Education: Academies and Free Schools

Lord Nash Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash)]

My Lords, I would like to thank all those who have contributed to this important debate. In particular, I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lady Perry for raising this issue. Few know more about driving educational standards than my noble friend, a former teacher and Chief Inspector of Schools.

This is my maiden speech. I understand that it is customary for new Members of your Lordships’ House to make their maiden speech before conducting any business here. I have in fact already answered three Questions from the Dispatch Box. Indeed, at the beginning of the first Question, I was so nervous that I managed to thank the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for welcoming me to the House before he had actually had a chance to do so. I hope that I am not going to earn a reputation in this House for doing things in the wrong order. I would like to thank all noble Lords and the staff here for being so welcoming and kind over the past couple of weeks.

Until about eight years ago, my life was focused on business—specifically the venture capital industry—but then I started to get interested in the care of children and young people, and in education. My wife, Caroline, and I set up a charity to support young people. We support a number of after-school clubs, supplementary schools and organisations like that, but it seemed all to come back to schooling. We decided to look at the academy programme and I was introduced to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, a truly great man. He appointed us to sponsor Pimlico Academy and, at that point, our lives changed completely.

The school was, by any definition, failing. It had been in special measures, had very poor behaviour—there was one famous fight outside the school involving 400 pupils—poor results, very low morale among the staff and students, low aspirations, very little for the pupils to do after hours, a building that was falling down, leaked and was infested with mice, and eight days of strikes in the year before we took over, over things any two Members of this House would have sorted out over a cup of tea. Thanks to our excellent team, led by our inspirational principal Jerry Collins, the school has completely turned around, students are happy, well behaved, engaged in school life, their heads are up and their aspirations are high. Teaching is much improved, the results are much improved, and we have only permanently excluded two pupils since we started over four years ago.

Although the academy achieved an “outstanding” Ofsted rating two years after it opened, we still have a long way to go if the school is to become the truly great school that we intend it to be. To help achieve this, my wife, Caroline, has led a project to develop a new key stage 3 curriculum which is now being taught in Year 7 and a new primary curriculum to go into our primary schools. This is a more content-rich and coherent curriculum which we believe will give our students the knowledge, skills, understanding and cultural literacy they need to be successful.

Our fundamental belief, which I believe is also the fundamental belief of this Government, is that our children and young people are capable of far more than we have hitherto asked of them. If you had seen, as I have, 11 year-olds in a charter school in the Bronx in New York, on an estate every bit as challenging as any here in London, seriously engaged in a lesson on the great philosophers, you could not doubt that. Nothing I have been involved in, in my business life, comes close to the experience of sponsoring an academy and I will be eternally grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and to another wonderful man, the late Sir Simon Milton, for giving us the opportunity.

I was delighted when I was asked to be a non-executive director of the Department for Education. When we arrived as non-executives in 2010 there was no doubt that the senior civil servants thought we were people to be managed rather than engaged with, but over time we have worked increasingly well together and are now all working closely as a team. So when, rather surprisingly, my right honourable friend asked me to do this job, it was something that I just had to do because it seemed like a natural progression.

A society where 40% of our young people do not even get the basic qualifications, where we have 1 million NEETS, where it takes two years and seven months from entering care for a child to be adopted and a year longer for a black child, where many of our children who leave care rebound quickly into the criminal justice system, where children with SEN are sometimes misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all and where their parents have to fight every step of the way to get the provision they need, where children go missing from care and end up the victims of dreadful sexual exploitation and where gangs of our young people are committing vicious murders on each other in our streets as happened only a week ago to one of our former pupils in Pimlico, such a society struggles to call itself civilised. It is a great honour to be a Member of your Lordships’ House, which I know cares deeply about these issues.

Turning to the subject of the debate tonight, it has been delightful to hear such a consensus in favour of academies and free schools. All my best points have, of course, already been made. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for her welcome and assure her that I intend to take a listening approach; I, too, look forward to debating with her on many future occasions. I would also like to thank the previous Government for taking the CTCs initiated by my noble friend Lord Baker and developing them under the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, into the academy product, a product that this Government have unashamedly developed in terms of numbers and also across primary academies, free schools, UTCs, special academies and studio schools.

At the risk of repetition, I will give a few statistics. There are now 2,673 academies open in England, of which 618 are sponsored and 2,055 are converters. Over 50% of all secondary schools are academies and there are 505 sponsors. Some 25% of sponsored academies in chains have an “outstanding” Ofsted rating. Sponsored academies are improving their GCSE results five times faster than other schools. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells will be pleased to hear that 89 converter academies are now sponsoring other schools. There are 80 free schools open, with a total capacity of 34,000 pupils, and over 100 more are due to open later this year and beyond. Half of the free schools open are in the 30% most deprived communities and over half are in areas of severe basic need. Free schools are in great demand: 75 per cent of the schools which opened in September 2011 were oversubscribed for entry last year. However, I note the comments made by the right reverend Prelate about the need for more free schools in BAME communities.

My noble friend Lord Baker spoke somewhat passionately about UTCs. Five of these are now open and 26 more are planned. There are 17 studio schools open with 16 more planned, and 63 special academies open with 50 more planned. We have opened the first alternative-provision free school, and the first specialist maths school is due to open in 2014. I would like to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, that we intend to continue with the pace of reform. The Government understand, as several noble Lords have acknowledged, that parents know what is best for their children. They must have choices and if there are not the schools that they want in the area they must be free to create more.

I am delighted to hear what my noble friend Lady Perry said about professional judgment always trumping bureaucratic prescription, and what my noble friend Lord Storey and the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said about the importance of freedom for teachers. This Government believe that teachers, head teachers and governors, not politicians and bureaucrats, should decide how schools are run and should have the freedom to make a difference to the lives of their pupils. The best ideas in schools come from schools themselves. I have noticed that the best schools often have the same characteristics: a broad and balanced curriculum, high aspiration, a longer school day, plenty of extracurricular and sporting activities, and good engagement with the local business community. We are keen for all schools to emulate what the best schools do. The evidence from abroad shows that strong autonomy for teachers, combined with accountability, delivers results. On accountability, I note the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, about the Ofsted inspection regime, and his other concerns, which, I can assure him, the Government take seriously. Regarding what my noble friend Lord Lucas said, I can assure him that we will take a tough approach to academy failure.

Academies are having a dramatic effect on results, particularly where new sponsors have taken on formerly underperforming schools. These sponsors challenge traditional thinking and have no truck with a culture of low expectations. There are plenty of examples of schools that have improved their performance over the past year alone by over 20%. However, there is still much more to do. We have already turned 200 of the worst-performing primary schools into academies supported by a strong sponsor. However, too many children are still suffering from a mediocre education. We therefore want to go further, as my noble friend Lady Perry said, and tackle more underperforming primary schools and pair them up with a high-quality sponsor. My noble friend Lord Moynihan made the vital point about the importance of governors. I can assure him that this is something that we will focus on intensely.

After attempting to answer three Questions not on my specialist subject, it has been a delight to respond to this debate on the contribution of academies and free schools in this country. It has been a most excellent debate and I thank all noble Lords for their contributions.