Birmingham Schools

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I had the pleasure of introducing Mr Tim Boyes, head teacher of Queensbridge School, to the noble Lord, Lord Hill, in 2010. I was grateful to the noble Lord for meeting Mr Boyes and allowing him to go on to meet officials. I listened with interest to the Minister who said that there is now to be an inquiry into what subsequently happened but I think he should say a little bit more about what his own department did or did not do after it was alerted to these very pressing issues.

I have long been concerned about what has been happening in some of our Birmingham schools. Would the Minister agree that this is not so much an issue about links to terrorism or, necessarily, extremism but that a small group of people were determined to change the governing bodies in a number of schools using entryist tactics? How that happens is well known to many Lords. In so doing, these people undermined the existing head teachers and caused a great deal of distress to many of the teachers—including many Muslim teachers—who found themselves very isolated because it appeared that no action could be taken.

I understand that the noble Lord said that Ofsted will now undertake spot inspections but I want him to answer the point raised by my noble friend. There are other schools in other parts of the country. Remarkably, the noble Lord’s Secretary of State allowed some schools linked to creationism to be established. Will those spot inspections apply to those schools to protect them from the dogma of creationism, which I believe to be reprehensible? I also ask the Minister—

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

We would also like to hear from other noble Lords, so could the noble Lord be brief?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I would just like to ask the Minister about Ofsted. Ofsted has now found that many of these schools need to go into special measures. I am glad that it has done so but why did Ofsted, in recent inspections of some of these schools, classify them as outstanding? We can have little faith in Ofsted’s approach if it missed all the troubles that have been going on in those schools.