Free Schools and Academies

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I start by thanking the Minister, and my noble friend Lord Addington for allowing me to speak now and so be able to catch the last train to Liverpool. I will have to depart a little earlier.

I want to recognise all our schools and teachers. All our children should have the right education for them. Some wonderful things happen in academies, which the noble Baroness mentioned. Some wonderful things also happen in maintained schools, which I do not think the noble Baroness mentioned.

[Noble Lords]

She did.

[Lord Storey]

Oh, did she? I apologise.

We want the best for all our children. Let us be very clear at the beginning: empirically, there appears to be very little difference between the education attainment achieved by local maintained schools and academy schools. Figures from the House of Lords Library suggest that, performance wise, there is very little difference. Interestingly, the Institute of Education recognised that, while multi-academy trusts accounted for some of the highest performing schools, they also had far more lower performing schools.

It is right to be looking now at the situation of academies. We have a new Government, we are having a curriculum review, and we will soon have the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill before us. There are some differences with academies, so let us understand those. First, on qualified teachers, there is a need across the country for expert teachers who follow a transparent curriculum so that parents can be assured that their children are receiving a good education. A legal teaching qualification would ensure a certain standard of teaching. I would not want my children to be taught by an unqualified teacher. Parents should have that right as well.

Let us look at the national curriculum. We call it national but it is not, because it is not taught in Scotland or Northern Ireland, and, as we have heard, academies do not have to teach it. I want a curriculum that is paramount in ensuring that children all receive a certain standard of education. It was never the intention for academies to have freedom around the national curriculum. Imposing these controls would ensure that a base is covered but would not necessarily restrict how far academies can go with their teaching. I hope the curriculum review, when it is published, will recognise that all schools need space to develop particular aspects and units of the curriculum. For example, in Liverpool, I would like schools to be able to develop further teaching on the slave trade. I would like schools to be able to develop creative subjects, which currently they are not always able to deal with.

We should be increasing local authority powers over who can be admitted to academies. Giving them powers to restrict certain actions by academies would enable them to function as a monitoring body to hold the actions of academies accountable to government standards.

I have only to mention off-rolling as an example, where academies have almost ridden a coach and horses through admission policies by deciding that they will not have certain children in their school. When it comes to special educational needs, they say, “Oh, we haven’t got the the facilities; we haven’t got the teachers, so we won’t be admitting those children”. That is totally wrong.

Let us look at salaries. In 2023-24, the median salary for a classroom teacher in an academy was £44,870, while in an LA secondary school, it was £44,677. There is a case for paying more where there are shortage subjects; that is important. It is a scandal—and the last Government should take responsibility for this—that 400 schools in England do not have a qualified physics teacher at sixth-form level. You have only to look at shortages of specialist teachers in other subjects as well. I hope that the new Government, never mind getting to grips with the salary scales for all teachers, will make a push to get those posts filled in shortage subjects but also give an opportunity for teachers to be paid a little bit more to make sure that they are interested in teaching that subject.