Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Harris of Peckham Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Peckham (Con)]

I thank the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, for his kind words, but it is not about me. It is because of our principals, teachers, support staff and children that we are so successful. We have many academy groups that really do well and get fantastic results such as good GCSE results. They are run well because they have the freedom to run schools how they should be run.

Since 26 November, five months ago, we have had 11 schools rated outstanding; four more might be outstanding, but the rule is now that if you are good you cannot become outstanding until the inspectors come back a second time; and two schools were rated good. On Friday this week we got another outstanding, which I cannot mention, and yesterday we had another outstanding—so the record is pretty good, with over 85% of our schools rated outstanding. We are grateful to all our staff and what they do.

I would like to talk about one school. I come from Peckham, which has a school that in 75 years has never been rated outstanding. It takes in the bottom 3% of the country. On the last inspection, four weeks ago, it was awarded outstanding by Ofsted. The inspectors said:

“The education provided by this school is transformational for many of its pupils … A large proportion of pupils join after Year 7, with many coming from overseas … Despite this, pupils go on to achieve consistently above national averages by the end of Year 11”.


This is because it can move the curriculum around. If somebody comes from abroad and cannot speak English, there is no point trying to teach them other subjects. That is one thing we should look at. I hope we look at it to see that we do not stick to a standard for every school.

We have taken over quite a lot of failing schools. Why are we giving them another two years? They have probably been failing for a couple of years and will have another two years of failing. We took over a primary school in Croydon that had failed for five years under the state system and five years under another academy group. It was taken off that group and we got it, and within two years and two terms it was turned into an outstanding school. We are changing the lives of so many children, so why do we need to wait for failing schools to get another two years to try to improve when we have good academy groups that can take them over and improve them quickly?

We talk about untrained teachers. Some 190 unqualified teachers a year start with us, and within a year 95% of them are qualified. They do not work only for our academies; they go to other academies all over the country. We want to continue doing this. Good teachers help pupils to get good results.

I hear that many state secondary schools are level with academies. Of course they are, because they are left with only 25% or 26% of schools, as against the nearly 80% that are academies. The only ways you can get an academy are as either a free school or a failing school. But now we are coming up level and we need more of these failing schools to become academies so that we can give children a better education. This is about giving children a better education, a better chance in life and a better opportunity.

Quite a lot of primary schools are failing. We have 23, and 21 of them are outstanding now. Why do we have to wait two years for children at a failing primary school, at that young age, to go to a proper school, such as an academy? There is not only our group; there are lots of very good groups in the country. Why do we have to wait two years? We should not; we should get on and make sure that every child has a good education.

I am pleased that the Government said they would put more money into education, but the new NI Act is costing us, as an academy group, £1.5 million. We have to find the funding for £1.5 million more; they are not giving us the same amount of funding. Of the 2.8% pay rise for teachers, they are funding only 1.3%. It will be difficult to find this money—not only for our schools but for every school in the country.

We have to look at what is happening and make sure we do better. We have to make sure the Government look at these things; I am sure they will. I am someone who wants to work together to give children the best education possible, because I believe that a child gets only one chance of a good education. All of us here want to give them that chance, and we can make it happen.