Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I start by declaring an interest: I advise the board of a charity, ARK, which runs city academies in inner London. Nothing is more important to the individuals concerned, their families and the country as a whole than improving the education and skills of our young people. We all want young people to be given the chance of fulfilling their potential; for many, this means opening their eyes to what might be and stretching their ambition to the future by offering them better chances at school and beyond. None of this is easy. In this wide-ranging Bill, I particularly welcome the proposals for apprenticeships. Vocational education has too often been the poor relation in our education system and, frankly, too often it has not been good enough. The introduction of a proper statutory framework for apprenticeships is a great step forward. It promises proper attention and funding to a crucial sector for the UK economy and new opportunities for many young people. I was fascinated to hear the noble Lord, Lord Baker, talk about the new technical schools, and look forward to hearing more in Committee. I also welcome the proposed establishment of an independent Ofqual. There doubtless will be questions on the details of this as we scrutinise the Bill, but any of us involved in the education system knows the debilitating effect of arguments over the veracity of results and standards. I am always really depressed by the instant response to GCSE and A-level results and the talk of falling standards, which immediately punctures the feeling of elation felt by many pupils on receiving their results. So let us hope that this new body can operate in an effective and transparent way to strengthen confidence in results and develop the support of schools, employers, pupils and parents alike. I am also strongly supportive of the proposals on young offenders and pupil referral units. Some PRUs do excellent work, transforming the chances of the young people they work with. Far too many, however, do not. They contain rather than educate; they manage behaviour rather than reform it. They are receptacles for youngsters who have been repeatedly excluded, disruptive to other pupils or worse, and sent there for the sake of others—understandably—rather than for their own benefit. I know that as a governor, I have sat on exclusion panels and taken decisions to safeguard the education of the rest of the pupils in a group rather than truly believing the excluded pupil was going to get a good deal at the local PRU. The proposal for earlier intervention in poor PRUs builds on the previous excellent announcement to widen the provider base of these units, and I welcome it. Of course, the pupils who end up in PRUs usually have attainment well below expected levels, many dramatically so. Their behavioural problems often stem from this. They have spent perhaps 10 years in schooling and have been failed by it. Their reading is substandard, their basic literacy and numeracy skills are well below average, they left primary schools in trouble, and it just got worse. That brings me to an area of concern I have about the Bill. We have discussed city academies in this House many times. We now know that the majority of the 133 now open are performing well. Indeed, in its recent independent evaluation, PWC commented: ""Ofsted reinforces our conclusion that, overall, sponsorship contributes significantly to school improvement"." The 2008 GCSE results for academies show that performance is improving faster than the national average and that the performance of pupils on free school meals gaining five GCSEs, including English and maths, has risen at more than double the national improvement rate. NFER research shows that most academies are in areas of relatively high deprivation—many in areas of very high deprivation. They admit higher proportions of pupils eligible for free school meals than the proportion living in the local postcode districts, higher proportions of pupils with special educational needs and a lower proportion of pupils with higher key stage 2 ability compared with the proportion living locally. Setting up and developing a successful new city academy in a deprived community is tough, but of course the majority are morphed from existing schools or amalgamations of existing schools, which have usually been the subject of repeated interventions and large resources over a period of years. The academy is often the last throw of the dice and, in my experience, has been an LEA’s sink school—with all that that entails—for several years previously. Results are way below national average; attendance is bad; punctuality is chronic; aspirations are at rock bottom; behaviour is poor; finances and systems are at best chaotic; in mixed schools, boys usually outnumber girls; leadership at senior and middle levels is poor; the staffroom includes the cynics group, the lazy and the hopeless; and the majority, who want to do a good job for the kids, could do so but have forgotten how to or feel isolated in their endeavours. The physical fabric of the place is usually rotten and depressing, too. The first 18 months after opening are especially tough. For a start, the place is usually a building site, as the work on the new building starts—although it will be fantastic and uplifting eventually, of course. The new governing body invariably has to replace much of the senior leadership. Often, too, there is a chronic weakness in the middle leadership, especially in core subjects. The basics are not there: schemes of work, lesson plans, systems of assessment and marking, and pupil tracking. There are no clear behaviour norms and understandable merits or punishment systems; there are no clear expectations of staff and certainly none of pupils; uniforms are patchy; the place is unloved. As a governor in several of these schools in the past few years, I have experienced at first hand the heavy lifting of turning the situation around. I have seen a majority of teachers raising their sights with new leadership and pupils responding fantastically. It is almost humbling to see the determination of year 11 pupils who are finally and belatedly given a fair chance. They grab at it and work ferociously—after school, in Saturday classes or through Easter revision. The problem is that it is last-minute catch-up. Two of the schools in which I am involved will be for those aged three to 18, meaning a real chance of improving the transition at 11 that causes many children to slip back and offering the opportunity of a more streamlined education. After all, some of the most privileged pupils in the UK move seamlessly through their schooling, so why not extend it to the most disadvantaged? Experience also suggests that the tighter the links between primary, feeder and secondary schools, the better the educational experience and outcome. So will my noble friend reassure me that the Government are open to the expansion of all-through academies and feeder academies? I am also acutely aware of the need to allow a new academy to focus on itself and its own pupils, especially in the first couple of years. Heads whom I speak to say that the last thing that they want is to be outside their school at meetings; they want to be in the corridors and in the classrooms—the last period at a failing school often sees senior staff outside the school at any opportunity. Such a desire is not because the heads of the new city academies are being isolationist, but simply because the challenges that they face every hour of the day are so huge. I am therefore wary of instructing academies to join local partnerships and structures, and want assurance from the Minister that there will not be encroachment on existing freedoms. Most city academies happily accept and work with peers and school improvement partners, but is making it mandatory truly necessary? One head I spoke to was clear: her pupils had adults endlessly involved in their lives. What she felt she could do for them was not to replicate all those others, but concentrate single-mindedly on their education alone. I know, too, that the freedom to run a longer school day and an extra week for staff planning can be crucial to improving the educational offer. So, too, is the chance to concentrate longer on literacy and numeracy, rather than spreading everything too thinly. Literacy, after all, is the passport to a wider education and, quite simply, has to be sorted first. I am not advocating a sort of laissez-faire for academies: I am as critical as anyone of those schools that continue to fail the same pupils as failed before. I want proper accountability and transparency of results, but also real insight into and support for those schools working in the toughest conditions. I am keen to see earned autonomy: let us reward those who are delivering well with a lighter touch. However, I do not want to see a new bureaucracy, which I fear we will get in the YPLA in so far as it affects academies. The core business of the new agency is 16-to-19 education and under-25s with learning needs. One departmental brief, for example, states that the Bill will establish the YPLA to, ""support local authorities when they become accountable for 16-19 learners … make sure they are working together and provision is coherent where pupils are travelling across … boundaries"." There is no mention of city academies. I therefore ask the Minister where the rather strange provision on city academies fits in. Why put a small group of schools into that mix? What possible expertise will a 16-to-19 agency bring to the running of city academies? How will it assist in raising standards for disadvantaged children? I urge the Minister to think a little more about that specific proposal and listen to all those involved in running these schools now who have respected the support and challenge of the academies division in her department in recent years. Last year, 65 boys in the whole country on free school meals got three As at A-level, while 175 at Eton got the same. Massive progress has been made, but we still have a heck of a long way to go. The schools working in the most challenging of circumstances need real support and expertise, not to be only the other business of an agency with a different, though important, focus.