Academies Bill [Lords]

Debate between Mike Hancock and Jon Trickett

Monday 26th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I beg to move amendment 54, in page 3, line 34, at end insert—

‘(3A) An Academy order must include provisions which make available for community use some or all of the school’s facilities.

(3B) Such provisions shall not be fewer and on less advantageous terms than those which have been available prior to the application being made for an Academy order.

(3C) Such provisions may be made by means of a contract or contracts with a local authority or other non-profit making or commercial body.

(3D) “Local authority” in this section means a county, district, unitary or parish council.’.

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Hoyle. I think that this is the first time I have served under your distinguished chairpersonship, to use a gender-neutral phrase. Notwithstanding the fact that you and I come from different sides of the Pennines, I am sure that you will exercise justice and mercy if I happen to cross the line from time to time—if that is possible between people from different sides of the Pennines.

Amendment 54 is a probing amendment, and a similar proposal was discussed, albeit briefly, in the House of Lords, where the Minister prompted more questions than he gave answers. I shall be brief because I know that we have other important matters to debate tonight.

We now know that the Government have effectively given the Secretary of State the power to change the status of schools by order—by fiat or administrative measures—notwithstanding the fact that we seek some form of accountability to local communities, which the Government have denied. Members of the House will know that I was against academies and that I voted against them when they were introduced by my own party. However, at least the previous Government had the merit of saying that schools should be accountable and responsible to local communities, and that their facilities should be as widely accessible as possible.

The concept of the extended school—a school that reaches out into the community, and a community that reaches into the school—was very much at the heart of Labour’s schools provisions. It occurred to me that I should like to know what will happen to schools’ assets that are associated with that community provision. The idea of the extended school is that the school is a facility for the whole community. After all, in the African phrase, it takes a whole village to educate a child—sometimes it takes a child to educate the village, too—so the interaction between the community and the school is important, and lies at the heart of modern educational thinking.

I am pleased that over the years of the Labour Government, many schools in my area developed a series of community activities, and I shall highlight two—I am sure that every hon. Member could talk about what happens in schools in their areas in the same way. At Minsthorpe community college, a gym provided by the Labour Government, the Labour council and the college is open to everybody. A brand new sports hall that was built at the cost of millions of pounds in 2009 is also open to the community at subsidised cost. The college might become part of the Olympic preparations, because it is an Olympic-recognised site, which is a very proud achievement for our whole community. The school also has AstroTurf, which is used by local football clubs, a training and conference centre, beauty training, adult education, and crèche facilities on site and in the local village of Upton. The youngest pupil at the college is three months old, and the oldest is 80 years old. That is the school’s range of provision.

Hemsworth arts and community college has also had millions of pounds spent on it, and it opens every single day in one form or another. Cherry Tree House, a multi-agency drop-in centre, is available to the whole community, the police, the health service and others, and an on-site sports centre is open all year. There is an Ofsted-registered day-care nursery, an adult education learning programme, and a programme of arts that works with all kinds of community groups, which use creative skills that were unimaginable even a few years ago in Hemsworth. There are outreach programmes with local Churches, the skills centre and so on and so forth. That is a description of two schools, but I am sure that every school in every community provides similar facilities.

By tabling amendment 54, I am asking the Government: what do they intend to happen to all that community outreach? I propose that there should effectively be two further aspects to the Bill. First, there should be no less provision to the community than there is on the day of transfer, and secondly, those provisions should be available on at least the same advantageous terms as they are now, meaning that there should be no increase in price or decrease in accessibility. It is a simple proposal.

Tens of thousands of people use community schools in my constituency and throughout the country. The question is: what will happen to those community facilities? After all, they were provided not by the school, but by the whole community, through council tax and central taxation. The Bill ought to make it clear that that community provision should continue—that should be the underlying philosophy of the nature of the relationship between educational institutions and the people who live in a community—and that the pricing should not change.

Paragraph 33(e) of the Government’s proposed model funding agreement allows the academy to

“charge persons who are not registered pupils at the Academy for education provided or for facilities used by them at the Academy”.

I guess that the Minister will say that that is simply a measure to give academies a legal power to charge. However, there are fears, including in the schools that I mentioned and among the people who use them, whom I represent, that fees will increase rapidly, and that the community will be seen as a cash cow. Like many other right hon. and hon. Members, I represent many deprived communities. They, too, are seriously worried about the intentions of some academies.

I mentioned that a similar proposal was debated in the Lords. Lord Wallace of Saltaire, speaking for the Government, said:

“We therefore entirely agree with my noble friend”—

who moved the amendment—

“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.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 28 June 2010; Vol. 719, c. 1620.]

I guess that the Minister will say the same thing.

There are two ways to deal with this community access issue. One would be for the thousands and thousands of academies—if that is how many are eventually created—to each have their own funding agreement, which would have to be policed separately. If constituents come to my surgery and say that the fees that they used to pay to do French or learn IT, or to use the sports or beauty facilities, have suddenly tripled or quadrupled, where will I turn if the amendment is not accepted? I will have to turn to the Minister and his civil servants, who will have to look at the funding agreement and make a separate enforcement order. This is not releasing schools from red tape, as was suggested a few moments ago by the Minister. It is nationalising the education system and the schools because, instead of schools being accountable to the local authority, or regulated under an amendment of the type that I propose, the Minister will have to take separate enforcement orders for every academy. How can that be the case for a Government who claim to believe in freeing up institutions and the education system?

If the Government are determined to go ahead with the system proposed in the Bill and if they agree with the philosophy that schools should be part of their communities, it would be simpler, more direct and cheaper to put something in the Bill so that each principal and governing body of an academy will understand from the beginning that they have taken over community facilities that the council helped to build, that they have inherited pricing structures, and that they have to honour them. The amendment is not an earth-shattering one, but I want to test the Government’s commitment to their expressed desire to release people rather than bind them up in red tape. The Minister’s answer in the other place opened up a Pandora’s box of national control over an education system that we have always been proud of it being administered locally. The Bill is a reversal of that trend.

[Mr Mike Hancock]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hoyle. This is the first time that I have had the honour of speaking when you are in the Chair.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) because he makes a very important point. We have had a helpful debate on all the issues over the three or four days of consideration of the Bill, and it has been remarkable how much common ground has been found, even by those who are diametrically opposed to the idea of academies. Several of us have seen the merits of some of the issues, and the debate as a whole has been fair and frank. I suspect that the Minister has also found some of the comments helpful in framing the final form of the legislation and the detail that is provided to future academies.

I support the amendment, because the effect of a large secondary school on the social fabric of a community—with possibly an increased role in the future—is important for social cohesion. I had hoped that we would consider new clause 2, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson), because that talks specifically about the importance of social cohesion. If that obligation were in the Bill, there would be no going back on the school’s commitment to the community. I have been a governor of schools where the local authority put in money for community facilities—such as a nursery—and bit by bit those services, which were additional to the school, disappeared, because of the weight of numbers. First, we lost the community room, and then the nursery. Those community facilities are not paid for by the education budget, but by the general rate fund—and in large council estates by the housing revenue account—but the pressure of numbers at the school means that they are lost to the community.