Education Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Tuesday 14th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

My Lords, I am grateful at this late stage to be following two such good speeches, because I have a great deal of sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Willis, and the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, have said.

The Minister may recall from the debate on the Academies Act that I am somewhat opposed to the general direction of government educational policy—in particular the writing out of local authorities from their oversight of education. That is not to say that I believe that local authorities did a fantastic job, but I do believe that that is the point where there is democratic and community oversight of what is happening to our future generations. In particular, it is the failsafe and the default protection of the kind of kids to which the noble Lord, Lord Willis, was referring, and the protection from the kind of community segregation to which the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, was referring. Indeed, I have another example. In terms of educational attainment, the schools of Northern Ireland are actually pretty good; in terms of their contribution to community cohesion, they are absolutely a cause of many of the problems of the last 100 years. Some of the roads we are going down in terms of the autonomy of schools’ decisions on admission policy are moving in that direction. It may not be dramatic but it is the logical conclusion.

That does mean that I have severe hesitations about the principle of academies opting out of local authority oversight. I did with the last Government, I do with this Government. I have retreated to what is probably a more defensible line on that: I recognise academies are going to happen. However, I am still not clear whether the Government’s policy is for a significant number of academies with the resources and protection and so on that could lead to a two-tier structure—which is what I was worried about during the Academies Bill—or whether their aim is that every school should be an academy and therefore that every school should have opted out from local authority control. The consequences of that objective seem to be in the area of lack of community cohesion, serious segregation by catchment area and by admissions policy, and a downgrading of the support functions in relation to special needs and to other functions that are essential for the more disadvantaged pupils.

On academies, the Minister referred to a “critical role” for local authorities, but in practice he is writing out any significant role for local authorities from this whole approach, and that I still deplore. Instead we are getting a system in the name of devolution and of localism but which is actually about centralisation—centralisation of funding and to some extent centralisation of control of what goes into schools—by and large not to independent regulators or independent bodies but to the Secretary of State. That is extremely dangerous and probably ultimately unworkable. The Government should rethink and redress the balance in favour of a strong local authority participation.

I said I had retreated a bit. My main complaint tonight is actually about free schools. Free schools are taking even the Government’s philosophy one stage too far. An article in the Observer at the weekend indicated exactly those areas where free schools were going to be established. They were in areas of very high average income and very articulate parents and they are likely to take resources and intake away from primary and secondary schools in their area. I asked a Written Question of the Minister the other week about catchment areas. He referred me to a website—there used to be a time when you were not allowed to refer to websites but now you are. I fought my way through all the websites to the final guidance, which was pretty uninformative but said effectively that the school could decide on its catchment area. I am aware of some propositions for free schools that refer to primary school feeder schools and they have excluded the most deprived primary schools from that definition of their catchment area. That is a very dangerous proposition and one on which the local authority ought to be in a position to intervene, even if we allow the principle of free schools. I am very unhappy about the free schools provision.

I will not say more about that now but I will no doubt return to it and indeed to the consultation process on academies. Noble Lords who are veterans of these debates will know—the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, in particular—that it took us some time to get any recognition of consultation procedures in the Academies Act. I do not think that the changes in Clause 55 of this Bill take us much further down the line but we need to tighten that up as well and I will return to it.

I wish briefly to make two other points. My noble friend Lord Puttnam has said quite a lot about the GTC. I find it very odd that in this country the one profession that guarantees, or does not guarantee, the future generation does not have a professional register or inculcate professional standards and, for example, allows for free schools not to employ qualified teachers. That is a downgrading of the teaching profession, whereas the lesson of the past few years is that we must upgrade the whole status of the profession in terms of competence.

My final point relates not to teachers but to the rest of the staff. The abolition of the support staff negotiating body seems to be an unnecessary act of spite. The body had not got round to setting standards in this area but it recognised that there was a real problem regarding those who support, and provide increasingly important support for, the teaching staff. One danger of the autonomy of schools is that, with the abolition of that body and with the freedoms that we are giving academies, those schools will be able to cream off the best teachers, paying them the better salaries and offering them the better terms and conditions. At the same time, they will be able to pay the lowest salaries and offer the worst terms and conditions to the support staff. That is not a recipe for schools to operate well; nor is it a recipe for social cohesion. The Government, who speak a lot about localism, social cohesion, good society and the big society, need to consider the long-term implications of measures such as this, and I hope that at various points during the passage of the Bill I shall be able to point that out again to the Minister.