Employment Rights Bill (Fourteenth sitting)

Debate between Sarah Gibson and Nick Timothy

Committee stage
Tuesday 17th December 2024 Public Bill Committees

[Nick Timothy]

Perhaps we could, but I am trying to make the argument that, in the end, when we are talking about employment in the public sector—when we are talking about terms and conditions and things like that—yes, these things are obviously of huge importance to the employees themselves, but they are also important regarding the way in which employers set themselves up. The purpose of a school is obviously to educate our children, and the ultimate objective is to drive up those academic standards. That is the context in which we are discussing these particular academy freedoms and what this Bill therefore does.

It is the case that free school and academy founders have been in the vanguard of reform, precisely because they have been able to use their freedoms from local council control—freedoms to develop the curriculum in their own way, to set things such as the school day and term dates, and to decide the pay and conditions for their staff themselves. We can see that in the data that is published: it is not just about things such the PISA rankings; it is also about things such as the trends in international mathematics and science study, an international comparative study, which was published a couple of weeks ago and showed that, despite the pandemic, English schools have actually improved and have outperformed almost all western countries.

It is also the case that the progress data that the Government have published demonstrates that the best schools in the country have benefited from exactly those kinds of freedoms. The best school in the country, looking at performance data, is Michaela, which is a free school. Free schools and academies far outperform normal maintained schools when it comes to that data, and that is because of the freedoms that we are talking about trying to defend through our amendment.

I know that this is a debate for another time, but I am very disappointed that the Government have cancelled the next wave of free schools, that they have weakened things such as Ofsted and its inspection framework, and that they want to water down discipline policies and so on. I am very disappointed as well that, through measures such as this, the Government are watering down the academy freedoms that have done so much to make our schools the best in the world.

[Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship this afternoon, Ms Vaz. I share the passion of the hon. Member for West Suffolk for education—as I stated earlier, both my parents became headteachers before retirement—so I appreciate that he is very concerned about the state of education in our country. However, I am very concerned that this amendment is in danger of creating a slightly two-tiered system between maintained schools and academies, whereby maintained schools would have a certain level of protection for their staff that would not be there in academies.

If this change is so important for the academies, my question to the hon. Members for Mid Buckinghamshire and for West Suffolk would be that, if this is good for academies, surely it is good for maintained schools? In that case, why are we not arguing that this whole Bill should be changed, and that this whole clause should be taken out and the change therefore applied to all schools?

I am also concerned about the separation of requirements for one school and not for the other.