Clause 18
Education and Inspections Bill
9:00 am
Edward Leigh (Gainsborough, Conservative)
Good morning, Mr. Chope. I hope that you are rested after the exciting events of yesterday and that we can now get back to work on this important Bill.
The clause deals with the publication of proposals to make the alterations to schools provided for under clause 17, which we debated on Tuesday. Clause 18 requires a local education authority to publish its proposals in a prescribed manner, but permits it to do so for any maintained school. It allows the LEA to make alterations not only for community schools, which is fair enough—after all, community schools are run by LEAs—but for voluntary or foundation schools. With the amendment, I seek to find out what might happen.
I believe that a local education authority should be able to publish proposals only for community schools, and not for voluntary or foundation schools. I hope that the Minister will reassure me that she does not envisage LEAs muscling in to make alterations to voluntary or foundation schools. I cannot believe that that is her intention, but it would be useful to hear her views on the matter. For instance, if the governing body of a voluntary or foundation school requires or does not require the enlargement of its premises, or if the governing body wants to add 16 to 18-year-olds to the school’s admissions, or if the school already has a sixth form and does want to lose it, the decisions on all such changes and similarly vital matters should rest with the governing body of the school. Because an overwhelming proportion of schools—as much as63 per cent., as my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) has said—are community schools I see no merit in LEAs, which have quite enough work to do with their own schools, trying to make alterations to others.
The amendments would limit LEAs’ scope to order a change to community schools only. According to my reading of the clause—the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—unless the amendments are accepted the LEA could cut off the sixth form of a voluntary school, order a voluntary school to stop providing for children with special needs, or order such a school to start making such provision. I cannot believe that that is the Minister’s intention. There is no point in voluntary or foundation schools having governing bodies if, in practice, such vital decisions are taken out of their hands.
I shall speak briefly to amendment No. 384, which deals with an important point. We support the concept of foundation schools: we hope they are successful and that we have more of them. I wish the Minister well in that endeavour. Unfortunately, the concept is nothing like the policy that the Prime Minister declared in the White Paper. His policy, which bears repetition because we share it, that all maintained schools should be “independent state schools”. That is my vision also. I believe that there are still far too many apron strings tying foundation schools to local authority diktats. Even more apron strings tie them to diktats from the Department for Education and Skills. None the less, foundation schools are a step in the right direction—one on which we can build when we take power.
It follows that if a local authority, perhaps a rather progressive one, can see the benefit to children’s education of having all the maintained schools in its area given the independence offered by foundation status, it should be free to make a proposal under clause 9 that all its schools should become foundation schools. I have spoken to my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), who reminded me that Kent, for example, ensured that all its schools were grant maintained—