Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Blunkett]

435: After Clause 44, insert the following new Clause—
“School inspections: multi-academy trustsIn section 5(2)(d) of the Education Act 2005, after “schools”, insert “and trusts””

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

In moving Amendment 435, I am grateful for the support of my noble friends and of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, who quite rightly drew attention in the last debate to anomalies that have arisen over the years that I hope we will be able to put right. Mine is a simple amendment that says that multi-academy trusts should be subject to the same inspection regime as schools and local authority children’s services. I shall be as brief as possible, otherwise the Committee will be sitting very late.

I want to take the Committee back to 1988, when the noble Lord, Lord Baker, brought forward the legislation which started the process of what was called local management of schools. Some local education authorities had had the wisdom to devolve much greater powers to heads and to free up schools to innovate before that date, but the Bill, along with bringing in the national curriculum, reinforced the importance of schools managing schools. The head was responsible for what took place in a school and could be held to account. Local management of schools was about accountability and where the buck stopped on standards being dramatically improved, with the support at the time of the better local authorities.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, will remember that, when we were in the department from 1997 to 2001, we spent a lot of time trying to unlock the worst of local authorities’ iron grip on the throats of head teachers who were trying to get on with the job and innovate. Back in the 1980s, there had been experiments in a number of areas of local governance. Governing bodies were being brought into being and parents and communities were being engaged much more with their school.

Many changes have taken place since. From 2001, when I was pleased and proud to be the Education and Employment Secretary, we started the process of academisation. It followed grant-maintained schools, foundation schools and the greater freedom that schools had already acquired over the previous decade, and was intended to have a laser focus on improving standards and changing the lives of children in many schools which had simply let them down. That process had a life of its own over the subsequent decade and led, in 2010, to a massive acceleration of separate free- standing academies, supported by additional resources.

I am going back on the history because what then occurred was what the chief inspector at the time described as atomisation—a fragmentation of the system. Quite rightly, the noble Lord, Lord Gove, as he is now, recognised that this was not tenable and that we were ending up with flowers that were sometimes blooming but quite a lot that needed watering and nurturing.

The growth of multi-academy trusts was a natural reversion to bringing schools together and to having a superstructure that could provide support. That support has grown. Some of the best multi-academy trusts, some of which have been supported and nurtured by Members of this House, have shown precisely what can be done with the right balance of support and guidance and sometimes rigorous intervention with the local management of schools—head teachers being given their head and carrying true responsibility. Other multi-academy trusts have had a different approach, and the split between the founding board and the trust board can have interesting outcomes.

Amendment 435 is very simple. If, as is quite right, we inspect local authority children’s services and individual schools, we should also inspect multi-academy trusts. That is not a threat—it is a promise. It will ensure that the best is highlighted and that, where there are problems, they are rooted out. If a multi-academy trust is in charge of overall funding and HR, and, as in many cases, has taken to itself the power of appointments, as well as being in charge of how the curriculum is developed and applied, all those elements are about the delivery of standards for children. Not to inspect makes no sense at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I am very grateful for the final intervention by the noble Baroness opposite. Collective memory has always been a problem in government. It is nice to know that there is something on a shelf somewhere, although we have had rather an experience over the last 14 months of sometimes pulling the wrong one off it.

I thank the Minister for her reply. It is perfectly feasible to square this circle. It is perfectly feasible to put in the Bill an enabling clause that allows the department, through the White Paper and beyond, to bring forward implementation. As has been suggested by a number of noble Lords, one can then sophisticate it with guidance or, if it requires it, regulation. We have got into a mindset of having to put things in the order that they were first thought of. It is difficult to get legislative approval within government. We used sometimes to manage it, not least when my noble friends Lady Blackstone and Lord Rooker were my representatives in this House, because they used to cause absolute sodding havoc. Normally they were right.

One time, I had the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the phone demanding the resignation of my noble friend Lord Rooker for something that he had said in the House. I said, “Well, there is one surefire way of making sure that everybody knows about it, Gordon, and that is to fire him”. On that note, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for getting such a speedy response from the Minister. It is almost unknown. It gives me the opportunity to congratulate the Minister on being reappointed as the Minister for Skills. Not only that but she has it in two departments—the DWP and education. She is the most powerful Minister for Skills that has ever been appointed. I think she will make the most of it. This change is one of the most significant of the reshuffle.