Education: Academies

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. In it there was mention of people crowing at the Government’s climbdown. I am not going to adopt that approach, although I have to say that I can understand why many would. U-turns are becoming a regular feature of this Government’s attempts to initiate or see through legislation, and the number of times that we have witnessed the brakes being applied soon after bold statements of intent suggests that a little more than bad luck is at play here. Bad judgment is more likely, I think, and that is certainly the case with forced academisation. Before I leave the issue of crowing, I find it rather depressing to hear the Statement say that people are crowing about a victory in their “battle against raising standards”. Is that really what Ministers believe? Nobody is against raising standards. The Minister and the Secretary of State should realise that they and the whiz-kids at the No. 10 Policy Unit do not always know better than those who, day in and day out, are at the sharp end of things, delivering education for our children. Of course there are examples of where schools are underperforming, and they must be helped to improve, but that does not justify the conclusion that academisation is the only answer.

The opposition to the White Paper proposals encompassed a broad alliance, including head teachers—I hardly need to remind the Ministers here this evening that head teachers made their collective voice very clear to the Secretary of State when she spoke to their conference—and also parents, governors, teachers, local government leaders from all parties and Members of Parliament, more than a few from their own party. Although the Secretary of State has conceded on the ideologically driven idea of forcing good and outstanding schools to become academies against their wishes, she still apparently holds the ambition that all schools will become academies, though still without advancing a single convincing reason as to why this aim is sensible in the first place.

The Statement today is certainly welcome, but it none the less leaves questions, one of which is whether high-performing schools will be forced to become academies. At one point, the Statement says:

“We will therefore seek provisions to convert schools in the lowest-performing and unviable local authorities to academy status. This may involve in some circumstances conversion of good and outstanding schools when they have not chosen to do so themselves”.

Yet later it says:

“While we want every school to become an academy, we will not compel successful schools to join multi-academy trusts”.

I say to the Minister: which is it? The Government clearly cannot have it both ways.

There is also the issue of autonomy. Do the Government really believe that that is the outcome when a school becomes part of a multi-academy trust? They claim that academisation devolves power to the front line, but that is a myth. Schools and academy chains actually lose most of their autonomy because the chain controls their premises, their budget, their staffing and their curriculum. The ultimate irony is that chains have far more power over schools than local authorities currently do.

Last week, I asked the Minister in your Lordships’ House whether there was any evidence that academies automatically performed better than local authority maintained schools, particularly those that are already categorised as high performing. The Minister avoided answering the question, perhaps for the good reason that the honest answer was no. What he did do was to pray in aid what he thought was a supportive comment from the Sutton Trust. But what he did not tell the House was that the research by the Sutton Trust found that there is a very mixed picture in the performance of academy chains and no evidence at all that academisation in and of itself leads to school improvement.

The White Paper promotes academy chains as the preferred model, yet many chains are performing badly and significantly worse than many local authorities—a point recognised by the head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw. There have been too many examples of financial mismanagement verging on corruption in academy chains and—perhaps it is a debate for another day—the Education Funding Agency is widely recognised as not being up to the job of supervising even the number of academies that we now have. So I again ask the Minister what evidence the Government have that only academisation leads to school improvement. Where is the choice and autonomy that the Government are so fond of emphasising despite advancing a one-size-fits-all approach? Is there sufficient capacity and accountability in the academy system to ensure that it is best practice, not poor practice, which is being spread?

These questions remain as the Government seek further powers to speed up the pace of academisation. Your Lordships might like to ask why this has been deemed necessary so soon after the Education and Adoption Act was in your Lordships’ House. We spent many days and hours going through the fine detail of that Bill; but were the White Paper proposals to be adopted, it would mean that we had effectively wasted our time on it. If the Government were so convinced that only forced academisation would do, why did they not amend the then Education and Adoption Bill appropriately? That would have been the honest approach instead of leading noble Lords and MPs down what is effectively a false path, knowing that the Bill was merely a stop-gap measure.

It is surely self-evident that we all want to see educational excellence everywhere, but at a time when schools are facing huge challenges from falling budgets and teacher shortages, top-down reorganisation of the school system will remove even more money, time and effort from where the focus should be. It is high time the Government recognised that further structural changes are at best a distraction and, at worst, could damage standards. Will the Minister now accept that, when it comes to change in education, the Government need to carry the professionals with them if such change is to be successfully delivered?

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. It is actually good to listen; it is good to hear what other people have to say rather than immediately jump to conclusions, and I welcome the fact that the Government have listened to people who have considerable experience in these matters and adjusted the likely content of the forthcoming Bill.

The Minister said in the Statement that the Government wanted to,

“deliver a great education to every single child”.

But don’t we all? I suppose that the difference is that some of us do not believe that the blind concentration on structures and types of school is really the answer. We think that, more importantly, it is about the quality of leadership of those schools. It is about the teachers—who are highly trained, highly respected and given proper continuing professional development. It is about a broad national curriculum which every pupil takes, and includes, as some of the Minister’s colleagues believe, PSHE and good careers advice. It is about parents being involved in the education of their child, not divorced from it; and it is about a curriculum which celebrates technical, vocational and creative education.

There is no evidence that turning a school into an academy will improve standards. In fact, academies tend to perform less well in Ofsted inspections than local authority schools do. I hope that we will see, once and for all, the end of the ideological obsession with pushing aside the role of local authorities in community schools. They need to be cherished, nurtured and given the resources to do the job.

I am very pleased with what the Minister said in the Statement about rural schools, which have been neglected for far too long and need special attention. But putting them into multi-academy trusts is not always the best solution. If they have to go into a multi-academy trust, the trust has to have a relationship with the community that the school is in, because the community is hugely important to the rural school.

I have two questions for the Minister. So far, he has resisted publishing tables to compare trusts’ overall performance. Will he now agree that that should happen? Secondly, he has refused to let Ofsted conduct full inspections of academy chains. Will he now agree that this should happen as well?