under his analysis, and the legislation before us, there will still be an educational apartheid: there will be schools with freedoms, and schools with lesser freedoms or no freedom at all.

[Mr Brady]

I should like more and more schools to attain the outstanding status that will allow them to move more rapidly on to academy status, but a policy of greater freedom for schools that can exercise it well, in the interests of their pupils, is clearly beneficial.

At the time of the 2002 Act, we urged the Government to go further, to accelerate their programme and to have the courage of their convictions. As I look at the reasoned amendment, I really wish that the current Opposition had taken a similarly generous approach and been prepared to accept not only that there is enormous common ground in the proposals before us, but that we had reached the point at which the previous Labour Government and the Conservative party had recognised the real value in giving greater freedom and flexibility to schools and more autonomy to good head teachers.

The previous Government were moving forward slowly but we want to move forward more quickly, and I really wish they would join us in that. Instead, in the discussions relating to the Bill, including by the shadow Secretary of State today, the Labour party has moved towards seeing the whole purpose of the academies programme that it pursued as being about funding. It sees the importance of academies as being the insertion of a sponsor, an outside partner, preferably investing a very large sum in sponsorship to help fund the school. Fundamentally, however, we see the central point of academies as being the freedom that they provide. We understand the importance of allowing good heads, governing bodies and teachers to get on with their jobs and teach.

I started by advising Members to be entirely consistent and I will finish entirely consistently. Having spent the Committee and Report stages of what became the 2002 Act criticising the previous Government for being too timid in their approach to academies and to giving good schools more freedom, I encourage my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to demonstrate with vigour the courage of our convictions and see this as just the beginning of what should be a truly radical, powerful revolution that will lead to much better state education in this country.