Lord Lexden
Main Page: Lord Lexden (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Lexden's debates with the Department for Education
Academies: Sponsors
Lord Lexden Excerpts(8 years, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Nash
We need to get this in context. Related-party transactions are permitted and often related parties will provide services much cheaper than anybody else. In 2013-14 we identified only 13 cases in which either goods were not supplied at cost or it could not be verified that they were supplied at cost. They totalled under £500,000, which compares with the total academies revenue budget of £50 billion.
Lord Lexden (Con)
How many poorly performing schools have now been taken over by academy sponsors with a proven track record of success? How successful have academies been in recruiting good teachers?
Lord Nash
We now have getting on for 2,000 sponsored academies. Last year, primary sponsored academies which have been open for two years improved their results by more than double those of local authority maintained schools. The benefits of academy status include the ability to employ teachers from a wide variety of backgrounds and to pay them appropriately.