Education and Adoption Bill (Sixth sitting)

Flick Drummond Excerpts

Tuesday 7th July 2015 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Gibb]

If I had longer and had done more research, I could have done that. Perhaps my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South can help me.

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

I declare an interest: I am a governor at Milton Park primary school. We had a federation between the infant and junior school, and we have now become a primary school. We also have what some would consider a weak federation with Portswood, one of the leading schools in Southampton, which has been helping us over the past two years to reach “requires improvement”. Another form of soft federation is clustering of schools within a local authority, which has also worked very effectively.

[Mr Gibb]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that helpful intervention. She is a champion of education in Portsmouth. I have visited schools with her and seen her dedication and determination to help schools raise their standards. I pay tribute to her work in Portsmouth, not only on education but more generally too.

Amendment 29 seeks to expand clause 4(1)(d), which gives regional schools commissioners the power to require a school’s governing body to create or join a federation of schools as a way of improving standards. The amendment seeks to introduce an additional power to require a governing body to leave a federation, perhaps so that a regional schools commissioner or local authority can direct a governing body to leave an ineffective federation and join another if that is seen as appropriate. If an underperforming school were part of an ineffective soft federation, there are sufficient powers elsewhere in the Bill to enable the regional schools commissioner to require the school to leave the federation. If a school’s continued membership of a hard federation were likely to prevent improvements, the commissioner could issue an academy order on behalf of the Secretary of State.

Amendment 30 seeks to introduce a new specific section to the power. That new section appears to introduce a new solution for an underperforming school, allowing the school to remain a maintained school but collaborate with an academy by becoming a member of an academy trust but not an academy itself. We do not think that is the right approach because it would lead to an unsatisfactory compromise. Simply being a member of an academy trust would not allow the maintained school to benefit from the strong governance structure of a multi-academy trust, from shared staffing or funding, or from being part of a robust line of accountability, which is a critical element of the academy programme. Maintained schools would be denied those benefits if we accepted the proposition in amendment 30 that maintained schools could simply become a member of an academy trust rather than securing enduring structural change. Given those explanations, I hope that the hon. Member for Cardiff West will not press his amendments.