Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Bristol]

My Lords, I speak in place of my colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who unfortunately cannot be present today. I declare his interest as chair of the National Society.

I rise briefly to welcome Amendment 40 in this group, which offers real clarity on the issue. We welcome the recognition it shows that the religious body must be involved in giving an interim trustee notice to the proprietor of an academy school with a religious character. We are grateful for the Minister’s continued work on this and hope this might provide a little encouragement at this point.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a lot of sympathy with the intervention from the Front Bench by my noble friend Lady Chapman around the unfortunate nature of the grouping of these amendments. I understand that there are reasons why technically the Government might want to bring forward amendments, and I accept that some poor drafting is being corrected by some of these amendments, but it is tricky. For example, there is no explanatory statement on Amendment 96, so without delving back into legislation it is difficult to prepare a view in advance or to understand anything to do with what the Government were proposing. That is really unfortunate.

Government Amendment 148 introduces a new criminal offence that is imprisonable, and with powers of entry for inspectors, by a technical amendment in Committee. These are quite big things. Given the explanation the Minister has given, I think I probably agree with the amendment, but at this stage it is difficult to form a considered view. When this Committee gets to considering independent educational institutions, which that amendment relates to, I hope we can be reminded by the Minister that we have already had some discussion of this new criminal offence around repeated operation of unregistered educational institutions.

There is a policy question around whether two years is the right notice period for secure 16-to-19 academies, as opposed to seven years, but I think the Minister has probably given a good enough answer.

I mostly rose following what the noble Lord, Lord Baker, had to say, which in a way felt a little outside the scope of these amendments, but I can see that there is a government amendment here on terminating an academy agreement and another about essentially including single-academy trusts in termination, so I think it is in the spirit of this group for the noble Lord, Lord Baker, to have mentioned this important issue about the independence of trustees. I am sure that most of your Lordships are trustees of some charity or other, or multiple charities, and so do not need reminding that pretty much the only thing you are asked to do as a trustee, first and foremost, is to put the charitable aims first, above anything else. There are then various other good governance and financial probity things you do, but the charitable aims are everything.

As academy trustees, we now find that we have a funding agreement with government, we are subject to direction from government, and we are now subject to being able to be removed by government, all within a statutory framework; the sense that there may be any kind of independence for trustees in that context, and that they are more than agents of the state, will be very difficult to sustain.

Should it not be appropriate for the Minister to reply instantly to what the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has said, it will be important for us to see some legal advice from government that the charitable status of academy trusts will not be threatened by the further encroachment of the Secretary of State in the operation of these organisations.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, following on from the comments of my friend the noble Lord, Lord Baker, the difficulty seems to be that we are discussing these matters in a vacuum. It will be very interesting to hear the Minister’s response to the point that the noble Lord raised. As I said on the first day in Committee, the Minister said at Second Reading that she was launching a review to

“establish the appropriate model and options for how best to regulate the English schools system”.—[Official Report, 23/5/22; col. 740.]

The question I put to her is this: how on earth can we deal with the substantive issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, if we simply do not know how these schools will be regulated in the future? If ever there were a case for pausing a Bill, this is it.

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Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

35A: Schedule 1, page 88, line 28, at end insert—
“33A In section 88(1)(a) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, after “in relation to” insert “an Academy or”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This is to make academies subject to the guidance from local authorities on admissions.

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[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, Schedule 1 applies the maintained school legislation to academies, as set out in the controversial Clause 3 that we have just been discussing. My amendment seeks to make academies subject to guidance from local authorities on admissions, so that they are the same as maintained schools. Here I probably part company with some of my new allies on the Benches opposite in my vision for academies, but so be it.

The starting point for me in thinking about this is my vision for local authorities in respect of the provision of education and schooling. I see the fundamental role of local authorities as safeguarding children’s interests in the area in which they have jurisdiction, rather than the interests of the schools that they might run. If we are going to move to every school becoming part of a strong multi-academy trust, as is the direction of travel and the Government’s intent, then they will not be operating schools. It is important to avoid that conflict of interest.

When my noble friend Lord Adonis first began the academies programme, as I recall, the arguments I was making in his defence in the other place concerned the notion that, in some cases, there are local authorities which are operating—and have been operating for generations—schools that are failing. There was a fundamental problem for them in calling out their own failure, which is part of why I am very nervous about the direction of travel, with the Secretary of State running all the schools in the country. The Secretary of State might ultimately become nervous about calling out the failures of all the schools they are responsible for.

If the local authority is to become the guardian of the interests of the children in its area, it is right that it should become accountable for fair local admissions for parents. In an environment where every school is an academy, every academy school should be subject to guidance from the local authority on admissions. My noble friend Lord Adonis just talked about the 101 varieties of admission arrangements. Nerdy people like me might understand them, but this is a real problem for parents, particularly parents of year 6 children.

Year 6 begins with parents starting to get their head around what school their child will go into year 7 at. They then have to grapple with banded admissions over here, some kind of attainment test over there, schools that are not that popular where you can get in if you just put them on the list, and schools that are popular and that attempt some kind of fair admissions. Then there are schools that have some faith-based admissions, and there is then the question of whether you have to go to church, the synagogue, the temple or whatever on a regular basis to be allowed into those schools; in some cases you might and in some you might not. It is deeply confusing for parents. I like the idea that they would hold their local council representatives responsible for making that process somewhat easier. I see that my noble friend wants to say something.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I am itching to say something, because what I am hearing my noble friend describe is that the best system we can envisage for the management of our schools is for them to be locally managed with a common admission policy across a group of schools in an area. That is the system that has been slowly dismantled, it has to be said, by the development of academies.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

That is where I part company with my noble friend, in that I am relatively comfortable with others managing the schools, but with that management being accountable to local authorities and part of that accountability being managing the admissions process for all the schools in their area.

Another problem I see in a minority of cases of those schools that are their own admissions authority is that they are trying to find ways to choose pupils: rather than parents choosing schools, it is schools choosing parents. That is strongly related to accountability. Accountability for public funding and for delivery of school services is really important and I do not want to dilute that in any way, but the danger is that we end up with schools trying to ensure that a standardised pupil comes in who their whole curriculum and way of operating fits, so that they have the best chance of success.

In that respect, I commend to your Lordships a book by Todd Rose, an academic at Harvard, called The End of Average, which begins with a great story of the US Air Force when it first introduced fast jets. They kept crashing and the air force did not understand why. It worked out that the reason was that they were all designed for a standard dimension of pilot, so the controls were in slightly awkward places and the split-second timing required for fast jets meant that a lot of them crashed. That is why we now have adjustable seats in our cars, so that we can adjust to the different dimensions of people. The danger I see is that, thanks to our system of accountability, we have that problem of standardisation, with schools trying to admit pupils of standard dimensions, so to speak.

I point your Lordships to a problem I have seen in the London Borough of Lambeth, where a multi-academy trust, the board of which I chair, has a secondary school academy called City Heights. We were approached earlier in this school year about reducing the pupil allocated number for City Heights. It was not a unilateral conversation: the local authority approached all the secondary schools in the area, because the predicted demand for school places was coming down and it needed to reduce the provision of school places across the borough. All the secondary schools agreed verbally, informally, that they would reduce their PAN proportionately to accommodate that reduction. What happened when, finally, the proposals were formalised and agreed? Two of those schools, which happen to be two of the more popular schools—two academy schools—increased their PAN so that they could get more money in and continue their story of success, but at the expense of all the other schools which had played ball and tried to do the right thing with the local authority. That kind of practice needs to be sorted out, and this is an opportunity to do so.

We see some problems about fair in-year access, where pupils need to get admitted into schools in-year. We see some social selection by schools that are their own admissions authorities: things such as very subtle boundary changes, where it is hard to spot what they have done, but they happen to have cut out a social housing estate or done something else that just makes it a little easier to select the standard pupil that they are designed for. There might be elaborate religious criteria, as I mentioned. There might be talk in their prospectus of these great school trips that everyone will be expected to contribute a load of money to. That is part of the social selection that can be the practice of admissions authorities that bothers me.

This amendment would lead to fairer admissions, provide more local compatibility with the 101 varieties of admissions arrangements going on within a local authority area, particularly primary feeders, and restore confidence among parents in our admission system where that small minority of schools which abuse it and try to choose parents are undermining that confidence and we need to put it right.

This group has a number of other amendments in it; I will not attempt to speak to them all. I am supportive of my noble friend Lord Hunt’s amendment on grammar schools. I will not anticipate his comments but, when thinking about what he might say, I was reminded of a wonderful passage in an interesting, really great book written by Tim Brighouse and Mick Waters, About Our Schools—it is a huge tome of a thing but I commend it to your Lordships—about some of the early private hospitals. They had criteria around what patients they would select, in essence, to make their job easier: if you could admit only patients who were not that sick, you would be a really successful hospital. Similarly, if you admit only pupils who are already pretty bright, your job is really straightforward, but it leaves the rest of the schools with a real problem that you then have pick up with the majority.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, the Clause 28 stand part notice is in my name. Because it is about grammar schools, I think it is right to have it in this group, in talking about admissions policies.

I very much empathised with my noble friend Lord Knight when he spoke about the traumas of year 6 for not only the children who have to take SATs but the parents who have to choose—or attempt to choose—a secondary school for their children. It was also interesting to hear about the parallel between private hospitals choosing their patients and schools choosing their pupils. Often, the difference between health and education is that, in the main, our best hospitals are based in urban areas, with some of the poorest people, serving them. In a sense, I am not sure that education has ever quite been able to pull off the support that the health service has often given to the poorest and most deprived people, imperfect though that may be.

Clause 28 is concerned with grammar schools and academies but it has prompted me to ask the Minister a wider question: what is the Government’s general policy in relation to grammar schools? We know that, in 2016, the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, said that she wanted to allow for an expansion in grammar schools. It was in the 2017 manifesto but nothing appeared in the Queen’s Speech; more recently, the Government have said that they do not want to see an expansion in the grammar school system. However, rumours and briefings often come out saying that, actually, the Government would like to see a change in policy.

We have already seen a number of so-called satellite grammar schools open or get under way. Basically, this is a back-door way of expanding the grammar school system. Satellite schools bear the same name as the host grammar school. They are often located several miles away. Eventually, of course, it will lead to two separate schools being established. We know that the county council in Kent seems determined to expand its selective schools despite all the evidence showing that the Kent system is a poor one in terms of overall outcomes for the whole of the student population. Grammar schools in Kent do nothing more than attain the results that you would expect if you selected for high attainment—hence my noble friend Lord Knight’s comment about schools choosing their pupils.

As Comprehensive Future has stated:

“What is there to stop any grammar school from creating a whole chain of satellites stretching from Northumberland to Land’s End?”


This is not an academic argument because there have been suggestions that the Bill could be amended by Conservative MPs when it goes to the Commons. The Evening Standard has reported that the Government refused to rule out lifting the current ban on new grammar schools, while the Telegraph has reported that the Government are open to expanding academic selection. Indeed, Chris Philp MP was quoted as referring to his plans to amend the Schools Bill to support new grammars. Can the Minister clarify the Government’s exact position?

I am afraid that I am old enough to have experienced the wretched old grammar/secondary modern system, and the 11-plus, which condemned so many children to be classified as failures at the age of 11 and to be sent to schools with fewer resources and less ambition. That is why the move to a comprehensive system was so popular. It is interesting that the movement started in some of the shire counties. I lived in Oxford, and Oxfordshire and Leicestershire were determined to get rid of grammar schools in the 1950s and 1960s because they did not want all their children to be branded as failures at the age of 11. In 1953 and 1957, Leicestershire started to experiment with comprehensive education, expanding it throughout the whole county in 1969. Oxfordshire started in 1955 and 1957, subsequently expanding throughout the whole county as well.

Why did parents support this? It is very simple. Those arguing for grammar schools present only the image of children passing the 11-plus and going to grammar schools, and their subsequent achievements. They do not refer to the large number of children—around 70% in Kent—who are told aged 11 that they are failures and then attend underresourced secondary moderns. There is plenty of research to show that in those areas with a grammar school system, achievement is lower. Look no further than Kent and Buckinghamshire. Grammar school systems continually and consistently undermine educational achievement. According to the DfE, in 2019, the GCSE pass rate was 11 points below the national average in Kent and five points below average in Buckinghamshire.

Claims that grammar schools give a foot up the ladder for poorer children have, again, been debunked comprehensively. Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that in the remaining grammar schools, the percentage of pupils from poor backgrounds is lower than ever: 2.7% are entitled to free meals, against 16% nationally. Once the pupil intake of grammar schools is taken into account, based on factors such as chronic poverty, ethnicity, home language, special educational needs and age in year group, Durham University analysis shows that grammar schools are no more or less effective than other schools.

Finally, the poorest children in Kent and Medway have a less than 10% chance of getting into grammar schools, while for children in the very richest neighbourhoods, it is over 50%—schools choosing their own pupils. I want the Minister to say that there is no intention of changing the policy with any amendments that any Conservative MP might seek to move in the Commons, although whether the Bill reaches the Commons is a question that we are all interested in. Assuming that it does eventually reach the Commons, I hope that the Government will say today that they will have no truck with that.

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I will happily arrange that conversation. There are two points I would make to my noble friend. The first is that the information is publicly available, albeit maybe not in the format that he thinks is most usable. The second comes back to the new collaborative standard requiring trusts to work collaboratively with local authorities, which will encourage better co-operation. I hope that will be a positive move in his eyes.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful that we have been able to have an hour and 20 minutes to discuss admissions. Given that the Government’s policy is that all schools should become academies, it is an uncertain area and it is really important that we have taken a bit of time to debate it.

I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Triesman already has a victory under his belt. I think my noble friend Lord Hunt is pretty close to a victory: we noted the words that the Bill as it currently stands will not enable the opening of new grammar schools and that it is not government policy for new grammar schools to be created without a parental ballot. Let us just hope that this government policy remains sound as the Bill proceeds through both Houses. There were some really powerful speeches, as ever, from my noble friend Lady Morris in particular, my noble friends Lord Triesman and Lady Blower—those are just the ones around me—and others.

I say to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol that it was not my intention at all to interfere with the admission arrangements for voluntary aided schools. I am scarred from my time as Schools Minister from a moment when we heard the shadow Secretary of State, a young David Cameron, say that we might want to loosen up admission arrangements for faith schools. So the then Secretary of State, Alan Johnson, and myself announced that maybe that was a good idea and we then had priests preaching against us on Sunday and MPs in the Division Lobbies beating us up, saying, “We are going to lose the next election if you go ahead with this” and we performed a very delicate U-turn. I really did not want to go anywhere near interfering with the admission arrangements of voluntary aided schools.

I say to my noble friend Lord Grocott, in connection to his comment about the 11-plus, that my dad was one of four sons in Kettering who all took the 11-plus. He passed; his youngest brother, Hugh, passed; the middle two brothers failed. The two who passed joined the professions, one as an accountant, the other as a banker; the two middle ones took much lower-skilled work and both emigrated, one to Canada and one to Australia. Those two remained close; the two who passed the 11-plus remained close; but in my view, the 11-plus created a schism in our family, and that is part of my very deep opposition to selection and grammar schools.

My noble friend Lady Morris talked about the chaos of admissions, and that undoubtedly advantages middle-class parents. They can navigate the criteria; they can navigate what order to put schools in—what is your second or third choice, but you will only get looked at if it is your first choice, and you have to be quite sophisticated to work out the order you put things down. Then there are appeals. When I was an MP, I occasionally had constituents who came to see me wanting help with an admissions appeal in the summer, and they were never the more disadvantaged constituents in my area; they were only ever the more articulate ones. We really need to get this right if we want a school system that deals with entrenched disadvantage.

Having listened carefully to what the Minister had to say from the Dispatch Box, I will be pleased if, subject to the conversation we are having about Clauses 1 to 18, we get to a point where she introduces a collaboration standard. I would welcome that. I encourage the Government to go further and show us what their vision is for local authorities across the piece. She came close to that in some of her comments, but I would like to see, in the context of schooling, the Government’s vision for the role of local authorities, MATs, individual schools, and the Secretary of State. Publish that so that we can all see it before Report and can then make our judgment about whether they have it right. That would really help us, and then we might have some agreement about the future of admissions for all our schools. I am happy to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 35A withdrawn.

Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

35B: Schedule 1, page 88, line 33, leave out paragraph 35 and insert—
“35 In section 127 (guidance), in subsection (2)(b), at the end insert “, including Academies”.”Member's explanatory statement
The effect is to require academies to employ qualified teachers and to be subject to the Secretary of State guidance on teacher pay and conditions that applies to maintained schools.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I find myself leading on a whole series of groups: it is slightly challenging, jumping around. This one is about teachers, qualified teacher status and teachers’ pay. It amends Schedule 1, which is about the use of other education legislation, as set out in Clause 3. This would require academies to employ qualified teachers and be subject to Secretary of State guidance on teachers’ pay and conditions as they apply to maintained schools currently. Again, this goes very much to the question: if every school is going to be an academy, what is our vision for teachers, for teaching and for teachers’ pay and conditions?

We know from the evidence—it is really well documented—that good schools are good because they have high teacher quality, and teaching and learning are well led. In a way, it is like Governments—great Ministers well led by the Prime Minister; that is what a good Government might look like one day. If we agree with that evidence around teacher quality, and if we believe in the Government’s reforms of initial teacher training, the early careers framework and national professional qualifications, then we must think that the Government’s emphasis on all that is important and will raise quality. I have some arguments about the reforms of initial teacher training, but the Government are consistent in saying that the reason they want to reform initial teacher training, the reason they want to introduce the early careers framework and have done so, and the reason they have the series of professional qualifications is to raise teacher quality. They must believe in the qualification of teachers to have all that.

In the context of all schools becoming academies, I think parents would be really surprised if they found that this then meant that all schools were no longer subject to having to employ qualified teachers. It would be quite a surprise if that was in the newspapers or wherever it is they get their news. Parents expect their children to be taught by qualified teachers, and mostly that is the case. The vast majority of academies want to employ qualified teachers and do so, so I do not really understand why we would not translate, as we move maintained schools into becoming academies, the requirement that they should employ qualified teachers as well. Of course it is also true that maintained schools can employ unqualified teachers as instructors, so they still have that get-out if they really need it. Indeed, a very long time ago, I worked as an instructor at a sixth-form college in Basingstoke. For me, it is tricky, and I would be interested in any argument that came from others as to why we would not want qualified teachers in our schools.

Then I would argue, as I have sought to do with this amendment by replacing the get-out—on employing qualified teachers—with saying that academies should abide by national pay and conditions, that we should have a coherent labour market for all our teachers, the largest single profession in the world. A coherent labour market for them, working in publicly funded schools, would mean a consistent arrangement for pay and conditions so that they can plan their own careers and are not trapped in a single MAT employer that would have its own career structure and pay structure for them. They would be able to move about and develop their career and professional expertise on the basis of something that is predictable around the country.

For me, this is a no-brainer. I devote a huge amount of my time, pro-bono, to the academies movement, but this is something we need to get right. We should have a very clear policy of having qualified teachers, based on national pay and conditions. I beg to move.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

I imagine it will come as no surprise that I support my noble friend Lord Knight. It seems to me that high teacher quality is obviously a critical issue in making sure that we have a well-functioning and successful education system. One of the problems by which we have been beset is that there is no coherence at the moment to the way pay and conditions work across the country—that is, across England.

At Second Reading I probably mentioned that if you are a female teacher, one of the difficulties you have in seeking to move is that you will have no idea what the arrangements are for maternity leave and maternity pay from one employer to another. While I entirely accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Nash—who is not in his place at the moment—that multi-academy trusts do seek to have a career structure within themselves, there are many reasons why individual teachers might choose to move, not just within the MAT but to a completely different part of the country. Of course, that might still be part of the same MAT, but that they might choose to move out of the MAT. Being able to have a predictable set of conditions and a predictable pay arrangement is critical.

One thing that has been noticeable over the years is that pay has become much less predictable because MATs have different arrangements. It is not so possible for teachers to be on permanent contracts and to know, for example, that they are in a position to get a mortgage. I imagine most noble Lords would believe that home ownership is something to which a teacher should reasonably be able to aspire, but in many cases it absolutely is not. A national, coherent set of pay and conditions therefore seems perfectly reasonable. I would add that that should be done on the basis of sectoral collective bargaining, but that is not in the amendment. I just like saying “sectoral collective bargaining” because it is the right way for us to run the system. I note, for example, that in Iceland there is no minimum wage because all wages in all sectors are based on sectoral collective bargaining—and that is not uncommon in other countries, too.

Finally, on the question of QTS, before I came into this House one of the things that I did was to work with colleagues in the European region of Education International, the global union federation for all education unions. The European region does not just cover the EU countries; it takes in a significant geographical area beyond that. When the arrangements came in that meant people could teach in England without QTS, it was a single thing that my colleagues in many other countries—including Scotland—were absolutely astounded should be happening in this country.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 35B and 36, which amend Schedule 1. Schedule 1 extends certain provisions in maintained school legislation which currently apply to academies through funding agreements to academies directly.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, for Amendment 35B. He is seeking to require academies to employ qualified teachers and to be subject to the Secretary of State’s guidance on teacher pay and conditions that applies to maintained schools. However, the provisions in Schedule 1 that the amendment changes relate specifically to special schools and the removal of the power for the Secretary of State to prescribe that special academies employ qualified teachers. The amendment would not have the effect that the noble Lord is seeking to achieve.

However, it is clear that the intended purpose of this amendment and Amendment 36, which is about removing the exemption that academies have for teachers to have qualified teacher status, would provide for a restriction to a core tenet of the academy system, namely that, with the exception of special academies, all academy trusts have the freedom to employ those they believe are suitably qualified to teach in their academies and that all academy trusts can make decisions about pay and conditions of service in their academies.

The academy standards regulations will reflect existing requirements in the funding agreements, including those relating to enrolment in the Teachers’ Pension Scheme or the Local Government Pension Scheme. I have heard the fears expressed about a future Government using these regulations to undermine the freedoms that enable academy trusts to collaborate, innovate and organise themselves to deliver the best outcomes for their pupils, and I am carefully reflecting on those concerns.

On teacher pay and conditions, although all academy trusts have the freedom to set their own pay structure and conditions of service for teachers, we believe the vast majority follow some, if not all, of the guidance in the school teachers’ pay and conditions document. We believe it is right that academies continue to benefit from this freedom because it allows heads and trust leaders to have the flexibility to respond to their local context to support recruitment and retention of teachers. I am reminded of the phrase used by the noble Lord. I do not want to misquote him, but he spoke very powerfully on the first day of Committee about how important and attractive it was to trust our leaders, and that is exactly where these freedoms fall.

Academy trusts are also allowed the freedom to make their own decisions about who they believe is suitably qualified to teach pupils in their academies. However, most schools, including academies, understand the importance of well-trained teachers and choose to employ teachers who have undertaken initial teacher training and gained qualified teacher status. I agree very much with the sentiment expressed by my noble friend Lord Agnew in relation to the quality of the qualification as opposed to just the qualification in its own right. I am slightly baffled at your Lordships’ focus on this, as 96.9% of teachers in academy schools held QTS in November 2021, compared to 97.7% in maintained schools, so there is less than a percentage point difference between the two. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, seemed to suggest that there are examples where it might be much higher. If that is the case, perhaps she would be very kind and share them with us, so that we can look into that.

The intention behind the amendment is to place additional requirements on academy trusts that would undermine the discretion and flexibility at the front line that fundamental academy freedoms give to heads and MAT leaders. That is not the intention of this Bill. On that basis, I would be grateful if the noble Lord would withdraw Amendment 35B and if the noble Baronesses would not move Amendment 36.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful again for this half-hour debate and for the Minister’s reply. It is important that we have a vision for the whole system, now that we are moving to a single system, and perhaps this is something we will continue to reflect on.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, for his comments. The core of the argument for having a single national pay and conditions arrangement for teaching relates to the difficulty of recruiting people into the profession. It is a critical profession for the future of our country and any society, and we must make sure that we recruit the finest people to be teachers—as one of their careers. These days, we are going to live longer and work longer. I am not saying that you necessarily have to do 40 or 50 years as a teacher, but would it not be great if, for one career, people wanted to be a teacher? It is easier to recruit people if they know that they have a predictable pay progression with a predictable, quality pension at the end of it, as part of their public service—as part of the motivation and the vocation around becoming a teacher.

I hear and respect very much what the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash, say about the output and the nature of the different routes into the profession. There is of course the assessment-only route. People who have been working for 20 years in the private sector or who are coming in from industry could perhaps have some brief training in some of the pedagogic or behaviour management elements that my noble friend on the Front Bench talked about and can then be assessed against the standards that are set around what we require from qualified teachers. They do not have to go through training; they can just be assessed against those standards. One of the things I pioneered when I was working at TES, with the TES Institute, was a route through the assessment-only process.

I am happy to withdraw this amendment. I hope this brief debate has given us cause and a pause to reflect on what kind of system we want for the teaching profession in the context of every school being an academy.

Amendment 35B withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

39A: Clause 5, page 5, line 11, leave out “satisfied” and insert “the Chief Inspector has given notice that an inspection of the Academy proprietor’s operations and educational provision has identified”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, along with the amendment to Clause 6, page 6, line 11, in the name of Lord Knight of Weymouth, is designed to require Ofsted to inspect multi academy trusts and restrict the use of the Secretary of State intervention powers to when an inspection has revealed the need for such powers to be used.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise yet again. This substantial group is about intervention and termination powers. Most of the group is made up of stand part debates on a series of clauses. My amendments are about a level of accountability for the Secretary of State around the use of powers. The clauses we will be thinking about in this group relate to the power for the Secretary of State to give compliance directions, give a notice to improve to an academy provider, impose directors on the trust and then, if none of that works, terminate both the single academy agreements and the master agreements, perhaps after seven years’ notice by mutual consent or if the academies are perceived to be failing, if the trust becomes insolvent, after failure to address concerns or after warning notices. That is what the set of clauses that we are about to debate is all about. They are substantial and, in my judgment, overweening, and that is why I have also signed up to the stand part debates in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Agnew, Lord Nash and Lord Baker.

My problem at its heart is the sense that the Secretary of State becomes judge, jury and executioner. The Secretary of State is taking powers, essentially, I think in reality, through a network of regional directors, as they are now called, and officials appointed on a regional basis. They will be monitoring the performance of academies across anything and everything they do and will then be suggesting to academies that do not do what they want that they have this huge range of powers and will make them do as they are told. I am mindful of the discussion we had earlier, what the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said and the advice from Stone King about how that might impinge on the independence of the trustees of multi-academy trusts. I was grateful to hear the Minister’s reassurance that the Government have been given legal advice that it will not, but I still have concerns.

My amendments would add in Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, and once it has made a judgment about a multi-academy trust—yes, my amendment says that Ofsted should now inspect multi-academy trusts as a whole, not just the individual academies—that can act as a trigger; it is acting as the judge or jury and the Secretary of State can then act as the executioner. An independent party will have been able to have a look at it, and one would assume that Ofsted, in coming up with its framework for how to inspect multi-academy trusts, would be informed by the academy standards that eventually, in one form or another, we think will be in place.

I would anticipate that the MAT inspection would look at the educational quality and safeguarding and governance arrangements and ensure they were sound, and at the trust’s compliance with various regulations, including financial. When that judgment is passed, action can be taken. All my amendment seeks to do, whether perfectly or imperfectly, is to introduce that.

In thinking about the stand part debates, of course there are questions about some of these clauses. Clause 6, which provides the power to give notice to improve, as I interpret it, reflects the academy agreement academy by academy, rather than the master agreement with the whole academy trust. Clause 6(4) includes the phrase “make representations”. I should be interested to know to whom—one assumes the Secretary of State. In a world where every one of 25,000 schools is an academy, one assumes that they will not all be failing at once. Let us say that the figure is 1%, if we are generous, which is 250 schools at once making representations. In reality, they will be made not to the Secretary of State but to the regional directors. I should be interested to know how the Minister sees the representations process working, because it is as close to some sense of appeal as we have in the clause. Subsection 5 says that the Secretary of State “may make regulations”. Will those regulations be one by one, school by school? Perhaps that gives a little bit of power to Parliament, but I should be interested in some clarification of that.

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[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is right about getting Ofsted into multi-academy trusts. It would make a great difference to how parents are able to interact with the eventual system. Parents need the level of information and reassurance that will come from an Ofsted report, and I hope it would be done in a way that, as others have suggested, is very much focused on the educational aspects, which is where Ofsted’s expertise lies.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I am grateful for those last comments, and that I do not have to speak for six minutes before I get my food while others discuss the national food strategy.

I am pleased to hear that, all being well, on Wednesday the Minister will be able to come and give us a little more information about the Government’s intentions, which is really important. It is also helpful that she was able to give us a vague timescale of “in the coming weeks” on the regulatory review. If on Wednesday she was able to give a little more detail on that timescale, I think the whole sector would be really grateful in terms of understanding the sequence of how things are likely to play out on all this.

The Minister talked about the blunt powers in agreements that she is looking to replace with a more nuanced and consistent response through the series of sequences, yet many of us are worried that the nature of the Bill, as written at the moment, will still be heavy-handed. If only all current Secretaries of State paid attention to their common-law responsibility to proportionality, I think we would all be a lot happier in this place.

The issues around paying and governance are issues to reflect on. All those many years ago, when I was Schools Minister responsible for academies, among other things, I commissioned some work around governance but it never really got anywhere. There may well be reasons why we want the ability to bring in people with a much more professional approach who therefore might be paid, but we need a really full debate around that. The people who give of their time voluntarily to be school governors, multi-academy trust trustees, ambassadors for local schools, et cetera, do so willingly, and we have to be really cautious about interfering with that by offering to pay even a few.

We look forward to hearing more on Wednesday. I do not think the Committee is persuaded about these clauses as they stand. I am sure the comments from my Front Bench about what will happen if we do not get a good response are being listened to by Ministers, but I am happy to withdraw my amendment.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for carefully explaining the Government’s justification for doing this. She is in a difficult and unenviable position, but I do not think anybody could have handled it better.

What the Government need is time to think about this and to reflect on what is needed. I am fairly clear what they are getting at, and it is a very narrow thing they want to do. I do not think that can be covered by tinkering with the existing 18 clauses, quite frankly. It will mean a redraft and new clauses, so I very much recommend what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said on the screen: we should gain time. That is to say that Report on the Bill should take place in the autumn, not in July. The Government really have to reflect carefully and define their targets more precisely than they have, so that solutions can be given. My three friends and I would be able to help and co-operate with that as much as possible. I very much hope that on Wednesday my noble friend will be able to say that Report will be done in the autumn.