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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I appreciate the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, about the importance of parents being engaged in schools, including in their governance. I will address that point directly, because the Bill does not diminish the engagement of parents in the governance of schools. The specific issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, is whether the proportion of parents required to be on the school governing body should be elected as opposed to being appointed, which they may be in a trust school or a voluntary-aided school as part of the representation of the trust behind the school. The reason why we have maintained and will continue to maintain their position is that where the trust itself appoints a majority of the governors, it is permissible to diminish the number of elected parent governors because otherwise it is impossible for the trust to appoint a majority. The capacity for a trust to appoint a majority is necessary for the trust to be able to maintain the level of leadership and control over the school that is essential for raising standards. After all, that is precisely the model that applies in voluntary-aided schools at the moment. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, largely answered herself. She said that she thought that 4,288 schools was too small a base from which to draw conclusions about successful governance. In all my experience of public policy, there are very few areas in which we have a model that is successfully operating in one in five among the totality of cases. I stress the words ““successfully operating””. Voluntary-aided schools include a high proportion of the most successful schools in the country. They are not simply Church schools; a number of other trusts are represented among those schools. The noble Baroness argues against a model that works very satisfactorily in 4,288 cases across the country and in which parents feel manifestly engaged in governance—those schools are substantially more oversubscribed than community schools, on average, which is the acid test of whether parents in the locality think that those schools are successful. It is simply not credible for the noble Baroness to argue on the basis of that successful experience that there is somehow either a danger or a diminishment of local community engagement, including parent engagement, in making the same governance arrangements available to a wider number of schools. Let me stress that under the Bill, no school will be forced to acquire a trust or to allow the trust to appoint a majority of governors. It will be for the governing body of that school to decide whether it thinks that the benefits that will come from an external partner are worth the transition to trust status. It is the governing body as presently constituted that will make that decision. So no external force is being applied in the matter. Within acceptable bounds—we believe that the bounds in the Bill are acceptable—we want to extend to schools the freedom to shape their own governance in the way in which voluntary schools and academy schools currently can. Specialist schools, voluntary schools and academies draw enormous benefit from their governance partners—including, I should stress, governors appointed by those relevant sponsors from the community that the school serves—in developing their individual character and ethos. Trust status will allow these opportunities to be available to any school that wants to benefit from them, whether they want to do so individually or collaboratively with other schools. On Amendments Nos. 39 and 40, we believe that the 20 per cent limit on local authority membership and voting rights in a trust is appropriate. This proportion is consistent with provisions in local government legislation about local authority involvement in companies and trusts. The provisions of the Bill already allow for parents and the local community to form a trust and to involve the local authority in that trust, subject to the 20 per cent limit set out in the Bill. The amendments would mean that a local authority may not be involved in a foundation with partners other than parents and community organisations. This could act perversely as a disincentive to trusts involving the local authority as trust members at all. In addition, imposing a requirement that the membership of any local authority that is a member of a trust must be precisely 33 per cent, as envisaged in the amendments, would provide the local authority with considerably less flexibility to carry out its role as it sees fit than do the provisions in the Bill. The amendments also prescribe that, where the local authority is involved in a trust, all schools that are part of that trust would be required to federate. We strongly encourage federation and collaboration—indeed, the trust model is intended to add to the options for such partnership-working. As the noble Baroness knows, many successful models of federation are now developing in the state system. We do not believe, however, that these relationships are at their most effective when they are forced on schools. Just as the community school is not the only category of school at the heart of the community, collaboration and community engagement will not be the exclusive preserve of a trust with this type of membership. We already know of schools that are planning to use trust status to facilitate collaboration. Last month, we published a list of trust pathfinders that showed a very large group of schools seeking collaborative arrangements. Indeed, almost all the proposals set out in the trust pathfinders are for collaborative arrangements between schools. Only a very small number of the trust pathfinders that we have published are for single schools seeking to develop individual trusts. We want to retain the flexibility for trusts to engage in partnerships of that kind, and it is precisely that kind of flexible arrangement that is made possible under the Bill. The prescriptive amendments tabled by the noble Baroness would limit the opportunity for real collaboration and partnership to grow, and would exclude any local authority from playing a part in the sort of exciting partnership that I have just described.