Education and Inspections Bill

I thank the Minister for his reply. I accept what he says about voluntary-aided schools perhaps benefiting from having more elected parent governors on their board of governors. I emphasise that we are talking about elected, not appointed, parent governors. The parents in those voluntary-aided schools may feel that they are more involved with the school anyway because of their shared faith, but we are not talking about faith schools—well, we are in some cases because some of these trust schools will be run by faith groups, but not all of them will be, so they will not all have that shared faith by which the parents can feel that they are involved with the school and that the board of governors, whoever they are, represents their point of view. We are talking about many schools that will not be run by faith groups, so to reduce the number of elected parent governors on those boards to a paltry one person who is supposed to represent perhaps up to 2,000 sets of parents is very unsatisfactory on the part of a Government who say that they want to strengthen the power of parents. I would have thought that the Government should be saying, ““Let’s have four, five or more elected parent governors””, but no. What are the Government afraid of? Do they think that parents do not want the best for the school? Do they think that they cannot get enough parents to become involved in the board of governors? I cannot understand why the Government are so much against this point of view. They are supposed to believe in democracy and real power for parents. Yet in practice they are taking power away from them. I simply do not understand it, but I am clearly getting nowhere, so I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendment No. 93 not moved.] Clause 18 agreed to. Clause 19 [Publication of proposals for alteration of school]: