Education and Inspections Bill

Sometimes when the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, for whom I have great respect, speaks, I have to pinch myself to check that we are not doing something that is genuinely outrageous, because the terms in which her arguments are made are very strong. But what we are doing here is a perfectly sensible adaptation of existing practice within the schools system. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said that what we are seeking to do is a great and radical departure. It is not. The model of governance that we propose for parents is precisely that which currently applies in many thousands of voluntary-aided schools, which are perfectly adequately managed within the state system. I am aware of no representation that parents feel that these schools are less well governed than other schools or that they feel less engaged than parents in other schools—indeed, if parental engagement and attachment to schools is measured by the popularity of schools and the willingness of parents to apply for their children to go to these schools, then the opposite might be held to be the case. In fact, in voluntary-aided schools there is no requirement for parent councils—none. I am not saying that the one is a trade-off against the other. We have looked at best practice in this area. In many trust schools, the majority of governors will not be appointed; it is an option to appoint up to the majority. We expect that in many trust schools a minority of the governors would be appointed by the trust, in which case there will be a larger number of parent governors. However, where the majority of governors are appointed by the trust—and that is done by consent with the school or through the process of competition and choice of the best school that can be provided, where it is a new school—they will take on real overall responsibility for governance in the way that the Churches do in their schools. We believe that it would be good practice to have other mechanisms to ensure effective consultation with parents over and above the arrangement for parent councils. As Bagehot once famously said of Parliament, the "““test of a machine is the work it turns out””." If the evidence from those schools that are governed on this basis is that they are well governed, popular in their locality and have a very strong community mission, and that parents feel well served and are willing to send their children to them, I simply do not understand the alarmist statements made by the two noble Baronesses as to the evil effects that this would have. This is one option that schools and local decision makers can pursue where they think it appropriate. They will do so in the knowledge that it would be giving majority control to a trust whose bona fides they would willingly have accepted as part of the arrangement for the trust school to be taken forward. On that basis, and given our experience of voluntary-aided schools, this seems a perfectly sensible emulation of existing good practice in the schools system and not some breach of fundamental principles. The more one looks at the state education system, the less fundamental they appear, in any event.