Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Davies of Brixton and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak principally to the amendment in my name, Amendment 79B, about regional boards. This is part of my ongoing quest—our ongoing quest, as a Committee —to stimulate thinking on what an all-academy school system might look like in practice, and flush out a few thoughts to inform the Minister’s reflections as she seeks to improve the Bill as it goes through its journey in Parliament. In particular, what I am interested in in this amendment is the accountability of MATs.

One of the main criticisms I have of academies generally and, to some extent, multi-academy trusts, is that they are insufficiently accountable. We have heard that in the context of this debate now. I am also interested in the accountability of the Secretary of State, particularly if they take on a lot of powers through the Bill. The most appropriate body, or set of bodies, to hold the academy system to account are local authorities, because they are locally elected and have that legitimacy of election—he said, speaking in the House of Lords. Currently, the system has advisory boards for what, up until just after I tabled this amendment, were called regional schools commissioners; they are now regional directors. My sense is that the system does not actually regard the current RSC advisory board that highly. They are elected by the CEOs of MATs in the region and they elect some of their number to serve and advise the regional schools commissioner in her or his job.

I think we can do better than the current construction, so I am not giving up on a structure that already exists. If you can make something that already exists work, that can often be quite a helpful way forward. It is important to focus accountability at a regional level, rather than at a local authority level. We have local authorities of various sizes, from Rutland to Birmingham—in terms of the number of schools; I am sure there are local authorities with larger geographical sizes than Birmingham. But that we might want a set of local authorities within a region covering multi-academy trusts, given their catchments and the geography that they are drawing on, seems to make sense to me.

I am suggesting that the local authorities within a region form the majority of such advisory boards that now would have a statutory basis; and that they would be required to publish an annual report, so that they would be reporting on the way that the powers had been used by the Secretary of State in that region, and by the regional director. It was notable that the Minister, in response to the previous group, confirmed that in practice some of these functions will be performed by regional directors. This is an attempt to make those civil servants accountable for some of the decisions they are making in the name of the Secretary of State. In essence, it is the accountability of transparency that I am after—that, by asking those boards to publish and make publicly available an annual report, we can all see how the powers are being used and how the needs of the children in that area are working, and how local authorities would function as the voice of parents and pupils in their areas.

As I think the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, was just talking about, in the end this is rooted in the importance of schools as part of a community. I do not think anyone in this House, from the Government Benches through to this side, disagrees with that. It is important that the community is reflected in the work of an academy, that the community as a whole is there to attract and retain teachers, that the school understands how to engage parents on the basis of the parents in that community, that it is able to develop engaging learning by making it relevant to that community, and that it is able to adjust the curriculum according to what is going to create the relevance to its community. That is my suggestion, and it is merely a probing amendment to see if anyone thinks it is a good idea.

There are just a couple of amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that I would comment on. Amendment 41 talks about a “similar geographical area”. I chair a multi-academy trust that is national and works across a bunch of regions, which by and large works pretty well, and some of the other national trusts work pretty well. The overall direction of travel of policy from the Government and elsewhere is that a more regional, localised approach is probably on balance better, but we are where we are with those large national trusts. We need to understand what is a viable footprint within a region to have a good relationship with a local authority, with its duties to SEND, and with its duties to children generally. If those national trusts have a mere smattering of a presence in a region, it might be as well for them to between them work out how to be more focused on a geographical basis. But if they already have a substantive footprint, and a substantive relationship with the local authorities, I do not think that it should be disrupted. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, might want to think about that.

Amendment 95 is about reporting on funding. Some multi-academy trusts do something called GAG pooling, which is nothing about keeping people quiet; rather, it is pooling the general academies grant to then distribute money across the map where it is deemed to be needed. As an example, I was in a meeting today to discuss an academy in Walsall that is the last one in the E-ACT group that is struggling. We put a considerable amount more funding into school improvement in that case than it would get through its general academies grant. It is that redistribution of wealth—to use an old-fashioned phrase that we like on this side of the Chamber—that is at the heart of the flexibility that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, is questioning. I think he is basically saying that it is fine but that we should have some transparency about this. I am not afraid of transparency, and if the Government choose to move to get more transparency about things, so much the better. We have to publish in our annual report quite a detailed amount of financial information, and that is all publicly available. I hear criticism that more information should be easily available on an academy-by-academy basis. I do not think any of us should be afraid of transparency if that is what people would like.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I have two points. My tendency is to support Amendment 41 but, after hearing what my noble friend just said about the direction of travel, maybe that is sufficient. I find the idea of widely dispersed academies problematic. In the White Paper that came before the Bill, in paragraph 131 on the size of trusts, the Government say:

“we will limit the proportion of schools in a local area that can be run by an individual trust.”

This is a genuine question: how does that fit together with the debate we have just had?

My second point relates to Amendment 55. I heard what my noble friend Lady Blower said, raising the issues of parents being faced with a decision about which they have not been consulted. We sort of had an answer from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester, speaking on behalf of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, but the Church needs to take a more understanding approach to this issue. We have a case in point: a group of parents were faced with the reality of their school being moved from an academy into a multi-academy trust with a Christian ethos. In principle I am against Church schools, but that is not the point here. The point here is whether those parents should have some input before that decision is reached. I find it impossible to believe that someone would argue in principle against consulting parents about this major change in the way that their school is run.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Davies of Brixton and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to add one thought to the debate. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, the Bill is setting out a brand-new structure for schools in this country. What is unclear is what that structure will be. What is the dynamic or philosophy, or even the structure that lies behind this proposed new system of school education? It has been nominated as academies—it has their name attached to it. I am a doubter about academies. We could have an interesting debate, probably more on this side, about their role and what they have achieved. Because it was raised by my noble friend Lord Young, I have to say that I find his reference to failing schools in London, with the implication that there was a mass failure of schools there, offensive. However, I am not going to debate that today.

What is before us today on the structure is not about academies at all. Multi-academy trusts are, in fact, the antithesis of academies as originally envisaged. These are large, bureaucratic, non-local, geographically distributed organisations, with no local involvement other than as a toothless add-on. We will try to do our best later on to build in local and teacher involvement. I would argue for school-student involvement in the way that they are run, but these will be big organisations and the dynamic will be for them to become even bigger. They will be big, bureaucratic organisations which are effectively under the thumb of the Secretary of State. Is that the schools system that we want? I certainly do not think it is.

As a final thought, we saw research this week from the Institute of Education showing that the one thing multi-academy trusts do not do is to rescue failing schools. Its evidence showed that they had no impact on rescuing failing primary schools and very little on rescuing secondary schools. So I am incensed, in part, by the failure to recognise the role that local authorities should still play in governing our education system.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I did not want to stand up again, but I need to respond quickly to my noble friend, just to defend the record of some multi-academy trusts. In doing so, I do not want to attack any local authorities. Local authorities do and have done a great job. Some individual schools were being failed when the first academies were set up by my noble friend Lord Adonis, and it was the right thing to do to intervene after generations of failure. But just within the multi-academy trust that I am so lucky to chair, I refer my noble friend to an Ofsted report that has just been published about DSLV, which is an all-through school in Daventry. It has gone from being in a very poor state to having an excellent report that we received this week. I could point to a number, just to say that there is a balance to the argument. I hope that he is willing to listen to it, in the same way that I am willing to listen to the argument around local authorities in London and elsewhere.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

Only if the noble Lord has finished; I do not mean to interrupt.

This is a really important debate on a very important set of amendments. They are essentially about two issues: parental involvement in the running of schools at a local level and whether every academy should have a local governing body. I see the two as being slightly different issues.

I support Amendment 23, and I probably support Amendments 24 and 26 as well. In thinking about this, I thought it might be worth telling the story of two multi-academy trusts. I know about one only through an article in Schools Week, so I therefore do not claim to really know anything about it at all and can only repeat what I have read. The other is the academy trust that I chair.

The Anglian Learning academy trust won the National Governance Association award for outstanding governance this year. I understand that it has 14 schools and its CEO, Jon Culpin, talks about empowering local governing bodies, not fearing them. His approach is that every academy in the trust has a local governing body, and it works very well. My understanding from reading about it is that the MAT board very much looks after the core operational side of the business—the finances and the schools’ capital—to take that burden away from the school business managers and heads. The heads then lead the teaching and learning on a school-by-school basis in conjunction with their local governing body. That works very successfully for them, by and large.

In one or two cases, they have had to essentially impose interim executive bodies as a MAT board because they have not been able to appoint local governing bodies, they have struggled to recruit, or there has been a problem. By and large, that has worked very well for them, and that sense of being really clear about where the MAT board adds value, and where a local governing body adds value, is important when thinking about this relationship and this issue around local governing bodies. Of course, parents would have been represented on every one of those 14 local governing bodies.

Long before I was involved in E-ACT, the previous CEO but one inherited the situation where a significant majority of our 28 schools were failing and were in low Ofsted categories—I think that maybe 25% were not. It was in a pretty poor state, academically as well as financially. I am sure that it was bleeping very largely on the radar of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, when he was the Academies Minister at the time. At that point, it had local governing bodies in each of the schools. However, the decision was made by the then CEO to remove all those local governing bodies because he had to make a lot of difficult decisions very quickly to turn around the finances of the organisation and the educational performance of the schools. As a result, we currently have no local governing bodies and I am effectively—in legal terms—the chair of governors of 28 schools. That is quite a considerable pro bono burden on my time, as counsel any Members of your Lordships’ House who are thinking of doing this. I get all sorts of letters from Ofsted and the department on all sorts of things about which, frankly, it is very difficult for me to know exactly what is going on, because they are about individual schools. I do not think that this situation is ideal either.

We have local ambassador groups in each of the 28 schools. The latest version of the academies handbook is encouraging us further around parental involvement and hearing from every one of those local ambassador groups if we do not have parental trustees on the trust board. I perceive quite an encouragement from the department for us to do that. In the next round of recruiting trustees, I am very keen that we should recruit parental trustees. This is why, in the end, I support Amendment 23 and have put my name to it. This is probably an issue for the articles of association—the department can then advise us on how they should be updated—rather than standards in the Bill. Nevertheless, that is a technicality, and it has allowed us to have this debate.

One of the other problems that exists when you have a large, geographically dispersed MAT, like this one, is that the trust board cannot possibly know all the details about what is happening in all 28 of those schools and communities. Therefore, it must delegate quite a lot of governance function to the executive leadership team, and there is a danger that they are then marking their own homework on some of the decisions they are making. That is another difficulty and tension within the system as it is currently constructed.

One of the things we are doing in my particular MAT is commissioning an independent external review of governance to see how we can resolve some of these tensions. I hope that we can do this. I do not want to anticipate how that will end up, but I want to ensure that we end up with better local intelligence at a board level about what is going on, so that we are cognisant of the culture and the views of parents. When I last visited our two academies in Sheffield, I had a great meeting with our ambassador groups; they are all parents, and I had great feedback and input from them around what was going on in those two schools. In the end, however, I do not think it is quite enough.

Does that mean that I think that we should impose local governing bodies on every single school, even though I agree that it is perfectly reasonable to have two trustees who are parents on the main trust board? If they were local governing bodies, they would have to have two parental trustees on each one, so to aggregate that up to two out of 28 does not seem unreasonable. However, I do not, in the end, agree that we should impose local governing bodies in every case. There are circumstances, such as the one that happened at E-ACT some time ago, where we might want to be able to impose things while we turn things around and sort problems out, and then, hopefully, have the maturity and the reflection to decide, “Okay, we now have everything running well”—as, by and large, we do at E-ACT—“and now might be the time for us to re-empower schools and re-empower governance at a local level.” However, I am not sure that a blanket approach is appropriate. It is appropriate for the MAT board and the central MAT team, particularly around the educational activity in schools, to have more of an attitude that they are servants of the schools and not the masters of the schools—culturally, that is better—but there are other operational aspects where we want to be the masters, because in the end we can move resources around and sort things out. It is going to be different on a case-by-case basis.

So, in the end, my counsel to your Lordships is not to go with the imposition of every academy having to have a local governing body, but to ensure that we have better parental representation across the piece than we might have at the moment.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. I have just one narrow point I wish to add. One thing that is lacking and to me seems essential is some reference to school students and their participation in the governance of their schools. To me, the case for those over voting age is unanswerable: they can vote in a national election, but they have no right to participate in the governance of the institution to which they belong. Given that the Labour Party’s policy is, I think, votes at 16, I would make the case that school students from age 16 should have a statutory right to participate in governance. I would even suggest that there is some scope for clear guidance to involve even younger children. I believe that there is some interesting work done in many primary schools now where the children are involved. Unfortunately, I missed the boat on making this specific point in an amendment, but I am sure that this issue that will return on Report and I hope that, at that stage, some reference to school students could be included.