Education and Inspections Bill

If I may say so, my noble friend Lord Smith has made my speech for me. I welcome the noble Baroness’s support for the post of the schools commissioner, who has an important role to play in the way she described. She asked me specifically whether the final interviews have taken place and when an announcement will be made. The final interviews having taken place, an announcement will be made in due course. I want to try and avoid getting into these wide-ranging debates. I accept that there is general agreement across the Committee, if I can try and bring us together, that not everything has worked perfectly, and I did not take the noble Baroness as thinking that it had. There is a good deal of room for further improvement. If that were not the case we could pack up and go home, and we would not need the many hours I can see in front of us. Many local authorities have done excellent work. I have visited Wigan and seen my noble friend’s team in play, and I pay tribute to them. We all accept that in some cases there has been too much complacency, to use his word, regardless of the political control of the authorities. I gently point out to the noble Baroness that her party now controls some of the great cities, and some of them still have improvements to make in their schools. I hope we can regard the improvement of education as a shared endeavour across the parties. I move to the detail of the amendments. Amendment No. 122, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, seeks to add definitions of trust schools and self-governing schools to the Bill. She rather flabbergasted me by saying that she thought the reason we had not put these definitions in the Bill might be because we were trying to hide the fact that there were trust schools and self-governing schools. If that were the case, there would have been no policy initiative in which the Government had been less successful than in attempting to hide the concept of the trust school. If the soldiers getting into the Trojan horse had been marked as the praetorian guard of trust schools, they would not even have got into the horse, let alone penetrated Troy and stood any chance of getting out again. There is no desire whatever on our part to hide what we are seeking to do. We could not have been more explicit. Trust schools do not appear in the Bill for very precise legal reasons. I need to get into the realm of technical detail here to satisfy the noble Baroness on why we have done this, but I will do so briefly. It is not our intention that existing foundation schools with foundations—that is the phrase used in the Bill to describe trust schools—of which there are around 90, will be trust schools as they are understood in the Bill. Yet they would be captured by the noble Baroness’s proposed definition as their foundations were not established under the School Standards and Framework Act 1998. A trust school is in fact—as is explicitly stated in Clause 18 and the following clauses—a foundation school with a charitable foundation with particular characteristics acquired under this Bill, not under previous provisions. The phrase, "““a foundation school with a foundation””," is used throughout the Bill precisely because ““trust school”” would cover existing schools if we used the term to refer to all foundation schools with foundations in the way that the noble Baroness proposes. The noble Baroness’s amendment would unpick and require the redrafting of a huge volume of existing primary and subordinate legislation. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said that she wished we would undertake more consolidation. I love the idea of having everything in one place but—having brought before the Committee a Bill which already extends to 248 pages, and will be much longer when we have all the regulations to which the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, referred—I hesitate to think of the reaction if I were now to propose such consolidation, including the bringing of all the provisions in respect of existing categories of schools into a consolidated Bill. Therefore, we do not think that sensible. Similarly, the definition of ““self-governing”” proposed in the amendment would not be helpful in the Bill. This definition ignores the differences between separate categories of school, each of which has its own legally distinct governance arrangements. Of course, the Government encourage and themselves use the informal use of ““self-governing”” to characterise the range of schools which are not community schools. The noble Baroness quoted the Prime Minister in that regard. Last year’s White Paper uses the term in relation to foundation and trust schools. But for the reasons I have given it would not be appropriate to include the term in legislation over and above the detailed provisions which already exist for the distinct categories of schools concerned. I turn now to Amendments Nos. 12 and 123. The duty in Amendment No. 12 would require local authorities to encourage all schools to become foundation, voluntary or foundation special schools and to acquire a foundation. It will not surprise the noble Baroness to hear that, for the reasons given by my noble friend Lord Young, that would not be appropriate. It would be a step too far. It would not be appropriate in all cases for a local authority to encourage all schools to become voluntary or foundation schools with a foundation. The way in which these amendments seek to impose this self-governing model in all circumstances would work contrary to the policy of giving schools the freedom to decide for themselves how they wish to develop to meet the needs of their pupils, parents and the wider community. Equally, requiring local education authorities to promote particular categories of schools in all circumstances would be inimicable to the very diversity and contestability we want to promote in the interests of parents and pupils, which might in some circumstances include the legitimate promotion of a community school. For those reasons we do not wish to go as far as the noble Baroness proposes in the amendment but, as she knows, we are going a long way in the direction that she wishes.