Schedule 10

Part of Education Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 9:15 pm on 29 March 2011.

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Photo of Nick Gibb Nick Gibb Minister of State (Education) 9:15, 29 March 2011

The schedule is meant to increase choice. I am slightly surprised that the hon. Member for Cardiff West seems to be hostile to our proposal. Tony Blair, in the previous Government’s White Paper in 2005, first sought to change the local authority role from being a provider of education to being a local commissioner, so it could champion parental choice pushing for improvement rather than interfering in the day-to-day running of schools. The hon. Gentleman has asked whether the provision will restrict parental choice. No; the intention behind the schedule and the general thrust of the Government’s education policy is to increase parental choice by diversifying provisions and ensuring that parents have a genuine choice of school to which they send their children.

Amendment 157 would remove the presumption for new schools to be academies and, as Committee members will be aware, that would include free schools, which are underpinned by the same legal framework. It would remove the requirement on the local authority to seek academy proposals, and to inform the Secretary of State of the steps that it has taken to do so, before holding a competition for bids from proposers of all types of school.

Amendment 157 would remove the presumption for new schools to be academies. As Committee members will be aware, that would include free schools, which are underpinned by the same legal framework. It would remove the requirement on the local authority to seek academy proposals and to inform the Secretary of State of the steps that it has taken to do so, before seeking a competition bid from proposers of all types of school. It would also enable a local authority to continue to submit its proposals in a competition for a foundation or community school. It would effectively undermine the changes that we are trying to make to the process for establishing new schools.

The hon. Member for Cardiff West asked how the Secretary of State will have local knowledge. The Secretary of State has a team of advisers who work with local authorities, and they will bring the local knowledge with them.

There is cross-party support for the academies programme and its expansion under this Government. For example, Lord Adonis has described the number of academies as “a phenomenal achievement”. Recently, he said in an interview with The Spectator:

“Neither I nor Tony Blair believed that academies should be restricted to areas with failing schools. We wanted all schools to be eligible for academy status, and we were enthusiastic about the idea of entirely new schools being established on the academy model, as in Michael Gove’s free schools policy.”

The academies programme has proved to be a genuine revolution in raising standards in schools across the country. A recent Public Accounts Committee report found that the latest GCSE results show that standards in academies continue to improve faster than the national average. It was on the basis of evidence about the effectiveness of academies and of international evidence from the USA, Sweden and from the far east about the benefits of school autonomy, that the Government moved quickly to introduce the free schools programme and expand the academies programme, including by allowing existing maintained schools to convert to academy status and gain greater freedoms. There are now more  than 450 academies, half of which have opened since September 2010, and nearly 200 of them were schools that chose to convert.