Clause 74
10:00 am
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely important point, but just this week I visited a grant-maintained school that opted out in the early 1990s under a Conservative Government. The school has only recently come out of special measures, having gone downhill rather rapidly after becoming a grant-maintained school, and it has now become an academy. That demonstrated that any changes to the classification of a school or to the group that sponsors a school do not inevitably mean that that school will for ever perform brilliantly.
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we cannot afford to return to the situation in, and prior to, the 1990s, when many schools were performing very badly and many local authorities were not doing their job properly. Our view of the future structure of the school system is one in which Ofsted and, indeed, the educational standards authority, which has not yet been established, should do a much firmer job than the current body in terms of holding local authorities to account. As the Minister will be aware, there is still a large number of local authorities in the country where school performance is extremely poor. The Government have focused a lot of attention, money and pressure on inner London, but there are many cities throughout the country where the level of performance is far too low. The existing mechanisms are not good at holding some of those local authorities to account. There needs to be much greater transparency about schools that are failing, and local authorities that are failing to support and drive school improvement in those parts of the country.