Academies Bill [HL]
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The Earl of Listowel
Briefly, I support this amendment. The Government recently expressed some horror at the number of prisoners we now have in our prisons. It made me reflect on how many inquiries have pointed to problems within our families. When one does not provide good boundaries within families and a secure upbringing for children, and when schools are quite chaotic, it does not surprise me that there is so much offending among young people or that we have overcrowded jails. It seems to me fairly apparent that if one does not set boundaries early in life, society is left setting boundaries later in life, at great expense to itself. Therefore, it is imperative to get all the right support for children early on. This is an important area. I look forward to the Minister’s reassurance that the early years foundation stage will be delivered in these schools.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, when I first joined the House of Lords, we did not receive any briefings on anything. That situation has been transformed in the 15 years I have been here so that now, on a Bill such as this, we are deluged with briefings, which are often extremely useful.
On behalf of the Minister and the department, I apologise for unreturned phone calls. I offer, if it is helpful, a meeting with the Minister and officials to discuss this question further. On the specific issue, I reassure the noble Baroness that all schools providing for under-threes’ education are required under the Childcare Act to register with Ofsted and to deliver the early years foundation stage. This includes independent schools and therefore also includes academies. Section 40 sets out the duty to deliver the early years foundation stage. That is the key element. This already applies to academies in the same way as it does to other schools.
Reference has already been made to the review to be carried out by Dame Clare Tickell, chief executive of Action for Children, which will report to my honourable friend Sarah Teather in spring 2011. The review will be open and will look at the foundations that should be in place to protect young children’s welfare and support their development and learning. It will also consider throughout how to reduce burdens on providers as the experience of the past three years is that the requirements of the early years foundation stage have increased the workload on many of those who work with young children, and so taken time away from children. We do not intend a fundamental change but we do intend to review the way in which the Act works in practice. I hope that that is sufficient assurance. I again apologise if phone calls have not been returned. With those assurances, I hope that my noble friend will feel able to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
I thank the Minister for his reply and the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, for her support. The noble Lord says that academies will have to deliver the early years foundation stage. However, it does not say that in the Bill. The difficulty has arisen because of uncertainty about the independent status—or not—of academies. According to independent schools, the definition of “independent” is a school that is inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate. However, that does not apply to the schools that we are discussing. Nevertheless, the Minister could not have been clearer on that matter. I suspect that the Early Childhood Forum will very much welcome a meeting with officials to set its mind totally at rest. It will probably be satisfied with the clarity of the Minister’s reply, but I think that it will take advantage of the invitation anyway. I wait to hear what it says to me when that meeting has taken place. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I remind the House that we are on Report and we need to be careful not to repeat in too much detail arguments which have already been made in Committee. We are intended to deal with new points and those that require further elucidation, not to go over points that we discussed in Committee.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
I rise to speak to Amendment 17A in my name and those of my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Garden. I entirely share the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, in relation to not being too prescriptive. We also very much share her view that school governors should represent the community that the school serves. In that respect, it is very important that parents, in particular, are represented. She said that only one parent was elected. However, in academies, the parent governor is currently appointed, not elected, and that is an important point.
I declare an interest. I am both a governor of a small primary school in Guildford and a member of the corporation—effectively a governor—of Guildford College, so I am actively a governor of schools at the moment.
Amendment 17A is different from the amendment put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, in three respects. First, rather than prescribe a percentage, we are suggesting specific numbers—a minimum of three and a maximum of seven parents, although obviously the figure will vary according to the size of the governing body, which itself will vary according to the size of the school. There has to be considerable flexibility here. Secondly, we are anxious to see representation from staff, including support staff, as well as from parents. Lastly, we also want to see representation from the local community, and what better way to do that than to have a representative from the local authority? In all three senses, we feel it is important that there should be representation of the community that is served by the school. Therefore, we thoroughly endorse the sentiments put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, although we have put a slightly different slant on it.
Academies Bill [HL]
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Lord Whitty
This amendment should be fairly straightforward. In a sense, I am on the same page as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, was at the very beginning of proceedings today. It appears slightly odd that we should propose amendments that require schools to obey the law, but life is more complicated than one would think. The point of my amendment is to clarify that, for the purposes of the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act, academies are regarded as public authorities. This is important in both contexts. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, got an assurance in fairly unequivocal terms on the Human Rights Act, and I should like an equivalent assurance, at least, on the Equality Act. I am proposing this in the hope that the Minister will be disposed, if not to accept the amendment, at least to give me a statement that meets the points of the amendment.
Notwithstanding what was said about governing bodies just before the break—and the Minister and others will know that I am not entirely well disposed towards this Bill in principle—I and, I think, most people in this House, would accept that the majority of governing bodies and managements of academy schools that come through this process will operate within the mainstream of educational approach and activity. Nevertheless, it is possible and, at the edges, probable, that the process of establishing academies—and even more so free schools, which will eventually be subject to the same provisions—can lead to governing bodies that are outside of the mainstream. I put that as delicately as possible. There are particular subsets of parents who have particular views on education; particular faith groups will have views on matters of gender and sexuality that are not the normal approach that would be guaranteed if the organisation were subject to the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act. We have to bear in mind that, whatever safeguards we build in, such minorities could qualify to establish a school under that process. Alternatively, it could be that the management of the school is proved to be so lax that, whatever the ethos of the governing body, it is not properly observed. I should therefore like it clarified that the requirements under the Equality Act and Human Rights Act that apply to public authorities will apply to academies, despite their slightly ambiguous position. If the Minister can give me that assurance, we can move on to the next amendment.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we are happy to confirm, as I thought that we had in Committee, that the Government accept that academies are public authorities for the purposes of the Human Rights Act 1998. We welcome the noble Lord’s intention of ensuring that; we will, as we said in Committee, ensure that academies are included in Schedule 19 to the Equality Act 2010. As the noble Lord will know, academies as independent educational institutions will be required to comply with all the duties in the Act that apply to schools more generally with respect to non-discrimination, reasonable adjustments for disabilities and the like, including gender issues. Academies are not currently included in Schedule 19, but the schedule will be updated before the duties come into force in 2011 and academies will be included in time for that commencement. Therefore, by the time those duties are implemented, it will be clear that an academy is a public authority for the purposes of the Equality Act.
With that clear reassurance, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the noble Lord is in the 15th minute of a speech on Report, which is a little long.
Lord Whitty
I accept that it is a little long, although I did warn the House, but it is actually only the 12th minute and this is an education Bill. I beg to move.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I agree with the thrust of what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has said. He referred back—as did the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath—to our debate on the necessary expensive services to children with special educational needs and the need for a strategic commissioning of such services. There could be an important role for local authorities in that area in future. Like the noble Lord, I would encourage the Minister to set up some kind of forum with the local authority so that there is an ongoing communication with it. Each local authority will have a councillor responsible for the welfare of children within its area; why could there not be informal meetings in which new academies are introduced to such people? This would enable the doors of communication to be kept open?
As my noble friend Lady Howarth made clear, if we want children to succeed at school, we need to make sure that their welfare is catered for. It is important that social services work in partnership with schools. I am sorry to repeat it one more time, but head teachers keep on telling me about the value of social workers when they are connected with a school; or, if they do not have a social worker, how much they would like one attached to their school. It is important to keep these matters in mind and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for making this debate possible.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the debate in Committee underlined the importance which many noble Lords attach to the role of local authorities. There are some very important questions here and we do not pretend to have all of the answers. Both parties within the coalition are committed to the principle of localism, with decisions and accountability returned from London to local communities. We are clear that we no longer want to hear the Secretary of State for Education—as happened under the previous Secretary of State—announcing on the “Today” programme that he had just dismissed a head teacher in Carlisle. However, it would be only honest to admit that neither party in the coalition is yet clear what localism means in detail, in this sector and others, and what the balance between the role of local authorities and of more local communities, including parents and others, should be.
In his letter to council lead members sent on 26 May, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for education made it clear that the Government see strong local authorities as central to their plans to improve education. This Thursday, the Secretary of State will be speaking on this theme to the Local Government Association conference. He will confirm that we want to see local authorities acting as powerful champions of excellence, both in education and in wider children’s services, and that we want to see local government playing a strong strategic role, working with schools to drive up standards, supporting schools in working together to share expertise, and in promoting the spread of innovation for the benefit of all.
We want to see a smooth transition to the new school system and we are pursuing a genuine dialogue with local government and other partners to that end. We will therefore pursue further dialogue with representatives of local government about these and related issues over the coming weeks and months. It may be, as my noble friend Lord Greaves suggested, that the local authority develops more of a commissioning role along the lines envisioned by the party opposite in its 2005 White Paper. It may also be that some of the other ideas that he alludes to in his amendment should be explored further as part of the future shape of provision and the relationship between local authorities and schools. I assure my noble friend that the Secretary of State is committed to this dialogue; he will be pursuing it further on Thursday and will make a number of proposals as to how it should be taken further in the next weeks and months. I invite my noble friend Lord Greaves, with his considerable expertise in this field, and other noble Lords who have expressed interest, to help shape our thinking in this area so that we can, in time, come forward with the best possible proposals. On that basis, I urge my noble friend to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
My Lords, I am delighted to support my noble friend's amendment. It may be late, but the contribution that support staff make to our country’s schools is worthy of significant attention. In Committee, I and the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, reminded noble Lords of the important role of support staff, and I am delighted to support my noble friend's analysis of the challenges that they face with a major expansion of the academies programme. This amendment provides a framework that is markedly different from the national negotiating body that the Minister referred to in Committee. When one looks at the contribution that the 123,000 new classroom assistants have made across the school system, it is important that we take all possible steps to maintain stability in the workforce. A framework such as this would contribute to that. In the past, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, eloquently said, support staff have been undervalued, and we should put in the work to create a new school support staff negotiating body. A lot of work and thought has gone into defining the roles and contribution that the staff make, and this could be a great support, particularly to small academies such as the primary academies that some noble Lords have been concerned to promote. I hope that the Minister will support this approach.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, will forgive me if at this late stage I do not read out the whole of the 15-page brief that I have been given in reply. We are all conscious of the importance of support staff. From the anecdotal evidence that I have picked up both in Yorkshire and London, many classroom assistants and support staff working in maintained schools are working for remarkably low pay on part-time contracts that do not include lunch. Therefore, this is not simply a question about the transfer to academies: there is a broader question of how we all value the very useful contribution that they make. Having said that, and underlined the fact that it is not just a question of the conditions of support staff in schools that convert to academies, but that the problem exists across the board, I also emphasise that academies are intended to have freedoms over staff pay and conditions. That is precisely the point of freeing academies from the deeply complex, embedded structures of maintained schools across the country. Freedom in relation to pay and conditions has been a core freedom since the academies programme started under the previous Government, and indeed that was part of the reason why the previous Government set it up. It enables academies to establish pay and conditions which reflect their approach to the school day and to attract and appropriately reward innovative school leaders and practitioners.
As academies recruit good support staff, I urge them to value them as well, and perhaps to value them more than some maintained schools under local authority control do at present. Having said that, at this early hour, as it has just become, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Academies Bill [HL]
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Baroness Perry of Southwark
If I might add another voice from the Back Benches: to try to guarantee to every parent that their child will have an ideally good school—what a wonderful thought that would be. People have been trying ever since the end of the Second World War to provide a good school for every child; successive Governments have not succeeded in doing so. There are still an awful lot of schools which fail an awful lot of children, so to try to put into legislation a promise to parents that they will have a good school for their child is really an absurd suggestion.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, when my children were at primary school I recall the primary head teacher telling me with great joy one day that there had been a very large package delivered in the school playground. They were not sure where it came from and had asked the police to inspect it. They had indeed blown it up; it was 400 pages of further instructions from the Department for Education. Of course, we agree with many of the aspirations set out in the proposed new schedule but, as the noble Baroness will have heard from behind the Front Bench, we are committed to giving schools more freedoms to get on with the job, with fewer detailed instructions taking less time away from teachers for teaching. What she is suggesting is very much the kind of approach that we want to move away from.
As my noble friend Baroness Walmsley and others have said, writing things down on paper and spending a long time negotiating them does not necessarily make them happen. We therefore share the aspirations but not the method. For most of us on this side of the Committee, part of what was wrong with education policy under the previous Government was the overdetailed instructions and prescriptions to schools, which we all know that teachers grew intensely to dislike. The aim of this Bill and of the Bills which will follow it—a larger Bill is promised for this autumn—is to free teachers to talk with parents and deal with pupils, and not to spend an immense amount of time with pieces of paper and negotiations. I therefore urge the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
My Lords, of course I listened with great interest to the noble Lord’s contribution. The pupil and parent guarantees were actually about empowering parents and pupils so that they can ensure that, in partnership with their schools and their local authority or academy trust, they can get the things that they need for their children. It is about looking at the education service that this country provides from a bottom-up perspective—looking at it from the point of view of the parent and child and of what goes on in the classroom. If we think back to Second Reading, how chastened might the coalition Government perhaps have felt when my noble friend Lady Morris criticised them for focusing so much on structure? Here we have a chance for them, just for a moment, to think about one-to-one tuition, for example. What has happened to one-to-one tuition? We have gone from a situation where the Government were committed to guaranteeing it in statute, with a process through local government—
The Earl of Listowel
Again, I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, has said. As far as I know, the best performing country, Finland, does not have league tables but relies on excellent teachers and trusts them to make the right decisions for children. As I recall, Finland also does not have exclusions, but has smaller, very mixed-ability classes.
Two things come to mind in this debate. The two amendments in the group are well related. There is the danger with academies that they will not be so well supported by, for instance, the good approach of having a child psychotherapist working regularly with teachers to talk about particular problematic children. That is a good approach, but it is easy to think that it is too expensive and a bit of a luxury and that an easier option would be to move a difficult child somewhere else. I have sympathy with both sides of the argument. Given that these things are already established, I would prefer to keep the status quo, because league tables have a perverse influence. I look forward to the Minister’s response. If he could say a little more about the plans for league tables and how they will be improved, that would be helpful.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Lucas said, this is a long-running problem. What we have heard from all around the Chamber this evening is that this matter concerns us all, across the parties, and that none of us is entirely sure that we have the complete and final answer. We are all aware that the early academies had an unusually high rate of exclusions. That was partly because they were going into the toughest areas and trying to reimpose discipline in schools that had lost control—there were special circumstances. I am happy to say that the figures have now come down.
We are also all aware that league tables have had a perverse effect not only on academies. I am well aware of one or two secondary schools in my part of Yorkshire of which it has been said that they have tried to avoid taking on difficult children from difficult areas precisely because of the impact that they knew it would have on their standing in league tables. I am afraid that I am unable to say anything specific about our plans on league tables; we will have to write to the noble Earl. As he will know, the question of how one can shape league tables to recognise the starting point as well as the output is being discussed, again across the parties and across the expert community, because it is recognised that league tables have had a perverse effect. We are engaged on this.
I will also say that these amendments were correctly grouped, because difficult children are often defined in all sorts of ways. I know little about the problems of educating children with autism, which is a low-incidence disability and special need. That also, in a sense, makes it easier for a school to say, “Let’s exclude that child. Let that child go somewhere else”. Therefore, there is an overlap. Children can be seen as difficult in a number of different ways.
On Amendment 72, I emphasise that academies are already required, through their funding arrangements, to take their fair share of challenging pupils through their involvement in local in-year fair access protocols. This will continue to be the case for all new academies, so they do not get out of this obligation. They should be free to co-operate with local partners in managing exclusions but, again, there is a question for the coalition of how one writes that down and in how much detail. The previous Labour Government were always in favour of prescribing everything in the most minute detail—usually twice a year, each time the name of the department or the Secretary of State changed. This, as the noble Baroness will of course admit, is a different approach.
Academies are regulated by their funding agreements, which require that they act in accordance with the law on exclusions as though the academy were a maintained school and that they have regard to the Secretary of State’s guidance on exclusions, including in relation to any appeals process. I hope that that provides assurance that academies have to follow the law on exclusions in the same way as maintained schools.
I turn to the subject of low-incidence disabilities. We recognise that this is a continuing problem, especially where there are only a very small number of young people in a district with those particular needs. Again, partnerships among schools will clearly be the best way forward.
Academies’ funding for SEN is paid on a formula basis by the Young People’s Learning Agency. If a pupil with one of the different forms of low-incidence SEN attracts individually assigned resources as a top-up to the formula funding, the local authority will pay this from its schools budget and will continue to be responsible for monitoring the provision. If the academy fails to secure such provision, it will be in breach of its funding agreement and the YPLA can ultimately investigate following a complaint. Therefore, measures are already in train. I am not saying that they will entirely resolve the problem, just as under the previous Government a number of other measures did not entirely resolve the problem. We all recognise that this is one of the most difficult issues in education in England and we will all need to continue to monitor and to work with others—
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
Can the Minister explain how this will be monitored? He said that, if it is a low-incidence special educational need, the YPLA will be responsible for paying an extra premium in respect of that need. However, the YPLA is a payment agency, not an inspection agency. How will it monitor matters to ensure that needs are met in an academy?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I am not sure that I can provide an instant answer on that. Particularly in relation to low-incidence disabilities, whether it is to do with deaf or autistic children or those with other needs, a specialist voluntary organisation will often also be doing its best to monitor the situation. Therefore, when I say “following a complaint”, very often the relevant specialist society will be doing its best to support the pupil and will make sure that the YPLA and the local authority are informed and concerned if the need falls short. However, we are looking to develop partnerships among schools. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, went a good deal wider than this and spoke about young people in care going beyond the education sector to the other local agencies that deal with difficult young people. That is the way in which we have to go forward. On that basis of reassurance, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Morgan of Drefelin
My Lords, on this occasion and given the hour, I have set aside my 2,000-word speech. I shall think carefully about what the Minister has said. I, too, was concerned by the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, and the idea that we can just leave the matter to trust. We know that, of the academies that exist, a very large number—I do not have the exact number to hand—currently take part in behaviour partnerships and they work. However, it is the ones that do not do so that I am worried about.
I shall read the report of the debate. It has been a good discussion and helpful in clarifying for me the Government’s position. I was concerned to hear the arguments put forward by my noble friend Lady Wilkins and was interested in the noble Lord’s response. However, again, we come down to the academy agreement. When we are talking about a change from the number of academies being in the hundreds to potentially all schools in the country being academies, we have to think much more ambitiously about how we can make these partnerships work.
Academies Bill [HL]
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Academies Bill [HL]
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Lord Northbourne
My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 20, 42, 44, 62 and 71. They are probing amendments, designed to ascertain what the Government are really planning or, if they are not planning anything, to try to encourage them to do so.
The amendments relate to special educational needs in the context of emotional and behavioural disadvantage, because the needs of EBD children are in some ways very different from those of many other SEN children. I shall change the mood, I hope, of the debate by asking whether academies could not be a positive force for good in the provision of help for these disadvantaged children.
Let us not delude ourselves: local authorities are in charge at the moment and it is not going wonderfully well. As we sit here today, there are nearly 1 million young people in this country who are not in education, employment or training—the so-called NEETs. That is about 10 per cent of the total population of 16 to 18 year-olds. I see this group of young people as a challenge and possibly a great opportunity for the new academies. But if the academies are to tackle this challenge, they must have the freedom and the power to address it effectively. I will quote from three recent reports that confirm the nature and the urgency of this problem.
Action for Children’s report earlier this year referred to the overriding importance of intervening as early as we can to support our most vulnerable children and their families. It states:
“The deprivation these families experience is deeper and more complex than poverty alone, and the belief at the heart of this work is therefore that fiscal help alone will not stop their problems from being passed on through the generations”.
The report goes on:
“Where there are multiple risk factors, the evidence is that deprivation is passed down from one generation to the next … This is often seen in the way relationships develop: children are defiant, blamed by parents and disliked by siblings. They are unpopular at school and get into fights or suffer bullying. Low self-esteem is exacerbated. They do badly at school, become involved in crime and drugs, and by the time they are 17 are on their way to becoming a career criminal. This may seem dramatic, but it is a recognised journey that too many of our children have travelled”.
In the Times last week, Kathryn Ecclestone, Professor of Education and Social Inclusion at the University of Birmingham said:
“There is broad agreement that Britain faces a crisis of mental ill health and poor emotional wellbeing, especially among children … Growing numbers of policymakers and teachers believe that emotional wellbeing is more important than reading, writing and numeracy. The Government’s social and emotional aspects of learning strategy asserts that we cannot leave the “skills” of emotional literacy and wellbeing to “dysfunctional” families”.
I have one final quote. The Centre for Social Justice Green Paper dated 10 January 2010 states:
“Stable … families are at the heart of strong societies … The absence of a stable, nurturing family environment has a profoundly damaging impact on the individual, often leading to behaviour which is profoundly damaging to society. Family breakdown is particularly acute in our most deprived communities. In these areas the concept of society is, for many, alien; whole communities are socially excluded from the mainstream. It is in these areas that we witness the highest levels of worklessness … and offending. If we are to create a fairer, more socially mobile society then we must invest in strengthening families”.
These reports all focus on the needs of children from severely disadvantaged, hard-to-reach, chaotic, inadequate families. Such children present a specific educational problem. If we could get this Bill right, it could bring new hope for many of those children and those families who, through no fault of their own, cannot provide their children with the long-term security, love, hope and boundaries that they need.
President Roosevelt said in the 1930s that it was a wicked thing to destroy a man’s hope, but it is a wicked thing to allow children to grow up without hope. Many of these children end up being statemented as having emotional and behavioural difficulties and often drop out of education altogether. They tend to be lacking in self-confidence, insecure, aggressive, quick to anger and deeply unhappy. It is with this group of children that I have had the privilege of working as a governor of an EBD school and for 16 years in the context of youth programmes at Toynbee Hall in Tower Hamlets. These children, whose families have failed them, comprise a socially and emotionally damaged underclass of which our society should be ashamed. My amendments intend to probe the Government's intentions in relation to the freedom of these academies to innovate in the best interests of their pupils.
I have just one or two questions for the Minister. Giving power to parents to choose may well be a way in which to improve the standard of schools, but what happens to those children whose parents are neither able nor willing to support their children, or who are not concerned, or who do not know how to do so? Who will fight for them? Secondly, with the children in this group the damage has usually been caused in the family long before the child reaches school—even primary school. Will the new academies have the power and resources to reach out and support parents of pupils in school as well as supporting, in the child’s early years, the parents of children who may later become pupils at the school? The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, asked that question earlier this evening. I assure the Committee that it is possible to help such parents. I know of two charities already doing excellent work in this area. Family Links, based in Oxford, last year helped some 80,000 parents. School Home Support, based in London, supported about 19,000 families and children last year. Will the proposed academies be able to undertake such work, whether through an associated primary school, a children’s centre or whatever?
Thirdly, will the new academies be able to deliver an innovative curriculum based on their pupils’ needs, which are pre-eminently to develop self-confidence and emotional intelligence as well as age-appropriate interpersonal skills. Could the academies do that, even if it involved omitting many of the academic subjects in the national curriculum? For this category of children, it is essential that they should have some opportunity for hope and success. If they are put neck and neck against children of much greater intellectual ability, it is very destructive.
The Government propose to allow a selection of pupils for special schools that become academies, if such a selection is in the best interests of the pupil. The question that I am going to ask now is controversial. Why do they not allow selection in other academies if it can be shown that such selection would be in the best interests of the pupil?
Finally, who will be in charge under this academy system for the well-being of each child? Will it be the social services, the academy or some combination of the two? I beg to move.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his amendments. His questions have ranged very widely and well beyond the question of academies. Sure Start, nursery education and the pupil premium are all part of a strategy to deal with the problems that he raises. As we all know, the problems that he raises take us way beyond what the education sector in itself can deal with. We have been discussing those with special educational needs across a range of amendments already and have stressed that academies will serve local children of differing abilities, as now. The only exception will be outstanding converting grammar schools, which will be expected to partner weaker local schools. There will be no increase in the number of schools selecting by academic ability, including free schools and converting independent schools. We are offering additional freedoms to academies in a number of areas, including the curriculum, but those freedoms are underscored by a requirement that ensures parity with maintained schools in relation to admissions, exclusions and SEN. That means that Amendment 19 is, I suggest, unnecessary. The requirement to make provision for pupils with SEN effectively includes a requirement to make provision for prospective pupils with SEN.
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I did not hear my noble friend answer the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, about the curriculum. These children have broken free from the ordinary structure of education and need to be reconnected with it. That process of reconnecting with it is in no way aligned with the idea of a curriculum based on English, maths or other academic subjects. You have to hook them on something to which they relate and then you can bring them back to academic work or whatever else is necessary to build their career. You have to be able to let go everything that they have rejected about the school and find another way into their psyche.
I am sure that my wife, who spends a lot of her time working with these people when they reach prison, would endorse that. She uses family ties because by the time most of these kids reach prison they have a family of their own. They probably do not know their father and do not have much contact with their mother, but they have children and they can be made to reconnect with them or with the remnants of their family. That can give them the motivation to get back into what you might call school work. But to contaminate that process with school work risks the whole process; you have to be able to adapt what you are teaching to the needs of these children.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we are indeed talking about something that goes wider than academies themselves. I visited a secondary school in Bradford some months ago and found that all these issues were raised in the local community. People were concerned that, in pursuing league tables, schools in the area did not do their best to push the difficult pupils off on one another, so as to up their game in the league tables. We are all conscious that this is a long-term problem and one that we shall have to continue to grasp as we move towards establishing more academies.
As regards the curriculum, children’s statements will specify the provision required to meet each child’s needs. This will include the curriculum requirement and whatever else is needed to meet emotional and behavioural needs. Academies will have greater flexibility in relation to the curriculum. That is part of what is intended. Academies will be encouraged to work with other local services, both public and third sector, to cope with these sorts of problems. As the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, remarked, this issue has been with us for several generations and it will not go away very quickly. We must do our utmost to ensure that the schools we are trying to develop pick up these children and give them the help that they need. The greater curriculum flexibility that the academies can provide may help in this respect.
Lord Northbourne
I am most grateful to the noble Lord. I shall, of course, read what he has said in more detail. However, I wish to make one or two small points. I think that he referred to what I was saying as not being part of education. Education is the fundamental development of the child.
Lord Northbourne
I accept that. I do not know whether the noble Lord has ever tried to get a statement, but I have friends who have had to get statements for disabled children who they have adopted. It is unbelievably difficult to get a statement out of the local authority. You have to be prepared to fight and fight. I support the Government. Let us look at this as an opportunity because, quite honestly, some local authorities are not doing terribly well. Some are doing well, but quite a lot are not, so let us recruit the academy movement into trying to solve some of these problems. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Rix
My Lords, I should like to take this opportunity to say how much I welcome the fact that the Bill requires mainstream academies to have characteristics which include teaching a balanced and broadly based curriculum, and provide education for pupils of different abilities. I trust that that includes pupils with a learning disability. However, I am concerned that the Bill does not appear to place a similar requirement on special schools converting to academy status. It is important to emphasise that a similar requirement is in place for special schools which become academies and ensure that they offer all children with SEN and disabilities a full and ambitious curriculum, including those working well below age-related expectations. Can the Minister guarantee that outstanding schools granted academy status also provide outstanding quality for all children, including those with special educational needs and disabilities. I beg to move.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, it is very difficult to guarantee that every school would be outstanding. That is one of the problems with statistics. The amendment in some ways seeks to go in the opposite direction from the intent of some of the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, in that it seeks to impose some restrictions on academies in terms of the curriculum that they offer.
We appreciate the noble Lord’s aim to get some security over the curriculum for pupils with special educational needs, but, as I said in answer to the previous group of amendments, for children with statements of special educational needs, the curriculum should be tailored specifically to meet their particular needs and curriculum requirements, as set out in their statements of special educational needs. We believe for children with SEN with statements this is the appropriate way to specify what they need in terms of teaching. Where a child requires a broad and balanced curriculum, I am advised that that will be specified in their statement, that the school will have to provide it, and that the amendment is therefore unnecessary. I hope that that satisfies the noble Lord. I recognise his deep concerns on this and the expertise on which he draws, but I nevertheless invite him to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Rix
My Lords, I cannot believe that I was placing restrictions in this amendment. I believe that I was trying to ensure that the teaching for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities would be of the highest quality and of the broadest possible range. However, I will take the noble Lord’s answer back to the Special Educational Consortium, which acts as my consultants on this, and I may return to this matter on Report. I hope that it is satisfied with his response. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Free Schools Policy
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Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, I welcome the Minister to his post. Can he be more specific on the issue of the creation of surplus places by the development of one of these free schools? I still bear the scars from dealing—in Lancashire County Council many years ago—with the issue of surplus places. It is no good saying that there will be the same per capita per pupil for existing schools, because if there are surplus places, the per capita will have to go up to protect the curriculum.
Can the Minister also be a little more forthcoming about the relationship between the teachers, who he says have very good motives in setting up these schools, and potential conflicts with parents? Major parts of special educational needs in our schools are to do with behavioural problems. In my long experience of governing bodies where parents served, the parents would quite frequently wish to exclude the children with behavioural problems. This could totally wipe out the aims of the teachers whom he has described.
Queen’s Speech
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Lord Baker of Dorking
My Lords, it is a great pleasure for me to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hall, on his maiden speech. We go back a long way together. He had the unenviable task in the Thatcher years for being responsible for the news services in the BBC when Denis Thatcher felt that the BBC was a bunch of pinkos. When I became Home Secretary, he was the director of news, and I was able to see the scrupulous way in which he ensured a fair balance in the presentation of news. After that, he became the director of Covent Garden. If you think that the BBC is a nest of prima donnas and vipers, the opera world is a swamp. It is due to his calm governance of the opera house over the past few years that it has been very successful not only artistically but financially. He reminded us that having been involved with the BBC and the opera house, he is a master of subsidy. Now that subsidies are to be slashed by this Government—I trust and expect—he will have ample opportunity to speak in our House on these matters in the coming months.
I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Hill. We, too, go back a long way—back before he became the head of John Major’s think tank at No. 10. I am glad to tell your Lordships that he has always been passionately interested in education. Not only was his mother a teacher, he has a daughter at university—this Government are full of Ministers who look much younger than they are—so he is engagé as a parent in education. I am particularly glad that he is attached to a department: he is a Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Department for Education; he is not a floater. That means that we will have his full attention on education, which is to be welcomed.
I should declare two interests. I am the chairman of the Edge Foundation, which is the largest charity in the country devoted to practical and vocational education, and of the Baker Dearing Trust, which promotes university technical colleges. I receive, of course, no remuneration from either charity.
I refer the House to the statement made by David Cameron and Nick Clegg on 20 May, which set out the programme for this coalition. It included this sentence:
“We will improve the quality of vocational education, including increasing flexibility to 14-19 year olds and creating new Technical Academies as part of our plans to diversify schools provision”.
I welcome this enormous endorsement for the colleges that Ron Dearing, before he died, and I have been promoting for the past three years: university technical colleges. When we met three years ago, Ron was alive. We decided that the one thing missing from the education system in England was technical schools. We had them in the 1950s and 1960s, but they were closed and became comprehensives. They were closed because people thought they involved dirty jobs and greasy rags and everybody wanted to be the school on the hill, so they fell victim to English snobbery. Germany did not make that mistake; it kept its technical schools and that is one of the reasons why Germany is still a great industrial nation. The latest report states that German technical schools are now more popular than German grammar schools.
We wanted to reinvent them in different ways. Why did we want to reinvent them? The CBI has just produced a report stating that 42 per cent of employers want our education system to provide high quality vocational options. Why do they want that? Because 77 per cent of employers in manufacturing say that they cannot employ people with higher skills. It is our history. Over the weekend, I dipped into Correlli Barnett’s book The Audit of War to remind myself about the history of radar. Radar was invented in the mid-1930s by Watson-Watt and by Professor Cockcroft and Professor Lindermann at the Cavendish and Clarendon laboratories, but we could not put it on enough planes, boats or airfields in the 1940s. HMS “Coventry” was sunk in 1942 for lack of radar. Radar was invented in 1939 for introduction in 1941. There were eventually 200 handmade sets in 1943. We should learn from history—it is the same with Afghanistan. We have not learnt from history. It is the lack of a technical force backing up our engineering graduates and our inventiveness. If you talk to engineering bodies, they say that we are producing enough engineering graduates, but the trouble is that graduates have to deskill in order to do technicians’ jobs because the technicians are not there. If we are going to have nuclear power stations, high-speed rail links, broadband and a green economy producing jobs, we need technicians.
University technical colleges are different from technical schools in two important ways. They are for 14 to 19 year-olds. Fourteen is a much better age to select children for skilled education than 11, which is too early. Ironically, when the Board of Education met in 1941 to decide the pattern of education after the war, it said that 13 or 14 should be the age of selection, but we chose 11, and it was a mistake. At 14, children select themselves. They know what they want to do. That is the first important difference. The second is that universities back university technical colleges, which means that their status is elevated for students and their parents.
We have three off the ground already. Aston will open in 2012, Walsall, in the Black Country, will open next year because it is converting an old school, and Greenwich was approved just before the election. The private JCB Academy will also open this year. It wants to be a UTC with 500 pupils. At these schools, youngsters will start at 8.30 am with a hammer, a saw, a drill or some welding equipment in their hands and acquire skills. In the afternoon, they will do English, maths, Science and IT for GCSE. The important thing is that the mind and the hand are trained under the same roof. The previous Government tried to make diplomas work. They got off to a poor start. In a comprehensive school, youngsters doing diplomas have to do three days in school and then take a bus to the local college. On the fourth day, they go either to school or to college. It is no way to do it. The previous Government were right to identify the 14 to 19 curriculum, but it requires 14 to 19 institutions.
I am glad to say that these schools count as academies. The pattern is this: Balls said he wanted five; Michael Gove, before the election, said 12; the team that I put together is now handling 23 applications, and I hope that in the course of this Parliament at least 100 of them will be established. They will begin to transform education in our country because our comprehensives are full of youngsters who at the age of 14 want to follow not an academic course but a course that gives them high quality skills. These colleges will do that.
They have the support of all parties in the House including, I am glad to say, the members of our coalition—I see the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, is smiling. I persuaded David Laws to support it, so I am sorry he has left the Government, but there we are. I hope that the Government will embrace these colleges. I am due to meet the Minister and the Secretary of State. We want a strong commitment to these colleges and for some of the money that is going to academies to go to these colleges. They will be an enormous contribution to the education system of our country.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, as indicated on today’s list, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, will repeat a Statement at a convenient point after 12.30 pm. This may be a convenient point. The debate on the Address will resume after the Statement.