Neil O'Brien

My right hon. Friend is completely correct. Some Government Members have reflected on this: the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh) said that the proposal to make it compulsory for academies to teach the national curriculum was of particular concern to her, and she is right. Ministers have never explained what they are trying to solve with this change, but the unions like it, so into the Bill it goes. We have tabled further amendments on qualified teacher status. The Government are getting rid of academy freedoms over recruitment and the freedom to employ non-QTS teachers. Sir Martyn Oliver from Ofsted gave us a good example of how these freedoms are used. He said: “In the past, I have brought in professional sportspeople to teach alongside PE teachers, and they have run sessions. Because I was in Wakefield, it was rugby league: I had rugby league professionals working with about a quarter of the schools in Wakefield at one point..”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 49, Q108.] Brilliant. The Government’s own impact assessment to the Bill says of this change: “some schools may struggle to find the teachers that they need.” Rebecca Leek from the Suffolk Association of Headteachers gave a good example of how this freedom is currently used. She said that she urgently needed an early years lead, and was able to take on someone who had run an outstanding nursery, even though they did not have QTS and nor did they plan to get it. But in future, she would not be able to do that. Former headteacher David Thomas told us in Committee that this freedom allows them to recruit people who may be at the end of their career, who have a huge amount of experience that they want to give back to the community. They do not want to go through the bureaucracy, and if we put up barriers, they will not end up in the state sector. Ministers have not produced a single shred of evidence that teachers without QTS are of lower quality, or for why they cannot be a good supplement to QTS teachers. Ministers have never explained why they, sitting in Whitehall, think that they are in a better position to judge who to employ than headteachers on the frontline. Ministers claim that is vital, but a footnote at the bottom of page 24 of the impact assessment reveals it would, in fact, not be applied to lots of different types of schools, including 14 to 19 academies, 16 to 19 academies, university technical colleges, studio schools, further education colleges and non-maintained school early years settings. It is supposedly vital but is not being applied to loads of different types of school. Yet Ministers are imposing it on loads of other schools. As the former head of Ofsted pointed out this week, taking that flexibility out of the system feels like a retrograde step, and she is right. Under the Bill, Whitehall micromanagement is back, too. Clause 44 allows the Secretary of State to direct academy schools to do pretty much anything. The Confederation of School Trusts is really worried about that and has suggested a way to bring such unlimited power under some limits. They say: “We do have concerns about the power to direct…It is too broad and it is too wide. We would like to work with Government to restrict it to create some greater limits. Those limits should be around statutory duties…statutory guidance, the provisions in the funding agreement”.––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 81, Q169.] Yet Ministers voted down our amendment to put that suggestion from schools into effect. Likewise, as we discovered in Committee, clause 34(5)(2) will require academy schools to get permission from the Secretary of State to make any change to the buildings they occupy. That includes any change to “(ii) either part of the building, or (iii) permanent outdoor structure”. Literally, if an academy school wants to build a bike shed, it will have to go to the Secretary of State. It was clear in Committee that Ministers had not even realised that that would apply to academy schools. Those are just two of the many, many centralising measures in the Bill. While freedom is being taken away on the one hand, accountability on the other side of the ledger is being watered down too. The Government already got rid of single-word Ofsted judgments and replaced them with something much more complicated that does not seem to have left anybody very happy. Then, clause 45 ends the automatic conversion of failing schools into academies. The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden has said, “The current system, in which failing schools automatically become academies, provides clarity and de-politicisation, and ensures a rapid transition. I fear that making that process discretionary would result in a large increase in judicial reviews, pressure on councils and prolonged uncertainty, which is in nobody’s interests.”—[Official Report, 8 January 2025; Vol. 759, c. 902.] She also said, “the DfE will find itself mired in the high court in judicial review. When we tried to transfer our first failing school to a Harris academy we spent two years in court, and children…don’t have that time to waste.” She is so right. Rob Tarn, the chief executive of the Northern Education Trust, has made the same point: “If there’s no longer a known, blanket reality…There is a risk that, where it’s been determined a school needs to join a strong trust, it will take much longer and we will go back to the early days of academisation when people went to court.” The Children’s Commissioner makes that point too. She says that she is “deeply concerned that we are legislating against the things we know work in schools, and that we risk children spending longer in failing schools by slowing down the pace of school improvement.” She is right. The Confederation of School Trusts has said that the current system offers struggling schools “clarity” as they “will join a trust, and that process can begin immediately”. In contrast, they warn, “We are not clear on how commissioning part-time support through the RISE arrangements makes that any easier.” The former national schools commissioner, Sir David Carter, has warned that the “arguments and legal actions that will arise if a school in Cumbria is told to join a trust while a school in Cornwall just gets arm’s length support will only add delay to delivering a fairer and better offer to children.” Worse still is clause 51, which attacks school choice and the freedom to go to good schools. It was in 1987 that Mrs Thatcher announced that “we will allow popular schools to take in as many children as space will permit. And this will stop local authorities from putting artificially low limits on entry to good schools.” That agenda became known as local management of schools and of it the former Labour Minister Lord Adonis wrote, “Local Management of Schools was an unalloyed and almost immediate success…school budgets under LMS were based largely on pupil numbers, so parental choice came to matter as never before.” In contrast, the Government’s impact assessment of the Bill says: “We want the local authority to have more influence over the PANs for schools in their area”. It goes on to say: “It could also limit the ability of popular schools to grow…If a school is required to lower their PAN, some pupils who would have otherwise been admitted will be unable to attend the school. This will negatively impact on parental preference”. Michael Johnson, the leader of the very successful Chulmleigh trust, warns that that “could be disastrous for successful schools…The Government are not better placed than parents to decide which school a child attends.”