Education and Adoption Bill

Lord True Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Earl has certainly not taken too long. The House always listens with great interest to his humane and informed words. I declare an interest as leader of a London borough council. All our existing or pending secondary schools are academies or free schools with my authority’s encouragement and support. I am also a trustee of a charity that provides funding for faith schools, whose existence I equally support. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, had pertinent things to say on that point.

I will concentrate on some of the educational clauses of the Bill, which I support. Like most local authority leaders, I agree with my noble friend that it is intolerable that any child should suffer poor education for a term, let alone a year or years. The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, is absolutely right on this too. Delay in effecting change is unacceptable. Delaying tactics damage pupils’ prospects. Whatever has been said by the other side, my noble friend is right to address the opportunities for delay in taking action in schools that are not performing. Young people get one chance. The Bill is born of that, and that is why it is so welcome.

We have heard a lot today about problems with the idea of coasting schools. We have all seen the Government’s draft regulations, and public consultation is promised. I have no doubt that noble Lords will want to look at this in Committee. There is common ground around the Chamber that the reality is that we all know that there are schools that are treading water, at best, and it is reasonable that pressure should be applied to them and that, where need be, their leadership should be changed. I support that philosophy in the Bill.

Much of the heat outside about this Bill at root surrounds the concept of academies. Those views are not particularly heavily represented in this House, at least not so fanatically. Some people think academies are an educational elixir, while others damn them as poison. I am always ill at ease with any absolutist position, and I am not comfortable with the view on either side. I do not accept the view that some put—not my noble friend—that local authorities are the origin of all the ills of education and that improvement will be found simply by moving schools out of local authorities’ control. That is not what my noble friend said, and I think it is not what he believes. Indeed, Clause 12 is interesting in that it allows the revocation of academy orders.

In many cases it is proven beyond doubt that conversion has helped. On the other hand, a generalised anti-local-authority mantra is unhelpful. It may be justified in some cases, but it is hurtful to high-performing local authorities and the dedicated people who work in local education services. I do not say that because I have a dogmatic “local authority first” view. As many in the House know, my local authority was one of the first—perhaps the first—to change its local education authority into a social enterprise or community interest company, Achieving for Children. That company recently achieved an outstanding result in turning round the quality of services in Kingston under its new Conservative management. It is helping disadvantaged children in Sunderland, working with the department. Those results were achieved by highly skilled and motivated public servants from local government. Some people call them bureaucrats, but in my view they are outstanding public servants and we need to watch our language, as the Minister always carefully does. The House should know that he works very positively and creatively with local councils in seeking to secure educational improvement.

On the other hand, I am sure all of us have an equal distaste for dogmatic hostility to free schools and academies. I do not think we have heard that today. For one or two moments, I thought its spirit hovered a little uneasily near the head of the opening speaker from the Opposition Front Bench. The reality is that the signal towards academies was given by the Labour Government before 2010. That progress was continued under the coalition Government and will continue. Indeed, the new shadow Secretary of State for Education said the other day that she anticipates that almost all schools will be academies or free schools by 2020. That is the reality. Frankly, anyone who looks at the really bilious website of the Anti Academies Alliance would want to repudiate some of the things there. That organisation actually salutes a strike at a local school where both the Labour council and parents have supported conversion to an academy. There can be no meeting point between such people and real pupil-centred education. I am sure that the noble Lord on the Opposition Front Bench agrees that such opinions need to be repudiated. Incidentally, I would be very interested in an exposition from the noble Lord when he winds up on what Labour policy actually currently is, because we have all been following very closely Mr Corbyn’s remarks on these matters.

I strongly support this Bill because we need to deal with underperformance. If my cold will allow me, I shall add two personal comments which do not detract from my support of the Bill. Back in 2010, after the general election I went to see the then Secretary of State, Michael Gove, who I consider to be one of the great Secretaries of State for Education. I put to him my fears that an overswift expansion of academies might lead to some excessively large chains emerging without the vital sense, which is fundamental to good schooling, that a well-led secondary or, indeed, primary school grows out of and is at the very heart of its local community. We discussed the idea of families of community-led academies—secondary schools surrounded by and perhaps even led by primary schools, or garlands of primaries as I like to call them—or multi-academy trusts going for conversion. The world is now moving in that direction. It is what we have tried to achieve in Richmond with our academies and it is happening in many other areas. We heard from the right reverend Prelate about how it is happening in Ely. Schools which are academies are not necessarily atomised. They are independent and have some elements of competition, but if they work together they can be balanced by local roots, cohesion and co-operation. At the time, I think Mr Gove saw the point, but he was understandably keen to make progress in the context of the law left behind by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. In some ways, my right honourable friend was right.

Of course, there are areas of weakness and on those the dogmatic opponents of academies gleefully pounce. Sometimes they may be slightly remote and complacent management, failure to grip poor leadership or teaching approaches or sometimes—I have experienced this at first hand—a sense that managers of academy chains do not adopt the deeply personal community-based approach that we heard about from my noble friend Lord Harris but are a little untouchable. I do not think that is the case. I know from experience that my noble friend the Minister has already taken firm action in relation to coasting academies, but I wonder whether it might be possible in the course of the Bill to reflect on whether it might be wise to make more explicit the Government’s power to intervene, in order to draw the sting from the idea that there is inequality between maintained schools and academies. I do not think that is the case; I do not think that the Government tolerate underperformance in any school, but I welcome the chance to talk to my noble friend about that.

I have some concerns about where regional commissioners might evolve. For now, it is a mechanism that we should support, adopt and use to make change. However, as pressure on them grows, the numbers of schools that they supervise increase. Questions will arise about accountability, as others have said. They are potentially, in effect, arms of a phantom regional government. Is it not inevitable that bureaucracies will grow? Who will recruit to those expanding offices? Who will judge their performance and how? Who can guarantee that such new bureaucracies will be responsive to local concerns, as local authorities must be? How will parents and the public hold them to account? I hope that, having used this necessary instrument now—which I support—we will not in a few years’ time find ourselves looking to rein in what we are now creating.

I do not want to encourage noble Lords opposite too much, but I always look at the political aspect. Regional commissioners could be morphed, by a stroke of the pen, into new appointments to the national education service—proposed by Mr Corbyn and controlled from the centre—with very different educational objectives from those of this Government. You cannot change local authority leadership except by the ballot box. You cannot break academies except by legislation but, for regional commissioners, a simple letter of dismissal from an incoming Secretary of State would suffice. I hope that, once he has used this necessary instrument in the years ahead, my noble friend and his colleagues will have a care that they are not creating new future bureaucracies. They might even be petri dishes in which the blob could replicate itself again.

These, however, are wider, long-term reflections, that are not for now; for now, we should address ourselves to the business of supporting the Bill, considering the Bill and, I hope, passing the Bill, so that my noble friend and the Government can continue with the necessary work of bringing improvement to pupils in our schools.