Education and Skills Bill

moved Amendment No. 62: 62: Clause 11, page 6, line 3, after ““body”” insert ““or proprietor”” The noble Baroness said: In Committee on Tuesday, we discussed Clause 10, which places a duty on local authorities to make sure that young people who have a duty to participate in education and training between 16 and 18, as mentioned in Clause 2, fulfil their duties. Clause 11 puts a duty to promote good attendance on schools within the local authority remit. It will never be enough just to put the duty on young people to attend education and training. Someone—the local authorities—has to keep an eye on what they are doing and to encourage them to attend. The purpose of these amendments is to extend the duty from what is mentioned in Clause 11(2)—community, foundation and voluntary schools, community or foundation special schools, pupil referral units and institutions within the further education sector—to city technology colleges, city colleges of technology of the arts, academies and independent special schools under Section 342 of the Education Act. If young people choose to carry out their duty to participate in any of these establishments, it is not unreasonable to put a counterduty on the schools to promote their attendance. If state-maintained community schools, PRUs and colleges, as well as foundation schools, have to do it, then why not others? They are all subject to inspection, so why should they escape this duty? It is inconsistent that they should do so. Therefore, Amendment No. 62 places educational institutions in the private sector within Clause 11, Amendment No. 63 places this duty on independent special schools, and Amendment No. 64 puts the duty on academies. In reference to Amendment No. 63, the Minister in another place suggested to my honourable friend Mr David Laws that the Government would consider including this duty in relation to special Section 342 schools, but nothing has been tabled. With regard to Amendment No. 64, can the noble Lord tell us the situation with regard to academies? I suspect that he will say that the matter will be addressed in their funding agreements. However, as he will know very well, those agreements are available only when they have been finalised, are not open to consultation and are not easily changed. I cannot see how such a duty would curtail the freedoms that the Government are so keen to give those schools, so that cannot be the logic behind their exemption. In Clause 12, academies and city technology colleges are included, so what is the logic behind this exemption? In a previous answer, the Minister said that he felt that we could leave the CTCs and CCTAs to their own devices. It is not normally the Government’s practice to leave to chance the implementation of one of their flagship measures, so how can the Minister be so confident? Indeed, why employ an army of civil servants to rewrite the funding agreements of academies and city technology colleges when it would be much simpler to add those sorts of schools to primary legislation? I beg to move.