Lord Fink
Main Page: Lord Fink (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Fink (Con)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott on securing this debate on a most important subject. Her knowledge and powerful advocacy of young people is well known and certainly appreciated by many in this House.
I also point to my entries in the Register of Interests, which include a range of non-financial interests in children’s charities. I wish to highlight my trusteeship of Ark, which is generally an educational charity which operates one of the largest chains of academies and free schools in the country. As well as being a trustee of Ark, I also have the privilege of being chair of the board of governors at Ark Burlington Danes Academy, a school in the White City area of London that I sponsored through Ark.
The debate so far has been wide-ranging and fascinating across the whole range of employment, apprenticeships, further education and, most movingly, from my good noble friend Lady Newlove on the subject of victims of crime, which is an area that I had not even contemplated for this debate. Because I have spent the majority of my time in and around schools, I want to focus my speech on primary and secondary education and on some of the achievements of Government in these areas, which have largely built on the remarkable academy initiative started by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and passionately supported, and then championed, by the then Education Secretary, Michael Gove and further by Nicky Morgan, the current Education Secretary, who between them have greatly expanded the academy programme and moved it through to free schools, which to most intents and purposes are very similar to academies.
I want to talk about the benefits to educational achievements that academies and free schools have created, particularly Ark, because I know a lot about it, and then explain some of the helpful ways in which the Government have expanded the programme and, indeed, most importantly, extended it to primary schools and beyond because, as several other speakers have said, the problems of the most needy need to be addressed very early.
Education was a transformational factor in my life, and as a former grammar school boy, I used to be a passionate believer in having more grammar schools as a major driver of social mobility, as it was for me and, indeed, many of the parliamentarians who sit in this House and another place. However, when I started looking at the data for the charities affecting the neediest, I realised that while grammar schools did help a large percentage of able students to achieve their full potential, indeed, incredible results, sadly, the attainment gap opens up in the early years for the most disadvantaged in our society. Most children in receipt of free school meals, which is one very important measure of poverty, would never make it into a selective school at the age of 11, as socio-economic factors and, in some cases, parental and family issues, will help determine the results of an 11-plus exam. Hence, despite having enormous respect for the achievements of all good and outstanding schools, including grammar schools as well as academies and all other schools, and particularly the staff who work in them, sadly, I cannot accept that grammar schools alone will achieve the social mobility needed to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty that affects many parts of our country.
I should explain that all of Ark’s schools are non-selective and almost all are in areas of major economic deprivation. The few that are not are in areas of very poor historical educational outcomes. Many, including my academy—Ark Burlington Danes—have high levels of free school meals and pupil premiums, some up to, and even beyond, 75%, which is over three times the national average. You have to be pretty poor to get free school meals.
Good academies with great teaching staff are achieving remarkable results for the most disadvantaged pupils. In fact, most Ark academies—we have several dozen now—are rated good or outstanding by Ofsted and achieve results well above the national average, despite poverty levels among their intake and prior attainment which would suggest that the students would achieve results markedly lower. I have to pay tribute to the executives at Ark, led by Lucy Heller, and the staff and senior leadership teams at our schools for these achievements and for their incredibly hard work. These schools are managing to get some of the poorest students into the best universities in the country, including Oxford and Cambridge. Many of the others go on to very useful jobs indeed, including some to apprenticeships, although I will leave that subject to others who know far more about it than me. But what is important to me is that whatever their pathway, the school helps them identify the right pathway, and the students have the confidence and resilience to shine at universities or places of work due to the extra work, initiatives and experiences that have been gained in school.
Ark uses a mixture of techniques to achieve this success and indeed is often rated the highest performing academy chain in the country. It starts with a real focus and incentive to get full attendance at school. When I first looked at secondary schools, I saw schools with attendance rates as low as 80% and, in some cases, the teacher attendance rates were nearly as low as the pupils’, which shows some of the intrinsic problems for both the schools and the problems for teachers teaching in a school with poor discipline, so we have rigorous attention to discipline and an extended school day because many children do not have facilities at home to do their homework, and we focus on depth before breadth.
The recruitment, training and promotion of many good young teachers who are generally fully qualified in their degree subject, including many Teach First teachers, combined with a very creative approach to the curriculum and innovation, including a programme called Mathematics Mastery that was modelled around the Singapore maths curriculum, which is a country that is rising up the league tables in mathematics, more or less mirroring Britain’s sad decline in maths, has helped to achieve our goals at primary level, where we are achieving levels of achievement for young children that are beyond any expectations.
As I said earlier, the main focus at Ark has always been depth before breadth. We want to ensure that literacy and numeracy are totally hardwired because, without this, it is difficult for students to benefit from the rest of the school curriculum or, indeed, get a job; if you are not numerate and literate other things really do not matter.
How are the Government helping? They are generally increasing the number of academies and free schools by changing the paradigm away from the original concept, under which too much was spent on each school’s capital cost because the sponsor was allowed its own choice of architect; many expensive architects were used. New schools were meant to cost £10 million to £15 million, but most of the data that I have seen suggest the average cost was in excess of £20 million. The programme has been made more sustainable by using refurbished schools and stopping the use of famous architects. Indeed, based on our data—the Minister will probably have more accurate data—the average cost today of a similar academy is less than £15 million. That is a cost reduction of about one-third per school, which clearly makes it more affordable to build more.
Another big improvement has been extending the programme to primary schools and encouraging its use all through schooling, from four to 18 years old, and beyond this, by trying to include nursery provision. When it first looked at academies, Ark was convinced, based on experiences in America, that for schools to be genuinely transformational they had to start younger. In many of the secondary schools it opened at that time, the first year or two were spent on remedial work, trying to offset levels of literacy and numeracy that were often two to four years behind expectations. This limited the teaching time available for GCSEs.
My school, Burlington Danes, eventually got permission to open a primary school last year. We started, in effect, in large porter cabins in an existing outbuilding. I went into that school last week. It has been operating for probably six weeks this year and already I saw a bunch of four and five year-olds who had started to make progress. I could see them beginning to learn how to read with the use of synthetic phonics and, using the maths curriculum, they were starting to be able to add up and understand numbers after just a few weeks. They also showed amazing discipline. They moved seamlessly from their desks to a bug board where they sat down for the lesson taking place. When they did not move quietly and efficiently the teacher asked them to do it again, and they did. I believe that sort of discipline, instilled early in a career, will hold them in good stead for the rest of their schooling—indeed for life.
I hope your Lordships believe that education should never be the subject of political infighting. I am privileged at Ark to work with the Labour Peer, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, as well as the prominent Liberal Democrat supporter, Paul Marshall. Truthfully, we have seldom, if ever, had any disagreement on our goals and virtually none on the methods for achieving the best for each student, particularly the most disadvantaged, who we focus on.
I also want to do something that we perhaps do not do enough and pay real tribute to the teaching profession. I have direct experience with the teaching profession at Ark schools. As well as many curriculum differences, we have saddled them with expectations which are beyond anything that they or the Fischer Family Trust tables would have children achieving, when there is the intake we have. In many cases that has involved a lot of extra work for the teachers. Frankly, provided that we could convince them that what we were doing was in the best interests of their students, the teachers have never stinted in their efforts and their enthusiasm.
I hope I have given your Lordships’ House an insight into some of the factors that enable disadvantaged young people to have a better chance of success in a more competitive world.