Education and Adoption Bill (First sitting)

Louise Haigh Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Bill Esterson]

Q 49 Okay. So we are not interested in high quality.

Sir Daniel Moynihan: It depends. How do you define local authorities as high performing? They are not directly responsible for the management of their schools, so what does that mean? If the schools in a local authority are doing well, does that mean the local authority is high performing? I think the headteachers of those schools would have something to say about that; their view would be that they have delivered.

Emma Knights: Or the governors.

Sir Daniel Moynihan: So if those heads and governors could take over schools, yes, I would agree with that.

[Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)]

Q 50 While we are talking about data, the Local Schools Network has managed—incredibly, given the lateness with which the Government made public the regulations last night—to crunch the data and has found that 814 secondary schools would be defined as coasting under the Government’s regulations. Some 342 of those are academies, a high proportion of which are converter academies. That is surprising given that, as the Minister points out, those would have been good or outstanding when they were converted, but 125 of them had a progress 8 value added measure. Is progress 8 wrong, or is the Government’s definition of “coasting” wrong?

Sir Daniel Moynihan: Do you mean that they had a positive progress 8 measure?

[Louise Haigh]

Yes.

Sir Daniel Moynihan: I think Becky Allen was correct in the sense that in a well-to-do context where lots of children are affluent, it is probably easier to get a good progress 8 value. What should probably happen is that schools should be benchmarked according to the progress 8 value of schools very like them. At the moment, there is a “families of schools” section on the Department for Education website, where schools are compared with 55 schools with a similar intake. Probably something needs to be done to make progress 8 more sophisticated in order to take account of the context. It is too easy for some schools to look as if they are doing well with that, given their intake.

[Louise Haigh]

Q 51 Do you agree with the evidence in the previous session that it should be based solely or at least largely on progress rather than on a fresh value?

Sir Daniel Moynihan: Yes. The proposal for secondary to be 60% means, I think, that we are going to miss a whole range of potential coasting schools—there are coasting grammar schools that will not be picked up by the 60% threshold—so progress needs to be the driver. That alone probably is not enough. It may well be that it is a signal that somebody needs to go in and take a further look.

Malcolm Trobe: It is also important that we realise at this stage that coasting is a situation judged over three years. At the moment, we do not know where progress 8 will end up, because schools’ curriculum models will be changing, so progress 8 as an indicator will change with time. I think it is a little dangerous to go in there. I would ask the New Schools Network how it knows where the measure is of being below progress 8. As I understand it—hopefully I have this bit of legislation right—that has not yet been determined, because the data have to be crunched. Quite logically, we do not know where progress 8 as a measure will end up, because of changing curriculum models in secondary school, so I think it is a little dangerous to throw numbers around at this stage.

[Louise Haigh]

Q 52 Do you think that it is dangerous to enforce this progress measure retrospectively?

Malcolm Trobe: I think it is important that we move very quickly on schools that are not improving. Therefore, it is important that we identify schools that are not improving, and that work is done and support programmes are put in place to ensure that those schools improve, because that is surely the ultimate objective of everyone in this room.

[Louise Haigh]

Q 53 But given that progress 8 is not due to come in until 2016, is it right that it should measure schools back to 2014?

Malcolm Trobe: What they are having to do—I have a concern about the measure that will be used in 2014 and 2015, because that is essentially an attainment measure. We have our concerns that you have not got a consistent measure. When progress 8 or an alternative version is in place for three years, you will be measuring progress over the three-year period, but we have concerns that what you essentially have is an attainment measure for the first two years, to deem whether a school is coasting or not in those years, and then the progress measure does not come in until the third year. So an element of caution needs to be urged in the first year.

We support what is in the notes: a very clear statement that academisation is not considered the first step in coasting schools. It is looking at the work of the regional schools commissioner. However, that highlights the capacity issues. You might ask Tim Coulson later about the capacity of the regional schools commissioner to look at the context of schools that, under this measure, particularly in the early stages, are designated as coasting because of the nature of the ’14 and ’15 indicators.

Richard Watts: If I may say so, I think there is a real danger about the risk of clashing accountability systems. I can think of one school in my patch that probably falls under the coasting definition as published last night but has had two successive outstanding Ofsted judgments and is the most popular school in my borough for people to send their children to. It would not command public confidence for that school to be described as coasting. They have people queuing round the block to get into it. I feel for heads in circumstances in which they can be judged as outstanding twice in a row and then be condemned as coasting under these things. More definition is needed to work out the priorities within the accountability system and to send a clearer set of messages to schools about what is expected of them.

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

Q 54 You have commented a bit, but I ask each member of the panel: which criteria would you use to identify a coasting school?

Richard Watts: I would be happy with an Ofsted measure. If we have Ofsted for a reason, we should respect its judgments. If we are saying that Ofsted needs serious reform, let us get on and reform it. If we have a schools inspectorate, it should be respected to some extent. It has to be about more than just progress. My borough is traditionally a highly deprived area that has seen very high levels of progress, but we are still not getting the final results. Employees never ask what your progress measure is; they ask what your GCSEs are. We need some measure of final result.

Emma Knights: I think we are in huge danger of over-complicating our accountability system. Schools are held accountable in so many different ways. I agree that layering this on top of Ofsted seems the wrong solution. We need to sort out Ofsted if we do not think that it is telling us what we need.

The real thing that will improve schools regards capacity in the system. Those of us who want to improve schools should all be worried about that. We have not talked about the regional schools commissioners and their capacity. At a time when the Department is having to undertake cuts, is there enough capacity in the system to identify these schools and work with them to improve? That is the real problem that we all face.

I cannot tell you how much governing boards want to recruit fantastic headteachers. That is what we want to do and that is what will change our schools. We are not getting applications from fantastic candidates in a lot of parts of the country. That is the real problem that we need to worry about, rather than layering measure upon measure and increasing the fear in schools. We think that one reason that some school leaders are not coming forward for headship is because they are already scared and drowning under the accountability system. We need to seriously change the culture.

Sir Daniel Moynihan: Going back to Richard’s point, there clearly are schools that are judged to be outstanding and have parents queuing round the block. The problem is, that if the children in them are not making the amount of progress that similarly good schools elsewhere are making, it is not wrong to jolt the school and possibly upset parents by saying, “Hang on a minute, these children are being short-changed. In other places—look at those—they are doing much better.”

--- Later in debate ---

[John Pugh]

Q 98 Can I just persist with this point? You could give them the data as part of the consultation. Suppose you give them the data and you share all the data with them, and none the less it is their view in their school—this is my scenario—which may be a good school, but none the less is graded as coasting, that they would rather stay with the local authority than become an academy. Your view is still, in that circumstance where you share the data with them, that their view should be overridden.

Zoe Carr: That school would be given time under a plan that we have already talked about to see whether it could make the improvements that we discussed previously. If it is found that that school still cannot make those improvements, then the route forward would be for that school to become a sponsored academy.

[Louise Haigh]

Q 99 In the earlier session, we heard that we have little evidence of which formal intervention works best. There are anecdotal examples of academies that have improved, but clearly we cannot say across the board that academisation is the best answer for all schools. What is clear is that teaching and leadership is the most important factor in improving schools. Would you all therefore say whether the Bill will make it easier, harder or have no impact on the ability of schools to recruit and retain teachers?

Lee Elliot Major: It is hard to know. I would urge, as part of the Bill, looking to trial this in different schools so that we can come back to a Committee in three years’ time and know the evidence. One thing I would say straightway is that we should try to develop some evidence around this because there is very little at the moment. As I said earlier, our evidence is—and there are lots of claims and counter-claims in this area—that there are academy chains that do very well and there are others that do not. That is the honest truth. In terms of recruitment, I think it can go both ways. There are some academy chains that have better career progress for teachers because they can go between schools. There is better professional development. There are other chains that do not do it very well, to be frank. It can go either way depending on the academy chain.

[Louise Haigh]

Q 100 So probably no overall impact.

Lee Elliot Major: I would say that there are other ways of doing it. There are school federations that do it well. Generally, the sector is facing a big issue around improvement, and that is a looming issue.

Zoe Carr: What I have experienced through our trust is that we have been able to do more of the growing your own version that the CEO of Harris academies talked about earlier. We have been able to take leaders from one academy and give them opportunities to get them prepared and ready for our succession planning, so that if we take on another school that needs to strengthen leadership, we have the people there to be able to do that. The more time that you have to work with people, the more that you know them and the more it takes out the variation of what the next headteacher we will appoint will be like. Or, if we cannot get the people we need to run the schools, we have already grown people we can use. We have a talent bank.

It is not a perfect solution. Of course, we have a shortage of headteachers in the country willing to go into the most challenging and disadvantaged schools. I am not going to skirt over that issue, because we need to do more to encourage headteachers to go into challenging schools. As accountability rises, the pressure in the job rises—that has to be said—but multi-academy trusts can build a support network around the trust’s key leaders so that people are not left alone to make every decision. In our trust, our leaders have the opportunity to concentrate on the things that matter the most for the outcomes for our children, because they are not burdened with all the bureaucracy around all the other things that headteachers in a single school often have to deal with themselves.

[Louise Haigh]

Q 101 So you think that an extra layer of accountability will act as a further disincentive to attracting headteachers into the most challenging areas.

Zoe Carr: I think that the most successful and aspirational leaders thrive on challenge. That can drive them forward to think, “Right, if that’s the bar, we will do all that we can to achieve it.”

[Louise Haigh]

Q 102 Do we need to be heaping further challenges on to what are already the most challenging schools through another accountability measure?

Zoe Carr: There is great accountability in the system at the moment, and I am not sure whether more accountability is the right way forward, but this accountability works in relation to what is already out there in the system—it works within the floor targets that we have previously experienced.

[The Chair]

I want to fit in one more question.