Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill
12:00 pm
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
Thank you very much. Can I ask Les and Frankie about that? What is significant about those powers, as I understand it, is that there are already powers of intervention in this respect—from the Secretary of State to a local authority—but that they are based on schools that have already been categorised as requiring special measures or significant improvement.
Clause 192 gives much more sweeping powers, as I understand it, for the Secretary of State to make judgments about schools that he or she thinks should be doing better on various measures, and then allows intervention against the local authority in the first respect to deal with that. That brings us to the point of whether the Government are able to effectively assess schools not already picked up by Ofsted, or some other body independent of the Government, that are not performing well. Are you two happy with the powers in clause 192, or do you think that you are going to end up with unreasonable decisions for interventions being made?