Clause 19
Education and Inspections Bill
9:15 am
John Hayes (Shadow Minister (Vocational Education), Education; South Holland and The Deepings, Conservative)
It is good to serve on the Committee under your chairmanship, Mr. Chope. Seeing you in the Chair reminds me of the Queen’s eightieth birthday—you share all her dignity, but not her age.
The clause relates to the procedures by which prescribed alterations to schools published under clause 18 are made. The amendment would require that, where the regulations under subsections (1) and (2) confer functions on local authorities or allow them or the Secretary of State to refer proposals to the adjudicator, they will exercise those functions
“with a view to encouraging all primary and secondary schools to be self-governing and to acquire a trust or foundation.”
In our previous sitting, the Minister said, rightly, that some would like to place an obligation on local authorities for all schools in their area to become self-governing. She said that every school should instead be encouraged to do so. I said that the Prime Minister and the Minister once took the view that all schools should be encouraged to adopt the new freedoms and independence in question. I quoted the White Paper, which says:
“At the heart of this new vision are Trust schools ... We will encourage all primary and secondary schools to be self-governing and to acquire a Trust.”
I then put it to the Minister that she might have changed her mind and bowed to pressure from the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor), who is a formidable figure. He and others made a powerfulcase that the spirit of the White Paper, with its encouragement of all schools to acquire a trust, would not necessarily be efficacious. He thought that it would be better for some schools not to follow the route set out in the White Paper.
I tabled the amendments with the intention of reinforcing the Minister’s position and injecting a little more steel into her backbone, so that she can see off the challenges from the hon. Gentleman and others. He is the acceptable face of the rebels—the tame rebel—but there are others who will be altogether harder to see off and more intransigent in their determination to frustrate the intentions behind the White Paper and the Bill. We want to help the Minister, as we have throughout the Bill’s progress. The amendments would make the proposals in the White Paper a reality by making it easier for schools to follow the route it envisaged.
The amendments would also ensure that the adjudicator would make decisions on prescribed alterations to schools with a view to their becoming self-governing. A “self-governing” school is defined in amendment No. 207 as a foundation or voluntary school, a foundation special school or an academy. New clause 15 would take further the duty to work with a view to schools becoming self-governing by applying it to all functions of the local education authority under part 2 of the Bill.
The amendments go to the very heart of the Bill. Do we envisage a future in which all schools will be self-governing? In our previous sitting, the Minister confirmed that she still believes it right to encourage that. Replying to my intervention, she said:
“I have not changed my mind. I am making a distinction between compulsion and flexibility and enabling. The legislation is all about allowing schools to move in the direction that we believe to be the most effective, which is spelled out in the White Paper.”—[Official Report, Standing Committee E, 25 April 2006; c. 442.]
She clearly wants all schools to become self-governing. She envisages not the future that the hon. Member for Bury, North wants, but one in which all schools take on the new freedoms available to them, to the benefit of the children who attend them.
We are all in this business to try to deliver the best education possible for as many children as possible, to build on good practice and to create effective schools. We should make it clear through the debate on the amendments that that is where we all want to be. Is it the destination to which we are all travelling? It certainly is not where other Members of the governing party who are not on the Committee want us to go. We will not ask why, as that would be indiscreet and, perhaps, impolite—[Interruption.] Well, they are here in the form of the Liberal Democrats, who speak for them on this Committee, and who will doubtless make their comments about the amendments in due course.
Those people have a perfectly reasonable point to make. They take a different view on education, the nature of school government and, I guess, the White Paper. That is fair enough; let us have that debate, but let us be clear where the Government stand on it. I want to be sure that they have not bowed, that there is absolute certainty about their intentions, and that they remain true to the spirit of the White Paper and of Lord Adonis, who has been a powerful figure in education for the Government. More than that, he has been a powerful exponent of many of the virtues in the White Paper that are given force in the Bill, and which we support.
I recommend to the Committee a book by Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard, called “A Class Act”. It talks about the myth of Britain’s classless society and goes into education matters in some detail, including the subject of grammar schools, which we will no doubt discuss later in our considerations. Lord Adonis is a powerful advocate of grammar schools as a way to enable greater social mobility. However, let us not digress. Indeed, I am sure that you will not allow me to do so, Mr. Chope.
Let us consider the background to the amendments. In a letter to no less a person than the Chairman of the Select Committee—the man who saved John Clare’s cottage for the nation; I do not make light of that—the Secretary of State wrote:
“Enabling schools to benefit from a trust is at the heart of our proposals.”
She went on to say that the amendments would create a duty to encourage all schools to become self-governing. In his monthly press conference, on 11 October, the Prime Minister said:
“By the end of this third term,”—
linguistically he is not at his best here—
“I want every school that wants to be able to be”
one to become
“an independent, non fee-paying state school, with the freedom to innovate and develop in the way it wants and the way the parents of the school want, subject to certain common standards.”
In the introduction to the White Paper, the Prime Minister says:
“Our aim is the creation of a system of independent non-fee paying state schools. It will be for schools to decide whether they wish to acquire a Trust—similar to those that support Academies—or become a self-governing foundation school. But it will be easy for them to do so, without unnecessary bureaucratic interference. And they will do so in a system of fair admissions, fair funding and clear accountability.”
The principle of trust schools is at the heart of the Government’s agenda. It was what drove the White Paper, and is at the core of the Bill. The White Paper says:
“At the heart of this new vision are Trust schools...We will encourage all primary and secondary schools to be self-governing and to acquire a Trust.”
That is precisely what we say in these amendments. We have become committed to the principles of the White Paper because we think that they are right. What works is what matters. That degree of self-government, in which schools have proper control of their affairs, and the greater diversity and choice that it will produce will be beneficial. It will produce an education system that delivers more for more children.
We want to align ourselves with the Schools Minister, the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister inasmuch as they agree with that vision. We could be churlish and say that we got there first, but we are all in the same place, so let us be nothing less than generous about that. On that basis, it would be almost inconceivable for the Minister to reject the amendments in my name and those of my hon. Friends. They give life to the principles that I have outlined and repeat the pledges that the Prime Minister and others made in the White Paper.
By the time the Select Committee considered the matter, however, the Government had begun to backtrack. As I said, they were subject to pressure. I do not need to tell you, Mr. Chope, that parliamentary arithmetic had a part to play in that. The Government did not expect my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and my hon. Friends the shadow Secretary of State and the shadow Minister for Schools to provide the principled opposition that they did; they thought that the Opposition might deceive them and not support the Bill. As we know, however, Mr. Chope, that is not the kind of Opposition that the Conservatives represent. We are absolutely principled in our determination to do our best for the children of this country and we would never let petty squabbles, short-term gains and a miserable pyrrhic victory obscure that vision. We were therefore there to back the Government. But, uncertain, they felt that they had to bend in the direction of those with a rather less clear view of the virtues of the White Paper and everything that it can do.
The Select Committee report said:
“The Secretary of State has told us that there will be no incentives offered, or pressure exerted, to encourage schools to become Trust schools. The decision to become a Trust will be for individual schools. We welcome these assurances. That being the case, the Schools Commissioner is likely to perform a much less executive role in relation to Trust schools than the White Paper suggests.”
That view was not, however, shared by the whole Select Committee. A minority report welcoming trust schools was submitted by some of its members, who are also on this Committee. I pay tribute to their work on the Select Committee and to their courage in producing a minority report. The report said:
“We support the development of Trust schools, with their greater autonomy and the external support that a trust would bring. This autonomy should include full ownership of assets. Independence must mean full independence if it is to have impact and real value. We believe that as the Trust is a new category of school it should be a duty to promote it. We also believe that the Government should leave open the option of a requirement for schools to become Trusts or independent of the local authority in some form.”
The minority report, the White Paper and the Opposition are clear: we want to encourage all schools to become trust schools, although I say no more than encourage. Contrary to what the Minister quite naughtily suggested at our previous sitting, this isnot about the difference between obligation and encouragement, and we should not oblige schools to do things that are not in their interests and which their governors and the local community do not want. This is about how actively we encourage schools—that is the real difference between us. The White Paper was clear about that, but the Bill is less so; the Prime Minister and Lord Adonis were clear about it, but Ministers are now rather less so. I appreciate that Ministers are in a difficult position, but I want to be helpful and guide them in the direction in which I know they want to travel.