Education Bill

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

My Lords, what a pleasure to hear the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Edmiston, to this House. I look forward to many more such contributions. I am probably the only person in this Chamber who had a 100 per cent attendance record at school from the age of three and a half to 18 and a half—so that puts us on different sides of the House for a start. In 1974, when my wife and I came back from a period of service overseas and wanted to cash in our savings, which had been invested for us during our absence, what I hoped would be £6,000 because of the stock market at that time turned out to be about £1,000, which bought a three-piece suite, two beds and a roll of linoleum. Even if our business careers also started off on different trajectories, it is so nice to welcome the noble Lord to the House and to speak after him in this way.

The Minister, in the short time that he has been at his post, has won the affection and respect of noble Lords on all sides of the House. He is a good listener, which makes it all the more difficult to direct the kind of fire and brimstone that this legislation evokes against his person. He is an honourable man but behind him lurks a lean and hungry man who thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. We are on the verge of implementing measures that will change the educational landscape of our country for generations, and in a radical way. It is deeply ironic that this debate has been interrupted by the Statement on the NHS. Would that we could take two months out for consultation on these educational measures too. I am reasonably certain that, after appropriate consideration, we might well come back with as big a U-turn on this front as we have witnessed on the other. While we are not going to have that, it is a fond hope.

The money to pay for the various provisions described in this Bill, as I understand it, has been snatched from a number of pockets and there are serious consequences to expect from all of them. First, there was the abandonment of the Building Schools for the Future programme which, I remind your Lordships, was intended to renew or rebuild every secondary school in the land. I remember the long period of Conservative government in the 1980s and 1990s when a previous round of budget cuts and financial stringencies—all at a time when the North Sea was bringing us huge revenues that were largely squandered—led to the near-dereliction of school properties as well as a dereliction of duty on the part of many people in power. Now the BSF programme, intended to reverse these depredations, has been brought to an abrupt end and the money wrung from the wreckage has been poured into the measures before us.

Secondly, local authorities are being asset-stripped to finance the freedoms of the new academies. I fear that we will one day rue this emasculation of local and accountable government and I was delighted to hear a real exhortation of the role of local authorities in our contemporary world from the Benches over there by the noble Baroness, who is no longer in her place. I have witnessed too much inefficient and inappropriate activity on the part of local authorities during my years in public life for me to become a bland advocate for them. They need constant revitalisation to respond to local needs in effective ways but emptying their coffers is not a way to achieve it. Babies, or at least our schoolchildren, are as likely to be thrown out with the bathwater as anything else. For school governors, charged with ever-mounting responsibilities, the loss of this source of knowledge, wisdom and experience will weigh heavily on us. I am delighted to hear that we may have a government amendment that will perhaps correct some of my thinking on this area, but I became aware of it only at the beginning of this debate.

Thirdly, the drive to train teachers on the job is replete with danger. We already have a mixed economy in the area of training—why change it? There is plenty of research to show that teachers who are given a formation which combines theoretical and practical elements turn out to be the most rounded and suitable for the classroom. After all, a PGCE itself involves 18 weeks’ classroom experience. If the measures before us are implemented it will be to the detriment of universities and other institutions which have accumulated long experience in this area, constantly shaping the curriculum to the changing needs of our society and forging links with thousands of schools where they send their students and evaluate their work. Mention was made by the right reverend Prelate of the University of Roehampton, which I had a big part in helping to shape in its early years. I can bear witness to that story too. Money taken from this sector will of course be channelled towards those schools identified as training schools.

For the past 30 years, I have been a governor of schools of all kinds. Governors have not been mentioned enough in this debate so far but they are Britain’s “unsung heroes”, says the White Paper. So they are; but there is a real cause of concern. As schools take charge of their own activities and head teachers become chief executive officers—buying in services currently provided through local authorities, shaping the learning experience of their pupils and selling their product in the marketplace—so we governors will have to be a check and a balance on the way a quite considerable financial responsibility is exercised. We are all volunteers who have to go to courses and night school to refresh our ability to keep up to date with things. These are multi-million pound businesses but all of us come from various walks of life. In schools in poorer areas, such as the ones I help to look after, we are going to find it more and more difficult to gather the competences and skills necessary for managing these complex and increasingly autonomous enterprises. There are going to be casualties in this area.

As I prepared these remarks, I resolved that even if I were drawn 51st out of 51 speakers and even if the points that I wanted to make had already been made 51 times, I was going to repeat them anyway. This Bill marks a turning point in our national system of education and will have consequences that we will have to live with for a long time. I hope there will be scope in the remaining stages of the passage of this Bill to improve it and that the Government, like their Minister, will have a listening ear and a competence for change.