Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, I will add to the question of “academies or maintained schools”. During the coalition Government, when Secretaries of State, often from the party opposite, talked about visiting schools and praised schools, they were always academies. I would like to find an example where they praised a maintained school, but I cannot remember a Secretary of State praising a maintained school. That is a problem because, while we may all accept at this stage that there is a rather unfortunate arrangement of different types of governance, contracts, and so on, if all we ever hear is that academies have saved everything and are brilliant, then it does not do anything at all for schools which have been and are successful and which have chosen in good faith with their community, parents and student body, to remain with their local authority and with democratic oversight.

I am not engaging in this argument by saying “Everything on this side is good; everything on this side is bad”. But I do say that I never once, for example, heard Michael Gove when he was at the DfE, in public or private conversation, praise a maintained school. That is a problem because clearly lots of young people are being educated in academies now, but equally there are still a lot of young people being educated in maintained schools. In fact, all young people in Wales are being educated in maintained schools—obviously not the ones in the private sector; I mean those who are being educated by the state. My noble friend Lord Knight talked about having been in Orkney and reflecting on this legislation. In Scotland, there are no academies, so we are an outlier in England, and it is regrettable.

I want us to think about this and, when we come to this debate, try not to always bring a particular prejudice about a particular style of school. Of course, we all want every school to be successful for every single child, but we have always wanted that, whether they were academies or maintained schools. I hope that, as this debate progresses, we will not hear any more about “This is always good” and “That is always bad”. It does not do us any favours in this Committee, and it certainly does not do any favours for our colleagues who are teachers and other education professionals—or indeed for young people being educated.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I intervene in what has been a wide-ranging debate. I must admit that I have felt increasing sympathy for the Minister. I do not think I have seen anybody quite so surrounded in this Chamber, with the only possible line of vague hope coming from the Opposition Benches. This is an odd Bill that we have got ourselves into.

The discussion about the philosophy of schools and how they are organised is one that will colour this debate, but the noble Lord, Lord Baker, put his finger on the essential thing here: we have a Government who have given themselves the capacity to change how things operate at the drop of a hat. That is it—“We can tell you how it should be.” The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, started on that. It is worth remembering —I hope those on the Conservative Benches will remember—that nobody is guaranteed to be in power for ever. Some appalling person in the Labour Party or some evil Liberal Democrat may one day be making these regulations. It could happen. We can argue about when it will happen or whether it will happen, but the tide of history is that eventually everybody changes. Therefore, we should have some capacity here for checking what goes on.

Taking out the first 18 clauses was the radical surgery proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Baker—cutting out the rotten bit. It looks increasingly attractive to me and, I suspect, to quite a lot of Members on his Benches. Two major reports from this House have come out and said that this is bad. They are Henry VIII clauses. Henry VIII may have inspired a very good musical recently but, in parliamentary terms, he is not seen as an example of good governance. He is stamped all over this from start to finish. If we are going to allow this to happen, a lot of us might as well pack up and go home. If any Secretary of State in any department—it starts with Education—gets away with it here, it will happen somewhere else. We might as well not be here. The amendment that I have put forward is one answer to this, but it would not be a complete answer; it is merely a way of saying that there are limits—that is, what is put down here must be what we are talking about. If it comes back to this, I would still, shall we say, judiciously prune that list, but that is what we are talking about in this Bill.

The educational merits of various types of school system are interesting and important, but let us concentrate on this bit first. A Secretary of State can wake up in the morning and change a system. I am not sure how we are going to get down to this—there is a lot of Clause 1 to go through—but this is the backdrop to it all. I hope that the Minister can say, as she has told me in meetings before, that the Government are in listening mode; I know she is trying to make things work. My challenge to the Minister on this occasion is: how good is her hearing? How much capacity does she have to tell people that they should change, should put some limitations on this and should allow discussion in Parliament and elsewhere to get at this. If we do not, I am afraid we are going to a very strange and unpleasant place.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, I intervene briefly. In listening to and reflecting on this debate, the bad news is that this Bill gives excessive powers to the Secretary of State. There seems to be consensus on that across the Committee. The good news is that there is no indication that the Secretary of State has any idea what he wants to do with the powers—for good or bad. There is no philosophy of education set out either in the White Paper or by Ministers—I read the Minister’s speech at Second Reading. It looks to me, as is the case with most legislation in my experience, that this is displacement activity. Governments who do not actually have a policy they want to take forward use displacement activity to introduce legislation. I should say that the Government of which I was a part was as guilty of that as any; I was responsible for piloting three huge education Bills through this House, none of which made the education system better. None of the big changes we made to education, which were extremely radical, required legislation. This includes academies, which I spent most of my time with my colleagues in the department trying to keep legislation out of, because I was sure that it would make it worse if we started seeking to regulate academies—and I just about succeeded.

Very unwisely, the Government who followed started putting academies in statute and regulating them closely, beginning with the first Academies Act after the 2010 election and reaching the point of this Bill. The legislation on which we depended for introducing academies was an Act which, from memory, had two sections, which had been passed by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, which simply gave the very limited power to the Secretary of State to set up a city technology college provided—this is a key point I stress to my noble colleagues—it did not have selective admissions. That was the key proviso put in statute: this could not be used as a mechanism for setting up new grammar schools. There was then a consensus between the two sides of the House that the future of education lay in establishing highly successful, all-ability schools in all parts of the country—although, obviously, there is an issue about the remaining grammar schools. From memory, I was advised by the department’s lawyers that we needed to amend the Act of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, because it referred to city technology colleges and I wished to set some up outside cities. I remember saying to him that I was very happy to have the argument in the courts when it comes to what constitutes a city. However, as I am not proposing to go into the heart of Sussex or Surrey at the moment, I do not think that is a particular issue.

Essentially, the Bill is a massive piece of displacement activity. The friends I still have in the Department for Education say this quite openly; they are not particularly worried about it. This will take up huge amounts of officials’ time, going to Bill Committees and doing all the drafting—which always happens with Bills—but it will not make any difference.

However, the big thing that has made a difference—which we should be debating and on which I would welcome legislation—is what has happened to state school funding over the last 12 years. This is the big thing that has led to a significant step back in the quality of state education in the period since the consensus set up by Tony Blair’s Government. Do noble Lords remember “Education, education, education”? He was as true as his word: capital spending on schools under the last Labour Government increased tenfold; real-terms spending on education, including revenue, doubled; and per-pupil funding went up by 50%. That was a revolutionary change. I was always very clear on this, because the biggest battles I had in that Government were not to do with legislative changes; they were huge battles about the funding level for education. I had some noble friends, including my noble friend Lord Hunt, who wanted everything to go to health—indeed, we trebled real-terms spending on health, too. The two great priorities of the Government in reconstituting public services were education and health, and education needed this, which it had never historically got. That is part of the reason why the 1944 Act never happened, technical schools were never set up, the raising of the school leaving age had been delayed by 20 years and the comprehensive school movement never really got a fighting chance—because their establishment was so underfunded at the beginning. Putting all that right was the great mission of the Government. The reason we were able to introduce academies as transformational schools is that, in schools which had the lowest standards, the weakest leadership and the worst inherited capital stock, we put all three of those issues right and massively invested in schools in the most deprived areas, replacing the worst failing schools. This is why I did not at all begrudge spending £25 million, £30 million or £35 million on purpose-built, modern education establishments in some of the most deprived parts of the country; I could not think of a better legacy for any Government—particularly a Labour Government—than that.

Of course, what went alongside them was the founding of entirely new institutions, with new leadership and new governance, and entrusting the schools with sponsors—I see some of them on the Benches opposite, including the noble Lord, Lord Nash, whose wife is also a sponsor—who were absolutely committed to the highest standards of education and knew how to govern successful institutions. That was the philosophy of the academy movement, and it did not require a single piece of legislation. It would not be affected in any way by this Bill: it might make it better; it might make it worse; it would entirely depend on what the Secretary of State chose to do with the powers in the Bill.

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Moved by

[Lord Addington]

2: Clause 1, page 1, line 6, at end insert—
“(1A) The Secretary of State may not lay a draft statutory instrument before Parliament containing regulations under subsection (1) (see section 32(3)) unless the Secretary of State has—(a) at least 26 weeks prior, published the draft statutory instrument with a description of the justification for the proposed regulations,(b) consulted for a period of at least 13 weeks after that publication, and(c) published a detailed response to that consultation.”

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, the inspiration for this amendment, I am afraid, is much of what we have already heard about, which is the idea that the Government are basically going to change standards by statutory instrument, possibly with the affirmative procedure. Although the Minister has said that there will be structures and other things in place, nothing in the Bill says how this is going to take place and what will go on.

The Government should regard this as a helpful suggestion about where they could start from. Anybody looking on from the outside will know what these changes are going to be; there will be a consultation period when the Government bring something forward. Let us face it: we are talking about schools, and they happen to work in something called the school year. There is a certain amount of time before you can get regulations and changes in place, and I would have thought that a six-month period within a school year was a reasonable amount of time to try to undertake the discussion. The 13-week chunks are taken from the most recent example of something which I hope will bring positive examples to the Department for Education: the consultation on special educational needs. I remind the House of my interests in that field. Could the Minister tell us why we would not have a compulsory period in which we will discuss a new idea—in which the Government will publish what they have, take on board what is said about it and then give us a response?

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

Does the noble Lord recall that the last time this House intervened on a statutory instrument was in relation to working families’ tax credits? We moved an amendment to delay its introduction, which was passed, and of course that led to the Government withdrawing their proposal, but this House was threatened with abolition by the Government of the time.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I do remember that, but as a hereditary Peer I am probably more familiar than the noble Lord with the threat of abolition. That whetted axe been swinging around my head for a good few years; I dodged it once.

There is this idea that Parliament should not interfere in this process because that is naughty and bad. I hope that the Government will at least allow us to have some process where this is discussed or to at least point out how this process of shining a little light—and indeed pouring a little water, if we may take a plant analogy—on these things will work. How will we know what we are getting?

On the other amendments in this group, I am learning not to prejudge the noble Lord, Lord Baker. The interesting thing about certain schools and establishments set up outside the system is why they are brought in. The noble Lord nods at me; I will take that as a win.

On the final clause stand part notice in this group and the reports of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and the Constitution Committee, I hope we can get a little further into those. I do not think I have ever been involved with a Bill which has had this type of reception. It is pretty appalling that the Government have done this. I therefore hope that the Minister will take this opportunity to tell us how the Government will make sure they know what is coming. If there is regulation and stuff that I have not seen where we can learn what is coming—it is not in the Bill—let us know where and point us in the right direction. Show us how it will be easily accessible and how we can have an informed debate that starts here and goes outside, and how it feeds in too. That, at the very least, is required if we continue to change the way the system works by regulation. I beg to move.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 27A. This speech will be very short. The amendment is defensive because, if Clause 1 continues to be part of the Bill when it comes back on Report, I will have to move it again, but of course if it disappears this amendment will fall. The Government realised half way through preparing the Bill that by giving such powers to the Secretary of State which have no checks or balances in them and no requirements for consultation, a maverick Secretary of State could abolish grammar schools and selection and could intervene with religious schools with regard to the amount of worship that they have. I am shocked by that. The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, raised what would happen if we had Jacob Rees-Mogg as the Secretary of State for Education. I shudder at the prospect. Similarly, what would happen if you had a Corbynite Secretary of State? I shudder at that prospect as well, because the powers of direction are absolutely overwhelming.

Protections were introduced for grammar schools and faith schools because they were so different, and I think the schools I have been promoting are sufficiently different as well. University technical colleges are totally different from a normal school. Take, for example, their curriculum for 14 to 16. Our youngsters—the girls as well as the boys—will spend two days a week making things with their hands, designing things on computers, making projects which local employers bring in or visiting companies. That is totally different. A Secretary of State with these untrammelled powers could simply stop them doing that and therefore destroy the distinction of the school, so this is only a defensive amendment if the Government do not see sense.

I must congratulate the Minister on her reply. As she recognised, no one has spoken in full-hearted support of the Bill. The right reverend Prelate came close: he gave it a sort of half-blessing, but not a full one. Everyone else who has spoken was highly critical of it, so I hope this amendment will not be necessary when Clause 1 is withdrawn.

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[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, that was an interesting and full answer, but one that did not in any way allay my fears. The Minister said that this Government have no intention of doing it. Let me put it like this: if the noble Baroness said that she had no intention, I would be very confident for as long as she is in her post. I take her word for it that the ministerial team does not have any plans at the moment, but she cannot speak for the next ministerial team or the next Government. If some of these things can be done already, which is what the Minister implied, we need something in there to bring some light on them right now. I will withdraw this amendment but I am afraid that this subject is not over.

Amendment 2 withdrawn.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I lend my support to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on Amendment 8 and to my noble friend on Amendment 37. This issue about the mental health of students and pupils is very important. I have no doubt that the Minister will argue that mental health is subsumed within “health”, and therefore that there is no need for this, but sometimes you do need to give absolute clarity to parts of society that mental health must be a greater priority than before, and this is a very useful way of doing it.

The Minister was involved in the passage of the Health and Care Act of blessed memory, which some of us were involved in. It struck me that when we were talking about the membership of ICPs and ICBs—integrated care partnerships and integrated care boards—I do not think we explicitly discussed whether the education sector would be around the table. Could the Minister look into whether there is some way of encouraging that the education sector is listened to? It seems rather like the police service in that it is being asked to pick up a lot of the issues that arise partly because our mental health services are so fragile at the moment, particularly for young people and adolescents, as we know. I do not wish to add more burden to heads and schools but this will bear thinking about. I hope there will be some collaboration between the Minister’s department and the Department of Health.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to the two amendments in this group that have my name on them, Amendments 9 and 11. Both deal with smaller aspects of this, although we have a big report coming through on special educational needs, in which I know the noble Baroness is active.

I would like to know where and how, in this envisaged system—or perhaps let us call it a wished-for system; let us not give it that degree of solidity—special educational needs will fit in. At the moment, if there is a priority that comes above them, they tend to get squashed going down. For instance, there is an ongoing row about systematic synthetic phonics, which is the preferred way to teach English but does not work that well for many dyslexics. In addition, people with attention deficit disorder do not like it; it is a different way of working. You therefore have to work smarter, or in a different way, to get the best results out of those groups in a basic interaction. There will be other examples; for instance, mathematics is also covered by this, because you have to have different learning patterns. Dyslexics like me have different learning processes in our heads, which work slightly differently from those of the majority of people.

That is not insurmountable; there are ways around it and lots have been found, but you have to do it. If you have one way of doing this, there will be problems for those groups who do not have those learning patterns. I was speaking only about small numbers there but maybe half of those with identified special educational needs would probably be covered by these groups already. There are others with more complex patterns. The Government will need to work differently. How will the recommendations of the review work through and counter other considerations? If the noble Baroness can give us some idea of the Government’s thinking at the moment, I will be grateful.

On extracurricular activity—I would say this, would I not?—the fact of the matter is that sport is one of the best ways of improving mental health. It releases all the right chemicals in your body. Basically, it is a chemical treatment for mental health—end of. It reduces stress and tension, as does the correct use of special educational needs support. If you have less to worry about, you are less stressed and less likely to experience a trigger point for a mental health condition. How will these things be worked in? What safeguards do activities have in these areas—and others, if the noble Baroness wishes to expand on that? Is Committee a discussion? We need an idea of how, when you have to work differently to get the best out of the system, you will do it to get to the positions and the approach coming through in the rest of the Bill. How is it working and how will you make those small changes? Some will be big structural ones.

Talking about extracurricular activities such as sport, music and drama, one of the big things the Government should do to make sure that people carry on doing those things is to link the activities within the school with those who do them outside on an amateur basis. There are very well-established models, some of which have worked and some of which have been removed but which worked quite well. How is this all working and how is it going forward? If the Minister could give us a little idea of the Government’s thinking on that, that would be helpful, if not for this Bill then certainly for future debates.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I shall say just a few words in support of Amendment 22, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox—assuming I am not jumping the gun, because they have not introduced yet; I assume they will do so during the wind-up. I would have put my name to it had I spotted it when I went through the Marshalled List, but I missed it.

I share the widespread bafflement and uncertainty about what the Bill means for what happens inside schools, not least in relation to the curriculum. One of those things needs to be careers information, advice and guidance, which hardly figures in the Bill, other than as one of the 20 rapidly becoming notorious examples listed in Clause 1, whose future seems somewhat uncertain. Work experience is a key element of the Gatsby benchmarks for best practice in careers education, and it needs to be more than just a week or two at a local employer, making coffee, running errands or just sitting idly about wondering how to pass the time—which I know has been the experience of some young people.

Standards for work experience are certainly needed, which is why I welcome that amendment, although from the debate so far I am far from clear how such standards should be set, let alone enforced, within the system being created by the Bill. I hope the Minister will be able to say something about how the Government will ensure, even if not in the Bill, that all schoolchildren receive work experience of a sufficient standard.

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[Lord Addington (LD)]

I am trying to get an assurance that there is a way to make sure that, if a new regulation is put forward, it cannot override. It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, is not here, because he helped me deal with an example of this, where a family said, “You don’t need to worry about dyslexia because I’ve got a way that teaches you to read wonderfully.” I took a delegation to the noble Lord, Lord Agnew. He put the pressure on Warwickshire and Staffordshire councils, on this occasion, saying, “No, stop it”, and it was dropped. If something like that comes in from somewhere, what is the mechanism by which the Bill will make sure that it is still there in law, and that you have at least to go through some hoops and bumps to change it? I am afraid there are small-scale examples of this happening. I do not like having to remind noble Lords of this, because I am sure most people here would not want it to happen, but it has in the past.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I hope to assure the noble Lord that those requirements will be written into the academy trust standards. If academy trusts do not meet those standards there will be enforcement mechanisms that they will need to comply with. If there is non-compliance on a specific standard where the trust is otherwise meeting requirements, it is likely that the Secretary of State would issue a compliance direction, which sounds like it might emulate some of the interventions the noble Lord took with my noble friend when he was previously Minister. If a trust failed to comply with a number of standards, or the Secretary of State was satisfied that non-compliance indicated a weakness in the governance or management of the trust, he might issue a notice to improve. The requirement on academies when it comes to special educational needs that is in place at the moment will be replicated in these standards. There will be a mechanism by which to enforce the meeting of those standards.

That takes me on to Amendment 22 on the inclusion of work experience. Again, we do not intend to use the regulations to place any significant new burdens on academies but we will replicate existing requirements in this area. For example, academy trusts must secure independent careers guidance for year 8 to year 13 pupils and have regard to the underpinning statutory guidance, which makes it clear that secondary schools and colleges should follow the Gatsby benchmarks of good career guidance and offer work experience placements as part of their careers strategy for all pupils. As the noble Lord will know, the Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Act 2022, due to be commenced in September, will extend the duty to secure independent careers guidance to all academy schools and alternative provision academies, and bring year 7 pupils into scope for the first time. That will be replicated and, as I explained to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, there is also a mechanism to ensure that those standards are met and enforced.

Finally, I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on the importance of extracurricular activities. It is not our intention to go beyond the existing requirements on schools. For many of those activities, the school is best placed to design activities that meet the needs of its pupils and, to address the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, situate them in its community. On the noble Baroness’s Amendment 21A, there is already provision in the funding agreement that requires academy trusts to ensure that each of its academies is at the heart of its community, promoting community cohesion and sharing facilities with other schools, other educational institutions and the wider community. It is our intention to reflect that in the academy standards when they are developed.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly to Amendment 28 in the name of the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, to which I have attached my name.

I agree entirely with what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, just said. However, what particularly attracted me to this amendment was its reference to

“an annual report on the exercise of the powers … and … an annual impact assessment on the exercise of those powers.”

The Minister reassured us a number of times in our debates on earlier groups by saying that “it is not the intention of this Government” to do this or that. The annual review proposed by this amendment would ensure, whatever Government are in power, an assessment of how the law is being used. Given the current powers in that law, many Members who usually sit on the Benches opposite might think that this would be a good idea with a different Government in place.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly. This amendment is in the spirit of many of the amendments that were moved before. Basically, we need it to see what is coming and get some opportunity for comment. Is the super-affirmative procedure here the same as that for the amendment I moved earlier? No, but it is another way of skinning this particular cat—if one is allowed to use that expression any more.

We must make sure that Parliament sees this and can interact with the process. That is what we are all arguing about here and what has dominated both Part 1 and Clause 1 of the Bill. If the Government accepted something like this amendment or some combination thereof, they would probably have a much easier time of it and rather less excitement in Committee.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, given the lateness of the hour, I will comment but briefly. Notwithstanding that some of us on these Benches have found this a difficult Bill to amend in the way we might have wanted, I hope the Minister can see that, by proposing the super-affirmative procedure, we are seeking a way through so that we can improve the Bill, at least from our perspective, although I hope that, on reflection, the Government might also consider that the Bill will have been improved.