Baroness Barran (Con)

My Lords, we all expected a very high-quality debate this afternoon, and we certainly had the deep experience of many years reflected in your Lordships’ speeches. I thank my noble friend Lady Evans of Bowes Park for securing the debate and for her work in this field. As my noble friend said, we have had some transformational successes over the past 25 years, some brilliant innovations and, of course, some things that did not work, which either have been or should be learnt from and addressed—I would argue that the vast majority have been. As we have heard, this debate is taking place against the backdrop of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which was considered in Committee in the other place today. I am not going to dwell on that Bill today—the Minister smiles—as there will be time for that when it comes to this place. However, I wanted to share with the Minister some genuine reflections that I hope she and her ministerial colleagues might consider, with an aim of looking to the challenges of the future in our schools system. I shall start with the variation in results across our schools, both maintained and academies. In the same local authority, SATs results at the end of primary vary between individual schools by at least 20 percentage points in pretty much every local authority area, and in the most extreme cases by 40 percentage points. Some of this can be explained by differences in deprivation, but even adjusting for this there are huge differences in any given area. We know what we need to drive this down and narrow the gap, but I think that the job for the DfE is to try to unlock more of that best practice in our schools. We tried to do some of this work when I was in government, and I know that my predecessors did the same. At the risk of losing the good will of the House, I will quote from the work we did on high-quality trust descriptions—I think officials in the Box may be running for the door at this point. When I joined the department, I asked colleagues what our definition of a good trust was. There was a long pause and the answer came, “This is not a Soviet model, Minister”. Of course it is not a Soviet model, but we should be clear what we think good looks like, so we worked with a number of the most successful trusts in the country and the Association of Directors of Children’s Services and built on that best practice that delivers for disadvantaged children and those with special educational needs. So, here goes. I appreciate that prose crafted by a committee is rarely elegant, but I will try to be brief. The first principle is that trusts should focus on a high-quality and inclusive education. They should create a culture in all schools that is motivating and ambitious for all, including disadvantaged children and children with SEND, so students can achieve their full potential. The second is a focus on school improvement, not just in cases of intervention but in all schools. The third relates to the workforce. The highest-performing trusts create a high-performing working culture for all their staff that promotes collaboration, aspiration and support, uses the flexibilities of the trust structure to create opportunities for staff, recognises the critical value of high-quality teaching and champions the profession. We then went on to finance, looking at the effective use of resources, and finally, governance and leadership, where the trust’s strategy should be grounded in the needs of its schools, the communities they serve and the wider educational system. I was struck when I reread those—I used to know them off by heart—by how important a strong culture is in delivering great outcomes for our children. That is true in a maintained school and in our trust schools. So, since this is a schools debate, the first exam question for the Government is how they can encourage strong, positive cultures in our schools. Because, if we get that right, as trusts such as those we have heard about this afternoon have done at scale and in our most deprived communities, everything else follows. I really urge the Minister to press the schools she speaks to, to talk about what makes or breaks their culture. The second exam question is how we build resilient schools for the future. All of us have met individual head teachers who are extraordinary and, luckily, those head teachers continue to exist. But we need resilience; we need to be confident that we have the capacity across the system to maintain the highest standards for every child, even when those head teachers retire. My noble friend Lord Nash was the first person who said to me that we really underestimate the potential benefits for the workforce if a trust is able to offer its staff a more conventional career path than is typically the case. We need resilience in turnaround capacity, which, with a couple of specific exceptions, sits almost entirely in the trust sector. We also need resilience in future leadership, which is why we created the trust CEO leadership programme, which I think saw literally the single highest return on money that any Government could spend to drive good standards in our trusts. I hope the Minister can reassure me that it will be continued. The third and final question that needs careful thought is that of choice for parents. The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, was too modest to say that Mossbourne Academy is 11 times oversubscribed. Parents are voting with their feet. We need choice for parents about the school that is best for their child, because we are not having a Soviet model in this country, and choice for teachers about where they want to teach. I understand very well the fiscal pressures if a school is not full, but there is a real risk that the Government’s narrative of consistency removes that choice and that inadvertently we do end up with a Soviet model that will be good for no one—not for children, not for staff and not for parents. There is so much more that I could cover, including my concerns about the pressure that the Government risk placing on our schools with the combination of changes to Ofsted and to the curriculum, and now the changes proposed in the Bill. Honestly, if I was in the Minister’s shoes, time spent reflecting on what we have learned from academies and free schools and what the best maintained schools and trusts do in practice—and how to encourage a culture that drives those outcomes—would be time well spent. Academies and free schools do not have a monopoly on good ideas, but they have had the flexibility to implement them and room to innovate. I urge the Minister, along with other noble Lords, to think on how we can offer those flexibilities to every school, not just trusts and academies. A school leader said to me this week that tone matters and that the tone he was hearing did not trust the sector, or our school and trust leaders, but rather focused on consistency. It genuinely does not help that such hostile comments about academies were made by the Prime Minister and across the Cabinet during the Labour election campaign. I know the Government say they want to keep schools innovating, but that is not what they are hearing. All schools need to hear that they are trusted to have the flexibility to do the right thing for the children in their care. If we want to recruit teachers and allow our schools to flourish, we have to focus on that. As the brilliant head teacher of Harris Westminster wrote recently on X, in a long thread that I commend to your Lordships about conditions for teachers, “Let’s talk less about making it easy and more about making it meaningful. That is why teachers go to work in the morning”. Yesterday I was with the wonderful Denton Community College just outside Manchester, which has recently become part of the Northern Education Trust. The pupils are living proof of the difference that a great trust can make to a school and its community. I am really worried that, as many noble Lords have said, we will lose the progress that we have seen in recent years. My simple message to the Minister is: let us build on what is working, spread the freedoms that have driven such improvements in performance for our children across all our schools and think again about the Bill.