Education and Adoption Bill

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when I first looked at the Bill, my reaction was that there was not much to it. It is a very small Bill. When I first tried to read it, I asked, “What on earth are they trying to get at?”. It has become clear that it is effectively the vehicle for an article of faith—that is, that academies are good and other things are bad and that the Government want more academies and want everything to be an academy. If the Bill said that upfront, I would have slightly more respect for it because it would say, “This is where we think we should go. This is the process”.

Then we get this wonderful concept about things that are coasting, but the Bill does not say what “coasting” is. We now have more of an idea about that as we have heard more people talking about it. Coasting implies maintaining a standard level. If it is a good standard level, surely we should encourage a little bit more coasting occasionally. But, no, coasting is bad—although we still do not know what it is.

I am trying to resist the temptation to refer to a monarch who had lots of wives and is pictured on a nearby wall. However, if you are going to do something, you should know exactly what you are going to do and the criteria according to which you are going to do it. If we do not include those criteria in the Bill, or at least give a much better description of how that process will take place, we will be missing a huge opportunity, because people will have to know what they are dealing with to make this process work properly. Given the Minister’s great declaration of faith, I hope he will allow us to know what sacred text we are working from, how this intervention is to be carried out and against what criteria.

The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, talked about data. Can we make sure that things other than just exam results are included in those data? We have spoken obsessively about the fact that obtaining five GCSEs—the great gold standard of a previous Government— not good enough. We are all agreed on that. If a school is great at getting pupils into apprenticeships, will that be taken into account when considering whether that school is coasting? I do not think so.

I have spoken to noble Lords before about sport. How is the interaction between sporting activity and cultural activity at a school taken into account when considering whether it is coasting? Is this taken into account? Going slightly beyond local interaction, because we all tend to look at things in silos, how does that school reach out in these departments? We know that, in the case of sport, putting a pupil in a club outside school, and building a link with it, however you do it, is a much better guarantee of success than whatever may be the results gained by that school’s team. The same could probably be said of apprenticeships and other forms of further education. How do we establish these links? What are the criteria for looking back, in and out of this? We must have some guidance about this on the way through. If we do not, we will miss the fundamental point. It is about getting a good result for the person who is going through.

We can talk much more, as my noble friend did, about selection and what goes on there. I remind everyone here that although I have heard many a great clarion call about how wonderful grammar schools were, I have heard very few about secondary moderns. What do we leave behind? What are we carrying on? How are we reaching out and doing something? How are we touching those outside the immediate environment?

As the Bill goes through the House, we will need far greater clarification of the process and the criteria, and we need it somewhere we can refer back to it. That is essential to us being able to function properly. Without that, we have merely an idea—an article of faith—that we fire this silver bullet of academisation into a school and it is cured; the demons are driven out. Let us take this rather tortured metaphor slightly further: it seems that some people are becoming immune to the silver bullet and it is failing. This werewolf is going to bite you again. There has to be something else about this or we should just go back to saying everything is becoming an academy because at least we will know where we are.

If the Bill is going to have some meaning about the fact that you are going to make an intervention in something that has become stagnant—which would be a far better expression than “coasting”—at least we would know what we are talking about. I hope that throughout the passage of the Bill we make damn sure that that clarity is injected into it.