My Lords, this amendment picks up an issue which we Liberal Democrats have been worried about sometime: accountability for academy trusts and academy chains, and what happens when an academy is put into special measures or, as in this case, fails to make the progress that one would expect over the three-year period.
I know that the Minister will reel off statistics and examples of how good academies are and how much they achieve, but he must admit that, looking at the picture overall, now that we have academies of 10 years’ standing and many of four to five years’ standing, the record is that the probability of an academy not performing as well as we might expect is just as high as for local authority schools, and that the record of local authority intervention in turning around failing schools is just as good as academisation. In its statistics report, his own department shows the same range of performance across academy chains as with local authorities.
I know that the Minister will protest that local authorities do not intervene when they should and that this legislation is a necessary wake-up call to
them. But if he is maintaining, as he does, that no child should have to put up with less than a good education for a year or so, it is only right that the principle should apply to academies as much as to local authority schools.
This clause is the mirror image of the one applying to maintained schools at the beginning of this Bill, explaining how the local authority, now the Secretary of State, can give a warning notice to an academy and requires, under new subsection (4B), those in charge of academies to take remedial action, and the local authority or the Secretary of State to do so if the academy fails to take that action. It also requires that the funding agreement should be amended appropriately.
I find myself very much in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on this issue. Now that we have got such a large number of academies, it seems extraordinary that we have to negotiate separate funding agreements with every single one. One of the reasons why we have education Bills and Acts is in order that all schools should obey the same set of regulations. It seems extraordinary that when you have thousands of schools having to obey the same set of regulations, you have to negotiate separate funding agreements. It is about time that the Government made up their mind on what they want to do. We have quite a lot of sympathy with the general principle of this amendment, which is that academies should be treated on a par with maintained schools.