Clause 11
Education and Inspections Bill
12:00 pm
Nick Gibb (Shadow Minister (Schools), Education; Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, Conservative)
I want to say a few words about the issue of federated schools. The purpose of the clause appears to be to enable the provisions on federated schools in the Education Act 2002 to apply to theBill’s provisions on the establishment of new schools. Clause 11(2) states that the phrase
“ ‘federated school’ has the meaning given by section 24(2)”
of the 2002 Act. I looked up that section, which states:
“In this Chapter ‘federation’ means a group of schools that are federated by virtue of this section, and "federated school" means a school forming part of a federation.”
So that is clear, then.
Section 24 deals with two or more schools being able to form a federation, with a single governing body, which in prescribed cases can be treated as a single school. That type of federation is, I presume, of the type referred to as a hard federation, whereas in a soft federation the head of a successful school would take on the additional headship of a local school that was failing or coasting, but would not formally merge the two governing bodies.
Will the Minister confirm that, notwithstanding the creation of a federation of schools of the hard kind, the exam results of the individual schools within the federation would continue to be published separately? Will she also confirm that parents applying for their children to attend a school in the federation would be able to specify the one that they wanted their children to attend, and would not be forced to apply just to the federation?
Does the Minister envisage any maximum size for a federation? I recently met an LEA officer who presented me with an apocalyptic vision of what a future federation could look like. She said that there could be a federation of 20 schools; that parents could have to apply to the federation rather than to an individual school; that the federation could allocate children to one of its schools as it saw fit; and that the exam results of the schools could be consolidated into a block for the federation as a whole.
That would in effect create a mini-education authority, within which parents would have no choice of school and exam results would no longer be published. That would take us back to the regime of the 1970s and early 1980s. I hope that the Minister will confirm that such a use of the federated schools provisions in clause 11 and in section 24 of the 2002 Act will not be permitted.