Academies Bill [Lords]

I want to speak to new clause 1, on the reversion of academies to maintained status, and amendment 4, on consultation on conversion to an academy. I shall concentrate the majority of my remarks on new clause 1, and will speak only briefly to amendment 4, as consultation has been pretty much covered in our previous debates. I tabled new clause 1 because there is no provision in the Bill for academies to revert to maintained status. That means that all the potential problems that the Bill would permit—such as restrictive curriculum, discriminatory admissions and employment policies—would be made permanent at the point of conversion. The Government admit that problems are likely. I have cited this before, but it bears repeating that the Minister responding for the Government in a debate in the other place stated:"““I fully accept that if you trust people things do go wrong, but that is the direction that we want to try to go in.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 July 2010; Vol. 720, c. 299.]" It beggars belief that the Government would not want to guard against certain things going wrong, so is it really necessary to give schools complete freedom over admissions, curriculum and employment just to show that the dedicated people running our schools are trusted? I would argue not. The public are funding these schools, so on their behalf we must ensure that children are protected from indoctrination, that they are taught key subjects and that their staff are fairly treated. But given the Bill's failure to make proper consultation mandatory when schools convert to academy status, it is crucial to have a mechanism for parents to say that they want their schools to revert to maintained status if, as an academy, things do go wrong. The Government want academies to be like private schools funded by the state, yet if things go wrong at a private school, parents have more recourse than parents of children at an academy as envisaged in the Bill. For example, if a private school behaves in a way that a parent does not like, the parent can stop paying the fees, withdraw their child or pay for their child to go somewhere else. There is no comparable control in the Bill for parents of children in academies. For example, it may well not be practical or possible for there to be the surplus capacity necessary for children to be pulled out of one academy and be sent to the next state-funded school of choice. If parents see things going wrong in schools and believe that the Government's complete trust has been misplaced, surely they should be able to do something about it. The amendment is designed to provide a remedy to parents as a group—if, for example, an academy failed to teach key subjects or sought to impose religious beliefs on pupils. The amendment means that where 10% of the parents of pupils at an academy request it, the governing body must make arrangements for the holding of a ballot of parents to determine whether they want the academy to be converted back into a maintained school. If the Government are in favour of decentralising, as they constantly say they are with their big society rhetoric, why do they not want to let parents have the power to act if they decide that an academy is not better and if they want the school to go back to being a maintained school?