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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, the noble Baroness answered herself in her previous contribution when she successfully outlined the importance of having icons, totems and loadstones in legislation to set out in a declaratory way the direction in which we think we are moving. My noble friend’s amendment makes two important points in that regard. First, it is important that a school thinks that it is a foundation school because that is an attitude of mind and sets the direction that the school takes. I think that it is a thoroughly constructive direction, as the Government do, as they are promoting it. It is the way to go, and even if the physical powers are not much different, the mental attitude is. Secondly, it sets out the mental attitude that we expect of local authorities. Those of us who were around at the time—which I suspect is most of us—will remember how difficult local authorities made themselves at the time of grant-maintained schools. Many still seem to be wedded to the idea that schools must be theirs and they must control them, rather than that they belong to parents and the community. Across this House, we have taken a step away from that. We have said that local authorities are as friends of the parents and helpers of the schools, but not their owners. We are going to get away from the difficulties that came from ownership, such as local authorities just accepting their schools’ faults, not doing anything about them and expecting parents to live with them; that they were part of the community and satisfactory because they were the local authorities. I can remember going around schools in Manchester a long time ago. When a teacher was so bad that he was eventually removed from a school, the local authority transferred him to another of its schools because it thought that it owed a duty to its teachers first and above any other duty. We have moved a long way from that, and we are now in a very satisfactory position. The Government’s vision of the function of local education authorities is one with which I thoroughly agree. To put a declaratory framework in the Bill so that local education authorities know what they are about and where we are expecting them to head has great value. I have been persuaded of that by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, herself.