I feel that I have to put the case for local councillors and their involvement in local education, since it is being not painted in the best possible light by my noble friend Lord Sutherland. I think that local management of schools came in about 25 years ago; I am looking around for some people who know better than I do. I have been chair of a large comprehensive secondary school in the maintained sector for a lot of that period. It is regarded as good by Ofsted, I am pleased to say, its value added is well over 1,000 and I hope we will continue to do well on the other scores of Progress 8 and all the rest. Its intake is below average nationally and locally. This is a local maintained school with local involvement where things can go right. I worry that our mindset seems to be that only local authorities can create good schools. I do not support that argument because it is plainly not supported by the facts. Equally, I do not support the argument that only academisation can do the same. That is not supported by the facts either.
The facts are that neither the structures of local authorities nor the structures of academies produce good schools. What produces good schools is something much more difficult than waving a magic wand and having a different structure. What creates good schools is good, outstanding leadership; a good cohort of leadership teams supporting the head teacher; a governing body that works well in supporting and challenging the school; and a local authority, or whatever the structure, that does the additional support improvement and provides professional training and development and all the rest of it. We know that that is what creates good schools and good opportunities for children in education, yet we insist on changing structures. But changing education structures does not achieve good schools—we know that.
A school in my own area—a leafy suburb school, as it happens—decided that it would become an academy. Within a year, it was in special measures and required improvement; that is the worst and the lowest possible rating. The school was good when it started, but in a year it went from being up here to being down there. Why? Because of the lack of the very factors that I have just described: failure of the head teacher; failure of the governing body; and no group to support it because it was outside local authority control. That is what we have to look at.
I am passionate about education and passionate about children getting a fair deal. Nowhere else are they going to get a fair deal, except through this route. Yet we insist on talking about structures. For goodness’ sake, let us talk about how we are going to deal with the national shortage of head teachers of any calibre, let alone outstanding ones. That would be a start.