Education and Inspections Bill
2:30 pm
Sarah Teather (Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Education & Skills; Brent East, Liberal Democrat)
Understood, Mr. Cook. I shall make those remarks at the end of my speech.
The Education and Skills Committee reported on academies in March 2005. Its report questioned whether the average extra £7,000 per pupil was delivering value for money and concluded that the programme should be halted pending a proper evaluation. Our amendment would enable the Government to do that if they choose—suspend the further provision of academies subject to an evaluation. It would not force the Government to do so; it is merely an enabling amendment.
The Select Committee found that the Government seemed to be proposing a major expansion of a largely untested scheme. It found that academies have mixed academic results in terms of both improvement and actual results, which we discussed earlier in this debate. The Government argue that they need a lot more time to demonstrate that improvements are occurring under the new scheme. However, they argue at the same time that it is so urgent and vital to improve standards that we must push on with it. They cannot make both arguments concurrently.
Professor Stephen Gorard of York University, who was quoted by the Select Committee, felt that standards had been raised by changing intake. We were discussing that point just a few moments ago. He found that only one of the early academies was still serving the most disadvantaged pupils in the area. Given that the whole point of the academy scheme was to serve the most disadvantaged pupils, that is a matter for some concern. It is less of a concern in academies that replace existing failing schools, but the Committee thinks that setting up new schools in an area will lead to concerns about cherry-picking from other schools.
Amendment No. 70 addresses a number of concerns with an impact on other schools, particularly the question whether academies are excluding more young people, manipulating their intake or their pupils by excluding the most difficult. The Department’s figures show that in proportion to the school population twice as many pupils are excluded from academies as from other schools. More worryingly, they also show that twice as many children with special educational needs are excluded from academies than from other schools. That is of particular concern. In earlier debates, we have discussed the vulnerability of young people with special educational needs and the necessity of ensuring that schools are flexible and sensitive enough to deal with those issues. Given the Department’s statistics, I feel that it is a cause for considerable concern.
A number of specifics are mentioned. The King’s academy in Middlesbrough, for example, seems to suspend or exclude 10 times as many students as the average school in the area. Ofsted found that the number of exclusions in West London academy was similarly high.
Academies are not bound by Government guidance on exclusions. For example, an independent appeals procedure is not required: appeals are allowed only if the school wishes, and they are made to members of the governing body rather than externally. Also, academies do not lose money when children are excluded as other schools in the system do. When pupils are excluded from community schools, the schools face a financial penalty. When academy students are excluded, the academy is allowed to keep the money for that financial year.
That means that the playing field is not level. Many people have expressed concerns that the new schools are not accepting their fair share of difficult pupils. The local authority ends up accepting the pupils excluded from other schools who fall through the net, and not everybody has a fair chance to attend the school that they choose.