My Lords, I apologise for not being here in the Committee’s session last week. It was for medical reasons—and my experience has not filled me with either enthusiasm or confidence that importing wholesale from the health service will solve all our problems. However, there are some very good individual doctors in the system, which is why it works.
To go to the challenge put to the Minister about maintained schools from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, I spent this morning with seven head teachers from maintained primary schools in the most difficult areas of inner London. I have no doubt that they are doing a terrific job. I agree that there are some excellent maintained schools doing an excellent job. Some of them even refer to the good partnerships with local academies which they hope will develop. That is the other side of the picture.
However, I would make two or three quick comments. When I hear the expression “democratic accountability”, the philosopher in me wants to write three articles to try to clarify what that means. The Committee should not worry, for I am not going to try to do that now, but it is a shibboleth at times. At other times it is an important use of language, just as talk of human rights is, but sometimes it covers a multitude of uncertainties and unclarities. I do not deny that it is important but here, for example, we have to distinguish between accountability for financial systems and governance—one kind of accountability that is not necessarily for a public committee; I would rather have a high-powered team from PricewaterhouseCoopers or some such going in to inspect them and report back—and the separate form of accountability which is necessary for educational practice. Parents and teachers no doubt have important things to say but it must never be forgotten that at least half of those, possibly both, are interested parties.
I come to the nub of what I want to say. The problem that the Bill is facing up to is essentially a question of dealing with what has arisen in schools that are currently maintained under the local authority system. If that is so, just recreating it without modification will not do the job. We need more subtlety and sophistication in trying to face that problem, when it is there that the difficulties have arisen. The Committee may have dealt, as I gather it did at some length last week, with the definition of coasting. But if there are coasting schools, a number of them have arisen within a local authority and within the maintained system. So there are good, bad and coasting schools, all of them within the maintained sector. That is why I find it difficult simply to pick up a proposal that all you have to do is to spread the responsibility by having ways of taking on board an additional set of views, without a means of sharpening them.
To go back to my speech at Second Reading, there is a danger that we will simply bring in delaying tactics, which are the curse of the current system. I am still worried about the Bill having delays built into it in a way that I find unacceptable. That is why I am not—