Neil O'Brien MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  And on whether all the costs will be met.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  For all the reasons we have just rehearsed, I am keen to push amendment 88. Ministers may well vote against it today, but I hope that later on in the process they will listen to what school leaders are saying. There is a group of amendments, but I intend to push only amendment 88 to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw amendment 78. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. Amendment proposed : 88, clause 43, page 102, line 37, leave out from “directions” to the end of line 39 and insert “as are necessary to secure compliance with statutory duties, the requirements of the Funding Agreement, or charity law.”— (Neil O’Brien.) This amendment would limit the Secretary of State’s power of direction should an Academy breach, or act unreasonably in respect of, the performance of a relevant duty. Question put , That the amendment be made.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  The Bill ends the automatic conversion of failing schools into academies. That measure was put in place because it became apparent that the most effective way to turn around failing schools at scale was to put them under new management. It also became apparent that when there was a question of discretion and choice, that opened the way for bitterly divisive local campaigns and time-consuming legal action. The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh) said on Second Reading: “I know from bitter personal experience that any change to the status of a school can become highly political. 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 on the “Today” programme that the end of the academies order will mean that “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.” 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.”

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  How many will go through academisation?

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is generous of the Minister to give way. To address the point that I raised in my speech, does she agree that the principle of a floor but no ceiling should apply to school support staff as well as teachers?

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I am keen to get a piece of information that the Government have not properly put into the public domain. They clearly know how many schools they expect to go through academisation in the next three years. What is the number? That is all I am looking for.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is not nonsense. It is your legislation. Sorry, let me correct the record: it is nonsense. This is nonsense legislation that we are being asked to pass. Now we come on to something really serious that school leaders are warning us about, which is another completely out-of-control piece of centralisation. As drafted, the Bill will create the power for the Secretary of State to direct academy schools to do pretty much anything. Leora Cruddas, of the Confederation of School Trusts, has suggested a way to bring the currently unlimited clause 43 power under some limits: “We do have concerns about the power to direct. We think it is too wide at the moment. We accept that the policy intention is one of equivalence in relation to maintained schools, but maintained schools are different legal structures from academy trusts, and we do not think that the clauses in the Bill properly reflect that. It is too broad and it is too wide. We would like to work with the Government to restrict it to create greater limits. Those limits should be around statutory duties on academy trusts, statutory guidance, the provisions in the funding agreement and charity law.” That is precisely what Opposition amendments 88 and 89 would do. We are not against Ministers having a new power to intervene to get schools to fulfil their duties, but that is different; it is narrower than the current drafting. It may just be that when officials have gone away and tried to turn Ministers’ intentions into legislation, they have gone too far. David Thomas, a successful headteacher, has made the same point: “If the purpose is, as it says in the explanatory notes, to issue a direction to academy trusts to comply with their duty, that feels like a perfectly reasonable thing to be able to do. The Bill, as drafted, gives the Secretary of State the ability to ‘give the proprietor such directions as the Secretary of State considers appropriate’. I do not think it is appropriate for a Secretary of State to give an operational action plan to a school, but I think it is perfectly reasonable for a Secretary of State to tell a school that it needs to follow its duty. I think there is just a mismatch between the stated intention and the drafting, and I would correct that mismatch.” I am not surprised that school leaders are concerned. The Government’s own policy summary notes make it clear that they intend to use the power to reach into schools and intervene on pretty much anything that the Department wants. They give the following example: “The academy trust has failed to deal with a parental complaint and has not followed its complaints process. Therefore, the issue may be escalated to the Department to consider. In such cases, the Secretary of State could issue a compliance direction to ensure the trust addresses the complaint appropriately”. It is crystal clear that the Government are taking a power to direct any academy school, without limit, on any issue they see fit. That is such a big move away from the whole idea of the academies programme—the idea of independent state-funded schools. There are two ways of fixing the problem. Amendments 78 and 79 would simply delete the bit that is excessive, proposed new section 497C(1)(b); amendment 77 would require a statement to be made when the powers are used. Alternatively, amendments 88 and 89—this is, broadly speaking, the suggestion made by the Confederation of School Trusts—would be more incremental reforms. They would retain the text about direction but, in two relevant places, would limit it to “compliance with statutory duties, the requirements of the Funding Agreement, or charity law.” The impact assessment for the Bill says that if schools do not comply with the new orders from the Secretary of State, the trustees may be found to be in contempt of court. This charge may come with punishments including fines. It is also possible that, in very extreme cases, individuals found in contempt of court could face a custodial sentence. Helpfully, the assessment says that that should be very rare, but what a long way we have travelled from the whole idea of academies as independent state schools! That has been the theme as we have gone through the Bill: again and again, we are moving away from a culture of entrepreneurialism, can-do spirit and freedom—going out there and solving problems and making the magic happen for kids—and towards a compliance culture that is all about dealing with what the Secretary of State wants and clicking our heels when they say jump. Since 1988, we have been on a cross-party journey away from micromanagement and towards greater autonomy for schools.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I did not say that.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Sir Christopher, you are a superb Chairman. You are also a very kind and thoughtful one for those of us who are not quick enough on the draw. I will not make detailed comments here. We are abolishing something that was set up in the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, and it struck me that there are related ideas that the Minister might want to pick up rather than abolish. As well as the education action zones that we are discussing here, the Blair Government had another go at that same idea in the 2002 Act and enabled huge amounts of school freedom in particular areas to bring about improvement. Although lots of work was done on that legislation and it was passed through the House, and lots of work was done to implement it, there was a change of Secretary of State and, strangely, the powers, although they are on the statute book, were never commenced. We, as the Opposition, do not have the power to commence them, but I would recommend to the Minister that she does. I think there is a great opportunity here to get some innovation into the system. New clause 67, when we come to it, may look familiar to Ministers and to DFE lawyers, because I am afraid we have stolen it—it is a straightforward rip-off of 2002 Blair era reforms. Even though in this clause abolishes a bit of Blair-era reform, we encourage Ministers to get back on the reforming horse and to return to that spirit. We hope when we come to that new clause that Ministers will spot what we are trying to do.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move amendment 78, in clause 43, page 102, leave out lines 35 and 36.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Well, she said the concerns are hysterical. They are not my concerns; they are concerns that have been put to this Committee by incredibly respected school leaders. The Minister says that only a few of them are using these freedoms. Well, if it is only a few, why should they not have the freedom to do what they know works? Why do Ministers think they know better? Let me just ask two specific questions. Will UTCs have to follow the curriculum as well, and will all the costs that fall on schools from this measure be met? I ask those questions now, because Ministers may want to get the answers from the Box.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way?

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move amendment 80, in clause 44, page 103, leave out from line 25 to line 8 on page 104 and insert— “(a) in subsection (A1), after ‘measures)’ insert ‘unless the Secretary of State determines that no suitable sponsor is available’; (b) after subsection (A1) insert— ‘(A2) Where the Secretary of State determines that no suitable sponsor is available, the Secretary of State must, within 14 days, publish a plan to secure appropriate governance and leadership of the school and to secure its rapid improvement. (A3) A plan published under subsection (A2) must include— (a) the parties with responsibility for the school and its improvement; (b) the parties who will take action to improve provision in the school; (c) the resources that will be provided to the relevant parties, including who will provide the resources and when the resources will be provided; and (d) the intended outcomes of the plan, with the relevant timetables for the outcomes. (A4) The Secretary of State must report annually to Parliament on— (a) the number of times the Secretary of State has published a plan under subsection (A2); (b) the resources which have been provided as part of any plans; and (c) the outcomes of any plans.’”

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I will be quite brief. Clauses 47 to 50 are all of a piece, though it is the last of them, clause 50, that we have the greatest concerns about. In the interest of time, I will reserve my comments on the other clauses until later. On clause 47, I just want to note my concerns that a rather vaguely defined duty to co-operate should not be abused by local authorities, and that a school’s failure to co-operate to the satisfaction of the local authority should not be used as a trigger for some of the rather alarming powers in clause 40. I just mark my concerns on this one, particularly about the vagueness of the duty to co-operate. I will return to more specific concerns on later clauses.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  This is a very centralising Bill. We have already talked about what PE kit people should be wearing at school; we have talked about whether schools will now have to apply to the Secretary of State to put up a bike rack. [ Laughter. ] Ministers laugh, but it is serious. They agreed to a clause just this morning that has that effect.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  We have been on quite a journey on this clause. At the Education Committee on 15 January, the Secretary of State said that critics of the Bill were confused. She said: “It has become clear to me that there has been some confusion and some worry about what I have said in this area, so today I want to be absolutely clear that all schools will have full flexibility to innovate with a floor and no ceiling on what that means.” The fact that, subsequent to that, we have pages and pages of Government amendments to their own Bill suggests pretty powerfully that it was not school leaders and critics of the Bill who were confused. This is a very significant measure. The impact assessment notes that an Employer Link survey conducted in 2021 found that over 28% of employers varied in some way from the school teachers’ pay and conditions document. Freedoms have been quite widely used. As Sir Jon Coles said in evidence to this Committee, just because people are using the freedoms does not necessarily mean that they know they are using them. Some of the innovations are great—they are things we all want for our teachers and schools. For example, United Learning, Jon Coles’s trust, was paying 6.5% on top of the national pay and conditions to retain good people. Dixons was innovating with a really interesting nine-day fortnight, so that teachers in really tough areas got more preparation time. This is really powerful innovation that we do not want to take away. The Secretary of State called for a floor not a ceiling and said that she wanted “that innovation and flexibility to be available to all schools regardless of type.” We think that is a good principle and we agree about extending it to all schools. That is why our new clause 7 would extend freedoms over pay and conditions to local authority maintained schools as well. Given that the Government said previously that it would be good to have the same freedoms for everybody, we assume that they will accept the new clause so that we can have the floor not a ceiling for everybody, not just academies. If a floor not a ceiling is right for teachers, surely it is right in principle for the other half of the schools workforce. Surely, school support staff—actually, they are the majority of the workforce in schools—are not worth any less than teachers, and the same principles should apply to them. This is critical. Lots of trusts are using the advantages of scale to make back-office savings and efficiencies, and ploughing them back into additional benefits and pay to support really good staff. I hope that Ministers will support our new clause 64, when we come to it, and accept that the principle that they have applied to teachers should apply to everybody else in our schools, too.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I literally just read out the Prime Minister’s own words. They are not my words. If he did not want to say them, he did not have to say them. I want to press the Minister, because I can sense that she is starting to wind up. She is talking about how many schools will go through structural intervention—in other words, academisation. The Government have put out a statistic saying that there will be twice as many schools going through RISE and academisation combined over the next three years as there were over the last two years. The Government clearly have a statistic for how many schools they expect to go through academisation, and I am keen that the Minister tell the House what that number is. How many schools do they expect to go through academisation in the next three years? They obviously know.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is always a bad sign when someone has to misrepresent completely what their opponent is trying to say. Allow me to address that point directly by, once again, reading what Leora Cruddas of the Confederation of School Trusts told the Committee: “We accept that the policy intention is one of equivalence in relation to maintained schools, but maintained schools are different legal structures from academy trusts, and we do not think that the clauses in the Bill properly reflect that. It is too broad and it is too wide. We would like to work with the Government to restrict it to create greater limits.” –– [ Official Report, Children ’ s Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 81, Q169.] That is what our amendments seek to do. To take the temperature out of the discussion, let me say that I do not have a problem with the Government having a new power of intervention to cut across their funding agreements with academies—although that is a big step, by the way. My problem is with the completely unlimited nature of the power. I am thinking about the effect of getting away from micromanagement over time. The sixth-form college I went to had become brilliant because it had managed to use the freedoms in the 1992 reforms to take a huge step away from micromanagement, but some of the older teachers there still remembered the days when they had to ring up the town hall if they wanted the heating turned up. Imagine that absurd degree of micromanagement. Terrifyingly, some schools in Scotland are still experiencing that insane degree of micromanagement; teachers there are currently on strike because their concerns about discipline are not being taken seriously, so we can see that freedom has worked in England. I do not think that this was the intention of the Ministers, but the drafting of the clause is far too sweeping. It gives an unlimited power. I see no reason why the Ministers should not accept the suggestion from the Confederation of School Trusts, which our amendments seek to implement, that we limit that power in certain reasonable ways. It is fine for Ministers to be able to intervene more, but we need some limits. I am sure that the current Secretary of State wants only good things, but a bad future Secretary of State should not be able to do just anything they want. The Ministers started from a reasonable point of view, but it has gone too far. I hope that they will work with the CST to turn the unlimited power into a limited one. Perhaps they will even accept our amendments, which would do exactly that.

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady, in her speech, is talking a lot of sense. I would just point out to her that in the last Parliament, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, per-pupil funding, in real terms, went up by 11%. There will always be constraints. Indeed, the current Ministers have cut the academisation grant and the trust improvement capacity fund, and cut Latin, maths, computing, and physics support; lots of things have been cut. In fairness, schools funding, per pupil, went up a lot faster in the last Parliament than it did in 2010 to 2015, when the hon. Lady’s party was in government. But there are always— [ Interruption. ]

• 4 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Tenth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I read out the very real concerns of serious educational leaders with strong track records. The Minister says that they are hysterical.

• 30 Jan 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  This was the main point that we wanted to make, and it is good to have confirmation from the Minister that our interpretation of the notes is correct. The notes say it “includes items required for PE and sport… even if an activity is optional, if a pupil requires a branded item of uniform to participate in that activity, then the item will count towards the limit.” The Minister has just said that this will absolutely bite on school sports teams—

• 30 Jan 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move amendment 33, in clause 24, page 46, line 3, leave out from beginning of line to “a” in line 10.

• 30 Jan 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move amendment 62, in clause 25, page 49, leave out lines 20 to 21. This amendment would remove a requirement for the register of children not in school to include details of how much time a child spends being educated by parents.

• 30 Jan 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. Amendment proposed : 46, in clause 24, page 46, line 4, leave out subsection (3).— (Munira Wilson.) Question put, That the amendment be made.

• 30 Jan 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eighth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I would have thought it was pretty clear that our intent was to provide information on the aggregate rather than the individual. Of course we do not publish individuals’ GCSE results anywhere, but does the Minister have a disagreement in principle with the idea of publishing aggregate data on the achievement of this group of young people?