Clause 66 - Proposals for new secondary schools in England
Education Bill [Lords]
3:30 pm
Mr John Pugh (Education Spokesperson, Education & Skills; Southport, Liberal Democrat)
This is an important clause, and I shall discuss it in connection with the accompanying schedule, which touches on some significant territory. I shall attempt to identify some significant flaws in the legislation.
The legislation may be largely academic in some respects, as falling school rolls across the country mean that there may not be that many new schools opening. However, any new schools will have to follow a particular process, and it is the weaknesses of that process on which I wish to dwell.
The basic concept is that local authorities are not the generators but the promoters of schools. They decide that there is a need for a school and put out advertisements indicating that the need exists. Various providers, including local authorities themselves, are then allowed to come into the frame. They may be anything from Wackford Squeers to the most exalted academy, but they all can come into the frame. The process is rigorously controlled by exacting rules and so on, but, none the less, it is a kind of beauty contest to decide what best fits the model that the local authority originally decided that it wanted.
A process is mapped out by which the decision goes to the school organisation committee, which has wide powers to consider the proposals. It can reject the proposals, approve a proposal without modification, approve a proposal with modification, or, if it is unable to do any of those three things, send the whole process to the adjudicator and let him make the decision. If it dallies for some time, not making the decision once the process is under way, the Secretary of State has power to intervene and send the process to the adjudicator anyway. However, the decision-making bodies are the school organisation committees and the adjudicators. They decide what best satisfies the concept of a new school that the local authority originally envisaged.
I do not understand what is wrong with the local authority making that decision. The local authority is a representative, democratic body. I see no reason to prefer that the school organisation committee or adjudicator should take the decision. There may be cases in which the local authority is incapable of making the decision, but that is a fairly unlikely contingency.
There is a downside to letting the school organisation committee make the decision, rather than leaving it with the local authority, as it traditionally would have been: the school organisation committee will not, ultimately, have to fund whatever it recommends. The local authority will probably be involved as a funder or at any rate as a landlord for any new establishment, whether it is an academy or any other educational institution that the school organisation committee chooses.
The problem, which I tried to clarify in the Chamber, is that where a number of schools are promoted by the local authority and chosen by the school organisation committee in a specific area—let us suppose that an authority is undergoing a major process of configuring its secondary schools—it is likely that there will be some kind of result. However, whereas the local authority has a specific duty to ensure that an equal offer is made to all children in its area, that there is an equity of outcome and that all children receive their entitlement, there is no guarantee that the activities of a school organisation committee, however well intentioned, will achieve that result. The committee may, for example, recommend schools with admission arrangements, which to some extent conflicts with most local authorities’ laudable objective of ensuring that all children get a fair deal.
That is the crux of the matter. It cannot be said that the procedure will not achieve a highly desirable outcome whereby every child receives the same type of educational entitlement. I am not saying one size fits all—a phrase that I hate; it has been used so many times, by so many Ministers and in so many circumstances that I thought that I would never utter it myself. Unfortunately, it has slipped out, so I shall have to check myself in future. If the local authority is empowered to deliver certain laudable social objectives and to ensure that every child who is represented through it achieves everything that their parents would aspire to, but are in no way disadvantaged by whatever educational arrangements transpire, it does not seem to me that an arrangement whereby the matter could be decided by the school organisation committee or by the adjudicator, or delayed and then decided by the adjudicator, will necessarily produce that outcome.
There is a strong suspicion that the intention behind the procedure is to generate a plethora of academies throughout the country. There has been criticism recently of what the project of academies is delivering. Intellectually, I cannot see that intention in the Bill, because although an academy can be a response to a local authority promoting a school or putting out a prospectus for one, there is no onus on the school organisation committee necessarily to choose that project. In fact, there is a further hitch in getting an academy proposition going, as the Secretary of State is necessarily involved in the complex of arrangements that are associated with delivering an academy in an area.
There is no credible case for saying that the provision is just about academies, full stop, but there is a case to be answered on how the arrangement ensures that there will not be myriad different admission arrangements in a local authority area that do not provide equity of outcome for each child. That is my fundamental objection, and nothing that the Minister has said so far in the debate has convinced me that it is other than a fairly solid objection. I may well get a nice letter in a few days’ time, explaining to me how wrong I am.