Education and Adoption Bill

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, we have had a first-class debate with many excellent contributions from those who strongly support the Bill and from those who have grave doubts and do not support it. In particular, I compliment my noble fiend Lord Blunkett on a classic maiden speech delivered with style and humour. He served with great distinction in the other place and brought his very considerable talent to bear as a Cabinet Minister. We are indeed fortunate that he has come to this House, and I am sure I am not alone in looking forward to hearing him speak in future, bringing to our deliberations that special and rare insight for which he is well known.

The Bill enables the Secretary of State to intervene in so-called coasting schools, yet when it started its Committee stage in the other place the Government were so unprepared that they had to deal with the adoption part first because they had not worked out the meaning of the term “coasting”. Those of us who have just completed the Committee and Report stages of the Childcare Bill should perhaps not be surprised, as we know full well how the Government will steam ahead with a policy, even though, as in the case of that Bill, they have not yet worked out how they are going to fund it.

As I said, at the start of this Bill’s passage through Parliament the term “coasting” was not defined, but now we have it—or do we? The Minister said in his opening remarks that the whole notion of the term is now to go out to consultation. What we do have is a narrow and short-sighted definition that is exclusively data driven and takes no account of the individual circumstances of a school. However, despite the definition being so narrow, it will have great consequences for pupils, teachers and parents. This definition of coasting is likely to exclude many schools that require intervention and include some that do not. Given that the Secretary of State has tied her hands by forcing herself to intervene in coasting schools, surely we need a stronger definition that takes into account all relevant factors and not just numbers and figures. That definition should be arrived at through proper research and consultation, not through a lottery.

When my party first developed the policy of helping underperforming schools, it specifically required local authorities to consider a full range of evidence about a school in order to make a balanced and fair judgment as to whether it was underperforming. The Bill completely removes this ability to consider both performance and context, which will inevitably mean that the term is used inappropriately—whatever the term is following the consultation.

Further to giving the Secretary of State no discretion in how a coasting school is identified, the Bill also allows no discretion in the making of academy orders. This means that a school in special measures must become a sponsored academy whether or not an adequate sponsor can actually be found.

The research group Education Datalab estimates that 1,179 schools would be classed as coasting if the previous three years of data are used, including four Ofsted-rated “outstanding” schools—two primary and two secondary. However, the data also show that schools serving more affluent areas will escape the “coasting” judgment. We know that schools serving more affluent communities make better progress on average than those in more deprived communities. Progress measures are still clearly affected by socioeconomic factors and that is why, before a school is labelled as coasting, it would be unfair not to consider contextual factors. Of course, the Bill does not allow for this and we can already see how the Government’s ill-thought-out definition of coasting would lead to wrongly labelling some schools as coasting while others were left unjudged.

Unlike the requirement for the Secretary of State to take action in a failing local authority school, there is no requirement whatever for her to act similarly in a failing academy. What is more, there is a lack of evidence to support the idea that academy status will lead to school improvement—not all academies are the success stories that the Minister indicated in his opening remarks. A number of academy chains have been criticised by Ofsted, the Sutton Trust and the Minister’s own department, because it has been shown that they are performing poorly compared with local authority maintained schools. Earlier this year, 146 academies were in special measures and 619 required improvement, but the Bill does nothing to deal with this. It simply creates a two-tier system with different standards for local authority and academy-sponsored schools. The Minister painted quite a rosy picture of the success of academies. I hope he might be prompted to provide us with a little more detail—he might write to me, if he can, and put the letter in the Library.

This Bill puts enormous further power in the hands of the Secretary of State. The noble Lord, Lord True, was a bit concerned about centralisation, but, whether it has a red or a blue tinge, centralisation is, nevertheless, centralisation. The Bill allows the Secretary of State to make decisions about academy sponsors behind closed doors and removes the right of local stakeholders—and, importantly, that of parents—to consult on the future of their school. But much more than that, the whole trend of encouraging more parents to take a stakeholder interest in their children’s education is being brought to an end by this one measure. For more than three decades, in my experience, there has been cross-party agreement on the need for greater parental involvement in schools—ranging from the appointment and election of parent governors, to parents having the right to meet school governors and being encouraged to set up before and after-school clubs. Why have the Government introduced legislation to specifically take away the right of parents to say what kind of school they want to send their children to every day? To me, this seems entirely wrong and at odds with the gains we have made over the last few decades in getting parents involved. Parents are not simply being sidelined; they are being deliberately excluded by an Act of Parliament. My Lords, this is Britain—some of us still like to call it Great Britain. It is not North Korea. It is important that we allow parents to have a full and proper say in changes to their children’s education.

I now turn briefly to the provisions on adoption. The legislation supports local authorities in combining into regional adoption agencies. Although we support this aim and that of speeding up adoption rates, we need provisions in place to ensure that super-regional consortia do not squeeze out smaller and more specialised voluntary adoption agencies.

It is also important that we improve the support given to people post-adoption, particularly mental health support. I hope that there will be an opportunity in Committee to look at the actual experiences many people have faced post-adoption. In my view, society’s involvement in adoption should not come to an end at the point the adoption takes place. I know from cases that I came across when I served in the other place, and from experiences made known to me by family and friends, that there are many lessons we could usefully learn.

The Bill fails us as much in what it does not address as in what it does. My noble friend Lord Watson said that the Bill does not address teacher recruitment and retention, or the provision of adequate pupil places. The Government seem much more concerned with restructuring our education system than with tackling the real problems we face in encouraging more teachers into our schools. This will become particularly difficult under the new system proposed in the Bill: teachers are unlikely to want to join schools that may be one inspection away from academisation. I hope that, during consideration of the Bill in your Lordships’ House, we may be able to make the Government see the problems it will create. I hope there will be opportunities in Committee for us to improve it, and that the Government will take note of the common sense they hear from all sides of the House.