Education and Adoption Bill

Flick Drummond Excerpts

Wednesday 16th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Brennan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There seems in the Department to be an in-built bias against facing up to failure in academy schools while exaggerating problems when the school is a maintained school. All we are calling for is a level playing field. We are just saying that every child should have the right to be taught in a good school, whatever that school is, and the Government should not be a propaganda department for a particular type of school structure.

I can see the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond) leaning forward. Does she wish to intervene?

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

indicated dissent.

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Lady is just very enthusiastic and very keen. I appreciate the attention she is paying to what I am saying.

Our proposed new subsection (4) treats maintained schools and academy schools equally as far as intervention is concerned, which picks up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central. It is right that the same forms of intervention can be used for both types of school—for example, working with an outstanding school or working with a school improvement provider or replacing the governing body with an interim executive board.

Subsection (5) prevents the Secretary of State from making a forced academy order simply on the basis that a school has been notified that its pupils are not reaching their full potential. This should be about taking the right steps for a school, not arbitrary academy targets.

I said I would return to subsection (3)(a) of proposed new section 60B, which deals with teacher supply. My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) is not here at present, but he said on Second Reading that

“the real crisis in education is in teacher recruitment and the quality of headteachers”

and that the Secretary of State’s proposals and speech

“have absolutely nothing to say about that.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2015; Vol. 597, c. 642.]

My hon. Friend was absolutely right. This is the real crisis and that is why we are addressing it. We cannot judge a school if it is not able to recruit the right teachers because of a failure of Government policy in relation to teacher supply.

Teacher recruitment has been falling since 2010. Some 10% of teacher training places remain unfilled this year, and one in 10 teachers left the profession last year, the highest rate in a decade. An extra 800,000 students will have entered England’s secondary programme by the next decade. It is predicted there will be a 7% shortfall in teacher training recruitment for next September, the third shortfall in a row. Also, Department for Education published statistics show that for the secondary programme 91% of the target, or 12,943 student teachers, were recruited; that is a shortfall of 2,278 teacher trainees against the target for this term.