Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, this is a broadly good Bill, but in boldly extending academy status from underachieving schools to any school, we must surely ensure that the Bill does not inadvertently undermine its avowed purpose,

“to raise school standards for all”.

Michael Gove in the other place and the noble Lord, Lord Hill, in his accomplished Second Reading speech here emphasised that primary focus of helping the educationally underprivileged. Mr Gove put it this way:

“We believe that the function of the state is to promote equity … the power of the state should be deployed vigorously to help the vulnerable and the voiceless, those who lack resources and connections, and those who are poor materially and excluded socially”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/6/10; col. 463.]

My amendment is to ensure just that—that the coalition walks that talk and exemplifies its values. It addresses the risk that the free schools—the brand new academies—do not cause undue detriment to existing neighbouring schools. I accept that that would never be the purpose of any group promoting such a new school. However, sometimes any of us—indeed, all of us at times—can so concentrate on our own children and our own back yard that we overlook the needs of others. That is a particular danger when social considerations intrude, as they too often do in this country, vis-à-vis education. At Second Reading I gave an example from my own part of Suffolk of the proposal to convert a feeder middle school into a secondary academy school. That would devastatingly undermine the really good school into which it feeds by the consequent impact on its entry numbers and all that that would mean for finances, staffing, social balance and, ultimately, morale.

Britain is still a sorely disfigured country—disfigured by acute inequalities of life chances. That underlines, among other things, our social and law and order problems, and leads to huge financial and moral setbacks. It is against this backdrop that I very much hope that the Government—my Government—will accept this constructive amendment, which will provide an essential but practical safeguard against the unintended consequences of the Bill as it stands.

[Lord Adonis]

The noble Lord is a stickler in this House, and rightly so, for precision in language and comprehensibility in legislation. In his amendment he uses some very general terms. He talks about the Secretary of State being satisfied that an academy meets “a public need” and that it,

“will not cause undue detriment”.

Will he set out somewhere for us how he defines “public need” and “undue detriment”?

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, the noble Lord made much the same point before the dinner break. If he looks back over some of the legislation that he introduced, he will find that it is peppered with considerations and language of that kind. You cannot legislate without using general terms. The amendment that I have put forward has a long-stop protection in that it is capable of being judicially reviewed. If the noble Lord were to suggest that that is the very evil against which more precise language would guard, I would have to tell him, first, that more precise language cannot be used in a situation such as this and, secondly, that to give a controlled guided discretion to the Secretary of State is a device used in every Bill in every month of every year in this place. I am confident that it will work in this case. You have only to look at Clause 1(6), which refers to,

“pupils who are wholly or mainly drawn from the area in which the school is situated”.

You could argue till the cows came home about what “mainly” means and what,

“the area in which the school is situated”

means. As I say, at times legislative language must, and can only, resort to generalities. I think that the amendment I have produced is capable of being used practically and to effect. The alternative would be to have nothing in the Bill, which I suggest would be the worst of all worlds.

Given the backdrop that I have described, I very much hope that the Government will accept this amendment, which does not apply, of course—I have specifically excluded it from doing so—to maintained schools converting to parallel academies, which will be by far the larger number. However, there would still be a significant number of new free academies, which must surely also be expected to serve the higher purpose of educational justice for all, not just their own pupils. A big society, surely, must be an equitable society, particularly towards its most needy. My amendment may not be perfect, but something like it must be in the Bill if we want to end what Mr Gove called in his Statement today a “segregated and stratified” school system. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I am sorry to return to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, but I believe that it is fundamentally unworkable. It is not a question of judgments having to be made about terminology in legislation; these judgments have to be made the whole time. The problem with his amendment is that there are deeply competing interpretations within the education world as to what the words he has used in his amendment would mean. Having been on the receiving end of representations about the setting up of new schools, including schools in the county from which the noble Lord hails, I can tell him that he is setting up a procedure that will see every proposal for a new school that does not have near universal local support end up in the courts being bitterly contested because of the imprecision of language that he proposes to impose on the Bill.

Let me take the two specific terms he uses: that a new academy must meet “public need” before the Secretary of State is allowed to agree to it and that it should not,

“cause undue detriment to any neighbouring school”.

King Lear got this right more than 400 years ago when he said:

“O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars

Are in the poorest thing superfluous”.

But when it comes to defining need in respect of new school places, two fundamentally competing views are held. One is that “need” should be defined as a numerical need for additional places, while another and essentially different interpretation is that “need” should be based on parental demand for a new type of place or, as alas is too often the case in local authorities with a large number of failing schools, for better places, which is what has driven so much of the academy movement. It is not that there have not been enough school places in a locality, but that they have not been of a quality that parents in good conscience wish their children to take up.

The noble Lord owes it to the Committee to be frank and direct about which concept of need he has in mind. Is need to be defined simply as a numerical need for places or is it to be defined in terms of appreciable parental demand for a type of place—it could be for Montessori-type schools with a different educational philosophy—or better quality places than those on offer in the existing schools?

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way, but he has rather challenged me. The answer to his question is this. My amendment leaves a discretion with the Secretary of State, and it will be for the Secretary of State to decide on the two or more interpretations of need. In the same way, it will be up to the Secretary of State to come to conclusions about undue detriment. If, through guidance, the Secretary of State gives a further indication of how the two tests have been interpreted, all the better. But as the noble Lord is well aware, the only basis on which this could be challenged in a court—and challenges to ministerial discretions, which are widespread, are extremely rare—would be that the Secretary of State had acted in a way that no reasonable person could have acted.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I do believe that that is a straight cop-out. Parliament has to be clear on what it means. There are two competing notions of need here and Parliament needs to state, before it charges the Secretary of State with these responsibilities, which one it means. As for judicial reviews and legal challenges being rare, there was one point when I was in the job now being done by the noble Lord, Lord Hill, when I was barely out of the High Court and the Court of Appeal on challenges to academies, most of them with support from the National Union of Teachers and a good number with support, one way or another, from bodies associated with local authorities. So Parliament needs to be clear on what it means.

We come then to “undue detriment”. Again, there are two competing views of what this is. It could be taken to mean making another school or schools totally non viable or it could be taken to mean that it would have a serious, definable or appreciable impact on another school or schools. Again, there is a fundamental difference between those two concepts of detriment—whether the detriment causes a school to become non viable or whether it simply has an impact or an appreciable impact. Again, Parliament needs to be clear which of the two it means.

This goes to the central point about school improvements as well. The noble Lord’s amendment says that the Secretary of State may not allow a new academy to be established if it causes undue detriment. I have to say that in many cases it is the dealing with the undue detriment that should be the duty of the Secretary of State or the responsible local authority using the huge array of school improvement powers available, including those that the Government of whom I was a member provided over 13 years. The idea that parents should not be able to access new or additional school places in areas where the schools are not providing good quality places simply because the provision of those places will cause detriment to other schools fundamentally ignores the interests of parents and their right to have a decent quality school to send their children to. If there is not such a decent quality school and someone is prepared to do something substantive about it, they should be applauded and not put through the legal rigmarole that the noble Lord is proposing, which will work fundamentally against the interests of parents, particularly in places where schools are not of a high enough quality. The imprecision of the language, where it is not clear what the definitions of essential terms such as “detriment” and “need” will be, will ensure that the only people who will gain from this are the lawyers, who will make huge fees while this is fought out in the courts over many years.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

My Lords, I support entirely what the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, has said. It is a pity that he is not saying it from the Labour Front Bench because he is absolutely right.

On listening to the debates both before and after dinner, I was struck by how similar they were to the debates on the Education Reform Act 1988, when I decided to establish two groups of independent schools—city technology colleges, which were totally independent of government and financed by business people, and grant maintained schools, which were almost independent of government—which we had to get through as a result of an elaborate electoral process which in those days your Lordships tried to hinder, restrict and limit. I was told at the time that these schools would destroy the education system, that the detriment to schools would be overwhelming and that ordinary secondary schools would be undermined and destroyed. That is not what has happened.

In 1988 the Labour Party objected so strongly that it said it would abolish them all; that it would destroy them as soon as it came into power. That did not happen. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, was a member of a Government who actually expanded and developed them at the expense of local education authorities, I would remind him. He was a senior member of a Government and a Minister of State who approved all this. The CTCs were not voted down. They became beacon schools which other local schools tried to emulate.

In the early days of city technology colleges, the local education authorities opposed them so strongly that they told the other local authority schools for which they were responsible to have nothing to do with them; not to play games with them. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, will remember; he was in the House in those days. The local authorities ostracised them; they said that they were the cuckoos in the nest that would destroy them. Now they tell them to co-operate with them; they are trying to imitate them and to reach the standards that they have established. That is an enormous change, as it was with the grant-maintained schools. I shall allow the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, to intervene but I want him to listen to me for a moment. Again, the Labour Party spent 10 years totally opposing the grant-maintained schools and then it reinvented them and called them trust schools.

However, let us forget all of that. I do not want to make party points tonight. This provision for alternative types of schools is good for the whole education system; it drives up standards. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, if parents are dissatisfied with a local school and the local authority has tried to improve it—it has thrown resources at it and changed the head three times in two years and done everything it can—and it still has not happened, what does it do? Just let it go on to the detriment of all the pupils? I shall give way to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, in a moment, because he is being stirred, but I shall give way to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, first.