My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate this evening; it has been incredibly valuable. It is very clear that the House is immensely passionate and knowledgeable about education and adoption.
I have heard many helpful points this evening—so many that I have, in fact, entirely rewritten my closing speech in an attempt to answer all the points made. I am sure that I will not manage that—I apologise if I do not—and I hope people understand that, as a result of my rewriting, there may be a certain amount of paper shuffling during my closing remarks.
Most of the opening remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, were nothing to do with the Bill so I will not waste noble Lords’ time by rising to all his comments. However, I will refer to a few. He made a point about the Ofsted ratings for academies versus those for local authority schools, and a similar point was made by the noble Lords, Lord Storey and Lord Touhig. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, was very quick to point out that many academies were failing schools that were then taken off local authorities. Academies have a far higher proportion of children receiving free school meals than other schools and, of course, many of these schools are in those sad, sad areas—of which we have too many in this country—of intergenerational unemployment, such as some coastal towns. In such areas, the statistics cannot take account of the drip-drip of negativity that these pupils experience when going home to a household where nobody works and where they know very few people who are in work.
Another point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, was the question of teacher recruitment.
The Labour Party does like to make a crisis out of the perennial challenge of recruiting teachers. The reality is that the teacher vacancy rate has remained stable at about 1% or below for the past 15 years and, on several occasions during the last Labour Government, was higher than it is now. However, I will write to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about our teacher recruitment strategy.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, had certain concerns about voluntary adoption agencies. Personally, I think the fact that 140 of 152 local authorities have bid for the regional support fund shows the enthusiasm with which local authorities are embracing this approach.
I assure the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, that the interests of all children will be critical to what lies behind the regional adoption agencies. Concerning her more general remarks about children in care, I reply that under the last Parliament we took many steps to improve the support for looked-after children. This included £99 million in funding through the Pupil Premium Plus grant, a new duty on local authorities to appoint a virtual school head, strengthening quality standards for residential settings and launching a cross-government strategy for care leavers. At the moment, we are looking at how we might build on this and do more to support care leavers, particularly those not in education.
The noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, spoke about the democratic deficit caused by removing consultation when a school becomes an academy. What we on this side of the House are concerned about is the education deficit that takes place in failing schools by the frequent exploitation of the democratic process and the fact that it takes, on average, a year for a failing school to become a sponsored academy. This is often because of roadblocks put in the way by dogmatic influences and people putting the interests of adults ahead of those of children.
We heard from my noble friend Lord Harris, whose academy group is one of our top-performing sponsors. I pay tribute to the remarkable achievements of his group and the thousands of children’s lives that he has improved as a result. When the Harris Federation took over the failing school Downhills, opponents tried to block the change through judicial reviews and various other tactics—they even made a film about their opposition. However, their attempts failed. Members of the Harris Federation did not let this deter them. This was not a popularity contest but something that was absolutely needed to help the children of Downhills.
In my experience, it took almost two years for the Pimlico Academy to open as a sponsored academy from the point at which it was judged to have special measures. The transformation was delayed by various objectors. People resorted to tactics that included consistently lying about us in the press, lying to pupils about our plans, breaking into my office, finding someone who had no real interest in the project but who qualified for legal aid to front up a judicial review application all the way to the Court of Appeal—all the applications along the way were thrown out fairly quickly by judges at huge cost to the public purse—and even resorting to having Pimlico pupils lying in coffins on the pavement
so that my wife and I had to step over them on the way to a meeting. This was all done to further the interests of adults and for petty dogmatic principles rather than worrying about the education of pupils. These delays cost hundreds of children lost educational opportunities, yet when after just two years, which was a record time, the school was transformed from special measures to outstanding, many of the same people asked to become the friends of Pimlico Academy. Also, while many of the original teachers had left, many others stayed. Others who had objected to the original proposals were lifted by the oxygen of success and have now transformed their own performance.
I am big enough and ugly enough to put up with the kind of nonsense we experienced at Pimlico, but I do not see why other sponsors should. More importantly, as the Secretary of State for Education has said on a number of occasions, a day spent in a special measures school is a day too long for the pupils in that school. Parents do not want their children in a failing school, and that is why we are bringing in proposals to speed up the process by which failing schools become sponsored academies.