Academies Bill [HL]

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, I, too, support this amendment in the name of my noble friends. The process of having an annual report might also greatly reassure all those who have raised concerns about special educational needs in the academies throughout these debates. This would of course be a monitoring activity whereby we could see how the academies were responding in that particular area as well as across the other fields.

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton]

I have a question for the mover of the amendment. While I am not unsympathetic to this amendment, because in a sense it reflects some of our conversations in Committee and on Report, I am not clear whether it suggests a parallel process of monitoring that goes into all academies in the future. If it does, I am unconvinced that the department at present is able or ready to do that. I do not think we have seen much evidence recently of sufficient numbers of civil servants with time on their hands with the capacity to go into schools and produce a whole set of parallel reports. I would have thought a more sensible approach would be to look to Ofsted to see whether it could do some specific work on the new section of academies that otherwise are not going to be reported on regularly. While I have nothing against the spirit of the amendment, I am rather doubtful about setting up a parallel process with a group of schools that is not being applied to other schools.