Education Bill

I could bore everyone by starting again, but I am not going to do that. I was talking about how under this legislation the power of local authorities to consult and to plan for a spread of school choices is massively curtailed. Under this clause, when a new school is needed local authorities will have a duty to seek proposals to set up an academy and to identify a possible site. They must obtain the Secretary of State’s consent before publishing proposals for a competition to set up a new school, and the Secretary of State can intervene at any point to stop a competition early. Meanwhile, competitive academy proposals will no longer need to be submitted to local authorities for approval and can instead go directly to the Secretary of State. I do not think local authorities are left in any doubt about what will happen to their proposals if they put forward anything other than an academy to the Secretary of State. They might well wonder what happened to their strong strategic role supposedly defending the interests of parents and children, as envisaged in the schools White Paper. I am intrigued to know how the Minister can explain how this central directive that new schools can be only one type squares with the concept of parental choice. Moreover, how would the Secretary of State know what represents the best type of school for a particular locality? If, as it appears, the Government think that academies are always the right solution, does that also mean that maintained schools, even the best performing ones, are in some sense second-class schools? It might be thought that as these provisions apply to new schools only, they will have relatively little impact on the overall architecture of school provision, but the proposals cannot be seen in isolation from other clauses in the Bill that allow the Secretary of State to close down schools more readily and to hasten the conversion of maintained schools into academies. From all these measures, it appears that the Government’s grand plan is that all schools should be academies. Perhaps the Minister can confirm that. I am sure that the Minister will remind us at this point that the academies programme was brought in under the previous Government, and indeed it was, but it had a different purpose. Academies were seen as a way of targeting resources and focusing on struggling schools when other interventions had failed. As more and more schools convert to academies, they will lose the kudos, focus and additional resources that helped them succeed. We do not oppose the expansion of the academies programme, although we recognise that the Government’s aims are different from the past, but we place the decision firmly back in the hands of local people. What matters is that parents and pupils have access to a choice of good-quality schools. However, the presumption that all new schools are academies takes away that choice. On this issue the Government are guilty of their rhetoric not matching the reality of what is actually in the Bill. For example, in Committee in the Commons, the Minister said, "““the intention behind the schedule and the general thrust of the Government’s education policy is to increase parental choice by diversifying provisions and ensuring that parents have a genuine choice of school to which they send their children””.—[Official Report, Commons, Education Bill Committee, 29/3/11; col. 790.]" It is hard to reconcile that position with what is in the Bill. The Minister is trying to suggest that there is a level playing field of choice, whereas the reality is that there is none. Therefore, we do not support the clause and the schedule but we support the rights of parents and local people to choose the range of schools they would like to have for their children in the community. I very much hope that noble Lords will support our amendments.