Schools: Academies

Baroness Hughes of Stretford Excerpts

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, following the decision to remove 10 academies from the E-ACT Academy chain, what action they are taking to ensure that other chains are managing schools satisfactorily.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, within the Department for Education we have a very tough process of performance management for academy chains. The vast majority are sponsored academies—that is, schools which have in most cases previously been allowed to languish in failure for years. Sponsored academies are now improving at double the rate of local authority-maintained schools. In the small number of cases where an academy is not performing well, we hold the trust to account and challenge it to take decisive action. We have a zero-tolerance approach to failure. Since 2011, we have issued 41 pre-warning notices to underperforming academies and these have proved highly effective.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, the question here is not individual academies but chains that have been allowed to take over very large numbers of schools. In fact, it is reported that E-ACT, the subject of my Question, has now lost control of 10 of its 34 schools—a third—after damning Ofsted inspections of those schools. Over the weekend, we heard that another big chain has claimed £1 million for so-called ghost pupils. Has not the Secretary of State been reckless in allowing big business to take over such large numbers of our schools without any continuing oversight of its ability to do so? Will he now agree with us, with Ofsted and apparently also with his Schools Minister, David Laws, that to protect the interests of children, parents and teachers, Ofsted should be allowed to inspect not just the schools but these very big sponsoring chains?

[Lord Nash]

E-ACT was undoubtedly overambitious. It took on a lot of schools which were failing and in very challenging situations. Personally, I think that big business being involved in the academy programme is an excellent idea, and it was of course the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who introduced this. As I said, this programme, which we are extending, is working extremely well, and we have extremely rigorous oversight of academy chains. We welcome Ofsted’s batch inspection of schools in academy chains and the support that it gets from those chains. However, Ofsted has a lot to do and, given the very tight grip that we have on the central management of these chains, we do not think that it is necessary for it to go any further than that.