Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Nash Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

We will not be voting on it here in Committee, of course, but I hope that, when we get to our arguments that Clause 1 not stand part of the Bill, the Minister listens to our sweet reasonings and fundamentally changes the whole tenor of the Bill. Constitutionally, it is an abomination. We should have had consultation on it, but there has been none on it at all. This is a serious Bill, which gives Secretaries of State powers that they have never had—that I never had and that the present Secretary of State does not have—to intervene in running schools around the country. That is unacceptable and I am amazed that a Conservative Government have done it.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, I have listened carefully to what everyone has said and do not disagree with much. I only ask what is wrong with the independent school standards, which all academies must follow. Surely this is a matter for Ofsted, not the DfE.

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I regret missing Second Reading, which, according to some noble Lords we heard today, was the DfE version of “Apocalypse Now”. Even the noble Lord, Lord Baker —I am an admirer of UTCs—joined the doomsayers then, as he reminded us again today. I am an admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose advice is that

“to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”

He is probably right about that.

I am an admirer of this House when it is at its best—for example, the debates on Ukraine or on the jubilee. However, as referred to by my noble friend—he is still my friend at the moment, but might not be at the end of this contribution—the debate on the then Health and Care Bill, which was an overcomplex and lengthy Bill, brought out the House of Lords at its worst. Every hobby-horse noble Lords could ride was ridden for hours, whether on modern slavery or organ transplants, but the real challenges facing the health service seemed a sideshow, in my opinion.

Before I contribute on this Bill, I want to give your Lordships a quotation. I am always indebted to my noble friend Lord Bragg, who continues to educate me in my quest for lifelong learning. A recent programme of his was about a philosopher of whom, I must admit, I had never heard—that is probably my ignorance—a man called John Amos Comenius. He was a

“philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education”.

What he proposed was fascinating—and bear in mind that we are talking about the 17th century:

“Comenius introduced a number of educational concepts and innovations including pictorial textbooks written in native languages instead of Latin, teaching based in gradual development from simple to more comprehensive concepts, lifelong learning with a focus on logical thinking over dull memorization, equal opportunity for impoverished children, education for women, and universal and practical instruction.”


If that had been written today, we might think it a modern prescription for education, but he arrived at it in the 17th century and travelled around advising a number of countries, so Comenius has a lot to recommend him to us and others.

I turn to my noble friend Lady Chapman’s amendment. Perversely, if we remove “may” and insert “must”, the Bill will give the Government the power grab that noble Lords are concerned about. To me, “may” means exactly that. I ask noble Lords if you really believe that the DfE has the desire or capacity to intervene in every school in the UK. Come on—even if it wanted to, it could not. That is my view, and people are free to disagree. Is this a perfect Bill? Of course it is not; that is the purpose of our debating it today.

I will just say this to the Committee. I hope this will not be a debate that says, “Academies bad, maintained schools good”, or vice versa. Actually, we have not mentioned free schools, which have made a contribution. My view about schools is that variety is not only the spice of life but makes an enormous contribution to education. Indeed, as my noble friend Lord Knight reminded us, it was a Labour Government who, having seen the appalling record of maintained schools in London that were failing, introduced academies. They did a good job of changing that environment. Let us remember how important that is, because children get only that one chance. If these schools are failing, then that chance is denied them.

I was also interested when my noble friend said to trust in teachers. I do, but I will tell your Lordships who I put a bigger trust in, who I regard as the key component of any successful school: the head teacher. If you have not got the head teacher right, that school will not flourish. I will give as an example a good friend of mine, Liz Wolverson. She has recently retired, but she was the diocesan director of Church of England academy primary schools in London, in really challenging areas such as Newham, et cetera. They have rescued 10 failing schools. I asked her what her prescription was for dealing with failing schools. She said, “I go into the school, I look around, I talk to the head, to parents, to teachers and to pupils. Then I go back to the head and I say, ‘You’ve got six months to turn the school around, and if you don’t succeed, goodbye. That’s it’.” That is a tough prescription, but it is a necessary one if we care about that one main chance for our children. I believe we should.

I looked at the report from the committee referred to by my noble friend Lady Chapman, which talked about the terrible Henry VIII powers. I took that into account. It is right that the committee should draw that to our attention, but I also looked at what the Minister said to us in her reply to the debate at Second Reading, where these concerns were expressed. She said:

“My noble friends Lord Nash and Lord Lucas, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, also were concerned about the impact on the fundamental freedoms of academies. These reforms will maintain the central freedoms and autonomy of the academy programme. Our ‘strong trust’ definition and standards will set out clearly what we expect all academy trusts to deliver, but trusts remain free to design, innovate and implement operating models that they believe will deliver the best outcomes for their pupils.”—[Official Report, 23/5/22; col. 740.]


I saw that as a serious statement from the Minister. I hope she will confirm that today.

For me, that is an important pledge by the Government. I welcome the coverage, investigation and analysis of the Bill, of course I do. I am sure there are parts of this Bill that can be improved, like any Bill, but I ask the Committee to consider carefully what it is trying to do with Amendment 1. Time is not on our side. I do not accept the argument that we should throw it all out, take our summer break and then come back again. I have never seen anything that appears in front of this House that we are completely satisfied with. If there is such a thing as a perfect Bill, no doubt it exists in some other version of the universe that we have not yet encountered.

I rarely give advice, because it is freely given and freely ignored, but I participate in the Lords outreach service. It is a great institution. This Friday, I am going to speak to a Catholic academy in East Finchley. I am looking forward to this. I will get an opportunity to talk to the pupils. I like to say to them “If you were Minister for Education, tell me where you would put the money.” That always gets them going because I remind them that politics is about the language of priorities.

The other interesting thing about it is that it is a Catholic school. When I spoke to it and we got to the end of our discussion, I said, “By the way, what is your admissions policy?”, and I was told, “Anybody can come to our school. They do not have to attend a church service or anything else.” We will go on to debate faith schools, an area where I suspect there will be further disagreements. All I can say on that subject is that a large percentage of the public have faith in faith schools because they believe they deliver good education with good discipline, so they participate in them.

I hope I have not lost all my noble friends with this contribution. I seem to be the only person who has contributed so far who has given the Government the benefit of the doubt. I believe that what they are trying to do is in the interests of every Member of this House, which is to improve the quality of the education that we deliver to our children.

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[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise; I should have declared my interests earlier as a chair of a multi-academy trust and a trustee of the Education Policy Institute. It is not particularly helpful—I agree with a number of points that have been made—for us to argue in this Chamber about the success or failure of one type of school, but I support the noble Lord, Lord Knight. Other research I have seen recently says that MATs have done an excellent job at turning around schools that were previously failing. More than seven out of 10 academies, which had taken over schools that were formerly failing and underperforming as local authority-maintained schools, were rated by Ofsted as good or outstanding at their next inspection.

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, very briefly, when my noble friend replies, could she explain to us how the matters that have been discussed proceed from the last Conservative Party manifesto and how they emanate from Conservatism, which abhors nationalisation and delights in diversity?

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I hope that the Government will reflect. We do not have much time. We rise on 21 July. That is really soon. There is little more than four weeks to do this and the Government want to get Committee through in June. It will be very difficult for them to refashion a completely new set of proposals and plans to amend the Bill so fundamentally. It might be a good idea to put off Report until the autumn so that they can reflect and focus on what is really needed to help failing schools. I hope the Minister will listen and that your Lordships will support these amendments.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

Although I share some of the noble Lord’s concerns about simplifying the regulatory system, as a lawyer—and, I admit, an academy sponsor—I struggle with the concept of producing legislation that overrides contracts that have been negotiated between the Government, proprietors and trusts unless absolutely necessary. The officials might say that they do not understand them because there are so many of them. Frankly, I think that they should. They are not that different. The trusts certainly understand their own individual contracts.

Before the Government seek to overturn these agreements and add a vast array of powers to them, they need to explain precisely why that is necessary, as a number of noble Lords have said. I believe that the DfE already has sufficient and substantial intervention powers and that these clauses are therefore unnecessary. As we go through the Bill clause by clause, I will articulate why I think the Government already have the powers and they need just to use them where necessary.

The MAT sector is in good shape. As my noble friend Lord Baker said, the number of cases where the DfE feels it now needs to intervene is extremely small, and the kitchen sink approach in the Bill seems like a sledgehammer/nut situation. However, if we can be satisfied that any of these clauses or something like them are necessary—it is clear that there is consensus for this across the House—we are prepared to work with the Government to craft them appropriately, but we need time to do so.

The Minister mentioned that when I took the Children and Families Bill through your Lordships’ House in 2014, we added free school meals. We had to do that because they were not covered by funding agreements. Much of what is in the Bill is already covered by funding agreements, so the Government need to explain why they need to bring in a lot of these clauses.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, I find myself following the noble Lord, Lord Nash. I wanted to say that it was a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker, but it is equally a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Nash. I have very little to say on the report since it has been covered fully by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. I say in passing that the wisdom and clarity of the speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, was a very good contribution to the debate.

As we have heard from all sides of the Committee, the extremely long, but apparently inexhaustive, list in Clause 1 appears to be overreach at an extraordinary level. As was said at Second Reading and earlier today, it is really a power grab by the DfE without any real understanding of what the purpose of all these things then residing with the Secretary of State would be. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, they are things that have never been seen. It is remarkable. It would be remarkable for school governors and staff to think that head teachers were going to be appointed in Sanctuary Buildings. It seems so remarkable as to beggar belief. These are unacceptable propositions.

As I thought about speaking today, I reflected that when I started teaching in the early 1970s, we thought of and talked about education as a national service locally delivered. That is what I would like to continue to see it as. I think all noble Lords would agree that the aspiration of the education service in England should be a good local school for every child. That seems to chime both with the title of the White Paper, Opportunity for All: Strong Schools with Great Teachers for your Child, and with the SEND Review: Right Support Right Place Right Time—it does not say local, but it has that sense of local.

Where is the local dimension in Clause 1? It is absent. It resides with the Secretary of State. Some matters are best dealt with at national level—my noble friend Lord Knight referred to one—such as remuneration, salaries, conditions of service, pensions and so on. That means that there would be coherence across teaching and education staff nationally, which has massive advantages because it means that teachers are free to move around the country and take their expertise from one place to another. In particular, when thinking about women teachers, it means that they do not have to worry when they move from one school to another about what their situation might be with, for example, access to maternity leave and maternity pay. However, if all these things are different, as they are at the moment, that is a significant problem. Clearly there are things which would be better done at national level, although it is my contention that salaries, pensions and conditions of service would be much better done through a framework of sectoral collective bargaining rather than by being imposed by the Secretary of State.

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[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to speak briefly to Amendments 23, 24, 25 and 27, to which I have added my name, and Amendment 26, which, alas, I overlooked but with which I absolutely agree. I declare an interest as a vice-chair of the APPG for Parental Participation in Education. The bulk of these amendments are obviously about the role that parents could and should have in their children’s schooling. It simply cannot be right that the voice of parents is absent from the fora in which important decisions are made. These amendments provide the opportunity to fill what I hope the Minister will acknowledge is a gap in the Bill.

Amendment 24 sets out the requirement for community engagement to make sure that it is not overlooked but is indeed strategic and effective, supported by the requirement in Amendment 26 for a parental council, for which I am sure all noble Lords would like to thank my noble friend Lord Knight.

Amendment 25 deals with local governance in the round to ensure that each constituent academy of a MAT has a local governing body, to which at least two parent governors should be elected. This seems to me an absolutely basic and essential requirement because if these things are done without parents, then when we want their help they will feel on the outside rather than being part of what is going on in those schools.

Amendment 27 is crucial to the local dimension of academies in a MAT. I am bound to say—I have some experience of this because it is going on at the moment—that it is all too easy when an individual school or academy is in the process, with a representative of a MAT, of their school possibly being absorbed into that MAT for it to be told in response to a variety of questions: “Yes, of course, that is an individual school decision.” That comes in response to a range of things that might be asked by parents or indeed staff. The fact is, however, that it is not clear that it necessarily will be an individual school decision, unless there is some requirement for it to be so.

Amendment 27 sets out the requirement that a multi-academy trust must devolve some responsibilities to the governing bodies of individual academies within the trust. That seems only sensible. We heard earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, that there was a trust with two schools in Norwich, one with presumably a relatively white demographic and one not too far away that was completely different. The noble Lord said that 25 languages were represented, which suggests a slightly different demographic. So of course, it has to be that some of those things are school-level decisions because the constituent schools are different institutions. It is central that local decision-making and engagement should be carried out by that local governing body.

The responsibilities suggested are all specific and ensure that each school within the MAT has the authority to determine, within its own local context, its strategic direction. The parties involved in a particular school would see these responsibilities as entirely appropriate and better held at the individual institution level. One example in particular is

“the professional autonomy of teachers over curriculum and content”.

This is not to say that each individual teacher goes in and does whatever they like; it is about developing curriculum content within the particular context of the school and with other teachers. In a primary school, it would be likely to be the whole school. In a secondary school, it might be at department level. It is logical to protect the professional autonomy of teachers so that they can make choices about curriculum content and, in particular, that they can make some decisions about pedagogy.

Most schools—obviously, I cannot speak for them all—would say that they are proud of their distinctive ethos. It is something all schools say. It is why it was quite appalling that someone once said “bog-standard comprehensive”. There is no such thing; there are schools that have differing ethoses. This amendment would ensure that the enhancement of that ethos would be with the local governing body and would be its responsibility—a local governing body, where all the voices of all the stakeholders would be able to be heard. Taken together, the amendments in this group could provide a significant improvement to what we have heard this evening is not, as it stands, a particularly good Bill.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, I will comment on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, about the benefits for an outstanding school of moving into a multi-academy trust, given that it is already outstanding. One of the biggest benefits for schools in multi-academy trusts is the career development opportunities for teachers. Lots of multi-academy trusts are now run by people who used to run one school and now run a group of schools. They consistently tell me that, although it did not necessarily occur to them when they got involved in MATs, the best benefit was career development opportunities for teachers. They used to lose all their best staff when they ran one school because they had no career pathway for them. Now they can give them career pathways. They can identify their rising stars and move them around. That is a major benefit.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. I had the experience of being a teacher from the early 1970s and what the noble Lord describes in a multi-academy trust is exactly what happened in many local authorities. There were many teachers—for example, primary teachers—who did not particularly want to go into management but had a particularly useful skill to spread around. They could be seconded from their school to the local authority to work in lots of different schools, enhance the skills base of their colleagues and perhaps enhance their own leadership skills. I recognise exactly what the noble Lord is saying, but that was entirely possible in local authorities prior to the MAT arrangements.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

I do not doubt that, but it is unlikely that in a local authority you would have a person working in one organisation who could be developed thoroughly by that one organisation. You may have people in the local authority who know who their stars are, but they are all in different schools, so I would say that this method is even better.

The other area where multi-academy trusts can greatly help teachers is in their workload, by developing curriculum and teaching resources that teachers can use in the workplace. I am sure that in schools that the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, was involved in there was not a question of everybody doing what they liked but, sadly, if we go back in the school system many years, that was exactly what did happen all too often when every school—if not every classroom—was a little island. There was too much freedom and too many teachers were, frankly, having to develop their curriculum resources from scratch. That is a real challenge for young teachers. One great advantage is teacher development. There are the other advantages, but I would say, therefore, that a school that is outstanding may well have a greater chance of staying outstanding working in a multi-academy trust.

The Marshalled List says that this group has been marshalled additionally in relation to Clauses 5, 6 and 7, so I will now briefly talk about those clauses. I said earlier that I would comment on why a number of individual clauses were unnecessary. Clause 5—

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sorry to intervene, but is that right? I thought that the Questions that Clauses 5, 6 and 7 stand part were in a further group.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I believe that is currently group 9, which we would reach on a future day. Of course, future days’ groupings are finalised, before they take place, with those involved.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

Perhaps my noble friend can help me with the fact that Amendments 39A, 39B and 39C are not on this Marshalled List at all.

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I believe that may be because they have been submitted later in the process. They will go through the grouping process through the usual channels and will be reached for debate in Committee, just not now.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

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

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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