Education and Adoption Bill

Lord Storey Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, before turning to the Bill, I want to point out that yesterday, in another place, there was a Statement from the Secretary of State on the establishment of an annexe to a grammar school 10 miles away from its current location. Could we be witnessing the next phase of government education policy to deal with failing academies: allowing grammar schools to open an annexe on their site? That is a question that I will leave in noble Lords’ minds. The Government have an obsession with selective schooling, which is damaging the educational chances of children up and down the country. Selective schooling leaves too many pupils behind at an early age, and does not deal with the serious problems of school places that many authorities face.

I now turn to the Bill and, first, the clauses relating to adoption. It is an uncontested truth that the younger a child is adopted, the more successful that adoption will be. While there are children waiting a considerable time for adoption to take place, while there are parents keen to adopt, we should not be precious about how we arrange that adoption. It is not about boundaries; it should be about what is best for the child or young person. Yes, there is excellent practice being carried out by many local authorities and voluntary organisations, but if we can strengthen and develop those arrangements, it is all for the good.

The time it takes for adopters to be made available for many children and young people is far too long, particularly for hard-to-place children: disabled children, older children, sibling groups and children from, black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. If the new powers to determine how local authorities discharge their duties in relation to adoption allow for the creation of regional adoption agencies, that is surely all for the good. No child should be hidebound by local authority boundaries. We need to make sure that the new system will improve the adoption of hard-to-place children, that changes will be in the best interests of the child, and that changes are characterised by transparency and accountability.

I was quite taken by a letter in the Times in 2011 from Chris Hanvey, who was then head of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. He said that,

“the current fragmented system encourages individual local authorities to hang on to ‘their’ prospective adopters until a suitable child comes into care in their area, however long that takes, rather than share them with other authorities where children are waiting in foster care for permanent new homes to be found”.

That is not a system that should ever be allowed.

I was also very taken with the Prime Minister's comments in his leader’s speech at his party’s conference about looked-after children and our responsibility as a society towards them. It was quite a moving passage. There are now nearly 70,000 looked-after children, and more than one in 10 of them have been in three or more different placements in a single year. Each year, 10,000 young people leave care. Moreover, around 45% of them have mental health problems. They often leave care under-prepared to live independently and without the support they need. I ask noble Lords whether they could imagine their own sons or daughters leaving home at, say, 16 without the constant parental and family support, advice and guidance that every child would want to be provided for them. That is, in effect, what we are doing with many of these young people. We have a moral duty as their corporate parents to help them rebuild their lives and do whatever it takes to make that happen.

I turn to the education side of the Bill. Just as every parent wants the best education and school for their child, every Government must and should provide the best schools and the best teachers; no Government have a monopoly on wanting to raise standards. As we heard, academies were first introduced by Labour under Blair’s premiership with a view to raising standards, particularly in disadvantaged areas. Academies were given more resources, finance and freedoms, along with a slimmed-down curriculum. Now, nearly 65% and rising of our secondary schools are academies—either stand-alone or part of a chain—and the Prime Minister has espoused that by the end of this Parliament he wants to see every school become an academy, hence the Bill.

The Bill, therefore, will give more power to the Secretary of State; it is more centralising, more bureaucratic, more undemocratic, and accountability is given a back seat. We cannot give parents a say in the matter because it is far too important; if a school is failing, we must get on with it—we cannot allow parents a voice. Neither can we give local authorities any say, even if they are a model of good practice and success, because they have no part in our plans. We will establish the wonderful term “coasting schools”, so that when the Secretary of State determines that a school is coasting we will be able, if we want, to force it to become an academy. What is more, because we cannot micromanage from the centre any more, we will give these Government-appointed regional commissars —sorry: commissionaires—the power to do so.

Is that really the way to develop an educational policy or build up confidence with our school leaders? Would it not be more honest, if you share the Minister’s aim, to say what you really want to achieve and then work with schools to plan out the road map for the academisation of all our schools? Undermining schools and teachers at every opportunity is not the way to do it. No wonder that, as we have heard, there is a crisis in attracting teachers to become school leaders and a considerable fall in the number of people entering the teaching profession; we are plugging some of the gaps in the teacher shortage with overseas teachers; and there is a shortage of teachers in specialist subjects.

No doubt the Minister will repeat the mantra that only academies are increasing standards. Perhaps he will cast his eye over the Sutton Trust research, which showed that, compared with mainstream schools, sponsored academies have lower grades and are twice as likely to be below the floor standard. In 2014, 44% of academy groups were below the Government’s new “coasting” level, and 26 of the 34 chains they analysed had one or more schools in this group. When analysed against a range of Government indicators on attainment, a majority of the chains still underperform in respect of their disadvantaged pupils compared with the mainstream average on attainment.

Of course, we should always be ambitious for our children and young people; no child should be in a failing school or with a poor teacher. If we are constantly supporting schools, developing and sharing good practice, expecting only the highest quality of school leadership and training of our teachers, with ongoing professional development, failing schools are less likely to occur and Ofsted inspections become a positive experience, because where school and curriculum issues arise they have been sorted out beforehand.

Talking of inspections, I do not understand why we, rightly, inspect local education authorities but not academy chains. One academy chain has 50 schools, which makes it bigger than my last local authority. Perhaps the Minister can explain the thinking behind this, as only 15% of the 20 largest academy chains are performing above the national average.

All the research shows how important the involvement of parents is in the schooling of their children—and yes, parents can play a very positive role. Why, then, are we now marginalising them? Parents should, must, be involved in changes to their child’s school. And what happened to the notion of parents being part of the governance of schools? The Bill will certainly improve the arrangements for adoption; as regards education, well, I have said what I think.

I was fascinated and quite moved by what the noble Lord, Lord Nash, said about his own experiences and how he got involved in academies, he and his wife having set one up. However, he must understand that many of us here have our own experiences of how we became involved in education. For myself, it was working in primary schools in deprived communities, and I have seen first hand that it is not about structures or the name on the tin. It is about quality—the quality of the teacher. Teachers go over and above the job they have to do. Believe it or not, I have seen teachers having to provide meals for children, provide clothes, and pick them up because nobody is at home. So, let us remember that all of us here have the best interests of children at heart.

I hope that when we discuss the Bill in Committee, we can look in a positive way at what I regard as some of the excesses of accountability and a top-down approach to schools and schooling, and perhaps be more realistic about developing caring policies for looked-after children.