Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am happy to confirm that this Government, like the previous Government, accept that academy schools are public authorities for the purposes of the Human Rights Act and that, consequently, they are under a duty to act compatibly with the convention rights in their dealings with parents, pupils and others. The Act does not spell out or list all possible public authorities. This is for an obvious reason: some private bodies also carry out limited public functions and, for the purposes of those public functions, they are also public authorities, but only in respect of those functions. It is not possible to identify all of them at all times. Nevertheless, when they are providing a public service—schooling—they are clearly public authorities.

The noble Baroness will know that academies will be required to comply with all the duties in the Equality Act that apply to schools more generally with respect to disability, non-discrimination, reasonable adjustments and the like. It is quite correct that academies are not currently listed in Schedule 19. However, Schedule 19 will be updated before the duties come into force in 2011, and academies will be included in time for that. This will also deal with the suggestion in Amendment 81 that an academy should be a public authority for the purpose of the Equality Act. I regret that I do not have immediate information on the inclusion of independent schools. I hope that the noble Baroness will allow us to write to her on that issue.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I am very grateful and, in view of that assurance, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

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[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I have some sympathy with this amendment. Certainly, as regards independent schools, under the Charities Act a great deal of sharing of facilities is required. That is extremely effective. Academies will be very much in the same position. It would be interesting to know how this will work for them.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Greaves for his probing amendment and I am happy to provide the assurances that he seeks. Perhaps I may mention that the new Titus Salt School, the site of which he will know very well, has built a car park for its staff that is available for people who use Roberts Park at weekends. The noble Lord will know exactly where I am talking about.

The model funding agreement requires academies to be at the heart of their communities and to share their facilities with other schools and the wider community—for example, by making their sports facilities available for local groups to use. That will remain a requirement on academies. We therefore entirely agree with my noble friend that it is important for a school to be at the heart of its community and that it should, as far as possible, encourage the community to make use of school facilities in the evenings and at weekends. The place to impose obligations on an academy is through the academy arrangements—either the funding agreement or the terms and conditions of grant. We therefore resist the imposition of this in the Bill but entirely sympathise with the intentions of the amendment.

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[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Whitaker and I have stood shoulder to shoulder in campaigns for good design in recent years and I am happy to join her in the field tonight. It is too much, no doubt, to ask that the magnificent £50 billion Building Schools for the Future programme should be continued, but it is essential that design standards should not be dropped in the school building that does continue. Presumably that will mainly be the construction of academies. Do the Government intend still to provide some funding to support the creation of fine new academy buildings, as their predecessor did? Will the Government at least maintain minimum design standards?

This matters very much. Children and staff in schools, like everyone else, should work in a good built environment. The benefits of that for their morale, spirit and performance are marked. Good design is practical and works better. Well designed schools, like well designed hospitals, hospices, railway stations and magistrates’ courts, are statements about the values we hold as a society, our attachment to civic values and the public realm and our commitment to sustainability, an important point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. There are important symbolisms in good design.

Good design is an expression of national self respect. It is a manifestation of the respect we have for our community. There is a noble tradition of design of school buildings and it is one which we must not lose. Our Victorian and Edwardian forebears took it as axiomatic that a school should be a proud statement on behalf of the community in its design. The school building programme launched after the Second World War by Ellen Wilkinson, as Secretary of State, led to a commitment in a number of local education authorities to good design in a modern idiom. The schools designed in Hertfordshire for the local education authority by Stirrat Johnson-Marshall were celebrated. He was an architect who was described as,

“Socratic in manner of discussion and intolerant of formality in any guise”,

which, I think, means that he sought to find out what people thought, to elicit their best ideas and to develop his designs accordingly, as good architects do. Equally, later in Hampshire, the schools designed by Colin Stansfield Smith were celebrated, and the local education authorities which committed themselves to a programme of high-quality design in school building were strongly and admirably supported by the ministry’s architecture and buildings department.

More recently, under the previous Government, we had the Building Schools for the Future programme. I shall mention two schools that were jewels in that programme. The Mossbourne Academy in Hackney was built in an area known as “murder mile” because of the gangland killings there. It replaced Hackney Downs comprehensive, a school which had gone so far down in the world that the tabloids described it as the worst comprehensive in England. The school reopened in 2004 in buildings designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership. The first intake of the new school consisted of children, nearly half of whom were eligible for free school meals and 30 per cent had special educational needs. They took their GCSEs in 2009 and achieved some of the best state school results in the country. The Mossbourne Academy topped the league tables in value added. That was, above all, due to the leadership of Sir Michael Wilshaw and first-rate teaching by his colleagues, but design, they acknowledge, was also an important factor—as was the case at the Westminster Academy, which my noble friend and I visited earlier this year. There, the architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris were awarded the RIBA Sorrell Foundation Schools Award. This is an opportunity for this House to pay tribute to Sir John Sorrell and his wife Frances for their extraordinary generosity and creativity in their support through their foundation for good school design. The design of the Westminster Academy is beautiful and clever. As my noble friend said, the results in the new school soared by comparison with the results in the old school because pupils were treated with respect through design, and thus learnt to treat their school and neighbourhood with respect. The head teacher and her staff above all deserve the credit, but she insists that the quality and nature of the design of the school were crucial in making possible the curricular flexibility which, in turn, was key to the motivation and success of that school.

The Government want to impose the minimum bureaucratic burden on academies, and that is right. Good design cannot be promoted by regulation, but bad design can be averted. I hope that the Government will keep the minimum design standards that the DCSF pioneered in the public sector. I hope also that the Government will keep the engagement of CABE, which is not a quango to cull. It mobilises at negligible cost talented and expert people to illuminate and promote good practice in design. Here the leadership of Ministers is needed and, as elsewhere in education, leadership, aspiration and ambition are the magical ingredients. Only the best should be good enough for our schoolchildren, their teachers and the staff in our schools. We can afford the best. Good design costs no more than bad design. It is simply a matter of doing the job well. Indeed, good design costs less over the lifetime of the building.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am tempted to answer that lengthy catalogue of good schools in London and close to London by giving examples of schools in Yorkshire and outside the south-east, because often in this House and even more in the national media we tend to focus on what happens in London, not in the rest of the country. One thing which disturbed me in recent years was when I visited a school in Yorkshire which appeared to have been built for a 25-year lifespan. Its sustainability was not good. Also a prison was built for a 25-year lifespan. That is part of what is wrong with current thinking about public buildings as a whole. I also went to a school last year which had been built within the past 10 years and had almost no worthwhile roof insulation. Sustainable standards are not very good in many of the new schools that have been built under the BSF programme. So let us not kid ourselves that the previous Government left us with an unsullied legacy of well designed, highly sustainable buildings of comparable quality to those wonderful Victorian school buildings now being replaced.

I appreciate the thinking behind the amendment, and I am conscious that behind it are stories about charter schools in the United States being put up in warehouses. We had some friends visiting us from New York this weekend who talked about some of the problems that they have run into there with people starting schools in unsuitable buildings. Of course, we wish the premises of all schools to meet the needs of their pupils, including those with disabilities. We are well aware that the quality of the built environment of the schools in which they are educated does affect their outcomes. However, sufficient protections are already in place to ensure that children at academies are as fully protected as those at maintained schools. All schools, including maintained and independent schools, are required to comply with the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which include a requirement to prepare and implement accessibility plans. These provide for the implementation of improvements to the school premises to accommodate existing and future disabled pupils within a reasonable period. The 1995 Act will be revoked by the Equality Act 2010, but the requirement for all schools to prepare and implement accessibility plans is replicated in the new Act.

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[Lord Howarth of Newport]

Will the Minister confirm that the department will continue to keep in operation the minimum design standards that operate at present?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I have no reason to doubt that—and if I discover that it is not the case, I will of course write immediately to the noble Lord.

[The Earl of Listowel]

I interject briefly to seek reassurance on those minimum standards. I am reminded by this debate of a report some time ago about a head teacher of a new academy school that had been built without a playground. The head teacher reportedly said, “We don't need one, we will have them working very hard in school all day, thank you very much”. A paper presented to the British Psychological Society emphasised the value to children of having play breaks in the school day, and looked at how those play breaks had been squeezed over time. It would be reassuring to know that there is something in the minimum standards about a play area for children in every new school. If the Minister would write to me on that, I would appreciate it.