I am happy to introduce the noble Lord to the people involved in this because the lack of progress under the local authority was, I am afraid, extremely disappointing.
Another example of delay was the Warren school in Barking and Dagenham. The Warren was judged inadequate by Ofsted in February 2013. The governing body and the local authority were opposed to academy status and in October that year the existing governing body voted against the sponsored academy solution. When the Secretary of State decided to appoint an IEB and issue an academy order, the local authority and the governing body made an application to the High Court to prevent this from taking place. When the case finally got to court in July 2014, the judge dismissed the claim on all counts. The school finally opened as an academy in September 2014 with the Loxford Trust, some 19 months after first being judged inadequate by Ofsted.
I emphasise that although the Bill proposes to remove the formal requirement to consult on academy conversion for failing schools, parents will still have opportunities to have a say in the future of their child’s school. Once a sponsor has been identified for a school, it is in their interests to engage parents and begin to build a positive relationship with them from the outset. They will want to involve parents in their plans and seek their views on their proposed approach for bringing about improvement during the conversion process. I shall say more about engaging parents in these situations in the later group of amendments.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, made some points to which I would like to respond. I pay tribute to her chairmanship of the Birmingham Education Partnership. I was meeting with Sir Mike Tomlinson this morning and we were both singing her praises. Lilian Baylis is of course an outstanding school. We would be delighted for it to become an academy and a sponsor. The issue that we have, we can talk about this in more detail offline, is that the best way to get the maximum organisational benefits out of a multi-academy trust is for it to be in the same legal structure. No one can argue with that. We can go into a lot of detail on it but that is the practical reason.
As for resourcing the RSCs, I made a point on this earlier but we will be resourcing up the RSCs to cater for more work. I cannot comment on this precisely at the moment but I will be able to say quite a lot more about it once the spending review is out of the way—certainly, I hope, in time for Report.
Turning to the duty to facilitate and the power to direct, noble Lords have proposed Amendments 26 and 27, which would have the effect of removing the requirement for governing bodies and local authorities to facilitate the academy conversion of schools rated inadequate by Ofsted. However, the amendments would still result in the governing body and the local authority having to facilitate conversion in other cases, such as when an academy order is made for a school that meets the coasting definition or has not complied with a warning notice.
Amendment 26 removes the requirement for governing bodies and local authorities to facilitate the conversion of inadequate schools. However, it is precisely these schools where there is a real need to intervene quickly
and turn the school around without local authorities or governing bodies blocking or delaying progress. We have seen too many instances over the past five years where conversion to academy status has been delayed through long debate and delaying tactics, such as the refusal to provide important information and reluctance to take vital decisions. One example of progress being unnecessarily delayed is the case of Beechview Primary School in Buckinghamshire. The school was first judged inadequate by Ofsted in January 2013 and, despite numerous discussions with the department, the local-authority-appointed IEB consistently refused to vote in favour of becoming a sponsored academy. A further Ofsted inspection in December 2014 rated the school inadequate for a second time, and a monitoring visit in April 2015 found that the local authority had been unable to bring about the improvements needed. The department tried to restart the conversation about sponsored academy status but the IEB remained unsupportive and went on to discuss alternative options with the local authority, including amalgamation with an infant school, as a way of avoiding sponsored academy status. However, at long last, in October 2015 the IEB voted for Sir William Borlase’s Grammar School to be its sponsor. Beechview is expected to open as an academy in 2016, more than three years since it was first judged to be failing its pupils.
To address the issue of unnecessary delays, Clause 10 will ensure that where an academy order is made in respect of a school that is eligible for intervention, the governing body of that school and the local authority must take all reasonable steps to facilitate the conversion of that school into a sponsored academy. In the majority of cases, the effects of Clause 10 should ensure that governing bodies and local authorities take the necessary actions to ensure a sponsored academy solution is in place quickly. However, Clause 11, which allows the Secretary of State to direct a governing body and local authority to take specified steps to facilitate the conversion, is necessary in the event that they are not fulfilling their duties or that more specific timescales or steps need to be set. Amendment 27 seeks to remove Clause 11 in the case of inadequate schools. It is crucial that regional schools commissioners have the benefit of the duties and powers in Clauses 10 and 11 in relation to inadequate schools. These provisions are crucial if we want to be able to strengthen our ability to deal with failure and to do so more swiftly.
Before concluding, I shall finally speak to Amendments 28 and 29, which probe Clause 12 regarding the power to revoke academy orders. In particular, they probe its purpose in relation to schools rated inadequate by Ofsted where Clause 7 has been clear that an academy order must be made. I have used this debate to reiterate the clear commitment in the Government’s manifesto that failing schools will become academies and that academy orders must therefore be made whenever a school is judged inadequate by Ofsted. There will, however, be rare circumstances where an academy order needs to be revoked. Clause 12 addresses this by inserting a new Section 5D into the Academies Act 2010. This will allow the Secretary of State to revoke any academy order issued to a school which is eligible for intervention, including in a failing school where an academy order must be made.
We envisage that in the case of failing schools there might be a very small number of exceptional cases where the Secretary of State decides that academy conversion should not be pursued. A school may, for example, prove to be unviable and closure may sadly be inevitable, or it may have gone into special measures for a very specific safeguarding issue which has been rectified. There may be other examples in future and while we expect those examples to be exceptional, it would be wrong to remove the Secretary of State’s power to revoke an academy order on any inadequate school as this amendment suggests. I therefore urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.