Academies Bill [HL]

My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, for tabling Amendment 4 and giving us the opportunity to look again at Clause 1(6)(d), because there is a potential difficulty for the Government down the line. We intend to provide freedom for people to establish schools, yet paragraph (d) says that, "““the school provides education for pupils who are wholly or mainly drawn from the area in which the school is situated””." The noble Lord, Lord Baker, has just spoken. Of course, the city technology colleges were successful because they did not have that restriction. There was nothing to say that they had to ““wholly or mainly”” draw pupils from the area of the school. Therefore, they could draw them from a wider area, which was how they became beacon schools. From my reading, Swedish schools are not subject to the same restrictions in terms of having to draw from very narrow boundaries. There is a potential risk, particularly in the primary sector as distinct from the secondary sector, of deleterious effects on neighbouring schools. I ask my noble friend to look again at the wording of that clause and see whether ““wholly or mainly”” needs to be included or whether a general statement about pupils being drawn from the area in which the school is situated would suffice.