No. I am going to turn to failing schools.
No one in this House can argue that we do not have a duty to transform failing schools. For those schools, urgent action is required, and the Bill introduces tough new measures to turn around failing schools from day one. In the past, such transformation could be delayed or even blocked altogether by pressure groups or unions with ideological objections to transferring power away from town halls to outstanding heads and teachers.
The Bill makes it clear that an academy order will be issued for all schools judged inadequate by Ofsted, enabling them to become sponsored academies. The Bill sweeps away bureaucracy and loopholes that currently mean it takes, on average, more than a year from the day that a school is judged inadequate to the day that it opens as a sponsored academy.
For some schools, it can take even longer. The Warren comprehensive school in Barking and Dagenham had never been judged better than satisfactory by Ofsted. In February 2013, Ofsted said the school required special measures once again. It took eight months for the governing body to vote against becoming an academy. The then Secretary of State decided to pursue academy conversion, which the governing body and local authority challenged through the courts. The school eventually opened as a sponsored academy, 19 months after Ofsted deemed that it was failing to give pupils an acceptable standard of education. While adults bickered and delayed, the young people in that school had to spend almost two academic years in a learning environment that was failing them. That cannot be right.