Education Bill

Lord Blackwell Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blackwell]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I welcome the Bill, especially the focus on helping with discipline, the greater freedoms for academies and the emphasis on measuring ourselves against international standards. However, I want to focus on one area which is ignored in the Bill and has been neglected in government legislation so far, and I should like to explore whether it could be added to the Bill as it passes through the House.

My concern is around the provision of high-quality education tailored to the needs of the most able pupils. It is of course important to raise standards across the board and to focus attention on raising standards in those schools covering disadvantaged areas where high standards are most difficult to achieve, and I fully agree with my noble friend Lady Stowell that we need brilliant doers as well as brilliant thinkers. But the most able children also deserve special attention. We should not forget that it is the most able children from whom the leaders of the future will often be drawn—the scientists, engineers, artists, business leaders and politicians who make the breakthroughs and create the wealth and social advance that the nation as a whole benefits from. Not only that, we need to ensure that very able children from less advantaged backgrounds are able to get top-quality education and rise to the top of their chosen field as a crucial aspect of encouraging social mobility—providing role models to raise aspirations in their local communities as well as delivering on our shared ideal of a fair and meritocratic society.

I fear that over time we have moved to a situation where the highest quality education is no longer open to all children based on merit, but is increasingly the preserve of wealthier families who can pay for private education or a house in an affluent area. That is neither fair nor a good development for society as a whole, so I would like to explore a number of possible amendments to this Bill to support the aims of fairness and access to high-quality education for all, regardless of their background.

First, I would like to explore whether it is possible to apply admission arrangements collectively to a group of schools, a group of academies or others in a federation. The group of schools would continue to admit all abilities in their locality, but one school in the group could be designated to offer specialised, top-stream educational learning in selected subjects that would be open to all pupils from all the schools within the group who were considered to have the ability to benefit from a faster and deeper pace of learning. This is no different in principle from the current arrangements whereby one school may offer specialist subject teaching—for example, Russian at A-level—which is then open to pupils from other schools on a shared basis.

Under this arrangement, there would be no admissions criteria based on ability to get into the school or schools, and the decision to refer a pupil to the fast-track classes could be taken at any age rather than at one fixed point. As well as making it economically possible to provide specialist teaching for a group of high-ability children by aggregating them together across a number of schools, this arrangement would recognise the well established benefits that high achievers gain from being taught in a class with other high-ability children. In one study at York University, for example, the achievement of children in the top 5 per cent ability range was shown to be significantly higher when they were in a year group with 20 or more other high-ability children than when they were in a year group with fewer than 10 other very able students. There may already be more flexibility to move in this direction under existing legislation, but I would like to explore whether amendments to the Bill could help achieve this aim.

Secondly, and with the same objective, I wonder whether we might not have a general requirement on all schools, particularly academies, to make adequate provision to enable pupils of high ability to achieve their potential, whether through setting, streaming or other tailored teaching methods. We put other general requirements on schools, so why not a general requirement to provide a fair opportunity for high-ability pupils? We could then perhaps also amend Clause 52 regarding Ofsted inspections, to require the Ofsted inspector also to consider whether the education provided by the school meets the special needs of high-ability pupils.

Thirdly, we do have some very high-quality academic schools that in past years were open to all as direct grant schools, but which chose to convert to private status when the direct grant status was abolished. I myself was a free-school-meals pupil at one such direct grant school, and I have no doubt that I owe a lot to the opportunities opened up by that completely free, state-funded education. What those schools provided was not only academic excellence but—just as important —the social constants that children from less advantaged backgrounds need to believe that they can aim for the top. We now have, through the Academies Act, the framework to welcome such schools back into the state-funded sector. However, to make that possible, I believe we would need to amend the restrictions on admissions policy so that these schools, like existing grammar schools that switch to academy status, can retain their existing admissions policy based on merit. I cannot see why, given that these excellent schools exist and continue to deliver some of the best academic results in the country, we would not want to open their doors to all children of ability, regardless of their social background or parental income, rather than leaving poor children locked out at the gates.

Finally, the most wide-ranging change would be to allow academies to opt for a specialism as a selective academic school. That may be a step too far for many, but again I think it is something we should consider. So I welcome this Bill and I look forward to my noble friend’s response to the debate. I will then reflect on how some of these points may be advanced as the Bill proceeds through this House.