Education and Adoption Bill

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I declare an interest as the governor of a primary school in Guildford which is part of the TKAT academy chain and was taken over by that chain because it was in need of significant improvement.

As my noble friend Lord Addington said, this is a short but very important Bill. It carries forward the Government’s manifesto commitment to increase very significantly the number of our primary and secondary schools which are sponsored academies during this Parliament. It does so by adding to the Secretary of State’s power to intervene a new category for intervention in so-called “coasting schools”, and by what the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, described as removing the bureaucratic legal hurdles to speed up the process. The basic purpose of the Bill, as we have discussed, is to ensure that all children benefit from the very best quality of education available, and therefore to minimise the degree to which they experience poor-quality teaching and a poor-quality environment in their schools.

We need to recognise that many—indeed, the majority—of our schools are not failing. The number of schools that are failing is roughly between 2% and 3%; 80% of our schools are judged by Ofsted to be “Good” or “Outstanding”. The remaining 17% between the two is probably the category of school that is most likely to be regarded as coasting: those that need some improvement but not necessarily the significant improvements needed by the failing category.

All of us are behind the purpose of the Bill, which is to improve the quality of our schools, but, like the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, I question the presumption that this can be achieved by academisation. We should recognise that, of the 25,000 schools in this country, 4,600 are now academies and, of the 20,000-plus remaining state schools, only 275, 1.8%, were judged inadequate by Ofsted as of April 2015, whereas, of the 730 sponsored academies—where, generally speaking, failing schools such as the one of which I am a governor had been taken over by an academy—81, or 12.1%, were judged inadequate. It is of course true, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, that if you take over a failing school, it takes time to turn it around, and it is therefore not surprising to find that, among the sponsored academies, a higher proportion are judged to be failing.

There is a very useful briefing that the Commons Library produced before the Report stage of the Bill in the Commons which emphasises the ebb and flow of schools from one category to another. Schools judged inadequate, whether maintained or academies, are put in special measures, often with a new head and senior management team, and do improve while other schools drop down the league tables. As the noble Baroness noted, some of the conversion academies which were outstanding are now in special measures.

The briefing note follows through on the 559 schools judged inadequate in 2012; 239 of these became academies, but 294 remained as maintained schools, the large majority of which had seen their Ofsted rating improve. Of those, 159 were now rated good or outstanding. In other words—and, again, this has been stressed by a number of speakers—academisation is in itself no magic bullet. Maintained schools can turn things around just as well as academies, and it is arguable that, from the children’s point of view, not fiddling around with the structure and all the disturbance that this entails is better.

It does take time. Many experienced heads will tell you that it takes five years or more, as indeed the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, to move a school from inadequate to good or outstanding. We see this both in relation to the maintained schools and in relation to academies. There is, therefore, something of a question as to why the measures of intervention apply just to maintained schools. Why should maintained schools that are seen to be coasting be subject to intervention, whereas academies that are seen to be coasting are not? There is no intervention.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, mentioned, the really important issue is school leadership. We see time and again that a dynamic school leader can turn a school around and can lead the school to be outstanding over a very considerable period of time. Then they leave and sometimes the school falls down the league tables just because of that. It is, however, increasingly difficult to recruit head teachers. Many schools are having to re-advertise or use agency staff to fill gaps in their senior management team.

While it is acknowledged that some elements of leadership are innate, it is also well known that many techniques of leadership can be taught. Perhaps I should put it the other way round: they can be learned. I would like, therefore, to ask the Minister why—one of the key issues that really ought to have been addressed—the Government have withdrawn their support from the National College for Teaching and Leadership? It was doing a lot of extremely good work in producing a new cadre of leaders for our schools and training them extremely well. If we want to train a cadre of outstanding school leaders, this is precisely the sort of facility that we need to be nurturing.

Likewise, I think the need for well-qualified and experienced teachers is absolutely crucial to providing high-quality education. It is very distressing that something like 40% of our newly qualified teachers drop out within five years, even though some of them are very good teachers. Many people, talking about teachers, cite the stress as being a major obstacle. Again, one sees this particularly with the number of early retirements among teachers at the moment.

The Minister rightly says, as he said in answer to an Oral Question the other day, that the quality of our recruits is extremely good and that at present vacancy rates are very low. As everybody knows, however, the pressures on primary schools are immense at present, as a new baby boom works its way up the age groups. Have the Government got their head in the sand over this teacher recruitment crisis? Is enough being done to relieve the stress in the classroom? Is enough being done to promote CPD among teachers, to give them time off so that they can recharge their batteries? All this is extremely important, but the Bill, with its threats of yet more intervention and change, more disruption, actually helps to make matters worse rather than better.

I want to end by talking about the issue of power in the hands of the Secretary of State. Is it really necessary for more power to be transferred to the Secretary of State? As Liberal Democrats, our belief has been firmly that schools should serve their communities. All along, we have had reservations about academies—and, as the noble Baroness will know, we were not very keen on academies in the first place—because they have broken the link between the school and its community and set the school apart from other schools.

We on these Benches, however, believe that schools collaborating and helping each other is the best way forward. There are hints of this in the Secretary of State’s powers of intervention under Clause 4, where the Secretary of State can intervene to issue a warning notice, whereas Clause 7, which is, I think, the more drastic one, makes it a duty of the Secretary of State to intervene when a school is judged inadequate and requires significant improvements or special measures.

As is made clear, the Department for Education now recognises that it cannot manage all 4,600 academies and more and has delegated its responsibilities to these eight regional school commissioners. The regions, however, are large. The south-east region, in which I live, stretches from Dover to Milton Keynes, running through Kent, the two Sussexes, Surrey, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire. The regional schools commissions, even with their advisory committees of top heads, cannot know how schools fit into their local communities. Are they really up to the job of being able to judge when schools are coasting schools? Surely you need something that is more local, because local heads know perfectly well which schools are achieving and which are not achieving and are very happy, or have been very happy to collaborate with their colleagues and to help schools that need help.

Finally, I would like to pick up this point about the sheer remoteness of these regional schools commissioners. I think it is very unfortunate that the Government have chosen to drop both the requirement for consultation with the local communities—I might say that was a concession which we Liberal Democrats managed to get into the Academies Bill when we were part of the coalition Government—and the right to appeal to Ofsted. I noted the comment by the National Governors’ Association about the democratic deficit. It said:

“This Bill represents a further centralisation of decision making regarding our schools; it does not sit well with the Government’s rhetoric about school autonomy as it not only removes the right for parents to be consulted, but it will give the Secretary of State power to overrule the decisions of local decision makers, whether these are the school governing body or the local authority”.

Henry Stewart, co-founder of the campaigning organisation the Local Schools Network, criticised the proposals to require governing bodies and local authorities to facilitate academy conversion and co-operate with identified sponsors, saying that they mean that,

“governors no longer have a duty of care to their children and instead have a duty to implement government policy. … It’s an extraordinary attack on basic freedom of speech, and I think governors across the country will be outraged by it”.

As a governor, I am not completely outraged, but I am a bit perplexed by the Bill. As I have indicated, I have some very grave reservations about it.