Clause 74
Public Bill Committees, 19 March 2009, 9:15 am
Christopher Chope (Christchurch, Conservative)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: amendment 26, in clause 74, page 45, line 29, at end insert—
‘(2A) For the purposes of subsection (2) “Academy arrangements” require the YPLA to support the objective of the autonomy of Academies wherever it is reasonable to do so.’.
Amendment 339, in clause 74, page 45, line 29, at end insert—
‘(2A) In exercising the functions in subsection (2), the YPLA must allow academies a right of appeal to the Secretary of State in circumstances where the governing body of an academy believes that a decision taken by the YPLA is unreasonable in the circumstances.’.
Amendment 391, in clause 74, page 45, line 35, at end insert
‘but excluding the power conferred on the Secretary of State by section 482(1) of the Education Act 1996 (c. 56) (Academies).’.
Amendment 392, in clause 74, page 45, line 38, leave out paragraph (a) and insert—
‘(a) an agreement entered into by him under section 482 of the Education Act 1996 (c. 56) (Academies);’.
Amendment 25, in clause 74, page 45, line 39, after ‘section’, insert
‘, except any functions related to the monitoring and assessment of school performance’.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
Despite protestations to the contrary, it is clear to most people in the academies movement and to most political commentators that the current Secretary of State is not a proponent of academies. He professes to support them because it is politically expedient for him to do so. When he was an adviser he sought to undermine reforms that promoted autonomy and choice in the public services. Since he became Secretary of State we have seen a gradual erosion of the elements of autonomy for academies that are the essential ingredients of their success. For instance, he has required more involvement by local authorities in their sponsorship, establishment and operation and he has reduced freedoms over the curriculum. The Bill reduces these freedoms further still.
In a letter to the Minister of 23 February, Mike Butler, chairman of the Independent Academies Association, generally reflects the wider view among other academy principals when he says:
“It appears that with every consultation, each missive and even new legislation from the DCSF there comes further erosion of the independent status of academies.”
Daniel Moynihan of the Harris Federation made similar points in his evidence session, when he said:
“We want to be fully accountable and fully in the daylight for our performance, and for that we need to be responsible for decisions about services and how they are used, and not have them forced on us.”
Later, in response to a question about the possibility of moving academies back to local authority control, Dr. Moynihan said:
“My answer would be that local authorities have called in academy sponsors because the various mechanisms that they have deployed in the past to improve the schools that they offer us as academies have not worked.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c.46-48, Q117 and Q126.]
It is clear from my discussions with academy sponsors that concerns over autonomy reside at the top of their list of worries about current Government policy. Amendment 26, therefore, seeks to embed in the legislation a requirement that the body that oversees them should have the key objective of protecting the autonomy of academies. If the Minister genuinely believes in the academies programme, rather than just paying lip service to it, he should have no problem supporting this amendment.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I share the hon. Gentleman’s concern to ensure that academies keep a good degree of autonomy. However, how much autonomy is he talking about? For example, if an academy seeks to use powers to select a higher ability intake than exists in the local catchment area, how would that be dealt with under his model of autonomy? Or would he be quite relaxed about that?
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
No. Autonomy does not mean that academies should not obey the law or nationally agreed codes of conduct, such as the admissions code. I see that admissions code as being very important. It should not perhaps be as proscriptive as it is, but the concept of an admissions code is correct and should apply to all schools funded by the Exchequer. How that code is enforced and who oversees the general effectiveness of academies should be for a body. I do not agree that it should be the YPLA, but obviously there should be some oversight body, whether it is the Department or a newly established non-departmental public body. Local authorities should not perform that function, given that it is freedom from local authorities that the academies most seek. The letter from the chairman of the Independent Academies Association goes on to say:
“Elements of your Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill are deeply disturbing in this regard. Of particular concern are the moves to extend greater powers to local authorities, the role of the YPLA in performance assessment (thus creating another regulatory framework).”
Since Ofsted is the regulator charged with monitoring standards, the academies feel that giving this same responsibility to the YPLA will just create more administrative burdens. Amendment 25, therefore, explicitly takes that out of the duties of the YPLA. As far as its relation to academies is concerned, any role in assessing standards should be left entirely to Ofsted. If Ofsted gives a judgment that a school or academy is underperforming, then there is a role for a national body to have discussions with the academy about how it is going to deal with those criticisms.
Amendment 24 seeks to make oversight by the YPLA voluntary for each academy. If an academy wishes to remain under the direct aegis of the Department for Children, Schools and Families it will, under this amendment, be free to do so. Much of that echoes the debates that we had during the passage of the Education and Skills Bill, about the proposal to move the monitoring and regulation of independent schools from the DCSF to Ofsted, for much the same reasons. In the end the measure was dropped by the Government under heavy and effective lobbying by the Independent Schools Council.
There is a general consensus that the administration and oversight of academies should, because of the growing number of academies, be performed by some form of agency acting for the Secretary of State, as we discussed with the hon. Member for Yeovil.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I am grateful, again, for the hon. Gentleman’s patience. Did I hear him correctly when he said, in relation to amendment 25, that he does not think that there should be any body, between the school governing body and Ofsted, to monitor and assess school performance? If that is his intention, is he not concerned, given the lighter-touch Ofsted that we have today, that problems in schools might go unnoticed, and without intervention, for a longer period than is satisfactory?
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
That is a very interesting and important intervention by the hon. Gentleman. The failings of Ofsted and the approach that it takes to inspections should not be remedied by having another body engaged in inspecting schools. If there are problems with Ofsted’s approach to inspecting schools—and there are issues to be addressed about the amount of time Ofsted inspectors actually spend in lessons—then they have to be addressed at the Ofsted level. We should not have another body to repeat the inspection of schools, simply because we are concerned about the light-touch, or different approach that Ofsted takes.
The view of Daniel Moynihan in the evidence session was this:
“It makes sense for the Department to have an agency to take care of academies. Clearly the Department was never meant to be a local authority, so we are perfectly happy with that”.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
Do you think it will work well in the end?
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
Elizabeth Reid, of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, believes much the same; she said:
“It makes absolute sense and, as the academies programme continues to grow, it would be anomalous and unusual for a Department of State to take direct responsibility for a very large number of schools”.——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c. 43-44, Q107 and 109.]
However, from my own discussions with academy sponsors, and on a textual analysis of their comments—which the Minister for Schools and Learners tempts me to engage in—I believe that there is no enthusiasm for the YPLA to be the body responsible for that work. The YPLA was set up to secure funding to enable education or training to be provided to young people over compulsory school age, but under-19. Its principal role was to take over those particular responsibilities from the Learning and Skills Council when funding for children’s education up to 19 was given back to local authorities. Academies, of course, are schools. Most serve children aged 11 to 18 and some, such as the King Solomon academy in north London, also include primary schools. The impression given is that the academy arrangements in clause 74, which give that oversight role to the YPLA, are a last minute add-on to the functions of the YPLA, and that it was decided to use that agency rather than establishing a specific agency to look after academies.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
For the sake of clarity, is it the policy of the hon. Gentleman’s party to set up a separate quango to be able to do that for academies?
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
I think that that would be the approach to take. There is a need for a specific quango, with specific responsibility, to look after academies, rather than to lump it in with another agency that has other responsibilities and a different skill set.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
Will the hon. Gentleman clarify how that squares with the criticism that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) made of the Bill on Second Reading—that it created more quangos? How can the Opposition criticise us for creating more quangos on the one hand, while supporting an additional quango on the other?
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
Just because the Government have engaged in a spending spree to establish a plethora of new quangos does not mean that our policies, which might involve setting up one non-departmental body, should be affected. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath that exchanging one quango for three or possibly four quangos to do effectively the same role is a waste and a concern. That does not mean to say that there is not a role for a specific non-departmental body to oversee the increasing number of academies.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Given the benefits of autonomy and the hon. Gentleman’s strong concern about local authority oversight, would he be happy for existing maintained schools, such as specialist schools, to opt out of local authority control into the oversight of such a quango if it were to exist?
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
My hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath has already spoken about the possibility of high-performing secondary schools being able to opt for academy status, not necessarily with a new building—outside the Building Schools for the Future programme—and being able to obtain the freedoms that come with being a high-performing school. There is a case for that, and in those circumstances the schools that became academies would be overseen by such a body.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Given that the academies’ programme was designed to challenge underperformance and that the hon. Gentleman sees autonomy as a key way of challenging such underperformance, would it not be more rational to allow some of the underperforming schools to opt out of local authority control under his model and to come under this new quango?
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
No, because there are two routes to becoming an academy. One is that the school has already demonstrated effective management and leadership, in which case a simple vote of the governing body could transform that school into an academy with the same leadership team in place. For underperforming schools, it is necessary to bring in new leadership and a new sponsor to completely change the whole approach, which is a route to becoming an academy, but it is a slightly more lengthy process.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
Let me be clear about the alternative to the policy that we are discussing here. In the various interviews that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath has given, he raised the possibility of establishing as many as 5,000 academies or free schools. Given what the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton has just said about setting up a new quango, is he not effectively talking about setting up a new national funding agency for schools, and taking the funding of school education away from local authorities?
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
No, I have not heard figures as high as that being debated. The initial aim would be to have about 500 or even 1,000 schools becoming academies, out of a population of some 25,000 schools. Therefore, we are talking about high-performing schools or those schools that become academies with new leadership because they are underperforming.
Amendment 339 reflects further concerns raised by Dr. Moynihan during the evidence session. In that evidence, he cited his experience as a principal of the Harris Federation of Academies of trying to establish an academy sixth form. He said:
“In one local authority, we were told by a different body from the Learning and Skills Council that we could not open sixth forms in two of our academies. It was a particularly poor part of London in terms of the staying-on rate, and the reason why we were told that was that it did not fit with the plan. Four years later we have 400 sixth-formers and an outstanding sixth form, but nothing else has changed in the area. As in that case, we would want to be sure that we had a right of appeal to the Secretary of State, and that it was clear that we could not necessarily be blocked by whatever the local plan was if it was not an entirely sensible and objective one.
We have experienced difficulties on other occasions when local authorities have not wanted an academy to open for political reasons and in order to protect underperforming local provision. We would want a right of appeal so that someone could look at that, and if we lost it, we lost it. But it is important that it exists.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c. 44, Q108.]
Amendment 339 inserts into the clause just such a right of appeal to the Secretary of State if the governing body of an academy believes that a decision taken by the YPLA is unreasonable in the circumstances. That is an important safeguard to prevent politically motivated local authorities from using their voting strength as part of a sub-group of local authorities to obstruct academies, thwart funding for sixth forms of academies or take any decision that would not be regarded by most people as reasonable.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
As we heard from the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton and in some of the interventions, clause 74 is an important part of the Bill. It may have special significance in the future regarding the way that oversight of the school system develops. I hope that you will allow me, Mr. Chope—as you allowed the hon. Gentleman—to make some general comments about the clause as well as addressing the specific amendments.
Christopher Chope (Christchurch, Conservative)
Order. The hon. Gentleman is right. However, if he wants to make some general comments about the clause, there will not be a stand part debate. We will have one debate about the clause and the amendments.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Thank you, Mr. Chope. I am happy to abide by your guidance.
I want to make it clear that we strongly support two critical elements of the academies programme that has been developed by the Government over the past decade or so. Those critical elements are, first, a greater devolution of powers to individual schools than is currently the case and, secondly, that other sponsors should be able to come into the school system to run individual schools, subject to proper regulation and oversight.
A long period of entrenched educational failure in large parts of the country and particular communities, which existing schools, the Government and local authorities could not challenge, formed the background to the academies programme. That failure was often due to low aspirations and extremely poor results. Although there is still an enormous gap between the performance of children in rich and poor areas, it was even wider prior to 1997. Levels of performance in some communities, particularly in inner London, were disgraceful, with 90 per cent. of pupils in some areas failing to get even a minimum set of qualifications.
We understand why the Government entered into what might seem to be a centralising programme to force the establishment of academies in certain areas, often with the opposition of local authorities. Many of the local authorities with the largest number of failing schools were in Labour-controlled areas, which in many cases—in parts of the country such as Islington, Sheffield, Liverpool and Newcastle—are now controlled by the Liberal Democrats. My discussions with local authority officers and members have confirmed that there was a culture of low aspiration, and sometimes, sadly, on behalf of the elected members. It came to be expected that because children in certain areas came from low-income backgrounds and households with low levels of educational performance and qualifications, that would be perpetuated in the future.
The best academies have helped to raise aspirations. In many cases, they have been more innovative than some existing community schools—although not all, as many community schools are extremely innovative. In most cases, we have seen an injection of good, highly motivated sponsors who have helped to drive improvement in those schools. Some of our criticism of the academies movement is based on the Government failing to follow through the logic of their own policy by believing in more devolution of powers and authority to individual schools. We have an odd situation, where the Government must defend the existing greater freedoms for academies while imposing new duties on existing maintained schools from which academies are usually exempt. Some of those new duties—for example, the requirement to have a certain amount of time for cooking and other parts of the curriculum—are perfect examples of the dottiness of Government policy, which insists that most schools do the new things that they believe are so valuable, while exempting those schools in the most challenging circumstances from the same obligations.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord Adonis, who has moved on to new duties in the Department for Transport, which he is pursuing with the same energy he applied in the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Now that the academies programme has expanded so considerably, and perhaps also now that the noble Lord who spent so much of his time on it has moved on, the Government are understandably looking for a new structure in which to embed it. Indeed, in his evidence to the Committee, that is what the Minister said the Government were doing. Regarding academies, he said:
“I do not think it right that they should be run directly from my office. It would make us by far the largest education authority in the country. I already have to deal with a lot of issues in respect of open academies, and I do not think that is the best strategic use of a Minister’s and senior officials’ time.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 10 March 2009; c. 155, Q348.]
We agree with that. It would be inappropriate for the programme to continue to grow and to be run from a single Minister’s office. That would not provide the oversight necessary for such a large programme. However, the real issue is whether the new structure is a more sensible way of dealing with that oversight or whether an alternative should be put in place, particularly as the powers that are being transferred are so significant.
On 10 March, the Minister described the YPLA as “principally a funding agency”, and in our discussion about academies he described the transfer of powers in this area as relating principally to funding. However, the explanatory notes indicate that the issue is much wider than that. Paragraph 197 of the notes states that
“the YPLA may be required to carry out the following of the Secretary of State’s functions: calculating and paying grants; supervising budgets; managing specific cases concerning admissions, exclusions and special educational needs; monitoring, enforcing and terminating funding agreements; monitoring the standard of performance of pupils”—
which the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton touched on; and—
“managing school building work. The YPLA may be required to report to the Secretary of State in accordance with the arrangements.”
The issue is whether all those functions should be exercised by the YPLA or whether some of them could be exercised at a local level. The hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton feels that some of those powers do not need to be exercised at all by any particular body. In amendment 25, he suggests that the functions relating to the monitoring and assessment of school performance should be taken out of the YPLA altogether, and I understand why he has that view and why he is concerned that there might be too much bureaucracy and intervention. However, my experience of schools and school performance across the country suggests that it would be dangerous to have no accountability mechanism between schools and Ofsted.
Although Ofsted generally does a reasonably good job with schools, it is becoming increasing light touch, and most of its school reviews are short and focused on high-level data, which do not often go very deep. The Liberal Democrats, along with the other major parties in the House, probably feel that Ofsted should have a light-touch approach to most schools and a more concentrated approach to those that appear to be performing poorly. But when schools suddenly go from performing well to performing badly or very badly, they can quickly fall off that cliff, and governing bodies and school leaders are often not good at catching them. They often want to make excuses for the declining performance rather than being a reliable mechanism for catching the schools. Ofsted is not a reliable mechanism either, because it always looks backwards at data rather than at what is happening in a school. It is now trying not only to assess and monitor 23,500 schools, but to undertake all the difficult assessment of the wider children’s services area. That is because of the recent focus on the baby P case and the questions that have been raised on whether Ofsted is looking at the substance of what is happening, rather than ticking boxes. I do not share the hon. Gentleman’s confidence that academies do not need a more local oversight of their performance.
One of the predictions that I make with great assurance and certainty is that as the programme expands, under whatever Government, there will be academies that fail and that perform badly. There is nothing magic about granting additional powers to schools, or about every sponsor, that will ensure that all schools in the academy class will always succeed. If there is not a proper mechanism in place to catch schools that are going downhill and to hold them to account, the academy programme might be discredited in future by having a higher failure rate than some parts of the maintained local authority system had in the past.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
The hon. Gentleman makes a good case for the problems of how Ofsted conducts its inspections. In fact, he was making a good case against light-touch inspections, but the answer must surely be to address our concerns about Ofsted, rather than effectively creating a new inspection body within the YPLA to deal with those problems, which is the thrust of his remarks. There is, of course, a role for the YPLA or any other non-departmental body that is set up to monitor academies to ensure that the results from Ofsted inspections are taken into account and result in action, but given all the skills and procedures established by Ofsted over the years, which are based on its experience, it would be a mistake to set up another body to engage in inspections and to try to replicate that body within what should be a monitoring oversight organisation.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I agree completely with the hon. Gentleman, but as he has anticipated, my view is that the oversight function for the performance of schools should be carried out by local authorities and that they ought to be the first tier of inspection and accountability. I know that some people are concerned about whether local authorities currently do that job effectively.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the evidence from Daniel Moynihan, the chief executive of the Harris Federation, who largely supported the Government’s proposed YPLA model. He made some interesting comments. Responding to my question on whether the oversight should be carried out by the local authority or the YPLA, he said:
“A national body that is accountable to the DCSF—a single unit such as the YPLA—will be a high-quality, high-profile body that provides strong accountability, without variation. We are more likely to get that strong accountability and rigour from an organisation such as the YPLA than we are from myriad local authorities...What I am saying is that academies are schools in extreme circumstances, which are often subject to extreme socio-economic conditions and in real conditions of failure. In those situations, you need a fresh start—you need something different.——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c. 49, Q128 and 130.]
He went on to say why academies are a good thing. I understand his views to some extent, but if it is true that we cannot rely on local authorities to discharge their oversight function in respect of 23,500 schools across the country, that is a devastating indictment of the current system by which we seek to hold schools to account.
There is no doubt that in the Government’s current model, the local authority is expected to be the first tier of accountability and to do the job of holding schools to account. Measures in the Bill give local authorities extra powers to intervene and the Secretary of State powers to intervene over the heads of local authorities if local authorities are not doing so. In my view, we will never get the oversight needed for 23,500 schools from one single national body, such as Ofsted, and we are unlikely to get that from the YPLA, particularly if the number of schools that are covered by the YPLA expands rapidly in the future.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
It might be helpful to inform the Committee about the alternative proposals that other parties in the House are putting forward. Will the hon. Gentleman clarify that he would like all secondary schools to become quasi-academies under the performance management control and accountability of local authorities? If so, has he consulted academy sponsors on the issue and found support for it?
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Academy sponsors are very supportive of the idea that all schools should be allowed to enjoy the freedoms that academies have. They cannot understand why it is sensible for 100, 200 or 300 schools to have a series of freedoms to innovate that are denied to the majority of schools. Our model is not that every school has to become an academy; many schools will continue to be sponsored by their local communities, so they will be local community schools, particularly if they perform effectively, as many such schools do. Under our model, there would be no need for the YPLA, because the oversight that the Minister seeks through it would be exercised at a local level. There would, however, be a devolution of freedoms to innovate to all schools, not simply the ones that the Government have currently selected.
I remember debating the future of the academies programme with Lord Adonis when he envisaged—I touched on this in the evidence sessions—that, at some stage, the programme could be embedded under local authority oversight. The programme would not be controlled by local authorities, because we want to embed academies’ freedoms rather than see local authorities take back control of them. There is absolutely no reason why we cannot legislate for the embedding of a whole series of academy freedoms that are granted to protect them from local authorities under circumstances such as those that the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton is worried about, where local authorities would not only exercise a strategic oversight, but attempt to meddle in the academies, take away their powers and freedoms, and suck them back into the local authorities. We do not want that, because we want schools to have greater freedoms and for those that are doing a good job to have sponsorship. However, it is not necessarily the case that the only way of guarding such freedoms is through a body such as the YPLA.
If we legislate to embed some of the academies’ freedoms and give powers of independent appeal to the schools commissioner—such powers would be similar to the commissioner’s current rights in relation to, for example, a perceived tension between the interests of a local authority and those of schools and colleges in expanding—there is no reason why those important freedoms could not be guarded by legislation and the schools commissioner.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
The hon. Gentleman paints a bleak picture of schools in the past when he speaks of widespread failure. That failure occurred when local authorities had a key role in inspecting and advising schools. The genesis of academies was the city technology colleges and grant-maintained schools that found form in the Education Reform Act 1988. One of the reasons for that was that the previous regime, which prevailed under local authority control, was thought to be lacking. I do not want to damage the elegant veneer of his argument, but it does seem to be inconsistent.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely important point, but just this week I visited a grant-maintained school that opted out in the early 1990s under a Conservative Government. The school has only recently come out of special measures, having gone downhill rather rapidly after becoming a grant-maintained school, and it has now become an academy. That demonstrated that any changes to the classification of a school or to the group that sponsors a school do not inevitably mean that that school will for ever perform brilliantly.
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we cannot afford to return to the situation in, and prior to, the 1990s, when many schools were performing very badly and many local authorities were not doing their job properly. Our view of the future structure of the school system is one in which Ofsted and, indeed, the educational standards authority, which has not yet been established, should do a much firmer job than the current body in terms of holding local authorities to account. As the Minister will be aware, there is still a large number of local authorities in the country where school performance is extremely poor. The Government have focused a lot of attention, money and pressure on inner London, but there are many cities throughout the country where the level of performance is far too low. The existing mechanisms are not good at holding some of those local authorities to account. There needs to be much greater transparency about schools that are failing, and local authorities that are failing to support and drive school improvement in those parts of the country.
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister, Children, Schools and Families; Bognor Regis & Littlehampton, Conservative)
I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman. However, I think that his model would prevent federations of academies from being established. He envisages an oversight role, ensuring that management is effective and that there are not endemic or incipient problems that will lead to poor results, which would then be picked up by Ofsted. That role should be conducted by federations, such as the Harris Federation, ARK, the ULT, the Woodard trust or the Mercers’ Company. We envisage that role being undertaken by those sorts of bodies, not necessarily even the national body that will fund these academies, but by the federations that will evolve if we allow academies to have freedom.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that point, and to you, Mr. Chope, for allowing us, rightly, to range quite widely on the clause. I understand that the hon. Gentleman might want these federations to hold their academies to account. Some of them might do so quite brilliantly, but I can easily imagine that we might have federations for academies—there might only be two, three or four of them—run by a sponsor under whom those federations and academies start not to do well at all. I would be more than happy if the Minister wanted to park a new academy in my constituency. In fact, I have one school in mind that I shall talk to him about later, if he has some spare money.
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
It is the one thing that he has not got.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
That is true. As the MP for that area, putting my name to the backing of such a new academy, I would want to be sure that there was a level of oversight for the school that I have in mind—it serves quite a deprived catchment area and most of the parents in that area send their children to it. I would want to make sure that if that wonderful new sponsor and its federation of two, three, four or 10 other schools started to do badly, there was some other mechanism of local accountability to do something about that. For example, the periods of sponsorship might be time limited, or they might be open to new, competitive tender, so that if the sponsor was doing a bad job there could be a re-tendering for that school.
As time moves on and the academy programme continues to expand, there is a real danger that we will find that some academies are not doing very well, just as is the case with many community schools. We have got to make sure that there are mechanisms in place to do something about that because if we do not, then the whole academy model will end up being discredited and replaced by something else.
I therefore challenge the Minister and the Conservative party to think about whether we really need to be establishing a new quango to oversee these schools. Further, is there not some better way to embed the freedoms that we all want academies to have, but in a way that uses the existing local authority structures to hold those schools to account without interfering in their freedoms? If we have concerns about the existing local authority structures and their ability to do that, we should be worried, because for the vast majority of schools we are still relying on local authorities to do that job. We need to make sure that if we are to improve the vast majority of schools, that local authorities can hold those schools to account and that they have mechanisms for identifying and commissioning—or brokering—other groups who can come in and deliver school improvement. It may well be the case, as John Dunford of the Association of School and College Leaders often says, that local authorities do not always have the necessary skills to deliver those improvements in their schools. However, they should at the very least be able to identify where schools need to improve, and they should be able to broker in additional support.
I am a bit uncertain about why the Government are so reticent about using the existing local structures to embed the academy programme. I am unsure why the Minister is not pursing the same sort of long-term vision as Lord Adonis. During the evidence session on March 10, the Minister gave us a clue when he answered the hon. Member for Barnsley, East and Mexborough, who asked why the YPLA was being created to oversee academies. The Minister replied:
“We would have given in to the charge of watering down the independence of academies if we had handed over their performance management and funding to local authorities. We did not want to do that.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 10 March 2009; c. 173, Q411.]
I do not know whether he said
“We did not want to do that”
because he genuinely meant that the Government did not want to hand over those elements to local authorities or whether he did not want to be open to the charge of watering down the independence of academies.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
Let me deal directly with that. It is because we do not think that it is right to give those responsibilities back to local authorities. I refer the hon. Gentleman to the response that Daniel Moynihan gave to him in the evidence session:
“My answer would be that local authorities have called in academy sponsors because the various mechanisms that they have deployed in the past to improve the schools that they offer us as academies have not worked. The key mechanism that they have deployed is their own management of those schools. It does not make sense to return those schools to local authorities.”——[Official Report, Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Public Bill Committee, 3 March 2009; c. 48, Q126.]
That is at the root of why we should have this arrangement, rather than the option that the hon. Gentleman is putting forward.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Yes, but I am not suggesting that academies should be returned to local authority control; we are talking about who exercises the strategic oversight. I am suggesting that the Minister could embed protections for academies in legislation covering the intervention that local authorities might otherwise engage in, rather than creating a new quango.
I hope that Ministers would be very concerned if they were supporting and signing up to the comments of somebody who said, at column 49 of the evidence session, in the answer to my question, that a body such as the YPLA was needed because it would be “high-quality, high-profile” providing “strong accountability, without variation.” That says that Mr. Moynihan thinks that local authorities are useless in many cases at doing the basic job of overseeing the performance of schools in their area and that he does not have confidence in their ability to do it. If the Minister shares that view, it is a terrible indictment of the oversight of 23,000 English schools.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
To help the hon. Gentleman, I am saying that they are a mixed ability class. Where local authorities have consistently failed in their oversight and performance management of schools and failed generations of children, it is right that there should be a high-level intervention, such as the formation of an academy, so that the local authority can be relieved of those responsibilities to focus on the other schools in its area and let sponsors who want to do a good job take over.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
It is interesting that the Minister thinks that where local authorities are doing such a dreadful job that one or, perhaps, two of the schools in their areas are taken out of their oversight, the rest of the schools should still be overseen by that grossly incompetent body. That is a very strange view of how we are going to rely on local authorities, or anybody else for that matter, to drive school improvement in the future.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
By way of clarification, just because a local authority has failed that particular school community, it does not mean that it is incapable of looking after other schools in its area. It might have had particular problems with aspiration for that community and believe that it is not capable of achieving in the way that it should. There might be issues attached to the governance of the school that the local authority has singularly failed to address. We are taking other powers in the Bill to be able to address that through intervention in underperforming schools, but I remain wedded to the belief that there are circumstances in which academies are entirely appropriate to move a community on quickly.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
It is highly unlikely that a local authority so incompetent that it cannot do anything about a failing school in its area is properly overseeing the other schools. Maybe the only reason the academy was established is that one of those schools had particularly awful results. But maybe if the local authority was doing a bad job on that school, it might also be similarly complacent on other schools, which, because they have a more affluent catchment area, have results that are above the national challenge level. There is an inconsistency in the Government’s belief that local authorities are competent enough to have oversight of the vast majority of schools, but not of an academy.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for being so patient with me. I recently expressed an interest to start an academy in Taunton, in his area of Somerset. That is not an expression of a lack of confidence in the authority’s ability to manage school improvement as a whole. However, I believe that the authority has not managed to secure the improvement that is necessary for that particular school community. That school, therefore, has a much better chance of success under a different sponsorship arrangement.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Yes, but the point is that the local authority wants that particular academy. It is not, as the Minister indicated, a failing local authority; indeed, it is one of the most highly rated in the country, and an improving one. What is it, therefore, that the Minister fears the local authority would do to that new academy if strategic oversight was returned to the authority—with, of course, the proper protection of the independence and freedoms of the academy?
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
The hon. Gentleman invites me to intervene again. It is more about what the local authority has not done in the past than what it will do in the future. It has not been able to ensure that the governance of the school is strong enough to support and challenge head teachers, appoint a leadership team to raise aspirations and performance, and create the ethos of achievement that is necessary to do better for that community. That school, over time, has not been doing sufficiently well to provide the sort of education service that we all want to see for all our children.
Mr. Lawsrose—
Christopher Chope (Christchurch, Conservative)
Order. We are having a good debate, and I have given a lot of latitude to right hon. and hon. Members. However, we are going further away from the principle of the YPLA’s role in the academies; we are going into details of local authority involvement. We have had some discussion about that, and I hope that we can return to the core essence of the clause.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
I will of course do that, Mr. Chope, but you will understand why I am particularly raising those issues, because it seems that the YPLA, in respect of academies, is completely unnecessary. I thought that the Minister’s answer to the last question that I put to him was particularly unconvincing. He is saying that the reason he wants the YPLA to have oversight of an academy in Somerset in the future is due to some problem in the past with one school. He has no concerns about the ability to have oversight of that school in the future. If that is the case, why on earth introduce a new tier of bureaucracy, rather than allowing existing mechanisms to work by having a proper inspection of the job that local authorities do, so that where they are failing to deliver improvement in local schools, they begin to do it, rather than the YPLA?
John Hayes (Shadow Minister, Innovation, Universities and Skills; South Holland & The Deepings, Conservative)
The clause transfers extensive powers to the YPLA, which include
“calculating and paying grants; supervising budgets; managing specific cases concerning admissions, exclusions and special educational needs; monitoring, enforcing and terminating funding agreements; monitoring the standard of performance of pupils; managing school building work.”
The hon. Gentleman seems to suggest that many of those functions should be handled by local authorities. But when the Minister talked about a mixed ability class, his metaphor was more apposite than he imagined. The truth is that we know from history that some local authorities are good at it, but some are not. Yet the local authority regime that the hon. Gentleman advocates suggests that they are all of a class of their own—they are top class.
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
That is surely a shocking view of the oversight of our schools. The view that has been proposed by both Conservative and the Labour Front Benchers is that there is no confidence in the ability of a large number of local authorities to manage and properly oversee schools. Therefore, 100 or 200 of those schools will be allowed to opt out and be run by the YPLA, while a large number of existing local authorities continue to do an incompetent job of managing schools in their areas—including a large number of schools that have characteristics of deprivation similar to those of academies and including many other schools that the Government consider to be coasting. When I asked the Minister and the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton whether other schools would be able to opt out of the existing local authority oversight and into the YPLA, the answer, on the whole—certainly from the Government—was no.
In other words, the vision of both parties seems to be that the YPLA will be allowed to do a good job only for those schools that happen to be classified as academies. Everybody else will be trapped in poor local authority control. I am suggesting that an alternative to the YPLA is to ensure that existing oversight through local authorities works and that the legislation protects academies’ independence, so that local authorities cannot simply suck them back into the maintained family and compromise their independence. That, I suggest, is a better way than accepting that a whole load of local authorities will run the vast majority of schools incompetently and that we will let a small number of schools, selected fairly randomly from among the low-performing schools, to escape from that incompetent management.
You have been patient, Mr. Chope, so I will move on to speak to the actual amendments before you lose patience. Amendments 391 and 392 relate to our concerns about the YPLA’s role. The briefing notes on the Bill seem to make it clear that it is not the Government’s intention to confer on the YPLA the power to enter into an academy funding agreement. That was also made clear in the discussions that the Bill team kindly held with the National Union of Teachers and others, but subsection (4) seems to contradict that by implying that the YPLA might have direct powers to enter into an agreement. I do not know whether that is deliberate, a mistake or our misreading, but I would be grateful for clarification from the Minister.
On the other amendments to which the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton spoke, we share his concerns to ensure academies’ autonomy through his amendment 26, although we want to ensure that that autonomy applies to things that are important in terms of innovation in schools rather than being the autonomy to select pupils from more affluent backgrounds in order to make the academy’s job easier, when it should be serving its local catchment and ratcheting up performance among youngsters who have been failed. We have some sympathy with the amendment, provided that it applies in those more defined and limited terms.
However, we are not very sympathetic to amendment 25, which would remove any performance monitoring between the academy governing body and Ofsted. We think that that could lead schools to go downhill quickly if their performance is not improved for a period of years because nobody is exercising oversight. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us on at least some of those points.
Jim Knight (Minister of State (Schools and Learners), Department for Children, Schools and Families; South Dorset, Labour)
We have had an interesting, wide-ranging debate in which we have heard alternative visions for the performance management and oversight of academies. It began with some assertions, which were not really based in fact, from the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton about the Secretary of State and his view on academies. I did not see any evidence to support those assertions.
We also heard about the hon. Gentleman’s vision of 500 to 1,000 academies. That contrasts with the interview given by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath and the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) to The Sunday Telegraph a couple of months ago, in which they spoke about having one in every community. Given where we are with children’s centres—we said one in every community—the Government interpret that as about 3,500. There is a little confusion about exactly what his level of aspiration and ambition is for the free academy schools.
By contrast, the hon. Member for Yeovil had a slightly confusing—it is tempting to say a slightly Liberal Democrat—view. He wanted them all to be academies but at the same time under local authority oversight. It appears to be an attempt to back both horses at once, which I am not sure would please anybody. However, I do understand the constraints that he is under—