Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

Yes, but we still want responsive, interested and active people there—and that is not what you get in my experience.

Secondly, I hope that inspection will look at the connection with parents, which can be hugely different across MATs. Some parents have a real connection with the school, and the school does that interface very well. With other, more distant MATs, anything that a parent is worried about just disappears into the fog and they never really know how to work with them. A good MAT will work well with parents, and Ofsted ought to look at that.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak in favour of Amendment 435, to which I have added my name. I am also happy to signify support for Amendment 436ZZB. I am less enthusiastic about Amendment 436ZZA, because it is prolix and bureaucratic —but, if the opportunity came, I would not vote against it.

What is noticeable and very welcome is the unanimity of view across the Committee on this issue, which is one of accountability. As my noble friend Lady Morris said, academies are a very important part of the school system. I have no connection with academies, unlike other noble Members who have spoken, other than as the parent of a child currently in year 10 of a school in a multi-academy trust in London. However, it is important that we have insight into what is happening within trusts to a much greater extent than we have at the moment, because there is a fundamental gap in the accountability system for school education. If schools and children’s services are inspected, why not multi-academy trusts? For that reason, we need transparency, consistency and fairness.

Ofsted needs to have the power to inspect trusts’ governance, financial stewardship, curriculum content and teacher development, and how the trust-level ethos affects children across their academies. Some tales of the way in which certain trusts operate do not look good, given some of the pressures under which children are placed. I believe that good MATs should and will welcome this.

I do not need to add further to what other noble Lords have said. This was a Labour manifesto commitment, as my noble friend Lord Knight said, so all I ask my noble friend the Minister is: if not now, when? I hope that the answer will be, “On Report”.

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I very strongly support the amendment from my noble friend Lord Blunkett. I call him a friend because we have both borne the same responsibilities in the past and it looks as if his proposal has all-party support in the Committee. I assure your Lordships that that is very rare in education—very rare indeed.

Multi-academy trusts were created some years ago because of the success of academisation. So many private schools had hitherto been controlled by local authorities, which understood money, but many independent schools did not have much understanding of money until they got their budgets. There was a need for an institution to sit between the Department for Education and the educational world of schools, particularly as—as anyone who has ever served in the Department for Education as a Minister or Secretary of State knows—not many people in the department have actually run a school. It is not their particular skill; they have other skills in other matters.

I have had some experience of it because of the schools for which I am responsible—university technical colleges —of which there are now 44 with over 21,000 students. Many of these are now members of multi-academy trusts —in fact, two-thirds of them. This is quite challenging for the trusts because we are not ordinary secondary schools like the other ones that they control. We go from 14 to 18 only and tend to have a longer working day and shorter holidays, but the 14 year-olds spend two days a week—that is 40% of the time—in workshops, visiting companies or learning how to use machinery. UTCs are very different from the other secondary schools in the multi-academy trust.

Initially, I was quite concerned that multi-academy trusts would not recognise the differences, but in my experience they have. I think we had difficulty with only one of them, where all the other schools in the trust were primary schools, so there was not a great deal of experience of running a secondary school. I also discovered that the chairmen of multi-academy trusts are sometimes very able people—not quite as able or experienced as the noble Lord, Lord Knight—who have a need and an important responsibility for handling money. I strongly remember my noble friend Lord Agnew spending very long days trying to teach financial control directly to schools to ensure that they understood how to control their budgets and to get the best out of them. The best academy trusts do this, so I think they have now become part of the institution and I can see no reason why they should not be inspected.

They are not really directly responsible to anybody. I expect that the Secretary of State, but not many Secretaries of State, will spend time worrying about how MATs are run. It would be a very good idea to have a system of education for them and therefore I support that amendment.