Education and Adoption Bill

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, in view of the immediately previous remarks, I have to declare an interest. I was involved in founding Ofsted, and therefore in bringing in a type of accountability that some have reservations about. So be it. So be it.

Twenty-three years ago this year, the first school to be declared “failing” in England was named. That was 23 years ago. I had to sign the order in question, so you can imagine that there was detailed scrutiny of the evidence and the grounds for making such an order. The consequence was immediate and decisive action: something was done. Something needed to be done. However, the order was vigorously resisted by the head teacher, teachers, governors, the local authority and a few of the parents. They did not like their school being labelled in this way. None the less, I believe that the decision was right and I stand by it 23 years later.

I avoid the phrase beloved of politicians—as a Cross-Bencher I can—so I am not going to say that it was the right thing to do, but it was the right decision. It was made, and it was hard. There had to be good evidence. This Bill, if it is justified—and I believe it is, in principle—will serve the same interest that we were looking to 23 years ago: the interest of the pupil. The others were ranked against such a decision; it was in the interests of the pupils that this failing school was shifted and turned around. That has to be the judgment about this Bill: whether it is in the interests of the pupils.

There are, of course, differences between 23 years ago and now. One of them—a very important one that we will spend much time on—is between “failing” and “coasting” schools. We will have to unpick that in quite some detail, I have no doubt, but it is very important. I have two passing comments on this. One is that it is interesting to me that the current Chief Inspector of Schools, Michael Wilshaw, has done a great deal to identify this middle range of schools that are not progressing but not necessarily failing. They are not failing in the technical sense, but if they are coasting they are failing the needs of the pupils who go to them, because these pupils deserve more. I echo what previous speakers have said: the pupils deserve more than to be flat-lining in a school for a period of time. I commend, therefore, Michael Wilshaw and the inspectorate for beginning to identify this. It is a sign of how we have moved on. At one time it was either “failing” or “improving”, and now we realise that improvement in schools involves a much greater middle ground on which we have to work. This Bill is an attempt to do that. It is not perfect, and doubtless we will uncover that as we go through.

The second difference is that “coasting” is best recognised in a more even process than the judgment of “failing”. The Bill, therefore, makes provision for this. In particular, it does not rest on the judgments of Ofsted alone but looks for an analysis of three years of data. I will come back to that later. It is right that more is required than a single judgment based on perhaps one or two inspections. We have to learn how to calibrate that data; it is important to collect it. As I said, I will come back to that.

“Coasting” is a subtle term. It is a subtle judgment and, as we will see very clearly, a contestable judgment—and it has been contested already—both in general and in specific cases, and we have to learn to deal with that. Whatever the accuracy and precision of the term, a great deal lies behind it. I have grandchildren who were looking for schools—I will not say where—but a large proportion of the schools in their area were clearly coasting. The children knew which schools were not coasting but were testing their pupils. We have to deal with that, and this Bill attempts to do so.

One of the ways in which it tries to define the notion of coasting is through the introduction of three years of data. I do not want to major on that, but I will come back to it. Can the Minister confirm that this notion of three years of data, which I believe was introduced in the Government’s illustrative regulations produced during the process of the Bill in the other place, involves a real and significant number? That is important, whatever view you take of it. There are three ways in which I want to raise questions about this issue.

First, the process of change that the Bill envisages—that is what the Bill is about: changing things—requires three years of data. It requires an introduction or run-up to that, and I would say that at least a year after that is required for the process triggered by these data to be put in place. That, according to my very minimal mathematics, leads to a period of nearly five years. That is one of my chief worries. I am not sure that there is a way round it, because you have to balance the process of being fair to the school—and that means evidence, which, rightly, has been stressed already—with the needs of the pupils who are in the school now.

I pay tribute to the Minister for the story that he told us about his own interest in the needs of pupils in Pimlico. They have benefited from this. However, if you say, “Sorry, we have some sense that there’s something funny about this school. We’re analysing the data and it’s going to take five years”, that is an educational lifetime for many children. It covers the ages of 11 to 16 and they will be gone. That is not good enough for pupils. I can get quite angry on that point and I will not go on about it, but it is not good enough to wait for five years in the hope that a process will kick in. Where there is an immediate need for action, I hope that there will be ways of taking that action. Would the Minister care to comment on this five-year period?

My second point may cause a bit of distress on some Benches. There is clearly a balance to be struck in the school getting a fair judgment between the needs of the parents, the governors and the head teacher. That is absolutely right, and I pay tribute to many, many teachers and the ways in which they perform their role. It is no part of my agenda to attack teachers—we desperately need and depend on them. However, if there is a potential delay of four or five years, we must make sure that we do not allow other delays to be put into the system. I have read the material that has been sent to me by the faith schools about possible ways in which they may wish to delay the process, for reasons that I quite understand, but I do not think that that can be allowed and I would resist it. When, nine or 10 years ago, education Bills were debated in this House—and they were very important for what we are going through now—a number of us made a point of resisting pressure from certain parts of the Chamber for the removal of all faith school status. We resisted that successfully and did so on one principle alone: never close a good school. It does not matter what its ideological background; you never close a good school—there are not enough of them around. If the changes that the faith communities want in this process are to delay change to a coasting school, I will no longer be with them. That is not the point of this legislation. We stick with what can be effective and what can be changed as quickly as possible.

The final point I want to make is that the data to be used—it will be very important, and this is what distinguishes it from an inspection-led basis; although I think that the inspections are very important—must be consistent, accurate and have the granularity that begins to tell us about individual pupils, groups and classes. That is a hard order and will not be achieved simply by external examinations. The data required to know whether a pupil is making progress are more than an exam externally set from one year to the next or two years on. There has to be more to it than that.

I simply draw to the attention of the Minister and the House the importance that information technology can play in this. I declare an interest here as the chair of Frog Education, a company that does this. However, I am not speaking for that company. I am speaking for the contribution that this whole industry can make to our understanding of what is going on in classrooms. IT is based on what we now call big data. That applies in the classroom, and we must find ways in the education system to analyse and examine those data and put them to use in diagnosing what is good and what is bad. Such data can produce a degree of insight that no single set of exams or inspections can. Therefore, I ask the Minister whether the Government have any plans to look at this in more detail. What will be the sources of the data that the Government are now committed to using in declaring a school to be coasting?