Academies Bill [Lords]

You will be pleased to know, Ms Primarolo, that I spent most of the weekend trying to pronounce your name without embarrassing myself or you. That is as near to pronouncing it correctly as I can get. I apologise for my rudeness to you last week when I could not pronounce it. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy). Is it Wigan? It was on the annunciator screen, but I missed it. It moved so quickly. You know how unaccustomed this place is to things moving quickly, Ms Primarolo, except on the annunciator screen. Anyway, it is a pleasure to follow the hon. Lady, and I had more than a degree of sympathy for what she had to say. I hope that Members will give serious consideration to some of the issues raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Dr Pugh) and others, including the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). She made a very good point. The only point on which I disagreed with her was the percentage business: I did not think that that was helpful to the debate. I am disappointed that the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) has left the Chamber. He seemed to be digging himself gradually into a deeper and deeper hole, and taking interventions to save himself from burying himself. He appeared to be saying that everyone else could be right, but parents would have to be wrong. Parents could not be trusted to make a decision as important as this, because they might simply get it wrong. Well, who is to say that anyone else is going to get it right? I should be interested to know what is wrong with giving people an opportunity to discuss and to make a decision. I shall explain shortly why I think that is important, but let me deal first with the notion that the amendment, or something like it, cannot be accepted because there is not enough time. Nothing in the rules of the House suggests that the business cannot be changed. If the Government were minded to accept the amendment, a Report stage could, if necessary, be arranged for tomorrow afternoon. Nothing in the rules states that the summer Adjournment debates must take place at a particular time on the last day before the recess, as long as they do take place. The business could be changed so that both Report and Third Reading could take place tomorrow. There would be nothing to prevent that, if good will existed in relation to bringing parents into the debate about academy status. I think it important to spread the franchise. I do not entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Southport that one governor should be able to intercede, to object and to force a parental vote. I believe that the issue is more important than that. Although I personally oppose academy status, I wish existing academies all the best, and if people have a choice and decide in favour of academy status, so be it. However, a determined effort must then be made if the arrangement is to work, and it will not work if feeder schools, and the parents of children at those schools, are not involved in the process. I believe that one of the ways to make an academy really work is to lock it into an all-through, all-embracing system involving the feeder schools and the secondary school, but those wishing to adopt such a system would have to carry a lot of parents with them. The questions that we should be asking are ““Is this really so good for education?”” and ““What will an academy do for children that a local authority working with a school cannot achieve today?”” Those fundamental questions are lost time and again in our debates in the Chamber. There has been no proper analysis here of the direct benefits that academy status will apparently bring to schools. Will all academies be a success? Are we brazen enough to say that no academy will ever fail? I hope not; that is to say, I hope they will not fail, but I also hope our thinking is not so flawed that we believe every academy will succeed. The problem is, if an academy does fail, who will pick up the pieces afterwards? Parents must be able to engage in a proper, informed debate themselves. The suggestion that all that can be sorted out in time for some academies to be in existence by September is mind-boggling.