Academies Bill [HL]

A diverse set of themes and topics has come up. I shall come back to the point about "wholly or mainly" in a moment, because it is one of the themes that have emerged on which I hope to be able to provide a little reassurance. I shall take my responses in the order in which I have them before me. Amendment 63 concerns monitoring and whether we need to have independent monitoring arrangements. The Bill requires that there will have to be compliance with the characteristics set out in the academy arrangements. How that works in practice is that the Secretary of State ensures at the outset of an academy project that it meets those characteristics. Compliance is then monitored by the Young People’s Learning Agency. It has the duty to monitor compliance and, if the Secretary of State is not satisfied, he has the power to terminate an arrangement. Amendment 17, moved by my noble friend Lord Greaves, is concerned with language. I agree that language is important. Personally, I quite like the word "independent" and the concept of independence. I take his point about how certain words carry freight. One could argue that one should call independent schools "private schools" and academies "public schools", but the amendment would make academies maintained schools rather than independent schools, which would in effect prevent them from gaining the freedoms that are the purpose of the Bill. On Amendment 22A, the Bill as drafted requires those setting up academies to meet the demands of both paragraphs (a) and (b). I am advised, and can assure noble Lords, that adding the word "and" to this subsection would not change the meaning of it. We do not believe that there is ambiguity in the current drafting.