Education Bill

My Lords, I have Amendment 103A in this group. What concerns me is that someone should have oversight as to whether fair access is going on. I am most grateful to the Bill team for sending some notes about how the school admissions and appeals code works and how the Bill seeks to change that. I was very exercised about the fact that, as the note states: "““School admission arrangements are set two school years before pupils enter the school by the schools’ admission authority, in line with the Admissions Code””." Of course, the authority must have consulted about those arrangements beforehand. That makes it very difficult for parents. If they apply to several schools two years before their child moves schools, they then have to scrutinise the admissions arrangements of all the schools to which they apply in order to make sure that they are happy with those admission arrangements. This is not the case just under the Bill, but is the case now, before the Bill goes through. The arrangements are very difficult for parents to navigate. The note also points out that: "““Parents, local authorities, other schools or the Secretary of State who have concerns about the admissions at a maintained school can ask the Office of the Schools Adjudicator … to investigate””." I very much welcome the fact that this power is being extended to the parents of children who want to go to academies. However, the problem is that many local authorities are not doing the job of scrutinising admission arrangements terribly well. It is therefore left to parents to make the complaints and appeal. If all the schools in the area are academies, parents have to look at a whole lot of different sets of arrangements. The note that the Bill team kindly sent us points out that: "““Local authorities will still be required to report annually on local admissions””." The Bill states that they do not have to report to the adjudicator, but they will have to report. Therefore, my first question to my noble friend is: to whom do they have to report? It does not say in the note. However, I have a clue here in the way that the note continues. It states: "““The Chief Adjudicator will still be required to report to Parliament each year and, as now, base his findings on a range of sources, including having access to local authority reports from their websites. The local authority reports will still focus on key issues for local parents and others with an interest in access to local schools””." My question, therefore, is: does the chief adjudicator or any parent just have to go to the website of the local authority to find out what the arrangements are and whether there have been any appeals, or what the problems are? The whole system is not at all parent friendly. It is not access friendly or social mobility friendly, given how important social mobility through education is to my Government. What I want to do in Amendment 103A is give a reciprocal duty to the Secretary of State to take this information from the chief adjudicator, who is reporting to Parliament, and act on it if he identifies trends of injustice happening, perhaps across the country. The difficulty with the proposed arrangements is that any adjudicator looks only at the appeals in his own area. Let us be clear that we are not talking about appeals from parents who did not get their child into a school; we are talking about appeals being made 12 months before parents even try to get their child into a school, and two years before the child goes there—or not, as the case may be. These are appeals against the nature of the arrangements. If the adjudicator can only look at arrangements in his own local area, who is going to look at trends? For example, an education provider may have a lot of appeals against the admission arrangements in one part of the country, another lot in another part of the country, and yet another lot in a third area. The adjudicators in those three separate areas can only see the problems brought to their attention in their own areas. Who is going to identify that there are trends of injustice in that particular chain of education providers? It is important not just to have, as the Explanatory Notes tell us, a requirement on the chief adjudicator to report to Parliament each year. We need a duty on the Secretary of State to take the information and ensure that the arrangements his department have in place are providing fair access for children all over the country, no matter what sort of school they go to.