Academies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister to the Front Bench and I welcome this Bill. It has an excellent precedent. It was the child of my noble friend Lord Baker; it was excellently looked after by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in his long tenure; and somehow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, and others who did not feel the same way about it refrained from strangling the infant. Now it emerges to manhood at the point where it can be set free. I welcome the momentum that is embodied in the Bill and the feeling that we are going forward with speed and determination. Letting excellent schools become academies is not a precipitate risk. We know what academies are. The schools that are being pitched into this can explore and innovate safely for a year or two and such regulation as is needed can catch up. They are already well governed and well operated institutions. I do not share the caution of my noble friend Lady Garden. I certainly do not share the ambition of the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, to turn every new aeroplane into a Bristol Brabazon, which, as noble Lords will remember, was designed with immense care by a big committee, had 10 engines and flew only once. There is a great deal to be said for getting things done with determination. It is one of the many things for which I admire my noble friend Lady Thatcher. I have a strong conviction that innovation comes from below: one can see that all through life. The reason why we do not see it much in schools is that it has been suppressed for so long by regulation and the immense burdens put on schools of targets, paperwork and control. In the tenure of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, we had an education Bill that was supposed to allow schools to innovate, but all it said was that if you submit an immense application to the Department for Education you may be considered in due course and perhaps allowed to make small changes to the way in which you run a school. Where the previous Government had allowed bottom-up innovations to happen, such as the growth in academies and the excellent experiment of technical colleges launched by my noble friend Lord Baker, they worked. Where they tried to impose change from above, such as AS-levels and diplomas, they did not work. That is inevitable in a system such as education, as you cannot control 25,000-odd schools from the centre. A particular change is never right for all schools at the same time. You must have a system of evolution and adaptation rather than one of imposition if you want good ideas such as diplomas to flourish. Diplomas were an excellent idea, but they should have been allowed to evolve and adapt to schools, which would then have found out how they worked best. One would then have got a sensible system—as we still may, depending on what my Government decide to do with them. Inevitably, as has been said by many of my noble friends, particularly those to my left, we shall not abandon our traditional inquisitorial attitude to the Government just because we happen to be part of it. There are many things that I wish to know about the Bill. In particular, I want to know how far the freedom to innovate goes and how much real freedom will be allowed to these schools. I very much hope that my noble friend will circulate to all of us who have taken an interest the model agreements and associated documents that doubtless are being sent to those thousands of schools that have made applications. They cannot possibly be dealt with by an à la carte system. There must be a standard procedure, which should be shared with us before Committee. I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, and others that partnership will be an important part of the new educational landscape. It has been pioneered to effect by the previous Government. If we are not to have central control or control by local authorities, there must be a way for schools to get support and for good practice to spread. Of all the things that have been tried, that seems to work best in schools through partnership. I very much hope that that will be explored and strengthened in the Bill. We need to be careful about the governance of the new academies. While there were only a couple of hundred of them and they were being looked after by association with reputable businesses and charities that could put in resources, expertise and understanding when things went wrong, and while they were quite thinly scattered or concentrated in areas where the current system had clearly failed, that, to my mind, was less of a worry. Now we are looking at a system where potentially, in the course of five years, quite a high proportion of our state schools could become academies, so we have to understand how governance will work. Governance is an imperfect matter—boards of governors go wrong. One can see that clearly in the private school system, where, as noble Lords may know, I spent a lot of my time as editor of the Good Schools Guide watching schools being destroyed by the idiocies of governing bodies. How are we to deal with governance in academies—particularly those that convert from excellent schools—and how are we to preserve the interests of the local community? How, indeed, are we to approach quality control as a whole in a world of academies? I should very much like to learn from the examples of my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham, who says that he has his own inspectorate in his schools. How does that work? In what ways is it better and more efficient than Ofsted? I can think of lots of ways in which Ofsted could be better and more efficient. It does not seem to be an organisation that demonstrably has its finger on the pulse of schools. It looks at them only every four years or so and does not provide a good service for parents. If there is a dodgy Ofsted report on a school, you hear nothing more for four or five years and, if it is a good school, you are not told whether it is going wrong. Ofsted does not seem to provide good value. It has a large number of immensely well paid executives, but I do not see that that level of spend is producing value for money. In general, I do not see Ofsted being supportive of schools. It simply seems to go in and be critical and not, as Her Majesty’s inspectorate used to do, provide good ideas, support and comfort to schools. Frankly, I think that a lot of cost could be cut out of that section of the department and that much better value could be obtained from the expenditure that remains. My noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby pointed out other areas where we could tackle costs, such as in the degree of central diktat and directive and in the level of imposition on schools—the sheer amount of effort in schools that has to be devoted to complying with these things and to watching what is going on. A great deal of money could be saved by reducing that. We will inevitably come on to the matter of faith schools—a subject already covered by the noble Baronesses, Lady Morgan of Huyton and Lady Murphy. In previous battles in this Chamber, we have extracted some hard-won concessions from the churches about inclusiveness—opening their schools to people of all faiths and none. The Church of England has very much led in that, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford said, but not all his schools are like that; some of them are not only religiously but intensely socially exclusive and the Church of England does not have the necessary degree of control over that. However, I know of schools of other faiths that are much less open to their communities. I think that we should try to move towards a situation where we welcome the ethos and value that faith schools bring to our children. Although I am not religious myself, I would happily send my children to faith schools. However, if we pay for them as state schools, they should be open to all. We should not see in the Bill a rowing back from the commitment to include the wider community in faith schools that we have extracted from the churches to date. Nor should we see an increase in sectarian teaching. There are Catholic schools that teach that Gandhi is burning in hell. Frankly, I do not think that we should fund that on the state. The matter of special needs will clearly be important. I think that I disagree with everything that my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking said, so we shall clearly have some interesting arguments in Committee. There is a great deal to be said for inclusion for the right children, but we should not have compulsory inclusion for those who would be better served by special schools. I think that the incidence of special needs is about right at 20 per cent. It has come from a greater understanding of the variations in children. A lot of the increase has been due to specific learning difficulties and just represents an understanding that children can be very strong in some areas and very weak in others. That is a fundamental point and it requires schools to adapt their methods of teaching. We have also understood that there is a spread of autistic spectrum disorders and other things. It is all about helping schools to teach better, to understand their children, to understand how children in a school interact with one another and to produce better results from them. I certainly do not agree with my noble friend Lord Baker that local education authorities should remain in charge of special educational needs. One of the features of the way in which schools, and certainly academies, developed under the previous Government was that they became much more co-operative with one another, forming their own groups. Windsor and Maidenhead—one of the smaller local authorities—runs a very good special needs service because it is big enough to have central expertise but small enough so that the people on the team are known by, and know, all the schools that they look after. In Slough, which is next door, the situation is horrible. I do not see why schools should not be able to opt into, or create for themselves, special educational needs services. That should not be beyond a group of schools co-operating together. The handling of admissions will be important but, again, I do not share the caution of some people. I hope that we will move to a much more dynamic arrangement and abandon the rigidity of the current system. If academies admit from a much wider spread than the schools that they replace—that would follow the pattern of the academies that we have to date—schools in the leafy suburbs will be opened up to those in neighbouring areas of deprivation. There will be a lot more parental discomfort as a result of that and, in that case, local authorities will need to become the parents’ friend. They will need to make sure that there are suitable places—if necessary by pushing schools around a bit and saying, "Hang on. There are five kids living right next to you that you have to let in because there’s no other sensible place for them to go". They will need to do battle with independent schools on behalf of parents. That really should be the role of the local education authority, as should dealing with special needs. Goodness—it would be a change if LEAs were to move from being seen as the enemy of parents, trying to prevent them from getting their children into schools, to being the friend of parents, trying to get their children into the schools that they should be in. That would be a much more natural and better relationship and it would be a better role for local education authorities. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, touched on freedom of information. I agree that we should not allow, through this Bill, a whole host of schools to pass out of the scope of the Freedom of Information Act. This was highlighted in the Times Educational Supplement a week or two ago. Actually, the article itself was rubbish—the data that were said not to be available are available—but the principle that schools should not move out of the range of the Act was there. I thought that perhaps the question of the curriculum and freedom from the national curriculum had gone in the coalition agreement. I thought that we believed in our pupils having an understanding of the world and of our history and who we are. The curriculum’s incorporation of Shakespeare, British history and an understanding of the world was important to us at that sort of level. Are we to abandon all control over that and allow it to become completely spotty or will there be some overriding continuity? In the debates on this Bill and in those that follow, we will get deep into an argument on the role of government in education—central and local. I very much look forward to that. I do not share the pessimism of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley. We can move from a position where all levels of government have seen their role as control to one where they see their role as supporting.