Education Committee
Oral evidence: The role of Regional Schools Commissioners, HC 401
Wednesday 2 December 2015
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 2 December 2015.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Department for Education (RSC0028)
– Department for Education (RSC0042)
Members present: Neil Carmichael (Chair), Michelle Donelan, Marion Fellows, Lucy Frazer, Ian Mearns, Caroline Nokes.
Questions 259 – 361
Witness: Lord Nash, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools, Department for Education, gave evidence.
Q259 Chair: Good morning and welcome to the final public evidence session of our inquiry into Regional Schools Commissioners. We intend to conclude this session by about 10.45 am at the latest because we are mindful of the debate on Syria, which is starting at 11.30 am, and we have business to conclude between 10.45 am and 11.30 am. It is great to welcome you, John, to this Committee. You have been here before.
Lord Nash: I have.
Chair: It is great to see you here again.
Lord Nash: It is a pleasure to be here.
Q260 Chair: You do have effective ministerial responsibility for the Regional Schools Commissioners, so I would like to kick off with the question: is this a sustainable model for the future or is it a temporary solution to having a mixed economy of schools in the system?
Lord Nash: No, I think it is a very sustainable model and it is working extremely well. We have hired eight really professional people and they have the backing of some excellent and outstanding headteachers on their headteacher boards. They are bringing rigour and pace and challenge to the system. I have had the opportunity of going around and sitting in on all the headteacher boards’ deliberations and obviously I spend a lot of time with the Regional Schools Commissioners. Before I rather unexpectedly got this job, I spent 30 years starting new organisations. One of the lead indicators of whether or not you have backed a winner is early momentum. I have to say I have never been involved in starting a new organisation that has got off to such a good start as this, which is not surprising, because these people are professionals. They have generally been in education all their lives and they are bringing judgment, experience and a lot of good local soft intelligence to the piece. It is very encouraging and I think this school leader-led system has been bought into by school leaders and is the way of the future.
Q261 Chair: The Department has a strategy unit. Was that involved in the decisions leading to appointing the Regional Schools Commissioners and the structure around them?
Lord Nash: Yes, very much so.
Q262 Chair: Right, thank you. Do you have a plan to restructure the structure, given the changing nature, especially driven by the increased number of academies in the forthcoming years?
Lord Nash: We have a plan to resource up the Regional Schools Commissioners quite substantially over the course of the next year. As a result of the Education and Adoption Bill we will have coasting schools coming into scope. They will not be coming into scope until the end of next year because it is a three-year measurement and we will not know the answer to that question until the end of next year, but we will be resourcing them up quite substantially, yes.
Q263 Chair: Did you look around other examples of middle-tier systems and glean anything from those experiences?
Lord Nash: We have looked at the local authority system. We looked at how charter schools are run in the States and took some experience from that. We have looked internationally and the evidence internationally seems to be that where you have autonomy with clear accountability that works best. You need both and I think we have that now.
Q264 Chair: When you talk about autonomy with clear accountability, that is the actual school, but the Regional Schools Commissioners are accountable to you?
Lord Nash: Yes, they are accountable through the National Schools Commissioner and Andrew McCully, the Director General of the division in the Department responsible for academies, to me and the Secretary of State, yes, and then I am accountable to Parliament.
Q265 Chair: Do you have a longer-term strategy for developing the middle tier? Is there an end game here?
Lord Nash: I think the Regional Schools Commissioners is the middle tier for academies. As I say, I think they are working extremely well. I think they are the way forward.
Q266 Chair: But the question arises: would they become responsible for other systems of schools or do you expect all schools to be academies, so that would solve that particular problem?
Lord Nash: I do not expect them to become responsible for other systems of schools and they are only responsible for underperforming academies if an academy was part of the autonomous system. If an academy is doing well, then they are left to their own devices, but they are responsible for underperforming maintained schools and underperforming academies. Of course we do expect more and more schools to become academies, particularly in multi-academy trusts.
Q267 Chair: If you are expecting the Regional Schools Commissioners to be in place indefinitely and they are basically there to deal with underperforming schools, there is an assumption therefore that you expect there always to be underperforming schools.
Lord Nash: It would be lovely to think otherwise and our ambition is to try to ensure that every child in the country has the opportunity of going to a school that is at least good. I would say that is a minimum expectation of a civilised society. Sadly, we are some way from that, even though we now have 1.4 million more children educated in good and outstanding schools than we did in 2010. There will always be underperforming schools, but the Regional Schools Commissioners have been very active in helping multi-academy trusts share good practice as we move to a more multi-academy trust system. Over the last year, over 90% of academies have joined multi-academy trusts, so they have been running a lot of sessions where the more experienced MATs have been sharing their good practice with the emerging groups of schools. That is certainly a role that the Regional Schools Commissioners play.
We are seeing as part of this system a lot of the more experienced chains giving out for free, for instance, Outwood Grange. I always carry this around with me: Outwood Grange, one of our top-performing sponsors, has made available on a memory stick all their school improvement, curriculum planning, financial planning information absolutely free for any sponsor to take. The Regional Schools Commissioners are also very active in encouraging MATs where they think they need leadership training. We have developed something called the Future Leaders MAT CEO course specifically for CEOs of MATs, which we funded the first 24 people on; they now have another 60. We have also been very active in introducing non-executive directors to MATs. We have a programme called the Academy Ambassadors Programme, where we have found literally hundreds of people from business and the professions who, pro bono, are prepared to sit on multi-academy trust boards to help them with their growth plans. We have already made 100 matches.
This is all part of the work that Regional Schools Commissioners will do, not just to focus on underperforming schools, but also to help those emerging and well-performing groups do better. A lot of people think that joining a group of schools is only the province of an underperforming school, and obviously there are a lot of successful sole trader schools, but even the schools that have been successful on their own in the past have found that when they come together in a group they get better and they learn from the experience and they manage to retain staff. That is one of the biggest things you hear from MAT chief executives—that as a result of working in groups they have managed to retain staff that they know they previously would have lost.
Q268 Chair: In short, Regional Schools Commissioners might be looking at getting good schools to become outstanding schools?
Lord Nash: Yes. Well, their job is not to interfere and oversee schools that are doing perfectly well, but as part of their work with MATs, as they expand and take over underperforming schools, they will be helping them share good practice so that the MATs themselves will be able to take responsibility for improving their own schools.
Chair: Marion is going to ask you about measuring impact.
Q269 Marion Fellows: When do you think a clear impact will be visible? Will it take a year or longer before we see an impact of the RSCs?
Lord Nash: Obviously you are quite right: it is too early to have clear evidence of impact. It is very early days, but we have spent a lot of time with the Regional Schools Commissioners and we do see them at very close range. They have a monthly meeting with the National Schools Commissioner, who goes through all the live issues, which I go to. We have a weekly meeting where we go through all the live issues and sometimes the Regional Schools Commissioners will attend. They all have a vision statement that we hold them to account to; they have their key performance indicators that we hold them to account to. They all have their own individual performance measurements, as you would manage any civil servant, which they are managed to. We can see impact in the way you would manage any organisation in terms of their performance, but in terms of the performance overall of the system, it is obviously going to take a few years. Education is a long-term business, as you know.
Q270 Marion Fellows: Yes. On the question of KPIs, they were released on a freedom of information request, but they are still not on the Government website. Can you tell me why?
Lord Nash: We are looking at this and developing plans as to how we can be more transparent on this, yes.
Marion Fellows: It does seem strange that it went out, but it is still not officially there.
Q271 Ian Mearns: The KPIs exist. Why not just publish them? They are in the public domain already; just put them on the website. If they subsequently change, there is no reason for not publishing them. They are already out there, aren’t they?
Lord Nash: I suspect we will publish them. We are in fact reviewing some of the KPIs, because after a year we think they may need to be flexed in a few areas. When we have done that, I suspect we will publish them, yes.
Q272 Ian Mearns: I am sorry, Lord Nash—the KPIs are a matter of fact now. We are talking about public servants here who have KPIs that are already in the public domain, but only if people know where to look. Why not just publish them and then if they change, change what is published?
Lord Nash: We are considering all of this. There is a view that to publish them and then change them a week later would not be helpful, so we are looking at this.
Q273 Marion Fellows: Are there specific targets for KPIs or is the direction of travel the thing that is most important?
Lord Nash: The KPI structures are the same for each Regional Schools Commissioner, but they do have targets, yes.
Q274 Marion Fellows: May I ask you what the Department’s review of the KPIs’ objectives are or will be?
Lord Nash: There was one area that people questioned, which related to, for instance, number of academies. Some people felt this was the wrong incentive because we are not here at all about volume, we are here about quality. That is the kind of area we might change.
Q275 Marion Fellows: What is the timescale for the review?
Lord Nash: We are talking months or weeks, so fairly soon.
Marion Fellows: Fairly soon as in early next year?
Lord Nash: Yes.
Q276 Marion Fellows: What would be a signal to you that the middle tier is performing optimally? A lovely word.
Lord Nash: When we have many fewer underperforming schools and when we see the gap narrowing more. It has narrowed somewhat; obviously narrowing that more. As I say, this is a long-term business and we have a lot of schools in this country, sadly, that have been languishing in failure for a long time in some very difficult areas, like coastal towns and former mining villages, where there is intergenerational unemployment, where however well the school is doing, if the children are going home to a drip-drip of the negative factor of living in an environment where very few people work, it is a hard job. But we now have a lot of rigorous, tough sponsors with a sense of urgency that are starting to deal with some of these schools, but it will take some time.
Q277 Marion Fellows: What would signal to you or the Department that the system needs a complete rethink? You are giving out vibes of quiet confidence at the moment, but what would signal to you that the system needs a complete rethink?
Lord Nash: Obviously if the figures or the statistics of performance all went south. I do not want to sound too confident because we are in early days, but having spent a lot of time with these people, we have attracted some excellent people into this, some very experienced school leaders. We believe in a school-led system run locally and I do think it is working extremely well.
Q278 Marion Fellows: You have no real issues at the moment with how things are going?
Lord Nash: No.
Chair: Okay. Ian, you are going to be talking about the clarity of the role of the RSCs and indeed the National Schools Commissioner.
Ian Mearns: I do not think I will be talking about it; I am hoping that Lord Nash will be talking about the clarity.
Lord Nash: I will try.
Q279 Ian Mearns: Lord Nash, could you describe in a simple sentence what the role of the Regional Schools Commissioner is?
Lord Nash: Yes. Their role is to oversee improvement in performance of maintained schools and academy schools that are underperforming, to generate new sponsors, to look at converter academies, to look at free school applications and maybe help generate some free school applications. Essentially those are the roles.
Q280 Ian Mearns: Given the fact that there are eight Regional Schools Commissioners with an average of 3,000 schools each to look after, that is an enormous amount of things to be doing with an enormous amount of schools.
Lord Nash: They do not really have 3,000 schools each to look after. They are focusing particularly on underperforming schools, so it is a much smaller number than that.
Q281 Ian Mearns: But one of their KPIs is about the number of academies and free schools in each region, so it is in their interest as a Regional Schools Commissioner to increase the number of schools that become academies or to increase the number of free schools within a region, isn’t it?
Lord Nash: We are seeing more and more schools becoming academies. As I have already said, we are looking at the KPI that is purely volume-driven because that may be inappropriate. They have adequate resources at the moment and we are planning to resource them up quite substantially over the next year.
Q282 Ian Mearns: One of the other roles that the Regional Schools Commissioner has is that each one has a number of academy trusts and they oversee the integrity of the trust even though the trust’s schools may be across several different regions.
Lord Nash: Yes.
Ian Mearns: Does that not become a bit tearing in terms of where their focus is? Because they may have an academy trust that has schools within about four different regions, but if they have ultimate responsibility for that academy trust, that means that they are then looking at schools across many different areas.
Lord Nash: It is a good question. We decided it would be better for a multi-academy trust to deal with one Regional Schools Commissioner mainly than four, in that case, and certainly that is what the multi-academy trusts would prefer. So they have one main point of contact, but that Regional Schools Commissioner will communicate closely with the other three Regional Schools Commissioners. For instance, in the case of Ark, Martin Post is responsible for Ark. He has had a meeting with all four Regional Schools Commissioners to review progress, so they will do this. As I say, they communicate well with each other and they meet at least every month together; they work very closely together to share good practice. I think that is the best way. That is much better than them having four different Regional Schools Commissioners to deal with.
Q283 Ian Mearns: Whose job is it to hold schools to account? Is it Ofsted or is it the Regional Schools Commissioners or a bit of both?
Lord Nash: Schools are held to account by Ofsted. They are held to account by their results. The parents will obviously hold them to account in terms of looking at the results and Ofsted and whether or not they want to send their children there. The Regional Schools Commissioner specifically focuses on underperforming schools or generating new sponsors.
Q284 Ian Mearns: Therefore, headteachers in schools have to be looking over their shoulder in a number of different directions, haven’t they?
Lord Nash: As I say, if the school is doing well, there is no need to look over their shoulder. If it is not doing well, then we need to improve it.
Q285 Ian Mearns: What if they are coasting?
Lord Nash: That is the new Bill. The Education and Adoption Bill will bring for the first time coasting schools into scope.
Q286 Ian Mearns: I think part of the problem with the definition of coasting schools is that people within the school probably think they are doing well and it is a question of then making sure that particular Regional Schools Commissioners can be giving schools a tip-off, “Look, we have a feeling that you might be coasting here. There is something you need to be doing about this.”
Lord Nash: I think that slightly misunderstands what a coasting school is. The definition of a coasting school is very clear: it is data-driven; it is over three years. You have to be coasting, for all of those three years you have to be below the bar and it is entirely driven on data. For instance, in secondary schools it will move to Progress 8. There have been some Labour and Lib Dem amendments in the House of Lords to the definition of coasting—which I am sure are very well-intentioned, but I am sure the profession would not like—which widen the definition to be much more subjective and entirely at the decision of Ofsted, based on different factors. I think that would be leaving the profession looking over their shoulder far too much. We think we have produced a very clear set of data and many schools will know now that they are not coasting because they have not fallen below the bar for any of the last two years. It is important that we have a very clear measurement.
Q287 Ian Mearns: I have a funny feeling that even with the definition that you have come up with there will still be some schools where a number of people need to have scales lifted from their eyes in order to understand that that is the position they are in.
Lord Nash: That may be right. We do not want schools to coast, whether they are pupils that have come from difficult backgrounds but are not having the education they deserve, or whether they are pupils who come from more advantaged backgrounds where the schools are not making the right progress. We do not want those schools to coast and it is time that we brought those schools into scope.
Q288 Ian Mearns: Do you think that the role of the Regional Schools Commissioner now is clearly understood by other players in the field such as Ofsted, such as local authorities, such as the academy chains?
Lord Nash: I think it is nearly fully understood. I would say there are areas where there is still some confusion, but I would say it is pretty well understood and I think within a little bit more time it will be completely understood, yes.
Q289 Ian Mearns: In their dealings with multi-academy trusts, would a Regional Schools Commissioner have the power to compel a multi-academy trust to take on a failing school?
Lord Nash: No.
Q290 Ian Mearns: No, so if we have a failing school that you think would be better managed by a multi-academy trust, how do we secure that in that case?
Lord Nash: Through discussion.
Q291 Ian Mearns: Through discussion, okay. Do Regional Schools Commissioners have the power to compel a multi-academy trust to relinquish control over a school?
Lord Nash: It depends on the exact position of that school and if the funding agreement between the Department and the school gives the Regional Schools Commissioners that power. They do have the power to compel, but in over 100 cases Regional Schools Commissioners have rebrokered academies from one sponsor to another and in many of those cases they did not have the technical legal power. The system seems to be working well through discussion, exhortation and frankly explaining to people that there are better people to do the job.
Q292 Ian Mearns: Do you think we can in every case secure that by consensus in the future?
Lord Nash: No, but in most cases.
Q293 Ian Mearns: Thank you very much indeed. What is the role of the National Schools Commissioner in this field? The Chief Inspector yesterday said that if all schools became academies, which he appeared to be taking as a given, the system would be much simpler to oversee as there would only be one type of school. If we move to a fully academised system—and there seems to be some sort of nuanced difference of opinion, because the Prime Minister is talking about every school being an academy and I think the Chancellor has talked about every secondary school being an academy—in that situation, if we have a more simplified system where every school is an academy, what would the role of the National Schools Commissioner be then?
Lord Nash: The role of the National Schools Commissioner now is to provide strategic direction, promote the overall academies and free school programme through events, meeting with stakeholders and to manage the Regional Schools Commissioners providing support, oversight and challenge. As I say, they have this monthly meeting where they look at the effectiveness of different practices and co-ordinate the practices, holding RSCs to account for their KPIs, their performance objectives. Obviously if we had a much more academised system that would become a more important role. As we see a year or so of data, we will be able to see what is the more effective practice. I can see the National Schools Commissioner having more involvement in that kind of management.
On the point about every school an academy or every secondary school an academy, as I said in the House of Lords last night, we are not about waving a magic wand and suddenly every school is an academy overnight, although there are obviously clear advantages and freedoms in being an academy. What we are about is through a process of time, through an ordered system of schools working together in groups called multi-academy trusts, to get the benefit of school-to-school support so they can benefit from sharing good practice and efficiencies, from better CPD leadership development, and as I have mentioned, significant career enhancement opportunities. That is what we are about.
Q294 Ian Mearns: The way in which the multi-academy trust model has developed, we have some fairly fragmented multi-academy trusts with a handful of schools in several different cities around the country or several different areas around the country. Where do those synergies take place?
Lord Nash: When I took this job three years ago, that was certainly the case. One of the things we focused very clearly on is local regional school-to-school support, because school-to-school support has to be done on a local basis. We have generated several hundred—probably over 300—local multi-academy trusts around an outstanding school working closely with their local schools. We have focused the more national chains on running themselves on more of a regional local basis. Where we have seen outliers like the ones you mention, we have tried to rebroker them and in many cases we have. Some of the larger chains have given up quite a lot of schools. You make a very good point, but we are very focused on that local school-to-school support system.
Q295 Ian Mearns: Do you think possibly there might be a need to sit down with the multi-academy trusts and get them to rationalise their estate, as it were?
Lord Nash: We have done a certain amount of that and we have had some discussions. We might do more of that and that might be a role for the National Schools Commissioner, yes.
Q296 Ian Mearns: What should the No. 1 priority for the National Schools Commissioner be?
Lord Nash: I think the No. 1 priority would be to ensure that the Regional Schools Commissioners are getting enough new sponsors, because we do need new sponsors, and also resourcing up their existing sponsors to build their capacity, which goes back to the leadership development, governor development that I have talked about.
Q297 Ian Mearns: Do you see the role of the National Schools Commissioner being similar or analogous to the role of, say, the Chief Inspector or to the Chief Regulator in Ofqual, Glenys Stacey?
Lord Nash: Not really. The Chief Inspector’s job is they are an independent inspection organisation. Ofsted’s job is to inspect schools and to rate them and rank them. The Schools Commissioner’s job is not to provide those school improvement strategies, but to recommend them. I think the roles are quite different.
Q298 Ian Mearns: Are you currently doing any work within the DfE reviewing the role of the Schools Commissioner?
Lord Nash: We are constantly looking at their performance, yes, to see how we can improve processes.
Q299 Ian Mearns: If you are constantly reviewing, would you be publishing the results of such a review at any stage?
Lord Nash: This is all part of good management. I am not talking about a massive review. I am just talking about how anybody would run an organisation to improve good practice.
Q300 Ian Mearns: If you were to make any decisions about the role of the National Schools Commissioner, would you be letting people know?
Lord Nash: If the role of the National Schools Commissioner was to change in a material way, yes, I think we would.
Ian Mearns: Okay, thank you very much indeed.
Chair: Thank you, Ian. We are now going to talk about consistency of approach and costs, first of all with Lucy.
Q301 Lucy Frazer: Thank you for coming, Lord Nash. What we have heard during the course of our inquiry, largely from multi-academy trusts who operate in different regions, is that they are dealt with differently in different areas. Some Regional Schools Commissioners go in a lot, some do not go in at all. There is a big divergence of view. Do you think there is scope for a difference of approach in different regions or should there be similarity of approach?
Lord Nash: Yes and yes, I think I would say. Yes, there is definitely scope for a difference because different regions are different, they have different characteristics. Some have a lot of rural schools; some have more schools than others; some have a lot of schools that have been academies for many years, some recently; some have issues with coastal towns, as I suggested. I think every region is different and there is definitely scope, but we do want to see as much consistency as is possible, bearing in mind obviously the Regional Schools Commissioners are human beings, not robots, and they will each have a slightly different approach. But as we have now 15 months of data, we will be looking more at the consistency of approach and what we think is the best practice to see whether we can make things more consistent. I would say that by and large the approach is pretty consistent. They all operate in line with common and published criteria, Ofsted reports performance, and they may vary, as I say. The KPI structures are the same, but there obviously is regional variation.
Q302 Lucy Frazer: You mentioned that the KPIs might change and then when you listed the criteria of what you thought the role of the Regional Schools Commissioner was, they were quite different from the KPIs. I think you mentioned the job was performance, generating new sponsors, looking at converters, which are not in the KPIs necessarily, they are not completely analogous. Which are the Regional Schools Commissioners working to at the moment? Is it the KPIs or is it the factors that—
Lord Nash: They are working to all those factors, but as I say, we are going to review the KPIs to see whether they are correctly focused.
Q303 Lucy Frazer: You identified “yes and yes”. Should the bar be the same for everyone or should there be a different bar according to the different regions’ needs?
Lord Nash: No, the bar should be the same, but often it is very easy to look at the stats on two schools and you might say, “This school has so much FSM, EAL and SEN. These are the results and this school has different results” but they may be at completely different points in their journey. One may be going up; one may be going down; one may have had a new leadership team recently; one may have an absolute crisis in the leadership team. It is easy to look at statistics and think that the schools are the same, but people are treating them differently. But they are social animals, schools, they are people-driven organisations and everyone is different. It is easy to draw conclusions that there is much more inconsistency than there is, but clearly we are keen to see as much consistency as possible.
Q304 Lucy Frazer: You mentioned the word “targets” in answer to another question. Is everyone’s target the same or are people’s targets different depending on where their starting point is?
Lord Nash: It varies, yes.
Q305 Lucy Frazer: In answer to one of our questions when we had a day out, someone suggested that the bar should not be how many academies have converted, but how many applications have been made, so that you did not get a situation where people were just converting to an academy, that was success for the Regional Schools Commissioner because he had achieved it, when maybe that was not right for the school or the school was not ready or it was not a good application. Do you think there is some sense in that—that Regional Schools Commissioners should be encouraging people to do it, but should not necessarily be judged on whether they succeed at it or not because that is not within his remit or control?
Lord Nash: We do want more schools who are not academies to convert and become sponsors. We still have a lot of outstanding schools that are sole traders and are very successful but are not involved, to the extent we would like them to be, in system support. We also have a fairly good ratio of those who apply becoming academies, because quite a lot of discussion goes on beforehand to tell people that if you are a no-hoper there is no point in going through the process. We do want more schools to convert to become academies so they can be sponsors. We do. We need them. We need people in the system to step up and support schools beyond their own. Some people have been—sometimes it is governors, not the senior leadership—resistant to doing that because they are fearful that it will prejudice their own position. That is understandable, but as I say, what we are seeing and when you talk to people, often the people who were quite sniffy about the academy process initially, who are now operating multi-academy trusts, do talk glowingly about the benefits, as I say, particularly the benefits of career enhancement, economies of scale and CPD. We now have a much more exciting career path for young teachers coming into the profession than we had some years ago. Until relatively recently, a young teacher coming into the profession in their early 20s might have had the vision that they might become a principal at 40, which obviously when you are in your early 20s is a lifetime away. Now they—
Lucy Frazer: It creeps up very fast.
Lord Nash: At my age, I will tell you it certainly does. But now you could see yourself being a head of subject or a faculty in your mid-20s, which many are; a head of school in charge of teaching and learning, but not a fully-fledged principal, with the MAT taking a lot of the other responsibilities for that; a principal in your 30s; an executive principal over a number of schools in your late 30s; CEO of a MAT. Although you may still not be thinking about that when you become a teacher, once you are in the group, the groups are increasingly seeing that as an attractive career path. I think the benefits of working together in a multi-academy trust are substantial. I think they are the way forward and we are increasingly seeing people who would previously have been just running one school seizing those benefits.
Q306 Lucy Frazer: Whose responsibility is it to ensure that there is consistency of standards?
Lord Nash: Across the Regional Schools Commissioners?
Lucy Frazer: Yes.
Lord Nash: That is the responsibility of the National Schools Commissioner; Andrew McCully, the Director General of the division that is in charge of academies; and myself. As I say, now we have some good data over 15 months, we will be looking at this more closely.
Q307 Lucy Frazer: Lord Nash, in an answer to Ian, you said you were breaking up multi-academy trusts so that they were more regional. I see the force in that, but you have also said in your last answer there are advantages to economies of scale. We all know that it is good that outstanding schools should expand, so that more children go to outstanding schools. Is there a negative effect of releasing some schools from an outstanding multi-academy trust when we do not have enough across the country already taking on that role?
Lord Nash: We have been quite careful in this. It is very important—you are right—that you have balance in that, so you have enough good schools to support the weaker schools. It has generally been the case, and life would teach you that this sort of thing happens, that where groups have been performing less well they have been more geographically dispersed. I think the reality is that it has been in that situation where we have been brokering movement.
Chair: Caroline, you are going to talk about costs.
Q308 Caroline Nokes: Apologies, I am going to squeak at you rather. But before I go on to talk about costs, may I pick up on your penultimate comments about the advantages of multi-academy trusts and encouraging schools not to be sole traders, but more SMEs working with other nearby schools perhaps? At no point did you mention the children. It is about career opportunities for teachers and I entirely concede that that is important, but surely the objective of the DfE must be to encourage good and outstanding schools so that those kids get their five-star GCSEs.
Lord Nash: I could not agree more and that is what I think all good sponsors do—they put children first. I think for too long in this country the interests of adults has sometimes been put ahead of those children. We are finding that our toughest, our best sponsors always put children first. Certainly since I have been in this job, when I am ever faced with a tough decision, I always come back to what is in the best interests of the children. I think that is absolutely clear that that is the approach that most sponsors are taking.
Q309 Caroline Nokes: Thank you for that clarification. On to costs, the Department told the Public Accounts Committee last year that the expected first year set-up and running costs for the Regional Schools Commissioners would be around £4.5 million. You kicked off, I think, to the Chairman’s first question that you are planning to resource them up quite substantially.
Lord Nash: Yes.
Caroline Nokes: How much?
Lord Nash: We have just had the spending review, as you know, and I cannot answer that question precisely yet, but we have had detailed discussions with the Treasury focusing on precisely how much we do need to resource them up. We have enough money, but we are just finalising our budgeting plans now over the next few months.
Q310 Caroline Nokes: Did you meet the £4.5 million for last year?
Lord Nash: I think we are pretty much spot on, yes.
Q311 Ian Mearns: Lord Nash, if you do not mind me pursuing this: £4.5 million, that is a definitive figure. You are having a discussion with the Treasury about how much your budget is going to be.
Lord Nash: We have had that discussion.
Ian Mearns: You must have some parameters that you are working in, plus or minus?
Lord Nash: It is going to be very substantially that we are going to be moving to more of a regional support system from the centre. It will be partly reallocation of existing resources; it is not necessarily new money. At the moment, Regional Schools Commissioners have up to 400 civil servants that they draw on and some of those would be reallocated to work with specific Regional Schools Commissioners so it is more a regional approach.
Q312 Ian Mearns: With that in mind, are you thinking about primary legislation at some stage to remove the responsibility for school improvement and school standards from local authorities?
Lord Nash: I am not, no. Local authorities are clearly responsible for school improvement for their local authority maintained schools.
Q313 Ian Mearns: No, they are still technically responsible for school improvement for academies as well, technically.
Lord Nash: Maybe technically, but they are not in practice and that has been made very clear.
Chair: That might need to be clarified.
Q314 Ian Mearns: It does need to be clarified, because the responsibility has not been removed from them and Ofsted are still inspecting local authorities on that basis.
Lord Nash: If I write to you about this, I hopefully can clarify this.
Chair: Thank you, John; that would be very useful. Michelle, you are going to talk about accountability and transparency.
Q315 Michelle Donelan: Lord Nash, in general terms, are you content with the level of transparency of the Regional Schools Commissioners?
Lord Nash: Yes, we do publish the minutes of their meetings. We will be publishing more detailed minutes in the future. We have to be careful; some of the issues are obviously quite sensitive. The important point is to give the community, the parents, enough information to understand why a decision has been made without breaching any personal confidences about particular individuals.
Q316 Michelle Donelan: Is there a framework within which those decisions are made and a pathway that is normally used?
Lord Nash: Yes.
Q317 Michelle Donelan: Is that framework publicly available, though, so that people know how they start at one point and get to the final decision?
Lord Nash: The framework as to what qualifies as a sponsored academy, what qualifies as a converter academy, what is a free school and what are the criteria that they have to satisfy are all published, yes.
Q318 Michelle Donelan: There is sometimes some confusion, isn’t there, about how the decisions are arrived at? There are different bodies; they feel they are not quite sure. We have heard that as a Committee from different people, that they are not quite sure how the decisions are made. Do you not think it would give people a bit more confidence if that was a bit clearer?
Lord Nash: That is a very good point and that is one of the reasons why we will be publishing more detailed minutes of headteacher boards in future.
Q319 Michelle Donelan: What about a complaints procedure? What is the process if somebody wants to make a complaint?
Lord Nash: About?
Michelle Donelan: About a decision that has been made by a Regional Schools Commissioner.
Lord Nash: Then they would complain originally to the National Schools Commissioner.
Q320 Michelle Donelan: Do you think there is a concern that because they have to work with the Regional Schools Commissioners on an ongoing regular basis, if they complain they could damage that relationship, or they could feel that it would do more harm than good and that therefore it is a bit difficult to complain, or is there an anonymous system? How would that work in practice?
Lord Nash: In terms of actual decisions, Regional Schools Commissioners’ decisions will be approved essentially by the headteacher board and then reported to myself and the Secretary of State. We have not had any complaints about actual decisions, but we obviously would look at that fairly objectively.
Q321 Michelle Donelan: But what I am getting at is, do you think that you would not get complaints because people are too concerned that making a complaint will do them more harm than good because this relationship has to be long term?
Lord Nash: No, we have plenty of judicial review proceedings going on in relation to the academy system, which is one method of complaining, so I don’t think people are slow in coming forward if they don’t feel that the decisions are right.
Q322 Michelle Donelan: There are no improvements you think need to be made to that?
Lord Nash: As I say, we have not had any complaints about decisions yet, so it is difficult to talk about improvements until we see how that works.
Chair: Now headteacher boards with Lucy.
Q323 Lucy Frazer: The role of the headteacher board—is that part of the local accountability structure responsible to the Regional Schools Commissioners and thus to the Department, or is it a scrutiny mechanism of Regional Schools Commissioners?
Lord Nash: It is both.
Lucy Frazer: Yes and yes?
Lord Nash: It is a yes and yes. Let’s see if we can keep this up. Four of them are elected and they are all locally based. As I say, I have been very impressed with the level of soft local intelligence that they have, as you would expect, but that is really crucial. It is also a scrutiny as well.
Q324 Lucy Frazer: You said you were impressed with the level of their talent. We have met a headteacher board and we saw that. They mentioned that they will all reach the end of their term at the same time, so what happens then? Do you lose all that expertise in one go or what happens?
Lord Nash: That is a very good point and we obviously would not want to lose all that expertise in one go. We would obviously have to put in place plans, which are not fully developed yet, as to how we would make sure we phase that. Some may stay, we may appoint some new people earlier, but we have that very much in mind.
Lucy Frazer: You are thinking about that at the moment?
Lord Nash: We are.
Q325 Lucy Frazer: In response to Michelle’s questions about complaints, I think you said you had not yet had any. There was judicial review, which of course is very expensive, so I am not surprised that people are not going down the judicial review—
Lord Nash: We have not had any complaints about decisions, no.
Q326 Lucy Frazer: If the Regional Schools Commissioner ignores the advice of his or her headteacher board, is that reported to you or not?
Lord Nash: It would be, yes, in every case, but it has not happened yet. Again, having spent 30 years prior to this job thinking very much about the way committees work and decisions are made, because I was in the venture capital business, the key decision is which companies you invest in. If you make the wrong decision you can still recover your money, but the real decision is whether to invest in this company or that company. I thought a lot about the dynamics of decision making and this is often driven by making sure you have enough information, the right information, the right due diligence, the right people in the room and the right scrutiny. If you do that and you do not have to rush the decision—it takes place over a reasonable period of time—generally the decisions are unanimous because the answers are fairly clear. I think we have a very thorough system and so far we have not had that situation. Where things are difficult, obviously Regional Schools Commissioners may talk to me in advance or talk to other officials. We have not had that situation yet, but if it did happen it would definitely be referred to me.
Q327 Lucy Frazer: Either it is all going swimmingly well, they are all in agreement and they are all making the right decisions, or it is possible that the Regional Schools Commissioner is an important part of their own school and a decision maker in their own school and they might be nervous of whistleblowing on the decision maker.
Lord Nash: That is perfectly theoretically possible, but we are talking here of some really professional people who have been around for a long time, who have no problem with priorities. They always put children first. I have certainly seen in a number of cases the headteacher boards say to the Regional Schools Commissioner, “We are not happy yet. We need more information.” It may be that when they get that information, the Regional Schools Commissioner changes his mind. We are not talking here of a forum where you have one chance to get the right answer; it is an ongoing dialogue. Quite often you will see that things will come up for discussion and then members will say, “We need more information about A and B, I need to see a bit more,” and some of them even say, “I would like to go and visit the school myself.” It is an ongoing process.
Q328 Lucy Frazer: In terms of recruitment to the headteacher boards, some are elected and some are appointed. You cannot do anything about the elected ones, I suppose—well, you might be able to—but does a school have to be outstanding before a headteacher is appointed to the board?
Lord Nash: Yes.
Q329 Lucy Frazer: Is that a requirement for an elected member?
Lord Nash: It has to be outstanding or that recently they were a head of an outstanding school. There may be some that have retired or something, but yes, essentially.
Q330 Lucy Frazer: What happens if their school is downgraded? Do they stay appointed?
Lord Nash: I don’t think they lose their status, but there would be a discussion as to whether or not they had the time, for instance, to do it or whether it was appropriate.
Q331 Lucy Frazer: We heard that the money that came into the headteachers went to the school. I assume that is because they are giving up time of their own and that might pay for some substitution of a headteacher. What happens when a teacher is retired? Who gets paid in that circumstance?
Lord Nash: I am not sure we have any retired at the moment. Do we have one?
Lucy Frazer: We do, because we met one.
Lord Nash: Then I guess it has to go to him or her, does it not? Why not? If that is not right somebody will tell me, but that seems to be perfectly reasonable. They are giving up their time. They are very experienced. They have decided, in their late 50s or 60s, to do this. I do not see why they should not be paid. Do you?
Lucy Frazer: I am just asking the questions. We will let you know.
Lord Nash: Maybe a yes answer might be the most appropriate.
Chair: We discussed that one, John.
Q332 Ian Mearns: All of the things that you have talked about in terms of the qualities of these individuals might well have also been said about many individuals in a whole range of public bodies before the Nolan principles on public appointments were invented. Do we not think that Nolan principles still apply in terms of the openness and transparency about how these appointments are made and how these people conduct themselves? They might all be professional, principled, experienced people, but can you guarantee 100% that every single one of them in perpetuity will carry on acting in a professional, principled way?
Lord Nash: Yes and no.
Q333 Ian Mearns: I honestly think, Lord Nash, that Nolan principles should apply to all appointments of this nature.
Lord Nash: I agree. That is my yes.
Chair: That is the yes bit, I think.
Q334 Ian Mearns: The other question is if Nolan principles apply on appointments, these people at this board level are also dealing with distribution of resources and policy decisions about a whole range of things in supporting the Regional Schools Commissioner. Will the minutes of their meetings be published?
Lord Nash: As I said, the minutes of the HTBs are published, yes.
Q335 Chair: On this issue of membership of headteacher boards, there is one lingering problem, and I suppose that is basically a conflict of interest. Who would monitor and navigate that?
Lord Nash: They have a very clear system of managing that. If there is an issue in relation to that, that member of the headteacher board would not be involved in any of the decisions and would not have any of the paperwork.
Q336 Chair: Like a governing body, you have a clerk just to watch out for that sort of thing. Is that the sort of mechanism that would exist on a headteacher board?
Lord Nash: Yes.
Chair: Marion will talk about capacity and resources needed.
Q337 Marion Fellows: There is planned expansion of the role of the Regional Schools Commissioners, as we have heard, in relation to coasting schools and presumably sixth-form college academies. What modelling has the Department done on the amount of additional resources that will be required?
Lord Nash: Extensive modelling.
Q338 Marion Fellows: May I drill down a little? For example, do you think a lot more money will be needed from the Department or will the Regional Schools Commissioner be able to work in conjunction and pick up on resources locally through local authorities and academy trusts?
Lord Nash: That is a very good point. They already do that with teaching schools, teaching school alliances, national leaders of education, maybe with local authorities and, for instance, in one area 40 heads have volunteered to help. So yes. Because this is all about a school-led system and we are seeing increasing support from schools, teaching schools and from local authorities, yes. For instance, in Birmingham we now have the Birmingham Education Partnership, which is a partnership chaired by Baroness Morris, which is working across both the local authority-maintained and the academy sector.
Q339 Marion Fellows: Has the Department specifically modelled for different models, a lot of close working across different bodies or in other regions? Because what we are finding as we have carried on is that things are not done exactly the same in each region, and nor would you expect them to be. It would require quite a bit of modelling. From what you are saying you have done some, but how specific has it been?
Lord Nash: We have done a lot of detailed modelling. In our models, we have not been overly dependent on outside resources. I believe we have resourced up enough from the Department, both in terms of people and money, for this.
Q340 Marion Fellows: One of the areas I was thinking of was teaching schools. It may well be that they will require a lot more help and support. What I am really trying to get to is how far down the modelling has drilled.
Lord Nash: I am not responsible for teaching schools—that is Minister Gibb—but yes, I know that this is something that has been looked at in some detail, that teaching schools do need support.
Q341 Marion Fellows: Do you have any idea of the number of colleges that are going to become academies?
Lord Nash: No. It is going to be double figures, I would imagine.
Q342 Chair: On the teaching schools and teaching schools councils, when we went up to Coventry to have an inquiry on the Regional Schools Commissioners structure, and Pank Patel in particular, obviously, he was making the point—it was also made in other ways—that the relationship between teaching schools and the Regional Schools Commissioner was a very useful one for identifying talent. Is that something that you would expect to see across the whole regional structure?
Lord Nash: Yes. Increasingly, you will see a commonality between multi-academy trusts and teaching school alliances. They will be increasingly the same thing.
Q343 Lucy Frazer: May I pick that up, because I think it is a really important point? You said teaching schools were not your remit, but you have also said you have some more funds, and it seems to me that they are all aligned, and that teaching schools do play an incredibly important role in recruiting teachers and training the teachers. You mentioned the progression that teachers might want and that might be going through your process of multi-academy trusts. I do not think you can delineate the two, especially if one is getting some money and one is not, or might not. It is a very important point
Lord Nash: Yes, I could not agree more. It is a very good point. They are very much integrated into the system.
Q344 Ian Mearns: The regional boundaries do make some of the geography for the Regional Schools Commissioners quite extensive. For the one covering my region, I think it is Yorkshire, the Humber and the north-east of England, which is a large geographical area. If you want the Regional Schools Commissioners to be hands-on with those schools that are less than successful, that is an awful lot of territory to cover. Closer to home, here in London, we have a city that has three different Regional Schools Commissioners. Do you think dividing London between three different regions has been a success?
Lord Nash: Yes. We did that quite deliberately. As we all know, the performance of schools in London has been particularly good and we want to share that good practice out into the regions. We deliberately broke London into three to spread good practice and we are starting to see some London schools, as a result, moving out into their regions in a number of cases. We will try to make sure that trend continues. It is a deliberate strategy.
Q345 Ian Mearns: I can understand that, but getting the central London potential sponsors to move out into the hinterland of London is not going to work on a national basis. I think I have referred to it as “trickle-down sponsornomics” before.
Lord Nash: I am learning some new buzz words.
Ian Mearns: But clearly places like the north-east of England are going to struggle in terms of getting the sort of sponsors that you are looking at, because we do not have that many corporate headquarters and so on in a region like the north-east of England.
Lord Nash: Yes. That is why we set up the Northern Sponsor Fund, to encourage a number of our top sponsors who have already been awarded money to do this to go to other areas, particularly up north.
Q346 Ian Mearns: In London, we do know that there are significant shifts of children between different London boroughs based on where the schools are, going back to the Greenwich judgment. Why are Islington and Hackney in different regions, for instance? That seems a tad strange.
Lord Nash: We all know that the mobility of children in London is very great. If we are going to have three divisions, there is going to be inevitably—as there are in local authorities—movement across boundaries. That happens the whole time. I do not think we can do anything about that.
Q347 Ian Mearns: Would you publish evidence that you have that shows the benefits of dividing London the way that you have outweigh the problems that it has created?
Lord Nash: I can tell you that, for instance, Loxford, which is one of our top sponsors in Redbridge, has gone out to Essex; Aspirations Academies Trust, which is one of our top sponsors in West London, has gone out to Banbury and to Poole, and Floreat is moving out to Wokingham. We have a number of examples of sponsors moving out.
Q348 Ian Mearns: You think those benefits outweigh any potential problems that might exist?
Lord Nash: I do. These are based on local authority boundaries. I am not getting a lot of issues about the London thing at all.
Q349 Ian Mearns: Given the fact that you have established the National Schools Commissioner and the eight regions, are you reviewing at all the eight regions? Are you thinking about the boundaries?
Lord Nash: Yes. We chose these eight regions very carefully. They have all built up relationships and I would not want to dismantle that; I think it is better to resource them up. But we are looking around the edges of some of these boundaries. Yes, we are.
Q350 Ian Mearns: You think the eight is just about right?
Lord Nash: I do. This is not the United States of America with a population of 300 million. I know there are some areas, particularly up north, which are large, but I do think they are, provided they are properly managed.
Q351 Ian Mearns: I personally think that the Local Enterprise Partnership area for my area is very large, because it goes from below Barnard Castle to Berwick-upon-Tweed. That is meant to be one LEP area. The area we are now talking about for the Regional Schools Commissioner goes from the Humber to the Tweed. It is an enormous area, I would say half of the country virtually in terms of the length of the area.
Lord Nash: It has relatively few academies at the moment, but I take the point. We are looking at some of them, around the edges.
Q352 Ian Mearns: Given the geography and the relatively low number of academies, that Regional Schools Commissioner has their work cut out?
Lord Nash: Yes.
Q353 Chair: Just building on that point, let us suppose most schools are academies in five years’ time. Are we going to have more Regional Schools Commissioners to deal with the capacity or are we going to give more capacity to the existing Regional School Commissioners?
Lord Nash: It is early days. We currently have 5,500 academies out of 20,000 schools. At this stage, my inclination would be to build on what we have rather than break up what we have, because they have the relationships. Obviously the way they may manage those regions may involve having people in charge of particular subsections of the region, which may be one way of doing it. But at this stage I think the capacity, particularly with the extra resource, is fine.
Q354 Ian Mearns: Something occurred to me then. You have said ultimately you would like to see every academy as part of a multi-academy trust. Is that right?
Lord Nash: I have not said that. If a school wants to—
Ian Mearns: I am sorry, I thought you did earlier.
Lord Nash: No, I did not say that. I said that if a school wants to continue to operate independently—and there are a lot of very good schools operating independently—it is entirely their prerogative, but I do believe that the multi-academy trust model is one that works for both the high-performing schools and the schools that need support. We have seen over the last year over 90% of schools becoming academies are joining a multi-academy trust, so that is the trend.
Q355 Ian Mearns: I am just trying to think about the development of the model over time, because at the moment, we have a situation where Regional Schools Commissioners have a lead role for a number of multi-academy trusts. It would seem to me that if the majority of schools that become academies from here on in become part of multi-academy trusts, the regional boundaries become quite irrelevant, because each Regional Schools Commissioner will be responsible for a number of multi-academy trusts, which will be part of the majority of schools. Only a handful of schools in each region will not be part of a multi-academy trust.
Lord Nash: I think that a lot of these multi-academy trusts will continue to be quite local and therefore will only be dealing, a lot of them, with one Regional Schools Commissioner.
Q356 Chair: I want to talk about relationships with stakeholders, because that is obviously something we have touched upon already. There have been one or two expressions of concern about the relationship between Regional Schools Commissioners and local authorities. Do you think there should be some sort of protocol for managing that relationship?
Lord Nash: I think all the Regional Schools Commissioners are closely working with most of their local authorities, though it varies. There are still some local authorities that are, bluntly, dogmatically opposed to academies. There is definite movement, but we are still seeing that in some areas. They are certainly attempting to work closely with the local authorities, and by and large, I would say that is working well.
Q357 Chair: Specifically with information-sharing?
Lord Nash: Yes.
Q358 Chair: Are decisions by the RSCs made in a way that takes account of nearby LA-maintained schools? Of course, if there is a group of maintained schools, they will be impacted by the decisions of the Regional Schools Commissioners in connection with the academies. How is that managed?
Lord Nash: That is normally, Mr Chairman, in relation to free schools. We are trying very hard to make sure that free schools are put in the right places, not to upset existing schools. Certainly since I have been in post, over 90% of free schools have been in areas that have been proven to be areas that need them because of a shortage of places. I think it is 93%. We are very cognisant of impact on other local schools when we make those decisions.
Q359 Chair: Are Regional Schools Commissioners guided as how they should consult and work with local authorities or do they take that as a part of the job description and do it anyway?
Lord Nash: They have some guidance. You have to remember that one of them used to work for a local authority, Tim Coulson, and most of them have been running schools or MATs and Dominic Herrington was in charge of Academies Department in the Department. They are all pretty experienced at working with their local authorities.
Q360 Chair: If a group of parents or a stakeholder wanted to have some influence or engage with an RSC, how would they go about it?
Lord Nash: RSCs do sometimes meet parents in difficult situations that need more explanation. They have obviously gone to meetings with parents. They are very open to that.
Q361 Chair: If there was a group of parents who were concerned about a school or whatever, would they write to the RSC and say, “These are our worries. What are you doing about it”?
Lord Nash: They could well do and they have done. The first port of call for parents is obviously their principal and their governing body, but yes, we do see that.
Chair: Lord Nash, thank you very much indeed for coming to our session. It has been extremely helpful and timely, because we have managed to accomplish all of the process within an hour or so. Thank you very much.
Lord Nash: Thank you.
Oral evidence: The role of Regional Schools Commissioners, HC 401 21