Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Phillips of Sudbury Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the Minister. I hope he will at least read my congratulations. I wish him well in his demanding position. In this House one has the task of concentrating on what one perceives as weaknesses in a Bill, but I should not let the opportunity pass to say that there are many extremely good and forward-looking measures in this one.

As one who habitually complains about the amount of legislation put forth by this and the other place, I add that this is an extraordinarily complex Bill, short though it is by modern standards. I fear that it will give my profession a wonderful feeding ground for the future. However, the task of the House in Committee and at later stages is to improve on it. I will quickly mention that it seems as though the powers of the Secretary of the State to enter into academy arrangements, as they are called, and to make academy awards are entirely discretionary. Even if an applicant fulfils the characteristics required of it, it will not, by any means, certainly get academy status. The Minister might like to ponder on that.

I will also mention the charitable status provisions of Clause 8, which say that all academies will, ipso facto, be charities. It is an inadequate clause, most particularly because it does not make any provision for a regulator. It is, in my view, essential that the regulation of this new body of schools be on a statutory basis. It must require the regulator to make an annual report to this and the other place. They must be accountable and transparent.

Secondly, I am a little foxed, and again, I hope the Minister might, in winding up, let the House know whether the provisions of the Bill are so framed as to allow the promoters of one of these schools, in effect, to outsource the running of the school to a profit-making provider. If that is the intention, I have to say that—as one who spends much of his life advising on charity law—I am not at all sure that the arrangement would be properly lawful. That will need careful consideration.

I echo briefly, because it so important, the remarks on implementation of the Bill that have been made by various noble Lords. It seems that we are rushing our fences with the Bill. There are hugely important matters to consider, plan and consult on before a single academy school under the new aegis should be up and running. I hope that the consultation requirements will be in the Bill, as they are in many other Bills, including the late-lamented and soon-to-be-consigned-to-oblivion identity cards Bill.

I will spend the rest of my time talking about new free schools. They are not specifically mentioned in the Bill or the notes accompanying it. However, the Government must sing their own tune with regard to new schools. They will, no doubt, be called academy schools. However, they are not schools that are converting from an existing maintained school; they will be created by parents and other interested parties. I commend the Minister in the other place, Mr Michael Gove, for what he said about this. He said at the beginning of his speech that we are,

“dedicated to ensuring that every child has a better start in life”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/6/10; col. 455.]

Later, he said:

“We have—we have been bequeathed—one of the most stratified and segregated school systems in the developed world … That is why we are pressing ahead with the sort of changes that will drive improvement across the whole of the state school system”.— [Official Report, Commons, 2/6/10; col. 463.]

That is my concern. Unless the new schools are constrained by the addition of characteristics to Clause 1(6) to make sure that this danger will not occur, there is a real prospect that they will do the very thing that the Secretary of State and the Minister in this place said that they were committed to preventing—that is, widening the gap between the best schools and the worst schools, to put it crudely.

The particular danger is that the new schools will siphon off pupils from the more middle-class families, leaving existing schools with a depleted intake. I spent this morning in my native town of Sudbury in Suffolk, which is an absolutely typical English market town. It currently has two secondary schools serving 25 or 30 villages. I was told by the excellent head and the chair of governors of one of the two, Cornard Upper School —my wife is a governor of the same school—that its position under the Bill could be made extraordinarily difficult. I am absolutely sure that that would be inadvertent, but our job is to guard against inadvertence. The key school in its present catchment area is proposing to set up as a new school. There are three principal damaging effects of that probability. First, it will unbalance the existing intake of the school. The head, Michael Foley, put it like this:

“All I can tell you is that in this area, the formation of a free school in one of the surrounding villages would lead to segregation by default. The existing fully comprehensive school, which has allowed children from all backgrounds to flourish … would be replaced by two schools in stark contrast: one with a largely privileged intake and the other largely populated by children living in challenging circumstances”.

It is a commonplace that in the past 20 or 30 years villages around cities and towns have become gentrified.

Then there is the massive cost of creating a new school. The local authority reckon that it will cost £4 million just to uprate the buildings of this feeder school to enable it to gain new independent status at a time when Cornard desperately needs to modernise its existing buildings as 10 classrooms leak when it rains. It is fruitless to pretend that the capital expenditure on these new schools will not affect the budgets and incomes of the existing maintained schools.

There is a third potential problem with the new schools, unless we guard against it. Cornard school will lose 40 per cent of its intake. That will create real viability problems with huge cuts in staff, massive disruption and consequent denting of morale in a school which this year has received a certificate from the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust stating that it is one of the most improved schools in Suffolk. The LEA in Suffolk noted that it had achieved the greatest added value over the past year. The Ofsted report stated that it was “a good school”. It continued:

“The quality of care, guidance and support that is provided for students is outstanding. The school has gone from strength to strength since the previous inspection”.

I urge the Government to include a further characteristic in Clause 1(6) along the lines that a new school can be established and maintained only where, on balance, it will improve education not only for its own pupils but for those of adjacent schools.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I fear that, if I may, I will need to write in more detail to the noble Baroness. I understand her point, but I do not want to get myself into deep water. I will follow this up with her specifically.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

Before the Minister goes off the subject of charity, and given that the Charity Commission is a highly effective and experienced regulator of all sorts of other charities—large and small—does he think it sufficient to leave the regulation off the face of the Bill? I am thinking particularly of the desirability for public accountability of regulation.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

That, too, is a point on which I need to reflect. Generally, I will follow that up with the noble Lord if I may.

Consultation was a recurring theme. It was raised by the noble Lords, Lord Turnbull and Lord Greaves, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Garden and Lady Williams of Crosby. The concern was expressed that there would not be sufficient consultation with parents or others. Current legislation does not require consultation with parents or the local community on the acquisition of academy status. The Bill does not change that. However, we anticipate that schools will want to consult parents about this, as they do at present.

In addition, maintained schools have parent governors who will be able to take part in the governing body and the decision-making process on whether to convert to academy status. Consultation with staff is another important point. Schools are required by the TUPE regulations to undertake appropriate consultation. We are advising schools on how best to carry out that process. That is linked to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, about speed, which I will return to in a moment.

The role of local authorities is clearly of great importance. I repeat a point that I made in the debate on the gracious Speech and earlier: there is, I hope, nothing in the Bill that noble Lords will interpret as an attack on the role of local authorities. We do not seek to send that message. Strong local authorities will remain central to the Government’s plans to improve education. We want to work with local authorities on what these changes will mean. We certainly envisage that local authorities will have a strategic overview of services in the local area and that they should help to support parents and pupils to choose a good school as part of a mixed economy of schools provision. They will retain a key strategic role in supporting the delivery of educational excellence. The law already allows local authorities to supply goods and services to schools, including academies. Many academies buy these services from the local authority. We expect this to continue. Nothing in the Bill will prevent an academy from buying a service from a local education authority and, if the academy considers the local authority to be the best supplier of that service at the best value, I am sure that it will continue to do so. As I have said, the local education authority will retain responsibility for ensuring that pupils’ SEN needs continue to be met.

The speed of the process was another recurring theme. The noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, led the charge, but the noble Baronesses, Lady Massey, Lady Sharp and Lady Royall, returned to it. I underline the fact that schools can carry out this process at their own pace. I understand the point, which has been raised before, about expectations. There has, perhaps, been a sense that the Government expect all outstanding schools to be ready to go in September—that they are rushing and that schools are being encouraged or pressured to convert by September. That is not the case. The aim of the Bill is to be enabling and permissive rather than coercive. Our wish is for schools to do this at their own pace. We believe that some schools will be ready to convert at an early stage. Others will certainly choose to convert at a later date. We are currently telling schools that we expect the fast-track process for outstanding academies to take three months, although a longer process may well be needed in exceptional circumstances. It should be noted that not all the outstanding schools that have so far expressed an interest in converting want to convert as soon as September 2010 or will be able to do so. Although we want to give the schools an opportunity, I am conscious of this point, and we will not force any school to do it any quicker than it wants to.

I say in response to a point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, that converting outstanding schools will not take priority over academies already in the pipeline. I am assured that we are able to deal with both. Nor do outstanding schools need to have an external sponsor. They will in effect be self-sponsoring, which will include existing arrangements with faith bodies.

The pupil premium, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred, is to be separately funded and will not be used as a subsidy for academies. We believe that academies have proved their success. I think that that point is broadly accepted on all sides of the House. Where they have worked well, their impact has been tremendous. This Bill will allow more schools to become academies, with a simpler application process and more trust given to the professionals who we think can and should be making decisions about how their school is run.

Raising standards in all schools is our primary goal—seeing the best performing schools do even better, supporting others to do the same, being more ambitious for the schools which are doing a good job but which could do better and transforming those schools which are underperforming and currently not delivering the standard of education that their pupils and parents rightly expect. We believe that academies are an excellent mechanism for achieving those aims placing, as they do, school improvement at the forefront of their focus, and working in a flexible way to achieve that. This is an important Bill. I am grateful for the advice that I have received today from all sides of the House. I look forward to continuing these important discussions in Committee, for however long that takes. I commend the Bill to the House.