Education Bill

My Lords, I, too, want to speak to Amendments 122A and 122B. Clause 43 gives the Secretary of State powers to intervene and close schools that are in special measures. That widens the powers of intervention to schools causing concern. Subsection (3) strengthens the Secretary of State’s powers so that where a local authority, having been directed to consider set performance standards and to issue a safety warning notice, has decided not to do so, the Secretary of State may direct the local authority to give such a warning notice. If such a warning notice is issued to a school and it fails to comply, it immediately makes itself eligible for intervention. As the noble Baroness explained, that may well mean that it is closed and an academy is opened in its place. Under the Education and Inspections Act 2006, the warning notice gives the school the right to ask the chief inspector whether the warning notice is justified and the chief inspector may confirm it or otherwise. Our problem with the subsection is the degree to which it removes all discretion from local authorities. The problem is that a local authority is asked to consider whether to give a warning notice and to set performance standards. If, having looked at the school it decides that other measures might be more appropriate and it therefore does not issue a warning notice or the appropriate performance standard, the Secretary of State may now just peremptorily intervene. At a time when the Government are anxious to try to devolve responsibilities—the Localism Bill is going through the main Chamber today—it is against the whole spirit of localism that the Secretary of State should be given these somewhat draconian powers. Amendment 122B is to some extent a probing amendment. It suggests that we want to know, if academies fail in the same way as some schools fail, whether they have to obey the same rules as maintained schools have to. Is it appropriate that there should be intervention in exactly the same way and that they might be closed down? If they are closed down, the obvious solution would be for the local authority to have the power to step in and open a maintained school in its place—a sort of quid pro quo for the shutting down of a maintained school and the opening of an academy. Here we would have the equal and opposite effect. We would like to know a little more about what happens if an academy fails.