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Academies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall say a brief word about Amendment 52, which is tabled in my name, and I hope that I can perhaps win the prize for the briefest speech of the evening. The object of Amendment 52 is to impose the SEN obligations on existing academies, which we already discussed to a fair extent when we considered government Amendment 11. The Minister made it clear that the SEN obligations would be inserted into the funding agreements of existing academies. The only point of unclarity that remained was whether we would have to wait for the existing agreements to run their course or whether the obligations could be inserted before that. If the Minister accepts the spirit of this amendment, it would enable the obligations to be inserted into the funding agreement within 12 months of the Act coming into force. I urge that that approach be adopted, rather than that we should be made to wait a number of years for existing agreements to run their course.