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Schools: Statutory Instruments (Merits Committee Report)

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, and his committee for an excellent and illuminating report. As the noble Lord said in introducing the debate, there has been a great deal of concentration on bureaucracy in the private sector and not nearly enough emphasis on the impact of bureaucracy on the public sector and its effects on public sector efficiency. This report begins to open that door and gives us pause for thought. I declare an interest as the governor of a two-form entry primary school in Guildford. It is not a very small rural primary school, but it is a smallish school. I am also on the governing board of Guildford College of Further and Higher Education, and a member of what is called the "local council" of Guildford High School, a private independent school for girls. In these different roles, I see different aspects of regulation. I was struck by two quotations from the evidence given to the committee. First, Clarissa Williams, president of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: ""Governors, as you know, have huge responsibilities in our schools and are ultimately responsible with the head"." I was also struck by the evidence from the National Governors Association. It struck home because in one form or another I have been a governor of schools since the 1970s. It said: ""Nor do we think it is right that the 350,000 volunteers who, as governors, provide schools with crucial support and communities with local lines of accountability for the work of their schools, put themselves at risk of penalty (albeit as a governing body rather than as individuals) for non-compliance with such an extensive and ever-growing raft of secondary legislation. Keeping governors abreast of change in schools is a major piece of work for school leaders and administrators. A major challenge facing school staff and governors is to identify what is actually required as legislation from what is offered as optional advice and guidance"." I echo that. As a governor, you sit there and the head says, "We need to implement this piece of legislation". As with many county councils, Surrey County Council has an advice service that tells us, and we governors get a rather formidable list of all the things that we have to do. Frequently, however, the head—or the head and the chair, or the chair of a particular committee—must translate that statutory guidance into a policy, such as a policy for behaviour or a policy for diversity. There are all kinds of policies. That takes time. Not only do you have to get your mind around what the legislation is asking of you and what the guidance tells you that you need to do, but you must then carry that forward, develop a policy and write it down in understandable terms, which your governing board then goes through and agrees. Then it becomes the school policy on books, or whatever. That has to be reviewed every year. All these policies come back to us regularly, and we look at them. It takes a lot of time for a head teacher to do this. I have been in this House for almost 11 years, for 10 of which I have been a Front Bench education spokesman. During that time 12 fairly major education Bills have gone through, with considerable secondary legislation attached to most of them. They were big Bills. The first Act on which I cut my teeth, so to speak, was the Learning and Skills Act 2000. We are now undoing it, doing it all up again and creating four quangos instead of one. I shall discuss later how many bits of secondary legislation seem to be coming from that. We also had the Children Act 2004. One of the features of that Act was that we had to create plans for children. You had to bring together all the partners so that you got social services, PCTs, schools and directors of children’s trusts, which we were trying to create, sitting there making five-year and annual plans. Each plan has to be put together, which involves a great deal of top management time. We are paying directors of social services or directors of children’s trusts somewhere in the region of £100,000 to £120,000 a year—huge amounts of money. Even the head of a small primary school now earns £50,000. Heads of large secondary schools often earn up to £100,000. We should think of the cost in terms of time spent sitting round a table developing plans which then have to be reviewed each year and translated into five-year plans to implement all this legislation. That involves a huge amount of time. We had difficulty finding a head for my primary school. Last year the head was off for a couple of months due to stress. Why was that? I had been receiving e-mails that she put together at midnight because that was the only time she could catch up. She runs an active school with about 250 kids serving one of the more disadvantaged parts of Guildford. She is constantly "fire fighting" incidents arising in the school. The only time she gets to consider statutory requirements and to write the plans and the school’s policies is between eight o’clock at night and midnight. Therefore, it is not surprising that that causes stress or that it is difficult to recruit new head teachers, as the right reverend Prelate said. The requirements we are discussing are a huge burden. How have they grown up? As noble Lords can tell, I have been involved in the education world for some time. In the 1950s and 1960s education was not generally centralised but organised through local education authorities. Some were very good. The old LCC, which became the Inner London Education Authority, had a reputation for excellence, as did the North Riding of Yorkshire and some other local education authorities. However, others were not much good. It was very much a postcode lottery whether you ended up with a good authority or a bad one. Gradually through the 1960s one saw a certain amount of legislation coming in that tried to create a level playing field—in modern parlance—between local authorities. However, an area that nobody ever delved into was known as the secret garden of the curriculum. That was the domain of the class teacher. In the 1960s there were things that parents such as myself could talk to the head teacher about but you never suggested to the class teacher that they should teach something different because it was up to him or her to decide that matter. A good head would always know what class teachers did as it was the head’s responsibility to find out what was going on but there was no national curriculum. There were often guidelines from local authorities about what they expected but we did not get the national curriculum until 1989. To my mind the turning point was the great debate on education that Callaghan instigated in 1978. He did so because it became clear that we had a superb elitist education system. At the top level we were doing quite well but down below we were just not performing. We had fewer young people going to university than our competitors and far too many of our young people were leaving school with no qualifications whatever, and far too few with intermediate level qualifications. We basically needed to up our game if we were to remain competitive in the new world opening up at that time. With the new Government of Mrs Thatcher—now the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher—in the 1980s, the push was for decentralisation and to get the schools off the back of the local authority. The problem so far as that Conservative Administration were concerned was the local authorities. We saw the introduction of the concept of the grant-maintained school and the city technology colleges, which were the predecessor of academies. On these Benches, we have always tended to defend local authorities but we have argued strongly, as the committee does, that if freedom for academies is so good why cannot all schools have it? When the Government started introducing specialist schools, we argued that every school should be a specialist school. Similarly, we argued that we wanted to return some freedom to the profession. It is necessary to do that. However, we have problems with academies. The noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, is right that the funding agreements are tight but commercial in confidence. We do not know them. There is not public accountability. We see education as serving communities, so schools need to co-operate with each other. That is now fashionable; we are pleased to see that. However, you need a broad strategic steer from local authorities; we see local authorities as still having a role in that sense. We went on to the national curriculum in 1989 and it has been downhill all the way from then. The opposition Benches make much of the fact that they want to devolve responsibility down to schools, but in their next breath you hear them saying, "But you much teach phonics with synthetic phonics". You cannot have both; you cannot devolve responsibility but lay down that you must teach phonics through synthetic phonics. There is obviously a line to be drawn there. We have seen the raft of tests and the like that come through once you begin. One feature mentioned in the report is the new financial management standards. In my little primary school, fortunately one governor came from business and we had a good bursar, and the two of them spent three months trying to translate those into the new standards. We meet the standards, but it was an enormous burden on them. Now you have the direct passporting of money to schools, central government lay down how much should be spent per pupil, what is to be taught to different age groups, the numbers of staff and support staff needed, what sort of training the staff have, how after-school activities shall be conducted, and all kinds of things like that. What is the overall impact? I spoke to the head of one of our large comprehensive schools, who happens to sit on the governing body of the further education college, just after the report came out. I gave him a copy and said, "You might be interested in this. As a matter of interest, can you do me a back-of-an-envelope calculation of how much of your time is taken up by translating all the stuff for the school?". The e-mail I got back from him stated: ""I have spoken to some of my Headteacher colleagues about the amount of time they spend on dealing with government directives, legislation, advice and guidance and they agree with me that it is now approximately 50 per cent of our daily working"." Everybody knows that heads of schools are vital. If you get a good school, it is usually because you have a good head and a good little team around them. The time that the head can give to leading that school is vital. We do not want them having to sit with wet towels round their heads trying to interpret legislation; we want them to be leading their schools. Education is leading people. It is vital that those heads can give their time to leading people, and that we do not turn them off. I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, said at the end of his speech. Last week, I attended the presentation of the final report of the Nuffield study that has been going on for the past five years. It was asking: what sort of curriculum do we need for our 14 to 19 year-olds? It ranges widely, but its conclusion on policy and policymaking was rather interesting and picks up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin. Perhaps I may read noble Lords a short paragraph, which states: ""We have argued that ‘fast politics’ and policy busyness is essentially manipulative, in that it tends to exclude, frustrate and demoralise social partners whose efforts are needed to shape and deliver effective educational reform. There is, therefore, a strong case for a new style of politics from the perspective of both equity and efficiency. There is a role for slower politics based on a regard for professional experience and judgement and the perspectives of different social partners"." That brings me back to my head teacher. If you are to motivate and carry people like that along with you, it is vital that you do not frustrate them with too many initiatives. If we look across the "initiativitis" that we have suffered in our public services over the past 10 or 20 years, we should have cause to reflect. This committee’s report is very good in terms of starting that reflection.