Schools White Paper

John Pugh Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

Einstein said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome. At the start of every Parliament somebody suggests that, before political capital is exhausted, there should be an attempt to restructure a major public service, with the hopeful, if naive, expectation that delivery will somehow be improved.

In 2010, the health service was turned upside down for reasons that people have now largely forgotten. Well, that all turned out so well! In 2016, it is the turn of the school and education sector. To be fair, the radical change started in 2010 with the introduction of the Academies Act 2010. That Act was rushed through the Commons before the ink was dry on the coalition agreement. Even then, there was hostility to parental involvement. I moved an amendment to guarantee a parental ballot if governors were undecided on conversion to academy status. It was voted down on 26 July 2010. It was supported, incidentally, by Ed Balls and the Labour party, but by too few of my own party, who at that stage had a misplaced faith in the good intentions of their coalition colleagues.

To be fair to the Government, they are entirely serious in their attempt to raise standards and equalise life chances. I want to give them credit for that. However, they seem to have forgotten that all the research shows that the really decisive factor in a child’s educational outcome is having the parents onside, empowered and involved. They seem to have forgotten that the evidence on the benefits of academisation is at best equivocal. They seem to have forgotten that money used on the process of academisation cannot also be used for revising the school formula—it cannot be allocated and spent twice. They also seem to have forgotten their own legislation on coasting schools, because they are actually abolishing schools in name. They seem to have forgotten the painful progress we have all made on the national curriculum, because it simply will not apply.

I am struggling to explain such selective amnesia, such bewitchment of minds. I have decided that two irrational forces are at play. One is a magical belief in the benefits of renaming schools and altering their governance. Whatever the educational problem—slow progress, poor behaviour, low aspiration—the answer, the universal magic, is academisation. The second irrational force that has to be acknowledged is the active distrust, positive dislike and contempt in current Conservative and Government culture for local councils. My local primaries are high achieving. They are happy with their LEA relationship. They are busy, hard-pressed and fun to be at. To them, this change is disruptive, unwelcome and—by any measure—utterly pointless.