Schools White Paper

Toby Perkins Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Like many Opposition Members, I am proud of the record of the previous Labour Government and particularly proud of what we did on the academies programme. We went into many struggling schools that were finding it difficult to attract the right staff and made them attractive for new people, but I see nothing in the Government’s approach that builds on that. They are butchering the Labour Government’s record on academies, and they are wrong to claim that the changes are an extension of what the Labour Government did.

I am pleased to say that virtually all Opposition Members have recognised in today’s debate that there is a huge number of good academies, because we are not here to say that academies are a mistake. Chesterfield has several academies. Newbold Community School was taken over by Outwood Grange, which I have visited and in many ways is doing a good job, as are the many schools under local authority control. Our argument today is not anti-academy, but anti the Government’s dogmatic approach to forcing good schools that are working well under local authorities to become academies.

I take issue with the Government’s amendment where it states that

“it trusts school leaders to run schools and empowers them with the freedom to innovate”,

because many academies are parts of chains that operate in exactly the same way in many areas. Outwood Grange has 13 different schools, and the schools are run identically in Scunthorpe, Worksop or Chesterfield. I put it to the organisation that that represents the “McDonaldisation” of education; it did not disagree and said that every one of its schools is exactly the same. The idea that headteachers have all the power in academies does not necessarily stand up to much scrutiny. The Government’s rigid approach to the national curriculum prevents local headteachers from innovating, so the Government’s record does not back up what they are saying.

It is clear from today’s debate that the Government do not have the support of their own Members, who are right to worry about the impact on small rural primary schools, because there is no way that academy chains will be interested in taking over such schools, which will close. I have no doubt that the policy will collapse, and it is massively disruptive for schools to have this hanging over them. By far the best thing that the Secretary of State could do is not to carry on clinging to a policy that we can all see has no chance of being delivered, but to announce at the Dispatch Box that she will rethink and get everyone concentrating on the key issues that face our schools, not this forced academisation.