Clause 10 - Powers of governing bodies to form or
Education Bill
4:45 pm
Mr Stephen Timms (Minister of State (School Standards), Department for Education and Skills; East Ham, Labour)
That does not sound like a likely scenario. The governing body has clear responsibilities in this area, which it will exercise normally. The scenario is possible—subsection (1)(a) makes this clear—because we are considering services provided to schools by other schools. We want more examples of that. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell, or one of his colleagues, suggested that strong schools could support weak schools. There will be many examples of that. The new provision will make that easier.
Amendment No. 60 specifies the people from each school who should be on the board of directors. We would not want the Bill to specify that the representative should necessarily be the head teacher or a teacher, which the amendment would do. That would preclude administrative staff or bursars from sitting on the board. Such people may have the experience and time that are best suited to the day-to-day role of running the company. Given the concerns expressed by members of the Committee about the work load of teachers and heads, it would be inappropriate to insist that only members of the teaching staff could undertake these duties.