Education Regulations and Faith Schools

Debate between Ian Swales and Lord Beith

Thursday 12th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) on securing this debate. It is a shame that so few Members are here for this debate on an extremely important subject. The two previous speakers have made important points, to which I am sure the Minister has been listening.

Let me say straight away that this is a matter of conscience, so I speak for nobody but myself. I have a lot of sympathy with what has been said, particularly on tolerance, and on the rights of children, which we need to think about very seriously. I come to this issue from a different angle; I confess that I am an atheist, but I am probably a model of tolerance for other ways of living. I think it extremely important that schools set people up for a full life in modern Britain. I shall come on to give one or two examples of where I feel that is not happening. To me, religious education is about education, not indoctrination. I shall briefly cover four areas in my speech: admissions, staffing, curriculum and community cohesion.

On admissions, it is interesting to note that only four countries in the whole of the OECD allow state schools to select on the basis of religion: the UK, Ireland, Israel and Estonia. No other country does. In fact, we are the only country in the OECD that has a legal commitment to an act of collective worship. That law is broken in about 80% of schools every day; if we think about the number of people involved, this must be the greatest act of collective law-breaking in history. I think it is time that we looked again at the collective worship provisions of the Education Act 1944. Given that so few schools go through with this, we need to clarify the position. It is interesting that we have heard a lot about the aggression of Ofsted, but in theory, it should be marking down and reporting the schools that are not carrying out proper acts of collective worship and are therefore breaking the law.

On staffing, my party is clear is about its policy. We believe that there should be a discriminatory recruitment process only for the staff needed to carry out religious activity in schools. A lady who lives two doors away from me in Redcar found her school in south Middlesbrough taken over by the Vardy Foundation, a creationist organisation, about 10 years ago, and she had to reapply for her job. I believe that the head of the foundation has now sold the schools that he took over. That woman, who was a drama teacher, was told that her new job would largely involve biblical tableaux. Not surprisingly, she left the school, and subsequently pursued a very successful career at a different school in my area. The issue of staffing is extremely important; young people deserve a range of staff to provide for their needs.

As for the curriculum—I mentioned the drama curriculum a moment ago—I suspect that that is where some of the trouble starts. Other Members have said that Ofsted appears to have been over-zealous in some of our more moderate schools. It certainly sounds as though it has, and I think that clarification is needed. However, it has recently identified various practices. I have already referred to the teaching of creationism as fact; that is happening in quite a few schools in the science and biology curriculum. It is a particular issue in the north-east, partly owing to the Vardy Foundation and some of its successor organisations.

GCSE science exam papers have been redacted in girls’ schools because the questions were deemed unacceptable. Some schools have not observed the legal obligation to teach anatomy, puberty and reproduction. Access has been denied to art or music. Schools have espoused a narrow view of the role of women and girls, homophobia, and exposure to extremist views. Those are all real, recent cases, and we need a system that is capable of picking them up.

I was a member of a parliamentary group that recently heard witnesses speak about three topics. The first was the Trojan horse situation in Birmingham, which has been well reported, so I shall not repeat all the arguments now, but I think it is well known that it was a problem for young people. We also heard from an ex-pupil from a Jewish Orthodox Haredi school in north London, who, despite having been born and raised in the United Kingdom, could speak only Yiddish at the age of 17 because he lived in such a tight, closed community. His education had been incredibly narrow. Some may say that his community is free to behave in that way, but I personally think that it is a poor preparation for life in modern Britain.

We also heard from a former Accelerated Christian Education pupil. ACE bases its entire curriculum on the Bible, and the former pupil said that he had left the school, at the age of 18, believing that the national health service and the welfare state were against biblical teaching. In other words, the teaching at the school was a cover for a very right-wing political agenda. Was that person well prepared for life in this country?

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I realise that I approach this issue from a slightly different standpoint, but I have to say that the examples given by my hon. Friend are unbelievably alien to the experience of faith schools in areas such as Northumberland. I would not want him to think that that is what faith schools are like. The motion refers to

“the ability of faith schools to teach their core beliefs in the context of respect and toleration for others.”

I am sure that that wording reflects his views as well as mine.

[Ian Swales]

Absolutely. Indeed, my right hon. Friend has anticipated the next part of my speech. I have very little against most faith schools. The head of Ofsted is the former head of a Catholic secondary school, and he said recently that most faith schools “have nothing to fear”. There are outstanding faith schools in my constituency: Sacred Heart in Redcar and St Peter’s in South Bank, and their four Catholic feeder primary schools. The point that I was making in giving those rather extreme examples was that we need an inspection system that is fit for purpose and picks up such instances. If anyone has been given the impression that I think faith schools are riddled with this kind of thing, I wish to correct the record, because that is not what I was suggesting.

Interpreting and Translation Services

Debate between Ian Swales and Lord Beith

Thursday 20th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Pritchard, to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) not only on his diligent chairmanship of his Committee but on his comprehensive introduction to the subject today. I am a member of the Public Accounts Committee, which considered the matter on 6 December 2012 and drew some shocking conclusions.

Life on the Public Accounts Committee involves meeting twice a week and each time hearing about very different situations, usually a litany of failure or ineffectiveness. As a result, we become a little cynical or even punch drunk. However, even by those standards, the hearing on 6 December 2012 was appalling. I am reminded by the large number of people in the Public Gallery today—no doubt some of them are personally interested in the matter—that we had a large attendance in the Public Gallery on that day. It was one of the few hearings I remember when there was shaking of heads in the Public Gallery as Ministry officials responded to the Committee. That is rare, but it happened repeatedly on that day, which says something about the officials’ complacency,

Our Committee found, not surprisingly given what we have heard, that the outsourcing of interpreter services was terribly mismanaged. We concluded that the Ministry lacked management information on the previous use of interpreters and therefore did not have a clear understanding of the requirements when contracting out the service. It did not know how much it was already spending on interpreters, or even how many interpreters were required or in what languages. As a result, the system it selected was driven by bidders’ proposals rather than the actual requirements.

Applied Language Solutions, the company that was awarded the contract, was clearly incapable of delivering on such a large contract, yet it was handed £42 million a year to cover the whole country, despite a credit rating report to the Ministry recommending that ALS should not have been awarded a contract of more than £l million. Departmental officials could not adequately explain to the Committee why it had ignored that advice. It is one thing to make such a striking error in the first place, but the Committee also found that the Ministry failed to penalise ALS effectively under the contract. Its penalty was only £2,200, and there was no penalty for the first four months when its performance was at its worst. Risible levels of penalties and low expectations of performance obviously allow private companies to get away with over-promising and under-delivering.

The Ministry should draft and implement future contracts to minimise transitional problems by piloting and rolling out new systems gradually, and incentivising contractors to meet contractual requirements from the outset—for example, through the robust use of penalties. Will the Minister tell us what penalties have been levied on Capita for failure to deliver since it took over the contract? ALS, of course, was handsomely rewarded for its failure. It sold the business on to Capita for £7.5 million only 10 months after winning the contract. As we often find on our Committee, the public sector had no say in that reassignment and certainly got no financial benefit from the on-selling. That is something we see constantly in the public sector: it is now a business to win a public sector bid or a PFI contract and then trade it on. That is how companies really make money, and ALS is a good example of it.

The Ministry estimated that it would need access to 1,200 interpreters to meet its requirements. However, it allowed the contract to go live when the supplier had only 280 interpreters ready to work under the terms of the contract. The Ministry believed that many more interpreters were available to work, in line with contractual obligations, than was actually the case, because it received over-optimistic assurances from ALS and there was confusion over definitions of what important terms such as “registered” actually meant. The Ministry was also unable to confirm that all interpreters working under the contract had the required qualifications, experience and enhanced Criminal Records Bureau checks.

The company was only able to meet 58% of its bookings, initially, against a target of 98%, which is entirely unacceptable. As previous speakers have said, it is not only about the mechanics of the contract; we are talking about people’s lives and life-changing decisions that may be made on their behalf. People who needed the services have paid a heavy price for the Ministry’s incompetence. We have seen a sharp rise in the number of ineffective trials, as others have said. A trial was recently cancelled in my area because, unbelievably, the chosen interpreter was on trial in a neighbouring court at the same time. Extra costs for the Ministry are then incurred by unnecessary trial postponements and delays. Those costs have not been revealed but they will almost certainly be far more than the money saved on the contract, and I urge the Ministry to measure the waste in the courts system caused by the problem.

Whatever value-for-money considerations drove the original decision will now bear little relation to what has actually happened. It seems certain that there has been a net cost rather than a net benefit to the justice system. In short, the Public Accounts Committee found that the process descended into total chaos, and that almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. I hope that the Ministry will follow up the recommendations of the PAC, the Justice Committee and the National Audit Office in order to clean up the mess. Given the large potential contracts that the Ministry is looking to award, it has a lot to do to convince the public that it has learnt the lessons, and that contracts such as those involving legal aid and rehabilitation—

[Sir Alan Beith]

Before my hon. Friend concludes, I wanted to put this point to him, which is not always recognised or understood by people. What has happened in this case, as is proposed in the case of legal aid, is that instead of outsourcing to a very large number of small, usually one-person businesses and making an assessment as to whether they are capable of doing it, the whole process of obtaining interpreters has been outsourced. It has been done on such a large scale that few organisations in the country would be able to do it.

[Ian Swales]

My right hon. Friend makes a valuable point, which is of great concern to the Public Accounts Committee. We seem to have a number of Government Departments that—I suppose it is belt and braces—are making the outsourcing, or contracting-out process, so complicated that now only four or five companies can win the bid. The whole job is how a bid is won and not what the service is, because frequently the people who win the bids do not do the work. Eddie Stobart will not be providing legal aid; its expertise is winning a Government bid. That is the almost farcical situation that we have now got into. The Ministry needs to learn the lessons from that process, particularly as it seems to be about to do some very similar things on a much bigger scale.

One of the other issues that we have—we use the expression on our Committee “following the public pound” —is that the more this type of thing happens, the less access the National Audit Office has to the people who are doing the work. If the services are run by the Department, the NAO can be all over them, but typically, the contracts do not provide transparency or access, so our auditors are unable to get into the key providers.

In summary, the Minister needs to convince us about the lessons learnt, and about what improvement actions will be taken. I feel—not my Committee but I, personally—that a lot of scrutiny by a lot of people should take place before we walk into the same trap again, and I fear that the Public Accounts Committee may have a lot more work coming down the road towards it.