Education and Adoption Bill

Baroness Evans of Bowes Park Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I take a slightly different view. I shall be brief. I am quite sure that the Government cannot intend that when this process moves forward there is no communication between the school and the other stakeholders, in particular, the parents. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that I am no education expert, but I know a great deal about children and children’s advocacy. My great worry is that often we worry about the status and needs of parents over and above those of children. I come from a pretty tough working-class background, and if my school had not, if you like, overridden my parents on occasion, I would not be standing here. As we are into personal anecdotes, I am giving one.

I think that both things need to happen. There has to be quick action when a school does not meet the needs of children. You cannot spend a long time discussing matters with parents who may be comfortable about what is happening, although it will not benefit their children in the long term. However, I do not think that that prevents good communication, and I cannot believe that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and his team intend that.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord was right when he noticed that I would be responding to this amendment. I shall allow him and the Minister to continue their debate next week, when no doubt we will cover these issues in more detail, and I will focus on the amendment.

Amendment 4 proposes that a governing body must inform parents that a school has been notified that it is coasting. We firmly believe that, once a school has been notified that it is coasting, we should trust the governing body to engage parents as they see fit, exactly as the noble Baroness said. That is what we would expect of a school. In practice, we envisage that where a school meets the coasting definition, the governing body will voluntarily inform parents. Issuing a communication to parents is already the normal approach taken by schools following the publication of exam results or Ofsted inspections. In fact, schools are not required to notify parents of Ofsted judgments but they do, and we would expect schools to adopt a similar approach in this situation. We would certainly expect governing bodies to be as open as possible with parents.

In the modern day and age, with social media and the availability of lots of websites, we would also—

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I note what the noble Baroness said about schools and Ofsted inspections but I have certainly come across cases where schools and governing bodies have been very reluctant to release this information because they do not like what it says. I agree with the noble Baroness about parents and children, but there ought to be a guarantee or requirement that parents will receive information, whether it relates to Ofsted or is about coasting. I am afraid the fact is that some schools do not do the right thing when they get an adverse Ofsted judgment.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I hope that the noble Lord will be pleased to know that I was going to go on to say that, in view of the concerns that have been expressed, we will consider how we can ensure, through the Schools Causing Concern guidance, that parents are sufficiently aware that their child’s school has been identified as coasting. We absolutely agree that that is important. Of course parents need to know. Our feeling is that governing bodies will provide such information but, in the light of the concerns raised, we are happy to consider being a bit more explicit. I hope on that basis that the noble Lord will withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

I am delighted to hear what the noble Baroness has said. She couched it in terms of “considering” but I await the schools guidance with interest. She said that governing bodies regularly notify parents of a number of issues. That is so but, as my noble friend Lord Hunt said, some do not, and our proposal would make the notification mandatory. If it is going to be mandatory in terms of guidance, why not put it in the Bill? I do not see any reason not to tie it down in that way.

There is the further question of what happens after the parents have been told. I was rather surprised by some of the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth. I accept that the needs of children have to come first but most parents are very concerned about how their children are doing at school and they want education to be as beneficial to their children as possible. I do not see that the needs of the parents and the needs of the children necessarily diverge. If we could make the assumption that they were absolutely the same, that would be very positive. I accept that we cannot; none the less, we have to trust parents to some extent as well, and surely they have the right to make representations about something with which they are unhappy.

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[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I have some sympathy with what the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said about teacher recruitment. A potential crisis is arising. I know that the Minister does not agree with that—we had a Question in the House the other day about precisely this issue.

I want to take the amendment at face value rather than preach about what is likely to happen with teacher recruitment. The amendment states:

“Prior to defining a school as coasting, the Secretary of State must undertake an investigation and report on the current level of teacher recruitment and retention in that particular school”.

That brings me back to the previous amendment, where I talked about how important it was that schools should build trust with parents and work in cohesion with them. I say again that a happy school is one where there is a stable staffing situation, without children being subjected to constant changes of teacher, sometimes halfway through a term, with supply staff brought in who have no knowledge of the young people whom they are teaching. Such teachers are often ineffective because they are coming in halfway through term and trying to pick up where other teachers have left off.

As I said earlier in relation to the first group of amendments, many underperforming schools are those which have suffered from a long interregnum in recruiting new head teachers. A new head who is finding their feet in a new school may be doing good things, but it takes time nevertheless to turn a school round. It requires at least a year, if not longer.

My reading of the regulations is that the regional schools commissioner must have discretion to look at the situation in which a school finds itself. It is not in a school’s interest, particularly where a new head is bedding down, to throw the whole thing into turmoil again by enforcing academisation, with a new senior management team, a new board of governors and so forth.

It seems useful in these circumstances to make it clear, perhaps in regulations rather than in the Bill, that the regional schools commissioner has discretion to look at teacher recruitment and retention. Teacher shortages still vary enormously from region to region and within regions. It is silly to require a new senior leadership team in a school which is coasting, as distinct from having positively failed, if it is going to be almost impossible to recruit a new senior leadership team. That is certainly true of parts of the south-east, where it is extremely difficult to get head teachers—I was talking about that earlier.

It would be very useful if we could have this spelled out in regulations. It need not necessarily be in the Bill, but there seems to be a lot of sense in it. In that sense, I support the amendment.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Watson, is right that the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers is crucial to achieving our goal of educational excellence everywhere. As I explained at Questions yesterday—the noble Lord may dispute the figures—the number of teachers in post is at an all-time high and the number of teachers leaving the profession remains low, with around three-quarters still in the profession after five years’ service.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, rightly said, there is an overall challenge, but in some areas of the country there is a struggle to attract, recruit and retain high-quality teachers. That is why we are actively supporting schools to take a leading role in the training of new teachers and have given schools greater flexibility to attract and retain good teachers through the pay system. It is also why the Secretary of State on Tuesday announced the creation of the National Teaching Service with the aim that by 2020 it will deploy 1,500 high-performing teachers and middle leaders into underperforming schools in areas that struggle to recruit. There are already many outstanding teachers and leaders working in challenging areas, but we know that more needs to be done to help them and we are committed to giving them support.

My noble friend was clear that when we are discussing coasting schools, regional schools commissioners will consider whether the school has the capacity to secure sufficient improvement without formal intervention. In some cases, a school which falls within the coasting definition may have a new head teacher, governor or leadership team who can demonstrate that they have an effective plan to raise standards sufficiently. In these cases, the school will be left to improve.

This amendment suggests that where a school fails to ensure that pupils reach their potential because there are retention and recruitment issues at the school it should not become eligible for intervention. We feel this is counterintuitive. These are the very schools that require additional support to address those problems in order to improve outcomes for their pupils. This Bill will provide that support. We have made clear in the Schools Causing Concern guidance, on which we are currently consulting, that RSCs will take a range of contextual factors into account when looking at coasting schools. They could include looking at teacher recruitment and retention. Where this is identified as an issue, the RSC will be able to work with the new National Teaching Service to bring teachers into the school to work alongside the existing teachers to make the improvements needed. Other measures, such as encouraging schools to participate in School Direct partnerships, which allow them to train and employ high-quality new teachers, might also be appropriate.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, raised several issues around School Direct, so I will cover some of them briefly. Completion and employment rates from teacher-led teacher training are higher than from university-led provision, but we agree that universities remain an important part. In fact, the move to school-led teacher training is helping to encourage collaboration because 70% of School Direct places are delivered by universities. As I said yesterday, a school-led system is not a university-excluded system. We want to see collaboration.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

I welcome what the Minister has said. I am not suggesting that the two are mutually exclusive, but figures show that universities are now less certain about the number of students they will get. They are also less certain of the relationships they will have with schools. School Direct seems to be the preferred choice of the DfE. That may or may not be the right way to go, but universities need some reassurance. Why are university departments closing? Why are education student numbers at universities falling if there is not a problem as I outlined? It is not a question of either/or. Surely the two should be working together.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

Absolutely. We are seeing growing collaboration. The noble Lord is right that we are looking at teacher training on a year-by-year basis because we believe that schools should be at the heart of thinking about where they want to get their best training. The best universities will be extremely attractive. They are still the only organisations that can award PGCEs, which remain extremely popular. While we think that the school-led system is the way we want to go, we see that the collaboration is working within the system.

This year we hit our primary recruitment targets. We made good progress on secondary and are ahead of last year in some key subjects, such as English, maths and physics. The noble Lord also mentioned STEM subjects. Again, we want to attract the best graduates into teacher training, which is why we are looking at generous bursaries from next year, up to £30,000. We are also looking at some of the issues that teachers tell us worry them most once they are in a job, such as unnecessary work-flow and poor pupil performance, so that we can help to ensure that when teachers are in the profession, they stay in it. Again, teacher retention remains good and has remained pretty stable for the past two decades.

I hope that the House realises that we take the issue of recruitment and retention very seriously. As the Minister has already said, high-quality teachers are absolutely crucial, and the impact that they can make on young people is huge—so we take this seriously, and we believe that we are already taking steps to support schools when this impacts on the progress that pupils make. I therefore ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

I thank the Minister for her remarks. I certainly welcome the fact that she has acknowledged the importance of teachers and underlined that they are key to future development of education and to raising standards. There is no point in bandying figures back and forth, because I suppose that she will cherry pick figures that suit her. I hope that I am not doing the same, but it has been quite widely reported that 50,000 teachers left the profession in the last year, which is the highest ever level. She said that the figures were down, so there is something not right there. To me, that is the most worrying statistic, because it means not that all teachers are reaching 60, or whatever age at which they choose to retire, but that they are leaving the profession because, for some reason or other, it is not giving them what they want, or they feel that they cannot put in what they want to improve children’s education. That is a very worrying statistic. The Minister said that primary recruitment targets have been met this year. That is obviously to be welcomed but there are, understandably, greater challenges in secondary schools, which must be pursued.

If I caught the Minister’s remarks correctly, she said that the amendment suggested that schools should not be eligible for coasting until teacher recruitment and retention was a problem. That is not what I said and it is not what the amendment said, and I certainly did not mean to say it, if I did. Attention should be given to the whole teacher recruitment question, and that was the whole point of the amendment. She will understand that, as with most amendments in Grand Committee, it is a probing amendment, and I wanted to get these issues discussed and on the record. I am pleased that we have been able to do that.

The Minister said that the regional schools commissioner would take into account contextual factors when considering whether schools should be designated as coasting. She said that that could include teacher recruitment and retention—but why would that not automatically include those things?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

Through the metric that we have discussed, when a school would be considered to be coasting, teacher recruitment and retention would be taken into account—it is about what intervention may be needed in terms of what support the schools may need when they have been identified as coasting through the measures that we have discussed. It may well mean additional support—and we have talked about the National Teaching Service coming in and helping with high-quality teachers. So it is about bringing that to bear, as to how best to help the school improve.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

I think that we have covered the issues that I hoped we would cover. With that in mind, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

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[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

In relation to this amendment, while we have some sympathy with the notion that there should be an appeal when a warning notice is issued, we are by no means convinced that the First-tier Tribunal is the right place to go.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 13 and warning notice appeals. The Bill proposes that the governing body of an underperforming school should no longer be able to make representations to Ofsted about being given a warning notice. The amendment would restore an appeal route, although not the same route. The amendment would require the Secretary of State to make regulations that would allow a school to have a warning notice reviewed, or allow it to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal, which could then revoke the notice.

The amendment would not preclude the local authority or regional schools commissioner from issuing a revised notice to that school, but we believe that it oversteps the mark and builds into the process delays and arguments that are a distraction from the important business of getting the school to improve. Indeed, appeals to the First-tier Tribunal would lead to the clock stopping and months of delay ensuing while all avenues for appeal are exhausted. During this time, children will be in a school that is causing serious concern and they will not be given the education that they deserve.

To clarify, any complaints about the decision made by a regional schools commissioner may be directed to the schools commissioner. If a formal complaint is lodged, it will be dealt with in accordance with the department’s formal complaints procedure, which involves an independent officer, an official, investigating the complaint and making a recommendation. One formal complaint about a regional schools commissioner’s decision has been made so far and has been considered but no evidence was found to uphold it. Ultimately, the process for appealing a decision made by a regional schools commissioner is to apply for judicial review via the courts.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred to warning notices. Our figures indicate that we have issued 112 formal notices to underperforming institutions. Ninety- eight of these were issued to academies associated with 53 individual sponsors. We have also changed sponsor arrangements for 100 academies and free schools where there has been underperformance.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

What period does that cover? Is it just since the regional schools commissioners were established or does it go back to 2010?

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[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

It is since the academies came in, so it applies to a wider period than since the regional schools commissioners have been in place. I reassure the House that we believe the process as set out in the Bill is fair and reasonable and that there are appropriate safeguards built in where schools have concerns. Regional schools commissioners and local authorities already have to act reasonably in carrying out their functions on behalf of the Secretary of State. The revised Schools Causing Concern guidance, on which we are currently consulting and seeking views, also sets out clear processes and expectations for the giving of warning notices. This is guidance which local authorities and regional schools commissioners will follow. The Bill requires the local authority to notify the regional schools commissioner if it issues a warning notice and vice versa. Regional Schools Commissioners can therefore already review a local authority’s warning notice and, if they believe that it is not appropriate, they can issue their own that would render the local authority’s notice redundant.

Although I understand the sentiments behind the amendment, it builds in additional process in primary legislation which is unnecessary and time-consuming and is not helpful in supporting schools to improve in the best interests of children. In the light of this, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw their amendment.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

If this is all just a distraction, will the Minister tell me what she thinks the role of school governors is?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

Obviously, the role of school governors is to hold head teachers to account to ensure that the school is providing the high-quality education that they are looking for. They have an oversight role and have to be involved in the school by going to visit and making sure that they know what is going on.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

But do they have no right to comment in situations where warning notices are being issued? This seems to me to be saying that they have no meaningful role, as it is being taken away from them. Surely that cannot be a positive step.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

No, as I said, any complaints about a decision made by the regional schools commissioner can be directed to the schools commissioner. If a formal complaint is lodged, it will be dealt with through the process that is in place. Ultimately, the end process is judicial review.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

I noted the noble Baroness’s remarks that delays and arguments are a distraction to the process of bringing about change in a school. The whole underlying ethos of the Government’s approach to the Bill is that people who might not agree with the proposal are simply to be sidelined. They are to be silenced—gagged—and to have no input, because they might delay the process. I do not think anybody has said anything other than that change needs to be brought about as quickly as possible. But at the same time the Government must consider the fact that some people have different views from those they may have. Those views should be considered.

The Government do not have, despite their victory on 7 May, the right to ride roughshod over people’s views, particularly those of local people, on such important issues. It does not serve the Government’s case to suggest simply that complaints can be made to the regional schools commissioner or the schools commissioner, or through judicial review. Yes, of course judicial review is open to anyone anyway in any situation, but that is not the point. This is a specific proposal that relates to the role of a school’s governing body, which is being taken away from that body. As I said earlier, it is difficult to see why anybody would want to be a school governor, because they are being disfranchised and disempowered, and basically being told that what they say does not matter. I am disappointed that neither Minister is willing to consider this. We may return to this issue on Report, but at this stage I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.