Trade Union Bill
Suella Braverman Excerpts(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Rishi Sunak
I completely reject those comments. There is nothing in this Bill that is offensive: it is a moderate Bill that is attempting to balance the rights—[Interruption.] Absolutely; it is a moderate Bill that is balancing the right to strike with the rights of people who are trying to earn a living in difficult circumstances, and trying to get to work or go about their daily business. When my constituents’ lives are disrupted and they express that frustration to me, I want to be able to tell them, because they want to be able to be sure, that that disruption was genuinely a last resort and a serious matter supported by a strong and continuous mandate. I do not want to have to tell them that their lives were seriously inconvenienced by a strike supported by just 22% of members almost two years ago.
Unions were created to give the weak more power against the strong, yet too often we find that strike action can hit the most vulnerable the hardest. When vital public services are put out of action, it is not well-paid corporate executives who suffer; it is someone doing less well-paid shift work, because if they cannot make it to work, they will not get paid. That is who I am thinking of when I think about the provisions in this Bill.
Despite the scaremongering, this Bill does nothing to prohibit strike action. Instead it simply ensures that the right to strike is balanced with the rights of people who are affected by strikes and have no say in whether or not they will happen. It ensures that those strikes are the result of a clear and positive democratic mandate from members. To me, this balance appears reasonable, fair and necessary.
Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the context of this Bill is that it is intended to deal with the problem of a 77% increase in the loss of working days over recent times? Last year alone the number of days lost to industrial action was higher than the average of the 1990s and 2000s.
Rishi Sunak
I agree with my hon. Friend. In today’s world, it is important that we maintain a competitive economy and increase employment, and having trade union legislation that is updated for that modern economy is vital if trade unions are to ensure their relevance in today’s economy.
Education and Adoption Bill (Eighth sitting)
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Kevin Brennan
My hon. Friend, once again, is right. We have to wonder what the Secretary of State’s problem is. Does she not trust herself to make the right decision? Why does she have to legislate to ensure she makes the right decision? It is a highly unusual clause, and I am racking my brains to think of something similar to it. I am sure that some constitutional experts, many of whom will be following our proceedings, will dig some up. I hope that this peculiar clause will be removed from the Bill, if not now then at a later stage, not because it is not vitally important that we do everything we can as quickly as possible to improve our schools, because it is, but simply because it is extremely foolish for Ministers to tie their hands and prevent themselves from carrying out other forms of intervention that might be the right pathway for improving schools in the long term.
The Government do not say enough about pupils who are languishing in failing academies—25% of failing schools are academies. From listening to Ministers’ wonderful anecdotes about academies that are thankfully successful, it would be easy to think that failing academies do not exist. We believe that a judgment about the future of a school should be based on evidence and on the particular circumstances of the school and the community. There should be a proper, open debate about that. There should be no stitching up of things behind closed doors.
Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)
Is it not clear from the evidence we have heard that some academy chains perform excellently and some do not, and some maintained schools perform very well and many do not? It is a mixed picture, but it is clear that the academisation programme over the past decade has produced success. The academisation of a school in my constituency has taken it from below average to “good”, and it is on track to “outstanding”. That must surely be progress. Anything that empowers that process and takes it a step forward must be supported.
Suella Fernandes
Does my hon. Friend agree that the clause allows governing bodies and local authorities to be involved in the conversion process, which is key to the local connection and will only bolster the leadership and transformation to academy status?
Mr Gibb
My hon. Friend raises an important point. This is about requiring involvement where it seems to be being resisted. She is right to make that point.
It would be wrong to introduce a new requirement for the Secretary of State to compensate local authorities in these circumstances. The clauses do not require the local authority or school governing body to do anything more than would be required for an academy conversion. As a school converts to an academy, it will be granted a 125-year peppercorn lease to operate on its land. The land continues to be used for educational purposes, and the local authority retains the freehold. In view of that, I hope that the hon. Member for Cardiff West will feel reassured enough to withdraw his amendments.
Suella Fernandes
Does the hon. Gentleman not consider that if a school has reached such a condition that an academy order is being taken forward, governance will have been one of the elements that was failing or required intervention, so it would not be responsible to allow governors a free rein, and this includes them in the participation.
Education and Adoption Bill (Seventh sitting)
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Mr Gibb
One can never state on the record in parliamentary proceedings the situation in all circumstances, but I am happy to reiterate that, as a matter of practice, it is important that regional schools commissioners discuss the membership of an IEB with the diocese. There may be circumstances, although I am not aware of what they might be, when that is not possible, but the desire is the same kind of desire that is in the memorandum of understanding between local authorities and dioceses to continue with regional schools commissioners. The London Diocesan Board for Schools has submitted written evidence welcoming
“the Secretary of State’s willingness to become pro-active in the formation of IEBs as proposals initiated by the Diocese have not always been acted on as quickly by local authorities as we would like.”
There is therefore support for these measures from the Church.
The purpose of the power is to enable regional schools commissioners to intervene swiftly when they are not convinced that an IEB constituted by the local authority will secure necessary improvements. The amendment would restrict that power by requiring regional schools commissioners to endorse an IEB whether or not they have confidence in it. That contradicts the clause’s purpose, which is to allow the Secretary of State to act decisively on underperformance.
We value the Churches’ important role in our education system, a role that predates the role of the state. Indeed, I have already written to the Second Church Estates Commissioner, my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), to reassure her of our continuing desire to work closely with the Church. My letter set out that if the Secretary of State is required to issue an academy order to a Church school that is inadequate under clause 7, there is a requirement under the Bill to consult the diocese on who might be the best sponsor for the school. In other cases of intervention, such as if a Church school is coasting or an underperforming church school has failed to comply with a warning notice, we will still seek the diocese’s views if we propose to make an academy order, as is required by section 4(1)(a) of the Academies Act 2010. We want to ensure that there are effective interventions in underperforming schools both to secure improvement and to protect their ethos. We already have non-statutory memorandums that set out the roles of the Church and the Government in relation to the academy programme. We have offered to review and update those memorandums with the Churches to reflect the changes in the Bill, as well as changes in the wider evolving party landscape. I am pleased that the Churches have confirmed their intention to work with us.
Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Opposition’s suggestion does not strike the right balance? If we allow discretion to be introduced, including a requirement would go too far and would be restrictive. The current draft strikes the right balance between consultation and inclusion, while allowing the intervention power to be exercised.
Kevin Brennan
Listening to the Minister, I wonder why he does not go the whole hog by abolishing local authorities altogether and replacing them with appointments from the Minister because—[Interruption.] That was probably unwise. I am sorry; I might accidentally have prompted a Government amendment at a later stage of the Bill. Could we strike that from the record?
It makes me wonder: what is the role of a democratically elected local authority not only when the Minister intervenes occasionally when there is an extreme issue and a need for state power to be exercised at a local level in a draconian way, but when he has decided to appoint a group of unelected and unaccountable people who can exercise the Secretary of State’s powers on her behalf and, to use the Minister’s word, restrict what local authorities do? Local authorities have to go cap in hand and ask for the permission of these appointed persons to act in relation to the schools in their area. The Government need to think this through in relation to what is said everywhere else about devolution. There is a disconnect between that and what the Bill will do to our education system.
Clause 6 claims to sort out how the intervention powers of the local authority and the Secretary of State interact. The way that the Minister has described it, it is hardly an interaction. The key is proposed new section 70B, which basically says that the local authority must give way to the Secretary of State or the regional schools commissioner acting on the behalf of the Secretary of State whenever she, or they, want to intervene—no matter how involved the local authority has been and how effectively the local authority might have been working with the school or how effectively the local community thinks that the local authority was working with the school.
Similarly, proposed new section 70C allows the Secretary of State or the regional schools commissioner—an appointed person, accountable to no one other than the appointed Minister of the Crown—to take over an interim executive board that has been set up for the express purpose of taking over from a governing body and taking any action necessary to improve a school.
Suella Fernandes
I note the hon. Gentleman’s concerns. However, what does he suggest should be done if a local authority fails to pick up on a failing school? Sir Daniel Moynihan highlighted that problem in the evidence sessions:
“If a school fails, it will not normally be because of something that has happened overnight; it will be because of a gradual decline in performance over a period of time. The local authority should have picked up on that and used its resources to do so”.––[Official Report, Education and Adoption Public Bill Committee, 30 June 2015; c. 13, Q22.]
Therefore, his view as an independent expert is that there should be a power for someone else to intervene. Is that not what the clause is getting at?
Education and Adoption Bill (Sixth sitting)
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Mr Gibb
My hon. Friend cites another good example. Again, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for her interest in education. I distinctly remember before the previous election, rather than this one, visiting schools with my hon. Friend. She is a great asset to Berwick-upon-Tweed, and long may she remain its Member of Parliament.
Some interventions, such as the forming of a multi-academy trust, may make it easier for head teachers to be more flexible with their staffing, and offer better long-term opportunities across the academy chain. Any intervention, whether structural or the provision of additional support from a national leader of education, is taken in order to support a school to become “good”. It has been noted by Ofsted and others, as I said earlier, that schools in challenging circumstances—in particular those going into special measures—often experience difficulties in recruiting and retaining good teachers. Therefore, the improvement that the Bill will bring about will ultimately make it easier to recruit.
Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend agree with the comments made in the evidence session that endorse the point he is making now, that academies, trusts and chains have greater freedoms in their budgets, on retaining excellent teachers and freedom from local authority control? That is at the heart of their success, and the Bill endorses that approach.
Mr Gibb
Yes, my hon. Friend is right. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work she has done in the past few years as chair of the Michaela free school, which is a school to watch. I am hesitant to praise an academy because I will be required, on the one in, one out rule, to praise a state school, so let me praise Wroxham primary school in Hertfordshire, which is an absolutely superb maintained school, but I also pay tribute to the work that Michaela does. That is a free school that is still in its first year of year 7. When I visited a few months ago I was astonished by the standard of behaviour, the academic achievement and the knowledge-based curriculum. That is certainly a school that we shall watch closely in years to come because I think it will become an example for many other schools to follow.
Education and Adoption Bill (Second sitting)
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Kevin Brennan
Q 41 Could I ask finally whether you think it will be necessary for the things contained in the Bill to be achieved on the school side for the staff to be transferred from local authorities to the regional schools commissioners?
Alison O'Sullivan: No, I do not think that structural change is the answer to those challenges. It is certainly something that could be considered but why would you put time and energy into structural change if you could achieve that without it?
Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)
Q 42 The provision on adoption aims to try and solve the problem of long-term decline in adoption. At the moment, as we all know, it is happening at too small and too localised a scale. It is hoped that the attempt to regionalise agencies and bring them together will encourage agencies to cast their net more widely, reduce the problems of delay, and encourage local authorities to look outside their immediate local area. We have heard a lot about this today. One problem which has been cited is the reluctance of local authorities to place children outside a particular area. What appetite do you think there is for looking further afield geographically?
Anna Sharkey: I think that there is an appetite. Local authorities met the requirement to up the game when it came to recruitment, and they were very successful. Local authority social workers work hard to do the best they can for the children they are responsible for, and that is what they aim to do. There are difficulties in the system as it exists at the moment, and I think that, because clearly there are children waiting in the system. I have adopters who have been approved and are waiting—it is not happening. Adoption Link has achieved a huge amount by getting adopters much more involved in the adopter-led linking process, and that has been very positive.
There some things that still prevent movement out of a local authority region. These are often to do with budget constraints, because local authorities are completely stuck financially. There is an historical sense that buying a placement from outside is very costly. Andy talked about children who sit in the care system and experience multiple placement moves, and who are then over-represented in mental ill health, the criminal justice system and underperformance at school. The cost to all of us of not getting it right at a much earlier stage is absolutely phenomenal, not least of which is the impact on that individual child and the rest of their family.
Getting it right is very important. At the moment the structure includes an inter-agency fee budget, an adoption budget, a fostering budget, a budget that does something else relating to supporting kinship care arrangements, and so on, which can make it very difficult to be child-focused, and to look at the best option in the most timely way to meet the needs of the child as soon as possible. Anything that tries to sort that out can only be a good thing.
I have some caution about the criteria on which that regionalisation would happen and how big a region would be. There is talk in the paper of it being around the 200 mark in respect of children. We are dealing with a very personal aspect of public care, and adopters need to feel that the people they are working with know them individually. We want those children to be known individually by the social worker who is advocating on their behalf, so getting lost in numbers is a real concern. We also know that where people are stuck with chunks of money that do something or boundaries that do something else, or if social workers are not prepared to go outside because someone else is saying “We have run out of money” or “It has got to be in-house” or “We have a family coming through in four months’ time who might be okay”, that will build delay into the system. If we can improve that, it has got to be better.
Alison O'Sullivan: It is really important that we do not build new barriers. If we are widening the scope of the way in which people collaborate to make things more effective and more efficient, then we must not have another set of boundaries that are just on a slightly bigger scale. It is not only how we create those collaborative arrangements, but how they interface and interrelate with each other as we go forward. That is one aspect that will need to be managed.
Andy Elvin: I would go back a step regarding the decline of adoption numbers. If your measure of success is an increase in adoption, then you are asking the wrong questions. That is not what we are after; we are after an increase in permanence and an increase in better outcomes for children. As the adoption numbers have fallen slightly, we have seen special guardianship orders rise. SGOs, in particular those for children under five, are largely made to extended family members to care for their relatives. That was exactly why SGOs were introduced. It is not a bad thing that they are now being used where there used to be intra-family adoptions, because they take some of the heat out of that conflict between different generations of a family.
We have a group of experts which was set up by the Department for Education, which will start meeting to discuss the rise in special guardianships. It will also look at the appropriate use and the assessments behind SGOs. Until that finishes in the autumn, we do not really know what the story is behind the rise in special guardianship, particularly for the under-fives.
The other side is that there is a huge rise in surrogacy in this country that is completely unknown and completely unreported. People who used to come forward for adoption are choosing international surrogacy, because it is available and affordable and more assured in terms of getting a younger child—a baby—than adoption. There are all these threats to adoption out there, but simply taking adoption numbers as your measure of success is to look at entirely the wrong thing. It is outcomes for children as a whole that we are after, and success comes in many forms. I know many complex children we look after in long-term foster care who have absolutely fantastic outcomes.
Foster care does not stop at 18; it will not stop at 21, when they are staying put. Our foster parents are godparents to their foster children’s children; they give them away at their weddings. It very often lasts for life in the same way that adoption does.
The Chair
We still have a few more questions to come and we have very little time, so can I ask the contributors to be a bit more succinct in their answers?
The Chair
Mr Hobby, there may shortly be a vote and two Members have indicated that they wish to ask a question, so I will take both questions together. Could you sum up quickly, because I think we will leave shortly?
Suella Fernandes
Q 58 What is your experience of headteacher boards and what is your view of the impact that they can have on helping schools improve?
Peter Kyle
Q 59 In a follow-up to the shadow Minister’s question, you expressed concern about the confusion in the framework for monitoring and evaluation that could result from this. How would that play out in a school and what impact would having different authorities responsible for different areas of monitoring, evaluation and standards have on the leadership of the school?
Russell Hobby: Two quick responses. Headteacher boards are a good idea in principle, but I agree with one of the previous witnesses who doubted the capacity of the current framework to meet all the schools required. You probably need more regional schools commissioners and more boards to support and advise them, and in the long term, see how that plays out. You have to be really careful about conflicts of interest on the headteacher boards though. These are leading academy chief executives and headteachers who may have an interest in some of the decisions being made. I am sure that they all do it from the principle of what is best for the children, but they need to ensure that the perception is there as well. There is a lack of transparency in some of their deliberations and I think that they will need to ensure that they protect themselves against that.
In terms of the multiple overlapping accountability frameworks, I think that is one of the most difficult parts of the system. When you are getting different messages from different people—one inspectorate tells you that you are good, another group tells you that you are coasting—it damages the legitimacy of some of the accountability measures in the eyes of school leaders. What am I—a good school or not a good school? Who is right? One phenomenon that you get in the education system is an amplification of other people’s accountability. Knowing that, for example, as a “requires improvement” school you have three years to improve—it is a fair timescale—but your local authority, knowing that it will be held to account for your performance, may come in after two years and say, “That’s no longer good enough.” Your governing body, knowing that it will be held to account by the local authority, may come in after one year and say, “That’s not good enough.” What often eventuates is that otherwise reasonable timescales—because three years seems to me to be a reasonable timescale in which to demonstrate improvement in a school—get truncated because the same people are accountable to each other. We never chart the different pressures and how they are magnified coming through the system. A streamlined approach to accountability, where schools knew that they had one set of targets, one group of people judging and a right of appeal, would allow heads to concentrate on improving their schools rather than reporting to stakeholders.
Education and Adoption Bill (First sitting)
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Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)
Q 32 I have a question on teacher recruitment specifically for Sir Daniel, but I am sure that others will want to chip in. Do you think that academies and multi-academy trusts find it easier to recruit good teachers and leaders?
Sir Daniel Moynihan: It is certainly the case that teaching schools—the Government set up a teaching schools scheme—like medical schools, can train their own teachers. Increasingly, multi-academy trusts have teaching schools within them, which are training large numbers of teachers outside the university system. We have got 94 trainee teachers for next September and we will be producing teachers not just for Harris schools, but for London schools. So in the sense that we now have the freedom to take teacher training into our own hands and deliver qualified teachers, it is easier to that extent.
Richard Watts: Although I would note that that power is open to all schools, I think that teacher recruitment is much more about geography and somewhere being an interesting place to come and work than about the governance status of the school.
Malcolm Trobe: One way in which multi-academy trusts and chains have a big advantage is that they work collectively, effectively to have continuing professional development programmes that run across the trust. They are able effectively to grow their own leadership and develop their own leaders and that, therefore, enables some movement of staff into key positions. So if you have a school in a multi-academy trust that is hitting certain difficulties, you have often got some flexibility to move teachers around.
The biggest difficulty is in schools, particularly those in coastal regions, that are isolated and do not have access to teaching schools. One might call these areas teacher education deserts: there is no provision for young teachers coming into them.
Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)
Q 33 This legislation, through guidance, aims to address the problem of latent stagnation in schools. It does that by identifying the standard for coasting and raising standards by offering those coasting schools the opportunity to work with some of the best experts in education to design a path to improvement. What should those plans include? What programme of improvement measures should there be for schools of that type?
Emma Knights: I think that, actually, pretty much every school in the country has a school improvement plan—it is part of what we do. It might be called something else, such as a school development plan, but that is actually what the governing board of the school is doing. I would not want the Committee to think that some schools are just bimbling along, not thinking about how they improve teaching and learning and outcomes for children. A huge change has taken place in schools over the last 10 years in terms of schools actually taking responsibility for that. We see, in fact, that a lot of schools do manage to improve without having to have what is called formal intervention.
I do not want to leave this room without mentioning interim executive boards, because there is more than one type of formal intervention and so far the Committee has asked only about sponsored academisation. We actually have very little evidence about which different types of formal intervention work best and that is a bit of a worry for me. This whole Bill has come into place when actually we are guessing.
The main bit of evidence was produced by the National Audit Office last year and it showed that 60% of schools deemed inadequate did improve without any sort of formal intervention because they had exactly that: a school improvement plan, and that worked in 60% of cases. Sponsored academisation worked in 44% of cases and IEBs worked in 72% of cases, so I really think the Committee needs to think about other interventions and please do not overlook interim executive boards.
You may think it is slightly funny that I am saying that as the National Governors’ Association, because obviously an IEB is put in place when the governance fails. But, if the school is failing, that is needed and we should be doing that.
Kevin Brennan
Q 34 If I may say so, that observation seems to be in direct contrast to what Sir Daniel said earlier. Sir Daniel, would you care to come back, rebut and destroy the points made by the representative of the National Governors’ Association?
Sir Daniel Moynihan: IEBs are an effective solution and in many cases IEBs precede academy conversion. In a number of the schools that we have taken on which have been—
Kevin Brennan
Q 89 Before you move on to that, can I make the point that I am trying to get to? Are IEBs ever a valuable way to deal with an inadequate school that is not on a pathway to academisation, but is nevertheless on a pathway to improvement within the maintained sector?
Dr Coulson: I have not experienced it.
Suella Fernandes
Q 90 I am a chair of governors at a free school. I want to build on the Minister’s point about the measure used to identify standards in schools and the move to Progress 8. We heard evidence from Dr Allen, who did not really think that Progress 8 was a suitable standard because it did not capture data for the requisite amount of time and displayed the same social gradient. She also said that the assessment of coasting would add an extra layer of accountability, which schools would find confusing. Could you all say a bit about what you think of those comments and opinions?
Dr Coulson: I think that the definition of coasting is a measured increase in ambition. What you heard earlier was about whether the threshold of 60% under the current measures and then 85% for primary schools gives a ceiling for the number of schools that would come into the scope of being addressed. I would love to address every single school. The draft regulations give a significant increase in ambition to schools that really need a focus, while managing the capacity question that I have been asked several times about how much we can grow the system in order for schools to come into it.
The points we heard about tweaking the measures were all really well made. There is a balance in terms of what the increase of ambition means at this stage in the draft regulations. As crafted now, they show a significant increase in ambition, even if they do not address every single school that people would like to have focused attention on.
Zoe Carr: I would like to pick this up from the primary angle, if I may. The 85% attainment measure—which all aspire to, so we will live up to it and do everything that we can—is more challenging for disadvantaged schools. However, the biggest thing for me is whether affluent schools will be identified under this coasting definition if they achieve the 85% measure but their progress continues to be poor. We must not miss that really important aspect when the Bill passes through Parliament, because we still need ways to identify those sorts of schools. I think that is the reason for the Bill being here in the first place—to try to address the coasting schools in our education system.
If those schools’ progress measures are not above the median for a number of years, yet their attainment is above 85%, it is right that we look at those elements. That is where schools in disadvantaged areas will feel that they are being hit twice by these accountability measures, whereas schools in affluent areas will have a much greater chance of attaining the 85% and their progress will not then really be looked at.
Lee Elliot Major: I was going to make exactly the same point. I worry—for me, it always goes back to the disadvantaged children—about the progress of children in high-attaining schools. I would love the Bill and the discussion to think about those schools in very advantaged areas. A lot of children coming into those schools are already high attaining, therefore the school’s results will generally be higher. My worry is: what about the sometimes small number of children—it is a significant number across the nation if you add them all up—who are not succeeding in those schools? You are then looking at progress measures in both primary and secondary schools. That would be my worry—that we miss out on those hundreds of thousands of children.
One final point—I was not here for Dr Allen’s evidence, but year groups come and go and can be very different in a school, so I like the fact that this will be triggered by a three-year passage of time. That is a sensible approach.
John Pugh
Q 91 I have two questions for Zoe Carr. You told us about the laudable efforts and improvements made by your trust. If, in years to come—heaven forbid—some of your schools or perhaps your whole trust is found to be coasting, you could not reasonably object to having imposed upon you the same disciplines, rigours and procedures as applied by the legislation to the maintained sector, could you?
Zoe Carr: Absolutely not. In my experience, through the work of the regional school commissioner and the headteacher board, those are exactly the rigours that the academy sector has now. The data for each academy are looked at in a great deal of detail and where schools are found not to be performing well enough then an immediate intervention is put in place.
Education and Adoption Bill
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Tristram Hunt
My hon. Friend makes a valuable point that there should not be a hierarchy of school type. What makes a difference is strong school leadership and great teaching in the classroom, which can be there across a range of different schools. At Committee stage, we will introduce amendments on a quality threshold for conversion. I am talking about a guarantee that only academy chains with a proven track record should be eligible to sponsor new academies. We want Ofsted to be allowed to inspect academy chains as it does in relation to local authority school improvement functions. What is there to hide? We want shorter funding contracts and for academy freedoms to be extended to all maintained schools as well as measures that challenge the stranglehold of poor academy chains by making it easier for schools to change their sponsors—a Bosman ruling for schools introducing autonomy back to the chains. In short, we want action on inadequate academies and encouragement for maintained schools with a strong plan for improvement.
We also wish to see an end to the continued and accelerating process of centralisation in education policy. When I read clauses 8 to 11 of the Bill, my first thought was to wonder whether the Education Secretary had reinstated her predecessor’s poster of Vladimir Lenin in Sanctuary Buildings. The proposed crackdown in those clauses on governors, parents, councillors, teachers and heads who merely wish to express an opinion in a free country on the future of their school is something to behold. As the Prime Minister’s former guru, Mr Steve Hilton, said of this Government’s approach to education:
“The Soviet comparison is an apt one—using central command to try and run a vast system. Of course you can squeeze some results out of it and muster some sign schools are improving. But is it the big transformation we want to see to prepare for the 21st century? No”.
Steve Hilton was right. These clauses are an extraordinarily statist attack on civil society and the individual’s ability to express dissent.
Suella Fernandes
(Fareham) (Con): I am disappointed by the hon. Gentleman’s accusation of Soviet-style centralisation on the part of the Conservative Government. What is his opinion of the hundreds of free schools that have been set up over the past five years, devolving power and decision making to local groups of volunteers to start up schools where they see a need?
Tristram Hunt
The hon. Lady was not listening. That is not my comparison; it was made by Mr Steve Hilton, who was the Prime Minister’s policy guru. I am just quoting him. Once upon a time, there was an idea called the big society of which the right hon. Gentleman was in favour.
Whatever else we might scorn about the Tory party’s approach to localism, we realise that devolution is valuable. The devolution of transport, skills and health powers to Manchester is a good thing, but there are few things more important to a community’s pride and prosperity than its schools, so why do schools stand in such stark contrast to the devolution offered so far as part of the northern powerhouse initiative? We believe that it is time that decisions to do with new schools and intervention in failing schools were made at a combined authority level. Regional schools commissioners are far too distant to understand the distinctive context of every school and community in their region, and we share the criticism from the National Governors Association of the capacity of commissioners to carry out their functions effectively. In Committee, the Labour party will seek to reshape the Bill with a series of pro-devolution amendments. It is called parent choice, something that the Conservative party used to believe in.
The success of the Labour party’s sponsored academy programme came through a deep and balanced understanding of how we improve schools and tackle educational failure. Our reforms sat alongside the challenge programmes, the National College for Teaching and Leadership, Teach First and sustained investment in teaching and learning. In contrast, the Conservative party offers a 10% budget cut for schools, rising pressures on places, larger class sizes, closing Sure Start, teacher shortages, excessive workloads, a collapse of professional support for head teachers, and a widening attainment gap between the poorest children and their better-off peers. The consequences are already being felt by the most disadvantaged in our society, and the terrible judgment of the Teach First charity is that
“things are getting worse for poorer children, instead of better.”
The Bill does not do enough to close the gap, raise standards, challenge complacency, unleash innovation or inspire our teachers. It is because we are ambitious for every child in every school in England that we will press our reasoned amendment to a vote.
Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)
I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) and I congratulate hon. Friends and hon. Members on excellent maiden speeches.
Aspiration is today’s buzzword. The reason why the Conservatives won the election was that we embodied the real sentiment of that word. What does aspiration mean? For me, our education reforms are the engine of aspiration and tackle social inequality at its root cause. Our one nation party says to every child that it does not matter where they start; they can get ahead through self-empowerment, taking responsibility and hard work. Nowhere do those values ring more loudly than in our schools and in this Bill.
In 2010, after 13 years of a Labour Government supposedly supporting education, two in five 16-year-olds left school functionally illiterate or innumerate. In a country where we have some of the best schools in the world, that is a shocking disgrace. It is therefore just and essential that the Government have powers to intervene in failing and coasting schools, and those powers are enabled in this Bill. We all know what coasting schools are. They are schools in affluent areas where there is no incentive to achieve beyond a C, D or borderline pass. One reason why I am so proud to support this Bill is that we are the only party—
Suella Fernandes
I wish to make progress. We are the only party that is courageous enough to talk honestly about failing schools. We have done that in the past by giving people, volunteers, teachers and parents a say in the solution.
Suella Fernandes
I will not give way. Teachers are wonderful, but endemic weaknesses in the system stop our children getting the best. I have seen at first hand how our reforms have addressed the problem.
Suella Fernandes
No, I will not. I teamed up with a group of teachers to set up a free school in Wembley, my home town. Led by Katherine Birbalsingh, an inspiring headteacher, the school has some of the best staff in the country. As chairman of the board of governors, I can say that our aim is simple: to bring excellence and a private school quality to the inner city. I grew up in the area, and attended a state school at the beginning of my education. Teachers went on strike, discipline was poor and expectations were low. After designing the vision of a knowledge-based curriculum, we secured approval and Government funding.
Kevin Brennan
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way; she is being very generous. Earlier in her remarks, she said that everyone knows what a coasting school looks like. Would she care to name for us the coasting schools in her constituency?
Suella Fernandes
I will not name any schools, but I have adequately defined the features and the hallmarks of coasting schools. It is clear that further guidance will be forthcoming.
After designing the vision of a knowledge-based curriculum for the free school in which I was involved, we secured approval and funding from the Government. We recruited staff and found a building. I am proud to say that Michaela Community School opened its doors last September to 120 12-year-olds and it is transforming their lives. Many of the children come from neighbouring council estates or areas such as Harlesden and Willesden. They have the chance to aim high because of inspired and innovative teaching. If one walks through the corridors, one can hear a pin drop, because pupils are quietly learning in their classrooms. I invite Members here to join them for lunch and they will see how polite they are. If they take a bus in the area, they will spot them by their impeccable uniform. Whether it is the practice of appreciation at lunchtime or the rigorous learning, Michaela Community School has been made possible only because teachers have been set free to teach and set high expectations. It was teachers, not the state, who saw a need and took action.
Rachael Maskell
Why has £241 million been spent on free schools in areas that do not have a crisis in school places?
Suella Fernandes
A key criterion for gaining Government approval for a free school is to establish need. There needs to be an established deficit in school places, which is evidenced in the data, to form part of the application.
Suella Fernandes
I will make some progress. My point is that it was teachers, not the state, who saw the need and took action. Those teachers who exercised strong leadership were set free to teach the subjects about which they were passionate. They had freedom over staff, and over spending. That freedom is bolstered by the reforms in this Bill and is at the heart of aspiration.