Schools Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2022-06-08
Topic: Education
Natalie Bennett (Green Party, Left): My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 21A in my name. We are again addressing Clause 1; I will put to one side the whole question of whether it should be there at all. We had a discussion earlier about what schools should be—that we should be talking about not just structures but what they should be doing and how they should fit into our broader social framework. This amendment is an attempt—a preliminary one, I stress—to look at how we might see schools as part of a community, not just as institutions turning out pupils to go into the workforce at the end of their time in them. With that in mind, there are three elements to my attempted draft. First, proposed new paragraph (u) suggests "consultation, engagement, and co-production with pupils, parents and the wider community" on what the school is. As many noble Lords have said, with multi-academy trusts potentially scattered all around the country, as some of them already are, how do they get embedded in the community and how does the community contribute to the trust? This is an attempt to write the setting of standards into Clause 1 to say that the school must be part of a community I went through the Bill and analysed the appearances of the words "pupil", "parent" and "community". Interestingly, "pupil" appears 58 times, quite often when the Bill talks about safeguarding and welfare, both things we could not possibly disagree with. There is also quite a lot about attendance at schools, which I will get to later. However, nowhere does the Bill talk about what role pupils might have in deciding their own education and having a democratic role in the structure of their own school. My representation to your Lordships’ Committee is that, if we want to be a democratic country, we want democracy to start in schools. Those most expert in the experience of being a pupil at a school are the pupils The word "parent" appears seven times. Two are in the context of the rights of parents with children at religious schools. There is a duty to explain the attendance policies of schools and a duty on parents to provide info to schools. However, again, there is nothing about the role of parents in running, deciding, guiding or acting in schools. I know that amendments to other sections of the Bill will try to ensure that there are parent governors; that is one way of doing it, but it is by definition only a very small number of people. This is an attempt to say that parents should have a much bigger, broader role. I have been a governor and seen parent governors facing huge wodges of paperwork; not every parent will be able to engage as a governor, but they should be involved Particularly interesting is that "community" appears only a few times in the Bill and that every reference is to the category of "community schools". There is no reference to the actual community in which a school is placed That is what this amendment is seeking to do. Proposed new paragraph (u) looks at seeing a school as a co-production of all the parts of a community. Proposed new paragraph (v) looks at academies and proprietors reflecting the needs of the community, so it is dealing with the structures and what the multi-academy trust and trust governorship are doing. Proposed new paragraph (w) looks at the contribution the school makes to the whole life of the community. The school at which I was a governor served a very poor, disadvantaged and diverse community, and as a practical example of the kind of thing that a school can do on a very small scale, it organised a number of events where parents got together and shared their different craft skills. Many of these parents had no language in common, but this was a way for people to make friendships within a community across different language groups and backgrounds, so the activities of the school were helping to build a community. That is the sort of thing a school needs to be doing.