Education and Inspections Bill

I shall speak first to Amendment No. 27 and then to Amendments Nos. 37, 38 and 40, all of which seek to change the nature of the school improvement partner’s role. I share the wish of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, to make appropriate assistance and support available to all members of the school community, so let me explain the remit of the school improvement partner—or SIP, as I will refer to it from now on—which has elements of both challenge and support and which, as the noble Baroness has reminded us, is part of the lighter touch, less bureaucratic, new relationship with schools. The ““challenge”” part of the SIP remit is the key process by which schools are held accountable to their maintaining authority. This part of the remit therefore needs to be determined by the local authority so that the line of accountability is clear. The SIP, as a ““professional critical friend””—as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, quoted—will help to challenge and focus the school’s leadership team on the school’s self-evaluation, leading to agreeing priorities and targets to improve pupil attainment, attendance and behaviour. The SIP will challenge on those key aspects for which the school is accountable to the local authority—the maintaining authority. The SIP’s support role is important but limited in scope. It is focused on helping identify and broker assistance for the school, relevant to the school’s needs and the needs of the school community, where appropriate. But the determination of assistance for a school is for the school itself. It is not for the school improvement partner to throw its weight around, making determinations. That is very much part of the self-evaluation to which schools have signed up. Amendment No. 27 covers academies and city technology colleges. In law, these are independent state schools. Therefore, we feel it would be inappropriate for local authorities to appoint their improvement partners. That is not to say that the external accountability of these publicly funded schools is any less important. The equivalent maintaining authority to which academies are accountable is the Secretary of State. Accordingly, the SIPs are contracted to the DfES, and no legislative support is required to do that. By September 2006, we are planning for 45 academies to be working with their school improvement partners. The amendment would also remove the requirement for the SIP to provide advice to the governing body of the school. That may not be the amendment’s intended effect, but that is what it does. Since a school’s governing body is responsible for the school’s strategic direction, the school improvement partner needs to interact with the governing body as well as with the head teacher. The SIP will offer the governing body a professional view on the overall direction of the school and will have specific responsibility for advising governors on the head teacher’s performance management objectives and the school’s performance management arrangements. The range of meetings and other contacts between the SIP and the governors for this work will of course be for local determination. Quite a lot of flexibility is built into this programme. Finally, the amendment opens up a potential danger. It does not say specifically that every maintained school is to have a school improvement partner. Accountability, as I said earlier, is essential for every school, and we need to be able to head off decline even in schools currently performing satisfactorily. Amendment No. 37 would hamper our efforts to guarantee national standards in the ways that local authorities hold their schools to account. School improvement partners will need to provide a consistently high standard of challenge and support to all schools, and be credible to schools. National accreditation is therefore essential to help achieve this and to provide assurance to local authorities and schools about the experience and quality of the individuals they will be working with as SIPs. We have introduced a system to provide this. School improvement partners are accredited by the National College for School Leadership and the National Strategies contractor, go through a vigorous training programme and are involved in continuous professional development. However, I can assure noble Lords that local authorities will play a key role. They will be responsible for appointing SIPs and deploying them to schools in their areas. The SIP will be primarily accountable to the employing local authority. Authorities will also share with the National Strategies contractor the continuing professional development of SIPs. Amendment No. 38 goes further than Amendment No. 37 by removing the role of the Secretary of State altogether from the requirements for accreditation and by seeking to remove from the clause the regulation-making power available to the Secretary of State. We have set out our minimum policy requirements on the face of the Bill—that each school should have a SIP and that each SIP should be nationally accredited. Those are the minimum requirements. But as with any policy, there are other more detailed requirements that it would not be appropriate to put into primary legislation but where the Secretary of State needs to be able to legislate if necessary. We have therefore created reserve powers in subsections (3) and (4) of the clause to enable the Secretary of State to put more detailed requirements into regulations should the need arise. We would consider using these powers only in the event of widespread or persistent failure by local authorities to implement the school improvement partner function in accordance with government policies. On Amendment No. 40, desirable as school federations certainly are—we are enthusiastic supporters—I do not believe that they are an adequate substitute for a school improvement partner. We want every school to have a school improvement partner to reflect our commitment to the potential of every child being fulfilled. Federations of two or more schools can make a major contribution to the raising of standards. We are keen to support federations and other forms of partnership among schools and we are building on the success of these partnerships in our proposals for trust schools. However, when schools federate they do not lose their individual identities or accountabilities to the maintaining authority. They receive funding individually and they are subject to inspection individually, so the SIP has a separate role for each member school. To facilitate that role, it will often make sense for a single SIP to be deployed to each of the members of a federation, but the SIP role has to remain distinct for each member school. To maintain the integrity of its challenge function it would not be appropriate for the head teachers of schools in a federation to act as SIPs to one another. Aside from the principled arguments, the amendment proposes a very imprecise criterion be put into legislation—that of two or more governing bodies, head teachers and senior management teams having merely agreed to work together in the way proposed—and I do not believe that that would be workable. On the basis of those arguments I invite the noble Baronesses to withdraw their amendment. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, asked whether we are confident that there is capacity in the system for a suitable and adequate supply of SIPs. The evidence so far has been quite positive. I understand that 51 local authorities have appointed secondary school improvement partners and 99 local authorities have said that they will appoint SIPs by September this year. We have had more than 2,000 responses to the advert that went out at the beginning of the year for the four waves of school improvement partners for primary schools. So we believe that the supply is there. They are in the main serving current or former head teachers and some senior school advisers. On funding, we understand that there will be a need to supplement funding and not have that as a burden on local authorities. The steady state of funding on this is £28 million, of which £21 million will be supplied directly by the department to local authorities. With that, I hope that I have answered the noble Baroness’s questions.