Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
Main Page: Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Jones of Whitchurch's debates with the Department for Education
(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement, but does he recognise that the damning failure of Al-Madinah school all too starkly illustrates that, in the rush to launch an ideological experiment, the Secretary of State has lost control of the free schools programme, and that it has, in fact, become a dangerous free-for-all? Does he now accept that alarm bells should have rung in the department when Ofsted deemed the school to be failing to meet basic child protection standards back in 2012, before the funding agreement was signed? Does not Ofsted’s conclusion that the school has not been adequately monitored and supported expose the dangerous lack of oversight of the current free schools programme, which has a complete absence of accountability and transparency? The truth is that parents will be wondering who will guarantee the standards in their local free school, and the Secretary of State does not have an answer for them.