My Lords, my name is attached to Amendments 78 and, with my noble friend Lord Storey, Amendment 162.
Amendment 78 deals with the issue that we were discussing earlier about the provision of school places by academies. It says that the Secretary of State must, within six months of the Act being passed, make regulations which provide local authorities in England with the power to direct academies within their area to admit students or expand school places. An example of why that could be important would be a new housing development of some significance which alters the balance of pupil numbers in a particular geographical area. Broadly speaking, our amendment is very similar to that of the noble Lord, Lord Knight. He uses “guidance”; we use “direction”. It is also similar to Amendment 160, which will be spoken to shortly.
The problem is simply that councils have a statutory duty to ensure there is a local school place for every child who needs one, but they currently do not have the power to direct academy trusts to expand school places or to admit pupils. This amendment would introduce a new backstop power for local authorities to direct trusts to admit children as a safety net.
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I understand that the Government have committed to consult on a new statutory framework for pupil movement, which might introduce a new backstop power for local authorities to direct trusts to admit children as that final safety net, with a right for the trust to appeal to the schools adjudicator. I seek the Minister’s confirmation that that is what the Government are planning. However, councils’ ability to meet local demand will be increasingly undermined as more schools convert from local authority maintained schools to academies, so we need to ensure that the backstop power is introduced as soon as possible to give local authorities the power to deliver their duty in school place planning. I regard these as essential powers for
local authorities. Parents and guardians would be incredibly surprised if they discovered that local authorities did not have those powers, which, of course, are currently limited, as I explained.
Briefly, Amendment 162 takes us wider than just the admissions function. It prescribes a list of functions that a local authority should be responsible for managing for all state-funded schools in the authority’s area. The first is what we have just been talking about: that every child “has a school place”. In addition, we need to co-ordinate
“the provision of education to children who are at risk of exclusion from school”
and
“the provision of support to children with special educational needs or disabilities”.
We also need a local authority
“to act as the admissions authority for all state-funded schools in the local authority area, including by managing in-year admissions … to manage the appeals process against individual admissions decisions … to prevent pupils from being removed from the pupil roll of a school unlawfully … to monitor the performance of schools; and … to monitor how schools engage with their local community.”
That all seems common sense, and it is what the general public would expect for their local area.
There are two overriding reasons why it is essential to define local authority powers and responsibilities. Local authorities are, after all, the locally elected democratic body to which parents and the public will turn if there are difficulties, but secondly, they are the place where the co-ordination and integration of provision in schools can be undertaken. We will talk later about multi-academy trusts and whether they can be geographically widely spread across the country, with all the problems we can foresee if that is a developing trend. With these two amendments, I seek the Minister’s assurances that the role of local authorities will be properly embedded in the schools system.