Education and Adoption Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Blunkett on his maiden speech. It was a privilege to have been here. I have worked out that it is well over a decade since he and I spoke in the same education debate in one of the Chambers of these Houses of Parliament, so it is very good to have him by my side again. Speaking in front of your former boss is never easy—I know he will read Hansard—but I shall do my best.

I want to start on a note of agreement. Perhaps the main purpose of this Bill is to address what we call coasting schools, and I do not differ in my view that that needs to be done. I want to make sure that every child has a good chance and that every school succeeds, but there is a debate about how we define coasting. I listened carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, and have huge respect for him, but part of the problem is that the notion of coasting has that idea of lack of progress over time. He is right that the minute you start measuring between fixed points, you build in a delay in terms of actually doing something about it. I am sure that in Committee we will want to look at that definition. We all know the sort of school we are talking about, even though it might be difficult to define it. I have only one plea on this to the Minister. From what I have heard and read so far—he has mentioned this a number of times—this is partly about schools dropping below target. I remember, when I was in his job, that the coasting schools that worried me were those that were at 70% but that should have been at 90%. We need to be careful that we do not equate coasting with low attainment. That can certainly be true, but sometimes somewhere with 50% is not coasting and somewhere with 85% is coasting. The whole area of how we address that is quite critical.

I agree of course with the main objective of the Bill—to tackle coasting schools and ratchet up our wish to have every school improve. I also agree with the need to change. The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, was right, although I am not sure he is right now. I remember the first school that went into Ofsted special measures, which I think was a primary in County Durham or somewhere up in the north of England. At that time teachers were very resistant to change, but I do not think that is the case now as much as it was. They were resistant, but when I go round schools now I can see that they faced up to the weaknesses in their own performance and that they want the best for children. They are just like us: they want every school to succeed and every child to have a decent chance. The problem now is working with them to work out what change is needed. Some resist, but not everyone.

That really takes us to the core of the Bill. My comments will be very much like those of a noble friend who spoke earlier because, when I look at what I think are the two core beliefs of the Bill, I do not think they deliver that objective, which we share. I accept the need for change, but I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, about whether the only change worth anything is a change to an academy. I want change and want to put pressure on schools. I am not satisfied with where we are, but I do not believe that moving to an academy is always the right way forward.

I follow the noble Lord, Lord Harris, in speaking. I love listening to him: it is like all my dreams coming true as somebody who cares about education and children. In the noble Lord, we have a man who has succeeded at running an academy chain, and I take my hat off to him for what he has achieved. We need to somehow replicate him. However, the truth is that not every academy chain is like the noble Lord’s. I do not want to go over the figures again, but the Minister has to face up to the fact that there is no evidence that academies are a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of failing schools. We hear too infrequently in this Chamber the stories about non-academies that have done the same thing as academies. I could pull heartstrings about kids who have gone to Oxbridge, whose lives have been turned around and whose families will be different generation after generation because of what a school has done, where that school was a maintained comprehensive school. It does not matter. We know what our predecessors did not know: what matters is not the title on the door of the school but the quality of the teaching and the leadership that takes place in it, which can be found in maintained schools as well as in academies.

That is my problem with the Government’s approach. The importance of the Bill is that it takes us to that point of no return. This has been a long battle and a long debate but, when this Bill is passed, we really will be on the way to a fully academised system. That is dangerous, for all the reasons mentioned by my noble friend Lady Hughes. It is dangerous because we do not know what our world will look like under total academisation. I will not rehearse the figures, apart from one which, for me, is so important in making the Minister face up to the evidence which he seems to be ignoring and which his party is responsible for. The last big education Bill, which the Minister mentioned, introduced stand-alone academies. It was a very simple Bill: it was not about the tough end of the market or those schools that were failing kids or coasting, but about the easy end of the market. They were good or outstanding schools, and they were allowed to become stand-alone academies. Do you know what has happened in the five years since? One in seven of them has gone into the category of “requires improvement” or special measures.

When the Minister runs a department that has seen the consequences of his previous attempt to make every school an academy, how can he not face up to the fact that it does not work for everyone? That is my problem. It is not that I do not like academies—I will tell stories of academies. I want someone in government to tell the story of schools that are not academies but are doing well, because it matters. The fact that we have a Department for Education that is essentially a department for academies and a Minister for School Standards who is essentially a Minister for academies matters, because it creates the environment in which everyone else is trying to work. It focuses on structures, not standards, as we have heard. It is a false prospectus, because it seeks to guarantee magic success if you become an academy, and it is not relevant to or suitable for all people.

What really bothers me is that it drains the energy out of the school system. I go to a lot of schools, and they are focused on when the department is coming to get them to change to be an academy. You hear things like, “The department has phoned me. They are coming up to see me. Does it mean that they want us to become an academy?”. Schools see it as a field force for turning them into academies. That is not what the Department for Education is meant to be. It is meant to serve every child. It is meant to put as many resources and staff and as much money into maintained schools as academies. It is meant to go to maintained schools and say, “We will help you, and the solution may not be an academy”. That is not the sort of department that the Government are running, and it worries me stiff, because it is not the way to do things.

My worry with this area of policy is not that academies are wrong but that we have an Animal Farm situation where it is, “Academies good, everything else bad”. We know the end of the story in Animal Farm, and that worries me a great deal.

When the noble Lord introduced the Bill in the previous Parliament, he made it appear as though he could run all schools from Whitehall. He has realised that he cannot and that he was wrong, so he has introduced school commissioners. I register one point of concern about commissioners. They are run off their feet, their areas are too large, they are insufficiently resourced and they cannot do the job that is expected of them.

Let us understand what has happened. The Government have created a new tier of regional government: unelected, unaccountable, with no obligation to parents, answerable to nobody but the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and the department, but essentially regional government. When one of the main thrusts of academisation is to get local government out of the picture, I do not understand why the answer must be to impose regional government on the education system in the form of the commissioners. It is not about the individuals. I think that the noble Lord has picked some really good men and women to do the job; I take my hat off to them. In the long term, it is not an answer to the problems that he has himself caused by deciding that he could run everything from Whitehall.

As my noble friend Lady Hughes said, that is a nonsensical approach to devolution to local authorities. I tried to make a list. What we have had from this Government is that a local council can be trusted with the public health budget but not to nominate the members of an interim executive board for a school. A local authority can be given the whole of the skills budget, which is several million pounds, but it cannot open an order to close a school. A local authority can be trusted with the transport infrastructure for the region but is not allowed to talk to an academy sponsor without the permission of the Minister. I do not know where that is going because, if those local authorities are good enough to be the powerhouses of our country, they are good enough to do those things with our schools.

That point must be answered, because it is the third central weakness at the core of the report: one size fits all, from now on it is academies or nothing; regional commissioners taking over from the Government, insufficiently resourced with no accountability to anyone; and a total lack of faith in local authorities.

I respect the Minister greatly, but this is a “Me, me, me” Bill—“Only I can do it, only I can decide what the school should be”. It is scraping the barrel—“Only I can decide who can be a member of an interim executive board in Wigan”. How that message will build partnerships with the other people in the school system with whom the Minister and his team have to work, I fail to realise.

Let me finish on a positive note, as we agree on so much. We are the lucky generation. When the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who is not in his place at the moment, started school improvement—as I always say that he did—the department did not have the evidence about what works. We do. Three decades of successive Governments working on school improvement in partnership with schools and others has showed us what works. It is the quality of leadership, what happens in the classroom, high aspirations and good values. Nowhere in that evidence list does it say, “Every school needs to be an academy, and do not trust local authorities”.