Clause 41
Education and Inspections Bill
9:30 pm
Jacqui Smith (Minister of State (Schools and 14-19 Learners), Department for Education and Skills; Redditch, Labour)
What a pleasant surprise that the hon. Gentleman was so brief.
Fair and open admission arrangements help children to access good-quality schools, while unfair and unclear admission arrangements can increase social segregation and limit parents’ choice of school. Clause 41 therefore builds on the rules in the School Standards and Framework Act to ensure that admission arrangements that are approved as part of a proposal to open a new school or expand a successful or popular school should remain in place for a fixed period. That will also ensure that schools adjudicator determinations on objections to admission arrangements are binding for a fixed period.
As hon. Members will see, the draft regulations that we circulated would prevent further changes in admission arrangements in the two school years following the year in which a change was authorised to a school. That would make for a total of three years in which the arrangements were frozen, but the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings wants to restrict that period to two years. We proposed that the freeze should be for three years, because two years is insufficient time for good practice—whether in new schools or expanding schools, or following an objection to the adjudicator—to become embedded and truly effective.
In defence of the three-year period, I should say that we made it clear in the White Paper that we intended to take the route set out in the Bill. If the White Paper really is the hon. Gentleman’s bible, as he says it is, he will want to support this particular element of it. As it is, his amendments would change it. We should, however, stick with the intention in the White Paper.