Academies Bill [HL]
Lord Lucas Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Lucas
“( ) arrangements have been made for Ofsted to prepare annually interim reports on the school;”
Lord Lucas
I should declare an interest, in that I run the Good Schools Guide and therefore spend an inordinate amount of my time inspecting schools, or rather causing schools to be inspected, and thus have a keen interest in the topic. Inspection is a crucial aspect of the Bill. We are considering schools that will be innovative, free schools. They will be newly founded, often with untried and untested combinations of people involved, with no established sponsors or with sponsors who are relatively new to the job. That will be at a time when there is considerable pressure on the central and local systems of support provided to schools.
The lesson that we have from the United States, as I am sure Rachel Wolf has told the Minister, is that charter schools succeed when they are properly regulated and inspected. If you think about it, it is obvious. If a school starts to go wrong, you can see it. If you can catch it reasonably early on, it is not too much work to put it right. If you let it go for a year or three, you will be in serious trouble.
We are also at a time when inspection itself is up for inspection. It is clear that this Government are reviewing the inspection regime in some detail and are prepared to make big changes—not surprisingly, if they want to cut the overall budget by 25 per cent. This is a good time to look at Ofsted and to ask: does it do what it is supposed to do; could we do better; could we do it for less?
Parents want, first, a regular report from Ofsted. The idea that you wait for four, five or six years between inspections is ridiculous. You want to know what is happening this year. You want to know that the school that you are about to commit your child to is still in good condition. Secondly, if Ofsted produces an adverse report, you want support. You want to feel that, whatever the problems at the school, they are now going to be gathered together and looked after. In both those aspects, Ofsted fails miserably. Most Ofsted reports are out of date. When Ofsted puts a school into special measures—this is my experience of the process, which has always been from the outside—parents spend a month or so in ignorance and, even then, when people start to react and be supportive, Ofsted just stands on the outside throwing rocks at the school, keeping on criticising, rather than being part of the support network.
Ofsted is also clearly not what schools want. Schools want support, advice and help in steering in the right direction. They want a constructive relationship with the people involved in inspecting the school. The most recent example of that that I can think of is the old FEFC inspections under our previous Government. They had that relationship with colleges. They would inspect regularly. Subject inspectors would be in and out of the college once or twice a year. Support and advice would be coming through the college. You worried about whether you might be ticked off for something, but the general relationship was supportive. You expected that the inspectors’ visit would, on the whole, be a constructive experience.
What the Government want out of Ofsted is value for the money that they are putting in. We are a long way short of that. After a fashion, we have an effective system of calling schools to account. Spreading good practice, knowing what is going on in schools and making sure that, say, PSHE is being properly taught, even though it is not being examined, are functions of the inspectorate. By and large, I do not have criticisms on that, except that it costs far too much to get there and does far too much damage to schools.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
I am sympathetic to the noble Lord’s argument, but why does the word “interim” appear in this amendment? Should this not be consistently carried on, rather than being purely interim?
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I apologise if the wording of my amendment is not exact. It is merely there to bring up the subject of inspections and to make it clear that I want them to be regular, not just every five years or so.
There is a good model of how this could be done. Every year, we are retiring a few thousand headmasters and deputy headmasters who have immense experience and the ability to judge a school pretty rapidly—the good ones. They know how to read a school, how a school works and what to look for. They have the ability to be immensely supportive and they are not that expensive because they have pensions. They have a commitment to the job and all they want is a reasonable return for the effort that they are putting in. If we were to pay £300 a day, that might be a figure with some echoes—we do it for that. It should not surprise us that heads and others with a real vocation and dedication to helping other people are prepared to work and put in similar effort for a similar amount of money. You are not looking at a lot of money. You are looking at people whom parents and heads naturally trust. You are starting off on a pretty good basis if you are staffing your inspectorate with that sort of person.
These people could go once a year into every school—and I do say “every school”. What is the point of an inspectorate not visiting outstanding schools? How are inspectors ever going to learn what best practice is if they never go into the best schools? Part of the point of an inspectorate ought to be spreading good practice. They should be there to say, “This is what I saw the other day”, or, “Why don’t you talk to him or her about that because they seem to be getting it right?”. If all you are doing is going round the schools that are not performing well, all you can do is spread bad practice. To be an effective inspector, you need to be in touch with good practice and with what is going on in the world of good schools. A simple report to parents—a paragraph or so, to say that since the last inspection report things are progressing, this is particularly good, there is still a bit of trouble on that but, overall, we are happy—is what parents need to know that they can take a baseline from the previous Ofsted report, read through it, know that things have improved or are much as they were and take a reasonable decision. Most schools with a head who is open to ideas will benefit enormously from having someone such as that around.
Once schools have come to trust the system, you would find that they were asking for extra days. When I was a governor of a college under the old FEFC system, we were looking to have these people in more often. We would say, “We’re not doing what we should do in biology. Let’s get the biology man around to give us an extra bit of help there”. Schools, particularly primary schools, are little, isolated, lonely places. They want support and they want to have contact with people who can provide that support and good ideas. At the moment, all we have is the school improvement partner system, which is too low-level and local. We would do much better if we moved to making that part of the inspection system. I think that we could run that bit of the inspection system for about £10 million a year and have a report on every school, every year. Over and above that, you obviously need a full inspection system. Every now and again, you need to go in and do the whole works. Even if you are quite generous on the budget and say that you will spend 10 man-days on average every five years, that will cost you only £20 million or so. Then you have the central system over that.
There is an enormous obsession with data in the current central system. Collecting the data imposes immense burdens on schools. Teachers worry about measuring every aspect of every child’s performance because the school improvement partner or the inspector may pick them up on this or that, which is not constructive. You do not need to look at data on that level. Any mathematician will tell you that, apart from in pure mathematics, figures are always wrong. Figures do not provide value on their own; they provide value only in relation to what is happening on the ground. Inspections should be about the human aspect of schools: the quality of the teaching; the quality of the atmosphere; the staff; and the relationships in the school. They are things that numbers never throw any light on, although numbers can be useful in confirming what is happening.
If we were to budget £50 million a year for Ofsted as a whole, that would be enough. We could then perhaps devote another £50 million to the same organisation, perhaps, if it was running well and was focused on supporting schools that were having a hard time, bringing them round and making them straight—if it was picking up schools that had scored four and setting them right—which needs a lot of concentrated help and advice very fast. That would still be half the current budget, but it would provide about 10 times the value. I beg to move.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
I support much of what my noble friend has said. It is desperately important to have proper monitoring of what is going on in these new and very innovative schools and to have feedback, not only to the schools—I will come to what my noble friend said about the positive nature of the feedback that is needed, which I agree with him about—but also to the Secretary of State. Ministers need to know how well the experiment is going and what adjustments are needed from time to time.
I wholly agree with my noble friend that the current Ofsted system is not what is needed and not what we are asking for. It seems to have put everything into one rather unsatisfactory basket. Ofsted inspects for health and safety issues and can fail a school on the height of its security fence. That is not the professional judgment of educational experts. The people who should be doing the assessment of the school’s success and innovation should be people who were successful professional teachers who know what they are talking about. Popping in to see whether health and safety rules are being obeyed or whether security is being maintained is not what an educationalist should be doing. There should be a firm and distinct line between that kind of inspection and the professional judgments that my noble friend so well described.
It is important that we have a cadre of people who are constantly in touch with schools. I say to my noble friend that we need more than simply a once-a-year report. Somebody should keep in touch with the school on a fairly regular basis and go in from time to time to be a shoulder on which the head can—one hopes not cry—pour out her or his ideas, thoughts and problems when they arise, and provide wisdom and judgment. As my noble friend said, they also need to be a sounding board so that the Secretary of State and Ministers can understand what is really happening in these innovative and exciting academies.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, certainly I will withdraw the amendment but I will make one or two points first. On the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, it is wonderful that we have all these data, but you can make far too much of them. I am a physicist and I have played around with data all my life; I have gigabytes of data from the Department for Education that I decorate my website with. But in the end, what is happening in a school is what matters, and all the data can tell you is that maybe there are some questions that you should ask because there are so many different ways in which a particular pattern can be accounted for. I agree that data are important, but they have been turned into something oppressive under the current Ofsted system.
Baroness Morgan of Huyton
I am sorry to intervene but I do not think that is right. What the noble Lord is talking about is what can be claimed to be the obsessions about narrow forms of data that dominate a lot of inspections at the moment and therefore dominate a lot of headlines. However, the intelligent use of data in terms of tracking individual pupils is something an inspector needs in addition to all the qualitative work that the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, talked about. When schools are only just starting to get there on using data in an intelligent way, it would be a retrograde step to chuck that out and return to the rather blunter instruments of the public lists which do not do the more sophisticated work that I am talking about.
Lord Lucas
Yes, my Lords, I agree that, used internally, those sorts of data are wonderful. I recall how, 15 years ago, Greenhead College in Huddersfield was one of the pioneers of such data, and it made a great difference. Even the English department was enthusiastic about it because it helped the staff to be better teachers. In a dumb world, data are great, but you do not need to inspect on them. If you do, you turn something that is a helpful internal tool into a weapon of oppression. It is a matter of getting the balance between being inspected on enough data that happen to be produced by the system and not pressurising teachers into recording every single aspect of every single child at great length and in close detail. The amount of time people are spending on this means that it is not productive. The inspectorate should not be interested in data at that level except when diagnosing a school that is clearly going wrong.
I am concerned about my noble friend’s relaxed attitude to inspection, particularly of the free schools that will be coming through under this Bill. These creatures are going to need to be looked at very carefully. As I said earlier, the New Schools Network is clear about the need for inspection, and I am clear that if you are starting up a new enterprise and you want to be proud of it rather than be landed with nasty cases where things have gone wrong and you should have known about it, you need a good system of what I call inspection but my noble friend Lady Perry would call a relationship between inspectors and schools. You need something that allows someone in authority outside the school to say, “Hang on. Something is going wrong and we need to get in and help”. If you wait for data that appear late because you need a year or two’s data before you can see the trends, a newly formed free school could be heading for trouble. So I hope that over the next year or so I will be able to convince my noble friend that going back in time and picking out the virtues of the system of which my noble friend Lady Perry was such an eminent part will be a good model to pursue. Not only can we do that, but we can save the Government a great deal of money while getting there. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
The noble Baroness invites my noble friend to return to the days of an old new Labour Government; I do not agree with her. Actually, we did not agree with her at the time. We spoke against these pupil-parent guarantees as being motherhood and apple pie without any legal levers at all, so she will not be surprised to learn that we do not support her amendment.
Lord Bates
Indeed, the guarantees were not just without any meaningful evidence as to what they actually meant, but without any resources so that teachers would be able to undertake that additional, onerous responsibility.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, as another former Secretary of State, perhaps I may say how strongly I agree with what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, as well as by my noble friend Lady Sharp. I will be brief. First, like other noble Lords, I have first-hand knowledge of the fact that, in some cases, schools have decided not to accept a child with special educational needs—for example, one who is dyslexic, dyspraxic, deaf or blind—when they believe that that would lower their standing in the league tables. The league tables have been devastating in that way, by making it difficult often for an ambitious and able head teacher who values their position in the league tables to take such children. There is a danger, as my noble friend Lady Sharp said, that if you begin to regard the position of children with special educational needs, or children who are difficult, as somehow excluding them from being part of the academy, that academy will become still further removed from the problems of the whole of society. I feel strongly about this.
Perhaps I may refer to the interesting comments of the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about Denmark. It is interesting also that the incidence of permanent exclusion in Scotland is proportionately a long way below that in England, because Scotland has chosen to go for short-term, temporary exclusions rather than for permanent exclusions that far too often condemn the child for the rest of their life to being outside society and often lead them straight on to being young offenders and things of that kind. I have a great deal of sympathy with what was said by both noble Lords. I hope that the Government will seriously consider a different kind of approach to children who are excluded.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, whom I congratulate on her open-mindedness on the issue, has indicated that partnerships play a large part in this. My noble friend Lady Sharp has seconded the view that they are crucial and significant. However, beyond that we must look at the whole situation of excluded children: why they are excluded, whether earlier intervention would save them from being excluded and whether temporary exclusions should be more common than permanent exclusions, with their devastating effect of taking the child almost altogether out of society.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I agree in many ways with what the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, has just said. We face a long-running problem of how to deal with kids who get themselves into a position where they need to be excluded from school. She said that the Scottish example is that schools retain ownership of these pupils. You cannot throw them away because they are still part of you. Even if they are not on the premises, the school has a commitment to help with their education.
That is one approach. Another might be through the use of the pupil premium, when we get that going. The kids will suddenly become much more valuable because they have been excluded. The resources to help them and deal with them will travel with them. Certainly, there is scope for free schools to innovate in this area. Many of the children’s homes that the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, talked about are privately run. The troublesome end of education has become increasingly well looked after by the private sector. There is a real opportunity. I do not expect to hear it today, but I hope for a commitment from my noble friend to deal with this. We have a chance, if we are sharp and inventive enough, to make real progress.
The problem raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, is rather more intractable. Imagine that I said to your Lordships, “Right, there are 800 of us or thereabouts. I will take £500 from one of you, but don’t worry, I will give each of you £1”. That is all very nice, as 799 of us will go and spend the pound and feel a bit better off, but someone will feel very upset when they get a bill for £500 and only have £1 to pay it with. That is the situation that we risk landing ourselves in with schools with low-incidence problems of any kind. If we do not operate this on a pool basis so that the school with the problem can find the funds, all the other schools that do not have the problem will have spent the money and we will be in trouble. Again, I am interested in how we will solve this in a world where not 200 but 2,000 schools are academies and the problem becomes much more obvious.
Academies Bill [HL]
Lord Lucas Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Garden of Frognal
I shall speak to Amendments 138, 139, 176, 184 and 193 in this group. First, I thank the Minister for the considerable time and trouble that he has taken to talk through the many concerns about special educational needs that have been raised as a result of this Bill. We have received full and helpful replies to many issues, but raising them in Committee ensures that there can be no misunderstanding about the debate and the decisions.
Amendments 138 and 139 are intended to clarify what will change once a school becomes an academy. Under academy arrangements, considerable freedom is given to the governing body and head teacher to vary the operation and organisation of the school. Although there is a requirement that the academy should cater for pupils of differing abilities, we would welcome confirmation that that requirement will be enforced and monitored.
At Second Reading, we raised the matter of exclusion of children with behavioural difficulties. Can the Minister say whether there has been any risk assessment of increased exclusions from the new academies? That, in turn, could lead to the need for more referral or specialist units, which would have cost implications. We know that local authorities have responsibility for placement of pupils with statements. It is not entirely clear how the local authority is to be supported in placing pupils in an academy. If parents feel that the provision is not adequate, as the noble Lord, Lord Rix, mentioned, they have recourse to complain to the Secretary of State. That sounds like a measure of last resort. If there are local problems, would consideration be given to a more local route by which complaints could be channelled in the first instance?
In the annexe to his letter of 15 June, which has already been referred to today, the Minister clarified that academies do not receive local authority funding for SEN transport. Co-ordinating school transport is a responsibility that local authorities have carried out in the past and, presumably, will continue to do. Amendment 139 would confirm that responsibility but would leave open the question of how it would be done most effectively when some pupils need transport to academies and others to maintained schools. There is an additional need to ensure that any complexity in the system does not lead to any pupil who requires transport being overlooked.
Amendment 176 concerns SENCOs. It arises from the fact that academies are not covered by the 2008 regulations for special educational needs co-ordinators, which stipulate that SENCOs in maintained schools must have qualified teacher status. The spirit of the code of practice implies that SENCOs should hold qualified teacher status, but that is not explicitly stated.
SENCOs are key post-holders who co-ordinate provision across the school to secure high-quality teaching and learning for pupils with special educational needs and the effective use of resources to meet the educational needs of children and young people with SEN. The position involves obtaining resources, managing the work of learning support assistants, advising and supporting fellow teachers and liaising with statutory bodies and voluntary agencies, as well as with parents. SENCOs are also expected to contribute to the in-service training of other staff. Those varied duties suggest that SENCOs should themselves be qualified teachers, both to ensure that they have a full understanding of the professional skills of teachers and to give them appropriate standing within the schools in which they operate.
Amendment 184 follows from the previous amendments. It would bring the proprietors of academies into line with other schools as far as their duties relate to SEN pupils.
Amendment 193 is offered to help the Minister. The term “proprietor” is mentioned frequently in the Bill, but no definition is given. In practice with academies so far, the person in Clause 1 often establishes another body to be the proprietor, not least because the proprietor has to be a corporate body and a charity, yet the person in Clause 1 can be an individual. The definition offered in this amendment is:
“‘proprietor’ means the person with whom the Secretary of State enters into Academy arrangements once the Academy has been established”.
Lord Lucas
I had better address my amendment in this group, since it is the exact opposite of two of the amendments just spoken to by my noble friend. My noble friend Lady Walmsley and I will be in perfect time at eight o’clock tomorrow morning as we practise for the Lords versus Commons rowing race, but there seems to be some dissonance at the moment.
It has long been said that the only people capable of organising school transport effectively are local authorities. I have never seen any evidence produced for that. It seems to go with the assertion that local authorities organise everything best. If that is true, there is no danger in giving academies the right to organise school transport because they will always turn to the local authority, as it does it best. However, I suspect from the practices of local authorities that I have experienced that that will not be the case. Many local authorities, particularly in rural areas, will not offer transport outside the catchment area of the school, even if there are others a mile or so beyond it who might conveniently be reached by the bus going an extra mile.
Many local authorities are not responsive to the requirements of schools and parents in other ways. They just want to organise things efficiently for the network as a whole. The idea that what is efficient for the network as a whole is in some way best for schools and parents and is cheapest is extremely arguable and the best way to test it is to give academies freedom to organise school transport for themselves. When it is more efficient for them to do so, they will do so; when it is not, they will use local authorities. That way we will get the best of all worlds.
Lord Northbourne
Amendment 69 is a permissive amendment along the same lines as that tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. We are trying to be overprescriptive in this. There may be circumstances under which it would be appropriate for charges to be made, possibly because the child’s parents were well off or because a charity had agreed to pay for the extra facilities being talked about. I do not see why we should screw the whole thing down in the way that it is screwed down in the Bill. My amendment loosens it up and allows a decision to be made on the basis of the facts and the best interests of the child.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, I do not think any of us realised that the Minister was going to reply quite so soon, before there was any other opportunity to support my noble friend Lord Northbourne’s point. One of the crucial issues is what we all know is happening and has been happening for 37 years, since Keith Joseph first mentioned the cycle of deprivation. All this has been going on and we have not managed to cope with it. The pertinent question is: who will get the right provision and the early statement for young people so that they can be helped at the earliest possible age? Who will ask that question for these individual children in this state? On any view, they cost us all—the individual and the country—huge sums of money. We have really failed in this way. We have all been talking about it for 37 years. I would very much like to have that point addressed.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I did not hear my noble friend answer the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, about the curriculum. These children have broken free from the ordinary structure of education and need to be reconnected with it. That process of reconnecting with it is in no way aligned with the idea of a curriculum based on English, maths or other academic subjects. You have to hook them on something to which they relate and then you can bring them back to academic work or whatever else is necessary to build their career. You have to be able to let go everything that they have rejected about the school and find another way into their psyche.
I am sure that my wife, who spends a lot of her time working with these people when they reach prison, would endorse that. She uses family ties because by the time most of these kids reach prison they have a family of their own. They probably do not know their father and do not have much contact with their mother, but they have children and they can be made to reconnect with them or with the remnants of their family. That can give them the motivation to get back into what you might call school work. But to contaminate that process with school work risks the whole process; you have to be able to adapt what you are teaching to the needs of these children.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we are indeed talking about something that goes wider than academies themselves. I visited a secondary school in Bradford some months ago and found that all these issues were raised in the local community. People were concerned that, in pursuing league tables, schools in the area did not do their best to push the difficult pupils off on one another, so as to up their game in the league tables. We are all conscious that this is a long-term problem and one that we shall have to continue to grasp as we move towards establishing more academies.
As regards the curriculum, children’s statements will specify the provision required to meet each child’s needs. This will include the curriculum requirement and whatever else is needed to meet emotional and behavioural needs. Academies will have greater flexibility in relation to the curriculum. That is part of what is intended. Academies will be encouraged to work with other local services, both public and third sector, to cope with these sorts of problems. As the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, remarked, this issue has been with us for several generations and it will not go away very quickly. We must do our utmost to ensure that the schools we are trying to develop pick up these children and give them the help that they need. The greater curriculum flexibility that the academies can provide may help in this respect.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I should like to speak to Amendments 84 and 85. Noble Lords will be glad to hear that I do not intend to speak to them at anything like the length that I spoke to Amendment 83. Many of the same arguments might be deployed and they both deal with the question of parity between academies and maintained schools.
Amendment 84 seeks the application of the admissions legal framework to academies as though they were maintained schools, and Amendment 85 is the same form of amendment, except that it relates to the exclusions legal framework. They are both essentially probing amendments designed to find out how far the Government see the two frameworks applying to academies as if they were maintained schools—in other words, whether the intention is to achieve parity in respect of these two frameworks as much as it is the intention to achieve parity in relation to special educational needs.
Lord Lucas
Amendment 36, which is in my name, expresses an ambition which I understand, having listened to the Minister, is clearly beyond the scope of anything that will be put into the Bill. I none the less hope that he will agree with me that it should be our ambition that outstanding schools which become academies, as they have the opportunity to expand, will look to bring in children from way beyond their geographical catchment area—to extend that excellence to those parts of their surroundings that are not blessed with outstanding schools but are blessed with children who require additional attention and the best possible environment. That should be part of our ambition, as it has been part of the history of the academies programme to look first at those who are disadvantaged.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
I added my name to and support very much the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Listowel. All the speeches I have heard emphasise the need for the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, about the need for a single admissions code. If there is this doubt—there certainly is, judging from the number of representations I have received about whether similar systems apply right the way through—surely there is a growing case for either having one system which applies to everybody and sticking to it or, as has been suggested, including it in the Bill to take away any misconceptions that still exist.
We should all congratulate the previous Government on their achievement on looked-after children. Quite a group of them have clearly benefited, the figure having moved from 1 per cent up to 9 per cent, which my noble friend mentioned as successes in education. We need to go much further. I understood from the Minister that instructions were already going out to ensure that the schools themselves had up-to-date instructions, but if not they would be put on the net. A number of us would have liked to have leapt to our feet to say, “Not just on the net, please—write a letter so that it is clearly available and everybody will know that there is just one system that really applies to them all”. I hope that he will address that point, although maybe he has done it already.
Lord Lucas
Lord Lucas
Academies are to be freed from the national curriculum, but in opposition we were—and, indeed, in my heart, we are—committed to reintroducing some universal entitlements for our pupils that have been dropped in the previous decade or two, notably an entitlement to learn the span of British history and an entitlement to study three sciences. I do not see how those two attitudes match. What requirements will we be able to put on academies to ensure that, where we see the need for a universal entitlement and for some consistency across the school system, we get it, despite the headline that academies do not have to comply with the national curriculum? I beg to move.
Lord Hill of Oareford
My Lords, although I will be interested to explore the question of the curriculum with my noble friend in the months ahead—not least in the context of the curriculum review, which the Government are carrying out and which will no doubt form the subject of further legislation—the key point is that academies should have freedom to innovate and to be creative with their curricula, to respond to parental pressure, the needs of the children and the needs of the area. From that point of view, we would not contemplate something more prescriptive for academies, so I hope that my noble friend will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Lucas
That seems rather a thin reply, which does not get to the meat of my question. I shall concentrate on something that I know to be a passion of the Minister’s honourable friend Mr Gibb, a passion that I share. For our children to have a real understanding of British history—not a specified understanding and not a list of things that people have to know—we should say that children should emerge from school with an understanding of the spread and depth of British history as an important part of being a British citizen and of creating British citizens and a unity of purpose and understanding in this country.
Many state schools teach a horrible subject called humanities. It is the only thing that they offer at GCSE. You cannot do geography or history, just this mishmash subject that teaches you nothing in particular. If you do history, you probably do only the great dictators and the Tudors. It has disintegrated so far from what Mr Gibb and I think is right. To say, “Yes, we believe this, but there is no way we are going to apply it to academies”, seems to be missing the point. It is not about schools but about an entitlement for our children and what is right for our society. It is not a big imposition to impose these basic requirements on academies, is it?
Lord Hill of Oareford
As an historian manqué, I could keep the Committee going for an extremely long time talking about my views on what ought to be in the history curriculum and I can see that there is great enthusiasm that I should do that. Medieval history is a subject that I am particularly interested in, as well as modern history and international history. However, I will resist the temptation. We will have to debate further the tension between the desire for politicians to prescribe and the competing instinct, which I have strongly, to let teachers and head teachers run their schools. In the mean time, I urge my noble friend to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Lucas
I think that I shall be in trouble if I do not, so I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Academies Bill [HL]
Lord Lucas Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Phillips of Sudbury
I rise to speak to three amendments tabled in my name: Amendments 10, 95 and 120A. I am hopeful that the first two at least may improve the drafting of the Bill, though it could be that the Minister will in response say that what I think is set out in the Bill is not as I think it is.
A grouping of this size, which deals with many different, technical and difficult points, is not a way to legislate. I do not know how Members of the Committee can possibly follow a grouping of this scope and technicality. I hope that in future stages of the Bill the groupings will enable Peers who are not experts in education law—and even those who are—to follow more reasonably.
Amendment 10 seeks to insert in Clause 1(3) the phrase,
“(as may from time to time be amended by them)”.
This is an attempt to make clear that the academy agreement between the Secretary of State and the other party should be defined not only as the initial agreement but as an agreement which may be amended by them consensually from time to time. I hope that that is helpful, because without those words we might run into trouble.
Amendment 95 seeks to amend Clause 2(4), which entitles the Secretary of State to indemnify those running an academy if the agreement is terminated. The amendment simply adds the word “reasonable” before “expenditure” so that the indemnity would be in respect of reasonable expenditure. Paragraphs (a) and (b) then refer to what the indemnity may relate to. It is a prudent provision because without it lavish and unnecessary expenditure would be indemnified, and that cannot be right.
Amendment 120A seeks to amend Clause 4, which deals with academy orders. I have tabled the amendment for clarification because I do not understand what the words at the end of subsection (3)—
“or a school that replaces it”—
mean, or are intended to mean. Are they intended to cover new free schools? I do not think they are because the whole of Clause 4 is confined to existing secondary schools converting into academies.
Lord Lucas
I shall speak to my Amendments 31 and 34 in this very diverse group. Amendment 31 proposes that,
“substantial freedom is given to the school to innovate”.
When I am going round schools I notice how hidebound they are by the restrictions that are placed on them in trying new things. Although the previous Government introduced an ability to innovate, it was subject to applications in triplicate to the Secretary of State and an extraordinarily cumbersome procedure. I hope we will now see a pronouncement in favour of innovation. I suggest that where a school does innovate it is merely necessary to inform the Secretary of State that this has happened—this becomes a risk factor for Ofsted in its decision on when and where to inspect—and that there is a requirement on the school to keep proper records so that the benefits or otherwise of the innovation can be judged in subsequent years. The whole tenor should be in favour of innovation. There are many good and experienced teachers out there who are capable of doing a great deal of good for the system if we let them have a go.
On Amendment 34, one of the good things to come out of the past 13 years of government was an increasing interest in schools co-operating with each other. Neighbouring schools will always be a little at loggerheads, but there are good examples—both those induced by the Government and those that have occurred privately—of schools forming networks to share problems and good practice and generally to get together and get beyond the confines of what is possible within a school, particularly a primary school. I am thinking particularly of the transition from primary to secondary and how schools can work together. There have been some excellent examples of that and I would not like the process of becoming an academy to be seen as an excuse to be isolated and a star on your own. It ought to be a process of becoming more co-operative and more linked into schools generally.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments tabled by my noble friends Lady Garden and Lord Phillips of Sudbury and explain what is troubling me about academy orders.
Section 14 of the Education Act 2002 is incorporated into Clause 1(4), therefore enabling academies to be dealt with by what might be called the fast-track process of essentially calling into aid the powers given to the Secretary of State in that Act. The difference is that only very specific use was made of the power in Section 14; I do not think that it was intended to embrace a whole category of school in the way that will be possible under the Bill. My straightforward concern is that, where we are looking at the possibility of removing many statutory forms of consultation, virtually no restraint will be placed on the Secretary of State, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, said, and that he will be accountable to no one but himself. The combination of Section 14—the powers of the Secretary of State—being incorporated into the Bill with the fast-tracking of the academy orders means that an academy could be approved, or for that matter rejected, with the involvement of virtually no one but the Secretary of State. Within a democratic structure, that is not an acceptable way to go.
We must therefore look very closely at the amendments that have been tabled. They would bring academies back into the structure of the academy agreement—my noble friend Lady Garden referred to this—which would enable us to set conditions and requirements for the schools that have to be met under the academy agreement but that do not have to be met in the same way under an academy order.
I, too, would be very grateful for greater enlightenment from the Minister on what accountability there is in mind. For example, it might be possible to look at the report from the education department on the experience of academies, their standards, their meeting of the admissions orders and other requirements under the academy agreements. That would enable Parliament to debate how far those requirements and conditions had been met and to distinguish between the effects of academy orders and academy agreements.
Perhaps even more significant than the proposals that my noble friends and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, have put forward is the need for this Committee to look closely at the level of accountability for academies and at academy orders under the Bill.
Lord Lucas
I had better get around to addressing my amendments in this group or I shall be caught up by my old friend on the Front Bench. I like faith schools, although I have no faith myself. I send my youngest daughter to a Church of England school and am very happy with it. Although I sympathise a lot with what the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said, I also have a great deal of understanding of what the right reverend Prelate said.
In the Bill we are looking at moving schools from the maintained school regime to the independent school regime. The provisions in relation to religion are different. We have fought long and hard for that in this House. I was one of the supporters of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in the battle, which we sadly lost, to bring up to date the relationship between state-funded schools and their religious sponsors. As part of the old and untouchable settlements in this country, there is a group of about 60 what you might call extreme Christian schools. They are inspected by their own inspectorate and have their own rules. We have allowed latitude to independent schools—where parents go to the length of paying for their children’s education—that we have not allowed in state schools, where we pay for the education. That is fair enough. If the community is paying for education, we can reasonably ask things of the religious sponsors of schools that we would not ask of them if they were paying for the education.
There are two crucial elements. The first is now broadly accepted. Even in schools that are of a firmly religious character, children should be taught about the precepts and practices of other religions and—I agree—humanism. They should be taught about the world at large. I have had, as part of my recent education, a lot of correspondence with my Catholic friends and cousins about how the Catholic Church has changed over the past 50 years. I now know why I did not study religion at university. It is far too complicated and difficult to penetrate for a mind such as mine. I was quite content with nuclear physics.
It is clear that the Anglican Church, in which I was brought up, and the Catholic Church are committed to teaching a broad view of faith in their schools. However, I am worried about the people who might try to run free schools. One of the great motivations for running your own school is to run it within the confines of your religious faith. That is fine; I am happy for people to do that. However, if the relevant school is a state school, it should promote understanding, community cohesion and all the other virtues for which we have fought. In other words, it should teach children about the religious and non-religious worlds at large.
My second amendment goes back to the battle that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and I fought. Purely religious schools that accept no other pupils are, of their nature, divisive and always have the potential to cause harm to the communities of which they are part. There may be circumstances where that is not the case—for example, where the relevant community is very much a minority community. However, where large proportions of a particular faith are represented in the make-up of a community and that community resorts almost entirely to its own schools, the situation becomes divisive. By observation, that is the case in the west of Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is not something that we should encourage. Some Anglican schools and more Catholic schools remain exclusive. One should seek to persuade them to open their doors. However, the notion that we should create new schools with this exclusivity—that we should not just perpetuate it but increase it—seems to me a very bad idea, as it was three years ago. I very much hope that I can convince my noble friend that it is a bad idea.
The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells
My Lords, in the diocese of Bath and Wells, which is very largely rural, we have some 184 church primary schools, which have served their communities for a long time. They are essentially community schools. That is reflected across the country to a greater extent than we might imagine. The essence of those schools is built around how you make a community and what is part of a community. Some of them have rather more effective relationships with their parish church than others. Some of them have Christian head teachers, others do not, but the essential ethos of those schools, founded within the framework of Anglicanism, has carried through to a greater or lesser extent in their religious commitment.
It is key for us to recall the requirement for a national curriculum of religious education. There has to be a commitment to that going across not just the faith tradition of the particular school but the wide experience of religion so that young people have an opportunity to understand it. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, that many of these schools are committed to reflecting on the philosophy underpinning humanism. I was asked a few moments ago to try to clear up what is a faith and what is a belief. I shall not risk doing that, but I will say that all faith involves belief at some level or another and is committed to some kind of system. By definition, faith cannot ultimately be proved. Therefore, how we understand and develop these things depends on a whole variety of our relationships with one another in the wider spectrum of life.
I support academies. Indeed, I had the privilege of being the chairman of the board of education in the diocese of Southwark when the first of the academies in south London was formed. I am extremely proud of that, because it did indeed reach into that community at its most vulnerable level.
However, the concept of free schools raises for me real anxieties, particularly in the sphere of religious influence. That is not simply because I want to hold up my hand to say that the Anglican or Catholic churches have a corner of the market. I remind your Lordships of our national identity and the way in which we are tied into the concept of the sovereign as the head of the Church of England, under our constitution, and our relationship with Parliament. The issue is much more complex from that point of view.
There is real merit in our looking towards the development of academies, but I hope that the view of the future of good schools will not be that they should all become academies and enter the independent sector. We have many good schools and, if we go down that road, I fear that we will, in the end, marginalise some of the poorer communities.
Baroness Perry of Southwark
My Lords, this is a hugely disparate group of amendments. We have covered a lot of topics and it has been difficult sometimes, despite the intelligence of Members of the Committee, to see any common thread in what has been discussed. I want to return to the issue raised by the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln. They deal with the absolutely key issue of the catchment area from where the academy will draw its pupils.
In recent years, I have been increasingly concerned over the whole issue of catchment areas, largely because we have seen that, where there is a good, strong school, parents who can afford to do so understandably—I do not blame them for it at all—cluster around the school and buy or rent houses in the area. There are even stories of parents being slightly economical with the truth in all sorts of interesting ways about where they live in order to claim that they are within the catchment area of a good school. Meanwhile, the schools most in need are in the most deprived areas. The people who live near those poor schools, often on local council estates, do not have the option of moving. They cannot buy their way into the catchment area of a good school.
This is one of the big issues for academies. I know that in Hackney the academies do not have catchment areas, but they do use banding and lotteries. I know that my noble friend Lord Lucas has an amendment—for various reasons, it is not in this group—that raises the issue of banding. I ask the Minister to think seriously about the issue of “wholly or mainly” in a local area and about the freedom which grammar schools have had since their inception and which grant-maintained schools had in their day—and which, as I say, many existing academies have taken—that allows them to go outside their area, maintaining the inclusiveness of the intake by means of banding but giving it a social mix or even a mix of talent.
Lord Lucas
I support entirely what my noble friend has just said. It is important, particularly when we are granting new freedoms to outstanding schools, that one of our ambitions for them is that they should reach out of the area immediately around them, which frequently has been colonised by people who can afford to buy houses in the area, to those who are not in that position. We will come to my amendment later. Perhaps I take a more active view than my noble friend, but I certainly would like it to be an ambition that all these schools should free themselves from geographical catchment areas that allow for their capture by financially mobile people. They should, at the least, be able to reach out and include those beyond the local area.
I also support the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in what he said about state boarding schools. They have a strong role to play and I would like to see an increasing role for them. As he says, most of them are excellent, but they are clearly not serving their local areas in any particular way. That also applies to religious schools. Existing schools such as the Jewish Free School have a wide catchment area and are excellent. I cannot see why they should be excluded just because their communities are widespread. They should not be geographically confined, particularly if new schools are following the 50 per cent rule. I do not see any damage arising from that. Again, historically we have supported dance, drama and music in specialist schools and I suspect that it would do our national pride a bit of good if we supported tennis. All in all, I come down to agreeing with the first amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I cannot see a function for subsection (6)(d) that could not reasonably and justly be dealt with in the ordinary discretion of the department.
Having agreed with noble Lords opposite, I take issue with my noble friend Lady Williams. If I start from the same premise as she did, I get to opposite conclusions. The community that my local primary school is part of is the village in which it is situated. The school is governed from Petersfield eight miles away, but that is an alien presence, not a local one. A primary school is very local, so one that has its roots in the local community is a much more local thing than one that is subject to the whims of the local authority, which has a lot of considerations other than the wishes of the local community. I see that as progress.
I spent part of my life running a small business, which felt like a primary school in that there were lots of things that I could not do myself. However, if I wanted to know about employment law, I subscribed £250 a year to a telephone service from Sage or someone else. I did not need a local authority to provide it for me. There will be lots of other providers of these services—indeed, there are many—and it is not like having to pay a City lawyer £500 an hour every time advice is needed. Services are built to be provided to small enterprises like primary schools.
However, I share my noble friend’s concern about how fragile primary schools are. The wrong head in a primary school can kill it in about two months, so I urge the Minister, when he comes to consider applications from primary schools, to make sure that they have strong heads and governing bodies and that they are committed to stay in place for some time. It may well be, over the long term, that a primary academy would be better as part of a wider federation of some kind, such as a group of primary schools, or as a school that is connected to a secondary school, as the existing primary academies are. That would provide the resources to deal with problems as they arise and which can so easily bowl over a small primary school.
Lord Hill of Oareford
I am considering that. On the specific point of sixth-form expansion, an increase in places would require a change to the admissions arrangements, which would itself require local consultation and agreement by the Secretary of State. That may provide the noble Baroness with some comfort.
Amendments 45, 47, 48 and 49 revolve around the debate we had about “wholly or mainly”. I share the views expressed on all sides of the House about boarding academies. I am very attracted to the idea and wish to see whether we can do more with them. Other points were made around a particular specialism and one would not want provisions in the Bill which made that problematical.
As to the specific question about the existing 35 state boarding schools—this provides the answer to the substantive question behind it—yes, they are able to apply for academy status. To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, the Duke of York’s Royal Military School will become a boarding academy within the current requirements—which, as he rightly said, date from 1988 wholly or mainly—so they have not prevented that from happening. A performing arts academy has been set up in Birmingham to serve that city’s pupils, and I am advised that that has been possible within the “wholly or mainly” requirement. I am alive to the point—I have asked about it within the department—and I am keen to encourage the kind of developments referred to by the noble Lord and others, including the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne. I am keen to do this and I am told that it is not a practical obstacle. I shall be happy to take up the noble Lord’s offer to discuss the issue subsequently and make sure that I am right in my understanding.
Amendment 56, which was spoken to by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, seeks to ensure that an academy continues to provide for CPD and suggests making it a requirement for future academy arrangements. Everyone would agree on the need for continuous professional development in academies, as in all schools. I am advised that it is one of the areas without the sort of requirement that she suggests. Academies often do particularly well as a result of the overall way in which they approach staff issues and pay and conditions. Academies are supported by education advisers whose role has included looking at this area in particular. I am told that it is working well, so we are not convinced that it needs to be a statutory requirement.
Amendment 57 would require that corporal punishment be prohibited in academies. The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 amended the Education Act 1996. It effectively abolished corporal punishment in all schools by providing that there should be no defence to criminal or civil proceedings as a result of any corporal punishment being given to a child being educated at a school. That provision applies to academies as well as maintained schools and has been in force since September 1999.
Amendments 58, 99, 109 and 120 would restrict academies to particular types or age ranges. Nursery schools are not able to become academies because they cater for pupils below compulsory school age and, to be established, academies must have at least five pupils of compulsory school age. I listened with interest to the debate on primary schools and understand some of the concerns raised. My noble friend Lady Sharp suggested federations of primary schools, which is exactly the kind of thing that one would want to encourage. We have said—this responds in part to my noble friend Lady Williams—that we will work with local authorities to address these issues as the scale and nature of academy conversion becomes clear. As I have said repeatedly, we are approaching this conversion permissively. We are not seeking to make all primary schools convert. We are committed to thinking through the issues that she raised about the practicalities involved for primary schools. We will continue to reflect on that and work with local authorities. That said, we are keen that primary schools of the sort that I visited in Edmonton on my second day in the department—it is a fantastic primary school which has been turned around—have the chance to convert. The headmistress there, Patricia Sowter, was very keen on academy freedoms. Primary schools should have that chance and we do not want to stand in their way.
Amendments 127 and 25 raise a theme that we have debated in previous groups. They would require a school converting to an academy to join forces with a weaker school unless particular circumstances led the Secretary of State to decide that it was not the right thing to do. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said that we have used warm words and that one is looking for more than that. I shall continue to try to heat them up even further if I can. I completely agree with her and other noble Lords who made similar points. The importance of partnership between outstanding schools converting to academies and other schools cannot be underestimated. We have been explicit that each outstanding school will be expected to sign up in principle. They will have to set out their plans as part of that process. However, it is still our view at bottom that approaching partnership on a volunteer rather than a conscript basis may make those partnerships more fruitful, in that they will be willingly entered into rather than perhaps approached more grudgingly. Amendment 127 is not limited to outstanding schools. Our view is that if a school is not yet outstanding, to burden it with a requirement to partner with a school eligible for intervention would not be a sensible way forward.
I hope that my answers have provided some reassurance, particularly on the “wholly or mainly” point, which I recognise is important and am happy to discuss further. On that basis, I urge noble Lords not to press their amendments.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, on “wholly or mainly”, could my noble friend provide me—it need not necessarily be now—with an example of the kind of school that the provision is designed to prevent becoming an academy?
Lord Hill of Oareford
My noble friend Lord Lucas has a well earned reputation for being able to ask such questions; I think that it is not designed to have a very simple or easy answer. However, I shall reflect on it. If I were able to offer any enlightenment to him, I should be delighted to do so and extremely pleased with myself for having been able to come up with an answer.
Academies Bill [HL]
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Lord Adonis
I begin by paying tribute to the Church of England for the outstanding work that it does in promoting academies. As the right reverend Prelate said, the Church of England is the largest single sponsor of academies. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool and I worked closely on the development of academies in Liverpool and the area around, and they are making marvellous progress, extending opportunity in an area that has not had it in the past.
This is my first opportunity in the House to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hill, on his appointment, which I do very warmly indeed. I should also say how glad I am that my noble friends Lady Royall and Lady Morgan are leading on this Bill for the Opposition. They bring a wealth of talent and experience to the task.
My noble friend Lady Morgan raised a number of policy issues about the extension of academies, which I shall leave the Minister to respond to. However, on the specific issue about the legal name that should be given to a certain category of school, I find myself in surprising agreement with the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. She and I are survivors from the interminable debates on the Education Act 2005, on which our views did not coincide all the time, particularly on the issue of academies. But she is right that, in terms of legal category, the schools to which the Bill proposes to accord that status have all the essential characteristics of existing academies.
I know that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet but, for two reasons, I do not support this amendment on the name that it gives to a legal category of schools. First, the schools which we are talking about in this Bill are academies in all their essential legal characteristics. They are managed independently of the local authority, on a contract with the Secretary of State that regulates a whole host of their policies and funding and which will be similar to that of existing academies. My noble friend says that academies are schools largely in deprived or challenging circumstances, and she is correct, although I need to point out to the House that that is not the exclusive preserve of academies. A number of entirely new schools have been set up as academies in very mixed social areas and a number of successful schools, including successful independent schools, have come into the state system by using the legal category of academies.
The legal status is clearly set out in Section 65 of the Education Act 2002, which is cast in similar terms to Clause 1. I emphasise the fact that the 2002 Act, which was passed by the last Government, does not specify that academies, in legal terms, can only be schools that pass a threshold either of deprivation or of low achievement. On the contrary, I invite Members of the Committee to look at Section 65, which says:
“The Secretary of State may enter into an agreement with any person under which … that person undertakes to establish and maintain, and to carry on or provide for the carrying on of, an independent school in England with the characteristics mentioned in subsection (2)”.
Those characteristics are that the school,
“has a curriculum satisfying the requirements of section 78 of the Education Act 2002”,
and that it,
“provides education for pupils of different abilities who are wholly or mainly drawn from the area in which the school is situated”.
Those provisions are almost identical to those in the Bill.
If there is no legal distinction between the schools that we are talking about in this Bill and those referred to under the Education Act 2002, is there another public policy reason for us to give a different label to certain schools within a similar legal category? I urge your Lordships not to do so. We already have an alphabet soup of different names for schools within the state system: community schools, foundation schools with a foundation, foundation schools without a foundation, voluntary aided schools, voluntary controlled schools, trust schools, city technology colleges, grammar schools, maintained special schools and non-maintained special schools. If the schools that we are talking about are academies, as they are in their essential legal characteristics, the right thing to do is to call them academies and not to add to the alphabet soup.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, paid tribute to the right reverend Prelates, so I shall pay tribute to him. He was a most excellent Schools Minister and was largely responsible for the success of the academies programme. As the Minister said, the party opposite has every right to be proud of what it achieved. I also praise the noble Lord for starting off his life as a Back-Bencher exactly as I hope he will continue, feeling free to disagree with his Front Bench. As my noble friend Lord Hill will discover, feeling free to criticise one’s own side when one feels that it is getting it wrong is the mark of respect that every Back-Bencher seeks to attain.
I feel that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, although she was in turn an excellent Minister, is getting it wrong. It was always inevitable that the academies programme, once it had proved itself and gained momentum, would be open to existing schools. The idea that schools have to fail in order to become academies is not tenable. The substance of the amendment is political phooey and should be disregarded.
The noble Baroness raised a number of points that I suspect I will agree with later—or at least I will share her concerns. This is a new phase for the academy movement and it raises questions which were left in abeyance when the academies were few and had strong sponsors but which need examining now. However, a change of name, with further confusion for parents and everybody else, is not required.
Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, at Second Reading many noble Lords pointed out that most parents want a good local school, whatever it is called, and that good schools depend on good leadership, good teachers and good classroom practice, none of which I see mentioned in the Bill. My noble friend made some interesting points about academies, as did the noble Lord, Lord Adonis—I quite agree with him about the alphabet soup of schools. However, this is not just discussion about a name.
I have never particularly liked the name “academy” for a school, despite my respect and affection for my noble friend Lord Adonis. To me, the term has always meant a Scottish secondary school, the garden where Plato taught or, as in the Brixton Academy, a nightclub. As I understand it, we are talking about names that have legal and constitutional significance. No doubt we will tease out some of these legal and constitutional issues, such as buildings, charitable status, admissions, inspection, employment, VAT regulations, freedom of information and data protection, throughout the passage of the Bill. My noble friend is right. If these apply to what are called direct maintained schools—in other words, if they have to obey the rules I have just mentioned—the name should be looked at again. Could the noble Lord please spell out—I am sure he will—the differences between the name “academies”, as referred to in the Bill, and other kinds of school which now exist, and tell us why the name should not be changed?
Academies Bill [HL]
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Lord Baker of Dorking
Very often, if there is a good local school there will not be the creation of another school. If you have got a very good primary school that is satisfying the demands of the parents and children, you will not get another group of parents and teachers wishing to create a new primary school.
The noble Lord does not know how difficult it is to start a school. For the past three years I have been starting new schools—at first with Lord Dearing—the new university technical colleges. It is a hard row to hoe because many people do not want it. These are colleges for 14 to 18 year-olds—which is disruptive for an 11-to-18 system for a start—specialising in technological and academic subjects. When Ron and I started, local authorities were not very interested. They did not like them for all the reasons that the noble Lord gave: they hurt good schools. Now I find that local authorities are coming to my little team, saying, “We’d like one of those, please”. They have seen that it is a new model that they like; it is better. I do not believe for a moment that a good school is threatened—that is rubbish, if I may say so to the noble Lord. He should not get up; he has had his go. Only bad schools are threatened; that is the problem. I can tell the noble Lord that it takes enormous effort to get a school started—to get parents together, to get teachers together. Meetings do not happen. Who is the champion? Can they bring it together? Then we have a divisive curriculum. Then they have to find support and make it viable economically: they have to find a primary school for 150 pupils and a secondary school for 500 to 600 pupils. That is an enormous hurdle. All the hurdles that Members of this Committee have tried to put in the way of the new schools over the past few hours is nothing compared to the task that committed groups will have to take on. That is the reality of life. It requires enormous effort and a tremendous act of corporate activity. We should not try to hobble and hinder that activity too much.
I prefer working with local education authorities. For the schools that I am establishing, we talk first to the local education authorities. If you are creating 14-to-19 colleges, they have to accommodate the 11-to-14 pupils. They also have to accept that it is a very different body in their school organisation. But now I am finding that local authorities like it. It is novel; it is different; and it will be effective. It will be effective, because in every comprehensive at age 12, 13 and 14, you have a vast number of disengaged pupils who do not want to continue in their local comprehensive school. We are providing an alternative which the state system has not yet provided. It provided it back in the 1950s as technical schools, but they failed because they were skill by snobbery. That is why we get a university to sponsor each of our colleges.
I therefore say to Members who are anxious about all this disrupting our education system that the new academies, to the extent that they will exist in the future, will improve our education system. They will improve the standards; they will get the commitment of local people, which will be very energetic. Even the Liberal Party knows how difficult it is to get local people to do anything—even to vote for them occasionally. So let us imagine how difficult it is to get local people committed to establishing a new school. That is why the Government are trying to make it as easy as possible. We should not make it too difficult for them to do so. This is a very imaginative proposal by the Government and it should be welcomed. It will be welcomed first by the Liberal Party—obviously; it will be welcomed reluctantly by the Labour Party, just as it came to welcome the city technology colleges and the grant-maintained schools. It is only a question of time. It is still in the mode of fighting the last election. When it starts fighting the next election, it will begin to realise that what we are saying is really rather attractive, responsive to the needs of people and beneficial to the education of our country. I cannot wait for the day.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I do enjoy this coalition politics, but I think that my noble friends on my left are looking too much at institutions and too little at parents. They should think in terms instead of the interests of parents and the pupils. They are taking too static a view of the schools system. Schools are changing and jostling for places all the time. In a town with three or four secondary schools, the least popular may suddenly get a good new headmistress who makes a great difference and the school becomes popular again. Pupils flow to her away from the other schools. This is a naturally dynamic system which can easily absorb other levels of change. As the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, the Government have lots of levers to deal with any problems that develop as a result of change—we will come to that when we talk about inspections and how we watch the way which the system is going. We are talking about a change which results in parents being happier, pupils doing better and provision being much more closely aligned with the best interests of pupils and parents. Yes, there may be a few bumps in the road, but if we are careful as a Government, we will make sure that they do not hurt people. That must be the way we should go, rather than sticking with what we all agree is a system with a very large proportion of unsatisfactory, or at least sub-optimal, provision.
Academies Bill [HL]
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Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Low, has set out the case for reconsidering special educational needs, as this is a very important and complex issue. I am also pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, mentioned governance, and that my noble friend Lady Morgan talked about standards, which are key. I understand that some academies have been allowed to opt out of publishing data on pupils’ achievement, which we will no doubt talk about later.
Amendments 2 and 3, in the names of my noble friend Lady Morgan and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, respectively, deal with consulting governors. I am a governor of a primary school in Wandsworth, and I think that school governors are important people in all this. I know that some later amendments deal with consultation, but for now I want to talk about governing bodies.
I understand that academies are required to have only one elected parent member on their governing body, while the existing principle is that a third of governing bodies should be parents. Parent governors are crucial. I am a governor at a school in a deprived area of Wandsworth, which attracts parent governors who are very helpful and useful to the school. This is particularly important in early years institutions if they are to become academies. Parents on those bodies will be essential. If parents are not involved in the early years, the children and the school suffer. I should like to ask the Minister about consultation with governing bodies. How is the future governance of schools foreseen?
Lord Lucas
I apologise for the misprint in my Amendment 33. For the word “roles” noble Lords should read “rules” and they will get a greater, if not absolute, idea of the sense of it. I am concerned about how the governing bodies of these academies will be dealt with when they go wrong. They can get into a mess from time to time when they are captured by strong individuals with very particular ideas. They can become at odds with parents and heads, and can contribute to poor performance in the school. I understand what happens under current academies with sponsors. But in an academy without a sponsor, what process will be gone through to set the governing body back on the right path? Who complains to whom? Who reaches a judgment as to what is happening? Who takes action under what powers?
What general powers will parents have to set things right if they see things going wrong? I do not think that there are any contractual arrangements with parents. So, if a school is failing to provide education, what is the route for the parent to enforce the right to education for their child? Finally, at Second Reading, I asked whether we might be circulated with a model funding agreement. I have not seen that yet and I am keen to do so while we are discussing these matters.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, the debate so far has been extremely interesting. It started with a clear indication that we will go down the academy route for all schools. I supported that direction very strongly before the break. To add free schools, when clearly they all fall within the same family, does not make any sense. I was slightly surprised at the amendment which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, addressed, to replace “person” with “governing body”. No noble Lord has said one word about the governing body and its role.
I must declare an interest as president of the National Governors Association. Therefore, all these areas interest me quite a bit. Given all that and the rather confusing and conflicting view that noble Lords around the Chamber seem to have about whether governors and parent governors are a good or a bad thing, it would be extremely helpful if the Minister—to whom I also add my thanks because he gave up a lot of time before we even began debating this Bill—could indicate how important he thinks that the role of the governing body is. It will have a hugely important role in seeing that these new academies—however many of them there are—come to the conclusion that I think many of us would see as an important step in British education.
Lord Hill of Oareford
We have two more days to debate these issues, and I am sure that we will come back to them. The answer to the noble Baroness’s question is, as much as it is possible, yes, of course.
Having concluded on Amendment 76, I urge the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, the noble Lords, Lord Greaves, Lord Lucas, Lord Northbourne and Lord Low, and the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, not to press their amendments.
Lord Lucas
I thank my noble friend for his reply and look forward to the model agreement, or the bits of it that we will get. Yes, charities do evolve, generally, a self-sustaining model for their governing body, but those that do not, die. Schools that do not either die, as many have this year, or the bursar very quickly puts other arrangements in place. It does not seem that those triggers are there for a straightforward maintained school with no sponsor. I shall return to this matter again in another context but, before the passing of the Bill, we need to know how we can stop schools getting into a real mess and how we can pick it up early and do something about it.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
We have had a very helpful and full debate, and I thank the Minister for replying so comprehensively and in such a helpful way. To return to my earlier remarks, and picking up on the point that my noble friend Lord Adonis made, I think that it would be helpful—now that we know that free schools will be academies, and being in favour of reducing the alphabetti spaghetti, or soup, as the House was earlier—if the proposal forms for the free schools were called proposal forms for academies. We should get that clarity and consistency, so that those outside, who have not had the benefit of listening to the deliberations that we have had, can be clear about the relationship between new schools, free schools and academies. That would be very helpful.
Free Schools Policy
Lord Lucas Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Hill of Oareford
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, in particular for the work that she does for Future Leaders. On the issue of detail, that is work in progress and I shall keep her informed and posted. We made the announcement about the outline shape of the process on Friday, and we recognise that we have to provide this kind of detail. I shall keep her closely informed.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, can my noble friend give me comfort on two aspects? First, will he reassure me that the existence of surplus places in the vicinity of a proposed free school will not be a bar to the establishment of a free school? Secondly, can he tell me whether virtual schools may be established under this legislation—that is, schools which are to ordinary schools as the Open University is to universities?
Lord Hill of Oareford
I can certainly give my noble friend Lord Lucas the reassurance that he seeks on his first point. I shall need to write to him on the second point.
Academies Bill [HL]
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Lord Lucas
My Lords, I welcome the Minister to the Front Bench and I welcome this Bill. It has an excellent precedent. It was the child of my noble friend Lord Baker; it was excellently looked after by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in his long tenure; and somehow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, and others who did not feel the same way about it refrained from strangling the infant. Now it emerges to manhood at the point where it can be set free. I welcome the momentum that is embodied in the Bill and the feeling that we are going forward with speed and determination.
Letting excellent schools become academies is not a precipitate risk. We know what academies are. The schools that are being pitched into this can explore and innovate safely for a year or two and such regulation as is needed can catch up. They are already well governed and well operated institutions. I do not share the caution of my noble friend Lady Garden. I certainly do not share the ambition of the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, to turn every new aeroplane into a Bristol Brabazon, which, as noble Lords will remember, was designed with immense care by a big committee, had 10 engines and flew only once. There is a great deal to be said for getting things done with determination. It is one of the many things for which I admire my noble friend Lady Thatcher.
I have a strong conviction that innovation comes from below: one can see that all through life. The reason why we do not see it much in schools is that it has been suppressed for so long by regulation and the immense burdens put on schools of targets, paperwork and control. In the tenure of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, we had an education Bill that was supposed to allow schools to innovate, but all it said was that if you submit an immense application to the Department for Education you may be considered in due course and perhaps allowed to make small changes to the way in which you run a school. Where the previous Government had allowed bottom-up innovations to happen, such as the growth in academies and the excellent experiment of technical colleges launched by my noble friend Lord Baker, they worked. Where they tried to impose change from above, such as AS-levels and diplomas, they did not work. That is inevitable in a system such as education, as you cannot control 25,000-odd schools from the centre. A particular change is never right for all schools at the same time. You must have a system of evolution and adaptation rather than one of imposition if you want good ideas such as diplomas to flourish. Diplomas were an excellent idea, but they should have been allowed to evolve and adapt to schools, which would then have found out how they worked best. One would then have got a sensible system—as we still may, depending on what my Government decide to do with them.
Inevitably, as has been said by many of my noble friends, particularly those to my left, we shall not abandon our traditional inquisitorial attitude to the Government just because we happen to be part of it. There are many things that I wish to know about the Bill. In particular, I want to know how far the freedom to innovate goes and how much real freedom will be allowed to these schools. I very much hope that my noble friend will circulate to all of us who have taken an interest the model agreements and associated documents that doubtless are being sent to those thousands of schools that have made applications. They cannot possibly be dealt with by an à la carte system. There must be a standard procedure, which should be shared with us before Committee.
I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, and others that partnership will be an important part of the new educational landscape. It has been pioneered to effect by the previous Government. If we are not to have central control or control by local authorities, there must be a way for schools to get support and for good practice to spread. Of all the things that have been tried, that seems to work best in schools through partnership. I very much hope that that will be explored and strengthened in the Bill.
We need to be careful about the governance of the new academies. While there were only a couple of hundred of them and they were being looked after by association with reputable businesses and charities that could put in resources, expertise and understanding when things went wrong, and while they were quite thinly scattered or concentrated in areas where the current system had clearly failed, that, to my mind, was less of a worry. Now we are looking at a system where potentially, in the course of five years, quite a high proportion of our state schools could become academies, so we have to understand how governance will work. Governance is an imperfect matter—boards of governors go wrong. One can see that clearly in the private school system, where, as noble Lords may know, I spent a lot of my time as editor of the Good Schools Guide watching schools being destroyed by the idiocies of governing bodies.
How are we to deal with governance in academies—particularly those that convert from excellent schools—and how are we to preserve the interests of the local community? How, indeed, are we to approach quality control as a whole in a world of academies? I should very much like to learn from the examples of my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham, who says that he has his own inspectorate in his schools. How does that work? In what ways is it better and more efficient than Ofsted?
I can think of lots of ways in which Ofsted could be better and more efficient. It does not seem to be an organisation that demonstrably has its finger on the pulse of schools. It looks at them only every four years or so and does not provide a good service for parents. If there is a dodgy Ofsted report on a school, you hear nothing more for four or five years and, if it is a good school, you are not told whether it is going wrong. Ofsted does not seem to provide good value. It has a large number of immensely well paid executives, but I do not see that that level of spend is producing value for money. In general, I do not see Ofsted being supportive of schools. It simply seems to go in and be critical and not, as Her Majesty’s inspectorate used to do, provide good ideas, support and comfort to schools. Frankly, I think that a lot of cost could be cut out of that section of the department and that much better value could be obtained from the expenditure that remains. My noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby pointed out other areas where we could tackle costs, such as in the degree of central diktat and directive and in the level of imposition on schools—the sheer amount of effort in schools that has to be devoted to complying with these things and to watching what is going on. A great deal of money could be saved by reducing that.
We will inevitably come on to the matter of faith schools—a subject already covered by the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan of Huyton and Lady Murphy. In previous battles in this Chamber, we have extracted some hard-won concessions from the churches about inclusiveness—opening their schools to people of all faiths and none. The Church of England has very much led in that, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford said, but not all his schools are like that; some of them are not only religiously but intensely socially exclusive and the Church of England does not have the necessary degree of control over that. However, I know of schools of other faiths that are much less open to their communities. I think that we should try to move towards a situation where we welcome the ethos and value that faith schools bring to our children. Although I am not religious myself, I would happily send my children to faith schools. However, if we pay for them as state schools, they should be open to all. We should not see in the Bill a rowing back from the commitment to include the wider community in faith schools that we have extracted from the churches to date. Nor should we see an increase in sectarian teaching. There are Catholic schools that teach that Gandhi is burning in hell. Frankly, I do not think that we should fund that on the state.
The matter of special needs will clearly be important. I think that I disagree with everything that my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking said, so we shall clearly have some interesting arguments in Committee. There is a great deal to be said for inclusion for the right children, but we should not have compulsory inclusion for those who would be better served by special schools. I think that the incidence of special needs is about right at 20 per cent. It has come from a greater understanding of the variations in children. A lot of the increase has been due to specific learning difficulties and just represents an understanding that children can be very strong in some areas and very weak in others. That is a fundamental point and it requires schools to adapt their methods of teaching. We have also understood that there is a spread of autistic spectrum disorders and other things. It is all about helping schools to teach better, to understand their children, to understand how children in a school interact with one another and to produce better results from them.
I certainly do not agree with my noble friend Lord Baker that local education authorities should remain in charge of special educational needs. One of the features of the way in which schools, and certainly academies, developed under the previous Government was that they became much more co-operative with one another, forming their own groups. Windsor and Maidenhead—one of the smaller local authorities—runs a very good special needs service because it is big enough to have central expertise but small enough so that the people on the team are known by, and know, all the schools that they look after. In Slough, which is next door, the situation is horrible. I do not see why schools should not be able to opt into, or create for themselves, special educational needs services. That should not be beyond a group of schools co-operating together.
The handling of admissions will be important but, again, I do not share the caution of some people. I hope that we will move to a much more dynamic arrangement and abandon the rigidity of the current system. If academies admit from a much wider spread than the schools that they replace—that would follow the pattern of the academies that we have to date—schools in the leafy suburbs will be opened up to those in neighbouring areas of deprivation. There will be a lot more parental discomfort as a result of that and, in that case, local authorities will need to become the parents’ friend. They will need to make sure that there are suitable places—if necessary by pushing schools around a bit and saying, “Hang on. There are five kids living right next to you that you have to let in because there’s no other sensible place for them to go”. They will need to do battle with independent schools on behalf of parents. That really should be the role of the local education authority, as should dealing with special needs. Goodness—it would be a change if LEAs were to move from being seen as the enemy of parents, trying to prevent them from getting their children into schools, to being the friend of parents, trying to get their children into the schools that they should be in. That would be a much more natural and better relationship and it would be a better role for local education authorities.
The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, touched on freedom of information. I agree that we should not allow, through this Bill, a whole host of schools to pass out of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. This was highlighted in the Times Educational Supplement a week or two ago. Actually, the article itself was rubbish—the data that were said not to be available are available—but the principle that schools should not move out of the range of the Act was there.
I thought that perhaps the question of the curriculum and freedom from the national curriculum had gone in the coalition agreement. I thought that we believed in our pupils having an understanding of the world and of our history and who we are. The curriculum’s incorporation of Shakespeare, British history and an understanding of the world was important to us at that sort of level. Are we to abandon all control over that and allow it to become completely spotty or will there be some overriding continuity?
In the debates on this Bill and in those that follow, we will get deep into an argument on the role of government in education—central and local. I very much look forward to that. I do not share the pessimism of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley. We can move from a position where all levels of government have seen their role as control to one where they see their role as supporting.