Education and Adoption Bill (First sitting)

Margot James Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 55 But does not that tell you that the school is not outstanding in the first place?

Sir Daniel Moynihan: It could well do. Some 80% of schools are judged to be good and outstanding. What is intriguing is that, in some of those judgments, there are schools with enormous gaps between pupil premium and non-pupil premium children. That cannot be right. How can a school be outstanding with an enormous gap there? A number of schools with those judgments from the past have very low value added, so there are issues to be looked at.

Progress has to be the driver. Progress alerts you to a school; you have to look at it in a bit more detail to judge whether it is coasting or not. You would have to look at destinations to find out where those children are going: what kinds of universities, apprenticeships and jobs they are going to, and what attendance is like. Progress is the first stop but you have to look at other things to get the picture.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

Q 56 I have two brief questions. First, Councillor Watts, you mentioned a concern you had about the capacity of high-performing academy chains to take over coasting schools. Earlier, we heard that, in a lot of cases, a school once defined as coasting will, in fact, be able to put its own house in order. Does that not alleviate your concerns about the capacity of these academy chains and high-performing groups?

My second question is to Sir Daniel. When you were answering the point about the measures that the Harris chain put in place to improve schools, you mentioned pupil tracking and discipline. Do you have your own pupil referral unit within your group? Could you comment on the issue of recycling disruptive pupils from school to school? To my mind, that is a real issue among the underperforming schools, particularly in areas of lower socio-economic status.

Richard Watts: However you cut it, the Bill envisages quite a significant increase in the number of schools that are converted to academy status to address performance problems, whether they are failing or coasting. If there are ways that we can address coasting schools without relying on high-performing sponsors, great. I still think there is an issue that the Committee needs to consider about whether there is the capacity in the sponsors’ market to take on the kind of increase in sponsored academies that the Bill envisages.

Sir Daniel Moynihan: To answer the question on PRUs—pupil referral units—we do have our own pupil referral unit called Harris Aspire. It has roughly an equal number of Harris students and non-Harris students. It is available for everybody. Our rationale for starting it was that sometimes a student does unfortunately have to be excluded. Sometimes it has to happen.

We would rather be responsible for them into the future than just unload and forget about them. If parents are content, after an exclusion has happened, students will go to Harris Aspire. There are other times when a student needs a respite period to overcome a problem. They might go there for six weeks and then return very happily into a school. It has both those types of provision. There is a definite need for more of those. We have opened that as a free school, and that is great route to introduce more PRUs and introduce a market and have some competition. Existing PRUs sometimes have a monopoly locally and the provision is quite poor, and heads do not have a great deal of choice sometimes.

[The Chair]

Any more questions? No. In that case, I thank the members of the panel for co-operating, and that has got us back on time. Thank you very much for your help.

Examination of Witnesses

Dr Tim Coulson, Zoe Carr and Lee Elliot Major gave evidence.