Amendment 3 seeks to add two further requirements to the document on regional schools commissioners mentioned in the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Since noble Lords considered the Bill on Report, the House of Commons Education Committee has published a report entitled The role of Regional Schools Commissioners, which was not exactly uncritical of the role of these commissioners and the manner in which they have operated since they came into being in September 2014. Indeed, the report contains a total of 24 recommendations, to which the Minister will, no doubt, respond in detail in due course. I hope his response will not be delayed for long and that he will accept and implement most, if not all, of the very thoughtful suggestions made after hearing evidence from a variety of sources—not least the Minister himself. I dare say he will regard the report as carrying a considerable amount of weight, given that it was produced by a committee which is chaired by a member of his party, which has an inbuilt majority on the committee.
It is striking that there remain so many questions about the precise role of the regional schools commissioners and in whose interests they operate. This means that a guide for parents, as suggested in Amendment 3, is a necessity. Ensuring parents understand who to hold accountable for their child’s experience at school and how to do so is vital, yet the Bill consistently treats parents with disdain. I have given examples before, but if a group of parents wants to break away from a maintained school and establish their own free school, they are welcomed with open arms by the Government and given every assistance, as well as considerable amounts to cash, to enable them to do so. Put simply, they are listened to and treated with respect. However, should another group of parents want their children’s maintained school to keep that status in the face of forced academisation, they are ignored, told the decision is nothing to do with them and that the change will take place no matter what they think. Put simply, they are not listened to and are effectively treated with contempt. So under the Bill, parents are denied the right to have a say when the school attended by their children is forced to become an academy. We have said on various occasions that consultation is appropriate for all parents if they want to take advantage of it.
When the Bill was discussed in Committee, the Minister assured noble Lords that governing bodies of academies would include parental representatives. It was understood that those representatives would, in some limited form at least, have the ability to hold their school to account and have an influence in areas such as hiring senior staff, monitoring budgets and standards. Well, my Lords, just last month it was announced that those notions had been effectively thrown out of the window by the E-ACT academy group which, as noble Lords may be aware, has unilaterally decided to scrap local governing bodies for the 23 schools that it operates. There will be a centralised process for monitoring standards, and the governing bodies will be replaced by so-called advisory bodies, the chairs of which, to no one’s surprise, will be appointed by the academy chain. That is not merely a top-down but a
closed-door approach, which it appears will brook no questioning of how the chain operates.
The fact that this has been handed down by an organisation that receives £135 million of public funds annually makes it even more serious. It appears that E-ACT is content to treat the public purse with respect, but quite unwilling to treat the public with respect. This behaviour would be serious enough for a chain that was operating effectively, but in 2014 E-ACT had the control of 10 of its academies taken away after Ofsted raised serious concerns about its performance. Not only its educational competence has been questioned; until July last year, the Education Funding Agency forced the chain to operate under a financial notice to improve. One might have thought that such inadequacy would have produced some humility at E-ACT, but as we have heard, the opposite is the fact. Perhaps the Minister can give noble Lords his take on this rather sorry state of affairs, including the action, if any, of the various regional schools commissioners, under whose auspices the chain operates.
My Lords, there are no circumstances in which a regional schools commissioner should stand by when an academy chain seeks to exclude parents, staff, local businesses and local politicians from the governance of their local schools. If regional schools commissioners are not there to ensure that academies operate to the highest standards, what, one might ask, is their purpose?
The education report highlighted a number of questions about whether the key role of regional schools commissioners was to help raise standards or whether it is simply to bring about more academies and free schools as quickly as possible. The key performance indicators institutionalise this confusion, which is a problem that must be dealt with, and soon.
It is not appropriate at this stage to go into greater detail on the recommendations of the Select Committee, which I believe has carefully put together a report that requires careful scrutiny. I am sure the Minister will scrutinise that report, but I hope that in doing so he will bear in mind the importance of parents being able to have some say in the way their children receive their education and how it is framed and delivered by academies. For that reason, I beg to move.