Education and Adoption Bill

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

First, I apologise to the Committee for not being able to attend the Second Reading of the Bill because of diary clashes.

My noble friends Lord Storey, Lady Sharp of Guildford and I have tabled this amendment to improve the local and democratic accountability of schools in a local community for a number of reasons. The first reason is that school funding accounts for around 50% of local authority spending for councils that have responsibility for education. The second reason is that, by their very nature, schools reflect the communities they serve and parents expect there to be a local process of oversight and a local means of expressing any concerns. The third reason is that there have been a number of high-profile failures of financial governance in the academy sector. For example, there have been allegations relating to fraud in a number of schools in Bradford and County Durham. The Education Funding Agency has issued financial notices to improve to several academy chains, including the Academies Enterprise Trust in 2014. The fourth reason for tabling this amendment is that multi-academy trusts currently seem to be the favoured way forward, but they are accountable for their strategic and financial performance only to the Education Funding Agency and the Secretary of State. The fifth reason is that governance models in multi-academy trusts ensure that the sponsor or sponsoring body controls the trust. I am sure the Minister will have seen the publication by the New Schools Network.

Multi-academy trusts are governed by a trust body and by so-called directors of the trust who take the strategic and financial decisions for the schools under their control. On the whole, multi-academy trusts set up local governing bodies to do the day-to-day running and there is no parental or staff involvement until this lower level of governance. The document recommends that there should be one member of staff and two parents on those bodies and that they should not have any oversight of the financial controls of the trust and therefore of the school in which they serve. The crucial thing in this model is that decisions on school budgets are in the hands of the directors of the trust and that the trust members are self-appointed and accountable for their actions only via agreements signed with the Department for Education and the Education Funding Agency.

In this model there is no accountability to the local community and to parents. This amendment seeks to address those serious concerns. There is currently a vacuum of democratic accountability regarding the attainment and achievement of schools and, even more importantly, for the attainment and achievement of the children in those schools. Those matters are no longer within the remit of the local authority. As a serving local councillor I can say that when parents approach me with concerns about their children’s academy school’s ability to achieve realistic opportunities for them, it is difficult to address those concerns other than by going through the very processes that created them in the first place—that is, the school’s governing body or trust.

In this amendment we propose to put matters right. In 2006 the Government established local authority health scrutiny committees. The government guidance for those committees, which is on the GOV.UK website, is very clear about their purpose. I think that the purposes for which health scrutiny committees were established could serve in establishing parallel scrutiny committees for schools within the local authority area. The government guidance for local authority health scrutiny committees, available on the GOV.UK website, states:

“The primary aim of health scrutiny is to act as a lever to improve the health of local people, ensuring their needs are considered as an integral part of the commissioning, delivery and development of health services … Health scrutiny is a fundamental way by which democratically elected local councillors are able to voice the views of their constituents, and hold relevant NHS bodies and relevant health service providers to account”.

It seems to me that by substituting “schools and education” within that guidance we have a prime way of letting local communities call to account all schools, particularly academies because there is a big vacuum in accountability for local academies. In the nearly 10 years since the committees were introduced they have been extraordinarily effective in bringing together local democratically elected representatives, health commissioners and CCGs, representatives of the acute trusts in the district and the public health people to scrutinise health issues. Together they have been able to resolve some of the difficult challenges of providing health services in the community. I would attest that this same model could work really well for local education.

The guidance goes on very helpfully to demonstrate how scrutiny committees can add value by bringing together partners providing, in this case, health services. I suggest that it could also be done for education in a district. It says:

“A greater emphasis on involving patients”,

and for education that could be parents,

“and the public from an early stage in proposals to improve services”.

Engaging people has got to be a positive. It continues:

“The work of health and wellbeing boards”,

in this case we could bring in the education scrutiny committee,

“bringing together representatives of the whole … system”.

This will therefore add value to the decisions made. It will provide an opportunity for a public, open, transparent and democratic hearing of a local community’s concerns about local schools.

One key to success in a school is harnessing the support of the local community that it serves. Anyone who has ever been involved in education, as I have, knows that good schools are supported very well by their local community. One indicator that a school is beginning to fail is when the local community starts taking support away from it.

The risk with the multi-academy trust model is that schools will become more remote from the communities they serve. I suggest that a successful multi-academy trust would welcome the opportunity of a public platform where it could demonstrate transparency in its decision-making and respond to questions about its performance from local people. With that in mind, I hope that the Minister will be able to respond positively to this proposal. I beg to move.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. I am not sure whether her suggestion is exactly right but the principles that she raises are very important. They concern local democratic accountability and they also concern what she described as flaws in the governance structure of academies, particularly multi-academies. I share her view on both points.

The noble Baroness suggested that we look at the health model and I think that she is right. One thing that puzzles me about academy trusts is that they do not seem to allow for a direct relationship between the governance and the parents, except in the circumstances that she has described. I suggest that we look at NHS foundation trusts, which after all were developed at around the same time.

I know that the education department is very isolated in Whitehall and this is yet another example of that, but the ownership of an NHS foundation trust is rooted in patients, staff and members of the public, because they become members without paying any cost and it is the members who elect the governing council. The governing council, in turn, appoints the non-executives and the chairman to the board and approves the appointment of the chief executive. The board of directors is a statutory body. It is the board that you sue and harangue if things go wrong, but it is accountable locally through a very well-ordered structure and it carries with it a much better sense of accountability. There is a clear line of responsibility with a proper board of directors. There is no problem about its legal responsibilities and it is accountable. When I chaired a foundation trust, the fact that I had to appear before the governors’ council every month or so to explain the trust’s problems and what we were doing about them was a very good discipline. It was not a very easy discipline—I confess that I did not enjoy doing it—but it was an immeasurably strengthening exercise, and I think that the noble Baroness is trying to get at that in part of her amendment.

The noble Baroness also raises the whole question of the local authority’s role in the education policy that the Government are developing. I refer back to a point raised by my noble friend Lord Knight during our first day in Committee. He basically said that if the Government want all schools to be academies, why do they not just say so and bring in legislation? Why do we have to have this rather obscure, backwards way of academising all schools? That is basically dishonest. I hope that the Minister might just praise a maintained school—he has four hours in which to do so but I have yet to hear him ever praise a maintained school. Clearly, he has an ideological problem with maintained schools. That is why we remain suspicious of the Bill and some of the motivations behind it.

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[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

As well as the fact that, on this particular point, the Education Department seems wholly out of step with the general direction of government policy—which, as my noble friend said, is transferring power from central government to the local combined authorities—the department’s stance undermines the very policy itself. The overarching remit of the combined authorities is to develop the economies of their city or region and translate that growth into opportunities for all their citizens, particularly the most disadvantaged. Surely education has to be part of that agenda of economic growth. Does my noble friend agree?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

This is another puzzle because the terms of the agreement with Greater Manchester focus on growth in the economy and specifically mention the skills agenda. I have listened to the Government talk about the issue of skills—albeit at the same time as destroying further education, which of course is where most of these skills are taught; but we will leave that aside for the moment—and I am absolutely amazed because the argument they put forward is that while skills are crucially important, the role of schools is to make sure that, when they come out, young people are ready to go into the workplace; that is, those who do not go into higher or further education, if any is left when they reach the age when they move on from school.

Why on earth is education being taken out of this really exciting development? I am enthusiastic about what is happening in Greater Manchester, and potentially it is hugely exciting, but I just do not understand why education is being left out of it. This is but one example of how, when the Department for Education says that it is consistent with the localism agenda, it is, frankly, completely unbelievable.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry that I was not able to be present in Grand Committee last week, but I have read with interest the Committee report. Two things come to mind in relation to this debate. The first is that I am most grateful to the Minister for organising an extremely helpful meeting with head teachers and regional schools commissioners. At the meeting I raised a question about local accountability which followed from our debate at Second Reading. On the question of regional accountability, I put to a regional schools commissioner the case that while it is important to improve academic outcomes for young people, there may be a reason to override the local interest of parents in their schools. I hope that I am paraphrasing him correctly, but he said that it is really important to bring the local community with one, which seems to support the notion of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and others that if one is to have a successful school, one needs to bring the local community on board as far as possible.

The second point I want to raise is that, having read the Hansard report of the previous sitting, I am concerned by the Government’s focus on a very narrow assessment of education; that is, on academic attainment. Of course it is extremely important that our children should do well academically so that they leave school being able to read and write and are ready in terms of employment, and that is important to their parents as well, but as was made clear in that debate, children need a rounded education. Some children in particular benefit from an education which perhaps does not emphasise academic attainment so much but allows them to excel in sport and vocational attainment in other areas. My sense is that we need to allow some young people to fail and fail and fail again. Young people in care in particular may do poorly in terms of their academic attainment while they are at school, but many of them will do well in their early 20s or even their late 20s. If one puts great pressure on schools to ensure that all children do well academically, the risk is that those children who do not have so much academic capacity may be excluded, be given less attention, or to some degree will be seen as an inconvenience.

Perhaps that is an argument for giving local authorities and local bodies more influence over and supervision of what goes on in academies and elsewhere. The people in Manchester may think, “Well, in this area we have a particular interest in vocational success and we would like to see our schools equipping our children to enter apprenticeships”. I am probably not expressing myself well. I think that my chief concern arose when I read about the new pressures being put on head teachers to ensure that children do well academically because of the emphasis that the Government are placing on this. I worry about those children who may not have so much academic potential but do have potential in other ways. Perhaps the amendment that has been put forward will allay some of those concerns.

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[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

That is because a number of state-maintained schools have now converted to become academies; so they have shifted into being academies.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

Is the noble Baroness seriously saying that the only failing academies are ones that have just transferred?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)]

No, we are not saying that.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

Quite.

[Lord Nash]

The answer to the noble Lord’s question is that we are not saying that, obviously; but as we made clear ad nauseam the last time we were here, there have been 1,500 failing maintained schools converted to academies, many of them very recently, all of which have been performing badly, many of them for years, under local authority-maintained status.

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[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 16, 17, 21 and 26 to 29, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Addington, Lord Watson, Lord Hunt and the noble Baronesses, Lady Massey and Lady Bakewell. I will try to keep my remarks to the point but, before doing so, I will respond to a couple of accusations made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. The first, that we are being dishonest, is quite an accusation and I would take great objection to it if I thought he really meant it. He said that it is dishonest that we should just pass a law turning every school into an academy. Maybe if he feels that is something we should do, he would like to bring an amendment to that effect. I made it clear last week in response to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, and again in a letter this morning which I hope he has now received, that the default position for a coasting school is not to become an academy. I suspect that in many cases they may well be able to improve sufficiently on their own or with limited support. I hope I have made that absolutely clear.

Secondly, there was a suggestion that I never mention maintained schools. That is partly because the Bill is about academies and I am trying to keep to the point. Of course there are many successful maintained schools and I pay tribute to them. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, took me on a most enjoyable trip to Morpeth School in Tower Hamlets, which I was particularly impressed with. I was struck by its approach to CPD.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way and for his comments. This comes back to the points raised by my noble friends Lady Hughes and Lady Morris. From the tone of the Bill, and the fact that schools will be forced to become academies because the Secretary of State has no choice, it is clear that in the end that is the option which the Government want. The point raised by my noble friend Lord Knight is that the Government really believe that academisation is the only route. They do not understand why any maintained school does not want to be an academy, despite the fact that many of us are involved in very successful maintained schools which do not. None the less, the Government have decided that they all ought to be academies. This is quite clearly the policy. Why on earth do they not just do that? What I do not understand is why we have to go through the charade that we are debating today? With respect to the Minister, he has to be forced into saying something positive about non-academy schools because his whole tenor throughout this, is to quote examples from academies. I must challenge him by asking why the Government will not come clean on what their policy really is. I just do not understand it.

[Lord Nash]

I will try and make it clear again. Our approach to failing and inadequate schools, category 4 schools, is that they must become a sponsored academy. That is not our approach to coasting schools, as I hope I have made absolutely clear.

The amendment seeks to address noble Lords’ concerns on a number of points. First, that academies as well as maintained schools should become eligible for intervention when they fail or meet the coasting definition. Secondly, that the Bill proposes to remove consultation on academy conversion when a maintained school is judged inadequate. Thirdly, that a duty is placed on the governing body and local authority to progress academy conversion in such circumstances, and finally that, if necessary, the Bill provides for the Secretary of State to revoke an academy order. I shall deal with these points in turn.

First, on failing and coasting academies, I agree entirely with noble Lords that failure and wider underperformance must be tackled wherever it occurs, whether in a maintained school or in an academy. As I set out when we debated the coasting definition last week, academies are governed by a different legal regime from maintained schools. They are run by charitable companies known as academy trusts which enter into a contractual relationship with the Secretary of State through the signing of a funding agreement. It is this agreement that governs how an academy will operate and how the Secretary of State will hold it to account for its performance.

The vast majority of the more than 5,300 open academies and free schools are performing well. In the small number of cases where we have concerns, I can assure the House that regional schools commissioners are already taking swift and effective action to drive improvements and, subject to the passage of this Bill, RSCs will hold all academies to account against the coasting definition just as rigorously as they will maintained schools. To demonstrate our commitment to continually reviewing our approach and ensuring that poorly performing academies are robustly challenged, we have already added a new coasting clause to the model funding agreement showing explicitly that we intend to tackle all schools which are coasting. This gives the Secretary of State formal powers to terminate a funding agreement where an academy is coasting. Even where academies do not have this specific clause in their agreement, I can assure noble Lords that RSCs will still hold them to account against the coasting definition.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I cannot resist intervening on that. The whole point is that when we have a failing NHS foundation trust, there are a number of options available to the regulators, whether it is the NHS Trust Development Authority or Monitor; it is not just one-size-fits-all. That really is all that noble Lords are saying here. When it comes down it, if you substitute “may” for “must” in the crucial clause, it is still quite clear where the thrust of the policy is going, but at least that would give some discretion to Ministers. There might be some circumstances where they might want to look at a different option.

I am glad that the Minister has raised the issue of what happens in relation to NHS bodies because I am absolutely clear that both in law and in practice there is a range of options. Something happened to a trust that I was involved in, and the chairman and chief executive of a neighbouring trust have basically become the chairman and chief executive of that one. As I say, there are options. What the Government are saying is that there will be absolutely no option whatever. Actually, I find it quite extraordinary that Ministers do not want to give themselves a little discretion and headroom.

[Lord Nash]

I note the noble Lord’s intervention. He has not disappointed me; we discussed this morning where comparisons might be made with the NHS, so I knew that he would jump up because he has vast experience in the matter of the health service. My point is that action in the NHS is immediate and swift. I shall come on to explain the “must” and “may” point. There are circumstances in which the Secretary of State may be able to revoke her academy order, so it would not always be “must”.

As to the point I made about NHS trusts, I fundamentally agree with those who say, “Should we not have a similarly urgent and clear response to tackling school failure?”. On too many occasions we have seen local authorities and governing bodies putting up barriers and delaying processes in order to prevent the school becoming a sponsored academy. A case in point is Uplands, which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, mentioned earlier, which has been in special measures for 22 months. The IEB was appointed by the local authority in December 2013. It considered a number of proposed sponsors, a missed opportunity for much-needed change. I first wrote to the local authority confirming that I was minded to intervene in February of this year and, after much debate and challenge, the Secretary of State was finally able to reconfirm her decision to appoint her own IEB in September of this year. This was especially needed in the light of Ofsted’s most recent inspection in June confirming that the school was not making enough progress to remove special measures under the local authority’s IEB. A sponsor match has now finally been able to be made.