Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Bishop of Bristol Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Bristol]

My Lords, I speak in place of my colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who unfortunately cannot be present today. I declare his interest as chair of the National Society.

I rise briefly to welcome Amendment 40 in this group, which offers real clarity on the issue. We welcome the recognition it shows that the religious body must be involved in giving an interim trustee notice to the proprietor of an academy school with a religious character. We are grateful for the Minister’s continued work on this and hope this might provide a little encouragement at this point.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a lot of sympathy with the intervention from the Front Bench by my noble friend Lady Chapman around the unfortunate nature of the grouping of these amendments. I understand that there are reasons why technically the Government might want to bring forward amendments, and I accept that some poor drafting is being corrected by some of these amendments, but it is tricky. For example, there is no explanatory statement on Amendment 96, so without delving back into legislation it is difficult to prepare a view in advance or to understand anything to do with what the Government were proposing. That is really unfortunate.

Government Amendment 148 introduces a new criminal offence that is imprisonable, and with powers of entry for inspectors, by a technical amendment in Committee. These are quite big things. Given the explanation the Minister has given, I think I probably agree with the amendment, but at this stage it is difficult to form a considered view. When this Committee gets to considering independent educational institutions, which that amendment relates to, I hope we can be reminded by the Minister that we have already had some discussion of this new criminal offence around repeated operation of unregistered educational institutions.

There is a policy question around whether two years is the right notice period for secure 16-to-19 academies, as opposed to seven years, but I think the Minister has probably given a good enough answer.

I mostly rose following what the noble Lord, Lord Baker, had to say, which in a way felt a little outside the scope of these amendments, but I can see that there is a government amendment here on terminating an academy agreement and another about essentially including single-academy trusts in termination, so I think it is in the spirit of this group for the noble Lord, Lord Baker, to have mentioned this important issue about the independence of trustees. I am sure that most of your Lordships are trustees of some charity or other, or multiple charities, and so do not need reminding that pretty much the only thing you are asked to do as a trustee, first and foremost, is to put the charitable aims first, above anything else. There are then various other good governance and financial probity things you do, but the charitable aims are everything.

As academy trustees, we now find that we have a funding agreement with government, we are subject to direction from government, and we are now subject to being able to be removed by government, all within a statutory framework; the sense that there may be any kind of independence for trustees in that context, and that they are more than agents of the state, will be very difficult to sustain.

Should it not be appropriate for the Minister to reply instantly to what the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has said, it will be important for us to see some legal advice from government that the charitable status of academy trusts will not be threatened by the further encroachment of the Secretary of State in the operation of these organisations.

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[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when we come back to this, we come back to our old friend the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and its second report of the 2022-23 Session. The report is all about the Bill and the things that are wrong with it. Primarily, this amendment is inspired by the last paragraph, which states that

“The Henry VIII power in clause 3(1) is too wide and should be removed from the face of the Bill”.


That is as damming an indictment to any piece of legislation as I have seen in three and a half decades here; it says that the Government have this horribly wrong. Nobody thinks that this is the right way to go about things.

The title of the clause—“Academies: power to apply or disapply education legislation”—is an incredibly wide starting point. Could the Minister give us a little more clarity and justification about why the Government think something like this is needed? We have not got much else on this first part of the Bill. We cannot really disagree with the Government because we are disagreeing with assumptions about things that might happen. That is where we start from. If the Minister—I wish her the best of British on this one—can convince us that we have got this wrong and there is nothing to worry about with it, then half of us can go home.

I hope—because hope empowers more than expectation—that we will get some reply here. I am calling to leave out Clause 3(1), but you could take a knife to any part of this and it would improve the Bill. The whole thing probably should go and, indeed, if someone were to ask me and it were the appropriate time, I would be voting for that to happen. However, I give the Minister one chance here to finally say why we need Clause 3—or any bits of it. I could jump up and down, make longer speeches and read out the report to noble Lords, but I think that this is enough. I beg to move.

[The Lord Bishop of Bristol]

My Lords, I rise to speak in place of my noble colleague the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who cannot be here today, to his Amendment 33 and to declare his interest as chair of the National Society, and also to speak against Amendment 34A.

Amendment 33 to Clause 3

“ensures that the religious designation of church schools could not be removed by secondary legislation.”

The Church of England provides 4,700 schools, so we take seriously our vision that we are deeply Christian and serving the common good. This vision is for the whole community but is built on the firm foundation of the character of our church schools, which is central to that vision. I again pay tribute to the Minister for the way that her department has valued this character and worked with us to ensure that it is safeguarded in this legislation. We believe that this amendment strengthens that intention and provides a further safeguard.

A necessarily broad approach is undertaken in this Bill in applying legislation for maintained schools to academies through amending regulations. While we can appreciate the need to do this, it is unusual to see primary legislation which enables power to be applied or disapplied by secondary legislation. This short amendment would ensure that the “religious designation” of

“schools could not be removed by secondary legislation.”

I appreciate that Clause 3(3) provides for the protection of the status of an academy “with a religious character” by prohibiting regulations for

“arrangements for collective worship and the provision of religious education”.

However, these are just some of the outworkings of the religious character of a school, and we believe that this additional safeguard is necessary to safeguard the very designation of its character. It would be inappropriate to allow secondary legislation to have such impact on the designation of character of so many schools. This is a significant issue for our schools, and I will be listening with interest to any assurances on this topic that the Minister can provide.

I want also to speak against Amendment 34A. While I support this amendment in principle, as drafted it does not include stakeholders in the list of relevant bodies for consultation. Church schools are not included, but they represent a third of the sector and therefore should be included in the consultation.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

We see that this group concerns the Secretary of State’s power to make regulations for any education legislation to apply to academies. Thus, some may see this as redressing the balance between academies and the maintained sector.

I am speaking to our amendments, beginning with Amendment 34A, which prevents the Secretary of State using these

“powers to apply or disapply education legislation”

until they have been consulted on with

“headteachers, governors, academies, and pupils”.

I will pick up the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol’s point, which could be a useful addition, so I thank her for raising it with us. Of course, consultation is the key to good governance and, if there is a sense of imposition from a distant central source, then legislation will never be as good as it could be or implemented in the way it should be.

Furthermore, our Amendment 35 removes the Secretary of State’s power to apply legislation

“relating to further education colleges to academies”

by removing “further education” from “the definition of ‘educational institution’”. As it stands, these clauses signal a further power grab, empowering a future Secretary of State unilaterally to remove religious designation from a faith school, as noted in the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham’s Amendment 33.

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I just find it depressing that we even need to discuss this, but I ask the same question that my noble friend did. If the Minister can reassure us that there is no intention to expand and develop the grammar school system, which for so long has been demonstrated to be unsatisfactory and unfair, then that is a status quo that I do not find acceptable but is at least better than the situation getting worse. Really, I blame all parties, including mine, for the fact that this iniquitous system was not removed from our educational structure a long time ago. It would be wonderful, although this will not happen, if the Minister were able to stand up and say that it was a bad system and that the Government were keen to see it removed.

[The Lord Bishop of Bristol]

My Lords, I shall speak against Amendment 35A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight. The amendment—for obvious reasons, given what he has said today—does not account for voluntary, aided and foundation schools. This is not a recent provision; they have always acted as their own admission authorities as maintained schools. As set out in the School Admissions Code, academies with a religious designation must also consult the diocese and the board of education and have regard to the advice of the diocese.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the thrust of the arguments from the noble Lords who have led this debate. I shall make one or two points that perhaps have not yet come out strongly. The freedom to set their own admissions arrangements was given to academies when they first started. To be honest, I think that was a huge mistake. In local areas, it caused terrible animosity between the academies and the other maintained schools. That is part of the rift and the bad feeling that exist in many communities. I do not know many schools that, in setting their own admissions criteria, have sought to prioritise the poorest and most challenging children, those who have been excluded from more schools than anyone else, those without supportive parents and those without a room to work in at home—that is not how choosing your own admissions criteria actually works.

This is not the schools’ fault but, in terms of judging schools by how well they do academically, our whole system incentivises schools to have admissions criteria that get those children who are most likely to do well academically. If we were to change the accountability mechanisms so that we had as our most important accountability measure how much you can do for the poorest 5% of children in your city, we would have a different system, but that is not the way it runs.

However, I also blame schools. I was a teacher for 18 years. At the heart of it, I have always believed that the job of a professional teacher is to teach the children who end up in front of you on any given day—not to pick and choose; not to reject and throw away; not to say, “It’s easier to teach you than you”, but to do your best with the skills you have with the children in front of you. I taught in a school that was very challenging, and as a teacher the greatest rewards come from the progress you make with the children who are furthest behind when you start—but that is not the way the system works. There have been too many examples of academies that have used their ability to have their own admissions arrangements to select the children, or the parents, that will put them highest in the accountability stakes.

If you are a school that is undersubscribed, this argument does not matter to you. If you cannot get enough kids through the door for your published admissions number, then none of this matters. It matters only if you are a school that is oversubscribed, because only when it gets to oversubscription do the criteria for admissions come into effect. So think that through: if you are a school that is undersubscribed and not attracting children, so not getting the money, you have to take whoever no one else wants. Therefore, you do not improve, you do not get as many children, you do not get the money and again, you do not improve. That is the cycle that happens: undersubscribed schools do not attract children and therefore find it very difficult to improve.

Looking back, when the academies started under the Labour Government they were addressing the needs of those schools in the most challenging areas. In truth, what happened was that if you gave them a new building, a new head and a committed sponsor, they still did not have a cross-section of students coming through their doors. The idea at that stage, in giving them some power over admissions arrangements, was to try to get a better social mix. I can sort of see that, but it has gone way out of kilter with how it should be. In 2010, the minute the vision was that every school should become an academy, that just did not make sense.

I say to my noble friend Lord Hunt that where schools differ from hospitals is that who you treat in one hospital does not usually have an impact on the neighbouring hospital or another in the outer ring of the city. But schools are interrelated: who you choose to admit has an effect on every other school in your locality as it is an interrelated business, so it is very important that we do not have schools competing with each other in any geographical area for the bright kids. It has to work across such an area, for two reasons.

First, successful schools will always manage to attract children who, quite frankly, are easier to get the high results with—I would not say they are easier to teach. That has an effect on other schools and creates that bad feeling, so it is interrelated. The way you choose to admit pupils has an effect on other schools in your locality. I do not mind what they do, whether they band or have feeder schools, or measure it in yards from the school. What I do mind is that all schools in a local authority area ought to do the same. If you want a social mix, you can band right across the local authority area. I am not sure I like that but I do not have a problem with it because the behaviour of one school will not badly affect the performance of another.

In Birmingham, however, the minute you let over 400 schools set their own admissions arrangements there was chaos. It meant that they do not match each other. Some people of a faith with a child of a certain ability live in a place where they cannot get them into their local school because they do not live close enough, or into a faith school because they are not of the right faith. Neither does their child have the right ability to get selected in the banding arrangements, so where do they go? They go to the school that still has places left. That is not choice, but it happens in areas where there are a lot of schools that are allowed to have separate admission arrangements.

In supporting very much the amendments put forward, my plea is that it has to make sense across a geographical area. That means you cannot allow schools within the same area to have different admissions arrangements from other schools within it. I think the local authority should manage that, and that there is nothing wrong in all the schools getting together with a local authority, the parents and the primary schools to decide what those criteria should be within a national framework set down by government. But at some point they have to come to an agreement, because education is about a social as well as an academic experience. Your social experience is, in part, the children who are around you in your school—and that matters.

To be honest, that is why parents go to so much effort to exercise choice over where they want their child to go. It is not just for the academic experience but for the social experience—again, it is different with a hospital. That social experience will be right for all children, or as good as we can make it for them, only if we have some camaraderie within a geographical area so that people sit down with the same admissions arrangements. Having done that, teachers should do what they do: get on with teaching the children in front of them, not spending time on trying to get a different bunch of children in their classrooms because they think it gives them a better chance of success.