Education and Adoption Bill

Debate between Tristram Hunt and David Anderson

Monday 22nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend makes a valuable point, not least because Ofsted removed more than 1,000 inspectors last week because it did not think that they were up to the job. It is no good Ministers saying, “We can centralise and govern this from the centre. The man in Whitehall knows what is best”, and then refusing to meet parents, activists and communities to be held to account for their decisions.

There is concern across the educational spectrum. Earlier this week, we saw a letter from the headmaster of Rugby school—so not a natural Labour supporter—who pointed out how the new curriculum is leaving children

“ill-equipped for a future that will place a premium on creativity.”

The challenges we face in terms of productivity, skills, social mobility, wellbeing, character and attainment are so much greater than the Government seem prepared to accept.

[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend also aware that we face a recruitment crisis, because teachers are overworked and underpaid? If we carry on treating people with disrespect, they will not want to work in the profession.

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend makes a very valuable point. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) made a very powerful intervention in the debate on this subject last week. As the labour market tightens and workloads grow, we will see more teacher shortages and recruitment crises.

We seek to highlight these crucial omissions and to improve the Bill before it receives a Second Reading. As it stands, the Bill fails to set out measures for dealing with inadequate academies and offers no reassurance on the quality of academy chains. It offers a reductive approach to school improvement without a decent evidence base. We regard the centralisation of power in the hands of the Secretary of State as unhealthy and arbitrary. I regard it as wholly opposed to traditional English forms of self-government. The Labour party is passionate about cross-party collaboration when it comes to education, so let me begin by focusing on areas of agreement.

The Labour party supports efforts to speed up the adoption process. Children put up for adoption number among the most vulnerable members of our society. We know that delays can be hurtful. We accept the principle that every step should be taken to minimise the harm a malfunctioning adoption system can sometimes cause vulnerable children. We do, however, have some questions and concerns to put to the Secretary of State.

First, on reorganisation, will the Secretary of State explain how the proposals will proceed by consent, given that proposed new section 3ZA would grant the Secretary of State significant powers of direction? We are not opposed to that per se—the Labour Assembly in Wales has carried out a successful consolidation of adoption powers across different local authorities—but it would be helpful if she could provide more clarity on the process.

Secondly, we have some concerns about hard-to-place children. There are some extraordinarily brilliant small and specialist voluntary sector adoption agencies that carry out tremendous work placing more challenging young people with families. I firmly believe we should retain their contribution to our adoption system.

Thirdly, I encourage the Secretary of State to set out more detail on how the proposals affect the roll-out of the national adoption support fund and whether there are any plans to extend the range of services that money can be spent on.

Finally, reflecting on the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson), we hope that as early as possible in this Parliament the Government will bring forward proposals on other permanent arrangements. The commitment to reforming adoption is laudable, but we would like to see it matched with a commitment to reform long-term foster care, kinship care arrangements, special guardianships and a closer look at the role of grandparents.

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[Tristram Hunt]

Does the hon. Lady mean the progress 8 data, the EBacc data, or the data relating to free school meals? Again, it is very unclear what the Conservatives are going for.

The tragedy is that we would like to support action to engage with coasting schools. My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) made a valuable point about how we should define a coasting school. A coasting school could be good or outstanding if one would expect greater achievements from its pupils. We want early intervention to deal with coasting schools. Intervention was part of the reason for the success of the London challenge programme which my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) did so much to deliver, and which did so much to increase attainment in the capital before the Government scrapped it.

It is not the job of Oppositions to give a blank cheque to Governments. We are seeing something similar to the Government’s collapsing Childcare Bill, in which they could not define the funding terms, could not say what constitutes full-time work, and could not explain child ratio rates. They should have done some work before introducing that Bill.

[Mr Anderson]

Work has already been done in the House. The Education Committee published a report in January, and the Department for Education published a statistical working paper just before the general election, in which it said that it was currently impossible to carry out any reliable statistical evaluation when it came to whether academies were better than traditional schools. What we have here is an attempt to ignore the facts and push through an ideologically driven agenda, which is typical of the Tory party.

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend has made an extremely valuable point about the excellent report produced by the cross-party Select Committee. I shall say more about it later.

The same haphazard approach is apparent in the Bill’s failure to deal with different types of school, such as academies and maintained schools, in a fair and consistent manner. There is a great deal in it about inadequate maintained schools, but what about inadequate academies? They do not face automatic interventions. As the Secretary of State knows, 145 academy schools are currently rated “inadequate”. Indeed, eight converter academies have been in special measures since 2013, and all eight remain with their original sponsor. The Sir John Gleed School in Lincolnshire is a converter academy that was rated inadequate in April 2013, and is still inadequate. I make that at least 783 days of inadequacy too many, which is too much for the Labour party.