Education and Adoption Bill (Second sitting)

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2015 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Thank you very much. I will call the last Member to ask questions in a minute. What you are telling us is very informative, but can you be slightly more concise? We have very few minutes left.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Q 29 Thank you, Sir Alan. There is only one clause in the Bill about adoption. In theory, what should happen after this session is that we look at your evidence and then think of any further amendment or improvements that might be made to the Bill. Unfortunately, because clause 13 is being debated on Thursday, we are out of time for that, but the Chairs have indicated that they will look favourably on any amendments that we might submit, even at this late stage, before Thursday. Is there anything that you think should be added to the Bill to improve it by way of an amendment or new clause?

Hugh Thornbery: The two things that I have mentioned: the duty to provide adoption support on the basis of an assessment of need and the extension of virtual schools to cover children adopted from care as well as looked-after children.

Andy Leary-May: For me, it would be an extension of what the Bill focuses on to cover other forms of permanence. Also, is there any way to inject some degree of required caution about how the power might be used? Rather than having a blanket movement and assuming that it will create improvement in all areas, maybe it could start a little more cautiously and take it step by step.

[Edward Timpson]

Q 30 In the Children and Families Act 2014, we took a backstop power in relation to the recruitment of adopters, so we could ensure that enough came forward who could be assessed and approved for the children still waiting to be placed for adoption. We have not had to use that power, and we have been successful in increasing recruitment by, I think, more than 27% in the past 18 months to two years.

This power widens it out to include matching and support, which we have discussed in this session. Based on the fact that there are already good working relationships between local authorities and consortia, which often include voluntary adoption agencies, and based on our statement on page 12 that, as we articulate in our paper “Regionalising adoption”, we need to harness the important role of voluntary adoption agencies in forming regional adoption agencies, how confident are you that in the next few years, through the work of the Department, yourselves and others with an interest in getting it right, we can ensure that we scale up services in all those areas so that we do not need to use the power on recruitment, as we have not yet had to do?

Hugh Thornbery: I am confident in the sector’s ability to improve. The examples that you have given have demonstrated that with the right degree of encouragement, and sometimes financial support, the system has been able to transform itself in terms of reducing delay, increasing the supply of adopters, improving adoption support and so on.

I think that there are systemic and cultural barriers to moving from those single entities working in partnership with each other to entities coming together to form a new entity. There are issues of governance and accountability. I think that we have seen some progress toward consortia working well. The progress that has been made toward a more formal consolidation has, in most cases, got quite close to achieving it and then stepped back. We need to understand why that is happening. I think it has to do with some of those issues that I have just mentioned.

Andy Leary-May: Within matching, in some ways we are already there, in that a local authority’s ability to have visibility of available adopters is already there. That was why we built our system, and it is there. It is about the decisions made as to which placements they go for. I do not think that those problems will be solved by regionalising agencies and it is important that they are addressed. If there were regions that for whatever reason do not come together as a regional agency, those other problems would still need to be addressed. But in either case I think there will be problems.

I think it is important to remember that a local authority may be willing to look widely when it is looking for a match for children, but local authorities do often hold on to their adopters. They need to be making adopters available from the earliest point, because otherwise the pool of adopters will never be big. I think that could be changed in other ways.

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[Peter Kyle]

Q 38 I have other questions, but would the other witnesses like to comment on either the failure aspect or the contribution aspect?

Anna Sharkey: Obviously, what we are discussing is the adoption clause and the multiple placement changes in fostering. Having managed a fostering service for some time and knowing the sorts of complex areas being dealt with, I accept that adoption constitutes a very small proportion of the population of looked-after children, and it has had a huge amount of focus. There has been a lot of attention on adoption, but part of the reason is that the outcomes for adopted children tend to be good. The disruption rate is still very low. We know from Julie Selwyn’s research that there are families that clearly continue to have difficulties in their adoptive placements, but most of them hang on in there.

The outcomes for children are very good, and we know that the children involved will be those who have had the most trauma, because if they had not had the most trauma, more would be being done to try to maintain them in their family of origin. These are the ones where there is often absolutely no hope of achieving that within their family. Therefore, by definition, they are going to be the little people who have experienced the most difficult things. Adoption, by achieving what it does for them, is hugely significant. The fostering bit, and the whole role of public care, is another whole area and while I am not saying that it is muddying the water, I think it will get very complicated if we discuss it here.

Alison O'Sullivan: I would agree with the general direction of those comments. I have nothing to urge specifically for legislation, but perhaps for guidance and the manner of implementation. First, it is really helpful to have a spotlight on adoption, but we can do more than one thing at a time. We need to keep the spotlight on adoption, but also look more closely at permanency, as has been urged by the other witnesses—I absolutely agree with that. The second thing I would urge is that we make real the spirit of local determination, because there will not be one solution. It is important that as we do that, we keep a very close eye, collaboratively, on the impacts on the whole system.

This is quite a volatile, fluid market in some places and having an overview of that and how we manage collaboratively the dynamics in that market will be key to its success. Otherwise, we will have unintended consequences in creating something strong in this bit of the system washing back into another bit of the system. That is not what any of us want. It will be an art rather than a science, but I think if we work collaboratively we can do that.

My third point would be to build on the arrangements for collaboration. We have local adoption boards coming into place. I have been visiting the regions over recent weeks, and the boards are starting to gain traction. Many of them are looking broadly at permanence. They are keeping their eye firmly on adoption but looking at it within that broader context. By tying those together with national oversight we will be able to keep in view the important dynamics in the system.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 39 It strikes me that given that improved quality of parenting, higher aspiration, more stability and a better voice for young people who are looked after in care should, as ever, be our principles, we should have had some young people giving evidence to our session today. It is all of our faults for not making sure that that happened, as it would have been useful. If there is any written evidence, we should take very close account of it.

While you are here, Alison, I wonder if I might ask you as a director of children’s services who also has some responsibility for education—the Bill includes clauses on education—whether you think the regional schools commissioner in your area has the capacity to increase their oversight of schools as envisaged in the Bill, from 500 academies or so in your area to about 2,500 schools under their new responsibilities for issuing warning notices and, on top of that, having responsibility for dealing with coasting schools? Do you think they have the capacity to do that with a maximum of about seven staff?

Alison O'Sullivan: I do not imagine that the existing level of resource into that part of the system would be able to cope without some additional investment. It is not for the local authority to determine the support to the academy part of the system. What I would say is that there is an untapped resource of collaboration at a local level. If we look at the shared ambition that we have to drive up standards in all schools in all categories, we should be exploiting the potential to collaborate more closely across the wider system.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 40 On that point, do you think that DCSs should be members of the teacher advisory boards, given that they are now taking over responsibility around maintained schools as well?

Alison O'Sullivan: I think we need the right people in the room to have the right oversight of those systems on the right scale. There are some difficulties with geography which I think would bear examination: the oversight of the academy part of the system does not sit easily in terms of coterminous boundaries with other administrative boundaries. That creates complexity that we could perhaps design out of the system to good effect. I personally feel that there is a great untapped resource of collaboration, because the expertise for improvement sits very largely within schools, but we need to be able to join that up across the whole of the system.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 41 Could I ask finally whether you think it will be necessary for the things contained in the Bill to be achieved on the school side for the staff to be transferred from local authorities to the regional schools commissioners?

Alison O'Sullivan: No, I do not think that structural change is the answer to those challenges. It is certainly something that could be considered but why would you put time and energy into structural change if you could achieve that without it?

[Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)]

Q 42 The provision on adoption aims to try and solve the problem of long-term decline in adoption. At the moment, as we all know, it is happening at too small and too localised a scale. It is hoped that the attempt to regionalise agencies and bring them together will encourage agencies to cast their net more widely, reduce the problems of delay, and encourage local authorities to look outside their immediate local area. We have heard a lot about this today. One problem which has been cited is the reluctance of local authorities to place children outside a particular area. What appetite do you think there is for looking further afield geographically?

Anna Sharkey: I think that there is an appetite. Local authorities met the requirement to up the game when it came to recruitment, and they were very successful. Local authority social workers work hard to do the best they can for the children they are responsible for, and that is what they aim to do. There are difficulties in the system as it exists at the moment, and I think that, because clearly there are children waiting in the system. I have adopters who have been approved and are waiting—it is not happening. Adoption Link has achieved a huge amount by getting adopters much more involved in the adopter-led linking process, and that has been very positive.

There some things that still prevent movement out of a local authority region. These are often to do with budget constraints, because local authorities are completely stuck financially. There is an historical sense that buying a placement from outside is very costly. Andy talked about children who sit in the care system and experience multiple placement moves, and who are then over-represented in mental ill health, the criminal justice system and underperformance at school. The cost to all of us of not getting it right at a much earlier stage is absolutely phenomenal, not least of which is the impact on that individual child and the rest of their family.

Getting it right is very important. At the moment the structure includes an inter-agency fee budget, an adoption budget, a fostering budget, a budget that does something else relating to supporting kinship care arrangements, and so on, which can make it very difficult to be child-focused, and to look at the best option in the most timely way to meet the needs of the child as soon as possible. Anything that tries to sort that out can only be a good thing.

I have some caution about the criteria on which that regionalisation would happen and how big a region would be. There is talk in the paper of it being around the 200 mark in respect of children. We are dealing with a very personal aspect of public care, and adopters need to feel that the people they are working with know them individually. We want those children to be known individually by the social worker who is advocating on their behalf, so getting lost in numbers is a real concern. We also know that where people are stuck with chunks of money that do something or boundaries that do something else, or if social workers are not prepared to go outside because someone else is saying “We have run out of money” or “It has got to be in-house” or “We have a family coming through in four months’ time who might be okay”, that will build delay into the system. If we can improve that, it has got to be better.

Alison O'Sullivan: It is really important that we do not build new barriers. If we are widening the scope of the way in which people collaborate to make things more effective and more efficient, then we must not have another set of boundaries that are just on a slightly bigger scale. It is not only how we create those collaborative arrangements, but how they interface and interrelate with each other as we go forward. That is one aspect that will need to be managed.

Andy Elvin: I would go back a step regarding the decline of adoption numbers. If your measure of success is an increase in adoption, then you are asking the wrong questions. That is not what we are after; we are after an increase in permanence and an increase in better outcomes for children. As the adoption numbers have fallen slightly, we have seen special guardianship orders rise. SGOs, in particular those for children under five, are largely made to extended family members to care for their relatives. That was exactly why SGOs were introduced. It is not a bad thing that they are now being used where there used to be intra-family adoptions, because they take some of the heat out of that conflict between different generations of a family.

We have a group of experts which was set up by the Department for Education, which will start meeting to discuss the rise in special guardianships. It will also look at the appropriate use and the assessments behind SGOs. Until that finishes in the autumn, we do not really know what the story is behind the rise in special guardianship, particularly for the under-fives.

The other side is that there is a huge rise in surrogacy in this country that is completely unknown and completely unreported. People who used to come forward for adoption are choosing international surrogacy, because it is available and affordable and more assured in terms of getting a younger child—a baby—than adoption. There are all these threats to adoption out there, but simply taking adoption numbers as your measure of success is to look at entirely the wrong thing. It is outcomes for children as a whole that we are after, and success comes in many forms. I know many complex children we look after in long-term foster care who have absolutely fantastic outcomes.

Foster care does not stop at 18; it will not stop at 21, when they are staying put. Our foster parents are godparents to their foster children’s children; they give them away at their weddings. It very often lasts for life in the same way that adoption does.

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[The Chair]

Q 48 Mr Hobby, I am pleased that you have been able to come to give evidence to the Committee. May I ask you a couple of favours? First, before we open the question and answer period, would you present yourself and your CV? Secondly, because this is a terrible room for acoustics—you are not supposed to admit to things like that in Parliament, but it really is not very good at all—would you raise your voice a little bit? It would help the Members. We will not be in this room in future—you have been unfortunate, as we have, to land here today. Without further ado, will you present yourself to the Committee?

Russell Hobby: Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me to give evidence. I am Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers. We represent 29,000 school leaders in all phases of education.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 49 Since time is very short and we do not have the pleasure of your company for long, can you tell us, as succinctly as possible, what you think about the Bill and what you would do to amend or improve it?

Russell Hobby: Okay. In a spirit of constructive criticism, the first issue is whether the Bill genuinely defines what we would normally regard as coasting schools. I think there is potential within the definition for some schools at the secondary level that we would normally regard as fitting the definition of coasting: those with affluent or privileged intakes who manage to achieve over the 60% hurdle but do not make adequate progress on that. It seems to me a better definition of schools that have been average for a long period of time rather than what we would normally define as coasting.

There is an issue in that we are already raising the performance standards while we are still waiting for new standards to be implemented. There is a risk of that being perceived by headteachers as more pressure being added to that. That is magnified by the fact that two of the years over which this is measured are retrospective—they have already delivered their performance for those two years. People complain a lot about not being able to predict what is around the corner in education and they also cannot predict what has happened in the past, to a degree, as a result of this.

We reckon that there are about 700 primary schools and perhaps 400 secondary schools that would fall within the definition of coasting and probably 60% of those—certainly at the primary level—have got a good inspection rating. They will have thought that they had done everything that had been set for them, but now they have a new bar to climb over.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 50 Do you think that the Government sometimes think it is ultimately possible for all schools to be above average?

Russell Hobby: Not if the definition of average keeps shifting as schools improve themselves over time. It is particularly hard at secondary level, where the exam results are re-normed year on year to ensure that a similar balance of results comes out, so secondary schools can find themselves in a bit of a rat race on that front.

It is right that we should raise our standards from time to time and we should reset that bar. The difficulty is, if the level of pressure on schools is too high—let us face it, they have dealt with five years of quite extreme pressure on that front—some of the effects on education can be negative. Rather than just raising standards, you get narrowed curricula, teaching to the test and people leaving the environment, so you find it harder to recruit headteachers to work in the most challenging schools.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 51 A final question. Could the whole issue of coasting schools be dealt with in the inspection regime? Is there a danger that there could be confusion about accountability if we have two separate regimes running side by side?

Russell Hobby: That danger does exist. We now have two separate systems with no read-across between the Ofsted categories of “requires improvement”, “good” and “inadequate” and the new definition of coasting. You will find schools in every Ofsted grade that will fit that definition—in fact, I think you will find slightly more “good” schools than schools in “requires improvement” meeting the definition.

There is a risk that schools will feel that they are working towards two distinct and different sets of criteria. We have always thought that schools should be accountable, but it is helpful if they are accountable in one direction and have one set of standards so that they can focus their efforts on that.

[Bill Esterson]

Q 52 If having a good headteacher is the best indicator of success in a school, what would you like to see in the legislation to increase the numbers of good headteachers?

Russell Hobby: We have taken the first step, which is to move away from vague generalisations of what a coasting school is to start to define what coasting schools are. One of the risks was that a lot of schools were looking over their shoulders, wondering whether they were coasting and, therefore, a lot of people were thinking, “That’s not the sort of school that I would want to go and work in” if there were extra pressures arising.

In favour of the legislation and the regulations being provided, although I have my concerns around the definition, we have now got a more graduated response to those schools that are judged as coasting. Rather than the default assumption being that you will sack the headteacher and academise the school, it is now proposed—at least as written—that you will look for a credible plan of improvement within the school and look to partner the school with other good local schools or national leaders of education. Only then will you move down into forced academisation. I am not sure that that message has reached many school leaders yet. If it does, that might reassure some of the people working in these coasting and challenging schools.

At the same time, some of the checks and balances have been removed or are proposed to be removed. The regional schools commissioners now have a great deal of discretion in determining whether the plan of improvement is credible and who the school should be paired up with. A school’s ability to represent and defend itself is not particularly enshrined within the regulations. School leaders will be wondering, “It’s all very well having the challenge, but do I have the chance to make my case or will I be rushed through a change?” I would look at strengthening those aspects, if possible.

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[The Chair]

Q 60 You know the drill, Ministers. We would be pleased if you presented yourselves, your areas of responsibility and your approach to the Bill. Questions will then come from the Committee.

Lord Nash: I am Lord Nash, the Under-Secretary of State for Schools. I am responsible, among other things, for academies and free schools.

Mr Gibb: I am the Minister of State for Schools. I have responsibility for school standards, issues such as Ofsted, Ofqual, qualifications, the curriculum and behaviour.

Edward Timpson: I am Edward Timpson, Minister of State for Children and Families, which includes: child protection; adoption, which is relevant to the Bill; fostering; special educational needs; character and resilience; school sport; and a whole host of other important portfolio areas.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 61 Nick, why do you have such a low regard for Ofsted inspections?

Mr Gibb: We do not have a low regard for Ofsted inspections. In fact, the Bill makes it clear that as soon as a school goes into Ofsted category 4, the Secretary of State will have a duty to issue an academy order based on that Ofsted judgment alone.

With coasting schools, we wanted to have a range of metrics, rather than the Ofsted judgment, to determine what is or is not a coasting school. The other principle that the Secretary of State set out on Second Reading, and is reflected in the regulations that you saw last night, is that the judgment should be over a period of years. In most cases, it is difficult to have an Ofsted judgment over a period of years. There will be one Ofsted judgment, almost certainly, during that three-year period. Here we have three years of metrics and a school is regarded as coasting if it falls below the bar in all three years.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 62 Do you envisage that any outstanding schools will be rated as coasting under the definition that you released at 10 o’clock last night?

Mr Gibb: It is certainly possible that a school could be graded as good or outstanding. Thanks to many of the reforms and the hard work of the teaching profession, 80% of schools up and down the country are now graded as good or outstanding. We are trying to ensure that every school is delivering the sort of education that means that every pupil will be making progress to fulfil their potential. That is a new ambition that we are bringing to the education system.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 63 One of our witnesses this morning has done a bit of number crunching since then. Apparently there are schools that are currently rated outstanding but will be deemed to be coasting under the definition you released. Does it not make a bit of a mockery of an Ofsted inspection if a group of inspectors goes into a school, judges it to be outstanding and, yet, separately the school is then deemed to be coasting? Why should they get an outstanding rating if it is so obvious that they are coasting?

Mr Gibb: We do not know for certain whether those numbers are correct, because until we have the 2016 results we will not know—

[Kevin Brennan]

You said you envisage that it is perfectly possible.

Mr Gibb: It is quite possible.

[Kevin Brennan]

So the question stands.

Mr Gibb: Yes, but, taking the first point first, we will not know precisely how many schools fall into this category until we have had the 2016 results. We will then be able to define precisely what the progress measure is for 2016.

In terms of outstanding and Ofsted, I suspect that we will not find that many. I do not know and I cannot predict that, but we are determined in this Parliament to address the issue of coasting schools to ensure that every child is making the maximum progress they can, and we want to ensure that schools do that. It may be that judgments Ofsted made in a different era—in the previous Parliament, two or three years ago—do not reflect that new ambition.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 64 Perhaps they should be inspected more frequently.

Lord Nash, how many academies does a regional schools commissioner tend to be responsible for? How will that change under the Bill?

Lord Nash: In total, each regional schools commissioner is responsible for 600 or 700 academies, although they will be focusing only on those that are underperforming. If a school is doing well, they—

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 65 Will they not have to monitor all schools to check whether they are underperforming under the Bill’s provisions?

Lord Nash: The accountability provisions in the Bill are pretty clear, so, if they fall foul of the coasting schools definition, that will be a statistical analysis. They will not have to do any—

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 66 Given their extra responsibility to issue directions, they have a responsibility to monitor all schools to see whether it is necessary to issue a direction as well as to improve schools.

Lord Nash: I am saying that monitoring to work out which school is coasting is not onerous; that is purely a statistical consequence of the accountability measures.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 67 How much extra resource will they require to perform those new functions?

Lord Nash: They will require extra resources and we will give those to them gradually.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 68 Can you give us an idea of what you have in mind?

Lord Nash: I expect in time we may need more regional schools commissioners—they will certainly need more people. They are heavily supported from the centre—the Department for Education—which runs very tight teams of six, seven or eight people. They will certainly need an increase in capacity, but we do not want them to become another arm of the DFE; we want them to be fairly tight-run organisations. I have to say that, having visited all of them and sat in all eight of the headteacher boards, they are performing extremely well.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 69 Are any of the regional schools commissioners coasting?

Lord Nash: I would say not. I have been involved in starting new organisations for 40 years and an early indication of success is early momentum. Frankly, I have never seen a new set of organisations start as well as this, which is not surprising given that they are all experienced professionals who know their regions well.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 70 Is there a method by which that judgment could be independently verified?

Lord Nash: I am sure there is. We have clear accountability measures set on the RSCs from the Department, but the ultimate test will be the performance of the academies and schools in their region.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 71 May I ask you a couple of other brief questions? I am looking for short answers. Should membership of headteacher boards be opened up now to headteachers of all schools rather than just academies, or do you regard headteachers of maintained schools as inferior in some way?

Lord Nash: We definitely do not regard them as inferior in any way, but the headteacher boards and regional schools commissioners are responsible for monitoring academies.

[Kevin Brennan]

That is being extended under the Bill—that is the reason for my question.

Lord Nash: It is not our current intention to open them up. Most of them are elected by their peers and we think that that is a healthy approach.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 72 So you would maintain the ban on maintained school heads being on the board?

Lord Nash: We have no plans at the moment to change that, but you make a point that we will keep under consideration.

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[Peter Kyle]

Q 81 Perhaps I could ask Mr Gibb. You were here during the evidence sessions today and there was a clear consensus that the Bill was too narrowly focused. That was accepted, and I accept it. I am the chair of governors at an academy school that was a converter. It was a failing school and has seen spectacular results in the four years that it has been in existence. But there was a clear consensus that conversion is one tool, not the tool. Do you not think that the Bill is too narrow and should take account of what all our witnesses said?

Mr Gibb: No, because academisation is only one tool. If you look at the Bill, it has all kinds of other powers. We are asking for the regional schools commissioners to require that a school that is not performing well enough, for example, collaborate with another school or enter into contractual arrangements with somebody who can improve their school. They might join a federation or use the national leaders of education, thousands of whom are doing a fantastic job up and down the country. We want to increase that number to 1,400 and then to 2,000 by the end of the Parliament. Academisation is a backstop if those other interventions, which the regional schools commissioners will be arranging, brokering and discussing with coasting schools, fail. I expect a lot of schools that fall within the definition will have their own plans in place. There may be a recently appointed head with a range of plans to implement. She or he will find themselves below the measure of what counts as a coasting school, but they will discuss those plans with the regional schools commissioner, who will be absolutely convinced that the plan will succeed. That will be the end of the matter and the RSC can move on to another school.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 82 Following on from what Peter said, he referred to clause 7 of the Bill where the Secretary of State “must”, where a school is eligible for intervention, make an academy order. That is an assumption that will not even be considered for any other method of school improvement. Does that not fetter the ability of Ministers to take a decision based on evidence?

Mr Gibb: No. This is about schools that Ofsted has judged to be in category 4, either requiring significant improvement or requiring special measures, so those schools have had that time. They have had that discussion.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 83 The Secretary of State already “may” do that. Why “must” they do it?

Mr Gibb: Because we made it very clear before the election and in our manifesto that we wanted to intervene in failing schools from day one.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 84 But you can do that already.

Mr Gibb: This is delivering that manifesto commitment to intervene in failing schools from day one. This is what will happen now. It will be automatic that an academy order will be issued for schools that are put into category 4 by Ofsted. We do not apologise for that. We are determined to tackle failing schools.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 85 It is just tough talk, isn’t it?

Mr Gibb: It may be tough talk, but it is tough talk that has delivered. As a consequence of tackling failing schools in the previous Parliament, we now have more than 1 million more pupils in good and outstanding schools than in 2010. That is a remarkable achievement, and we want to build on that now by speeding up the process. Sometimes it can take more than a year to convert a failing school to an academy. We want to build on that further and tackle coasting schools where pupils are not being delivered their full potential. We want to make sure that every child, regardless of background or ability, is fulfilling their potential.

Lord Nash: It is more than tough talk. The regime we have at the moment is basically tough talk. As Minister Gibb says, it means that the average time a school takes to become an academy after being in special measures is more than a year. That is not acceptable. Often the delays are caused by adults putting their priorities ahead of children. We have taken these powers to make it absolutely clear that delaying tactics cannot be used.

[Peter Kyle]

Q 86 To be clear, you are talking about failing schools, but it is also about coasting schools.

Lord Nash: We are talking here about—

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[Peter Kyle]

Q 106 My point is that we cannot use that as an excuse to shut out parents. I understand about people making broad political points, but parents of students who are going to the school and the school community are actively engaged. We do not want to push them to one side for fear of a group that is somewhere else.

Mr Gibb: I do not disagree with you on that. It is about the legal process of converting a school into an academy. We do not want that process being delayed by a group of people who are being driven by politics and ideology. Regarding the parents who want the best for the school, are involved with the PTA, are governors and are involved with their children’s education, a good school will always want to embrace and involve them in the running of the school and the school community. Nothing in the Bill prevents that from happening.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 107 We have talked about reasons for delays around academisation. Is it not the case that delays are more often due to departmental incompetence, PFI deals and lawyers arguing about public land, or does that never happen, Lord Nash?

Lord Nash: The answer to your question is that is does happen sometimes. Lawyers do argue on those issues, but they are not issues that result in extensive delays.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 108 Have you witnessed many lengthy delays, none at all or small delays for those reasons?

Lord Nash: Sometimes, the legal process on land can take a bit of time, particularly if the information forthcoming from the local authority is slow, but generally it is the other delays that we talked about.

[Kevin Brennan]

Q 109 Tim Coulson acknowledged earlier that having a key performance indicator relating to the percentage of academies that should be converted in an area could be perceived as a conflict of interest when dealing with coasting schools, in relation to how to approach them. Do you see any conflict of interest being possible there?

Lord Nash: We make sure that all our accountability measures and all the ways in which we asses the performance of regional schools commissioners are based on the principle of putting children first. There are no hidden agendas as you imply.

[The Chair]

That brings us to the end of the time allotted. We are grateful to the Ministers. This is undoubtedly only the opening foray of a period of time that I am sure we will all enjoy. We will examine everything that has been said today by witnesses and the Ministers, and we may come back with some further requests for information. The next meeting of the Committee will be on Thursday 2 July at 11.30 am in Committee Room 12.