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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, with great respect to the noble Baroness, that is precisely what we are talking about. The Secretary of State will exercise his discretion in deciding whether or not to allow competitions to be entered into by community schools, precisely with a view to seeing that current weak or failing schools are replaced by ones with a much better prospect of success. That is where most of these competitions are going to come from. If I may say so, I think that the noble Baroness is confusing the status of the local authority in terms of its performance assessment, which is a judgment on the local authority at large, and the precise set of circumstances that apply in respect of the individual school competitions, many of which will be to replace existing weak or failing schools. With regard to the latter, it might be absolutely appropriate for the Secretary of State to wish to see a greater diversity of proposals coming forward rather than for the local authority to promote a community school where the set of circumstances surrounding the school to be replaced would lead the Secretary of State to judge that other proposals would have a much better chance of producing a successful school. For those reasons, we do not believe that the amendment should be supported. The clause as drafted puts the details in regulations, and the draft regulations specify that only authorities with an annual performance assessment rating of four should be allowed an automatic right to promote community schools in competitions. For other authorities, as I said, the Secretary of State may well give consent for community schools to be entered into competitions, but we believe that that judgment should be made on a case-by-case basis, specifically because we want to see effective action taken in areas where standards are low and where there is insufficient diversity in the provision of schools. We do not believe that it is inappropriate for the Government to play that role in areas where educational standards have not been sufficiently high or where choice for parents is inadequate. For those reasons, we invite the House to disagree with the amendment.