Ofsted: Pupil Absence Rates

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Tuesday 13th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord will be aware that Ofsted has been involved in a number of prosecutions of illegal schools. We remain very concerned about those—indeed, the Private Member’s Bill to which I referred earlier will go some way to addressing this issue.

[The Lord Bishop of Lincoln]

My Lords, I express gratitude to the Minister for the way in which the data has been produced; I understand that more is to come, and that will be examined in great detail. As an unrepentant pedant, though, I am as interested in the adverbs as the nouns—in how the data is to be applied. How do we get more children across the line in terms of the culture of school? Some years ago, the Children’s Society’s Young Commissioners looked deeply into child poverty in school and how children are identified as those, for instance, receiving free school meals or who are not able to purchase the very expensive school uniforms from the agreed seller. How is school culture being encouraged by government further to change in order to get children across the line? How, indeed, do we expect Ofsted to become the “office of encouragement”?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

As the right reverend Prelate knows, Ofsted is about to start its Big Listen exercise, so maybe that is one of the questions that could be asked. He asks an important question about how the data will be used. There is more we can do within the department on analysing and breaking down the data into more actionable insight for schools, and we will start engaging with trusts and local authorities on that very shortly. We need to be careful to make sure that children who really have major barriers to coming to school and whose attendance is very poor are not conflated with those who are in school nine or nine and a half days out of 10. It is about how we get those ones, too, over the line.

Schools: Special Educational Needs

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Monday 12th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bishop of Lincoln]

My Lords, I welcome everything that the Minister has said, but we all know that, even with the initial screening online, a full diagnosis for many children with any of these needs can take years to confirm. I am interested in what the noble Baroness has to say about how families—and the children themselves—are accompanied through several years of negotiation with the NHS and with local authorities, especially when, as has already been said, certainly in Lincolnshire, staffing costs outstrip the need that is expressed within our schools.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Again, I stress that not every special educational need requires a diagnosis. Children should get support regardless. If we look at the age at which children get an education, health and care plan as a proxy for diagnosis, we see that around a quarter receive an EHCP under the age of five, with almost half getting one between the ages of five and 10. That has been very stable over the last 10 years. The remaining quarter are above 11. I understand that these can be stressful, difficult times, but there has been relative stability over many years at the age of diagnosis, although there is greater identification of specific issues—in particular, autism.

Special Educational Needs

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

My Lords, I understand that the purpose of the 2014 set of reforms was to ensure a holistic approach by health, education and social care services in the support of children with special needs and of their families. But when appeals take place, I understand that it is not uncommon for social care services to say that they do not know the child. Are the Government ensuring proactive co-operation between health, social care and education services in supporting such children and their parents?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

To reassure the right reverend Prelate, I can say that we are learning from the process. I mentioned earlier the area inspections being carried out. Indeed, a number of inspection reports have required improvements. I shall give a recent example: Rochdale was inspected and asked to provide a written statement of action only in January. An update report showed improvements including educational outcomes, timeliness of response to children and young people, and promotion of understanding of services provided by the LA to those with SEN.

Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

Yes, as I mentioned a moment ago, newly qualified teachers in their second year will have 5% taken off their teaching timetable—that is in addition to the 10% taken off the timetable in the first year. High-quality, freely available curricular and training materials will be designed to complement the early-career framework. There will be funded early-career framework training programmes and support from a trained mentor, including funding to take into account the additional call on mentors’ time in the second year of induction.

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his Statement and for this way forward. First, he knows that the Church of England runs many small rural schools, and recruitment and retention is always a creative challenge. Have the Government considered how the strategy is to be rural-proofed for full application across the country? Secondly, Chapter 3 talks about further leadership development. Can the Minister tell us whether the Government are going to continue to encourage bodies such as the Church of England Foundation for Educational Leadership in developing professional qualifications for middle leaders and heads of MATs?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I share the right reverend Prelate’s concerns about rural schools. We have particular funding pots within the overall formula—sparsity funding, for example—which give a typical small rural primary school an additional £135,000 a year and a small secondary school £175,000. We are committed to the various ongoing training programmes. Only this morning, I was addressing a group of some 80 people involved in professional development training and encouraging them in what they were doing. I absolutely support what the right reverend Prelate has said.

Education and Society

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

My Lords, as the lead Bishop for education in this House, I am grateful to my most reverend friend for the opportunity to address the crucial place of education in providing value and enabling every member of our society to contribute and flourish. We must continue to develop the curriculum to suit our developing industrial and commercial needs. This means that we must work to nurture and support our children and young people so that they may be employable on the grounds of their skills and their rich and steadfast character, and give them the support and foundations for good mental health that will be necessary throughout their lives, as we have already heard.

We are currently experiencing a period of great uncertainty politically, socially, financially, industrially and morally. While we may not know exactly what things might look like come March 2019, we do know that we must continue to prepare for the longer term to meet the demands of our changing industrial and commercial landscape and be ready to face the competitive markets we will engage with. People therefore must be skilled, adaptable and resilient. This will be possible only if we tackle inequality of access to the acquisition of life and technical skills. Inequality of access is the scourge of our generation. I applaud the commitment to social mobility and the tackling of educational disadvantage of the Secretary of State for Education and the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, the Minister in this House, but we are not doing anywhere near enough.

Faith in the City, the report that came out in 1985, inspired me, as an ordinand, to seek ordination in the north of England in a poor community. The Church continues, with other institutions, to be passionate about seeking to reach out to the most excluded to relieve need and to renew dignity in the home, school and workplace. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, about the challenges faced by schools in some of our northern towns. I was visiting church schools in Blackpool myself earlier this year and saw the challenges that they face. Severe deprivation, of course, does not happen only in urban areas, but also in some of our coastal towns and more remote rural areas, where I live. As this year’s Good Childhood Report from the Children’s Society shows, disadvantages accumulate. For example, children living in poverty or family debt are more likely to experience mental and physical health deficits, as well as an impoverished life of the imagination. All these factors have an impact upon a child’s educational and life outcomes. We must seek out those in need and use education provision to fuel and enable aspiration so that we can ensure that no member of our society is hampered by their background.

I am very encouraged by the policy of Her Majesty’s Government for opportunity areas, with targeted funding to tackle disadvantage in education. The Church of England is a recognised partner in the working of this policy, not least in east Cambridgeshire and Fenland, where I live. Her Majesty’s Government are working hard to develop a curriculum and qualifications that meet our future industrial needs, most notably through the recent introduction of T-levels and the continuing development of apprenticeships. I am thrilled that the diocese of Chelmsford is a founder member of the London Design and Engineering UTC in London Docklands, the country’s first school to be an approved apprenticeship training provider. The Church of England is committed to opening more secondary schools, such as the free school we have won in Huntingdon in my diocese, to take to the next stage the model of a single campus providing academic and innovative technical pathways on the same site, with a special school which we have also created a partnership to run. We aim to foster a student-focused, economically ambitious approach to education. It must also be prophetic enough to equip young people for an agile and robust 50 or 60 years of wholly human adult productivity in a global setting not yet visible to us.

However, education is not simply about imparting skills or knowledge. As the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, said, this is fundamentally about character and about creating an educational environment that goes beyond the metrics of the core curriculum. We need a holistic attention to each individual child and young person, a large part of which includes being attentive to their mental health needs, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neuberger, said. The arrival of the Government’s Green Paper on mental health provision and schools is timely. I am pleased to read that the Government are committed to ensuring that every school and college will be able to play a vital role in identifying mental health needs at an early stage, as well as promoting positive mental health practices from the very beginning of a child’s education. I regularly visit the students at the Phoenix Centre in Cambridge, where they can continue their education while in hospital receiving treatment for their self-harming and eating disorders. It is a constant pain to me to see these children, whose needs might have been met sooner.

The work of St Catherine’s College in Eastbourne, a disadvantaged coastal community, is a perfect example of a school engaging with children’s mental health needs at a very early stage. As part of the Church of England education office’s national project, Unlocking Gifts, St Catherine’s is running a project to help overcome mental health disadvantage through early identification and targeted support for children who have mental health needs.

It is very easy to dwell on the negatives, but the Church of England’s vision for education is rooted in hope, the hope offered by Christ to us all and the opportunity we can all have for fresh starts and the full dignity of our humanity in Him. We do not despair in the face of cumulative deprivation. We seek to tackle it head-on and make a significant difference to the lives and confidence of young people and their families.

Schools

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Grand Committee

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

Follow that! My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for having made this debate possible and for providing the opportunity for us to focus not only on a fair distribution of funding for our schools and the children in their care but on fair access to good teaching in good and imaginative schools.

The Church has, down the centuries, provided a constant yet adaptable force in education. The Church of England recently produced a new vision for education, two pillars of which are dignity and hope. As the ultimate aim of our schools is to promote human flourishing, we are particularly concerned—particularly in our emphasis on supporting schools in areas of disadvantage—to enable every child to fulfil his or her aspirations, and indeed to be given the opportunity to have any aspirations in the first place.

While a “good school” can be defined to a certain extent by its Ofsted results, schools must remember to embrace excellence and academic rigour within a wider framework. A good school must educate the whole person so that one day our school pupils will become successful members of our society as adults in their roles as citizens, neighbours, parents and people committed to the public good, as well as those who are called to be economically productive. One way in which this access to equal education is to be served better than it is at the moment is by thinking about how we allow children and young people to access technical education alongside academic prowess. In the diocese of Ely, we have won a new secondary school where academic and technical education will be provided in parallel on the same campus alongside a special school.

Fundamentally, however, we must seek out areas where there is particular disadvantage and strive to bring children living in these places on to an equal footing with their more advantaged counterparts. The Secretary of State has effectively identified parts of the country where we need focus and change through the means of education. One of these “opportunity areas” happens to be Fenland in east Cambridgeshire in my diocese of Ely. Along with our local MPs, the Church is keen to engage further with the initiative to support local communities and as a means of improving attainment and aspiration in the area. I look forward to seeing how all the elements, such as the life skills programme and work experience opportunities, tie together to ensure that every child receives the best education possible. As these new resources and strategies continue to be developed, we must also ensure that education is funded with future economic and industrial needs in mind, as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, has already said.

In the same vein, I hope that the national funding formula, announced in September, will go some way to ensuring that schools receive what they need in order to cater for the local demographic. Indeed, the formula has resulted in more funding for each of the schools in the diocese of Ely, although there is a slight concern that, due to the increase in pension payments for teaching and non-teaching staff, over 40% of the extra proceeds will go towards addressing funding concerns in the pension schemes as opposed to flowing through to the front line. As such, I emphasise the importance of resources and strategies that allow funding to go directly to solving the issues which the Secretary of State herself has identified.

In the light of what the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said about pedagogy, it is very important that we train our teachers to prepare their pupils for a very different future, and this requires both rigour and imagination. However, I would still like to stick up for our teaching profession and for the imagination and commitment they apply to their vocation. I particularly pay tribute to teachers who commit themselves to working in very difficult schools where there is acute disadvantage and problems with discipline and even violence. These teachers persist in their vocation for the sake of the children and with a vision for the future which those children might have.

To go back to 1811, which is even further back than 1972, this ties in with Joshua Watson, who founded the national society which I now chair. The aim, long before state education was conceived, was to give the poorest children access to education to enable them to flourish, and ultimately to give them worth as citizens.

New resources, strategies and fair funding for school education are components of a much larger drive to improve social mobility. One of the most important things about social mobility is that it is not conceived simply as moving to London. We need to equip and empower young people, through a variety of points of access to education, to be contributors with vigour and energy in the places where they already live, so that those places are also regenerated. By supporting the most disadvantaged children at the earliest stages, we can help to build character and in turn produce generous and adaptable contributors to their communities and to wider society, whatever economic and industrial developments the future may bring.

Secondary Schools: Counselling Services

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I cannot. There is a long-standing tradition in this country of parents being able to educate their children at home. We rely on parents to ensure that where their children need counselling services, they get them.

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that an excellent education in a medical setting for those with severe mental health issues is essential to their recovery? Will he join me in paying tribute to the importance of education in acute mental health settings, such as the Pilgrim Pupil Referral Units in Cambridgeshire, which provide a stable learning environment for children and young people?

[Lord Nash]

I am delighted to join the right reverend Prelate in celebrating the value of this important work. I pay particular tribute to the Pilgrim PRU, which provides specialist support to build resilience and self-confidence, enabling children to reintegrate into mainstream or other settings. In her speech last month on mental health, the Prime Minister talked about ending the burning injustice of mental health problems. Children with more serious mental health problems deserve the same opportunities as everyone else. Ensuring that they get high-quality education is vital to their success in later life.

Education: Newly Qualified Teachers

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Monday 30th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I think the noble Baroness was referring mainly to CPD. Last July, we published an entirely new standard for teacher professional development to help schools understand more fully what was involved in good CPD. We spend a significant amount of money on subject enhancement courses. We continue with high-performing senior and middle leader courses. We are reforming the NPQs. We have a number of high-quality MAT CEO courses coming on stream provided by institutions such as Cranfield University and King’s College London. We also have the teaching and leadership innovation fund, to which I referred.

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the working environment for teachers is so often determined by the quality and effectiveness of school leaders, and therefore it is essential to equip school leaders to ensure the flourishing of their staff as well as their pupils? Will he be pleased to note with me the launch this weekend of the Church’s Foundation for Educational Leadership to work in this field?

[Lord Nash]

I am delighted to agree with the right reverend Prelate. I know that the Church is taking the lead in this. It has engaged in a big way with the Future Leaders Trust’s executive educators course. I believe it is sending 100 of its leaders on this course. As I say, we have other courses coming on stream from the likes of the University of Salford and a combination of the IoE and Deloitte. It is very encouraging to see these high-quality providers coming into this space.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

My Lords, I join the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, in thanking my fellow right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham for his speech. I join my right reverend friend in reminding the House that, in particular with children and young people, we are about ensuring their experience of love and the fullness of life. If you like, we are interested in human flourishing and community. That is the prism through which I will look at some of the direct provisions from the gracious Speech and the implications for future policy.

Research done already on the implications of what has been said by Ministers shows that academisation will proceed very fully. The think tank CentreForum suggests that only about 3,000 free-standing schools might be left that are not academised in the future. I am concerned that we do not end up with thousands of outstanding schools going it alone. We need to ensure that all strong schools, in MATs or otherwise, support schools that are struggling. There is no way of flourishing that does not take in support for others.

Another thing relating to structural change as it continues is that it is very important that this change, however important it may be, does not distract us from the business of front-line support for children and young people in school. In that regard, I am thrilled that the Government intend to sustain the pupil premium, and I am very pleased that one of my right reverend friend’s schools, the Northern Saints Church of England primary school in Sunderland, was a joint winner of the DfE’s pupil premium award very recently. It won that award because it used the pupil premium to establish a reader-in-residence scheme. This funds a reader for two days each week, transforming the children’s early reading experience. It set this up following research that says that successful adults have a love and enjoyment of reading. Northern Saints works with national and community groups using evidence-based strategies and a knowledge of their pupils’ needs to give them access to a broad and varied curriculum.

But funding on its own does not solve the challenges faced by schools. It requires good stewardship of those resources, an interest in what actually works and a commitment to the children that they serve. Collaboration, aspiration and creative thinking are as important for schools as the funding that they receive. I assume that the proposed legislation on fairer funding for schools will make good the White Paper’s commitment to support isolated rural and small schools with additional funding, but we hope it will also encourage them to collaborate and find sustainable ways of working for the future, sharing CPD and ensuring that children have access to a breadth of educational opportunities.

I note the intention of the digital economy Bill to improve access to broadband. In the Fen country the architecture for broadband and mobile access has hardly got beyond early English, let alone to Gothic. Although I will offer every available spire and tower to improve this, the main concern is about connectivity and how this directly facilitates the delivery of education across remote rural areas. Lack of connectivity is not just a nuisance for us adults; it is a genuine deprivation for our children and young people. We must also be mindful in these straitened times that adjustment to the funding formula for schools will mean losers as well as winners. There is a need to support education in any disadvantaged community, whether rural or urban, if this Bill is truly to benefit all.

I also wish to raise a question of religious literacy. We live in an age characterised by globalisation, social media manipulation, and concerns about religious extremism and the limits of pluralism. In this febrile as well as fertile context, religious literacy is more and more vital. This is never neutral, but it should be reasoned and generous. As the Church of England’s chief education officer recently said:

“Religious education is about giving people the critical skills they need to recognise deep differences in religion, belief and worldview, to understand our history and to take the diversity of voices seriously … This means much more than simply accumulating knowledge about religion and belief. It’s about enabling children and young people to encounter and wrestle with fundamental questions about God”.

This should never involve coercion or violence, but should ally passionate faith with a deep honouring of the other. Our Church schools are not proselytising communities, but they are places where we are sufficiently confident in ourselves and in our faithful witness that we are even more confidently inclusive and diverse.

In the past, local authorities have been a key link in ensuring that children have access to high-quality religious education and collective worship in schools that do not have a religious designation. This has enabled engagement with local faith communities and given children access to information about religion that dispels fear and promotes understanding. Currently, local authorities are statutorily obliged to maintain a standing advisory council on religious education. I ask the Minister: will this be lost as the role of local authorities in education changes? If so, how will we be able to monitor and assure the quality and provision of religious education in areas that have become fully academised? This is an issue of great concern to all those of us who believe in the importance of religious education and see the need for improved religious literacy.

In response to the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, I say that the implication of closer working between the RSCs and the dioceses is very important. In the case of the diocese of Ely and our RSC it is working well, but it continues to need further development.

Moving on to FE and higher education, I note the intention of the Higher Education and Research Bill to link the quality of university teaching to the level of fees that institutions can charge. It would be unfortunate if this were to lead to a situation where only the wealthiest could attend the best universities, and I hope that the legislation will seek to avoid this. In our Anglican foundation universities we are clear that the best education goes beyond simply serving the knowledge economy or providing a ready supply of well-trained employees, important as these things are. Indeed, without a wider perspective it is difficult to do those things in any case.

I look forward to finding out more about the Government’s skills plan and reforms to technical education. The further education and skills sector, which already educates more than 3.5 million learners every year, including a large number of those studying HE-level programmes, is worthy of greater recognition. It would be a great shame if HE and FE provision were separated like sheep and goats. This would, I fear, further reduce the prestige given to vocational education, a long-standing problem in our system.

Whatever the shape of the future it is clear that a key factor in implementing this legislation is leadership. Great leaders not only set out a bold vision of what educating for flourishing should look like, but equip their teams to deliver it. This is why the Church of England is establishing a foundation for educational leadership, offering the kind of networks, training and research to potential leaders which will enable them to make manifest in our systems a vision of education which sees its purpose as human flourishing for teachers and learners together.

The Church of England will soon make public its renewed vision for education, at the heart of which is the teaching of Jesus himself that he has come that people,

“may have life, and have it abundantly”.

This is not theological code for coasting. Life in all its fullness means being exacting, rigorous, ambitious and having appetite for all that excellence demands. Any school which accepts underperformance from children is failing those children. Academic rigour and progress are vital components of school life lived to the full. The Lord who promises us fullness of life tells us in John’s gospel that he is the good shepherd who is not going to lose even one of his sheep. No child is ever to be written off and we must do all we can to ensure that they receive fullness of life.

Education and Adoption Bill

Lord Bishop of Lincoln Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pinnock]

Anyone involved in local government, as is the noble Lord, Lord True, knows that you can set a programme for consultation that can be as short as six weeks. That is a normal period for consultation in local government. If six weeks is what it takes, that to me is time well spent in having that in-depth conversation, an opportunity for people to get together to understand what has gone wrong and how it can be improved.

I will tell the noble Lord something from the part of the country I come from: you do not dictate to Yorkshire people, because if you do you will have them on the wrong side from the word go. I assume that other parts of the country can be that rebellious as well. We must have consultation, but we on this side of the House do not believe that that is a plebiscite, it is a discussion about how the school can be best improved by all parties coming together to make that difference to a child’s education, which is fundamentally what it is about.

[The Lord Bishop of Ely]

My Lords, I am very keen to support the idea of effective communication with our parents, not least about the ethos and character of schools, given that they have a deep effect. We see in the good key stage 2 results this last year the impact of character and ethos on effective academic results. Our parents are really keen to ensure that in any change of school, its ethos and character are maintained and that that is effectively communicated to them by any academy proprietor.

I had submitted my own amendment, which I have now withdrawn because I am content, following conversation with the Minister, that he agrees that ethos and character can be maintained and should be safeguarded effectively. I understand that parents around the country want, of course, to have even more say in what happens, but consider that church schools, in particular, have something significant to offer in relation not only to academic performance and ethos but future guarantees of religious literacy in the way in which our country is served.

One school deeply embedded in its community is the Saint Mary’s Church of England primary school in Moss Side in Manchester. This school was named primary school of the year in 2014, having previously been towards the bottom of the north-west league of schools. It is now in the top 2% of schools in progress in reading and 7% in maths. The judges said:

“This is a school with a determined attitude that not only achieves wonderful results for its pupils but also challenges stereotypes about its catchment and local area,”

In the service of religious literacy, we also have a school, St Luke’s primary school in Bury, where I am pleased to say that the head teacher is Jewish and the majority of the children are Muslim. Another school, St Chrysostom’s in Manchester, has an intake of about 40% Muslim students. This is to demonstrate that the Church of England is engaged in education because parishes and generations of citizens have provided land, buildings and teachers to ensure that Christian values could be shared with future generations and to give poor, disadvantaged children with no previous access to education the chance to receive that wonderful gift as a matter of right.

Church of England schools are deeply embedded in their local community, whether it is affluent or deprived. Schools such as Northern Saints in Sunderland and St Peter’s primary school in Wallsend have 49% of their students on free school meals. Both schools are doing excellent work to ensure that their children develop academically and personally. Stretton Church of England Academy, sponsored and managed by the Diocese of Coventry multi-academy trust, went from special measures to outstanding in less than three years. In the most recent Ofsted report, it was written:

“Disadvantaged pupils, disabled pupils and those who have special educational needs are making the same outstanding progress as that of their classmates”.

Our own diocesan multi-academy trust in Ely has outstanding rural schools such as St Martin at Shouldham, inclusive of a great cross-section of the community. The parents there are deeply engaged with the governors and the students themselves, proud of the school’s commitment to sustainable development and the preparation of the pupils to be responsible custodians of creation.

It is schools such as those which I have mentioned that are the norm for Church of England provision. That commitment to serving the common good and providing excellent education for all is the driving force of the Church of England’s involvement in education, and it is this ethos and vision that we, with our parents, seek to protect.

As I said, I have withdrawn my amendment on the safeguarding of the ethos of Church of England schools because the Minister has been helpful in offering us assurances that it will be protected, and because I am hopeful that amendments to come, including Amendment 20, will offer parents some confidence that in helping to improve failing or coasting schools they will not lose the values and ethos that they want from a school. The Church of England is keen that any change must always be for the benefit of the children and that it should happen in a turnaround fashion, as swiftly as possible. In support of that, I would still be grateful if the Minister could expand on the safeguards that exist to ensure that that much-valued ethos is secured, and if he will commit to ensuring that the Secretary of State will work with dioceses to ensure that those safeguards are enforced.

[Lord Harris of Peckham (Con)]

My Lords, I have some experience of these meetings with parents. I should like to talk about three primary schools: Roke of Croydon, a school which took us 18 months to get approval for, was failing and letting children down. All of you will have heard about the Tottenham school, which took us two years to get approval for, and Carshalton. They were all failing, and they all took more than two years to get approval.

I went at least twice to all those schools, and we had six meetings. A small group of parents complains. The governors are worried about their jobs and whether they can stay on. Of course, some teachers have to worry, and we meet all the teachers before we have the meetings with the public. At the second meeting, the same thing happens: eight or 10 of the parents complain about it.

I would like to say a few words about Roke at Purley. I could pick any of the three, but time is short tonight, and I want to talk about that school. It was failing for three and a half years. We have now had that school for two years and one term. In the first two years, we moved exam pass rates up from 42% to 94%. In those two years, the school has become outstanding. What is more important is that parents now want their children to go to that school. The 10 or 12 parents who complained were stopping that happening. Last year’s intake was 45. Last September, we had 550 applicants for 60 places. The parents want their children to go to the schools, and we want them to be successful. That is true of many of our schools. We take over failing schools. All but one of our schools was failing, apart from five free schools. We know that we can turn these schools around in under two years, but we need help to get to them more quickly—to make sure that we get hold of them in six months and put a governing body in as quickly as possible and make these schools successful and the children motivated.

I am going to keep my speech short tonight, but I want to say one thing. We talk about sport. We won five national championships last year, with all our schools, and last weekend Louisa Johnson, who goes to one of our schools, won “X Factor”. We have singing and we make sure that our children are motivated and that parents want them to go to our schools. At Crystal Palace, there were 3,200 applicants for 180 places, and there are many more like that. We have got to get more successful schools and get schools that are failing to become academies as quickly as possible, and we have to make to make sure that every child in this country gets a good education.