Education and Inspections Bill

We have ensured in the Bill that local authorities will have the leading role in objecting to the kind of expansion of a school that would damage other schools. The Secretary of State has given us assurances that will provide some constraints, although not all the ones that I would have put in if I had been asked to write the Bill. However, I was not asked to write the Bill, so I am working with the one that we have got. We have made a lot of progress since the White Paper was published in ensuring that there are local strategies and local admissions forums that will be able to determine whether a development will be damaging to pupils in the wider area. Many of us fought for certain safeguards, not to prevent a popular school from expanding, but to enable us to say to a school, ““If you act like that, if you cheat like that, if you develop like that, or if you change in this way, it will damage the education of other children.”” The Bill is not perfect in regard to the safeguards that it contains, but it is a lot better than what we had when the White Paper was first published.