Academies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I very much support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Low as I follow his interest in special educational needs. I have tabled Amendment 24 in this group, and I intend throughout Committee to introduce amendments and to speak about a particular form of special educational needs: those of children who have grown up in severely disadvantaged and chaotic families and who so often end up being statemented with emotional and behavioural difficulties. In that context, I ask who will govern these new academies. Who will make the decisions on the ground? I fully acknowledge that parents sponsoring and running a school may be a good idea, but I am not convinced that a whole or even a majority of the governing body composed of parents of children at the school is at all desirable. My own modest experience in the independent sector has certainly indicated that short-termism tends to dominate decisions that are taken when there are too many parents with children at a school. Parent governors will obviously want the best for their children and are right to do so. Indeed, we want the stimulus of parents who push to get the best for their child, but there is a real danger that, if we get the governance of academies wrong, they will end up with the same fate that has unfortunately befallen so many of the admirable Sure Start centres which the previous Government introduced. Money was put to serving the community, the community was encouraged to consider how it wanted the money to be spent and the money was then spent in that way. What has tended to happen is that the brighter, pushier and more intelligent parents have jumped on the bandwagon and got the kind of input and outcomes that they wanted, and the parents with disadvantaged children who have no experience of addressing leadership or influencing events—the hard-to-reach parents—have gone to the bottom of the pile and the funding that was intended to go to them, if it is not wasted, at least does not reach them. What is the Government’s intention for governance? I refer to all the different kinds of school: free schools, parent-sponsored academies or academies sponsored by existing schools.