Birmingham Schools

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

No.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

Noting that Ofsted has already put the spotlight on the quality of school leadership and management as part of the inspection, and recognising the Government’s focus on the skills of governing bodies rather than just on stakeholder representation, does the Secretary of State agree that that, combined with further accountability to the regional commissioners, will strengthen the resolve of councils to get rid of failing governors and is a step in the right direction?

[Michael Gove]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, who has shown brilliant leadership on the issue of improving governance. As well as all of his important points, there are some specific recommendations on strengthening governance from Sir Michael Wilshaw that recommend themselves to me.

Free Schools (Funding)

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

First, there is an area of consensus between the hon. Gentleman and me about the fact that there are good local authority schools and good local authorities that provide appropriate support and challenge for their schools. I absolutely accept that, but it is important to recognise that there are many underperforming local authority schools, and local authority oversight is very far from a panacea for school failure. As I pointed out earlier, every day that schools are open, two local authority schools and others go into special measures. It is also the case that so far, according to the tough new Ofsted criteria that we have set up, free schools outperform other schools. Furthermore, my Department has I think been faster in dealing with school failure, whether it be in Derby or Crawley, than many local authorities have, and I think it right to bear down on failure wherever it occurs.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

I note that basic funding for schools in Gloucestershire will provide an additional 1,680 places over the next two years. Does the Secretary of State agree that the purpose of the additional funding for free schools is to provide choice for parents, and that the need for parents to have that choice is behind the drive for higher standards?

[Michael Gove]

That is a very good point, and it is the point that was made by Tony Blair, the former Member of Parliament for Sedgefield, when he was Prime Minister. The purpose of new school provision is not simply to provide additional places where they are needed, but to provide a choice for parents when standards are low. It is critically important to recognise that the Government are both funding local authorities to ensure that there is a school place for every child and providing choice and quality in great schools such as the Krishna Avanti free school in Leicester, which I had the honour of opening alongside the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz)—another Labour supporter of the free schools programme.

Schools Funding

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Tuesday 29th April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

First, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) for the tremendous work that he has done, because this is a complicated but very important subject. His achievement is the start of a very necessary journey that has still to be completed.

It seems to me that £350 million is an injection of money that is both substantial and much needed. It is a clear admission that the funding system needs to be fixed, because having in place a measure such as this, however temporary, demonstrates that the system is flawed. Today, if we do nothing else, we should acknowledge that point, so that we can move on to devise a system that is workable and fair for rural schools as well as all other pupils who might be suffering in an indirect way.

I would never automatically link the amount of money spent to the services provided, but I will draw hon. Members’ attention to the fact that Ofsted has produced a very important report, “Unseen children: access and achievement 20 years on”, which highlights the failure of many schools in rural and coastal areas. We have to acknowledge that that is just not good enough. We need a system that ensures that all schools, all teachers and all pupils benefit from fair funding. I would say to my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Education, that that is a subject for his Committee to consider, because we need to lay the foundations for fundamental reform. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to talk about just how thorough the Department will be in ensuring that all areas are considered when coming up with a new formula that provides fairness. Of course, there is also the issue of timeliness, because we cannot wait indefinitely. We need a firm commitment that action will be taken on this matter. That has already been recognised to be necessary.

As for my own patch in Gloucestershire, I of course welcome the £9.6 million. That is much needed and will be wisely spent by our schools, because they have consistently suffered, as many of my colleagues have noted about the schools in their constituencies. Ironically, the situation is about the same between Northumberland and Newcastle as it is between Gloucestershire and Bristol. That is just not a reasonable situation for us to have to deal with, so my question to the Minister is basically this: what commitment will she give to ensuring that fundamental reform of the formula funding system will be brought about, and how long will it take? I ask that because the needs of our children and the urgency of our reforms elsewhere in the education system, coupled with our place in the global economy, all add up to this being a major part of the long-term economic plan.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 10th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

Exactly. I pay tribute to the work that my hon. Friend does in bringing together employers and schools and colleges so that young people know what it takes to succeed in work. The strengthened statutory guidance that we are publishing today will help to drive that, alongside league tables that include not just exam results, as before, but pupils’ destinations.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

15. What steps he is taking to improve productivity.

[The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Vince Cable)]

The Government’s approach to raising productivity is to deliver macro-economic stability through a combination of monetary activism and fiscal restraint, while implementing a programme of long-term structural change through the industrial strategy. This is giving firms and individuals the confidence they need to invest.

[Neil Carmichael]

In my constituency, we have several modern and forward-thinking firms, such as Renishaw, Delphi and ABB, which are all keen to make sure that they can recruit skilled engineers and a skilled work force—[Interruption.] The Secretary of State has sat down now. Does he agree that the long-term economic plan is pivotal because it deals with the need to make sure there is a pipeline of well educated young people entering the labour market?

[Vince Cable]

I apologise for remaining standing; I was so gripped by the question, I could not tear myself away.

I commend my hon. Friend for establishing what I think he calls the Carmichael commission in his constituency to look at ways to improve growth. He is right that having a pipeline of skilled staff is essential. I am familiar with Renishaw and I shall see the company tomorrow at the MACH exhibition in Birmingham. The crucial requirement is a long-term train of apprenticeship, at graduate and sub-graduate levels.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vince Cable]

The simple truth of the matter is that, as a result of discussions across the Cabinet and with the Minister for Universities and Science and myself, there is no cap on the number of overseas students. [Hon. Members: “There is.”] There is not. We want to maximise the number. We actively encourage them, and only this week there was a £1 billion contract signed with Saudi Arabia for higher education training in which we are a participant.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

T2. With the excellent news that manufacturing output year on year has increased by 3.8%, and with export week in mind, what steps is the Secretary of State taking to improve productivity so that we can further enhance the innovation of cutting-edge products and penetrate new export markets?

[Vince Cable]

That is a suitable rejoinder to the hon. Gentleman’s earlier question. The key point he made in his earlier question is that to drive productivity we need an adequate supply of trained people. I would add to that the emphasis we are placing on innovation and the establishment of the Catapult centres across the country. This is a new approach based largely on the German model and it is succeeding admirably.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

If this were a fire sale, it would certainly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) has said, be one of the longest fire sales in history, given that Governments have been trying to sell Royal Mail for over 20 years. I think we should salute Moya Greene’s achievement in transforming a loss-making public corporation into one of Britain’s top 100 companies and congratulate her, as one of all too few female chief executives, on her award as business person of the year. We have yet to receive any proposal from the remuneration committee.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

When I last visited Stroud sorting office just before Christmas, I noticed that the much-needed modernisation programme was being started. Does the Minister agree that that has been made possible by the sale of shares and that it represents a Government success?

[Michael Fallon]

Yes. The purpose of the sale was to enable Royal Mail to have access to private capital so that it would not be dependent on the taxpayer for ensuring the successful delivery of the six-day-a-week universal service on which we and all our constituents rely.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for drawing my attention to those concerns about the principal. I am aware that there are concerns more broadly about Fulwood academy, and I will write to him about what we propose to do.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

The key point is how swiftly responses are made to those schools that are failing. Does the Secretary of State agree that the important thing is leadership and management, and that includes the role of governing bodies, which should contain fully skilled governors to do the job?

[Michael Gove]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. I am grateful to him for his work not just on the Education Committee but more broadly in making it clear that we need to recruit an even stronger cadre of school governors. I pay tribute to the many thousands of superb school governors that we have in place at the moment, but we need to attract more people, particularly from business, to take on that role in what is an increasingly autonomous school system.

Oral Answers to Questions

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

17. What steps he is taking to promote engineering as a career.

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

In September the Government announced a £400 million boost for science, technology, engineering and maths teaching. Last month we launched the first annual Tomorrow’s Engineers week, during which the Government worked with more than 70 partners. Our recently published Perkins review of engineering skills calls for action from employers, educators and the profession to work with us to inspire young people to become engineers.

[Mr Willetts]

We strongly support such initiatives, which are absolutely what is required to ensure that employers get the skilled engineers they need.

[Neil Carmichael]

Now that the Government’s economic plan is delivering the rebalanced economy we need, we also need engineers, as the Minister just said. Does he agree that one way forward is to encourage engineering in schools, and to ensure that it is considered a protected profession?

[Mr Willetts]

I certainly agree that we need to encourage engineering in schools. “Engineer” is not a restricted term, but we support professional titles such as “chartered engineer” or “engineering technician”, which are regulated, and we aim to register 100,000 apprenticeships with EngTech status by 2018.

School Governing Bodies

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. We are having an interesting debate, which I am pleased is being held, because the Education Committee did a huge amount of work on the subject.

I also applaud those who have supported me in the all-party group on education leadership and governance, which has been an important vehicle to promote school governance. It has struck me that not only have we been debating governance within these walls lately, but I have been invited to several debates in London and beyond to discuss it; most recently, I attended a debate hosted and organised by The Guardian. That underlines the point that school governance is becoming an important subject, largely because of the changing landscape in our education system.

We need to look back to 1944, 1988 and the legislation that paved the way for the academy programme and all the rest to understand that the system has changed considerably, but that the governance structure of governors has not kept up—the pace of change for school governors has not been fast enough. We must understand that central point if we are to debate governance properly.

The other major overall point is that our schools need to engage not only with the community, as the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) said, but fully and thoroughly with business, professions and opportunities in the world of work. Governing bodies have a role to play, and I want to talk about that in some detail.

First and foremost, I urge the Government to start thinking about how they might inspire the best governors to be even better and great people to become governors. We need to attract from a broader range of society the kind of people whom we want to run our schools. That means talking up the role of governors, enhancing the role of governance and ensuring that people feel that, when they become governors, they count, are valued and can make a difference. We have to think about the need to inspire, and I urge the Minister to consider how the Department and others can inspire people to become governors.

On the question of regulation or deregulation. I am not a great believer in regulation; I like to see things operating freely and individuals using systems to promote good things in a good way. My inclination, therefore, is that we should not have more regulations or training programmes specifically tailored by someone else to be superimposed on people who might well have their own opinions. What is important, however, is for us to create an environment—a framework—for governing bodies to make such decisions for themselves, so that they know who they need to recruit and to train and how such training should be done. Only they know what their school and governing body need.

Therefore, I ask the Minister what can be implemented to encourage governing bodies to think about how they are structured, how their membership is formulated and other such matters. I have already urged the Education Committee to write to the Department to see how the draft Deregulation Bill might help—I would be grateful to hear from her about how that might be done.

In my constituency, I want to see more interface between business and schools; I want to see medium-sized and small businesses more engaged with education. Furthermore, I will come up with a plan to implement that, which will, broadly speaking, involve a series of seminars at which chief executives and board members of businesses can meet governors. Two things will be achieved: first, governors will see how boards operate, make decisions, decide strategy and ensure the highest standards in their businesses, whether they are a recruitment firm, a manufacturer or whatever; and, secondly, on the other side of the coin, businesses will be able to talk to education as a whole and schools in particular with a view to saying, “These are the sorts of skills that we need for our recruitment”, and to explaining the sort of people they need to design and manufacture their products, operate their services and be their professionals.

There is not a sufficiently clear interface between our education system and employers as a whole. One of the ways in which we can improve that is through improving governance, so that it becomes more business-oriented, benefiting from business skills—not to the exclusion of all the other vital skills, but to ensure that business skills are part of the narrative.

On the question of what happens if a governing body fails, I pressed the case in the Education Committee that we should be tough on failing governance—because we have to be. Too many schools are simply not doing well enough. Worst of all, too many schools are coasting and seem to think that that is okay. We need a governing system that holds those schools to account, to ensure that coasting or the quiet tolerance of some rather poorly taught subject does not happen. As we know from the past week, we have a long way to go to ensure that our schools deliver the kind of education that we need for the long term.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about failing governing bodies. It is key that we encourage local authorities to intervene accordingly. Sadly, in my constituency a school has recently been rated inadequate; that rating included the governing body. We need quick change when there are those kinds of problems.

[Neil Carmichael]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who makes a powerful point. I can point to similar problems in my constituency. Any Member of Parliament interested in schools in their constituency will be able to say the same thing. That is rather a sad fact.

We need to find ways of making sure that governing bodies almost fear the consequences of failure. Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, has suggested that he should have powers effectively to remove governing bodies that are quite clearly incapable of turning a school around from failure to success. If we see that local authorities are unwilling to act—perhaps because everybody knows everybody and no one is willing to upset someone they knew a long time ago or have worked with successfully in some other department or school—we have to find other ways.

The people we should really be thinking about are children and their parents. They are the real stakeholders. We have to provide a system that guarantees that their school will be promoted, managed and dealt with in the best possible way. So my next request to the Minister is to make sure that we have a way of getting rid of governors who cannot do the job. It is dead easy: that is what we would do in a business, so it is what we should do in a school.

We want to see self-improvement. Our whole education system is about self-improvement. Any organisation should always be motivated to improve. The question we should always ask ourselves each day is, “How can I do this better?” That is a natural thing to do, so we want to see governing bodies doing it. Of course, that must be in conjunction with head teachers. As my hon. Friend the Chair of the Education Committee correctly pointed out, we need clarity as to what the head is supposed to be doing and what the chair of governors is supposed to be doing.

Again, that may well be a matter on which different types of schools would have different opinions—I accept that. But we cannot have a situation in which chairs of governing bodies are sitting around in schools for a couple of days a week trying to do what the head should be doing—that is completely unacceptable—and we cannot have a head basically taking on the role of the chair by steering the governing body through a difficult course to cover up or disguise inappropriate results and the like. We have to have clarity on those roles. That is where the Department for Education comes in: we need an explicit description of what the chair of a governing body is supposed to do. That should be part of the attempt to inspire people that I referred to earlier: we want to inspire the best people to be chairs of governing bodies, so we need to make sure that they know what they are doing when they approach the job.

I have talked a lot on the Education Committee about interim executive boards. As we all know, IEBs are used to replace governing bodies if the big decision to dismiss a governing body is taken. That is quite right. But that raises the question of why, if the solution is an interim executive board—a smaller body than the one it is replacing, made up of skilled people and with a focus on improvement and the capacity to get on with the job—we do not have something similar to that in the first place: a smaller structure, made up of people equipped with the right skills, so that the school can benefit from that kind of flexible, imaginative, innovative, robust governing system. That is where I have a slight variance of opinion with some of my colleagues on the Education Committee.

[Alex Cunningham]

I have experience of working with an interim board that was placed in a school in Stockton-on-Tees. It brought tremendous skills to the school and helped turn it around, so I was all in favour of that approach. But I have also seen tremendous parent governors, who are not going to be the leader of the body or its chair, but are tremendous advocates for parents. Surely there is room for people such as that as well in our governing body system.

[Neil Carmichael]

The key point is that a lot of governors are parents anyway. I have been a governor for a long time and a parent for a long time. I do not know about the hon. Gentleman’s family life, but I assume that most Members of Parliament have children. If they do not, that would not prevent them from being a governor, but if someone does have children that would not prevent them from being a governor either. I do not think that the question concerning parent governors is relevant to what the membership of an interim executive board should be. I have seen a large number of interim executive boards and I know that their members have children.

[Alex Cunningham]

Does the hon. Gentleman mean that he does not think that parents should have the right to elect some of their own to our school governing bodies?

[Neil Carmichael]

What is really important—this was going to be my next point, so I am glad the hon. Gentleman has taken me on to it, as we are probably done and dusted with IEBs—is that if the governing body is not good enough, parents should be able to say so. Accountability rests on that point. The real interface of accountability is between governors and parents. If parents think that the governing body simply is not doing a good enough job, they should be able to dismiss it. It is important to give parents as a group the capacity to make a decision as big as that, in defence of their children’s education and future.

[Alex Cunningham]

The idea of parents being able to sack governing bodies is an interesting concept; perhaps it should be explored in greater detail. Would we apply that idea to academies and free schools as well as to state-maintained schools?

[Neil Carmichael]

The logic of it is that if we want to make sure that governing bodies are properly accountable, we have to decide who they are accountable to. In my view, that should be parents. The problem with stakeholder representation and all that sort of thing is that it actually dilutes accountability: the fact is that once parents get on the body, they start becoming defensive of their own behaviour and conduct, when in fact what they should be doing as parents is testing what the body is doing.

[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

I know from my experience as a governor that quite often one or two very vocal parents seem to take the flow of other parents with them, but often are not doing the right thing but the worst thing that could be done. Will my hon. Friend elaborate on that point?

[Neil Carmichael]

I assume my hon. Friend means parents on governing bodies, and I completely agree, as I have seen that behaviour myself. We should be making sure that governing bodies are truly accountable and responsible to the key stakeholders, who seem to me to be the parents. Having parents on the governing body is a great idea, but not as a specific group of parent governors—they should be people who happen to be governors and to have children. That is the way to look at the issue.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I fear my hon. Friend might be confused about interim executive boards. He seems to think that because the people on those boards are focused, dedicated, highly skilled and small in number, we can extrapolate from that the idea that all governing bodies everywhere should be small and similar in make-up to IEBs. That is simply not possible, given the weight of work required of governing bodies. That was the evidence we heard: as Professor Chris James of the university of Bath said, there is no statistical relationship between governing body effectiveness and governing body size or vacancies. I put it to my hon. Friend that there is no evidence for his view. If we could have astonishingly elite, small boards of dedicated people to put the time in, it might be a better system, but we do not have those people and they do not have the time.

[Neil Carmichael]

There are two points about the size of governing bodies. First, with a governing body of about 20, the influence of individuals is diluted. That applies to any committee system, including school governance. Secondly, it is not necessary to replicate exactly an interim executive board because that would be counter-productive. The word “interim” does not imply permanence, the word “executive” does not imply strategic decision making, and the word “board” is not commonly used in schools. The characteristics of IEBs and how they operate are important and we should think about how that might influence the way in which governing bodies will be shaped.

[Craig Whittaker]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the recent changes to the legislation to allow flexibility and innovation with smaller governing bodies are in place and do exactly what he is arguing for? The problem is that the Government have not communicated those models widely enough.

[Neil Carmichael]

That is precisely why it is important to signal that governors, and particularly chairs of governors, should be aware of the opportunities to reshape their bodies, and why I suggested that the Minister should demonstrate how that might be amplified and improved on. My hon. Friend is absolutely right in saying that we do not want an avalanche of more regulations. We want to encourage governing bodies to shape themselves around the needs and characteristics of their school. That is yet another reason why we should not require certain organisations to be represented; we should allow the governing bodies to make those decisions.

If all the schools in Stockton are absolutely determined to have stakeholder representation, they should have it, but if schools elsewhere want to focus specifically and exclusively on the skills they need, that is what they should do. We should have a system that enables that to happen. We want to ensure that governors and governance are fit for purpose, that our schools are constantly improving and delivering the best possible outcomes for their pupils, and that our pupils have the ability to seize and exploit opportunities in the world of work and whatever else they want to do with their lives.

To my mind, the future is not about replicating what happened in the past. It is about understanding the dynamics and changes that will influence people’s experience of work and economics. We are talking about a global economy, new technologies, new ways of working, new relationships and new structures. Governance must change to be able to respond to all those dynamics.

I want to ask the Minister several things. First, how will she inspire the best people to be governors? Secondly, how will deregulating the system ensure that governing bodies can shape themselves to reflect the sort of school that they want to have and their interpretation of their community and the business world? Thirdly, will she consider how to get rid of failing governing bodies? I have put on the table the idea of the ultimate option—parents revolting—but there are processes between doing nothing and using a “nuclear deterrent”. Those processes must be teased out and must have some relationship with measurement of attainment and inspection of schools. Fourthly, it is key to ensure that we focus on skills rather than just stakeholders. One can be achieved without excluding the other, but the most important thing is to have the best people governing our schools for our children and their future.

Start-up Loans

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

The scheme is growing and accelerating, and it has the capacity to do more. I hope that we can do more with it, not least because it is helping people who would otherwise not be able to start their own business. We started the scheme because of the difficulty that is faced in getting finance from banks at an early stage. The evidence that my hon. Friend sees in his constituency is what I see across the country. That is exactly what this successful scheme is for.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

I have great pleasure in welcoming this excellent statement because it brings good news about the real economy. Does the Minister agree that encouraging schools and colleges to have governors with business experience would enhance and embed the entrepreneurial spirit that we need in those places?

[Matthew Hancock]

I encourage links between colleges and local enterprise partnerships, which can be strengthened a great deal by their governors and board members sitting on each other’s boards. There are schools around the country that bring in businesses and entrepreneurs, not only to talk to students, for example through the brilliant Speakers for Schools programme, but to help design the curriculum and motivate children to improve their performance in academic subjects. That is a great success when it is done well and I encourage more schools to do it.

Al-Madinah Free School

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

I salute the Government’s swift action on this matter. Does the Minister agree that it also reinforces the argument that we need strong and effective leadership in schools, especially through school governance?

[Mr Laws]

I certainly do. If Members, particularly on the Opposition Benches, reflect more carefully on this issue, they will see that one of the lessons is that the speed with which we have acted on the concerns expressed should be reflected in the speed with which we see action in all schools that are weak.