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Academies Bill [Lords]

I do not intend to detain the Committee for long as we are only three amendments into a 30-odd amendment marathon. I am not a fan of the legislation as it takes a set of proposals that were meant for one set of schools and transfers those, lock, stock and barrel, to schools in a wholly different category. It takes resources that were meant to improve the educational outcome for children in schools that are underperforming and transfers them in a targeted way to schools that are, in the first instance, already regarded as outstanding. It will also take resources that the local authority currently receives to be targeted at school improvement and gives those resources to schools that are already outstanding, in a ““devil take the hindmost”” fashion.