Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, in moving Amendment 282 I shall also speak to Amendment 283. With these two amendments, we move onto the next part of the Bill, which is about schools. Chapter 1 of Part 10 concerns the intervention by the Secretary of State in local education authorities when a large number of their schools are underperforming. The purpose of this amendment is, first, to ensure that where the Secretary of State intervenes to take over the education services of a local authority—because it is running a disproportionate number of low-performing schools—the judgment on whether a school is low-performing is not the peremptory one of the National Challenge, based on raw performance data, but the more considered judgment of Ofsted, which looks holistically at the school’s overall performance. Ofsted also takes into account the population it serves and the difficulties it may face in serving a particularly disadvantaged or, perhaps, an ethnically and linguistically diverse population. The second purpose is, similarly, that the question of whether a local authority has a disproportionate number of such schools is, again, to be a matter for Ofsted to decide in its local area agreement, rather than for the Secretary of State to decide and step in. I am sure that the Minister will tell us that the Secretary of State would not step in without consulting Ofsted, just as it happened with Haringey and Baby P. Nevertheless, if that is the case, why should we not have Ofsted instead of the Secretary of State in the Bill?