Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I believe that the problems so far have included not only the degree of independence, or perceived independence, but the expectations that there have been on those bodies and the powers they have had to carry out their functions. Even in the proposals the Government are bringing forward today, there is not really the expectation that Ofqual will be doing a serious job and will be given the resources and discretion to assess what is happening in terms of educational standards. It is in danger of looking as though the Government simply want the slightly more independent body of Ofqual to rubber-stamp the exam results each year, so that it is somebody who is apparently independent, rather than Government Ministers, who will have to appear on television in August to explain why the results have gone up. The Minister for Schools and Learners will then be able to stay away in whatever exotic destination he is holidaying in, instead of returning to answer questions on the airwaves. That brings me to a second area of concern, which I think would be shared by almost anybody who is familiar with Labour policy on education and public services over the last decade or so. It relates to the extent of central control and the tendency to introduce additional burdens of bureaucracy, often unnecessarily. The Association of School and College Leaders says in its representations that it is particularly concerned about the extra powers the Bill gives to the Secretary of State. It says these powers increase the centralisation policy and have the potential to undermine the capacity of school and colleague leaders and governing bodies to make decisions appropriate to their local circumstances. I agree with that; in many areas, a lot of additional central control is being given to the Secretary of State, and we will return to that later when we discuss improvement powers in relation to schools. There is also a great deal of bureaucracy in some of the new proposals. Many of them are no doubt being introduced with the best of intentions, but there is a real danger that they will become a bureaucratic nightmare of considerable proportions. I shall start with the new complaints procedures, which remove the Secretary of State's power to have to get involved in messy and difficult appeals. It is one of the few areas where the Secretary of State is actually giving something up—and it is possibly the one power he would want to give up. That power will be handed over to a new appeal mechanism, which is essentially an ombudsman function. There is a major concern that that could lead to a proliferation of complaints, not all of them well grounded, and a need for schools to increase enormously the amount of monitoring and collecting of evidence that relate to cases that could emerge through this ombudsman process. The National Union of Teachers says in its representations that there is concern among teachers and head teachers that this provision is at best unnecessary and at worst may further complicate existing complaints structures. The ASCL says in its comments on the Bill that guidance about what constitutes a good complaints policy is the best way to deal with the relatively small number of cases where school complaints systems are not working well. It suggests that the proposed complaints service has the potential to be expensive and bureaucratic and that, as it will have an interest in justifying its own existence, it may be liable to increase, rather than diminish, whatever problems there may be. We will therefore want to look very closely at these proposals during the passage of the Bill. We notice that in clause 194, which describes some of these powers, what is a qualifying school includes"““a community, foundation or voluntary school…a maintained nursery school…or a short stay school””," but that academies are apparently not included. Can the Minister clarify now or later whether academies will be exempt from this complaints process and, if so, what complaints process will relate to them, and what is the justification for leaving them out of this process? Another Government proposal is the right to request time off for training. That, of course, either sounds wonderful or probably already exists in many businesses. However, when we look at the Bill in detail, we will have to consider how this right and the appeal routes that will be given to employees will work in practice. The Bill lists a whole series of what are essentially opt-outs for employers—circumstances in which they would find it difficult to give this right to time off for training. Most of them require an enormous amount of discretion and judgment, and it will be interesting to learn how the Government envisage some of these proposals working in practice, and what the scope may be for an increase in bureaucracy and appeals, and, perhaps, in cases being brought where there has been a breakdown previously between employer and employee. Also on the bureaucratic and centralising burdens in the Bill, there are some important proposals on powers to search, which the hon. Member for Surrey Heath has touched on, and the important issue of reporting a physical constraint. We would want to make sure that policy on the latter strikes a sensible balance between the requirement to report incidents that are sufficiently serious while avoiding being so onerous that it creates impediments to sensible behaviour within schools. In relation to the powers to search, we and a number of the teaching organisations share some of the concerns expressed by the hon. Gentleman earlier that the way in which the Bill grants these powers leaves out certain powers to search for other items, which any head teacher or governing body would probably want to be able to exercise. Therefore, the issue is whether it is right to grant a more generalised power that allows for a greater degree of discretion, or whether the Bill should allow for some of the other areas that have already been identified by bodies outside this House. Finally, I turn to school accountability and improvement. Under this Government, there has rightly been a great deal of concern about schools across the country that have not been performing to the level that is possible—that has been demonstrated to be possible in areas where there is a similar, and often particularly challenging, catchment. I commend the Government for having not been willing simply to assume that such schools, often in deprived areas, should automatically be sentenced to achieve poor results. I can also understand why the Government have not in the past been willing to allow mechanisms of accountability that should have been exercised through local authorities, because it is clear that in large parts of the country over a very long period of time some local authorities—quite often in Labour areas and where Labour has been in power for long periods—were simply not discharging those responsibilities effectively. Indeed, in many cases those local authorities had themselves got into a mindset where they had a set of low expectations for the young people in their area because of the types of household and levels of income that they came from. Over the past 10 or so years, we have had an increasing range of Government policies designed to intervene and deliver improvements. They are well intentioned, but they have often been counter-productive, as were some of the announcements on the National Challenge programme, which dubbed schools ““failing”” even when in some cases they had been converted into academies, were improving rapidly and had very good value-added. In some of those cases we know that the ability of those schools to improve was made more difficult because of their having been designated by the Prime Minister as failing schools: they lost pupils who were previously going to attend and they lost staff who were going to apply to work in them but who, when they read in the local newspapers that the schools were at risk of closure, decided not to apply there. Our education system needs a more coherent mechanism for holding local authorities and schools to account, and then a proper means of intervention. At the moment, we just have a complex muddle between local and central responsibility. The Government say that they want local authorities to be the commissioners for education services, but they do not really believe in the ability of local education authorities to perform that role. We also have a vast range of different mechanisms to be used in a very arbitrary way to deliver school improvements. The Bill repeats many of the errors that we have seen over the past 10 years. The Local Government Association, for example, notes how the Secretary of State will now take additional powers on school improvements and forcing notices of improvement to be issued, even when local authorities are being proactive and have other proposals for improving education in those areas. We know that the Government's response to the expansion of the academies programme has not been to try to find some mechanism through which the academies can become locally accountable to the local authorities, which are supposed to be the commissioners. The response has been simply to acknowledge that Ministers cannot ultimately control an academy programme of 200, 300 or 400 schools and to set up another agency—a mini local authority—to do that job for the Government and local authorities. That confirms the view that the Government still do not trust local authorities to be effective commissioners and to deliver change. The Liberal Democrats would like to see a proper role for local authorities in holding schools to account and a proper devolution of power, not only to schools—so that they can exercise some of the powers that have been decentralised to academies but not to other maintained schools—but to local authorities in their oversight of school standards, with appropriate scrutiny of their performance by Ofsted or an education standards authority. Such an authority should hold not only schools and pupils to account, but local authorities as commissioners of services. Instead, we have from the Government another set of arbitrary measures that will no doubt be replaced in the fullness of time by other arbitrary measures or changes made by whatever Government we will have in the future. The Bill is a hotch-potch of different measures, thrown into a long piece of legislation designed to give the impression that the Government still have some sort of agenda for education. However, it is sadly lacking the fundamental changes that could make a difference in addressing the major concerns about the education system that are actually shared by all parties.