My Lords, I shall move Amendment 10 in my name and speak to my Amendment 43 in this group. I preface my remarks by commenting on the important points that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, made about schooling. He is absolutely right that it is the role of school to motivate children. It can do that with the best possible teachers and resources. As the noble Lord rightly said, children get only one chance, but I think he missed out leadership. Leadership is hugely important.
In this debate about academies, one of my concerns has been that we almost regard maintained schools as not very good and have forgotten them. I have rarely heard Ministers praise maintained schools that did a good job in turning themselves around. You have to look only at the area where I taught: there was a maintained secondary school called the Grange School, which had appalling results. Along came a new head teacher, with dynamic leadership, and the school blossomed and thrived in exactly the same way as the schools that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, talked about.
I hope we can stop this business of claiming that one type of school is better than another. I remember the constant “Well, academies’ results are better than those of the maintained sector.” We can all play that game, if we want to. The latest figures out now—I do not particularly want to dwell on this—say that the maintained sector is possibly performing better than the academies sector.
That does not matter now, because we know the Government’s direction of travel. We know that academies started during Tony Blair’s Government and developed during the coalition, with my party working alongside and supporting that development. Much to my regret, as I always thought there would be a dual track in the maintained sector, we saw that if there was a slight suggestion that any school was failing, it was immediately pushed into an academy. But we have moved past those days.
At Second Reading, I welcomed the fact that we are moving towards one system of schooling. It would not have been my choice of how we do it, but we are there now and, over the next 10 years, I think we will see all schools becoming academies and local authorities being given the opportunity to create multi-academy trusts. The amendment in the last group in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and referred to by my noble friend Lord Addington, is one of the ingredients of a multi-academy trust that is hugely important. We will come back to that in future.
This group is about governance. I remind your Lordships of my major concern. If we look at the top 10 multi-academy trusts, we see that they have 70 or 80 schools. Take United Learning just as an example, with 75 schools which stretch from Barnsley to Stockport, Manchester, Oxford, Bognor Regis and all over the country. The trust and the trustees are headquartered in the south-east. I have concerns about that and about how the trustees of that multi-academy trust relate to local people and local communities. We have always agreed that the local community is an ingredient of a successful school, so we need to look at how we can recognise and develop community links and relate to the community and the locality.
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It is interesting that the 2,539 trusts now established are made up of only 10,000 schools. The largest proportion is in the south-west—58%—and the smallest number is in the north-west—26%. The largest geographical areas where these trusts are headquartered are, as you can imagine, the south-east and the south-west.
That brings me on to the issue of the governing bodies of schools. We know that academy trusts set the strategic direction of the trust, hold the senior leadership to account and oversee the trust’s financial performance, but governing bodies of schools are equally important. Governing bodies are there to do a number of very important tasks: to build up that community relationship that I talked about; to establish ethical standards; to monitor and evaluate the progress of a school; to be curious and critical; and to ask difficult questions. Governors of schools should be good at problem solving and be prepared to give and take advice. It concerns me that we are seeing a number of multi-academy trusts deciding that they do not need a governing body and not putting anything in its place to do the things I have talked about. Amendment 10 states that every school should have its own governing body. It is crucial. It is a way of relating to parents in the community and of involving teachers in a school. I hope that when the Minister replies she will reflect on what I have said on this amendment and will support it. I beg to move.