Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Shipley Excerpts

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

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that there are many maintained and voluntary-aided stand-alone schools that have turned themselves around incredibly well through good leadership and high-quality teaching, so academisation is not the simple answer. Local leadership and governance undoubtedly need to be got right. I declare my interest as chair of the National Society and would like to highlight the importance here, in the church sector, of the diocesan boards of education as key local engagers. We will come to that in a later group.

Local knowledge of schools is crucial in ensuring that their flourishing is provided for. However, I am going to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Storey, because I find the amendment overly mandatory and restrictive, giving too much power to a local body to trigger a school leaving an academy trust; I am not sure that that is right. The principle of local governance needs to be got right. I am not convinced that this amendment as proposed is quite the right way to do it. As was said in Committee, it is important to have proper local engagement, but it must not be too detailed in how it is mandated.

In relation to that, I support the proposals from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, around local consultation in Amendments 33, 34, 37, 38 and 41, because that is critical. Also critical is Amendment 43 on geographic consultation. I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, about multi-academy trusts that are spread out a long way. Inevitably, people based in the south-east will not know, for example, what is going on the north-east, in my patch. That geographic consultation is very important.

Amendment 45, which has not been talked about, is about the inspection of MATs. It is surely inevitable, if we move in the direction of travel that the White Paper lays out around all schools being in strong multi-academy trusts, that we are going to have to have a new system of inspection for MATs by Ofsted. I would like to highlight an example of an alternative way of doing it, which involved the diocese of Birmingham’s MAT and the diocese of Liverpool’s MAT. They have twinned to undertake mutual scrutiny and support. We heard about it at the conference last week, which the noble Baroness attended, for which I thank her. They found that the most powerful, helpful way of improving themselves and learning was by twinning with a MAT that had a similar flavour—they were both diocesan Church of England school MATs—but in different geographical settings. As we look to explore the proper inspection of MATs, let us also be imaginative about how that might be done.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, my name is attached to Amendment 10. As we start Report, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

I spoke in Committee on the issue of governing bodies applying or being established for all academies. I have a serious concern about multi-academy trusts which are not geographically located in a small area but are spread, as the right reverend Prelate has just reminded us, across the country. It is the question of local accountability to a neighbourhood or a community that I feel most strongly about.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, made a very important contribution and a very convincing case about the issues around the consultation of governing bodies in maintained schools at the point it might be proposed that they are going to transfer to academy status. The example he gave us, of Holland Park, was particularly important. Having been given a pamphlet by those across the road explaining the problems they thought the schools had with the process being followed, I found it to be particularly convincing. I hope that the Minister, in the course of the summer, when these matters are to be looked at again, will give some consideration to a process which seems to be that a decision is made and the consultation follows. I would be much happier if there was a preliminary consultation before a decision was made.

I come to the principle in Amendment 10. Amendment 43, which my noble friend Lord Storey raised, is about how it might be possible for a multi-academy trust to engage better in a local area if it does not formally have a governing body—although the amendment does not rule one out. For me, this is an issue of principle: every individual academy should have a governing body. Many of those who have contributed on Report so far, and who may do so later, might have been governors of schools. Having been the governor of several schools over several decades, I know that a governing body can be a structure that solves problems before they get more complex or difficult.

When a school transfers from maintained status to an academy, I do not want its governing body to feel that, somehow, its commitment to that school has been lost. So where there is a representative system that functions well, I do not see the benefit, either to the multi- academy trust or the local area, of losing the experience and expertise that a governing body can bring.

In conclusion, having a governing body for each academy would help to engage parents and the local authority and resolve problems much earlier than they otherwise might be. Another benefit is that a governing body can hold a multi-academy trust to account in its area because, where a trust is spread across the country, it is possible that decisions could be made that do not have the support of a particular academy in a particular area. Giving a voice to that academy through a governing body is, for me, an important issue of principle

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

I support the amendment about specialist schools in the name of the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. It also touches on academies. As the founder of academies, I never at any time said that all schools should be academies. In fact, when we established them as city technology colleges in the 1980s, I said that they should be beacons for other schools to follow if they wanted to—I was not prescriptive. I was asked several times whether I would support that concept and I never have. It took a huge step forward under Labour when the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who is in his place, persuaded Tony Blair to go for 200 academies and the Labour Party accepted this.

There is no doubt that some schools improve when they become academies, but there is a geographical spread. My friend the noble Lord, Lord Storey, emphasised how many of the successful MATs are in the south-east and south-west—the Home Counties areas, as it were. In the very depressed areas of Stoke, Sandwell or Blyth in Northumberland, where youth unemployment is 20%, there is no easy switch to say that if schools there became academies, they would suddenly get better. Many of these areas have what are called sink schools, which continue to be inadequate or require improvement, again and again. There have been studies on this recently, and making these schools academies does not necessarily have any effect on them, because a fundamental change in the curriculum is needed.

A specialist school makes a fundamental change in the curriculum. When I started to promote university technical colleges over 12 years ago, they were specialist schools that did not have to follow the national curriculum of Progress 8 and EBacc; rather, local people could decide what they wanted to specialise in. That was the breakthrough.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I return to the subject of grammar schools with two modest amendments, which I am sure the noble Baroness will wish to accept. I have always taken particular interest in grammar schools, having been brought up in an environment of selective education. This was compounded by direct experience of the failure of the Buckinghamshire education system through my eldest daughter, who had the misfortune to be living there for her secondary education and attending a secondary modern school. More generally, I recoil still at a system which essentially labels the majority of 11 year-olds as failures.

The move against grammar schools was supported hugely by parents when it happened. I was genuinely concerned when I saw Sir Graham Brady MP recently suggesting that, when this Bill goes back to the Commons, it should be amended to remove the statutory ban on new selective schools. We know he has received support from other Conservative Members of Parliament. I say to the Minister that if the Bill comes back amended in that way, we will fight it tooth and nail in your Lordships’ House, and will expect at least a day to debate it.

My two amendments are very modest and address issues relating to the 1998 legislation. It was introduced in good faith but, as time goes on, one sees that it needs to be improved, and this is what I am seeking to do here. I have some experience in this. In Birmingham, the local authority where I live, my wife was a leading member of the campaign to use the legislation to allow a ballot to remove selection from the eight grammar schools in the city. She and others discovered that, under the legislation, only parents in primary schools which have sent five or more children to grammar schools in the last three consecutive years were allowed to vote, thus denying parents in other schools the franchise.

Of course, the schools denied the franchise were predominantly schools with higher levels of free school meals, and those that got the franchise were in the most prosperous neighbourhoods. That is not surprising, as data shows that it is predominately middle-class children, whose parents have the money to pay for private tuition, who pass the grammar school exam. This is not a meritocracy, as is sometimes claimed by Conservative MPs, but a bought privilege for those with money.

In my two amendments, I first want to reduce the 20% of qualifying voters to 10%. That is the same as is required for the recall of an MP. It is not unreasonable to set the level there. When the legislation was introduced in 1998, we were run on paper as a country; we know the world has changed. So secondly, I am suggesting that we allow electronic communications in relation to regulations. I know from the meeting I had with the Minister this morning that, because of the academy grammar schools, there will be new regulations. I ask that this be considered as part of the revision of those regulations.

My other two amendments in this group, Amendments 102 and 103, are on a completely different matter. They are about strengthening the rights of parents and increasing the public accountability of schools. Given the development of the admissions system around academies, instead of what previously was a unified system where the local authority provided all the information and you went through the local authority system, a parent can often be faced with a multitude of applications to academies in their area. It can be very confusing. I propose a straightforward extension to the existing remit of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. I want to enable parents to seek an independent investigation into complaints about admissions to academies if they think their child has been wrongly denied access to their preferred choice of school. The other amendment proposes an equally practical, but perhaps even more important, extension to the rights of parents: the right to complain about what goes on within the school itself.

In Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, in response raised five points to justify rejecting those amendments: that there was a route for complaints through the independent Office of the Schools Adjudicator; that the School Admissions Code has improved the process for managing in-year admissions; that the Government will consult on a new statutory framework for pupil movements between schools and a back-up power to enable local authorities to direct an academy trust to admit a child; that every academy trust must have a published complaints procedure; and, finally, that her department provides a route for independent consideration of complaints about maladministration of appeals in relation to academy schools.

I am very grateful for the Minister’s full response but it does not go far enough. For instance, the Office of the Schools Adjudicator does not make decisions on individual complaints about the admissions appeal process. On the School Admissions Code, although the changes that were made are welcome, they do not in any way address the lack of independent redress for school admissions for academies and free schools or the underlying fragmentation of the admissions complaints system for parents. On the new statutory framework for pupil movements between schools, I would just say that powers of direction are not a substitute for parental access to an independent appeals and complaints process. Finally, on complaints directly to her department, my understanding is that her department focuses on whether a school has followed the complaints process, rather than carrying out a fresh investigation into the substantive matter complained about. I hope that the Minister will give some consideration to that.

All schools are going to become academies. The Minister’s previous arguments about wishing to maintain the freedom of academies has to be balanced with a proper accountability system. I wonder whether the review she is chairing might look at this. It seems to me that one key element of allowing academies to continue to have the freedoms that they enjoy is that there are some safeguards in the system. I would argue that having the Local Government Ombudsman as a backdrop would be one of the building blocks to allowing academies to continue to have their freedoms.

Having said that, I hope we can give these and other amendments a fair wind. I beg to move.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, my name appears on Amendments 47 and 106. I want briefly to say that I am very strongly in favour of all the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. Amendment 46, in particular, is very powerful, and I hope the Minister will think carefully about it.

I turn first to Amendment 47, which relates to the provision of school places by academies. There is a problem here which needs to be solved before it arises. Local authorities in England must have a power to direct academies in their area to admit individual pupils and to expand school places. As I said in Committee, the question that arises is around what happens when there are not enough school places for a local authority to fulfil its statutory duty—for example, if there is a new housing estate and school places have to be found for the children living there. Given that local authorities should in my view have some power over appeals, local authorities must have the power to be more directional than the Bill currently permits.

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[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I shall speak to all these amendments. I declare my interest as chair of the National Society, but I should probably make it abundantly clear that, in the previous group, I was definitely speaking on behalf of the Church of England corporately, whereas I do so now in a personal capacity—though I suspect that many of my colleagues on these Benches will not disagree with me.

The proposal made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, makes a lot of sense, but it strikes me that it probably falls under the academies regulation and commissioning review. The role of local authorities and devolving it down makes some sense.

I associate myself completely with everything the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has just said about the provision of free school meals. We all know that there are a growing number of children in households that are facing real difficulties in providing for them. Today, in the End Child Poverty report, we see that the north-east of England has the highest percentage of children in poverty of any area now, sadly overtaking London. Time and again I hear from schools that are struggling because children are arriving not having been adequately fed. They see the advantage of those on free school meals and know how much it means, and they struggle with those whose family are on universal credit but are not being given free school meals. Ideally, personally, I would go back to free school meals for all primary school children. However, I know we will not get that, so this proposal makes complete sense. Simply put it is a win that the Government can make in the public eye. We know that the situation will get worse in the coming months, and this would help enormously. I hope it will be given serious consideration.

On Amendment 59, I was recently in a maintained school—not a church school—where a high number of children have the pupil premium. I talked to the head about how she used it, and she was very clear that she makes sure that the pupil premium grant goes to the relevant child and is used appropriately. I asked her if it covers all the extra costs. Her answer was very simple: in most cases, no. She was happy to accept that in some cases the answer was yes, but it most cases it was no. She has to supplement the extra needs for pupils who are eligible for the pupil premium from other quarters. This proposed increase would make sense, and then to tie it to inflation. The pupil premium makes a huge difference for many children and many schools. Schools seek to use it properly for the individual children.

Amendment 60 is simply common sense and I hope it will be supported.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I want to add a comment about a recent report by the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust and the University of Bristol, published a few days ago. It pointed out that over 4 million households, or one in six families, are in very serious financial difficulty now. The Child Poverty Action Group has identified some 800,000 children in poverty who do not qualify for free school meals.

The cost of giving free school meals to families on universal credit is around £500 million to £550 million a year. This is a very serious issue, as my noble friend Lord Storey and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham have identified. At a cost of £550 million, it would mean that a large number of children are able to have a hot meal every day they are at school. That seems to me to be a basic need that can be fulfilled by the Government very quickly.

As we know, we are heading into a very difficult few months because the uprating of benefits will not apply until April of next year, based on September’s figures for CPI. I hope the Minister will say something about how poor families and children in poverty are to be assisted by the Government over the next few months. The amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Storey is a way of the Government delivering a more equal and fair society.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

First, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hunt on his amendment in this group. I see it as a safeguard, if you like, against the system not delivering as the Government anticipate. The Secretary of State could deal with the situation without having to come back to this House and, I suggest, it would be in the Government’s interest to consider this amendment positively.

Should the Government choose to adopt the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, especially Amendments 58 and 59, they would have our wholehearted support. Noble Lords should not be surprised, of course, that the Labour Party takes this view. We lifted 1 million children out of poverty when we were last in government; we introduced the minimum wage and Sure Start; we introduced the first universal free childcare offer and oversaw significant increases in education and spending. This is at the heart of who we are.

This is an urgent and widespread problem. In the north-east, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham said, a third of children are already on free school meals, so I know all too well how valuable a free meal is to families. Alternative proposals have been made; for example, providing a free school meal for children in families earning less than £20,000. In Labour-run Wales, reception-age children will get a free school meal from September, with all primary schoolchildren receiving them by 2024.

We are concerned, too, about hunger during the school holidays. Currently, the holiday activity fund benefits only around a third of children on free school meals. I had hoped to discuss this with the relevant Minister last week, but he resigned instead. However, we are concerned about this and while some good evaluation has been done of the holiday activity fund, the fact that we are missing two-thirds of children on free school meals indicates that there is more work to do on why more children are not accessing it. While it is an attempt to improve the situation, it is just not working widely enough.

I say this to the Government: whoever emerges as Prime Minister in a few weeks’ time, he or she will have to bring forward urgent measures to support hard-pressed families. Labour has argued for increases in the early years pupil premium and a recovery action plan, but it is important that we go much further. It is important, too, that we do not make spending commitments without having identified the source of the funding tonight. We are working on how best to do this, so that stigma and holiday provision are tackled as well, because we need to act.

Families are struggling to afford the basics and with inflation, energy costs and food prices all increasing, the situation is just getting worse and worse. I put on record my sincere thanks—thank goodness they are there—to all those schools, teachers, charities and voluntary organisations that are saving lives by doing such amazing work in communities up and down the country. They are trying the best they can to fill this gap.

From our position, the Opposition can only hope that the Government bring forward measures quickly, as the Labour Party has done in Wales. If they do, we will support them.