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This cluster of amendments would maintain the role of school improvement partners—like the noble Baroness, I shall refer to them as SIPs—but alter the direction to ensure that they would be part of a school’s own management team, rather than imposed by an outside authority.

Amendment No. 28 would change the appointments procedure, putting the appointment of a school improvement partner in the hands of the governing body. The main reason for giving appointment of SIPs to the governing body will be

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clear to the Committee and the Minister. I remain convinced—as I and my noble friends were at Second Reading—that the schools themselves are the experts on schools. In other words, we would take the issue much further than the Liberal Democrats would. We believe that the schools and the governing body should have this role; even though the local authorities might, in the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, know the local scene, that is not enough.

However, the amendment would leave the funding of SIPs to the local authority. This would ensure that, while a SIP was approved by the governing body as a matter of government policy, the school would not be expected to pay for a role that, while potentially very useful, is not a teaching or welfare role.

The Minister’s words in another place seemed to support the concept that schools should have a strong voice in the appointment of school improvement partners. Jacqui Smith stated:

However, the regulatory impact assessment takes a slightly different line. On page 54, it states that SIPs could,It goes on to say that legislation is,of SIPs,

The disparity in those statements concerns me. SIPs are just that—they are there to work with the governing body of a school to improve its status. They are not called policy commissioners, but the regulatory impact assessment description suggests that that may be the case. What is more, if they are there to ensure that government policy is followed to the nth degree, I do not see why schools should bear the burden of cost. The regulatory impact assessment states that the Government expect the whole SIP project from April 2008 to cost around £28 million, as we have heard—I assume that that does not account for inflation—but that the Department for Education and Skills expects to contribute only £21 million, subject to the outcome of the next spending review. Does that mean that schools are expected to pay an extra £7 million for what I suspect may be a form of full-time inspector? We have heard that the measure is no such thing and involves only 19 days, but we might want to pursue that matter a little further.

It is vital to get the right people to do the job—as the Minister has said, the SIPs need to be credible—not just local authority employees instructed to keep an eye on schools, which has posed a problem in the past and would pose more problems, according to the regulatory impact assessment. I am pleased that there will be formal training for the role, but I am concerned at the extra cost of that training.

It is interesting to note the high percentage of former and serving head teachers who have responded to advertisements to work as SIPs. I take

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on board very much what Members of the Committee have suggested—that head teachers, possibly more than any others, have much to contribute to that role. As I say, it is interesting to note the number of serving head teachers who have responded to such advertisements. However, I question whether a serving head teacher, who is probably crucially tied up with that important role, is able to provide an extra 17 or so days a year. I presume that those 17 days would on the whole be best served during term time. Therefore, I can see a conflict in terms of time.

6.30 pm

I am mindful of the fact that out of those people of working age who are qualified to teach, more are not currently teaching than are. The challenge to raise standards in education has many sides. There have been some fantastic teaching initiatives, not least the Teach First scheme. I congratulate the Government on that scheme, which we thoroughly support. But more needs to be done to encourage and sustain a steady stream of people into teaching. I worry that while the role of a SIP will provide an avenue for people who are passionate about education to play a part in its improvement, it might create a diversion from the teaching roles that we so desperately need those people to take on and retain. I have suggested the concept of secondment to the Minister in relation to the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, and I wonder whether he would also consider secondment in this context.

Amendments Nos. 32 and 43 extend that logic. Their effect would be that only those schools that require significant improvement or fall under special measures under Clause 54 would be compelled to have a SIP. I was surprised to see that SIPs would be compulsory for all schools, given that in the White Paper, SIPS are dealt with under a section entitled,

As my honourable friend John Hayes has mentioned in another place, while the added value measurement has its problems, it enables us to identify coasting schools. The White Paper rightly points out that,No one could argue with that. But it is not quite clear to me why it is absolutely necessary, given the costs of training and remuneration involved, not to mention the other collateral costs of SIPs, to implement them in every school.

The amendments seek to ensure that SIPs would be an elite body for improvement and that the very best candidates would be chosen to ensure continued progress in our schools. My amendments, to ensure that only failing and coasting schools would benefit from their role, have as much to do with wise economics as with an objection to policy. We must ensure that where education is concerned, an effective, carefully thought-out route is chosen, which stands to benefit our schools the most and which makes the best of limited resources. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, mentioned that there might be a figure of £1,000 per SIP. We need to attract the very best; and the very best will command a higher income to take them away from their other role.



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I ask these questions out of genuine concern for the role of SIPs. I accept that they could prove to be a useful ingredient in the new drive to improve school standards, which is key. They could be invaluable to schools that are valiantly struggling to improve but need extra support. I pay tribute to those schools and to the head teachers, teachers and governors in them who do excellent work while making progress. I hope that the amendments will go some way to ensuring that those who need the most focused support will get it, and those who are in no need do not prove an unwilling drain on resources.

Amendment No. 33 would ensure that school improvement partners accept the religious basis of a denominational school. It is a probing amendment that reflects concerns expressed by groups representing such schools, particularly the Catholic Education Service, that the school improvement partner might threaten the schools’ distinctive character and ethos. That concern is reflected in the summer newsletter sent to school governors by the Diocese of Portsmouth department of education. A common question asked of education officers and listed in the newsletter is:

The answer given by the newsletter is:That could extend to all kinds of other voluntary aided schools.

It is very important that the development of school improvement partners does not lead voluntary aided schools to feel under threat. That is particularly important when one considers the vital role that such schools play in providing a high-quality education for many of the most vulnerable children. For example, in voluntary aided schools where 33 per cent of pupils are on free school meals, an average of all pupils shows that 47.6 per cent achieve five or more A star to C-grade GCSEs, rather than the 40.6 per cent in other schools. Overall, 23.7 per cent of pupils with free school meals at voluntary aided schools achieve five or more A star to C grades, including English and mathematics, compared to 16.3 per cent at community schools.

Similarly, the proportion of pupils with special educational needs achieving five or more good GCSES is 10.4 per cent in voluntary aided schools. That is a commendable record. The record of voluntary aided schools is beaten in these areas only by city technology colleges. It is perhaps for that reasons that so many parents, even non-religious parents, are so keen to put their children into voluntary aided faith schools. It is important that the school improvement partner appreciates the reason for these successes, as that would place him in a far stronger position to make constructive criticisms of

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the school’s approach. It is also important that SIPs have the confidence of parents and of the religious bodies that support faith schools. I encourage the Minister to consider our amendments as a means of achieving that. I beg to move.

The Deputy Chairman of Committees: I must advise your Lordships that if this amendment is agreed to, I will be unable to call Amendments Nos. 29 to 32 because of pre-emption.

Lord Lucas: I have a number of amendments in this group, and by and large they support what my noble friend has just said. I shall start off with a request and a question. My request is whether I may have an answer to the question that I asked in the last group of amendments about whether we might see the result of the trial.

Lord Adonis: It is published.

Lord Lucas: I would love to know where; that would be a great help.

Secondly, what is happening to Amendment No. 36? It does not appear to be on the groupings list. Perhaps I am just being blind. It has not been referred to. Are we covering it now or later? Some guidance would be appreciated.

The difficulty that I have might be illustrated by imagining that the Minister and his team at the Department for Education and Skills were approached by the Treasury, who said, “We think that ministries could do with a better understanding of financial affairs, so we are going to give you a Minister who is expert in these areas, who will hang around for 20 days a year and make sure that you are up to scratch in these things”. I think under those circumstances that any departmental team worth its salt would say, “No; if we need that sort of expertise we will appoint it ourselves”. It matters a great deal whether the person who is advising you and helping you is regarded, in ordinary day-to-day things, as part of your team and as part of the way that the school works; although you regard them as your peer and as having a lot of independent and real expertise, and you understand at the end of the day that they have responsibilities that run outside the school.

I can see that I am not going to win this argument, and I will wait and see how these things go, but I foresee that conflict will occur. I also think the provision misses a great opportunity, in that these people ought to be operating between LEAs. There is such a difference between the practices of LEAs.

To come back to a matter that I mentioned on the first day in Committee, and which was raised by the noble Baroness just now, there is a lot of data out there. I have looked at that data on special educational needs in primary schools, and children with special educational needs in Windsor and Maidenhead have more or less the same value added as those without them. If you go right down the list to Slough, just a few yards away on the other side of the Thames, children with special educational needs are doing about half a key stage 3 worse than children without them. That difference is not affected in any

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way by the proportion of free school meals. There is no correlation there. The difference is not affected by language or race, as far as I could discover, and it is not affected by the overall level of results achieved by a local education authority. All of those figures have been run through wonderful statistical engines for me in Oxford, and I can see no correlation whatever.

My conclusion from that is that we have here an effect that depends on the way in which a local education authority supports its schools. If you talk to some of the better LEAs, as we have, you can see just how supportive and effective they are in helping schools deal with the questions that arise regarding supporting children with special educational needs and why they might be doing so well. Well, that is fine; but if Windsor and Maidenhead has its own SIPs and Slough, across the water, has its own, the expertise in Windsor and Maidenhead will never cross into Slough. It will never find out what it could be doing better to vastly improve the average performance of nearly 20 per cent of its pupils—and it has not done so by any existing mechanism.

If there was a system in which SIPs were subject not to LEAs but were appointed by schools, and if I were a school in Slough, the first thing that I would do would be to appoint someone who knew the Windsor and Maidenhead system, because a great deal is going on there that I should be picking up. That would never happen if SIPs were responsible to LEAs, because LEAs are so jealous of each others’ performance. If they were not, that difference would not persist.

While I am concerned at a personal level that the Government’s proposals will not work, they miss a big opportunity for cross-fertilisation between local education authorities in practices that have become common at LEA level.

The Lord Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham: I support the amendments in this group, particularly the probing Amendments Nos. 33 and 35, and I shall refer also to Amendment No. 28. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, was concerned over the grouping and not being sure about whether to jump up. So, I have seized this opportunity of jumping up now to say that a school improvement partner has an important role in a school—and that is obvious. But, if the person appointed is not in sympathy with the character, ethos, or purpose of the school, the advice and support that they offer will not be as effective as it should be. It may even be counterproductive and, in a worst-case scenario, could be disruptive or even destructive.

Local education authorities could make a mismatch and misjudgment—after all, they are only human. However, if, as Amendment No. 28 proposes, the governing body of a school made the appointment, that would be less likely. We on these Benches support the thrust of the amendments.

Lord Dearing: I have tabled Amendments Nos. 35 and 42 in this group, which I shall discuss together. The first concerns the incompatibility issue, to which reference has been made already. The proposal is that if, after two years, it is clear that the relationship is not working, the governing body should be able, if the

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local authority will not agree to a change, to make application to an adjudicator for a decision on a change. That would not be saying that a person would be unsuitable to be a school improvement partner, but that he would not fit in those circumstances. If this is going to work, the two people must be partners and critical friends.

I have to admit that people whom I have dealt with in my career and whom I have admired greatly would not be the kind of friends who would get on with me. Imagine the reaction of some right honourable gentlemen who have been Secretaries of State if some other right honourable gentleman had walked through the door and said, “I have come to help you for 19 days”. Some relationships just do not work, although they may involve admirable people. So, when the relationship is not working, it is necessary to have the provision proposed by my amendment. Amendment No. 33, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, refers to that point—as did the right reverend Prelate.

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We are talking about some 20,000 appointments. If you get 99 per cent right, you would still have 200 disasters—and 99 per cent would be a high score. So there must be a way out of a relationship when the governing body says, in all conscience, after two years, “Look, this isn’t working”.

Perhaps I may comment en passant on the money side—the £2,000 for the 19 days. It works out at very much the same rate of pay as that of a dinner lady at £6.50 an hour. It seems a trifle light and I suspect that a lot of money will have to come from another pocket—not £20 million, but something like £60 million—to pay for this.

So I hope that the Government will be responsive to that practical suggestion. I have seen excellent people in both industry and commerce. People at the head are often strong-minded and opinionated, and they do their magic in very different ways. If you put two wrong kinds of magic together, you get hell.

My second amendment is practical and echoes what the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, said about time. Some schools do not need much help, while some need a lot of help, although they may not realise it. The local authority should have power, after consultation with the governing body, to say, “In your case, there should be X amount of time, and in the other case, there should be much more than X”. There should not be a standard ration. Some schools desperately need the help of a wise partner, while other schools need very little, and we should say, “Thanks very much for all you are doing and we will leave you to get on with it”. So I hope that the local authority will have the power in some cases to insist on more time, while in others to say that so-and-so time is enough.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford: These Benches have great sympathy with the two amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing. The issues being discussed are the degree to which a SIP should be compulsory and the degree to which a school should

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choose its own SIP. We have much sympathy with both issues. The model that we were picking up from the Government and trying to put forward was one which, to a degree, moved in that direction, although it was still left to the local authority to appoint—but we were looking at the federation model as a self-choosing model. We have much sympathy with the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, which removes the “must” and allows the school to decide its own partner.

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: I, too, support Amendments Nos. 33 and 35, because they are essential safeguards if we are to go ahead with the Bill as it is roughly constituted. There may, however, be a better way, suggested in the other amendments in this group, by giving to the governing body responsibility for appointing a SIP. That body will know what its needs are and will have to live with the consequences. That is important, also.

I wish to ask a question about compulsion and the extent to which that might be moderated. If it is compulsory to have a SIP, one could envisage a situation where a head teacher who is about to retire, who is trained and accredited as a SIP, gets a letter on his last day saying, “You are now an accredited SIP”. The next day, the new head teacher gets a letter saying, “Your school requires a SIP, although your predecessor was good enough to run a very good school and be accredited as someone who can help other schools”.

Even more improbable would be the possibility of a head teacher being accredited as a SIP and getting a letter appointing them with the PS: “Someone will be in to help you and your school next week”. That is the logic of the compulsion laid out in the Bill.

Baroness Crawley: This group of amendments is about aspects of the appointment of school improvement partners. I shall speak first to Amendments Nos. 28, 29, 31, 34, 39 and 41. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, asked about Amendment No. 36. I understand that that was debated last week.

Local authorities have responsibility for the standards and levels of attainment in the schools they maintain, and schools are accountable to their maintaining local authorities. We are introducing school improvement partners to support that accountability. It is therefore right that each school's SIP should work for the local authority under its direction and be contracted to that authority. We expect the local authority to pay attention to the preferences and needs of individual schools when deploying SIPs, which might well entail discussion with the governing bodies. Once appointed to work with a school, the SIP will need to be sensitive and responsive to the views of the governing body. But the role of the school improvement partner is to provide external challenge and support to the school. That challenge and support are more likely to be consistently effective if the SIP is appointed by, and accountable to, the maintaining authority rather than the governing body of the school, which is responsible for the school.



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Amendment No. 34, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, seeks to specify that the local education authority shall remunerate the school improvement partner appointed by the school governing body. We believe that the amendment is not necessary. Some local authorities are already employing or engaging school improvement partners, which is quite rightly part of their role. My department also provides funding to local authorities to help them run the SIP programme, and that funding includes an element for the remuneration of the SIP as appropriate.

Amendment No. 42, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, concerns the time that each school improvement partner will spend with the school. The interaction of school improvement partners with schools will not be uniform. Our guidance is that each SIP will devote five days a year to the school, but that is an average for all schools. There is sufficient flexibility in the system which will allow for the days allocated to each school to reflect the needs and context of each school. It is quite right that this level of detail should not be dictated by the department. Local authorities will be able to appoint SIPs and allocate them to schools, reflecting local context and local priorities and tailored closely to the school's individual needs and circumstances.

Amendments Nos. 30, 32 and 43, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, seek to relax the requirement to appoint a school improvement partner to each school. We are committed to the appointment of SIPs for all primary and secondary schools because all schools need to work systematically for improvement. Even in schools that perform well overall there may be underperformance by particular groups of pupils; for example, relatively low achievement by its most able pupils, low achievement by pupils entitled to free school meals, low achievement among members of one particular ethnic minority group—

Baroness Buscombe: Does the Minister honestly believe that that kind of under-achievement will be sorted out in an average of five days a year?

Baroness Crawley: As training and professional development allow for high standards of peer review for SIPs, if a school needs assistance in a particular area, I believe that it will be better off with five days a year than without it.

A decline in progress among 11 to 14 year-olds is another example, as is low achievement across all pupils in a specific curriculum subject. Even schools doing extremely well sometimes need that extra assistance and challenge. We believe that we would be letting down many thousands of underachieving pupils if we did not extend the SIP function to their schools. We need to be able to head-off decline in currently satisfactory schools. The introduction of SIPs to all schools is also about learning from others and sharing good practice. In our debates last week, noble Lords talked about the importance of the sharing of good practice. Feedback from SIPs, using local authority and national networks, will support all schools in learning from success in particular schools.

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I turn to Amendments Nos. 33 and 35. The way that the local authority and the school work together on this has to be approached in a spirit of partnership. When a local authority deploys SIPs, we expect it to pay attention to the preferences, needs and characteristics—including religious characteristics—of individual schools and their governing, bodies. We expect SIPs as well as local authorities to be responsive to the individual circumstances and characteristics of the schools they work with, including their religious characteristics. The national assessment for people seeking accreditation to be SIPs strongly stresses that expectation. It is designed to withhold accreditation from anyone who might work with a school without taking account of its ethos, including religious ethos, and other characteristics.

Authorities will therefore need to manage effectively the SIPs that work with their schools. Authorities will use a range of approaches to that task, including feedback from schools and evidence on the impact that advice from SIPs is having on the schools’ performance. The discontinuance of a SIP’s deployment to a school will be one of the available management actions.

If a governing body has serious concerns about the SIP allocated to its school—and here we return to concerns raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Williams and Lady Buscombe—the first step should be a discussion between the authority and the school. Local authorities are also supported by regional co-ordinators from the national strategies who can help to resolve such issues. The local authority and the school are not the only two players; they can call in help when conflict arises—as they may well do, as the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, suggested.

I hope that that will reassure noble Lords that effective mechanisms are already in place to resolve this kind of conflictual issue. That aside, the use of the schools adjudicator in this area would of course be new work for the adjudicator and outside his current remit. The adjudicator, as noble Lords will know, currently has two main functions: to consider and make decisions on objections to schools' admission arrangements, and to determine proposals to set up, close or make changes to schools.

Noble Lords asked a number of questions and I will try to answer them as quickly as possible. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, asked why not let schools appoint their own SIPs. As the debate on Clause 4 illustrates, society has big expectations of the school system that go beyond the concerns of the individual school and the pupils currently on its roll. An external body has to hold schools to account for delivery of those expectations. The SIP works for that body—the local authority—while acting responsively to the schools. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, also mentioned SIPs that were to be seconded. When a head teacher works as a SIP, the arrangement is effectively a part-time secondment. The head’s school has notice of the arrangement and financial recompense, money which can be used to back up its organisation and to bring in extra resources.

Several noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, asked for further details on funding.



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7 pm

Baroness Walmsley: Perhaps the Minister can clarify something that she has just said. Is the money for all this extra work going to the school rather than the person? That sounds like what she meant.

Baroness Crawley: In the case of a current head, the extra money would go to the school. Perhaps it will be clearer if I make a few more comments on funding.

Establishing the SIP function is an important change for a local authority, and the Government are providing them with funding to facilitate it. The level of funding recognises both the cost of the SIP function—to which the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe referred—and the savings to authorities that the SIP function makes possible. The cost of the SIP function arises from the allocation of SIP time to each school and the allocation of time for each SIP to take part in updating and professional development. Savings arise because, when SIPs start work with an authority’s schools, the authority can discontinue the link adviser function through which authorities currently hold schools to account.

We estimated time allocations and costs for the SIP functions from our experience in trials of the new relationship with schools. We took link adviser time allocations and costs from the benchmarking data. We expect SIP work with each school to require, as I said earlier, about five days a year. Our information suggests that the current link adviser work with a school typically takes three days a year excluding any follow-up school improvement work. We therefore need to subsidise local authorities for the extra two days required for SIPs beyond the current school link work and for SIP-related professional development for SIPs who are serving heads. The subsidy amounts to £2,000 per school with authority set-up costs of £380 per secondary school and £770 per primary. That funding is expected to meet about 75 per cent of authorities’ costs. To save time, perhaps I may undertake to write to all noble Lords on funding, payment and costs. I hope that that will be suitable.

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