Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Agnew of Oulton

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I speak strongly in defence of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and his Amendment 435, supported by my noble friends Lady Barran and Lady Spielman, which is long overdue. When I was the Minister in 2017, it was the first thing I tried to do, and I ran into a turf war between Ofsted and the department. It was as simple as that. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, asked why nothing has been done about it. It is because the bureaucrats were fighting each other.

The excuse then was that there were not the sufficient financial skills in Ofsted to look at the financial framework and capability of the MAT. I think that is nonsense; I think we could train a small number of Ofsted inspectors very quickly to understand the basic principles. For example, GAG pooling, which is one of the big advantages of multi-academy trusts when they essentially have one bank account. Only about a third on MATs do that. I am a huge fan of it, although I do not think my noble friend Lord Nash is. That is fine; that is part of the flexibility that the system has created, but the Ofsted inspector would need to understand that.

The noble Lord, Lord Knight, made a point about it freeing up resources, and I completely agree. In the three years since I have been back as the chairman of my trust, I have had to sit through, I think, 12 interviews with Ofsted inspectors. Some 80% of what I tell them is exactly the same every single time: we have a joined-up curriculum across the whole trust and we have GAG pooling of all the money. That is all happening; the heart and brain is at the centre.

Therefore, having inspectors going round all these peripheral schools, where they will get the same answer time after time, is a tremendous waste of time. Go to the centre and, and if you are then worried about the messaging or the data you are inspecting, take a deeper dive into individual schools. If you did a single MAT inspection every three years, you would not have to go into every school.

I really cannot understand why there would not be huge support for this. Would it not be wonderful if we could bring the Committee together with the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and my noble friend Lady Barran, and agree an amendment that the Minister can work with? I promise noble Lords that everyone would benefit .

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My noble friend of course runs a good academy trust. Where things are not so good, you can get a lot of variability between the schools that append themselves to a trust. So this has to be judged on the occasion: you cannot just say you we will inspect the middle and not the outside; if the middle is not functioning well, the outside can really be very up and down.

I will add a couple of thoughts. First, I do not like the idea from the noble Lord, Lord Knight, of local authorities appointing. The way you gather good people together is by having a few excellent people in the middle who want other excellent people around them. Then you have Ofsted, or whoever, saying “Is this working?”. Local authorities just tend to appoint anybody, and those people do not turn up or know enough. Where I have seen local authorities appointing boards, it has been uniformly a disaster.