As it said in our manifesto, a school will become an academy in these circumstances.
I go back to the excellent work that the Innovation Enterprise Academy did in the case of West Bank Primary School. It had drop-in sessions at the school for parents and appointed a parent champion to the interim executive board. Parents and pupils were invited to name the new academy and design the new uniform and logo. As a result, parents were much more supportive of the school becoming an academy.
Noble Lords who attended last week’s meeting heard from Martyn Oliver, chief executive of one of our most successfully performing academy trusts, Outwood Grange. He said:
“A prospective trust does not just ride roughshod ?over a school and its community. Outwood Grange has a clear vision and we are passionate about engaging staff and parents on that vision. The advantage of our model is that alongside the clear vision of the trust, local governing bodies are left with more space to focus on things like engaging with the local community. Ultimately parents are happy, especially when they start to see the dramatic improvements in results for their children”.
Examples such as this show that parents will still have opportunities to have a say in the future of their children’s school if it has failed, even if there is no longer a question of whether or not a failing school should convert.
Looking at coasting schools, we debated at length last week the importance of parents being aware when their child’s school is identified as coasting so that they can then understand and challenge how the governing body and leadership team intend to improve sufficiently. As I said earlier, unlike in failing schools, intervention in coasting schools will not be automatic, and schools will be given time to demonstrate their capacity to improve sufficiently. There will therefore already have been a dialogue, likely to have taken place over a long period of time, about a school’s plans to bring about improvement and an opportunity to share views with RSCs, the community and parents before any decision for the school to become a sponsored academy is made.
As discussed, we already expect that governing bodies in schools identified as coasting would share relevant information with parents, but we have committed to consider whether there is anything further that can be included in the statutory Schools Causing Concern guidance to ensure that such engagement with parents consistently takes place.
The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, asked about the circumstances in which governing bodies were obliged to notify parents. The legislation in this area is quite complex, depending on the status of the individual school. I am happy to write to her to explain that in some detail.
We feel confident that what parents want most is for their child to attend a school that is performing well. The Bill is all about ensuring that we have robust powers to challenge underperformance wherever it occurs, enabling us to tackle not just failing schools but now also coasting schools.
The noble Lord, Lord Watson, again referred to my tendency to talk about only academies and not schools in the maintained sector. There is an excellent example of cross-academy and local authority maintained work in the Birmingham Education Partnership, which the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, chairs. Of course we recognise that there are many excellent schools in the maintained sector, but this Bill is about failing schools. We are not here to talk about excellent maintained schools.
As for the local knowledge that regional schools commissioners have, it is excellent. I look forward to introducing the noble Lord, Lord Watson, as part of his essential due diligence on this Bill, to some of the regional schools commissioners. He can discuss with them how close they are to the coal face. I hope that he will engage with them and be very impressed. As he said, a list of RSC decisions is already published on the GOV.UK website and we are making the decision-making of RHCs and HTBs more transparent. From December, a fuller note of head teacher board meetings will be published to cover all meetings from October this year, and will contain information on the particular criteria that were considered for each decision.
I turn to Amendment 19, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, which relates to where a governing body is proposing that a school should convert to an academy voluntarily where it is a school that is performing well and is not eligible for intervention. The amendment proposes that rather than consulting whoever it deems appropriate, the governing body should specifically be required to consult certain persons, including parents and guardians, teaching and support staff at the school, the local authority and also itself.
The purpose of Clause 8 is to ensure that we have robust powers to take action in schools that are failing, coasting or otherwise underperforming. I want to ensure we remain focused on that very important issue. The Bill does not have any impact on schools that are performing well, but I will gladly address the amendment. As I have set out, that is why Clause 8 removes the requirement for the governing body to consult on whether a school should become an academy. It is crucial to remember that we are talking about removing consultation only in the most serious cases.
The amendment proposes that, rather than the governing body having the flexibility to consult such persons as they think appropriate in cases where they convert voluntarily, it should be specified that the governing body must consult certain people. This very
matter was discussed in detail, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, said, when the Academies Act 2010 was a Bill under consideration by this House, where we first introduced the prospect of schools that were performing well voluntarily converting to academy status.
Where schools are performing well, we must trust professionals to do their jobs without the unnecessary interference of central government—a fundamental principle underpinning the academies programme—and therefore it is right, as my noble friend Lord Deben said, that we leave it to those professionals to decide exactly who should be consulted on the matter of whether a good school should convert to an academy. In our view, it would not be right for us to dictate an inflexible checklist in legislation, which would not in itself ensure that consultation was any more thorough or meaningful. As my noble friend Lord Deben said, it might essentially consign some people to being second-class consultees. Having said that, we have very clear guidance to prospective converters, available on GOV.UK, setting out expectations that the consultation will include staff members and parents and should also include pupils and the wider community, but anyone with an interest can share their views.
I therefore do not believe that the amendment is necessary. The process for good schools converting to academy status is working well. In practice as opposed to theory, we have had no significant challenge or any real pressure to change the current requirements. Interest in conversion remains high: since 1 September 2014 we have received over 500 applications to become a converter academy. Converter academies continue to perform well: 2015 results show that the key stage 2 results of primary converter academies open for two or more years have improved by four percentage points since opening. Secondary converter academies continue to perform well above average, with 63.3% of pupils achieving five good GCSEs in 2015, 7.2 percentage points above the state-funded average.
While we have made the case for the need for a swifter academisation process in the case of underperforming schools, the Bill does not intend to change anything about the very successful process of converting strong schools. I hope, however, that this debate has clarified just why Clause 8 is so integral to the Bill. We still believe that sponsors and governing bodies should engage with parents about plans affecting their child’s school, and of course they do, but to mandate through legislation such consultation and what form it should take would be disproportionate and would only lead to delays in schools whose performance requires quick redress. I therefore urge noble Lords not to press their amendments and to let Clause 8 stand part of the Bill.