Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Agnew of Oulton Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I intervene briefly and echo the support for all those who have spoken about the problems with the powers of the Secretary of State. I come back to a point made slightly earlier about the lack of detail in the Bill, which does not provide a framework for what should follow in regulation. Some of us who have followed the health brief throughout the Covid era know this all too well.

I will just give noble Lords one example of where things went wrong. Nothing gave any guidance to the Health and Safety Executive about how its responsibilities would be carried out. There were Covid enforcement powers for local authorities, Covid enforcement rules for the police and everything else, but whenever anyone went to the HSE to ask it what they should be doing, there was no role for it at all. In fact, on at least two occasions Ministers brought back regulations because they were not working in the field. One might say that in a pandemic mistakes will happen, but because there had not been a framework in the Coronavirus Act it was not clear what the Government were trying to achieve by those objectives.

The worry is that Bills keep coming to your Lordships’ House with so little detail in them—this may be the most recent and most egregious example—that it will be impossible to safeguard everything, and even for this House to do its job should we get to scrutinise them properly, because we just do not have the framework that the front of the Bill sets out for us.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I draw to your Lordships’ attention my relevant interest in the register as the deputy chairman of the Inspiration academy trust.

Although I have been here for nearly five years, this is my first experience of dealing with legislation as a Back-Bencher and I am completely flummoxed by the process. The Bill has been introduced with no consultation with the sector and there has been a promise of a regulatory review that has not even begun, so it has landed like a lump of kryptonite among all of us who are trying to educate children in the system. That is why I have asked my noble friend the Minister to just step back and kill off these 18 clauses so that there can be some proper reflection.

When we have such a backlog of legislation, I find it extraordinary that we are going to waste days and days grinding through pointless clauses. I defer to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and so on about all the constitutional stuff, but I know how much this country needs to legislate on important things, and I am going to have to go through the 20 paragraphs of Clause 1(2) and explain why none of that stuff is necessary. In the education system we all know that it is not necessary. If it needs to be clarified, fair enough, but in my two years as Academies Minister I used the Academies Financial Handbook. Every year I amended it; I consulted the sector and we basically squeezed out the mavericks that my noble friend Lord Baker refers to.

A few days ago we had a bizarre conversation with our noble friend the Minister and her officials. I asked how many there are left—I knew there were problems. They said 1%. We are going to spend days going through this for 1%, without having had any consultation and without any regulatory framework in place. I do not understand that, so I urge the Minister, however uncomfortable it might be in the short term, to back off and reconsider. I understand that it might need a write-round, but take the hit early because this is going to be very messy. I think there is enormous consensus across the Chamber today. We have at least three previous Academies Ministers and a previous Secretary of State for Education. We all come at it from different perspectives, but we share one overriding objective: to improve the quality of education. I hope the Minister will listen.

There are really only four things that the Government, sitting in their ivory tower, should worry about: good governance, sound financial management, good educational outcome and the highest level of safeguarding. That is where they should start. The Government have four organs to achieve those things: bureaucrats sitting here in Whitehall; the regional school directors—although they have just been renamed—out in the field; the ESFA, which is the financial organisation that oversees the financial capacity of the academies; and Ofsted. We have to mesh those together and show the sector how they should work. That should be the starting point.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

Given the noble Lord’s relatively recent experience as Academies Minister, can he clarify, using those four things, how he would have gone about dealing with the 1% that is the basis of our having to legislate, as the Government would put it?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

That is a very good question. I can tell the noble Lord candidly that when I arrived in that post in September 2017 it was more than 1%. In my first few weeks in office, I was probably getting three or four cases a month of maverick trusts on the brink of failure financially and basically, as my noble friend Lord Baker said, putting a gun to my head for a financial bailout. By the time I left, we had virtually eliminated that. I did it through what was then called the Academies Financial Handbook—it is now the Academy Trust Handbook—by absolutely binding the ESFA tightly together with the RSCs, so that whenever they met a MAT or a single-academy trust, the two people were in the room. I bang on about the money because if you get the money right, you have the resources to educate properly. That is how I have always managed the process, and we achieved it.

I accept that there are different views of Ofsted and that Ofsted is not perfect, but one thing about Ofsted is that the brand value across the sector is very strong. People respect it—they might resent it—but there is a mechanism to appeal if you get a report you do not agree with. Everyone in the sector largely accepts that it is the arbiter of good education.

When I left, the ESFA was an extremely effective organisation; it knew where the money was. I know that noble Lords opposite me do not all agree with academies, but the financial reporting and transparency of the academy programme is infinitely greater than those of local authority schools. An academy trust closes its books on 31 August. It has to file audited accounts in four months, by 31 December; ordinary companies have nine months to do that. That is not a requirement in the local authority schools and it provides huge scrutiny. You pick up the warning signals. If those accounts are not filed on 31 December, I used to get a weekly report on who was late and how late they were, and went after them. If they were late filing their accounts, you knew there were problems. By the time I left, we had got that down to a very small number.

I do not want to bang on about all this detail in this Chamber—it is not fair on noble Lords. I just want the Government to back off on this. There are some important things in this Bill—the homework and home schooling stuff—which are absolutely vital. I saw that agony when I was here, in my noble friend’s place, when we had a Private Member’s Bill and it was suffocated. This is a huge problem, getting worse all the time. Let us get that sorted out. This is a crucial problem, not to be sorted out in a rush. My noble friend has been bounced; the Bill Office has just said, “You’re the first cab in the rank in this new Session, get on with it,” and she has not had the time to do the job properly.

I am going to stop here, but I want to thank my noble friend the Minister. I think that she has been given an impossible job; she is bending over backwards to listen to everybody here, and I want to extend my courtesy to her and say that I will do anything I can to help.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

We do, of course, have the ability to recommit a Bill to Committee if there are substantial changes to it.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friend Lord Lucas on protecting these freedoms and to try to cross the bridge between the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight. I managed those interventions with the powers that already exist. The freedoms that my noble friend Lord Lucas proposes go to the heart of what academisation is about. I will give noble Lords one tiny example. In Norwich we have two primary schools four miles apart. In one school they speak 25 different languages and the other is in an old-fashioned 1950s council estate—a totally different dynamic where a totally different approach to education is needed. Is that to be decided here in an ivory tower in Whitehall?

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I apologise for missing some of the earlier speeches; the ones I heard were very helpful. I support this group of amendments because it emphasises the question of freedoms. The one thing I had agreed with the Government on in the past—there has not been very much—was the emphasis on the kind of freedoms schools would have, which is why I am completely bemused by what has happened with this Bill.

The other very important thing has been raised in other comments, which I would like the Minister to take away. If you tell anyone outside this place that there is a Schools Bill and you are talking about schools, interestingly enough they say, “What are the Government proposing for schools? What is the educational vision?” I have talked to teachers, parents and sixth-formers and they say, “What’s the vision?” I have read it all and I say, “There is none, other than that the Secretary of State will decide that later on.” Because there is no vision, these amendments really matter as they give a certain amount of freedom to people who might have some vision, even if I am not convinced that the Bill has it. I was glad to see these amendments.