Schools White Paper

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.

As I say, we have over £500 million available in this Parliament to build capacity, including recruiting excellent sponsors and encouraging the development of strong multi-academy trusts. As ever, however, the back-of-a-fag-packet calculation that the hon. Member for Manchester Central seems so fond of, and that was put out by the Labour party press office, uses grossly inaccurate costings—in one case, for example, erroneously calculating that the average cost of academisation will be £66,000. In fact, costs per academy have fallen from over £250,000 in 2010-11 to £32,000 today. The cost per academy will continue to fall significantly in the years ahead as we move towards full academisation.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State talks about the £500 million available in this Parliament. Will she give an undertaking to publish in great detail the Department’s costings to reassure us that this is indeed a fully funded policy and that all the costs have been fully taken into account? I am afraid to say that her figures seem a bit pie in the sky.

[Nicky Morgan]

I assure the hon. Gentleman that my figures are absolutely not pie in the sky. We publish a huge amount of information and if he wants to write to me about how much it will cost to academise all the schools in his constituency, I will be happy to respond.

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[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

This debate is actually about children and the interests of children; it is about making sure that they have opportunities to fulfil their lives. We would not be having a debate like this if local education authorities in the past had delivered opportunities to all children in a proper way—that is an absolute fact. The Labour Government under Tony Blair would have agreed with me, because they started off the academies programme and they emphasised the importance of “Education, education, education.”

[Wes Streeting]

The hon. Gentleman is right to pay tribute to the last Labour Government’s academies plan for what it did for school improvement in the most disadvantaged areas. Surely he would agree with the former Education Secretary Lord Blunkett, who said that the current Government’s approach, which is not based on evidence, risks

“discrediting the entire academy programme”.

[Neil Carmichael]

Lord Blunkett was correct when he was expressing concern about schools in Yorkshire and wondering why there was not a commission on schools there to deal with the problems that he has identified—that came up in the all-party group on Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire—so I think the hon. Gentleman makes a good point well.

We need to think about the current position in our education system. The “long tail of underachievement” report published by Ofsted back in 2012-13 makes it clear what the problem is: there are too many failing schools or coasting schools, particularly in the primary sector. They are the ones letting down young people and causing a problem. When children leave primary school without the ability to read or write, as too many children did back in 2010, they struggle and they continue to struggle in secondary school. The evidence is frightening. Analysis of the data on children who had a bad start shows that they never recover.

We need to think of an alternative way, and the academies programme has delivered success. More than 80% of academies are good or outstanding. That is why it is important to have more academies. However, the framework for academies needs to be carefully explored. It is important for us to understand what a good multi-academy trust looks like, and the Education Committee will be looking into that. That does not mean that all academies should become members of MATs, but it does mean that a good MAT will attract a lot of good schools because of the range of opportunities it provides, the emphasis on partnership, the strength of leadership and so on.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) spoke about primary schools, and that is exactly the right subject for us to talk about. We must make sure that primary schools get together, work together and form partnerships. That is why I was pleased to be present when the Association of School and College Leaders and the National Governors Association launched their report entitled “Forming or Joining a Group of Schools: staying in control of your school’s destiny”. That is about bringing schools together, hopefully through a structure that will benefit their transition from maintained to academy status if that is a direction of travel that they need to take.

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[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

I declare an interest as a councillor in the London borough of Redbridge, a borough that has a high level of retention of schools as part of the local authority family, and also an excellent and constructive relationship with the free schools, academies, grammar schools and independent schools that make up the rich diversity of education in our borough.

This Government have got their priorities on education very badly wrong. When they should be focusing on school standards, they are focusing on structures, without any focus whatsoever on evidence. It has been striking that so few Government Members have stood up in support of the Government’s proposals. We have heard many excellent speeches against those proposals and against the outrageous attack on parent choice and voice. I will not single them out, because being called a red Tory is a cross that no one should have to bear.

The Secretary of State should have been at the Dispatch Box today talking about the first real-terms cut in school budgets since the 1990s. She should have been talking about how she is going to deal with the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention that is seeing many excellent teachers leave the profession because of the stress of their workload and also because of the offence caused by people in this place and in Whitehall continuing to tell professionals how to do their job.

Our job is to make sure that every child gets the best start in life, and to ensure that the accountability mechanisms are in place to assure ourselves that that is the case, and, if it is not, to intervene. What justification can there be for the fact that the majority of schools that will be affected by the policy are primary schools, more than 80% of which are already good or outstanding? Why are we focusing on excellence when we should be focusing on underperformance?

Why is the Secretary of State not taking advice from her own chief inspector of schools who, after an inspection of seven multi-academy trusts, highlighted serious weaknesses, sometimes the same as in the worst performing local authorities and often accompanied by the same excuses? Conversion to academies and placing schools in the hands of multi-academy trusts is not a panacea or a magic wand. We should follow the evidence when setting education policy.

That is my fundamental problem with the White Paper—it does not follow the evidence. There is no evidence that making a school an academy will somehow make it better. Yes, we need more freedom for schools and more trust in professionals. We need to follow the example that we saw under the Labour Government. Contrary to what the hon. Member for Fareham (Suella Fernandes) said, I am proud of what the Labour Government delivered on education. I am a product of it. I went to school in London when London schools were left to sink. Instead, we had the London Challenge, Excellence in Cities and a raft of measures that came through funding and also through focus on outstanding teaching and outstanding leadership. That is what the Secretary of State should be talking about today. Instead, she has a dogmatic, ridiculous White Paper that will not deliver what she says it will.

[Mr Speaker]

I call Rachael Maskell to speak until 6.44.