Schools: Local Oversight

Baroness Bakewell Excerpts

Monday 28th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

Our solution to ensuring better local accountability is to have a system of regional schools commissioners which is run by head teachers. Personally, I trust head teachers to be better wired into their local systems than bureaucracies and bureaucrats are, any time. We are also increasingly seeing the emergence of regional multi-academy trusts, which are proving particularly effective.

[Baroness Bakewell (Lab)]

My Lords, after the Trojan horse allegations, it has been reported that teachers who spoke out at the time are now suffering harassment and the threat of losing their jobs. What do the Government propose as a way of protecting whistleblowers locally so that they are given enough courage to come forward and speak out?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness raises a very good point. We are doing all that we can to ensure that that does not happen. Indeed, there are some teachers we are particularly concerned about who had themselves been causing harassment and who have now been suspended from their jobs. We are talking to Ofsted about expanding its whistleblowing arrangements to cover exactly this kind of situation.