Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Bates Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty]

I owe the noble Lord, Lord Baker, at least a brief response since he took us back not only to 1988 but to the 1950s. I read his article about technical colleges and I have some sympathy with it because, for the record, I am strongly in favour of local authorities. But that does not mean that I am against choice and diversity of provision. I do not think that the local authority has to provide everything or that everybody who works at the local authority school has to be employed by the local authority. That is not my position. My position is that the local authority should have oversight. The local authority is responsible for the community and the future of that community. However, the amendment that the noble Lords, Lord Phillips and Lord Greaves, and I are proposing is much more modest. It simply says that the local authority should be consulted, and that these things should be taken into account.

Despite a wide-ranging difference of ideological approach between the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and me, the actual answer to these amendments is relatively restricted. It emphasises the importance of local authorities. Unless the Bill keeps in mind that local authorities are big players in this game, there will be conflict and difficulties.

The other point that I would make to the noble Lord, Lord Baker is that much of what he was describing is not what is being proposed by this Government but what was being enacted by the previous Government. In other words, they were seeing schools that were failing and areas where the local authority was performing badly overall. They introduced academies into that context. I do not totally agree with it, but I sympathise and understand the motivation for that. But what the Minister and his boss Michael Gove are proposing is almost the opposite. They are saying that all schools can apply, but they will take the outstanding ones first. They will automatically take the outstanding schools away from the role of the local authority and leave it to manage the less good schools.

That is an inversion of how the noble Lord, Lord Baker, described the motivation for establishing academies. To some extent, it is an inversion of what the previous Government were attempting to do with the academies that they established. That is the part of the strategy I object to. But I repeat that our amendment is much more modest. I hope that the Minister can at least accept one of our amendments.

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, for tabling Amendment 4 and giving us the opportunity to look again at Clause 1(6)(d), because there is a potential difficulty for the Government down the line. We intend to provide freedom for people to establish schools, yet paragraph (d) says that,

“the school provides education for pupils who are wholly or mainly drawn from the area in which the school is situated”.

The noble Lord, Lord Baker, has just spoken. Of course, the city technology colleges were successful because they did not have that restriction. There was nothing to say that they had to “wholly or mainly” draw pupils from the area of the school. Therefore, they could draw them from a wider area, which was how they became beacon schools.

From my reading, Swedish schools are not subject to the same restrictions in terms of having to draw from very narrow boundaries. There is a potential risk, particularly in the primary sector as distinct from the secondary sector, of deleterious effects on neighbouring schools. I ask my noble friend to look again at the wording of that clause and see whether “wholly or mainly” needs to be included or whether a general statement about pupils being drawn from the area in which the school is situated would suffice.

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, there have been times in the past half an hour or so when I thought that I should contract my job out to the noble Lords, Lord Adonis and Lord Baker, and I have been sitting here feeling rather redundant. Between them, they made many of the points that I hoped to make, perhaps more briefly but no doubt less forcefully and persuasively and argued with far less experience, in my case, than that which noble Lords bring to bear. Both their contributions very eloquently made the core point that I would like to make in response, particularly to Amendment 4.

Generally, these amendments probe the Government’s intentions in relation to local authorities and the effect of academy orders on local provision, particularly in circumstances in which a large number of maintained schools wish to convert within a single local authority. We also have a specific amendment to do with new schools, to which I shall come in a moment.

We had an earlier discussion about consultation, which noble Lords will be relieved to know I do not intend to rehash. I said in the light of those comments earlier that I would ponder further and, in doing so, think about the points made to me by my noble friend Lord Greaves. We expect schools to consult parents, staff and pupils.

I move to one general point that touches on the points made by my noble friend Lord Baker and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I think that it is the case—and I am discovering this already with anything to do with academy proposals—that there is no shortage of people coming forward when there are academy proposals, making their views known. The local press tend to make their views known and local groups make their views known very forcefully. Groups of parents not in favour of conversion make their views known and groups in favour make their views known. It is not as though currently these academy proposals are considered in a vacuum or in some kind of Trappist silence. I am sure that that vigorous debate in which local people, whoever they are, make their views known as widely as possible will continue.

Our point of principle in this Bill is that schools that want to pursue academy status should have that freedom. Others have made that case far more forcefully than I am able to do or need to rehearse.

On the point of the role of localism, which in the coalition we discuss frequently and to which the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, referred, the debate will clearly continue. People have different views on what localism means and how it should be represented and policed—if that is the right word. With the Bill, we think that individual schools—