Lord Sewell of Sanderstead (Con)

My Lords, as someone who has not put down an amendment, I will give some collective memory context to what we are debating today. I support most of the amendments. I hope they will not be rejected, but we will see what happens. Yesterday, I listened to the speech made by the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson. She rightly boasted about the legacy of Ernest Bevin and how he understood that real social mobility is about working-class people and the agency to aspire. Sadly, as she reeled off the achievements of the labour movement since Bevin, she forgot perhaps one of the most radical and important achievements from Labour: the setting up of the academies—yes, a Labour invention. It may have been this philosophy that inspired Tony Blair in 2002 to set up the Hackney Learning Trust. This became the birthplace of the academy movement. Luckily enough, I was part of the board that was tasked to transform Hackney education. Some would say that our task was impossible; we were faced with a Labour education authority that totally failed all of its students and parents. Hackney was given the label not only as the worst education district in Britain but the worst in Europe. In those days, boys from an African-Caribbean background were at the bottom of the heap. When I remember the early days, there was joy from the current education authority in handing us the power. Yes, there were some grumblings about what it knew about the new model of academies, but there was a real sense that this was the answer. Our first task was to find an iconic school which was regarded as the worst performing and transform that. We set about closing the then Hackney Downs School and built the fantastic Mossbourne Academy, led by Sir Michael Wilshaw. We were given a 10-year contract. Within two years, Hackney was on its way to moving from the worst place to educate your child to the best. For African-Caribbean boys, the results zoomed to above the national average. How did we do this? It was because of a number of factors that are in danger from this schools Bill. Great school leaders were a key element. Another was the massively high academic expectations of the students. There were also rigorous school improvement methods—no school was allowed to fail Ofsted. We were creating schools of excellence that could go toe to toe with the best of our private schools. For many ethnic-minority students, particularly black students, the context of a traditional, well-disciplined school with high expectations and great leadership—and no evidence of identity politics; that made no difference at all to them—made the difference. For me, the big difference was that we gave schools autonomy on the curriculum, discipline, hiring of staff and allocation of funding. These were key elements which drove that success. One of the things bringing us up into the highest levels of educational outcomes was that drive. The proposal to remove automatic academisation for underperforming schools and replace it with something else is problematic. My concern is that we would probably be going back to those really dark days when schools, particularly in London, were going backwards. I want to share a quote from one of the leaders of City of London Academies Trust. If he were here, he would probably put it as a plea. He says: “I was fortunate to be granted the rare privilege of founding a government-funded state school in Newham, the second most deprived borough in London. Thanks to the freedoms afforded by the academies programme, that school now outperforms many independent and grammar schools. It regularly sends pupils to Oxbridge and Ivy League universities on full scholarships worth £250,000 each. I am by no means alone in this achievement. Across the country, others have used the opportunities of academisation to become beacons of hope in their communities and rank among the highest in national league tables for educational outcomes”. I return to old Ernest Bevin and what he would have loved. He would probably have liked the academy movement and would turn in his grave at some of these new attempts to disrupt what is working for students from poor backgrounds and ethnic minorities. At the heart of some of these changes is the idea that academies are perhaps not working for the majority of the population or special needs students. I think that misses the point. We need to be creative in spreading a model that can work for all pupils, not dismantle and tinker with a great asset for social mobility. That is the key element in this. I end with a quote from Ernest Bevin: “I did not land on the rocks—I was launched from them”. That is the spirit of academies, which enable schools and pupils to do their best and realise the best that they have. In London, we have created a great asset that was, in a sense, birthed by Labour. We carried it on, and we want to ensure that we have something we can be proud of. We should think again when looking at the curriculum to see whether we can find a way of ensuring that those students continue to do their best. We now have schools in London which can reach better results even than Eton. Noble Lords here who taught 20 or 30 years ago would not have dreamed of that. Now we can do it. That has come about through the way we have used academies and that process. I urge the Government not to tinker with their own success.