My Lords, this is a wide group of amendments. I shall speak first to Amendment 49, which says that, within a year, the Secretary of State must consult on whether the Bill is adequate enough a mechanism to enable schools to either de-academise or leave their trust. Once a school joins a MAT, it is trapped. We need to empower schools to leave failing MATs or those it has irreconcilable differences with. Where else in society would it be impossible to get out of an unsatisfactory agreement? No other organisation would be tied in this way to a compulsory contract with no get-out clause.
In our Amendment 94, we ask that the Secretary of State must report yearly on the financial health of academies, including any measures necessary to address disparities, especially over financial reserves, and that academies must state their intentions for the use of reserves over £250,000. Too many academies are sitting on reserves of millions of pounds. Notwithstanding the points made by my noble friend Lord Knight about reallocation and GAG—I had not heard that acronym before, but I will not forget it now—we need to encourage academies to be transparent about this. If they are saving for a huge capital project and can justify it, it is an acceptable way forward, but these institutions cannot be cash cows. Money needs to be invested for pupil benefit.
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When I was cabinet member for education at Newport City Council, we set up a fair but far-reaching review of school balances to ensure that such practices could not continue. It was justifiable carrying over from one financial year to another for specific projects, but this needed to be accompanied by ongoing reviews by the financial team with the head teacher and chair of governors. It was my first opportunity as poacher turned gamekeeper—boy, did I enjoy interrogating those head teachers. We did not want to stifle innovation and capital projects—indeed, I could not be prouder of the new schools we built, constructed in partnership with the Welsh Government’s 21st century schools project—but we carefully monitored balances and reserves and we audited in order for pupils to be at the centre of school spending commitments.
On Amendment 157, within a year, the Secretary of State must consult on the merits of the functions of the Education and Skills Funding Agency and regional schools commissioners—they are called something else now—being combined and given to one entity. Duplication of services has always been a poor feature of bureaucracy and this amendment would go some way to avoiding the issue. Managing the finances and performance of schools is not well joined up. The ESFA, commissioners, LAs and Ofsted all have a role. This needs to change if schools are to be well run.
With Amendment 159, schools must maintain a digital record for pupils, updated quarterly, which may include an assessment of grades, effort, behaviour and any work experience completed. Parents need more information—and information that is relevant to them. Paper reports can easily be lost. All information needs to be centralised so that parents can track progress. Many, if not most, schools in the maintained sector have moved to online systems. If anything came out of the pandemic, it was a shift to online recording of student attainment and parental access to the whole spectrum of teaching and learning resources for their child. Notwithstanding that, I put in a cautionary note. I had a discussion with my noble friend Lord Knight earlier today about the confidential use of data and not selling data to commercial companies.