Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, when we are concentrating in these amendments on the technical arrangements—indeed, this part of the Bill gets into technicalities—it is worth reflecting on why it is important that academies have autonomy. We are making an assumption that it is a good thing that they are independent and autonomous and perhaps we should remind ourselves why that is so important. We have at the moment probably the greatest disparity in our nation’s history between the performance of children in the poorest schools and those in the best schools. It is appalling that we still have a considerable number of schools where very few children—fewer than 20 per cent—attain the necessary five good GCSEs whereas others are regularly attaining 92 per cent, 95 per cent or 98 per cent. For many decades now—in fact, for over a century—the local authorities have been in charge of local authority schools in the most deprived areas and we have not seen any improvement. I remember vividly, in my days long ago as a chief inspector, that when we were asked by the then Secretary of State to prepare a map of the most deprived areas of cities, and after we had worked away for many months doing so with the advice of all our troops out in the field, one of the clerks responsible for mapping pointed out that the maps exactly overlaid those of the 1930s. Schools in exactly the same areas had been designated as areas of extreme disadvantage educationally 40 years later. Something drastic is needed, rather than just encouraging local authorities to make every school a good one. I am tired of hearing that; I have heard it for 30 years. They have not succeeded in doing so. I am a great supporter of local authorities—local education authorities have been huge contributors to the quality of education over the years—but they have not cracked the issue of areas of extreme educational and social deprivation. However, the academy programme has begun to do that. I declare an interest as a trustee of Bacon’s, which is a Church of England academy that has over recent years made astonishing changes to the lives of hundreds of children. The Harris academies in south London have so far turned around the lives of more than 18,000 young people. That is why it is desperately important that academies are allowed to experiment and innovate. They should be allowed to bring in different hours of schooling, as many of them have done, and different contracts for teachers, requiring them to do more in different things, as well as bringing in different areas of the curriculum which may not be in the national curriculum. All those freedoms, quite apart from their shiny new buildings, have enabled the academies to turn around the lives of many thousands of children. Of course, we support the programme and want to see it vastly expanded, with far more than 400 academies, but we also want to see the absolute autonomy of those schools to perform differently from local authority schools and to tackle a problem that has remained for over a century.