Education Bill

My Lords, briefly, I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Hughes of Stretford, has just said. It seems eminently reasonable to support such a mode of working—of sharing the burden of the most difficult children among a group of schools. From speaking to head teachers, I have not experienced that model. However, I have spoken to the head teacher who was responsible for something called the Greater Manchester Challenge in the Greater Manchester area. It gathered together teachers and head teachers in Manchester to support each other. I understand that there is something similar in Greater London. This, perhaps, was one of the strengths of the previous Government. One of the good things that they brought forward was a mode of encouraging heads to work together to produce better outcomes for children. One sees that the new coalition Government are moving in the opposite direction. There is a lot that we will support in that. Perhaps we can all support greater autonomy and respect for individual professionals, but I would be very sad if, in the process of that move, we went from one extreme to another and we lost some of the good things that came out in the years of work that the previous Government put in. To my mind, it would be very sad to lose that co-operation and recognition that some problems are bigger than any one school can deal with. The Minister may say that there are new modalities in developing these sorts of collaborative approaches. I recall what his noble friend Lady Ritchie said in the previous Committee session when she expressed concern, as the person responsible within the Local Government Association for the safeguarding of children, that the academies programme has given rise to concerns about fragmentation. There is a swing in the pendulum from one extreme to another. Some really good things came out from the previous swing in the direction of collaborative working, and I should be grateful to the Minister if he can reassure the Committee—as I am sure that he will—that he recognises the importance of schools working together to deal with these issues, and say what new mechanisms he is helping to bring into place to make it work for children in the future.