Neil O'Brien MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

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

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  Q Would an amendment to that effect be helpful to preserve those freedoms? Leora Cruddas: It would be very helpful to have clarity on that position. Obviously, we have not had the curriculum and assessment review report yet. I have absolute confidence that Professor Francis will be eminently sensible. She is a very serious person, and will follow the evidence; but I think we need to be careful that we are not tying ourselves into high levels of prescription in all parts of the Bill, including the national curriculum.

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

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  Q 89 Thank you for coming—welcome. I want to ask for your view on the second half of the Bill, on schools. We have heard a lot of criticism of it from the Confederation of School Trusts, some of our leading trusts and, indeed, a couple of Labour MPs. What is your view on the schools, rather than the wellbeing, part of the Bill? Dame Rachel de Souza: I am the Children’s Commissioner and have been since 2021, and before that I was a school leader in the most disadvantaged areas for 20 years, so I am very interested. I am pleased to see a Bill on children’s wellbeing; it is great that we are getting some legislation on that. I was well consulted around the first part of the Bill, on wellbeing, and I was able to take the children’s voice through. I worked closely with the Department for Education and others to ensure that it was honed, refined and made really good, as I did on some bits of the schools part. But I do not think that anybody got to see the schools bit until it was published. On the schools bit, what I feel more than anything is that we now have a period of time when we need to see a vision for a new, vibrant and transformative schools system—how it will work locally, with local authorities, to do the best for children, particularly the most vulnerable children. I have a number of outstanding questions around that.

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

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  Q On pay and conditions, you might think that the idea of a floor, not a ceiling, is a decent direction of travel, but to be clear, that is not where the Bill is now and it needs to change. That is my position. Leora Cruddas: Again, I would cite the Secretary of State’s evidence to the Select Committee, where she made clear that it is also her expectation around curriculum to have that floor and to be able to innovate and have flexibility above that floor.

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

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  Q I understand the sense of that. Catherine McKinnell: We need a proportionate response and that needs to be framed—

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

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  And others.

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

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  Q No, but what if it is a teacher in your little schools? Nigel Genders: They will have to be resourced to do it in other ways to make it possible.

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

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  Q One last point. Zooming back a bit, a few different witnesses called for a vision of where the system is going, and they intuited what the Government’s vision was from the contents of the Bill. I thought that was very interesting. I just wondered what Ministers’ view was of what had gone wrong in Wales. Obviously in Wales a lot of the different academy freedoms were never taken up, academies were not put in place and league tables were abolished. It was effectively a natural experiment going the opposite direction to England. The IFS report “Major challenges for education in Wales” is incredibly damning about what has happened there as a result. In terms of the Government’s overall theory and the vision they are trying to enact in the Bill, I am curious about why Ministers think things have gone so wrong in Wales. Why have things gone so backward? Why is the IFS report so damning? Catherine McKinnell: I am conscious that other Members of the Committee might want to actually ask about the legislation, but I am happy to set out our overarching vision.

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

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  Q Do you recognise that sometimes a school can bring someone in who might be at a later point in their career and be highly specialised—perhaps a great sportsman, an IT person or a scientist—and that if the headteacher takes the view that they would be a good person for teaching, as an alternative to having no teacher, that can be the right decision? Sir Martyn Oliver: Speaking as a previous headteacher, absolutely. Bringing in external expertise to supplement high-quality qualified teachers is clearly of benefit to children.

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

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  Q The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh) has raised some concerns, as has the Confederation of School Trusts, about the end of academy orders and the fact that because academisation is no longer automatic, there will once again be the prospect of legal action, lots of community campaigns against these things, and potentially quite long delays. She said on Second Reading that children in those schools do not have time to wait. Do you agree with her? Dame Rachel de Souza: I think, Neil, that you have given quite a thoughtful comment, which people new to education might not quite get. Probably the main reason for academy orders was to try to expedite improvement quickly against a backlash. Would it not be great if we could get everyone on side to be able to act really quickly, together, to improve schools that need improving? I am not going to get hung up on this bit. What I want to see is the vision for how we are going to work together with the best knowledge we have about school improvement, and with a sense of absolute urgency about making sure that no child is sitting in a failing school, because childhood lasts such a short time. What makes a great school? Whatever background you are from—whether you are from the academy sector or the local authority sector—the evidence is clear: we need a great headteacher and great teachers allowed to do their jobs, with support from a family of schools, whatever that family of schools is. That is what we need.

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

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  Q Is that primary? Kate Anstey: There is a higher proportion in primary, but that 75% is across all. Sorry—I have forgotten your question.

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

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  Do we know whether that is the case? Nigel Genders: There is the question of how to make all that possible within the allotted hours that staff can be directed. It needs resourcing. It does not have to be teachers who provide those breakfast clubs—

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

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  Having looked at that document, it does have a whole bunch of different maximums in it. It has quite specific maximums as well as minimums. Sir Jon Coles: The thing about the schoolteachers’ pay and conditions document is that it is fundamentally a contract. Section 122 of the Education Act 2002—it happens to be an Act that I took through Parliament as a Bill manager, when I was a civil servant—essentially says that the Secretary of State may, by order, issue what is commonly known as the pay order, but the pay order includes a lot of conditions. Section 122 of the Act says that that applies as if it were a contract. Indeed, if you are a teacher in a maintained school, typically your contract will literally say, “You are employed under the terms of the schoolteachers’ pay and conditions document,” so it is your contract. Therefore, the schoolteachers’ pay and conditions document has to act as a contract. It has to be specific. A teacher looking it up has to be able to see, “What are my terms and conditions? Have I been treated properly?” and so on. That is how the schoolteachers’ pay and conditions document needs to work, so if we have to abide by it precisely, that is what we would have to abide by. I think that officials—I speak as an ex-official—should be asked to look again at whether the Bill they have produced for Ministers does what Ministers want it to do, and whether it actually provides a floor but no ceiling, or whether there is something slightly different that would enact Ministers’ policy.

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

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  Q So an amendment to bring those two things back into line—the stated intent and the actual Bill—would be sensible. David Thomas: Yes.

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

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  Q You said: “We accept current arrangements are fractured: introducing the Schools Adjudicator worsens rather than improves this”. What do you mean by that? Leora Cruddas: We are not sure what the intention is behind the Government’s need to bring forward the clause in the Bill that would introduce greater powers for a schools adjudicator. That is one of the conflicts of interest that we would be alive to—if a local authority could bring forward a case to resist an academy trust’s pupil admission number, that would be a source of concern for us. That is why we need this high-level decision-making framework.

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

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  Q Right, so you do not think that there is a particular problem out there that needs to be solved. David Thomas: No, there is not one that I can see.

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

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  Q David, welcome and thank you for joining us. I want to ask you first about the national curriculum and its imposition on all academy schools. We have heard about the use of that flexibility as a form of freedom—where schools are being turned around, they might do something different for a while and diverge from the national curriculum. But I know there are also trusts and school leaders who use it on a longer-term basis—they make a conscious choice to focus on, for example, the core academics, often in situations of great difficulty, in order to secure what they regard as the most important, core things for their students that will enable the maximum number of choices later on. Obviously you have been a maths teacher—you have been in that core discipline—and I wondered whether, in an education system where parents have school choice and can choose different things that are right for their child, you thought it was legitimate for people to have different models and to have that flexibility, and whether it was useful to have that freedom from the national curriculum. David Thomas: We need to strike a careful balance. It is absolutely a central purpose of education to make sure that all children going out into society have some shared knowledge in common and can interact as a society and function in that way. That is very important. It is also important that people running schools get to look at their children, look at the challenges they are facing and have bold and ambitious visions for what they want those children to go on and do and what that community wants for itself, and that they can be flexible and go on and achieve that. That is why you need a balance of different things. At the moment we have statutory assessments that apply to all schools, whether an academy or a maintained school. We have Ofsted making sure that you teach a curriculum that is at least as broad and balanced as the national curriculum, so that you cannot go narrow. But you need to be ambitious for your children, and my understanding from Sir Martyn’s evidence earlier was that that system appears to be working for children.

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

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  Q What I am getting at is that we need to change the Bill as it is currently drafted by officials, in order to achieve those things. Leora Cruddas: Yes, I would say that was true.

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

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  Q I have a quick one for Leora on academies’ freedom with the curriculum. Some trusts not far from my constituency have used those freedoms quite strongly. They have deliberately focused on the core academics. In some cases, they do not necessarily even have the facilities to provide the national curriculum—if they are to be made to do that immediately—because they have focused on getting the core academic stuff for kids in situations of deprivation. Are you aware of others? There are definitely schools and trusts out there that are using those freedoms around the national curriculum, are there not? Leora Cruddas: There definitely are trusts that have used their freedoms around the national curriculum. I would say it is not unreasonable for a state to want a high-level national curriculum framework—that is not an unreasonable position—

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

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  Q I want to ask you about a few other issues, including pay and QTS. As a headteacher, you have used academy freedoms, and you have also worked in a global shortage subject, mathematics. I do not know what you think of the Bill more generally and whether there are things beyond what we have talked about already that you would amend, or what you think of the general tenor of the Bill—trying to take away academy freedoms and make things more similar. What do you think of the Bill’s direction of travel and what would you amend, if you were able to control it yourself? David Thomas: On pay and conditions, I agree with the Secretary of State’s stated intention to spread the freedom to innovate, and to make teaching a more attractive profession, to all schools. I think we are only scratching the surface as a profession of what it means to offer flexible working within education. I do not think anyone has really mastered that, and it is a really big challenge. We need to be allowing the maximum freedom for people to be able to innovate. Of course, we have just done an experiment in what happens if you tell lots and lots of schools that they do not need to follow the statutory teachers’ pay and conditions: people only ever exceed it and offer things that are more attractive, because you want the very best teachers in your school. I think it is essential that we have that freedom, and it is not enough for a Government to say that their intention is to grant that in a future statutory teachers’ pay and conditions document. It needs to be there in legislation for trusts to know that will be the case, which is really important for both pay and conditions. If you want to nail flexibility and offer that to teachers, you need to be able to trade off around conditions to make something more flexible. I think that is really important, and I agree with the Government’s intention, but I do not think that the Bill, as drafted, achieves that at the moment.

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

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  Q Good afternoon. Thank you for bearing with us while we voted. During the course of the day we have been discussing free school meals in secondary schools. It is obviously desirable to give lots of people free breakfasts, but there has been a bit of a debate about how to prioritise in a situation of inevitably scarce resources. We heard from Mark Russell that, if given the choice, rather than go for a universal obligation in primary schools, he would have the roll-out of breakfast clubs in more secondary schools targeted at schools with high levels of deprivation. Should we focus first on areas of deprivation and secondary schools with deprivation? Obviously, we would like to have infinite money. What do you think of his argument? Kate Anstey: We certainly welcome the introduction of free breakfast clubs in the Bill. We speak to children and families in schools extensively and carry out extensive analysis. We know that where breakfast clubs are provided freely, they make a huge difference to low-income families —they make a big difference to lots of children, but to lower-income families disproportionately. The fact that provision is universal is very important; we know that removes a lot of barriers for parents. Where there is any kind of targeted approach, there are issues around stigma and families are less likely to use provision.

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

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  We have limited time. Can you please just answer the question. I have incredibly limited time.

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

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  Q On unit costs, I saw in the Government document that there was an initial grant—a lump sum—but the unit cost was about 65p per session per child. I know that there was the lump sum as well, but that struck me as being not a huge amount. I do not know what it really costs to deliver these things in practice in a lot of other places. Kate Anstey: It is probably worth speaking to organisations; I am sure that Magic Breakfast will be able to speak more to that. There are certainly economies of scale that can help you bring down costs, but again, our area of expertise is free school meals, and schools are struggling with the funding that they have for free school meals. I would imagine that 65p might be a struggle for schools—I do not know. You would have to have conversations with some of the providers about that.

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

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  Q I was trying to get at what the unit costs look like and how you manage the interaction of providing a new, free entitlement to 30 minutes together with paid-for sessions that offer longer and existing, charitably funded things. Is there anything we need to do in the Bill to ensure that that does not get tangled up? Kate Anstey: A large proportion are already running breakfast clubs. It is a real mixture in terms of how that is funded, whether it is through schemes or other things. In primary schools, it is much more likely that parents are paying in some form for that. Again, it is a mixed picture. There is a postcode lottery for families. If you are in a more affluent area, you are more likely to have breakfast club provision available to you, and you are more likely to be supported by family. In what the Bill is trying to do on breakfast clubs, we really welcome the fact that it is bringing consistency and ensuring that there is access for all families. In the early adopter phase, it would be good to understand what schools are doing already and how this can work, but I think that standardised limit that includes both time and food for families should be standardised for everybody. There might be other things that go around that.

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

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  Q That is very helpful and specific. Another thing you have raised concerns about is clause 50, which will give local authorities the ability to challenge a school’s PAN, even if it is just keeping it the same. I am sympathetic and understand what they are trying to do, with place planning and so on, but I have concerns about the local authority being both the regulator and the provider of other schools. I worry about that, particularly in the context of falling school numbers in some areas, which will make these questions quite acute, because of the lack of any guidance or trammelling around it. For example, if there is an outstanding school and one that is struggling and may shut, where is the prioritisation? Where are the rules that say, “You must not treat academies unfairly compared with your local authority schools.”? Do you share any of those concerns? Do you think that there is scope to make amendments to improve the Bill? Leora Cruddas: I start by saying that we really welcome the duty to collaborate at a local level. Trusts already work with local authorities; you may have heard that from my colleagues in the previous session. We are concerned about some of the potential conflicts of interest. We say “potential” conflicts of interest in the context, as you point out, of falling primary school rolls. We would like to work with Government to set out a high-level, strategic decision-making framework that would mean that, in a local area, we know our children really well and we get our children into the right provision at the right time. That means working together strategically around pupil numbers, admissions, falling rolls and the sufficiency of need in a local area. Those conflicts of interest can be managed, but they would need to be set out in a very carefully framed decision-making framework so that they are managed properly.

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

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  Q I have a very specific question on small rural primary schools attempting to deliver breakfast clubs, potentially with a very small number of staff. What is your understanding of whether the time spent doing breakfast clubs will count as directed time?