Education and Inspections Bill

I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me for intervening, as I am really here as an observer and it is with some trepidation that I move into the field of education. As a member of a county council local education authority for some 12 years, I feel obliged to point out to her that local authorities have not managed schools in the way that she describes for well over a decade. Certainly, during all my period in Suffolk County Council the move was towards freeing up the local authority. The noble Baroness must accept that, if local authorities are to be given the sort of strategic powers that she describes, they have to have a locus to be able to do that. If the schools are entirely free, the local authority can set all the strategies in the world that it wants, but it will be powerless to do anything about them. There is always a balance to be struck between the freedom of individual schools and the role of the local education authority as the strategic provider. It is about where that balance falls. In defence of the comments from these Benches, I point out to the noble Baroness that that sort of direction or micromanagement of local education authorities has been a thing of the past now for quite some time.