Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

It was indeed another ambiguity. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman was making a point rather than a serious proposal, although his response a moment ago suggests that there may be a serious proposal behind it. I understand that the previous position of the Conservative party was that it wanted academies to continue to be under the oversight of Westminster and the Minister. We do not believe that that is sustainable. It might have been sustainable with one Minister who was very engaged in the programme when the Government were running 20 or 30 academies, but it is surely not sustainable when there are 100, 200, 300 or 400, and it certainly will not be sustainable if the vision for the education system set out by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) in his speech on 5 November comes to fruition. He made it very clear that the Conservative party's long-term goal was for academy status to become the norm not just for secondary schools but—I assume from the thrust of his comments—for primary schools as well. If the Conservative party, or Members of Parliament in general, really think that the Department would be capable of holding to account 3,500 secondary schools and 23,500 primary and secondary schools from Westminster, it and we will be making a grave mistake. I do not see how that could possibly be consistent with many of the criticisms made by the Conservative party of big government and the system of running everything from Westminster and Whitehall. I would also say gently to the hon. Gentleman that if he is concerned with political interference in the academies movement, there could not be a better guarantee of uncertainty in that regard than putting the Secretary of State and the Department in charge of the oversight of academies. That is because whenever there is a Minister or Secretary of State who is unenthusiastic about academies, they might easily and rapidly implement changes to undermine the academy movement. Therefore, those who support academies might want some elements of their oversight or freedoms to be at a greater distance from Secretaries of State. I would have thought that this might be a concern that the hon. Gentleman would have in respect of the current Government. It does not appear to me to be at all obvious that we should stick with the existing system, and it appears fairly obvious that we should move towards a different approach. The hon. Gentleman seems to be suggesting this in amendment (a). I assume the amendment is not a serious proposal, but that it has been tabled to make a point. If implemented, however, it would either make the YPLA entirely responsible for the oversight of academies or lead to the appointment of so many principals to it that the YPLA would become obsessed by academies and would pay little regard to many of its other responsibilities. It would therefore effectively end up being a regulator of academies. Because we do not think that that is a satisfactory approach, my party has not been able to support the Government or the Conservative party on this matter. Such an approach could leave some parts of the country with regional branches of the YPLA that have oversight of a tiny number of academies and that would duplicate the oversight that is already supposed to be in place from local authorities. From my understanding of what happened in Committee, it would also leave us with a deeply unsatisfactory situation in which the Government essentially set up a YPLA to take on the oversight of academies because they do not trust local authorities with the oversight and performance management of schools, and particularly of those schools with high levels of disadvantage and poor levels of overall performance. It seems to me pretty astonishing that the Government might put in place a system of oversight for these schools that suggests that they have no confidence in the other mechanisms that are used for the oversight of the vast majority of schools in this country. If there are problems with local authority oversight of either academies or existing schools, it seems more appropriate to deal with and address the deficiencies in that oversight than to seek to set up a separate organisation such as the YPLA to do the job or perhaps to end up—this could be Conservative party policy, depending on which branch line it takes in its current review—with the oversight of 23,500 schools from one ministerial office in Westminster. Many of the concerns about academy oversight and independence—which I think are shared by all three Front-Bench teams—could be met by addressing three separate issues. First, the freedoms of academies need to be protected, and could be effectively protected by legislation. Secondly, there should be support for the establishment of academies where it may not be sufficient to rely on local authorities providing that support if they feel those schools are competing with the existing local authority family of schools. Authority for that could rest with either the Department or a much smaller agency of the type that the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton suggested. In our view, that ought to leave the oversight of academies and all other state-funded schools with local authorities, and they themselves should be under very rigorous oversight from an independent educational standards authority of a type that, frankly, we do not have at the moment. That lets down not only those schools that could come under the oversight of local government, but the thousands of other schools that have to rely on a performance management mechanism, which the Government seem to feel is so defective that they are having to set up a separate body to do this for the academies. We therefore believe that amendments 178, 72 and 73 offer some welcome tweaks from another place, but we believe that the fundamental issue of the oversight of academies has not been dealt with. We certainly do not believe that the right way to go forward is through amendment (a), which seems more of a probing amendment than a serious proposal.