Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part one
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, what an extraordinary Bill this is. It is silent on so many of the pressing issues facing our school system. It is silent on the financial pressures in the early years sector. It is silent on the crumbling infrastructure, to which a number of noble Lords have referred. It is silent on the workforce pressures, particularly in secondary schools, where physics, maths, chemistry and modern foreign languages are facing severe problems. It is silent too on presenting any bold vision of educational outcomes or dealing with the issue described recently by Peter Hyman, co-founder of Rethinking Assessment. As he put it,

“After 11 years of schooling students are given a set of numbers as the sum total of what they have achieved, and for a third of students those numbers indicate that they have failed. Surely young people should leave school with a profile of what they can do (head, heart and hand) and what they are like … That is what employers are looking for and that is what matters in life.”


The Bill has nothing to say on any of these fundamental issues. On the face of it, its focus is on the governance and structure of academies, with one or two useful measures added on. However, the noble Lord, Lord Baker, put it so well when he said that, in reality, it is an extraordinary grabbing of power by the Secretary of State to essentially direct and intervene in the affairs of every school in the country. A number of noble Lords have welcomed the national formula for funding, but when you link Clause 1 with Clause 33, you are giving all the levers of power to one person, aided by an army of officials far removed from local schools.

Clause 1 is quite extraordinary. It sets out 20 examples of standards, ranging from the curriculum, to the nature and quality of education provision to be provided, governance structures, remuneration of staff and spending of money. All this is to be done via regulations with only limited parliamentary scrutiny and those are only examples; the Secretary of State can dream up any number of other standards he or she wishes to have and bung them through by another regulation. I hope we will examine this very carefully. If Ministers are insistent on going down this path, then they surely need to spell out in primary legislation exactly what standards they are going to impose on every school in the country. To leave it as vague as it is is simply not acceptable.

On academisation, I am the first to acknowledge the excellent work in many of our academies. However, I wish the Government could bring themselves, just once or twice, to acknowledge the good work in maintained schools. The noble Lord, Lord Nash, is not in his place. When he was Minister, we made very many efforts to get him to praise maintained schools. I hope the noble Baroness the Minister will do so in in her wind-up because she knows that the Government are slightly selective in the figures that they use to justify academisation, and I applaud the NEU’s recent exposure of this and its vindication.

On schools and academy schools, just as we are seeing aggrandisement of power at the centre, we are also seeing local schools lose power within a multi-academy trust. This is something I am concerned about. There is no doubt that the emergence of MATs has drastically reduced democratic accountability, and once subsumed into the MAT structure the voice, autonomy and legal identity individual schools are lost. Communities are locked out of the MAT system. We now have Ministers empowered to impose academisation and switch academies between different MATs without consultation. That cannot be right.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, mentioned the excellent research paper from the LSE by Professor Anne West and David Wolfe. They identified many of the current governance shortcomings in relation to academies within MATs. There are other shortcomings too. I refer to the work of the Public Accounts Committee on the annual accounts of academy trusts a couple of months ago. The issue of academy CEOs’ pay has been well documented, but the PAC complained very recently that the noble Baroness’s department does not have a handle on excessive pay within the sector. What are the Government going to do about that? The PAC also said that

“a lack of transparency in local academy financial information is harming parents’ ability to hold their local academy leaders and the DfE to account, for the services they provide to pupils or for their use of public funds.”

In the work the Government are taking forward, how will they ensure that, locally, parents and other interested citizens see the financial information for local academies, even when they are part of a multi-academy trust, in order for them to be able to monitor, judge and scrutinise the performance of those trusts? I hope we will get answers to this.