Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I think I support everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, said. I am not a signatory to any of the amendments in this group, but I am fully supportive and have other, broadly similar, amendments in other places.

I agreed with the noble Baroness when she said that she expects that Clause 1 will not leave this House intact. She must be right. Clause 1 is very poorly drafted and requires amendments. It may be that it should be removed entirely from the Bill. I find it very strange to have primary legislation that gives such widespread and unnecessary powers to the Secretary of State. As the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, said, Clause 1 suggests examples of matters about which standards “may” be set. Those words are far too loose. What is to happen, for example, if the Secretary of State decides not to set any standards at all, given the use of the word “may”? Surely standards must be set. After all, independent schools have standards to meet, which are those set out in Section 94 of the Education and Skills Act 2008.

Unless the Minister can show good reason, it would seem wise for the Government to support the principles underlying the amendments in this group. Surely the Government should accept that intervention by a Secretary of State on everyday matters would be centralist, divisive and quite impossible to manage. Defining standards is one thing; permitting interference by the Secretary of State is quite another. The job of Ministers is to give the legislation that the Government are proposing clarity of intent. This clause fails on that count because it places in the Bill unnecessary powers, unnecessary doubt and unnecessary interference in day-to-day matters in schools right across the country by a single person.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I remind the Committee of my interests in respect of education in the register; in particular, I chair the trust board of the E-ACT multi-academy trust. This group is clearly about the open-ended powers that the Secretary of State is seeking to take in the Bill. I fully support what has already been said by both speakers, particularly from my Front Bench. In the end, this group goes to the heart of the conundrum of the Bill.

I have just come back from a glorious week in Orkney, basking in the glorious biodiversity of that part of our country. To go back to how we are to deal with this, if the Government’s policy, as set out in the White Paper, is for all schools to become part of a multi-academy trust—I think “strong multi-academy trust” is the phrase—first, do I agree with that? That is the direction of travel and I shall not argue with it. I then turn to how we will make that work. I also agree with what I think is the outcome that the Government are trying to achieve, which is a rationalisation away from a multiplicity of legal agreements with different academy proprietors, and something much easier than having to then have officials go around and try to renegotiate individual agreements one by one every time we want a change of policy. We therefore have to put something in statute that overrides those agreements; I think that is what Clause 2 is all about.

Incidentally, I would be interested if the Minister could circulate to us any advice she has had about why the Bill is not hybrid. Of course, the private interests of those academy proprietors are different from each other because of all those different sorts of legal agreements, and we are seeking through a public Bill to be able to interfere with various sorts of private interests. That might make the Bill hybrid and it would help the Committee if any advice that the Minister has had on hybridity was circulated for us.

However, when I think about those legal agreements, I then think about a culture of stable-horse regulation, which those of us who have been Ministers are all familiar with: there is an outcry about something that has gone wrong in an academy somewhere, or in some schools, so you then have quickly to try to fix it so that every subsequent legal agreement does not allow that thing to happen again. That is one reason why the legal agreements keep changing. However, I think that then means that the Government have said, “Okay, what are all the things covered in all the legal agreements that we currently have with all the various academy trusts? We’ll put them all into Clause 1(2) and that kind of covers everything.” They should, rather, have taken a breath and said, “Okay. What do we really need to regulate in the form of standards for these academies?” and not just to gold-plate all that stable-horse regulation. Any approach to good regulation and re-regulation would avoid repeating and gold-plating the mission creep that we have seen, which is now resulting in these highly draconian powers that the Secretary of State proposes to take in the Bill.

I come to my first recommendation to the Government, mindful of the letter that we have all had from the Chief Whips and Convenor to remind us that Committee is a conversation. We are having a conversation and this is also the closest thing we have to pre-legislative scrutiny, because the Bill is a Lords starter. In listening to the conversation, I suggest politely to the Minister and to the department that they listen to the debate that we have had and, in particular, listen to the noble Lords, Lord Nash, Lord Baker and Lord Agnew. We have not heard from them yet, but their amendments make it look as though they are saying, “Just scrap it all and start again.” My first choice would be for the Government to listen to this effective pre-legislative scrutiny—it is the closest thing we have to it—say, “Maybe we’ve got this kind of wrong”, take the summer, think about it and come back in the autumn on Report with a whole new set of clauses to achieve what the Government are trying to achieve, which I kind of agree with in terms of outcome. However, if they do not want to do that, we have all these other amendments with really good ideas that we can have a conversation about now.

When I think about what I want to say in the context of those amendments, I go back to what I was thinking about in Orkney and what I would do if we wanted every school to be an academy. I want to hang on to the independence that was there when my noble friend Lord Adonis first started the academies movement back in the day, particularly around curriculum. It is fair to say that we have not seen that much use of curriculum freedoms, but we have seen a bit. I would like to see more use of curriculum freedoms to get a better balance around the social, emotional and physical development of children, as well as their cognitive development, just as an example. However, I am happy to have a system where we build trust in school leaders and in teachers to make decisions about their local context and local community and the pupils and the parents they serve, to find the right curriculum mix for their own community.

There is independence and then a limited number of standards. I have put my name to Amendment 6 in the name of my noble friend, which repeats the standards set for independent schools. That is a logical and rational approach to setting standards that has a read-across to other independent schools. Those standards should then be inspected. We have an Office for Standards in Education—Ofsted—which should inspect against those standards at a MAT level. I am interested in ideas about whether we stop routine inspection at a school level and just inspect at a MAT level unless parents trigger an inspection at an individual school level. There is something interesting there to have a conversation about.

Then, of course, because we are spending a lot of public money, schools must be accountable. It is not just about the money but about setting children up to succeed in life. That accountability should be local to local authorities and parents, regional—I have tabled an amendment with some ideas about holding regional schools commissioners to account for the work that they are going to do under the Bill—and national. We have some systems here for the Secretary of State, but Parliament does not have a big enough role in the Bill as it is currently set up, which is why I support the use in some cases of the super-affirmative procedure that some of my noble friends are suggesting.

Fundamentally, we must build this on the basis of trust in teachers. That is why I have tabled amendments on teachers’ pay and conditions applying to teachers in academies, and on removing some of the academies’ independence in how they employ teachers. I do not expect anyone to agree with me on all of that, but that is my starter for 10 in trying to approach and think about this. In the end, this is my encouragement to the Government: take this opportunity to listen to what people around the House, with our expertise and experience, are saying. Do not come back on Report before the Summer Recess; take the time and grab that opportunity to get this right, because if the direction of travel is for every school to be in a multi-academy trust, we must get it right. At the moment, the Government have got it horribly wrong and I do not think they will get the agreement of this House.

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[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to add one thought to the debate. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, the Bill is setting out a brand-new structure for schools in this country. What is unclear is what that structure will be. What is the dynamic or philosophy, or even the structure that lies behind this proposed new system of school education? It has been nominated as academies—it has their name attached to it. I am a doubter about academies. We could have an interesting debate, probably more on this side, about their role and what they have achieved. Because it was raised by my noble friend Lord Young, I have to say that I find his reference to failing schools in London, with the implication that there was a mass failure of schools there, offensive. However, I am not going to debate that today.

What is before us today on the structure is not about academies at all. Multi-academy trusts are, in fact, the antithesis of academies as originally envisaged. These are large, bureaucratic, non-local, geographically distributed organisations, with no local involvement other than as a toothless add-on. We will try to do our best later on to build in local and teacher involvement. I would argue for school-student involvement in the way that they are run, but these will be big organisations and the dynamic will be for them to become even bigger. They will be big, bureaucratic organisations which are effectively under the thumb of the Secretary of State. Is that the schools system that we want? I certainly do not think it is.

As a final thought, we saw research this week from the Institute of Education showing that the one thing multi-academy trusts do not do is to rescue failing schools. Its evidence showed that they had no impact on rescuing failing primary schools and very little on rescuing secondary schools. So I am incensed, in part, by the failure to recognise the role that local authorities should still play in governing our education system.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I did not want to stand up again, but I need to respond quickly to my noble friend, just to defend the record of some multi-academy trusts. In doing so, I do not want to attack any local authorities. Local authorities do and have done a great job. Some individual schools were being failed when the first academies were set up by my noble friend Lord Adonis, and it was the right thing to do to intervene after generations of failure. But just within the multi-academy trust that I am so lucky to chair, I refer my noble friend to an Ofsted report that has just been published about DSLV, which is an all-through school in Daventry. It has gone from being in a very poor state to having an excellent report that we received this week. I could point to a number, just to say that there is a balance to the argument. I hope that he is willing to listen to it, in the same way that I am willing to listen to the argument around local authorities in London and elsewhere.

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[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I draw to your Lordships’ attention my relevant interest in the register as the deputy chairman of the Inspiration academy trust.

Although I have been here for nearly five years, this is my first experience of dealing with legislation as a Back-Bencher and I am completely flummoxed by the process. The Bill has been introduced with no consultation with the sector and there has been a promise of a regulatory review that has not even begun, so it has landed like a lump of kryptonite among all of us who are trying to educate children in the system. That is why I have asked my noble friend the Minister to just step back and kill off these 18 clauses so that there can be some proper reflection.

When we have such a backlog of legislation, I find it extraordinary that we are going to waste days and days grinding through pointless clauses. I defer to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and so on about all the constitutional stuff, but I know how much this country needs to legislate on important things, and I am going to have to go through the 20 paragraphs of Clause 1(2) and explain why none of that stuff is necessary. In the education system we all know that it is not necessary. If it needs to be clarified, fair enough, but in my two years as Academies Minister I used the Academies Financial Handbook. Every year I amended it; I consulted the sector and we basically squeezed out the mavericks that my noble friend Lord Baker refers to.

A few days ago we had a bizarre conversation with our noble friend the Minister and her officials. I asked how many there are left—I knew there were problems. They said 1%. We are going to spend days going through this for 1%, without having had any consultation and without any regulatory framework in place. I do not understand that, so I urge the Minister, however uncomfortable it might be in the short term, to back off and reconsider. I understand that it might need a write-round, but take the hit early because this is going to be very messy. I think there is enormous consensus across the Chamber today. We have at least three previous Academies Ministers and a previous Secretary of State for Education. We all come at it from different perspectives, but we share one overriding objective: to improve the quality of education. I hope the Minister will listen.

There are really only four things that the Government, sitting in their ivory tower, should worry about: good governance, sound financial management, good educational outcome and the highest level of safeguarding. That is where they should start. The Government have four organs to achieve those things: bureaucrats sitting here in Whitehall; the regional school directors—although they have just been renamed—out in the field; the ESFA, which is the financial organisation that oversees the financial capacity of the academies; and Ofsted. We have to mesh those together and show the sector how they should work. That should be the starting point.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

Given the noble Lord’s relatively recent experience as Academies Minister, can he clarify, using those four things, how he would have gone about dealing with the 1% that is the basis of our having to legislate, as the Government would put it?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

That is a very good question. I can tell the noble Lord candidly that when I arrived in that post in September 2017 it was more than 1%. In my first few weeks in office, I was probably getting three or four cases a month of maverick trusts on the brink of failure financially and basically, as my noble friend Lord Baker said, putting a gun to my head for a financial bailout. By the time I left, we had virtually eliminated that. I did it through what was then called the Academies Financial Handbook—it is now the Academy Trust Handbook—by absolutely binding the ESFA tightly together with the RSCs, so that whenever they met a MAT or a single-academy trust, the two people were in the room. I bang on about the money because if you get the money right, you have the resources to educate properly. That is how I have always managed the process, and we achieved it.

I accept that there are different views of Ofsted and that Ofsted is not perfect, but one thing about Ofsted is that the brand value across the sector is very strong. People respect it—they might resent it—but there is a mechanism to appeal if you get a report you do not agree with. Everyone in the sector largely accepts that it is the arbiter of good education.

When I left, the ESFA was an extremely effective organisation; it knew where the money was. I know that noble Lords opposite me do not all agree with academies, but the financial reporting and transparency of the academy programme is infinitely greater than those of local authority schools. An academy trust closes its books on 31 August. It has to file audited accounts in four months, by 31 December; ordinary companies have nine months to do that. That is not a requirement in the local authority schools and it provides huge scrutiny. You pick up the warning signals. If those accounts are not filed on 31 December, I used to get a weekly report on who was late and how late they were, and went after them. If they were late filing their accounts, you knew there were problems. By the time I left, we had got that down to a very small number.

I do not want to bang on about all this detail in this Chamber—it is not fair on noble Lords. I just want the Government to back off on this. There are some important things in this Bill—the homework and home schooling stuff—which are absolutely vital. I saw that agony when I was here, in my noble friend’s place, when we had a Private Member’s Bill and it was suffocated. This is a huge problem, getting worse all the time. Let us get that sorted out. This is a crucial problem, not to be sorted out in a rush. My noble friend has been bounced; the Bill Office has just said, “You’re the first cab in the rank in this new Session, get on with it,” and she has not had the time to do the job properly.

I am going to stop here, but I want to thank my noble friend the Minister. I think that she has been given an impossible job; she is bending over backwards to listen to everybody here, and I want to extend my courtesy to her and say that I will do anything I can to help.

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[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I want briefly to respond to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about his amendments being detailed and therefore not echoing the feeling of the debate we have had so far. On the contrary, it absolutely gets to the heart of the problem. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, in the last group, about the detailed work he had to fulfil as Minister in his role of managing academies as a whole and failing and problematic academies specifically.

The amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, go in the other direction and say that academies should be able to retain their personal freedoms. The difficulty is that the Bill does not give us any sense of the Government’s direction on academies. It is absolutely summed up by those two contradictions. It is important and this is the place in the Bill. I may not agree with all the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, but I am very grateful that he has laid them because it makes something very clear to me: the Government do not understand what they are trying to achieve.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I follow those welcome comments from the noble Baroness. This conversation—the closest thing we get to pre-legislative scrutiny—ought to give us the opportunity to guide Ministers in their reflections, which we all urge them to have and hope they will have, on what we think is important and less important; what there must be standards about, if we are to agree that; and what we should leave to academies. That is what the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the next group are helping to do. They are opportunities for noble Lords to flag things they think are sufficiently important that the Secretary of State should have a view on them on behalf of the country.

I too will not get into the whys and wherefores of curriculum freedoms, leadership and management or the length of the school day. I happen to broadly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and it is not unusual that we find ourselves in broadly the same place on such things. However, I echo what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said. It is awkward, unsatisfactory and goes back to what my noble friend Lady Morris said earlier; this is a difficult Bill for us to deal with at this stage.

The substantive point I want to make to the Minister at this stage is for when the Government are thinking about time for Report and how we deal with it. It will be quite Committee-ish in how we deal with things—assuming they come back with something substantive and different which shows that they have listened to us. We are going to have to have the opportunity to properly debate what we hope will be much more of an educational vision that they will set out for us. We can then put down amendments on it and discuss in the normal way on Report.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

May I very briefly add to that? This is not just a matter for the Government; it is also a matter for the Chief Whip in the timetabling of Report. We had exactly this problem with the Health and Care Bill. We suddenly discovered a lot of detail on Report which should have been visible to us in Committee. As a result, Report took much longer, and the House sat until 1 am or 2 am on certain days. I hope the usual channels are looking at the detail of this because it will affect Report stage.

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I understand that you cannot always get everyone to agree with you. My noble friend Lady Morris gave her example, but the example that I can remember is when the Labour Government introduced the literacy and numeracy hour. Not everyone was thrilled about this; it was seen as a bit too interfering and too prescriptive, but the Government at the time were clear why they thought it was the right thing. They had to go out and justify it, look for evidence and say that it was about addressing a very fundamental problem that we had with standards of numeracy and literacy at the time in our primary schools. They went ahead and, in the end, those measures got broad support from teachers and parents. That would be a much better approach.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

Reflecting on the debate that we have had, it occurs to me that, effectively, in announcing that all schools will become academies, it is an announcement of the end of the national curriculum. What my noble friend has just described in respect of the literacy and numeracy hour was an up-front policy and up-front announcement—it was something about which there could be a consultation, discussion and debate. There has been no press release saying that the Government’s wish is to abolish the national curriculum, yet that is what we must have in mind as we debate this Bill.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Is it? I would like to know the answer to that question, because it is not clear whether that is the Government’s intention or not. Were the Government to come forward to say that it is what they plan to do and that they want freedom such that there is no national curriculum as we would recognise it now, then we could have a really big argument about that. We would involve school leaders and parents and look back over the successes and failings of the national curriculum; I very much agree with what my noble friend Lady Morris said about an entitlement to education, particularly around music and literature.

The fact is that we do not know. The Government’s intention is not being shared with us. We may be imagining and fearing the worst, and fearing intentions that do not exist, but the Government are asking a hell of a lot for us to accept on trust an assurance from the Dispatch Box here that there is no current intention to do certain things. Really, what we ought to expect, and what families expect, is much more information about is going to happen on the ground and in the classroom. That is what people are really interested in.

I take it that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, will not press his amendments, so we do not need to get into whether we would support them individually, but I just flag this issue about the lack of effort that the Government have made to engage with leaders in the sector. It is really damaging and is destroying some of the confidence that leaders have in the department at this point.

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[Lord Nash (Con)]

Then I will defer to the noble Lord, Lord Knight.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

Only if the noble Lord has finished; I do not mean to interrupt.

This is a really important debate on a very important set of amendments. They are essentially about two issues: parental involvement in the running of schools at a local level and whether every academy should have a local governing body. I see the two as being slightly different issues.

I support Amendment 23, and I probably support Amendments 24 and 26 as well. In thinking about this, I thought it might be worth telling the story of two multi-academy trusts. I know about one only through an article in Schools Week, so I therefore do not claim to really know anything about it at all and can only repeat what I have read. The other is the academy trust that I chair.

The Anglian Learning academy trust won the National Governance Association award for outstanding governance this year. I understand that it has 14 schools and its CEO, Jon Culpin, talks about empowering local governing bodies, not fearing them. His approach is that every academy in the trust has a local governing body, and it works very well. My understanding from reading about it is that the MAT board very much looks after the core operational side of the business—the finances and the schools’ capital—to take that burden away from the school business managers and heads. The heads then lead the teaching and learning on a school-by-school basis in conjunction with their local governing body. That works very successfully for them, by and large.

In one or two cases, they have had to essentially impose interim executive bodies as a MAT board because they have not been able to appoint local governing bodies, they have struggled to recruit, or there has been a problem. By and large, that has worked very well for them, and that sense of being really clear about where the MAT board adds value, and where a local governing body adds value, is important when thinking about this relationship and this issue around local governing bodies. Of course, parents would have been represented on every one of those 14 local governing bodies.

Long before I was involved in E-ACT, the previous CEO but one inherited the situation where a significant majority of our 28 schools were failing and were in low Ofsted categories—I think that maybe 25% were not. It was in a pretty poor state, academically as well as financially. I am sure that it was bleeping very largely on the radar of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, when he was the Academies Minister at the time. At that point, it had local governing bodies in each of the schools. However, the decision was made by the then CEO to remove all those local governing bodies because he had to make a lot of difficult decisions very quickly to turn around the finances of the organisation and the educational performance of the schools. As a result, we currently have no local governing bodies and I am effectively—in legal terms—the chair of governors of 28 schools. That is quite a considerable pro bono burden on my time, as counsel any Members of your Lordships’ House who are thinking of doing this. I get all sorts of letters from Ofsted and the department on all sorts of things about which, frankly, it is very difficult for me to know exactly what is going on, because they are about individual schools. I do not think that this situation is ideal either.

We have local ambassador groups in each of the 28 schools. The latest version of the academies handbook is encouraging us further around parental involvement and hearing from every one of those local ambassador groups if we do not have parental trustees on the trust board. I perceive quite an encouragement from the department for us to do that. In the next round of recruiting trustees, I am very keen that we should recruit parental trustees. This is why, in the end, I support Amendment 23 and have put my name to it. This is probably an issue for the articles of association—the department can then advise us on how they should be updated—rather than standards in the Bill. Nevertheless, that is a technicality, and it has allowed us to have this debate.

One of the other problems that exists when you have a large, geographically dispersed MAT, like this one, is that the trust board cannot possibly know all the details about what is happening in all 28 of those schools and communities. Therefore, it must delegate quite a lot of governance function to the executive leadership team, and there is a danger that they are then marking their own homework on some of the decisions they are making. That is another difficulty and tension within the system as it is currently constructed.

One of the things we are doing in my particular MAT is commissioning an independent external review of governance to see how we can resolve some of these tensions. I hope that we can do this. I do not want to anticipate how that will end up, but I want to ensure that we end up with better local intelligence at a board level about what is going on, so that we are cognisant of the culture and the views of parents. When I last visited our two academies in Sheffield, I had a great meeting with our ambassador groups; they are all parents, and I had great feedback and input from them around what was going on in those two schools. In the end, however, I do not think it is quite enough.

Does that mean that I think that we should impose local governing bodies on every single school, even though I agree that it is perfectly reasonable to have two trustees who are parents on the main trust board? If they were local governing bodies, they would have to have two parental trustees on each one, so to aggregate that up to two out of 28 does not seem unreasonable. However, I do not, in the end, agree that we should impose local governing bodies in every case. There are circumstances, such as the one that happened at E-ACT some time ago, where we might want to be able to impose things while we turn things around and sort problems out, and then, hopefully, have the maturity and the reflection to decide, “Okay, we now have everything running well”—as, by and large, we do at E-ACT—“and now might be the time for us to re-empower schools and re-empower governance at a local level.” However, I am not sure that a blanket approach is appropriate. It is appropriate for the MAT board and the central MAT team, particularly around the educational activity in schools, to have more of an attitude that they are servants of the schools and not the masters of the schools—culturally, that is better—but there are other operational aspects where we want to be the masters, because in the end we can move resources around and sort things out. It is going to be different on a case-by-case basis.

So, in the end, my counsel to your Lordships is not to go with the imposition of every academy having to have a local governing body, but to ensure that we have better parental representation across the piece than we might have at the moment.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. I have just one narrow point I wish to add. One thing that is lacking and to me seems essential is some reference to school students and their participation in the governance of their schools. To me, the case for those over voting age is unanswerable: they can vote in a national election, but they have no right to participate in the governance of the institution to which they belong. Given that the Labour Party’s policy is, I think, votes at 16, I would make the case that school students from age 16 should have a statutory right to participate in governance. I would even suggest that there is some scope for clear guidance to involve even younger children. I believe that there is some interesting work done in many primary schools now where the children are involved. Unfortunately, I missed the boat on making this specific point in an amendment, but I am sure that this issue that will return on Report and I hope that, at that stage, some reference to school students could be included.