Education Bill

My Lords, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley has said, we debated these issues at length and amended the consultation requirements during the passage of the Academies Act, which was just over a year ago. The fundamental question today, as it was a year ago, is how much detail about consultation we should prescribe in statute. When we discussed consultation during the passage of the Academies Act, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, shared with this House his experience of consultation on the academies programme. He argued that just because the detail of a process is not set out in statute does not mean that it does not happen in a comprehensive manner. Like the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, this Government do not believe that minimal legislation leads to minimal consultation, which was the point made by my noble friend Lady Walmsley. Also like him, and like schools and head teachers, we believe firmly in the importance and value of consultation. The department’s website contains advice on carrying out all stages of the academy conversion process, including consultation. A departmental official liaises with every converting school and among other things advises it on ways to ensure a fair and open consultation. Ultimately, schools make the choice to convert and they are under a legal duty to carry out a reasonable consultation of appropriate persons. Given the variation in these circumstances, it is right that the school assesses, in carrying out its consultation duty, what is reasonable in its local community, rather than Ministers prescribing it from the centre. Once consultation is complete, it is the responsibility of the school to reflect on the responses and to decide whether to proceed with academy conversion. That will go ahead only with confirmation from the school to the department that it has carried out its legal duty to consult appropriate persons and that the school wishes to go ahead, having considered the consultation responses. The noble Baroness raised two issues about whom to consult and when the consultation should take place. In relation to whom to consult, we think that schools can be trusted to assess who the appropriate persons are to consult according to the circumstances and that in those cases the appropriate parties, as my noble friend has just said, will include parents, pupils and staff. If we have concerns that consultation has not been adequate—for instance, if parents have not been consulted—these concerns will be raised and dealt with prior to the funding agreement being signed. On the timing of the consultation, the noble Baroness pointed out that consultation should take place before a decision is made, and I agree. The consultation requirement in the Academies Act already reflects this principle. It requires that consultation should take place before a school is converted into an academy. As I think that the noble Baroness accepted, an application for an academy order is a procedural step and does not signify a decision that the school should become an academy. That does not take place until the funding agreement is signed, which may happen many months after the issuing of an academy order. With that in mind, both last year and still now, it seems right that the school can carry out its consultation and reflect on the responses to it right up until the point at which it decides to become an academy and signs the funding agreement. We discussed consultation at length during the passage of the Academies Act but, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley has said, we have a key advantage now compared with when we last debated the issue a year ago. Our debate about the legal framework for consultation can now be informed by the experience of schools in implementing it. We have had around 1,100 academy conversions since the Academies Act was enacted. I would argue that for the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, to ask the House to overturn the position it reached last year after a long debate, she would need to provide strong evidence that there is widespread disquiet about the consultation process. I do not think she has provided that evidence, and I think that that is because it does not exist. The department has had very few complaints from parents or other interested parties about the way that consultation has been carried out. This confirms my belief that the House got the issue right in the Academies Act 2010. I would therefore ask the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, to withdraw her amendment.