Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill
12:00 pm
Daniel Moynihan: I am honestly not here to represent the IAA, but we support the establishment of the agency. It makes sense for the Department to have an agency to take care of academies. Clearly the Department was never meant to be a local authority, so we are perfectly happy with that and we think it will work well.
The key issues for us will lie in the detail of commissioning and how that will affects academies’ freedoms to establish sixth forms, what they can offer and how that freedom will compare to the existing situation.
We broadly support behaviour partnerships. The issue with them is who decides who is in the partnerships and what form they take. In some local authorities we have very effective partnerships. In others we have produced outstanding schools initially by working alone, because local provision has been so poor that we would not want to be locked into that on a compulsory basis.
Co-operating with children’s trusts is a very good principle, as long as children’s trusts focus on integrating services and making them available, in an easy way, to individual students. If it takes away the freedom of head teachers to be responsible and accountable for running their schools, that would not be such a good thing.