I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend section 5 of the Education Act 2005 to provide that Ofsted may inspect the governing bodies of Multi-Academy Trusts.
Mr Speaker, you have may heard me mention only a few times that I used to be a teacher and trade union representative, but having proudly worked in academies in London and Birmingham—I also have a partner who works in the sector—for over eight years before entering this place, I firmly believe that the most important thing we can achieve is to give our children the very best education. In my mind, there is no greater task that we have as MPs, and there can be no better investment than in our children’s futures.
I know that as a teacher and a Conservative, I am a bit of an outlier. There are not too many of us around, although I am delighted to count my hon. Friends the Members for Bassetlaw (Brendan Clarke-Smith), for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates) and for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) among our ranks on these Benches.
The Conservatives’ record on education since 2010 is a proud one. The proportion of schools rated as good or outstanding by Ofsted has risen from 68% in 2010 to 86% in 2020. Between 2011 and 2019, the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their wealthier peers narrowed by 13% at age 11 and 9% at age 16. In 2019, 82% of year 1 pupils met the expected standard for reading, compared with just 58% when the light-touch phonics check was introduced.
The great Govian and Gibbian reforms have been key to that improvement, as a result of which almost 2 million more children are now in good or outstanding schools than in 2010. At the reforms’ heart has been the academy and free school programme, which has freed schools from local authority control, given parents more choice and granted schools more control over their curriculum, budgeting and staffing. Through those changes, we have been able to drive up standards across the country.
Since 2010, the Government have invested in academy trusts to be the vehicle of school improvement. Over half of children are now educated in academies and 42% of schools are now academies. Some 84% of academies are part of multi-academy trusts, or MATs, and as of August last year, there were 1,180 MATs, covering 7,680 academies between them. Of those, 70% oversee six schools or fewer, and 38% run two or three schools. There are also a small number of big beasts that oversee 20 schools or more.
Parents and teachers must have confidence in the leadership of academy trusts. Over the years, various scandals have appeared in the papers, such as trusts paying for the lease of a new Jaguar for their chief executive, trusts paying thousands for first-class travel and high-class hotel rooms, and even trusts paying for transatlantic flights. We regularly hear of trusts’ chief executives getting huge salaries of £100,000 or £200,000—and, in some cases, close to half a million pounds. I am a big supporter of the drive for academisation and hope that all schools will become academies. I am not against trusts expanding, but, where they are encouraged to do so, it must be for the right reasons.