Education and Inspections Bill

I shall reply to the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, to begin with. Where a former head teacher is a SIP, there will be very little difference in the quality of the experience, advice, support and challenge that will be given. The vast majority of the SIPs operating in the future will be current or former head teachers. They will, however, have gone through a vigorous training process. They will not be ““old hacks””. They will, for example, have to have looked at, under quite strict conditions, all the new data that are now available to local authorities, schools and the Secretary of State. Today, for example, we can put together data on children who have free school meals with data on their academic performance. That was not the case even a few years ago. The data are becoming finer and finer. The new SIPs, with that training, will have to be able to deal with that, to talk as a critical friend to heads about those data and to encourage heads to see from those data whether they are reaching their targets. That is just one example of how these people will be under constant professional development and have vigorous training. However, the majority will be head teachers. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was worried that this might be some sort of Stalinist move, or some sort of spy in the cab. This system replaces the current one in which link officers from local authorities go to schools to advise and to be a critical friend. We have been consulting schools where that system has perhaps not been working too well. Heads want someone who is a peer reviewer, whom they find credible to have that serious and challenging conversation with. Mainly, they want another head teacher. So we are upgrading a system that has existed for some time, whereby a person comes and helps with the challenging aspects of the school’s accountability to the local authority. The noble Baronesses, Lady Williams of Crosby and Lady Howe of Idlicote, wanted to push me a little further on the supply issue, particularly in the context of the concern expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, about, as she saw it, the problems with people coming forward to be head teachers. As I said earlier, over 2,000 individuals have responded to the first advert for primary SIPs. Eighty per cent of those are people with experience as a head teacher and 50 per cent are serving heads. These are serving heads who have volunteered, knowing the pressures of the job, to be SIPs. We suggest that the time requirements of the job are quite modest. Typically, there would be 19 days a year per SIP head. That would be in addition to the work that they already do, but the requirements would not take over their current job. We also believe, very much in the spirit of the intervention of the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, that the system will develop the senior staff of the SIP’s home school by giving them managerial opportunities to deputise. This can have a good knock-on effect for the home school.