Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Low of Dalston Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, I will speak briefly given the hour. Despite the reassurances received by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins, there remain a number of concerns that need to be addressed. The specialist services of which the noble Baronesses, Lady Wilkins and Lady Howe, have spoken are at the heart of special education provision. As we have heard, they include support for mainstream teachers, Braille teaching and mobility instruction for visually impaired pupils, communication support, advice on equipment and speech and language support for pupils who are deaf or hard of hearing. I declare an interest as a vice-president of the RNIB, an organisation that is very concerned about the maintenance of services for blind and partially sighted pupils.

The services that I have mentioned are examples of those that meet low-incidence needs. The LEA is a large enough unit for these needs to attain a critical mass and generate demand for a level of support services that is capable of being sustained. The academy system is much more atomised and fragmented, and much less able to sustain a critical mass of support services. Of course, academies can form consortium arrangements, and the Minister spoke of partnerships; but it will inevitably take time to get these up and running, and in the mean time local authority arrangements are likely to become increasingly vulnerable as academies, with their attendant funding, opt out of the local authority system. Therefore it is absolutely essential that the Government make clear in detail exactly how specialist support services will be sustained in the new environment.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson]

My Lords, I support the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Wilkins. The noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, wanted to speak in support of the amendment, but could not make the late hour for health reasons. I am therefore pleased to take her place, after taking her considerable briefing.

I share her concern about losing essential support for disabled children if we do not ensure that the Bill delivers an appropriate system to do the job. I am a member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Disability, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell. The group has frequently been told that too many disabled children are not getting the specialist support that they need at school fully to engage with the curriculum. I am concerned that the Bill may have the unintended consequence of worsening this problem. I will give an example. The National Deaf Children's Society identified a case in the West Midlands in which a small all-through school became an academy. It admitted a disabled child who required significant levels of support. However, the academy had difficulty in funding this support as it took up a disproportionate amount of its special educational needs budget. As a small school working with one deaf child, the academy was unable to access the economies of scale that would have made the support for this child affordable.

On a more positive note, I am pleased to hear about Waltham Forest local authority, which decided to adopt a different funding model when a delegated structure similar to that proposed in the Bill failed to support the needs of disabled children. Now, a local special school receives its funding to operate an outreach service for all other local schools free of charge.

The lesson from Waltham Forest demonstrates how important it is to think through the impact of any changes to funding, especially for support services, before proceeding. I believe that this amendment helps us to do that and to avoid unnecessary damage to the education of disabled children. I urge the Minister to respond positively to it.

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[Baroness Whitaker]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly to Amendment 44A, which rather oddly is in this group. The arguments I made to ensure that the design of academies in new or refurbished buildings must be conducive to good education and not a waste of public money in Committee are still the same. I will not repeat them now.

I have tabled this amendment again because the answer from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, although helpful, did not deal with what general minimum design standards would operate, and no letter was forthcoming from the department to amplify his, perhaps I may say rather vague, response that he had no reason to doubt that they did. I would not press for a statutory requirement if it were definite that the free schools network would include such design advice in the general advice that the Government are funding them to give to aspirant academy-makers.

The noble Lord cited the law covering access for students with disabilities, which was welcome, but I am sure that groups of parents, teachers or others need to get themselves guidance on how the broad provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act and successor obligations under the Equality Act should be translated into design.

The Government’s approach to housing, in their letter to me of 15 June, says that they will issue guidance by,

“setting out minimum environmental, architectural, design, economic and social standards”.

Are academies where children will spend a large proportion of their time at a formative period of their life really so much less important?

[Lord Low of Dalston]

My Lords, I shall say a brief word about Amendment 52, which is tabled in my name, and I hope that I can perhaps win the prize for the briefest speech of the evening. The object of Amendment 52 is to impose the SEN obligations on existing academies, which we already discussed to a fair extent when we considered government Amendment 11. The Minister made it clear that the SEN obligations would be inserted into the funding agreements of existing academies. The only point of unclarity that remained was whether we would have to wait for the existing agreements to run their course or whether the obligations could be inserted before that. If the Minister accepts the spirit of this amendment, it would enable the obligations to be inserted into the funding agreement within 12 months of the Act coming into force. I urge that that approach be adopted, rather than that we should be made to wait a number of years for existing agreements to run their course.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I should like to speak to Amendment 44A, and I thank my noble friend Lady Whitaker for once again tabling the issue of the design of school buildings on Report. To take care to design school buildings well is a mark of respect for school communities. It is also plain common sense, not only because of its effects on the morale of the school community but because of its benefits for practical functioning and, very importantly, for the benefit of disabled children in schools. Inclusive design that enables disabled children to be fully integrated into the whole life of the school community is design that is good for everybody. This is not simply a matter of aesthetics but of fitness for purpose.

By no means all the schools that have been built under the Building Schools for the Future programme have been exemplars of good architecture and good design, but a number of them have been very good indeed. One of the virtues of this programme has been that it has encouraged some of our leading architects in this country, who are of course leading architects in the world, to return to school-building in their practices.

If they are retained, minimum design standards will do much to ensure that the schools that are built in the future are built to good design standards. We did not get a clear answer in Committee—I make no criticism whatever of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who was unable to clarify the point—as to whether the Government intend to retain minimum design standards. I hope that they will be able to give us that assurance this evening.

I have to say that I draw no encouragement from the Secretary of State’s Statement on education funding on Monday after we finished Committee. In the course of that long statement on school buildings, the only references he made to design were disparaging. He picked out care to ensure good design as an instance of what he regarded as undue bureaucracy, cost and delay. He cited as instances of wasteful process that,

“local authorities involved in this process have employed … an enabler from CABE, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment—another non-departmental public body”.—[Official Report, 5/7/10; col. 40.]

It is a great pity to dismiss CABE. The enablers that CABE has ensured have been available to assist people who face the difficult and complex responsibility of commissioning and securing good new school buildings. CABE enablers are design professionals who generously and public-spiritedly are willing to give their services for modest fees, well below market rates, to enable people facing these challenging, difficult and important tasks to know better how to handle them.

A moment later the Secretary of State said that,

“local authorities were expected to engage a design champion”,—[Official Report, 5/7/10; col. 41.]

Design champions exist in some local authorities, although they are not compelled to have them. These are people who are already there, whether as elected members or as senior officers, whose role in the local authority is to advocate good design. Given the enormous power that local authorities have over the built environment for good or for ill, through planning and through the procurement of buildings, it must be a good thing that they appoint someone from within their midst to prompt and remind them all the time of their responsibility to ensure that the buildings that are built under their auspices are well designed. I suspect that the Secretary of State had not understood what these functions were when he ridiculed them.

Later in the Statement, the Secretary of State went on to announce that he was going to appoint a “capital review team”. Among the people he named as members of that team is Sir John Egan. Sir John is, of course, deeply versed in the issues of building design and quality, and will be a most excellent member of that team. I am more concerned to see that the group operations director of Dixons Store Group and the director of property services at Tesco are included in the group. I know nothing of these individuals. They may be the most enlightened people, but I do not think that the most ardent admirers of Dixons and Tesco—and they have many good qualities—would claim that they have been patrons of fine architecture: rather the reverse. The banality and triteness of the design of modern supermarkets is a sad and indeed disgraceful falling away from the best of our historic traditions in the design of department stores and shop fronts.

The Secretary of State says that he wants buildings to be built more quickly and to look at the scope for savings. The reality is that a little time taken to achieve good design is an investment that richly pays for itself in reduced lifetime costs of the building, in the better performance of all those who work in it, and in the quality of life for years ahead of the people in the community immediately around it. The Secretary of State is a civilised man with a sense of history, and so of course is the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Hill. I hope that they will think more deeply about their responsibilities in this area.