Queen’s Speech

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to pluck one bloom—education—from the bouquet brought forward on this first full day’s debate on the gracious Speech. I suspect that education underlies the consideration of all the other areas of concern today. I listened carefully to the opening speech by the noble Lord the Minister and have read the Government’s outline description of the education measures to be presented in due time to your Lordships’ House. It is from the impressions that I have gathered from those sources that I am left with two areas of concern, which I want to express.

The first arises from the way in which we intend to pay for the proposed new measures. As noble Lords will be aware, a consultative exercise on school funding was held earlier this year, and we await the Government’s response to it. The driving force behind the exercise is to achieve a fairer system of support for pupils in every part of the land, which is very noble and worth while. There are so many variables to consider in agreeing a formula to apply across the board—some regional, others economic and yet others relating to special needs. These should help to shape such a formula, which can then be applied to all schools and authorities in an effort to iron out the huge funding discrepancies that are to be found in our system. This is greatly needed. The coalition Government, to their credit, allocated an extra £390 million to the 2015-16 school fund grant. That covered 69 of the least-funded authorities and more or less brought them up to par. However, that action also clarified the need to go further and look at the funding arrangements more broadly in the round. All this is to be honoured, and we await with great interest the Government’s response to the consultation.

A great deal has been achieved, so where then is my concern? I speak on the basis of my experience in London. There is a feeling here in London that the response to the consultative exercise will see a top-slicing of funds from London schools to schools in other parts of the land. A first glance at the figures might seem to support such a proposal. Eighteen of the 20 most disadvantaged boroughs in the land are London boroughs; only Birmingham and Nottingham get a look in on that league. Arsenal came second in the Premier League to Leicester, trailing by a massive 10-point gap, but with education it is exactly the other way around. Islington schools are allocated £6,220 per pupil, while Leicestershire pupils received £4,238—a massive gap of around £2,000, or over 30%.

So should London happily concede the point and let the redistribution take place? Heaven forfend. It is the investment in London schools over the last 10 years that has completely turned them around. Failing schools have become good, outstanding and outstandingly good schools. I shall take as an example the two schools where I have some responsibility, the Central Foundation schools of London. They are inner-city local authority schools that are both ethnically very mixed and single-sex. They have hugely outperformed the national average for five GCSEs. For English and maths, A* to C grade, the boys’ school got a massive 82%; when I joined the governing board, it was down to 12% or 13%. So those schools are riding high.

If the funding cuts, together with other costs related to pensions, the living wage, special programmes like Prevent and others are applied as anticipated, each of our schools, with others throughout London, will need to cut its budget by 14% in the three years beginning 2017. Add to that the fact that existing grants per pupil have remained cash flat—they have not risen with the cost of inflation since 2010—and noble Lords will have no difficulty in recognising the looming crisis lying ahead if, as feared, that top-slicing of money going to London schools takes place. All this is at a time when London has been experiencing the fastest pupil population growth and the severest school-places shortfall—a trend set to continue, they say, until at least 2020.

The commendable injection of new money for the most deprived authorities in this current year must surely point the way to achieving justice and fairness in funding across the board. More money needs to be found. It cannot be right to make radical inroads into the successes of those schools that have found the road to success. “Boom and bust” cannot be a phrase that can ever be applied to education. We cannot risk the recurrence of some of the educational problems that London has known in the too recent past. Even at a time of austerity, money spent on education should be viewed as an investment. Sustainability must be built into the system. What assurance can the noble Baroness give me on this point?

I shall deal with the second concern only briefly, although I feel just as passionately about it. The drive towards academies, the one-size-fits-all approach to education, sounds more ideological every time I hear it. The whole country—certainly the world of education —heaved a sigh of relief when the Secretary of State seemed to draw back from forcibly imposing such a model on the country a few short weeks ago. But here it comes again in the note supporting yesterday’s Speech:

“a system where all schools are academies”—

a phrase that kept coming up. I am not unfamiliar with the world of dogma; I have spent the whole of my professional life fighting it. I bring my innate sympathies to this kind of suspicion, and I am as fearful of formulae that would convert schools into academies as I am of those who seek to convert Catholics into Protestants or Baptists into Methodists. Respect, variety, humility, diversity: these things must be at the heart of our educational policy. I honestly see the strong points of academies, and I am pleased that they are part of the mix. Bring them on, say I.

I was glad to see that the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, is down to speak in a few minutes’ time, because he chaired a forum recently on Multi-Academy Trusts: Governance, Growth and Accountability. The virtues of academies are well-rehearsed in that report: innovation, entrepreneurialism, independence, good leadership, economies of scale, value for money, academic success. What could be more desirable? However, that same report had other, counter-indicative, things to say. There are challenges; governance can prove “unhelpfully complex”. There will be dilemmas; a successful school that takes on a less successful school might find its own dynamism reduced. Regarding leadership, it seems that,

“Headship was as unattractive as it ever had been. … There was also a danger that, with the imposition of rules and regulations across the chain, MATs”—

multi-academy trusts—

“might increasingly reproduce the bureaucracy of local authorities”.

I will leave things there. I could go on.

All this reinforces the point that we ought to let this road towards academisation unfold at its own pace. We have yet to accumulate the data to make sound judgments. If more and more schools choose to become academies, indeed if all schools choose to become academies, I could live with that outcome, but forced change is too risky. We should opt for the age-old formula of “solvitur ambulando”: let things work themselves out. There are enough academies in the system now for the case to be made on the basis of their performance.

I hope that the Minister will feel able to assure me that schools will be allowed to make their own choices rather than be lured with financial goodies or frog-marched into doing what they would never otherwise have chosen to do.