Education and Adoption Bill (Fifth sitting)

Flick Drummond Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Public Bill Committees

“Councils’ powers of intervention in schools must also be freed from the restrictions placed on them by successive Governments. These stop them from acting quickly and decisively when issues arise in the interest of local children and parents. For example, even if Ofsted has rated a school as Inadequate, councils have to apply to the Department for Education to remove the governing body and replace it with an Interim Executive Board (IEB). The LGA therefore supports amendment 22 which would allow the local authority to take steps in relation to schools where, for example, standards and progress are unacceptably low. The steps which may be taken by a local education authority include the giving of a direction to the governing body or head teacher.”

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

If a school has been failing so badly, does it not suggest that the local authority is failing because it should have kept an eye on the school in the first place?

[Kevin Brennan]

I am making the point that local authorities are complaining that the current system restricts them from taking that action even more quickly. Through the amendments, we envisage that local authorities could act more swiftly. I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say.

[Kevin Brennan]

I would not accuse the hon. Member for Portsmouth South of making a strange comment, but my hon. Friend is right; we could ponder whether a double standard is applied to local authorities and academy chains. There is certainly a double standard with regard to inspection, but we will come back to that. Alternatively, it might be an illogicality in the observation.

[Mrs Drummond]

We have already discussed the fact that 131 academies have been put into special measures. If we have managed to do that, local authorities have surely been failing if they have not been looking after their failing schools.

[Kevin Brennan]

We should all be concerned to ensure that any school, whatever its character, delivers on behalf of its pupils, and that these interventions take place. We support academisation as one means of school improvement, but we simply say that it should not be used exclusively as the only way to bring about school improvement.

I would welcome a much more level playing field in the debate on this. Now that 60% of secondary schools are academies—the Minister has pointed that out several times—the whole issue of school improvement in academies will become bigger and bigger. If the answer to a failing school is to academise it, we need to know in much greater detail what the answer ultimately is to a failing academy. That is going to be a live debate during the passage of the Bill and in this Parliament.

Amendment 23 relates to clause 3. New Members may be surprised to know that the way we do things in this place means that from time to time we debate amendments to other clauses if they relate to the amendments contained within a previous clause, but we may decide upon them at a later stage. At this point we are debating clause 3; although, technically speaking, it occurred slightly later in the Bill, it has been grouped here. It removes the requirement that the Secretary of State must be informed about a section 60A warning notice in order to probe why the Government think it necessary to legislate that the Secretary of State should be informed.

The National Audit Office report of 30 October 2014, “Academies and maintained schools: Oversight and intervention”, made it clear that the Department for Education does not know in any detail what is happening in schools. Perhaps there are times when it needs to get out of the way a bit and allow others who do know what is going on in local schools to do a proper job—that was the view expressed in the NAO report. That view is shared not only by Labour Members but by Conservative representatives at a local level, so it would be extremely useful to hear the Minister’s response to that and to our amendments.