Mr.
Gibb: 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.
Mr.
Laws: 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. 10
am
Jim
Knight: 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?
Mr.
Laws: 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.
Mr.
Hayes: 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.
Mr.
Laws: 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.
Mr.
Gibb: 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.
Mr.
Laws: 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.
Mr.
Hayes: It is the one thing that he has not
got.
Mr.
Laws: 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: 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.
Mr.
Laws: 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: 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.
Mr.
Laws: 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.
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