Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I support both propositions of delay, particularly not giving the Bill a Third Reading. Not only are there legislative problems with the Bill now not being a Bill in any substance, as originally intended; many measures in it give a future Education Minister the power to provide guidance and put in place statutory instruments—but we do not even know who that Education Minister is going to be.

To be implemented, the Bill will be passed from this House to the other side over next year and the year after, but we have no idea who will be leading on this, how long they will have been in the job or how good their guidance will be. Will it simply be left to the civil servants—for whom I have great respect, but obviously government must lead? We need people in post who know what they are doing and who, ideally, know about education. Over the passage of this Bill, that, sadly, has not always been the case, even with the present team, as much as I respect them. How can we have any confidence that it will be the case with the very fresh team coming in in the autumn?

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in particular. The Minister listened carefully and that is why she agreed to remove the first 18 clauses of the Bill. That puts the House in a difficult position in allowing the Bill to go to the other place in its gutted, skeletal form. The suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, not to give the Bill a Third Reading gives us some time before next week, when we will be asked that question, to consider whether he is right.

I suggest that we proceed to Report now and have the debates for which noble Lords have been preparing. But we should take some time, within the usual channels and among ourselves, to decide whether the noble Lord, Lord Baker, is right and whether the Bill should have a Third Reading.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I will briefly speak to this. I agree with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight. The Government have moved on this Bill; they have listened. They have given more than I have ever seen a Government give. It is possibly true that they had to. It is the worst Bill I have ever seen, but the Minister was described by one of my colleagues as the rock around which a raging department breaks. My noble friend Lord Shipley came up with that one, not me, so he gets the credit. I hope when the Minister replies that she gives some indication or guarantees of what we are going to get if we carry on with the planning. Things have moved on.

There is a nasty little internal fight going on behind the Minister. As much fun as it would be to wade in, it ain’t my fight. I hope the Minister can tell us what is going on. I have never seen another Bill that has got itself into this big a mess. I am not the longest-serving person here, but I am the longest-serving on my Benches. If nothing happens and the Bill is unacceptable at Third Reading, we can do something then, but let us hear what the Government have to say now. There has been a great deal of work done and a great many meetings. A lot of work is going on here. Grand gestures are great, but let us not get in the way of the work of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, would the Minister also consider coming to this House to make a Statement when the proposals are published in the other place, so that we have the opportunity at that point to feed into the proposals that she is making as they go to the other place?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am more than happy to take that suggestion back to the department and consider it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

When I looked through the list of committee members, I could not see anyone representing local authorities. The Minister might well discuss this with them, but it would be helpful if she could send us all the terms of what they are expected to cover. If it is just about multi-academy trusts and the controls that the Government have held to regulate them, I would go along with her. If it goes further than that, I have reservations. The involvement of local communities and local views has inspired English education since the great Act of 1870. Quite frankly, however, there is none of that in this Bill; nowhere are the views of local people to be found. A school is not just an education institution; it is part of a local and social community. This has always been the tradition, and these views must somehow be reflected in any proposal that the Minister brings to us.

I am very grateful for the support of various Peers, particularly the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, on the question of the Government’s power. This Bill increases the powers of both the Secretary of State and the department in a way that has never been known since 1870. I do not believe that the Minister had any hand in drafting the Bill. When I was Secretary of State, I always found that there was an element in the department which wanted these controls from the word go. Although these people have never run a school, some of them always want to run all the schools—thank heavens we managed to stop that. I do not think this will come back in any of the amendments we get after the new Government take over.

This is really strange procedure but it is utterly unsatisfactory to be offered only one day for debate. The clauses will be important and a way must be found—and a guarantee given by the Government before we pass Third Reading—for us to have plenty more time to discuss it in this House, should we pass Third Reading. This Bill started in this House and can be improved again in this House.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly, focusing on this group of amendments and to help the House move on from discussing procedure and process. There are some really strong amendments in this group. It is right that the Minister has listened to us and agreed to take out the clauses that she has—extraordinary as that feels. It gives us the procedural problem that we have been debating. I welcome the contribution of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, on that subject.

I support Amendment 2 in respect of “parents councils”; it is important that the voices of parents are heard in our academies. I especially support Amendment 5 from my noble friends on the Front Bench. Thinking forward to how this Bill will proceed, when we have a substantive new Secretary of State, it will be really helpful for that person to look at this amendment and make some kind of policy statement to both Houses on how they see an all-academy school system working, so that we have clarity around several issues: how we attract and retain sufficient high-quality teachers in the system; the view on qualified teachers working in academies; the view on them abiding by national pay and conditions; and how we hold accountable academies and the regional directors in the system who will be carrying out the Secretary of State’s bidding. What is the role of local governing bodies alongside parents councils? That question is the substance of the next group of amendments, so I will not speak to that. What is the place of a national curriculum when academies do not need to abide by it, and what elements of the curriculum do we want to make compulsory in such a school system?

Finally, of course, there is clarifying which academy freedoms are left once all those other things have been made clear. That is the kind of thing that Amendment 5 is trying to set out; it is trying to put some kind of guide rail around the standards that will come forward in the fullness of time. On that basis, I very strongly support the amendments.