Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, we on these Benches welcome Amendment 70. We think it a very good thing that the YPLA board will be able to call upon the right spread of expertise, covering all of the areas that the YPLA will have to deal with including, of course, academies. We also thank the Government for Amendment 83, which I believe came as a result of our probing amendment in Committee. It is now quite clear that the YPLA will not be able to enter into funding agreements, or to propose or confirm subordinate legislation. We also welcome the complaints procedure for academies against possible mismanagement by the YPLA. On academies, I am afraid that we have a diametrically opposed opinion to that of the noble Baroness, Lady Verma. We have a completely different vision of academies. The noble Baroness seems to believe that their success—which has in many cases been very considerable when dealing with children from the greatest deprivation—comes solely from the fact that they are free from local authorities. However, I believe that it might just have something to do with their ability to attract the best leaders and teachers, having shiny new schools with extremely good facilities, having freedom to innovate and, of course, having parents who take a great interest in the children’s education because they have chosen to send them there. Our view of academies is quite different; in the Liberal Democrat world, we would even call them something different. We would call them sponsor-managed schools, and we would have local authorities having strategic oversight over them. They would be able to commission appropriate sponsors with the right expertise to set up and manage academies, but they would be able to ditch them after 10 years—or whatever time limit we would put on them—if they were not delivering the goods. We would make sure that there was no unfair selection, that all schools had the freedom to innovate and that they would be funded fairly and consistently. We would also insist on community use of the facilities, although I am not suggesting that academies do not make their facilities available to the local community, when they often do. Unfortunately, we have had the situation where, up until now, the DCSF has become the largest local authority in the country, because it has been dealing with so many schools managed directly from the centre. There is, of course, a danger that the YPLA will now become the largest education authority in the country. However, we have had some useful discussions with Ministers and with the future head of the YPLA about how the YPLA will address its task. We are convinced that although what the Government propose is not, by any stretch of the imagination, our ideal it is somewhat nearer to our ideal of how the community and the local authority should interact with academies. I am therefore afraid that we are not in a position to support the noble Baroness, Lady Verma. As I say, when academies join the YPLA, we shall watch very carefully to see how well that works. We hope that local authorities will be consulted about the operation of academies at every point where legislation allows that to happen. We would like to see academies more engaged with the local family of schools than is the case at present.