Graham: It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden), who has done us and the nation a great service with the clarity of his speech. The Labour party is often accused of working to serve the producer interest rather than the consumer interest, looking after the needs of the trade unions and not those of the ordinary citizen or, in this case, the child. But rarely does any Labour Member make it quite so explicit as the hon. Gentleman just did, with a total betrayal of the child and a total focus on the needs of the professional, their interests, their pay, their disparities and their conditions. There was nothing about the child, nothing about the standards of education. Never have I seen a Labour Member speak up so honestly about what this Bill is really about. We should be enormously grateful to him for doing that, and for doing it so clearly—and in not many words.
This Bill contains 38 policy proposals all linked by a troubling theme: the misguided notion that the bureaucrat knows best. In advocating for new schools to be opened and controlled by local authorities, the Government choose to ignore the evidence that competition and innovation are what drive up standards, and instead they consolidate power in the hands of bureaucrats.
This Bill also undermines the rights of parents to determine what is best for their children’s education, whether it be attending school or being home educated. Far from empowering schools, which until the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr came along Ministers have tried to pretend this Bill does, the Bill imposes a centralised, outdated version of education that stifles choice and which will reverse 14 years of progress.
Actually, it is more than that. It is 25 years of progress because, as I referred to earlier in an intervention, it was 2000 when the then Labour Prime Minister announced the academies programme, and I think it was in 2002 that the first city academy opened. That is a quarter of a century of progress in which time demonstrably, by every known measure of performance, schools in Wales have fallen behind schools in England practising these supposedly appalling academy policies which have led to such an improvement for the child. The hon. Gentleman’s speech was quite remarkable. but I would hope there are Members opposite who are not so tied up in their trade union engagement—their producer-interest capture—that they can instead focus on the interests of young people.
When my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and I and Members opposite served on the Education Committee which I chaired, we were horribly aware that the policies that we were helping to scrutinise and influence would have an impact on lives for decades to come. Education policies are in many ways more fundamental than the economic policies pursued by a Government at any time, which are at least more easily altered. But if we close down the opportunities for disadvantaged children, that will be having a negative impact on them, on their families, on their community and indeed on this country for decades to come. That is why this is such a bad idea.
Sarah Smith MP (Lab, Hyndburn): Under the current system, a third of our children leave school without the basic qualifications to succeed in life, so does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that that shows that the current system is failing and needs change? Furthermore, in the communities with the most disadvantaged—I mean those outside of London—the academisation approach has not made an impact and has not turned around the life chances of children growing up in the most deprived wards. I have worked in those communities and with those schools and seen the impact of trust after trust failing those children. I will not accept that. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that that is unacceptable and that we have to move forward from this day to make greater improvements to make sure that the most disadvantaged students genuinely get the opportunities they deserve?
Graham: I thank the hon. Lady for her speech, if not intervention, and I certainly applaud her passion for the interests of children, disadvantaged children in particular, and her rage at failings in the system and her desire to see improvements, which might need to be radical, but we have not heard how the mechanics of the changes proposed in this Bill will raise standards. They will in fact dismantle them. The hon. Lady’s intervention comes in the context of my following the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr talking about Wales, and it is clear that the system being created by this Bill is much more akin to that in Wales, exactly as the hon. Gentleman so honestly said. Does the hon. Lady suggest that deprived children in Wales have better outcomes than they do in England? [Interruption.] She moved to stand up but then thought better of it, which was wise because she knows that the situation in Wales—which, as the hon. Gentleman said, is exactly what this Bill is trying to create—is infinitely worse than it is in England. Whatever the failings of the system in England, it is demonstrably better than it was 15 or indeed 25 years ago, and it is demonstrably better than it is in Wales.
Sarah Smith MP (Lab, Hyndburn): I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way once again. In my most recent conversation with a group of my headteachers, not one of them raised concerns about this section of the Bill and the reforms. For them, the question of academisation and how the amendments have been made will not limit them in their capabilities to do the best for their children. They are concerned about issues that will come forward as a result of the Bill around SEND, which have been mentioned by hon. Members from across the House, and other things that are restricting them from making progress.
Graham: I thank the hon. Lady, but she again could not explain anything about the Bill. Her passion for improvement is great—we would all applaud that—but her linkage to anything in the Bill that will improve matters was distinctly missing.
Many people, including Sir Jon Coles of United Learning, have criticised the proposals in the Bill; he said they will effectively destroy the academy system. I could not tell where the hon. Lady is on that, but the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr spoke with great clarity. Where once Labour promised us “education, education, education,” it now promises us bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy. Tragically, it is our children who will bear the consequences.
The outcomes of the last Labour Government serve as a stark warning of where the Bill will lead. In 2010, notwithstanding the nascent academy movement, we inherited a country where our children ranked 27th globally in reading. We spent more on education than Germany, yet achieved results that lagged behind nations like Poland. By the time we left office, England’s students were ranked as the best readers in the western world. In 2010, just 68% of schools were rated good or outstanding, but today that figure is 90%. These dramatic improvements did not happen by accident; they are the result of a system that puts freedom, competition and accountability at the centre of education, and equally importantly leaves mediocrity with nowhere to hide.
If the Conservative education reforms were great, it was only because we were standing on the shoulders of giants.
“Academies were introduced in the areas of greatest challenge, harnessing the drive of external sponsors and strong school leadership to bring new hope to our most disadvantaged areas.”
Not my words, but those of the longest serving Labour Prime Minister, Sir Tony Blair, in 2005. To his credit, he recognised the failings of our country’s overly centralised education system and started the reforms that paved the way to make our schools great again.
From tiny acorns do mighty oaks grow, and that is what the Conservatives delivered. In 14 years, the number of children attending academies skyrocketed from 192,000 to 4.9 million. That was transformative for pupils across England, particularly those living in deprived communities. One example is Harris Academy Battersea. Formerly known as Battersea Park school, it was considered inadequate before joining the Harris Federation in 2014. At that time, 68% of students achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C. By 2017, that figure had risen to 83%, and in 2018 Ofsted rated the academy as outstanding, noting that teachers were proud to work there, morale was high, and pupils of all abilities made very strong progress. By putting a strong emphasis on cultural enrichment and academic excellence, the life chances of the working-class pupils that academies predominantly teach and who Labour claims to represent were transformed.
I am pleased that the Government have seen sense on one issue—I congratulate the Minister on that—and have amended the Bill to stop the extension of national pay rules to academies, and only require academies to have due regard to the school teachers’ pay and conditions document, rather than impose a ceiling on pay. That would have undermined the remarkable progress made by these institutions in raising standards, particularly for disadvantaged pupils.
New clause 38 goes one step further, making the pay set out in the school teachers’ pay and conditions document a floor and extending freedoms over pay and conditions to maintained schools. One of the strengths of academies is their ability to respond flexibly to local needs, including offering competitive salaries to attract and retain the best teachers in challenging areas. Limiting that flexibility would ignore the realities of teacher recruitment and retention, especially in communities where the need for high-quality education is greatest, because people respond to incentives. If academies cannot pay the best maths or physics teacher more, the children who would benefit from their skills the most will be left behind.
Building on the need for greater freedom and flexibility to raise standards, we introduced free schools, an initiative that helped to spark a renaissance in English education. Walking hand in hand with its union paymasters, who decry those schools as unaccountable and underfunded, as we heard set out in the previous speech, Labour wants these engines of social mobility to be destroyed. Its proposal to allow local authorities to open new schools, along with its planned review of the free school programme, would shift control of our children’s education away from communities and teachers and back into the hands of bureaucrats.
Unfortunately, the process has already started. In October, Ministers paused plans to open 44 new state schools in England, putting parents who planned to send their children there in limbo, so I am pleased to support new clause 39, which would reverse that pause and allow those schools to open as planned. Let us be clear: in 2024, 21% of GCSE entries from free schools achieved a grade 7 or above compared with 19% in comprehensive schools. Labour may not want to face the facts, but the reality is that sometimes the bureaucrat and the trade union shop steward do not know best. The Secretary of State is Labour’s Miss Trunchbull, putting our teachers in the chokey to satisfy her union paymasters.
This Government are so certain in their belief that they know best that they will not even allow parents the freedom to educate their own children without state interference. Buried within this Bill is a new legal requirement for local authorities to maintain a register of children not in school—a policy that I recognise was in the Conservative party’s manifesto, but which has the potential to be not just unhelpful, but actively harmful to children.
Our country has long upheld the primacy of parents, not the state, in determining the best education for their children, and this proposal seeks to undermine that fundamental covenant. That is why I support amendment 200, which would require a local authority to submit a statement of reasons when it does not agree for a child to be taken out of school to be home educated. It should at least have to account for itself. Compulsory enrolment could have serious consequences, as families may simply refuse to comply and potentially disengage from state involvement altogether because of this overreach, leading to negative unintended consequences that could impact on the child’s wellbeing.
The state thinks that it has a divine right to infringe on every aspect of the child’s life—or, at least, this Government do. They want to know what home-educated children do at the weekends and during the holidays. If that information is not required for children who attend mainstream schools, what is the justification for demanding it for children who are home-schooled? Why, in response to my repeated interventions, could the Minister not provide any reassurance that some sensible and proportionate rules would be put in place? I therefore support amendment 197, which would remove that requirement.
It was John Maynard Keynes who said: “When the facts change, I change my mind”.
In the same spirit, I ask colleagues across the Chamber what they do. The evidence is clear: freedom and flexibility in education drive up standards and deliver better outcomes for children. In government, we followed the evidence and built on the previous Labour Government’s body of work, and the results speak for themselves. England now has the best readers in the western world, a record number of schools rated “good” or “outstanding” and greater opportunities for working-class children, albeit never at the level we would like, which is why that needs to be built on, not knocked to the ground.
As proud as I am of our record, this debate is not about party politics. At its heart, it is about ensuring that every child, regardless of their background, has access to the highest-quality education that we can provide. I urge the Secretary of State to follow the evidence, not ideology. I will vote against this Bill, but given the Government’s majority, we accept that however misguided these policies are, they will probably pass. All I can do is finish by appealing to colleagues across the Chamber to show courage, stand up for the poorest in society, stop the wreckers and support our amendments this evening when we come to vote.
Graham's speech in Parliament on 18th March 2025. Text taken from Hansard.
