Education and Adoption Bill

Debate between Lord Sutherland of Houndwood and Baroness Hughes of Stretford

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

It does, and that is helpful, but it still leaves the question of accountability for finance and governance, which is very specialist, and accountability for educational practices, which is pretty specialist too but perhaps does not relate to some of the issues that we are concerned with.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

Before the noble Lord’s previous intervention, he seemed to me to be saying, and perhaps he could clarify whether this is his view, that all the schools that are bad or coasting are in the maintained sector, that the solution to dealing with that is to take them away from local authority control and relationships completely and that therefore, by implication, all the academies that have gone through the process of becoming academies are excellent. We know that that is not true. Is that what he is saying—that all the bad and coasting schools are only in the maintained sector?

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

The noble Baroness will be pleased to know that that is not what I am saying. I have been an advocate of full inspection for academies ever since the last Bill was introduced, and I still take that position. That is the way in which academies should be judged; have no doubt about that. I do not think it likely that we will deal with that in this Bill but the noble Baroness asked me what my position was, and that is it.

What I am saying is that the Bill deals with coasting schools in the maintained sector and, if that is so, there is a bit of a problem if we are going to deal with the issue by simply recreating that. I simply record my reservations. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, was right to say that as it stands the clause may not achieve all that it sets out to, and if it comes back again I would be very interested to have a look at it. Still, I have these reservations and wanted to put them on record.