May I now formally move that Clause 1 should not stand part of the Bill? If I cannot do that yet, I will speak to it anyway. First, you cannot just abolish Clause 1 or Clause 3 by themselves. You need to go the whole hog and get rid of them all, as they are interdependent. I like what was done by the committee of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, but it was not quite strong enough. I am going to quote from the report and say how good it is, but it could be better.
Clause 1 is important because it creates the framework for the Bill. As I am sure colleagues will know, every school, maintained or academy, has to have an agreement with the Department for Education, which it signs. They will all be voided; that is what Clause 2 says. The schools will then have to accept a new agreement that has been drawn up entirely by the Secretary of State, as far as I can see without any widespread consultation at all. He has powers to vary the agreement at will under Clause 4. It is really quite extraordinary.
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What is more, to make quite sure that schools follow that agreement, in Clause 4 academies
“must have regard to any guidance”.
That is not the position today. Ministers and Secretaries of State can give guidance to schools, but schools can ignore it completely if they do—and they did ignore some of my advice, and that of other Secretaries of State. With this, the Secretary of State can actually issue a direction for a school to follow what they say. That is not a power any Secretary of State has ever had in controlling education in our country. There are no checks and balances to it at all in the Bill.
In Clause 7, the Secretary of State takes the power to appoint a director or a governor of a failing school. In its history, since 1870, the department has never appointed a head teacher or a head of governors, approved the board of governors or actually run a school, yet it is going to. I think I mentioned this earlier; if the department found a failing school in Darlington—I hope it will not—and decided to sack the board, how would it know from the people in Darlington who to appoint? It is not familiar with the community. We have to realise that a school is not just an educational institution; it is a very important part of the social community in which it is based. That is very important, and there is none of this in the Bill.
The Secretary of State then has a power to give a direction, as I said. He can do so on a wide number of things. Clauses 12 to 16 talk about terminating a school altogether. That is another word for school closure. Of course, school closure is very reluctantly done by a Secretary of State. In fact, it is a very rare power. The Secretary of State can close a school only if Ofsted has found that there is moral turpitude, financial fraud or that it is a completely failing school that is utterly incompetent, but Secretaries of State
close only about two a decade. I do not think that I closed any at all. In the past, school closures were always done by local authorities, which had checks and balances. They had to listen to the parents, to the councillors and to the effect on the community if a school was closed. None of this is in the Bill at all. There are absolutely no checks and balances.
When I asked the Minister whether the department would actually close a school, she said, “We wouldn’t actually close it; we would put it into a MAT and they would have to cope with it in some way—or first we would make it an academy”. I am a strong supporter of academies because I started them back in the 1980s as technology colleges, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said. I recognise that in many cases they have been highly successful, but they have been rather less successful in dealing with schools that are called “stuck schools”. A stuck school is one that gets either “requires improvement” or “inadequate” again and again. I came across this when I was Secretary of State. They have not been improved very much by going into either an academy or a MAT. Once again, the Secretary of State has the power to close the school if he requires it. That is unacceptable.
I come to the report that my noble friend Lady Meacher raised. It is a wonderful report. The chairman of her committee wrote to the Secretary of State and said very clearly:
“There could be no clearer example, so early in the first Bill of the session, of Government taking wide delegated powers to make changes to important areas of social policy rather than set out the details in primary legislation.”
This is a constitutional Bill, at the end of the day, and the committee says quite specifically in another part of the report:
“The delegated power in clause 1 is considerably too wide and should be removed from the face of the Bill.”
It goes on to Clause 3:
“The Henry VIII power in clause 3(1) is too wide and should be removed from the face of the Bill.”
I agree entirely, but you have also to suspend all the other clauses.
The Minister is a listening Minister. My noble friends Lord Agnew and Lord Nash and I met her and her officials last week. She was certainly prepared to listen. We asked, “Why are you doing this? What is the situation you are trying to get at in helping failing schools?” The officials said, “We’re worried about certain MATs.” They are bodies that have never been debated in this House, by the way, but there are amendments down in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and others where we can actually discuss them. These bodies have been created by the Government because they do not actually want to run each school; they want an intermediary agency to do it for them. But MATs have never been debated in this House ever, as far as I can find.
The officials then said, “The real problem we have is with ‘renegade MATs’”. These are not good, mediocre or quite good MATs; they are villains engaged in financial jiggery-pokery. They hold the Government to account and say, “Bail us out”. I said, “How many of these are there?” The answer was 1% of MATs. So this whole extraordinary structure for the power of the Secretary
of State is geared to dealing with renegade MATs, principally, because they do not want to put failing schools into renegade MATs.
I hope the Minister will reflect on this, discuss it with her colleagues and redraft this completely. Some powers may be needed to deal with failing schools, but not in the way they are in the Bill at the moment. It really is too powerful and too unnecessary. Noble Lords will hear from my two colleagues who had to deal with failing schools. They did a very good job. For two years, my noble friend Lord Agnew established a means of controlling and holding failing schools to account that was very successful. With his business experience and his experience of running a MAT, he was able to introduce very effective controls to deal with failing schools. The same can be said of my noble friend Lord Nash. They should be listened to very carefully by the Committee, but particularly by the Government.
I hope that the Government will reflect. We do not have much time. We rise on 21 July. That is really soon. There is little more than four weeks to do this and the Government want to get Committee through in June. It will be very difficult for them to refashion a completely new set of proposals and plans to amend the Bill so fundamentally. It might be a good idea to put off Report until the autumn so that they can reflect and focus on what is really needed to help failing schools. I hope the Minister will listen and that your Lordships will support these amendments.