Academies Bill [HL]

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Whitaker]

175: Schedule 1, page 16, line 8, at end insert—
“( ) requiring the appointed person to ensure provision of premises which meet designated minimum design standards, including standards which meet the needs of students with disabilities”

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, I will try to race through this. I apologise for not signalling the subject at Second Reading, which I could not come to. It was, however, trailed in the Statement on free schools. I was grateful for the insight into government thinking which the Minister provided then.

Amendment 175, in my name, is predicated on one overarching fact—that the design of school buildings is fundamental to their purpose; and that a well designed school building, as well as keeping initial and recurring costs down and being environmentally sustainable, contributes materially and significantly to the educational success of the school. In the new Westminster Academy we can see even wider social achievements, including not only the educational results of a drop in truancy and a big rise in attainment, but also a drop in crime around the school. There is nothing in the Bill about the role of design; nor, as far as I can see, is it in the remit of the very interesting New Schools Network, about which the Minister wrote to us. Design was not directly included in the statutory remit of the original academies either, but they were to be created as part of a framework which insists on design criteria.

Design is not an amateur matter. We may all think we know a good design when we see one, but it is not just a matter of good taste. It is a matter of functionality, and of buildings or other objects which achieve a purpose. As regards school buildings, the standards—the modern ones in the Building Schools for the Future programme of the last Government—are well accepted. I entirely agreed with the Minister when he said in the Statement on free schools, in answer to my question, that the building regulations need a fresh look. I am referring not to this ancient corpus of law but to the up-to-date and innovative standards of our excellent new schools. If academies are to be built or put in refurbished buildings outside this framework, unless the sponsors have access to or understanding of school design skills, the children who study there will be deprived. Money will be wasted. I am sure that the noble Lord opposite does not want academy students to be let down in this way.

Listeners to the “Today” programme on 18 June will have heard new sponsors of academies being grilled about how even to get their building up in the first place. Procurement and construction are complex processes, requiring expertise and negotiation. If good design is not part of the process from the beginning, it invariably loses out and so then do the students, not least those with disabilities. My amendment would ensure that the appointed person in the regulations in Schedule 1—usually, no doubt, the sponsor—has a duty to find out what the appropriate design standards are and apply them. As I said, the standards exist. They could of course be adapted to allow for a range of educational models and school ethoi. This would work very well if the Government continued with the client design adviser system, another successful innovation.

I do not think that we should allow our children’s education to be vulnerable to the vagaries and variations in expertise of groups of people who may have clear ideas about the teaching culture they want to set up but no acquaintance with design. I beg to move.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, about the importance of design. There is such a thing as a dysfunctional building. Schools are buildings around which large numbers of children have to be moved every day. It is very important that they are well designed for that purpose, as well as for concentration and calm contemplation of the lessons. If the buildings magnify sound, they will not be very good for that purpose.

I am also concerned about the green credentials of schools. Will the Minister say something about the design standards in relation to the use of energy and water, and the disposal of waste and all those issues? I have often suggested that schools are ideal places for ground-source heating. They have large tarmac playgrounds under which you can put the pipes. It really is important because in the future energy will be even more expensive than it is now and we will all have to pay for it.

I recently went to an academy school where in order to switch the lights off at night the caretaker had to go to the top of the building. However, he was forced to leave the lights on all night because health and safety would not allow him to come down the stairs in the dark. That new, purpose-built academy building was ablaze all night. It was a disgrace and I hope that we will avoid that sort of thing.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Earl of Listowel]

I interject briefly to seek reassurance on those minimum standards. I am reminded by this debate of a report some time ago about a head teacher of a new academy school that had been built without a playground. The head teacher reportedly said, “We don't need one, we will have them working very hard in school all day, thank you very much”. A paper presented to the British Psychological Society emphasised the value to children of having play breaks in the school day, and looked at how those play breaks had been squeezed over time. It would be reassuring to know that there is something in the minimum standards about a play area for children in every new school. If the Minister would write to me on that, I would appreciate it.

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have joined in at this dreadfully late hour. I particularly value the point about CABE, which is an economical and expert organisation that we hope will continue to be used as it has been. I am grateful, of course, to the Minister for the degree of his understanding, and for his assurances on accommodation for children with disabilities. I was not quite so sure about the firmness of his assurances about design standards for all schools. Perhaps he might write to me with the assurance that the current design standards will be used for academies, or perhaps we could have a brief chat about it. If the outcome is satisfactory, there will be no need to take the matter further; but we do feel strongly that there must be this assurance. I will read Hansard carefully and hope for another letter, or perhaps a conversation. In the mean time, I am happy to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 175 withdrawn.

Academies Bill [HL]

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells]

My Lords, in the diocese of Bath and Wells, which is very largely rural, we have some 184 church primary schools, which have served their communities for a long time. They are essentially community schools. That is reflected across the country to a greater extent than we might imagine. The essence of those schools is built around how you make a community and what is part of a community. Some of them have rather more effective relationships with their parish church than others. Some of them have Christian head teachers, others do not, but the essential ethos of those schools, founded within the framework of Anglicanism, has carried through to a greater or lesser extent in their religious commitment.

It is key for us to recall the requirement for a national curriculum of religious education. There has to be a commitment to that going across not just the faith tradition of the particular school but the wide experience of religion so that young people have an opportunity to understand it. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, that many of these schools are committed to reflecting on the philosophy underpinning humanism. I was asked a few moments ago to try to clear up what is a faith and what is a belief. I shall not risk doing that, but I will say that all faith involves belief at some level or another and is committed to some kind of system. By definition, faith cannot ultimately be proved. Therefore, how we understand and develop these things depends on a whole variety of our relationships with one another in the wider spectrum of life.

I support academies. Indeed, I had the privilege of being the chairman of the board of education in the diocese of Southwark when the first of the academies in south London was formed. I am extremely proud of that, because it did indeed reach into that community at its most vulnerable level.

However, the concept of free schools raises for me real anxieties, particularly in the sphere of religious influence. That is not simply because I want to hold up my hand to say that the Anglican or Catholic churches have a corner of the market. I remind your Lordships of our national identity and the way in which we are tied into the concept of the sovereign as the head of the Church of England, under our constitution, and our relationship with Parliament. The issue is much more complex from that point of view.

There is real merit in our looking towards the development of academies, but I hope that the view of the future of good schools will not be that they should all become academies and enter the independent sector. We have many good schools and, if we go down that road, I fear that we will, in the end, marginalise some of the poorer communities.

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, I had not intended to prolong this long debate by joining in, but I have to confess that I, too, was made more anxious during the course of it. I share the anxiety of the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. I should say that I, too, am a humanist. Indeed, I am now a vice-president of the association. Long before that, however, I felt strongly that we live in a plural society and we need more than ever to be at ease with our fellow citizens. Our education system ought to increase that. I have some sympathy with the approaches taken by the noble Lords, Lord Baker and Lord Lucas, but most of all with Amendments 61 and 133 in the name of my noble friend Lady Massey.

Perhaps I may quickly throw this in: “belief” is the name given by international law to those systems of morality or ethics that are not religious. I quite agree that it is rather an odd word for that purpose, but it is generally taken to mean that. My question for the Minister is—if he does not mind putting my anxiety in the anxiety basket, so that it is a bit heavier than the certainty one—in what way will academies teach the national curriculum in respect of religion and belief?

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, we have heard about two extremes of school—one in which only faith is taught, and the other in which everything is taught. There has been no reference to a concern that we might have, whereby one may learn much about everything but not have a thorough understanding of any particular thing. Perhaps at this time our faith schools are more important than ever to our children because, as the report of the Church of England’s Good Childhood Inquiry showed us, an increasing number of children are growing up in families where their parents separate or there are family tensions. As the 2004 UNICEF report pointed out, at that time this country performed the poorest in terms of our child welfare. There was a number of dimensions to the report. It looked at family relationships and highlighted the fact that Italy came top as regards children spending time with their family on a regular basis and enjoying a meal together.

I am speaking speculatively, but perhaps the particular value that faith schools of various kinds can offer can give children a sense of belonging when they do not have that sense at home. The value of a Catholic school is that it has behind it a whole tradition of music, ceremony and dress. Children in those schools benefit from feeling that they belong to something. While I recognise the danger of extremes, and of having a Jewish school by a Muslim school by a Catholic school by an Anglican school, and the difficulty of different faiths interacting, perhaps if this is worked right, the stronger our individual identity is, and the stronger our basis in our religious community, the more we can relate in a positive way to those of different faiths.

Free Schools Policy

Baroness Whitaker Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

As I said earlier, the Secretary of State has made it clear that he sees local authorities having a role in shaping his thinking. We will need to reflect precisely on the criteria, how we set them out and what is then done with those criteria.

[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, I apologise for missing the beginning of the proceedings, but I do not think that anything has been said so far about design standards. The Minister will know very well that the impact of the environment in which children study is extremely important from an educational point of view. What guarantee can he give that free schools will conform to acceptable design standards?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

One point of the policy is to give schools greater freedom and flexibility over where schools are set up and in what kind of building. Overall, the department intends to look at the whole set of regulations around buildings for all schools because our view is that they are expensive and bureaucratic and the process of building schools takes too long. Some of the regulations do not seem to serve any particular purpose while others serve an extremely good purpose. We will look at them all and, as part of that, we will obviously need to take into account important points about design.