Education Bill

I will speak to Lords amendments 18 and 19 on the duty of schools to co-operate. It is important that we have a framework that delivers competition and choice in rural areas. There have been many examples of innovation in my constituency in which schools have co-operated to provide a better service across disparate and sparse rural areas. Methwold high school in my constituency operates a vertically integrated model with Hockwold primary school. It has been able to save on administration costs and to run the school more efficiently. It offers GCSEs in subjects such as maths to local adults, thereby lowering its costs and offering a wider service. It also collaborates with further education and higher education establishments to offer local people degrees and other qualifications that they would not normally be able to access in such a remote area. Another school in my constituency, Swaffham Hamond's high school, was regrettably unable to continue to offer A-levels last year due to the lack of local demand. Unfortunately, students from that school were obliged to travel for up to 45 minutes on local buses to go to King's Lynn to study their A-level choices. Since then, a local collaboration programme has been developed with Dereham school, which has been able to offer its A-levels at Swaffham Hamond's, ensuring that specialist teaching staff are used in the best way possible. The raw economics of life in a very sparsely populated area mean that it is often more efficient and effective for specialist teachers to travel between schools than for students to travel vast distances from one school to another. That is what the head teachers of Swaffham and Dereham have achieved. They have ensured that the best sixth-form provision is available across a network of rural schools. That was a highly rational decision, but to get to the point of being able to offer that service they had to go through a whole load of bureaucracy. I know that the county council was involved in trying to sort that out, but ultimately the school from Dereham that offered its provision to Swaffham, a good 20-minute drive away, had to take a huge risk due to how the Young People's Learning Agency funding worked. A very innovative offering was available in a rural area, but schools struggled to put it in place because the funding models were more suited to large conurbations. I am a huge supporter of academies and free schools, and I was very grateful to the Secretary of State for visiting Thetford academy, in my constituency, a couple of weeks ago. At present, however, the model delivers better for larger conurbations than for disparate areas. We need to find a way of making the funding more flexible, so that it can apply in remote rural areas and so that there is some pressure on failure and success in areas where it is very difficult for students to travel a long distance to a different school. We need to find a way of ensuring that failures are dealt with quickly and that success is rewarded, so that bad provision can be replaced and good provision can expand not just within a geographical location but elsewhere locally. Norfolk schools are showing how collaboration should be done, but we need a way in which competition and collaboration can work alongside each other to ensure that we get the best economic models, that we use our teaching resources in the best possible ways and that we see innovation within the current environment.