Clause 6

Part of Children, Schools and Families Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 3:00 pm on 28 January 2010.

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Photo of David Laws David Laws Shadow Secretary of State (Children, Schools and Families) 3:00, 28 January 2010

The Minister finished on some words that are rather relevant to clause 6. He said that there was good bureaucracy and bad bureaucracy. I fear that what we are coming to here is rather bad bureaucracy. According to the explanatory notes, clause 6 amends the Education Act 1996 so as to require local authorities in England to seek and assess parents’ views on the provision of schools in their area. Where there is material dissatisfaction with existing provision, a local authority is required to consult with parents and develop a response plan that addresses the dissatisfaction. This is another of the clauses in the Bill that has caused a lot of concern about whether this additional bureaucracy is justified.

The NASUWT, in its submission to the Committee, said:

“it remains to be convinced of the need for parental satisfaction surveys”.

The Local Government Association said that it had concerns about the measures in this part of the Bill and believed that responsibility for responding to parental concerns about the provision of schools should rest with councils and that they did not support a right of appeal to the adjudicator. They have supported a lot of the amendments to this part of the Bill, including amendments 86 and 139.

There is one thing that the LGA says in its submission that I do not agree with and where I have some sympathy with the Government. It says:

“Councils are held to account by local electors through direct elections; the accountability of the ballot box provides an effective recourse for parents who are dissatisfied with councils’ plans for the provision of school places locally.”

The truth is that the ballot box has proved across the country and for many years to be an extremely ineffective way to deal with discontent about school performance and the provision of places. Many parts of the country have what are essentially rotten boroughs, where one party has been in power for a long period. They are often complacent about educational standards, and aspirations are low among elected members, and often officers as well, but because of the party’s strength, some parents’ concerns are not expressed effectively at the ballot box. I put it to Committee members, who will have a great deal of experience of local elections, that the performance of local schools, even when performance is low, is rarely an issue in such elections.

I am sympathetic to any Government who seek to implement intelligent accountability in a monopoly state system where people have a limited choice of provider. It is sensible that we should try to make the system as responsible as possible, understand the concerns, appoint  an inspectorate to hold schools to account and have some kind of inspection mechanism to hold local authorities to account when they are doing a thoroughly bad job and the ballot box is not proving effective. However, the issue here is whether the parental satisfaction survey and all that comes with it is really a sensible way to deliver school improvement. In our view, it is not. Our amendments seek to remove the compulsion and bureaucracy involved in the proposed parental consultations.

In some ways, the most important amendment that we have tabled is not the lead amendment; it is amendment 86, which would make the parental satisfaction surveys voluntary by allowing local authorities to decide whether they would be useful. That raises a question about the clause. If you will excuse me, Mr. Amess, I will put the case for amendment 86 now instead of speaking at great length later about the clause as a whole.

Some of the other amendments were also designed to moderate the worst effects of the provisions. For example, amendment 138 would remove the obligation on local authorities to consult annually, which is surely excessive, even for those who feel that parental satisfaction surveys might be useful. Amendment 139 would also give local authorities a different kind of flexibility by ensuring that the use of parental satisfaction surveys was conditional on the local authority’s having judged that the survey provided good value for money and helped deliver school improvement.

The Conservative party has also tabled an amendment in the group. Amendment 47 suggests that a parental satisfaction survey should not be necessary in schools that have had a full Ofsted inspection within the past 12 months. In other words, the survey should not replicate a review of school performance.

Mr. Amess, I do not know whether you have had the chance on a dull evening to read through the full horrors of what is involved in the clause, but Members who have read the paper circulated by the Department on the parental responsiveness trial will have a sense of what a bizarre and bureaucratic set of requirements are about to be imposed on schools if the Bill is passed. The clause is one of the many parts of the Bill that must be taken seriously, because it will affect many people and involve great expenditure of public funds.

The policy is set out clearly in paragraph 2.3 on the first page of the report on the parental responsiveness trial, which has already been carried out. I am afraid that I will have to quote a bit to prove my point that the provisions are excessively bureaucratic and should not be a duty. The policy is described as follows. First, every local authority in England will be required

“to ask parents of children in Year 6 their views on secondary school provision in their area, alongside the annual admissions process, and act on those views.”

John Dunford, the respected leader of the Association of School and College Leaders, noted in his evidence to the Committee that that is already striking, because the Government will require every local authority to consult parents whose children are not yet in secondary school. In other words, the secondary schools are going to be held to account by parents whose children do not yet attend them. As a consequence parents, whose children may be going on to secondary school, will be giving feedback based on what they have heard locally. Although I am not suggesting that the views of such parents on  secondary provision have no value—parents often have some sense of the quality of schools in their area—that is a serious deficiency in the suggested policy.

The second part of the policy is that views should be gathered via a—needless to say—nationally prescribed survey that will ask parents how happy they are with the local provision. The survey is designed to yield quantitative results and we have been sent a copy by the Department. The key question that parents will be asked to answer is how happy they are with the secondary schools in their area. Parents will have the stunning choice of being able to say that they are either very happy, happy, neither happy nor unhappy, unhappy or very unhappy.