Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

I shall also speak to Amendment 219. Both amendments refer to school behaviour partnerships but I shall first say something about Amendment 219 and then I will come to Amendment 218. Under the Bill, schools are required to join together into behaviour partnerships to work together to promote good behaviour. I am sure that the Minister is aware that the vast majority of good schools do this already, but I suppose it was felt that making it a statutory requirement will force the not-so-good schools to do it too. That is all well and good and I do not disagree with it. That is why I do not support Amendment 221 in this group, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Verma. Co-operative working has produced some excellent results. No one has a monopoly of the best ideas and it makes sense for schools in a locality to work together on this, particularly since some of the bad behaviour that they want to tackle happens out on the streets of their town or village and is a problem common to all the local schools. However, it is going over the top to require the partnership to have to send an annual report to the children’s trust board. Surely that board has quite enough to do with child safeguarding apart from reading such reports. I would question whether the children’s trust board has any levers that it could use anyway against the schools if it is dissatisfied with the contents of that report. Let the partnership send a report to the CTB by all means, if it wants to, for information, but please do not impose further bureaucracy by forcing it to do so. When I looked into the rationale for this, I discovered that it was an attempt to put pressure on schools to form proper partnerships and not just allow a bad school to link up with another bad school in a nominal partnership that does not do anything. I can understand that concern—there is a loophole in the Bill. That is why I have tabled Amendment 218, which changes the wording of subsection (2) to say that it has to be a partnership with a group of relevant partners, rather than a minimum of one, as it says in the Bill. One other school cannot be regarded as a group, by any stretch of the imagination, so I hope I have proposed something that would close that loophole. Let us use a nutcracker to crack this nut, not a sledgehammer which would impose an unnecessary time penalty on all good-behaviour partnerships. I should have thought that the Ofsted inspection was a much better lever than any annual report sent to an already busy CTB. Ofsted should be looking at how the school tackles its behaviour problems overall and once the duty to be part of a partnership becomes statutory, that will go further up Ofsted’s checklist. We all know that schools and Ofsted inspectors look at what a school has to do first before then looking at what it is desirable for it to do. I offer my little package of amendments as a less bureaucratic, more effective way of ensuring that schools do the right thing and I hope that the Government will accept it, if not in this form, then in some other. I beg to move.