Academies Bill [HL]

Lord Bates Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I, too, welcome Amendments 6 and 7, and I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Hill, has responded to the persuasion and effective blandishments of my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury on this matter.

I have a question on proposed new subsection (4) in Amendment 6, which states:

“For the purposes of subsection (3)(a) a school does not replace a maintained school if it provides education for pupils of a wider range of ages than the maintained school”.

Will the Minister explain that, because it is not covered by the letter which he wrote about the government amendments of 9 July 2010? I think it means that it excludes from consideration as an additional school an academy that decides to establish, for example, a sixth form that did not exist before. I would not want this part of the Minister’s amendment to work as a loophole that would allow schools covering substantially the same age range, but with a little tweak at one end or the other, to be established without the Secretary of State having the very serious job of considering the impact on other good schools in the area.

[Lord Bates]

Briefly, I support my noble friend and place on record a slight disagreement on the amendment from this perspective: I am rather pleased that the wording is retained—that an additional school should consult with such persons as appropriate. It is fair to say that there is potentially a different view. I believe that it is a philosophical point about how we do government. It is about whether we want to go back to the day, which has been tried before, when we have Bills that run to 250 pages. They are so prescriptive about what everyone has to do, and people respond to that simply by taking a tick-box approach to everything—“Have I spoken to them? Have I spoken to them?”. They never bother to contemplate and absorb the issues. There is an attempt by the new coalition Government to do things differently. They are saying, “We are prepared to trust people and introduce legislation which is not prescriptive but is simply enabling people. If your school has been judged outstanding by Ofsted, clearly you are doing a good job and we trust you to do the right thing in the right way. If you are a new school and you have support for that, you have greater authority and we want to trust you”. That message needs to come across so I urge the Minister not to concede any further ground on this amendment. I think that it is fair enough as it stands.

[Baroness Walmsley]

I do not want the noble Lord to get away with the idea that I do not support these amendments. I simply asked the Minister a question about subsection (4) of the proposed new clause.

[Lord Bates]

Let me correct that for the record in Hansard. There was no suggestion of that at all.

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hill, on his Amendments 6 and 7. He has gone as far as he reasonably should to meet the concerns about consultation in respect of new schools. He will obviously explain his response to the particular issues to do with funding raised by my noble friend Lord Knight. I do not regard the concerns raised on other issues to be matters of substance. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, was concerned that the definition of what constituted a replacement school in subsection (4) of the proposed new clause might mean that a school which just had a somewhat larger age range did not constitute a replacement school, but my reading of the amendment is that, if that were the case, it would then be a new school and so would still be subject to the consultation arrangements which are encompassed in the other amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hill. Either way, whether it constitutes a replacement school or whether it constitutes, in the wording of Amendment 6, “an additional school”, it is captured by requirements for consultation that are equivalent.

Regarding the concern raised by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, about the subjective nature of the consultation, I do not read the amendment as being entirely subjective. He is the lawyer and I am not, but my reading of subsection (2) of the proposed new clause is that because the Secretary of State must take into account the likely impact of establishing the additional school on maintained schools, academies and institutions within the further education sector, he will have to be satisfied that there has been a consultation in respect of them. It would not be possible for the Secretary of State to take into account the impact on those institutions unless they had been consulted. My reading of subsection (2) of the new clause proposed by the Government’s Amendment 6 is that it substantially limits the subjective scope, because the Secretary of State would need to be satisfied that they had been consulted in order to be able to evaluate the impact.