My Lords, I respect the noble Lord’s motivation in tabling these amendments. My objection to them does not get into the specifics relating to qualified teachers or whatever, but it is simply that I think that it is wrong for primary legislation to lay down what Ofsted should and should not inspect. The noble Lord suggests a very short list of what should be inspected, and I am sure that Ofsted would have a much wider field of interest in any inspection that it conducted, but I think that he has a focused and almost myopic picture of what Ofsted can and cannot do.
Over the years in which it has worked, Ofsted has built up a comprehensive picture of what is going on in schools and in education. It will undoubtedly have inspected at least one of the schools of most of the chains which might be candidates to sponsor a coasting school. Similarly, I cannot believe that any school would have been classified as coasting over a three-year period without Ofsted having been alerted to that and having gone and had a look at it. So we should have more confidence in what good HMI can do and their knowledge both of the system and of individual schools which are in trouble, rather than trying to lay down specifics such as, “They must inspect to see how many qualified teachers they are going to have, or they must inspect for this, that and t’other”. I therefore ask the noble Lord to think again about the amendments and to have a little more confidence in what HMI within Ofsted would be able to do.