Free Schools and Academies

Lord Bates Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Evans for securing this debate and for the way in which she introduced it, with her passion, enthusiasm and expertise. We benefited from some outstanding speeches, not least from my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. At its best, education, they remind us, is a partnership between inspiring teachers, supportive parents and enthusiastic, well-behaved students. It is about promoting expectations, excellence, encouragement, enthusiasm, ethos and effort. Yet, as we have heard, those leadership qualities are under threat in our academies and free schools.

We have been here before. I was in the audience in 1986 when my noble friend Lord Baker announced the plan for city technology colleges. With fear and trembling, I went up to him and asked whether we could have one of these schools in my hometown of Gateshead, one of the most deprived communities in the country. He was very kind and encouraging. He said, “Yes, of course, but you’re going to have to find me a sponsor first”. That led me to the door of Peter Vardy, a remarkable and inspirational business leader who not only agreed to provide the necessary funding but added so much more. He set the standards of excellence and the ethos and built a great team, of which I was privileged to be a member for a time as vice-chairman. Emmanuel City Technology College opened its doors in September 1990 and was an instant success with pupils, parents and teachers. It was massively oversubscribed. It was not popular, however, with the teaching and local government unions, which felt threatened by its success.

In 1997, the unions persuaded the new Labour Government that CTCs should be closed, not because they were failing students but because their success was threatening them. However, before the policy was implemented, Tony Blair’s education adviser decided that he wanted to visit Emmanuel to see it for himself. That adviser was Andrew Adonis, now the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I quote from his account of that visit in his excellent book Education, Education, Education, published in 2012. I will start on page 55. He wrote:

“I decided … to visit more City Technology Colleges and get … the details of what made them tick … The seminal moment was at Emmanuel College, Gateshead, sponsored by … Peter Vardy. Tony Blair on my mobile just as I was leaving an inspirational session with a group of sixth-formers telling me about their life stories, the brilliance of their school and their ambitions to get on. When I told Tony where I was, he said: ‘Of course I know the CTC and Peter Vardy ... Even out in Sedgefield’”—


his constituency—

“‘they want to go to his school’”.

The noble Lord continues on page 56.

“Why were the CTC so successful? Over … my visits, I came to see it in simple terms. It was governance, independence, leadership, ethos and standards. The CTCs had all five and they were mutually reinforcing ... The sponsors were not ‘here today, gone tomorrow’, like all too many local education chief education officers. They were making long-term commitments”,


like my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, continues:

“Strong headteachers were appointed and supported by these sponsors, instilling an ethos of success, discipline and high standards in every aspect of the CTC’s work”.


His conclusion and advice to Tony Blair and David Blunkett—now the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett—was that they should not be closing down successful CTCs; rather, they should be closing down failing local authority schools and replacing them with academies based on the CTC model.

Thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, the college was saved. Thanks to Peter Vardy and the Emmanuel Schools Foundation team, it prospered and expanded. Emmanuel College became one of the best schools in the country and maintained its outstanding grade in Ofsted inspections for the entire 20-year period in which that rating was given. Less than two miles away, my former school, Joseph Swan, which is run by the local authority, was judged as inadequate by Ofsted. In 2019, Emmanuel was asked to take it over, and it is now turning it around, increasing the life chances of disadvantaged young people in the process.

My point is that academic success should not be envied; it should be emulated. You do not help the poorest-performing students by undermining the performance of the best. The aim is to level up, not to level down—to learn from the best to inspire the rest. No education policy can succeed if it is quick to punish success yet patient and slow to tolerate failure.

I therefore urge the Minister and officials to acquire a copy of the book by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and include it in the Secretary of State’s weekend box with a Post-it note on chapter 7, which is entitled “Why academies succeeded”. It is available on Amazon, hardly used, for £3.54, which represents extraordinarily good value to the taxpayer, as indeed do academies and free schools.