Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
Main Page: Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Forsyth of Drumlean's debates with the Department for Education
(10 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberI stand by my original Answer regarding the rigid regime that academies operate under, and resent any allegation that we do not have a grip of the situation. When we came into the Department for Education in May 2010, we found a department with, frankly, a very poor understanding of value for money. Since then, we have halved the cost of building schools under the previous Government; by 2015 we will have cut the cost of running the department by half in real terms; we have slashed the amount of money spent on sponsored academies from an average of more than £300,000 under the previous Government to under £100,000; and we have substantially tightened the rather loose arrangements that the previous Government had in force in relation to these arrangements. I stand by the results of the academies. Sponsored academies open for three years improve their results by 12% versus 5% at secondary level, and primary converter academies are far more likely than local authority schools to be rated outstanding at their next Ofsted when they have previously been rated good.
My Lords, did my noble friend have the opportunity over the Christmas Recess to read the interview in the Times given by our noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham about the huge success in transforming the lifetime chances of youngsters in this country? Would a responsible Opposition not be asking why we are not getting value for money like that from local authority schools, which are cheating a generation of those opportunities?
I entirely share my noble friend’s sentiment. We should be praising philanthropists like my noble friend Lord Harris and encouraging more of them into the academies programme, as we are attempting to do. In 2013 the Audit Commission carried out a survey of annual detected fraud and corruption within local authorities and reported 191 cases of fraud in schools. My department is considering what we can do about improving procedures in local authorities in relation to this.