Draft Coasting Schools (England) Regulations 2016

Robert Flello Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2016 General Committees

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, as ever, to see you in the Chair, Mr Gray. I will make just a couple of points, if I may. First, I certainly do not think it is a political point to say that every child should fulfil their potential, and I therefore do not think that anybody wants to see a school that coasts or deliberately allows its pupils not to fulfil their potential. Sadly, what is a political point is the means by which that potential is achieved. We have heard numbers bandied about on more children being in good schools and all the rest of that, but I pay tribute to the teachers and senior leadership teams who, despite everything, are performing phenomenally under huge pressure, and who are helping our children to be the best that they can be.

This instrument will not win any prizes for plain English. A slight bugbear of mine is when measures have quotes such as “‘PTREADWRITTAMATX’ column” and so forth. It takes me back 30-odd years to when I was messing around with my first computer and looking at coding. My fear is that the measure is some sort of code, and that the result is automatic academisation. I will come to that point shortly.

The explanatory memorandum states:

“Once a school has fallen within the coasting definition, Regional Schools Commissioners (RSCs) acting on behalf of the Secretary of State will engage the schools to consider its wider context, and decide whether additional support is needed”.

It is a shame that it takes a mathematical calculation to require the regional schools commissioners to do something. I am sure that better regional schools commissioners are already all over their schools, but the way the measure is structured suggests that there is no engagement, which I am sure there is. Not only would a non-professional non-teacher think that the instrument is gibberish, they would also be slightly if not very concerned that the engagement of commissioners happens only when a mathematical problem arises and when various points are triggered from something that is, at first sight, unintelligible.

Another concern is the time delay—the measure talks about looking at things over three years. It may well be that a school has not been performing particularly well for a year and starts to trigger the tests. By the end of the three years of tests, we are potentially into the fifth year of that school not performing well, by which time pupils will have passed all the way through that school without it ever being identified as coasting. I would like a situation whereby, if a primary school has problems—[Interruption]. Bless my hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn. If a primary school has been identified, can support therefore be offered to the secondary schools that those children are going to, to ensure that they do not suffer in their education?

I wanted to share my concern about paragraph 7.9 in the explanatory memorandum, which states:

“Intervention will not be automatic.”

The Minister repeated this point. It is a shame that there is not already support, but if support is not automatic, it seems to contradict the requirements that the commissioners try to get more schools to be academies. I am therefore concerned not only that that intervention will be automatic, but that the automatic default position will be for the school to be made into an academy.

You will be delighted to hear, Mr Gray, that I will not detain the Committee any more than I already have, but I would like the Minister to address my points and concerns. I beg him please in future to have statutory instruments that do not use such awful phrases, albeit in inverted commas.