My Lords, we now move on to the question of performance standards and safety warning notices—in this case, specifically with reference to academy schools. The amendment would extend the power of local authorities to allow them the right—albeit one challenged under the clause—to issue performance standards and safety warning notices to an academy that they consider is underperforming.
The wording is drawn from existing provisions for giving warning notices to maintained schools. The only difference is that the local authority would need to ask the Secretary of State to intervene if the warning notice did not have the desired effect of bringing about improvement, but the academy would be required to comply and the power would apply to both existing and new academies.
The argument in the amendment turns on local versus national—or local versus regional, in the case of the regional schools commissioner, although she or he acts on behalf of the Secretary of State, of course. A local authority is much better placed to identify problems than a distant Minister or even a regional commissioner. Not only can it scrutinise data but it gets all the soft intelligence that comes through the local community, in whatever form that may take. Specifically, I would imagine that it would be from other schools, issues raised in MPs’ or councillors’ surgeries, the local media, information from social services, and health services, as well as issues with admissions or exclusions.
It is apparent that the Department for Education has huge difficulty in keeping tabs on the growing number of academies. The Public Accounts Committee laid that out very clearly in the previous Parliament, and I suggest that eight regional schools commissioners cannot properly scrutinise several hundred academies each as well as getting involved with maintained schools and promoting new conversions. It is reasonable to assume that any regional schools commissioner worth her or his salt will seek informally to source local intelligence, but that will be limited, and the amendment would allow such activity to be formalised. The key to the benefit of handing this task to local authorities lies
simply in the first word of their title, because local knowledge is essential to enable intervention when necessary.
In addition, it would restore proper accountability to local communities. It would mean that the concerns of parents and residents could be taken up locally by a local authority that has the right to take the action necessary. It should be noted that this would not reduce the autonomy of academies. All the freedoms they currently have would continue to be in place, but this would provide a much more robust accountability system. Centralising accountability in the hands of the Secretary of State and her appointees is both undemocratic and ineffective, and the poor outcomes from many academies that have already been referred to demonstrate that.
At Second Reading, I invited the Minister to comment on the Ofsted inspection results up to June 2015. They demonstrated that of all schools inspected, the percentage of academies classified as inadequate was 3.4%, with the percentage of maintained schools classified as inadequate less than half that figure at 1.6%. I do not welcome any school, whether maintained school or academy, being classified as inadequate, but those are the figures produced by Ofsted. The evidence is clear: despite the fact that there are more pupils in the maintained sector, there are now more pupils in inadequate academies than there are in inadequate maintained schools. That surely should give the Minister pause for thought. I understand why the Minister would not like to deal with those facts, but having declined the opportunity to tell me and other noble Lords what that says about the panacea that academies are supposed to be, will he use his closing speech today to do so? Clearly, something is not working.
In the same way that we have argued for maintained schools and academies to be treated equally when it comes to coasting—or, indeed, outright failure—we believe that parity in respect of performance standards and warning notices is entirely appropriate. I beg to move.