Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[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.