Education and Adoption Bill (Second sitting)

Margot James Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Louise Haigh]

Q 99 Yet it is a major issue in our education system. Sir Michael Wilshaw himself has said so.

Mr Gibb: The vacancy rate in the teaching profession is about 1% and it has been at that level since 2000. We know that we face challenges with a strong and growing economy: the competition now for graduates is very fierce and we are aware of that. All teaching recruitment organisations—Teach First, the National College for Teaching and Leadership—face that challenge, but you describe this as some sort of crisis. Teacher vacancy levels are very stable at 1%, we are above where we were this time a year ago in terms of acceptances, so I am not complacent about making sure that we have measures in place such as good marketing and bursaries to attract top graduates in shortage subjects such as maths, physics and modern languages. We are doing everything we can to make sure that we recruit graduates into teacher training, but we are actually doing very well considering the strength of the economy and the fact that we have a relatively small number of graduates coming out of our universities this year.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

Q 100 We heard this morning about Downhills primary school and the campaign against its academisation. I am a governor of a school in Stourbridge which is now an academy and the process of academisation there took place against an orchestrated campaign, which ran for more than 12 months. Given those experiences and the potentially even greater struggle that failing schools or struggling schools in poorer areas would have in the face of such a campaign, do I take it from you, Mr Gibb, that the speed with which the measures in the Bill will enable the Secretary of State to turn a failing school into an academy will be the answer to those sort of problems? Under the measures in the Bill, how quickly do you think the improvement in a child’s education and the life chances of those children in a school that was failing will be turned around?

Mr Gibb: We heard from Sir Dan Moynihan this morning about how they managed to turn Downhills school around in two years and it is now good with some outstanding features. He also cited the metrics of the improvement in the proportion of pupils reaching level 4. It is quite staggering. That is in the face of delays that were caused by the “save our failing school” protests. It is a tragedy that any month is wasted when children only get one chance at an education. The Bill is designed to speed up that process and that is why a school that is in special measures or category 4 will automatically be issued an academy order. The whole issue of whether a school is going to become an academy will vanish. There is no point in protesting because that is going to happen and then we can get these outstanding academy groups to take over the school and bring in support and leadership and transform it very rapidly. I think Lord Nash might want to say how rapidly.

Picking up the earlier question from Louise Haigh about morale, I would say that this is a great time to be a teacher. We have between 400 and 500 new academy groups developing that are based on a good school. A headteacher can use their expertise to develop other schools. We heard that earlier today from the lady from Sunderland—her name escapes me—who runs the WISE academy chain. It is a wonderful professional thing to be able to do, to take your expertise and experience and to spread it into three, four or five other primary schools and raise their standards. Those opportunities were not available before the coalition Government came in in 2010 and there will be increasing numbers of those opportunities available to the profession in years ahead.

Lord Nash: Our mottoes are “Every child deserves to go to a good school” and “children before adults”. I know the experiences you are talking about from personal experience as an academy sponsor appointed by Andrew Adonis for a school in Pimlico which was in special measures. We had a group of teachers and parents who were very against the whole idea and came up with a lot of appalling tactics, including breaking into my office and various other things, but two years after we took the school over, it went from special measures to outstanding, thanks to the leadership team and teachers that we recruited. The people I have just referred to asked after a year if they could change their name from, I think, the Pimlico School Association to the Friends of Pimlico Academy. They got quite a short answer from me on that. We do not want other people to have to go through that experience because it is just adults putting their dogmatic prejudices before the interests of children. That is what part of the Bill is about.

[Steve McCabe]

Q 101 Mr Timpson, during the passage of the Children and Families Bill, your colleague Lord Nash here, accepted that a power to require all local authorities to undertake joint arrangements should

“be subject to full and rigorous scrutiny by Parliament.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 December 2013; Vol. 750, c. 622.]

When Baroness Hughes pointed out that the steady use of powers of direction could result in the same effect, she was assured that that was not the Government’s intention and that any direction

“would be preceded by a letter setting out the Secretary of State’s intention…This would explain the underlying reasons and provide the affected local authorities with an invitation to respond. Only then would the Secretary of State take a final decision to issue the direction.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 December 2013; Vol. 750, c. 625.]

Will you follow roughly the same procedure with these arrangements? Is it fair to assume that the risk is still pretty much the same as the one identified by Baroness Hughes?

Edward Timpson: First, I do not know which particular aspect of the Children and Families Act 2014 you are referring to.