Academies Bill [Lords]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), the former Select Committee Chairman, who rightly gave full credit to Members on both sides of the House for our commitment to furthering the interests of all children and ensuring the best in education. He raised concerns about the free schools policy, of which I am a strong advocate. I join my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in having visited a KIPP—knowledge is power programme—academy in a very deprived neighbourhood in Washington DC, where I saw tremendous educational outcomes. It was one of the most exciting schools that I have ever visited. I want that kind of provision and flexibility opened up in this country, so that people have access to decent state schools, particularly people in communities that are too often deprived of any such schools. That is one of the most exciting parts of the Bill. I am delighted to support the widening of the academies programme. Again, I have form on that issue, on which I am entirely consistent. Perhaps it is a great vice of mine, in politics, to be consistent. The former Secretary of State criticised the involvement of the private sector, but he, as the former Select Committee Chairman pointed out, presided over the involvement of the private sector in school provision and in local education authority provision. I am entirely relaxed about the involvement of the private sector, where it is appropriate. More fundamentally than that, I have always taken the view that good, well-led schools benefit most if they have the maximum freedom and liberty to flourish, without excessive bureaucratic intervention. One of the main reasons why I take that view is that I represent a constituency that has possibly the best state schools in the country, and nearly all the secondary schools were grant-maintained prior to the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. I sat on the Committee that considered that Bill, and strongly opposed the Government's efforts to remove grant-maintained status. There was a bit of banter earlier about the qualities of grant-maintained schools. My experience locally was that they very much worked together. They took great pride in co-operating and built exactly the community of schooling and education to which Members on both sides of the House referred, but they did so because they wanted to, and because they saw that as part of what would bring greater success to their school, and better educational outcomes for the whole community. I have always supported that. Now I find that the enthusiasm in my constituency, in secondary schools in particular, for the possibility of academy status is precisely because so many of them have a positive experience of grant-maintained status and would very much like to see returned at least the freedoms that they enjoyed under it. Having sat through the proceedings of the School Standards and Framework Bill and served on its Standing Committee and those of other education Bills in previous Parliaments, I was pleased when the previous Government eventually saw the error of their ways. Having removed some freedoms from grant-maintained schools and moved on to foundation schools, which were more restrictive, they wanted to build on the academies model precisely because they started to understand that greater freedom, fewer restrictions and less bureaucracy for those schools would be the way for them to continue to raise standards. The notion that one can create independent, state-funded schools is very radical, and my right hon. Friend rightly chided the Opposition for being conservative in their response to the Bill. We are being radical: we are pushing forward measures that will not only free schools to become more successful, but start to break down the barriers—some have referred to it as an apartheid in the education system—between the state and independent sectors. I would certainly welcome more independent schools choosing to enter the state sector as academies.