Free Schools: Educational Standards

Lord Winston Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, it is not often one has the opportunity to join an evangelical meeting in the House of Lords, and I am very grateful for this debate. First, I declare an interest as president of the outreach programme at Imperial College London. I do not know how many schools I have visited in the past 12 months, but I have spoken to about 55,000 school children and at numerous teaching conferences, as well as visiting three schools a week on average across the country. I have focused mainly on the poorest parts of England, including the south coast, the area 50 miles east of Cambridge where it becomes a complete desert, some parts of Essex, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, the north-east and the West Country—I spent some days living there and talking in schools, mainly in Devon. The noble Lord, Lord Nash, is to be deeply congratulated on securing this important debate. I want to pay tribute to him as a respected Minister for Education and somebody who I like and deeply admire for what he has done. I also pay tribute to him for his notably successful free school, the Pimlico Academy; I think I was the first Pimlico lecturer some years ago, as he will remember.

As children progress from primary to secondary, and then on to Year 12, they are increasingly channelled in school. Irrespective of the subject, young people are required to learn more and more about less and less. The curriculum encourages knowledge of facts, but so often their school subjects are not brought into a wider context or focus. For example, in science, they may learn a great deal about physics, chemistry and biology, but they are not able to put this into an ethical or societal context. Science literacy is not merely a matter of knowing a great number of facts about physics; it is much more about understanding the relevance of that science—for example, understanding the societal issues involved. Because of the narrowness of the curriculum, science literacy is even worse in students not studying science. This is important, because in a democracy, we need to make wise decisions about how science is used. These decisions cannot be left to scientists, or—worse still, dare I say it—to politicians. Every piece of modern technology may hold great promise for us, but it is often undercalculated, and the significant threats are usually forgotten and ignored until too late.

I have explained what kind of schools I mostly visit. Many teachers in these parts of the world seem very deeply depressed, and I travel long distances on the train back to London in the evening feeling equally depressed about what I have seen and discussed. So many teachers feel they are undervalued and are unable to offer a real education because of the juggernaut of the curriculum. The idea of establishing free schools, which are not so heavily bound to the curriculum, where teachers can choose more what they teach, is really valuable—I have no doubt about that. Replacing much-constrained local government with the increased involvement of parents is also a brilliant notion. It should work because so much of education depends on family background. In many parts of the country, there are excellent teachers but children go home to houses where there are no books, no interest in education and no understanding of what success it might bring in the future. This is much more difficult in schools where there is not a sufficient budget for a mix of A-levels; for example, mixing science and humanities subjects, which is important for making these things contextual.

In my view, funding for education is more important than funding for the health service. I say this in front of the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, who was a Health Minister for the past few years. We are grateful to him and sorry to see him leave his post. We spend too much time considering the NHS but not nearly enough considering the underfunding of education, which I am told about again and again in state schools that I visit throughout the country.

The interesting ideas behind establishing free schools should allow flexibility, but what we observe, on the whole, is far from a massive success. There is very little hard, peer-reviewed evidence that in the majority of free schools children have a better idea of how their learning in science or humanities fits the societal context to make them better citizens. In my visits, I have seen insufficient capability for debate and discussion. Moreover, teachers tell me that it is often extremely difficult to get parents really involved. Indeed, the statistics published recently by the Sutton Trust suggest that the involvement of parents is decreasing, not increasing. It is probably true in two-thirds of those schools.

At Imperial College we had a very close relationship with Harris academies. The noble Lord, Lord Harris, did not mention this but he will remember that for three years we taught science in a special context to his students who came to our Reach Out Lab. We did the metrics, with proper educationalists measuring the impact on those students. We found that it changed their aspirations and the way that teachers thought about how they might teach their science, but at the end of the three years, we had an unfortunate message from the finance officer, who told us that working with the Reach Out Lab at Imperial was no longer possible because they could not afford the luxury of working with us. As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, has pointed out, there is not sufficient money in the system, but our metrics demonstrated that improved science capital is not a luxury. It is desirable. Nick Gibb said that the schools represented,

“a renaissance … of intellectual thought and debate about pedagogy and the curriculum that used to be vested only within the secret garden of the universities”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/12/18; col. 359WH].

That is counterproductive to what we were trying to do. There seemed to be no understanding that that was very far from the real case, so I regret that statement.

When free schools start to fail to attract pupils, their £4,000 capitation fee starts to reduce as well. Eventually such a school with failing pupils may end up with inadequate finance and may no longer be financially viable. As your Lordships know, a number of free schools started with great verve but have collapsed. This is a disaster, not only for the children but for the teachers and the system. It is really shocking when teachers are already dispirited.

Another issue is the employment of untrained teachers, which nobody has mentioned. Of course, it could be argued that I am untrained teacher. I do not regard myself as being capable of teaching in a school. I could not do that job. I can come in and give a short lecture but what people want from me is the expertise to raise the morale and the profile of a particular subject, perhaps briefly, once a year. The Government’s acceptance of the failure to have trained teachers in these schools is massively disrespectful to the teaching profession. The qualification in teaching is the lowest standard with which we need to start. When I qualified as a doctor, I was not really able to do very good medicine—I needed time to continue training in order to get to the right level, just as teachers do. We should never forget that in relation to our training system. It is important that teachers acquire the ability to communicate. The noble Lord, Lord Nash, has given an account of how successful these schools are, but the metrics are dubious. The Government’s own reports suggest that we do not yet have a clear idea of whether the free schools have been truly successful: more research and details are needed.

My first question for the Minister is: what peer-reviewed research into the metrics is currently being carried out by the Government, and which metrics are being used? If he cannot answer that, perhaps he could write to me. Secondly, will he tell the Committee what money has been spent on schools that have failed, or that started but did not finish? It would also be helpful to know whether he agrees with the Sutton Trust’s report, which states that on the whole the free schools that have been established do not attract the most needy and deprived children in those areas. One problem is that the competition that everybody has talked about is not a good idea in relation to our education system. Education should not be about competition but about collaboration, and to introduce competition into our education system is not sensible. The success of individuals depends not on those individuals themselves but on how they work with each other.

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[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Earl is right in saying that in this country Ofsted seems to command more influence in the sector than happens in other countries. This is a cultural issue, and one of the first things my Secretary of State did when he arrived last year was to produce a video that showed him and the Ofsted chief inspector on a panel trying to slaughter some of the myths about inspection outcomes and so on. It is a cultural issue that we will not be able to deal with overnight. However, I accept his concern.

I am conscious that I am running out of time. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, is correct: we have cancelled some projects during the pre-opening process. In my view this demonstrates our rigour in ensuring that the quality bar is kept high. The point made by the noble Baroness about good governance is also correct. As the noble Lord, Lord Nash, said, however, 50% more free schools have achieved “outstanding” judgments than the average in the state school system—so something must be going right.

Of course, along the way not everything has gone right, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, among other noble Lords, mentioned. We have closed some 13 free schools, seven UTCs and 21 studio schools, and where failures occur we take swift and decisive action. I agree with my noble friend Lord Popat that we cannot shy away from failure and that we should address it and learn lessons from it.

I finish by quoting the motto of the academy trust of my noble friend Lord Nash: “Libertas Per Cultum”—freedom through education. Education provides the stepping-stone to improving people’s lives. Free schools play an increasing role in that work.

[Lord Winston]

I thank the noble Lord for his comments. I do not want to extend the debate beyond the time allotted. Listening to it, however, is one of my PhD students who is a qualified teacher with a Cambridge degree. He is evaluating some of our work. It seems to me that we need to be evaluating not just entry to Oxford and Cambridge but the wider issue of the scientific and cultural capital of school leavers who may not go to Russell group universities such as the one where I teach. This is not a party-political thing for me—I do not go to schools as a member of the Labour Party but as someone who wants to help people have aspirations. I hope that we can persuade the Minister to say how we can look at the metrics on things that do not involve merely exam results, because education is so much more important than that. I hope that we can collaborate in that.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I would be very happy to meet the noble Lord’s PhD student if that would be helpful in pushing the discussion on. All noble Lords present, particularly on this side, got into this for no other reason than to improve the quality of educational outcomes and the lives of the less advantaged people in our society. We all share that passion. We will have vigorous debates about how it works, but I am absolutely up for learning from the mistakes we have made. Some schools have closed. We backed some of the wrong promoters in the early stages and we have learned from that and moved on. Therefore, if the work that the noble Lord’s PhD student is doing can shed any more light on how we can improve going forward, I would be delighted to be part of that.