Academies Bill [HL]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Whitaker and I have stood shoulder to shoulder in campaigns for good design in recent years and I am happy to join her in the field tonight. It is too much, no doubt, to ask that the magnificent £50 billion Building Schools for the Future programme should be continued, but it is essential that design standards should not be dropped in the school building that does continue. Presumably that will mainly be the construction of academies. Do the Government intend still to provide some funding to support the creation of fine new academy buildings, as their predecessor did? Will the Government at least maintain minimum design standards? This matters very much. Children and staff in schools, like everyone else, should work in a good built environment. The benefits of that for their morale, spirit and performance are marked. Good design is practical and works better. Well designed schools, like well designed hospitals, hospices, railway stations and magistrates’ courts, are statements about the values we hold as a society, our attachments to civic values in the public realm and our commitment to sustainability, an important point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. There are important symbolisms in good design. Good design is an expression of national self respect. It is a manifestation of the respect we have for our community. There is a noble tradition of design of school buildings and it is one which we must not lose. Our Victorian and Edwardian forebears took it as axiomatic that a school should be a proud statement on behalf of the community in its design. The school building programme launched after the Second World War by Ellen Wilkinson, a Secretary of State, led to a commitment in a number of local education authorities to good design in a modern idiom. The schools designed in Hertfordshire for the local education authority by Stirrat Johnson-Marshall were celebrated. He is an architect who was described as, ""Socratic in manner of discussion and intolerant of formality in any guise"," which, I think, means that he sought to find out what people thought, to elicit their best ideas and to develop his designs accordingly, as good architects do. Equally, later in Hampshire, the schools designed by Colin Stansfield Smith were celebrated, and the local education authorities which committed themselves to a programme of high-quality design in school building were strongly and admirably supported by the ministry’s architecture and buildings department. More recently, under the previous Government, we had the Building Schools for the Future programme. I shall mention two schools that were jewels in that programme. The Mossbourne Academy in Hackney was built in an area known as "murder mile" because of the gangland killings there. It replaced Hackney Downs comprehensive, a school which had gone so far down in the world that the tabloids described it as the worst comprehensive in England. The school reopened in 2004 in buildings designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership. The first intake of the new school consisted of children, nearly half of whom were eligible for free school meals and 30 per cent had special educational needs. They took their GCSEs in 2009 and achieved some of the best state school results in the country. The Mossbourne Academy topped the league tables in value added. That was, above all, due to the leadership of Sir Michael Wilshaw and first-rate teaching by his colleagues, but design, they acknowledge, was also an important factor—as was the case at the Westminster Academy, which my noble friend and I visited earlier this year. There, the architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris were awarded the RIBA Sorrell Foundation Schools Award. This is an opportunity for this House to pay tribute to Sir John Sorrell and his wife Frances for their extraordinary generosity and creativity in their support through their foundation for good school design. The design of the Westminster Academy is beautiful and clever. As my noble friend said, the results in the new school soared by comparison with the results in the old school because pupils were treated with respect through design, and thus learnt to treat their school and neighbourhood with respect. The head teacher and her staff above all deserve the credit, but she insists that the quality and nature of the design of the school were crucial in making possible the curricular flexibility which, in turn, was key to the motivation and success of that school. The Government want to impose the minimum bureaucratic burden on academies, and that is right. Good design cannot be promoted by regulation, but bad design can be averted. I hope that the Government will keep the minimum design standards that the DCSF pioneered in the public sector. I hope also that the Government will keep the engagement of CABE, which is not a quango to cull. It mobilises at negligible cost talented and expert people to illuminate and promote good practice in design. Here the leadership of Ministers is needed and, as elsewhere in education, leadership, aspiration and ambition are the magical ingredients. Only the best should be good enough for our schoolchildren, their teachers and the staff in our schools. We can afford the best. Good design costs no more than bad design. It is simply a matter of doing the job well. Indeed, good design costs less over the lifetime of the building.