Academies Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the Minister and to the Secretary of State in another place for the consideration and care that they have given to the whole issue of accountability. The Bill has improved considerably as a result of discussions in this House. We have had long discussions about the issue of consultation and governing bodies, and the net effect of this has been that we have a much more accountable and responsible structure in the Bill than we had when it began. For that, and for their willingness to listen, I thank them both. At an earlier stage in the Bill, when my noble friends Lord Phillips of Sudbury and Lady Walmsley were very concerned about issues of accountability, we came up with the proposal that there should be an annual report to Parliament, and it is still highly appropriate to hold on to that. It is correct that the Government should have accepted this amendment and I thank them for their help in drafting it. The purpose of the amendment is to enable not only the Select Committee but Parliament itself to consider what is, after all, a major experiment in education. There will be many aspects of that major experiment that people will want to look at. What happens to the quality of schooling, the movement of teachers and school leadership? What happens to the heads and governing bodies? There will be many more questions. So it is appropriate that a wider body than even a Select Committee should be brought into this discussion. One of the important issues here is going to be that the basis on which statistics are laid down in the annual reports should be broadly comparable with those in other related reports. My noble friend Lord Phillips will say more about that. I shall point to two things in particular that are crucial in this report that we hope will be made available on an annual basis from this year onwards. The first of those is to track the effects of the removal of a great deal of what one might describe as "micromanagement" from the schools. Many of us on this side of the House, and many of us in the coalition, have been concerned about the levels of micromanagement in schools, and we believe that there is likely to be a more innovative approach and a greater deal of discretion for teachers if this experiment succeeds as the Government clearly intend it to do. On the other hand, there is a valid question that hangs in the sky: might we be moving towards a two-tier system of education? The initial applications are a little troubling in that respect. For example, counties such as Surrey and Hertfordshire appear to be responding at a rate of around 10 per cent of the secondary schools that might be applicable to become academies, whereas areas such as Middlesbrough, Knowsley and other poorer parts of northern England do not seem to be caught up with excitement at the idea of academies and are therefore not applying in large numbers to join. There is another, related factor. So far, the schools that have applied appear, from the London School of Economics study which has been published in the past couple of days, to be atypically low in terms of free school meals and youngsters with special educational needs. These things will need very close observation, discussion and scrutiny. An annual report will be crucial in making that happen. Again, I thank the Ministers on behalf of my noble friends and me for the consideration that they have given to this issue. I hope that this—which will, in its way, be something of an experiment—will turn out to be a very useful, radical new proposal in managing government and making it more accountable to Parliament than ever before. I beg to move.