Education and Adoption Bill

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 8th February 2016 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Addington]

2: After Clause 12, insert the following new Clause—
“Regional Schools Commissioners
(1) The Secretary of State must make widely available to the public a coherent document that sets out the powers and responsibilities of the Regional Schools Commissioners which are connected with the provisions of the Education and Adoption Act 2016.(2) The document under subsection (1) must contain—(a) a list of the Acts of Parliament and regulations from which each responsibility and power of the Regional Schools Commissioners is drawn;(b) a user-friendly executive summary.”

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, it became obvious during the progress of the Bill that the action proposed by Amendment 2 was needed. Regional schools commissioners are a new subject for us all. I became increasingly aware of just how important they are to the new structure roughly at the same time as the entire House of Commons did; nevertheless, we do what we can. It became clear that we could not find out very easily how this occurred. It needed a little bit of digging, and I thank Thomson Jones—a young lad who has been helping in my office—who did some of it. He is good at reading back on bits of legislation. Several bits had to be referred to, to find exactly what was going on and how it functioned and fitted together. Legally it was there, but you could not find it. Anecdotally, a lot of people are telling me that education authorities have people phoning up and saying, “What do I do about the academy?”. They do not know the new chain of command.

This is merely a sin of omission, but if we can get it right now, we will save a great deal of trouble for ourselves in the future. Even if we do not like the structure that is coming, it is clearly going to be with us for a while, so we must make it function properly. The objective of the amendment—and presumably those which have been tabled as amendments to it—is to make sure there is a clear way of getting to the legal basis for operation. The schools commissioners are soon going to have far more of the problems of the education system put on their doorstep to deal with. I hope the Minister can give positive answers to show exactly how this is going to be done, even if he does not—for some bizarre reason—choose to accept this amendment. I beg to move.

Amendment 3 (to Amendment 2)

Moved by

--- Later in debate ---

Amendment 3 (to Amendment 2) withdrawn.

[Lord Addington]

If we may draw back from the amendments we are actually discussing, I thank the noble Lord for his work and the courtesy of his department. There have been a lot of emails going back and forth. There was also an entertaining point when the good old-fashioned steam telephone was not working in my office, so in the end a piece of paper was handed to me by one of the doorkeepers. That meant that I knew the noble Lord was getting back to me, for which I thank him.

If we address what the noble Lord said about this amendment, it is a triumph of the bleeding obvious, if I may put it like that. We should let people know what is changing. What he has done is not quite as much fun as getting an amendment accepted, but half a loaf is better than no bread—and this is a bit more like three-quarters, so I thank him for that.

Given that we seem to be going slightly off-piste, I shall also take the opportunity of thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for giving the assurance at an earlier stage that the KPIs for increasing the number of schools becoming academies were withdrawn. I should have mentioned that at the time, but it got rather swamped by other matters. Having heard that, and having those assurances on the record, I thank the noble Lord for his work on this and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 2 withdrawn.