Academies Bill [HL]

I support entirely what my noble friend has just said. It is important, particularly when we are granting new freedoms to outstanding schools, that one of our ambitions for them is that they should reach out of the area immediately around them, which frequently has been colonised by people who can afford to buy houses in the area, to those who are not in that position. We will come to my amendment later. Perhaps I take a more active view than my noble friend, but I certainly would like it to be an ambition that all these schools should free themselves from geographical catchment areas that allow for their capture by financially mobile people. They should, at the least, be able to reach out and include those beyond the local area. I also support the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in what he said about state boarding schools. They have a strong role to play and I would like to see an increasing role for them. As he says, most of them are excellent, but they are clearly not serving their local areas in any particular way. That also applies to religious schools. Existing schools such as the Jewish Free School have a wide catchment area and are excellent. I cannot see why they should be excluded just because their communities are widespread. They should not be geographically confined, particularly if new schools are following the 50 per cent rule. I do not see any damage arising from that. Again, historically we have supported dance, drama and music in specialist schools and I suspect that it would do our national pride a bit of good if we supported tennis. All in all, I come down to agreeing with the first amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I cannot see a function for subsection (6)(d) that could not reasonably and justly be dealt with in the ordinary discretion of the department. Having agreed with noble Lords opposite, I take issue with my noble friend Lady Williams. If I start from the same premise as she did, I get to opposite conclusions. The community that my local primary school is part of is the village in which it is situated. The school is governed from Petersfield eight miles away, but that is an alien presence, not a local one. A primary school is very local, so one that has its roots in the local community is a much more local thing than one that is subject to the whims of the local authority, which has a lot of considerations other than the wishes of the local community. I see that as progress. I spent part of my life running a small business, which felt like a primary school in that there were lots of things that I could not do myself. However, if I wanted to know about employment law, I subscribed £250 a year to a telephone service from Sage or someone else. I did not need a local authority to provide it for me. There will be lots of other providers of these services—indeed, there are many—and it is not like having to pay a City lawyer £500 an hour every time advice is needed. Services are built to be provided to small enterprises like primary schools. However, I share my noble friend’s concern about how fragile primary schools are. The wrong head in a primary school can kill it in about two months, so I urge the Minister, when he comes to consider applications from primary schools, to make sure that they have strong heads and governing bodies and that they are committed to stay in place for some time. It may well be, over the long term, that a primary academy would be better as part of a wider federation of some kind, such as a group of primary schools, or as a school that is connected to a secondary school, as the existing primary academies are. That would provide the resources to deal with problems as they arise and which can so easily bowl over a small primary school.