My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 20 and 22 as well as to Clause 8 stand part. We are quite happy with Amendment 19, which has been moved by the Liberal Democrats, but to some extent it misses the bigger picture. Clause 8, as the noble Baroness has just said, is the Government’s attempt to enshrine in law the fact that our public education system is to become two tier—not so much the haves and have-nots as the haves and those who have much less. On the one hand, we have the maintained sector: under-resourced, tarnished by having its every fault highlighted, it seems, and on many occasions characterised as not fit for purpose. On the other, we have the academy sector: shiny, polished and well-resourced. It is the brave new world where failure does not exist or is at least not publicised.
I have to echo a point made earlier by my noble friend Lord Hunt in response to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, but I would direct this equally at the noble Baroness, Lady Evans. I accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Nash, that the Bill is about academies—I get that. But, at the same time, when the Minister gives out all the good news about academies, by not mentioning
the maintained sector it seems that there is virtually nothing of value or merit in it. Today was one of the rare occasions when he talked about what is good in the maintained sector. I say to the Ministers in an open spirit that it would do them and their case some good if they were to highlight the fact that parts of the maintained sector are doing very well. I have no objection to them highlighting when academies are doing well, too, but there should be a little balance. As the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, said, that is what is missing: there is no balance. There is really no attempt to give credit where credit is very often due.
Section 5 of the Academies Act 2010 is quite clear. It allows for consultation to take place before a maintained school is converted into an academy, and that is the way it should be. I would argue that that is basic democracy: putting a proposal in front of people, asking “What do you think about this?”, and then listening to their considered response. I say to the Ministers: yes, that takes time, and it may not elicit the hoped-for response, but that is life, or at least it is life in a democracy. Ultimately, while the parents do not have an inalienable right to carry the day, they have an inalienable right to have their say. That is the kind of open and accessible process that we have known in this country for longer than anyone can remember. We probably take it for granted, as surely we are entitled to do. However, the Government now want to shut that down, stifling opinion and, it has to be said, not for the first time.
That wording was added to the 2010 Bill following a wall of protest, including many Conservatives, after the original draft of that Bill excluded consultation. Five years on, we have gone back to the future, but it is not a future that any of us should anticipate with anything other than trepidation because it represents this Government saying, “We’re not going to ask your opinion because even if you agree with us it will take time, and that’s a price we’re not prepared to pay”. That is not to rubbish the suggestion that one day of a child’s education lost can never be regained; of course that is the case. However, it is not appropriate to say that because of that, there can never be consultation.
I have referred on numerous occasions, both last week and today, to the Government’s authoritarian approach. The Minister has made it clear that he disagrees but the evidence is clear, and I am not talking simply about the Bill. The Bill seeks to disfranchise and keep in the dark local authorities, governing bodies and parents. Millions of parents are apparently unaware that they are about to lose any say as to the kind of school in which their children receive their education. How, in 2015, did we arrive at a place where neither democracy nor transparency has any place in a Bill in your Lordships’ House?
There are other examples of what I would call attacks on our human rights. The Trade Union Bill currently winding its way through another place is even more shocking, making strike action virtually impossible. Then there is the Housing and Planning Bill, published last month, to which I made reference earlier in response to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel. That is one of the most centralising and anti-local-authority pieces of legislation that we have seen, effectively ending a local
authority’s ability to secure a mix of new homes in its local area. It has been dubbed “the end of localism”, and one can understand why; it gives the Secretary of State 32 new powers, almost all of them wide open, with detail to be decided by Ministers with little public scrutiny after the Bill is through Parliament. That touches on the point that we made earlier about the definition of “coasting”. The Minister said in his response that it would be dealt with through regulation. The Delegated Powers Committee said in its report that it was unhappy with that, but it appears that the Government are going to carry on regardless.
The Housing and Planning Bill also includes the enforced sale of affordable homes, often against the charitable functions of charities, which has echoes in the Bill that we are discussing, regarding the sale of church land and property following an academy order. Another example of the Government’s heavy-handed approach came just three days ago when information emerged of their plans to restrict human rights further by telling our judges that they are not obliged to follow rulings from the European Court of Human Rights. The Minister may sigh, and I am sorry to detain him if he feels there is somewhere more important that he should be, but this is part of a pattern and I am entitled to make that argument because this Bill is not seen in isolation. The draconian measures in the Bill chime with a lot of other pieces of legislation that are going through, and if the Minister is not willing to listen to that then I would ask that he at least not listen to it in silence. It is not difficult to detect a distinct pattern here of intolerance of those who disagree with or threaten the more extreme plans of this Government, whose answer is to lash out and use all their power to silence and cow their critics. Added together, the measures undoubtedly amount to a display of authoritarianism that I believe we have a moral obligation to stand against.
The key part of the clause is the addition of subsection (2) to the existing Section 5 of the Academies Act 2010. That has the effect of saying that academies are to be taken out of consultation and placed on a higher plain where only the Government, their business friends or other supporters are permitted to tread. Everything associated with academies is to become almost a gated community, with entry denied to lesser mortals. For “lesser mortals” read “parents”, who—the Government seem to have some difficulty in coming to terms with this—have more than a passing interest in the status of their child’s school. In the eyes of this Government, though, parents are regarded as worthless, or at least their opinions are. It is a shocking indictment that this sort of proposal can come forward in a Bill and the Government expect it to be greeted with equanimity.
Amendments 19, 21 and 22 are aimed at writing academies into the whole process of intervention by including them in the process that exists under the Education and Inspections Act 2006. By amending Section 59 of that Act, Amendment 22 would specify that all the provisions on schools being eligible for intervention, and the kind of intervention that would be possible, would apply equally to academies. It would also mean that local authorities would have the same power in relation to academies as they have in
relation to their own schools. It is about treating academies in the same way as maintained schools in an intervention aimed at raising standards. I say: why not? Surely the aim of improving schools is one that we and all schools share, irrespective of the categorisation.
I have referred in the past to the Secretary of State, and indeed the Minister himself, describing the reasons for not allowing consultation. I have a quotation here from a recent press release from the Secretary of State, in which she said that,
“campaigners could delay or overrule failing schools being improved by education experts by obstructing the process by which academy sponsors take over running schools”.
That, in itself, is no reason for denying everybody the opportunity to speak out. She is saying that some people may delay the process, so nobody will have the opportunity to say anything. Surely that amounts to a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Clause 8 represents what I believe to be an extraordinary departure from the normal processes of governmental decision-making. Under the clause, the Minister is empowered to make a decision without reference to—far less without making any attempt whatever to listen to—parents, pupils, teachers, governors, local authorities or anyone who might be thought to have some local knowledge of the situation on the ground relating to a school. It was suggested earlier that the regional schools commissioners would have that knowledge. Where would they get that sort of local information from? Surely they would have to go to the sort of people whom I have just mentioned, so why not involve them in the process right from the start?
There are certainly several reasons why Clause 8 should not form part of the Bill, but a powerful one is that it runs completely counter to the Government’s stated belief in devolution, or what they themselves have termed their “localism agenda”. In Committee last week, I quoted from a letter to the Minister from the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House. I return to it now. Referring to the Bill augmenting the Secretary of State’s powers to intervene in matters which have previously been the responsibility of local authorities, the committee said:
“These provisions appear to be at odds with the Government’s localism agenda, which emphasises the importance of local communities running their own affairs”.
And it gets better—although perhaps that is a view exclusive to this side of the Room—because the committee even quotes the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as recently as 14 May this year, saying that,
“we all know that the old model of trying to run everything in our country from the centre of London is broken”.
There is an element of left hand/right hand in that. We have already heard that the Constitution Committee was pretty unequivocal in its comments to the Minister. The members of the committee said that they would be interested in understanding the reason for this decision to shift power away from local communities. They were not alone.
We have today received from the Minister a copy of the letter that he sent to the committee in reply. It is slightly disappointing that we were given the letter
only a couple of hours before the start of this Committee, given that it was dated 5 November—five days ago. The Minister’s only response to questions raised by the Constitution Committee about the localism agenda is that the Secretary of State has devolved power to regional schools commissioners to act on her behalf. I am sorry but that is not what devolution means; it means handing power to people locally—people who are elected by their peers, wherever possible—to engage in the process and act on their behalf. Simply giving regional schools commissioners a remit and saying, “Go out and do this or that on my behalf”, certainly is not devolution and it has next to nothing to do with localism. I believe that the Minister needs to revisit these issues to get a firmer grasp of what they really involve, because they are important to people at a local level. People want to be involved in decisions.
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We know that the Minister believes it is appropriate to dispense with democratic procedures when expedient. I was not impressed—I did not say anything at the time—when the Minister referred to our exchange last week on his manifesto. I have to say to him that, following that debate, I did something that I do not do very often, which was to get a copy of the Conservative Party manifesto. First, I quote what the Minister said in this Room last week. He said:
“The democracy in this is that it was clearly in our manifesto”.—[Official Report, 5/11/15; col. GC 413.]
I have the three pages of the Conservative manifesto that cover education, pages 33 to 35, and there is nothing about education that mentions consultation. It says:
“We will … turn every failing and coasting secondary school into an academy and deliver free schools for parents and communities that want them”.
So some parents will still get a say, but only if they are seeking a free school. Henry Ford and the colours in which his Model T cars were made available springs to mind here. The manifesto went on to say, somewhat opaquely, that,
“we will introduce new powers to force coasting schools to accept new leadership”.
We know what “accept new leadership” means, but that is all that the manifesto says. None the less, the Minister says, “I am doing this because it was in a manifesto which we put to the people of the United Kingdom. We asked them whether they wanted to support that manifesto or not”. Of course, a majority did not, but 24% of the population voted for the Conservative Party, which is more than voted for any other party and so it is in power, but it did not get a mandate for the Bill as there was no mention of consultation or transparency. It simply said it would force schools to become academies. How that is done is another matter.
This is redolent of the display we got from the Chancellor of the Exchequer two weeks ago on the working tax credit issue, when he claimed a manifesto commitment, despite there not even being a mention of tax credits in the manifesto. It is at best disingenuous, meretricious even, to suggest that somehow a manifesto gives you carte blanche to create an eighth day of the week, simply because it has been voted in by the people of the country.
I apologise for going on at length about this, but it is a fundamental issue. I talked about millions of parents not realising what is going to happen to them. If they did, there would be much more of an outcry. It is the duty of those of us involved in this Bill to publicise it a bit more because it is a shocking dilution of what parents are entitled to expect as far as their schools are concerned.
There is an unanswerable case for consultation, and there is no reason for it to be withdrawn simply because in a small number of cases people disagreed. There is no convincing rationale there at all. It effectively casts every parent in England as a potential trouble-maker because of the chance that they might, just might, have the temerity to suggest that the decision proposed for their school is not the appropriate one. If there is a more appropriate word to describe that approach than arrogance, it escapes me.
Despite the efforts of Ministers to prevent Ofsted finding out what is really happening within academy chains, we know from Ofsted how inadequate some of those chains are. I think it was the noble Baroness who mentioned the Kemnal chain, which appears to take pride in having sacked 26 of its 40 head teachers and in holding the axe over the heads of the rest with targets to be met every six weeks. This emerged in evidence to the Select Committee in another place. That is not clever, and it is not surprising that Ofsted was unimpressed with that record.
Local people and local communities are right to be extremely angry if they are shut out of decisions that affect their children. The Government’s authoritarian approach denies people respect and is made even worse—even more insulting, I would argue—by being carried out largely behind closed doors. The decision about whether a school should become an academy is normally taken by the head teacher board, one for each of the regions covered by the regional schools commissioners. I decided to try to find out what my local head teacher board got up to, so I went online and downloaded the minutes of its most recent meetings. That turned out to be a bad idea. I managed to locate the minutes of the east of England and north-east London boards but, having done that, I am next to no further forward because the so-called minutes conceal far more than they reveal. They are merely a list of decisions that do not even stretch to two pages, with half of one page taken up by the list of the great and the good who were there. There is no discussion of how the decisions were reached, just a note that this or that was decided.
I have to say to the Minister that this is serious. This is about the use of public money—my money, your money, everybody’s money. Yet the public—all of us—are denied knowledge of how, or even why, it is being spent. The Bill threatens to drag democracy in England back a century, which is indefensible. Thank goodness it does not apply to Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales. This clause represents everything that is wrong about this Government’s overbearing, “we-know-what’s-good-for-you” approach and it should be struck from the Bill.