Education and Inspections Bill

As training and professional development allow for high standards of peer review for SIPs, if a school needs assistance in a particular area, I believe that it will be better off with five days a year than without it. A decline in progress among 11 to 14 year-olds is another example, as is low achievement across all pupils in a specific curriculum subject. Even schools doing extremely well sometimes need that extra assistance and challenge. We believe that we would be letting down many thousands of underachieving pupils if we did not extend the SIP function to their schools. We need to be able to head-off decline in currently satisfactory schools. The introduction of SIPs to all schools is also about learning from others and sharing good practice. In our debates last week, noble Lords talked about the importance of the sharing of good practice. Feedback from SIPs, using local authority and national networks, will support all schools in learning from success in particular schools. I turn to Amendments Nos. 33 and 35. The way that the local authority and the school work together on this has to be approached in a spirit of partnership. When a local authority deploys SIPs, we expect it to pay attention to the preferences, needs and characteristics—including religious characteristics—of individual schools and their governing, bodies. We expect SIPs as well as local authorities to be responsive to the individual circumstances and characteristics of the schools they work with, including their religious characteristics. The national assessment for people seeking accreditation to be SIPs strongly stresses that expectation. It is designed to withhold accreditation from anyone who might work with a school without taking account of its ethos, including religious ethos, and other characteristics. Authorities will therefore need to manage effectively the SIPs that work with their schools. Authorities will use a range of approaches to that task, including feedback from schools and evidence on the impact that advice from SIPs is having on the schools’ performance. The discontinuance of a SIP’s deployment to a school will be one of the available management actions. If a governing body has serious concerns about the SIP allocated to its school—and here we return to concerns raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Williams and Lady Buscombe—the first step should be a discussion between the authority and the school. Local authorities are also supported by regional co-ordinators from the national strategies who can help to resolve such issues. The local authority and the school are not the only two players; they can call in help when conflict arises—as they may well do, as the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, suggested. I hope that that will reassure noble Lords that effective mechanisms are already in place to resolve this kind of conflictual issue. That aside, the use of the schools adjudicator in this area would of course be new work for the adjudicator and outside his current remit. The adjudicator, as noble Lords will know, currently has two main functions: to consider and make decisions on objections to schools' admission arrangements, and to determine proposals to set up, close or make changes to schools. Noble Lords asked a number of questions and I will try to answer them as quickly as possible. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, asked why not let schools appoint their own SIPs. As the debate on Clause 4 illustrates, society has big expectations of the school system that go beyond the concerns of the individual school and the pupils currently on its roll. An external body has to hold schools to account for delivery of those expectations. The SIP works for that body—the local authority—while acting responsively to the schools. The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, also mentioned SIPs that were to be seconded. When a head teacher works as a SIP, the arrangement is effectively a part-time secondment. The head’s school has notice of the arrangement and financial recompense, money which can be used to back up its organisation and to bring in extra resources. Several noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, asked for further details on funding.