Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part one
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a declared interest as the honorary president of the Association for Citizenship Teaching. I agree entirely with the comments of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. I just wish that citizenship teaching was taken more seriously, from the top and right through the system, from headteachers to Ofsted in particular. I know that the Minister will listen today, because she listened earlier this year. I hope that she can take back to her colleagues in the department the comments from this afternoon and those in Committee. I also hope that, when she comes to respond to the debate today, she will say something about the juxtaposition between the special educational needs Green Paper and consultation and this Bill, and whether proposals will be brought forward when the Bill reaches the House of Commons.

I commend what has just been said in relation to mental health, the way we need to take it much more seriously and how that then needs to be co-ordinated so that local authorities and local health services have a very key role to play. Of course, this is highlighted by today’s report on safeguarding and children in care, which shows that we have a scandal on our hands. This might not have been so bad—although it would not have resolved it—had Sure Start not been destroyed in what I consider to be a criminal fashion.

I turn now to the Bill. Not everything in an education Bill is actually about education. I very much appreciate that a lot is going on elsewhere. However, we have a crisis in recruitment, including a shortage of 30,000 teachers. We have a shortage of male teachers and role models. One in seven who starts teaching drops out in the first year. We have had a 25% cash cut on the amount spent on repair, maintenance and renewal compared to 2010, and we will get back to 2010 levels for revenue funding only in two years’ time. The situation is scandalous. While the Bill has a number a very good elements in it which have already been mentioned—including the role of Ofsted in the registration of children who are allegedly taught at home—there is so much left out. It is a mouse of a Bill. As my noble friend Lady Chapman on the Front Bench has described it, the Bill is a lost opportunity.

I will concentrate on trying to wheedle out where we are going with the structure, functions and accountability of the service. We started in 2010 with the mantra that every school would be free-standing: free to do what it wished, and free to adopt the curriculum or not. Thank God that we have moved away from this and returned to the idea which all education institutions—or at least 90% of them—understood to be the case: you need a family of schools in which schools worked, contributed and spread success together. We are moving back to that, albeit under the multi-academy trust model. This actually makes free schools a complete anomaly—that is, the idea that you can create a new school only by calling it a free school, even if it is not free because it is part of a multi-academy trust which, as has already been spelled out, will now be dictated to by the department itself. We have moved seamlessly in 12 years from everything being part of an isolated, fractured and “fragmented education system”—as the former Chief Inspector of Schools, Michael Wilshaw, called it seven years ago—to putting them into multi-academy trusts. We have moved from, “You do it your way and all flowers will bloom”, to giving the Secretary of State powers—which I actually welcome on the whole—to intervene to avoid failure.

However, we are not really providing any accountability; it has already been said in this debate that the missing element is accountability. This involves the engagement of parents and governing bodies with some role and power to ensure that this is a function of the whole community and not just the creation of isolated multi-academy trusts peppered across the country. This also involves ensuring that those recruited as trustees—and, I hope in the future, as governors—of the schools themselves are appointed on a transparent basis. There is so much to do to rethink the curriculum and assessments, and to work out how best to teach in the modern era, what to teach and how to prepare young people for a very different future. Very little of what is in this Bill will affect the fundamentals of our education system for the future, and that is a great shame.