My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran’s amendments to Clause 56 and my noble friend Lord Agnew’s Amendment 454. I have heard much around the Committee this afternoon that is extremely important, but I think there are some wider points to make.

There are many romantic expectations of school admissions—that there is a perfect world in which every child will go to the school that they and their parents choose, in which every mainstream school can provide well for every child no matter how extreme their needs, and in which no child will ever cause harm to any other child or adult in a school. In this perfect world, the romantics expect children to be distributed perfectly evenly between schools on any measure by which we choose to analyse the population. But this is a dream, and chasing dreams rarely improves children’s experiences in the real world. Sadly, it is entirely possible that the extended powers to direct admissions will backfire, especially with policy pressure on local authorities to keep even the worst behaved children in mainstream schools irrespective of the consequences.

Consider a child for whom an LA is trying to find a managed move. If several schools decline to accept the child, it may mean that they are all shirking their responsibilities, or it may mean that they have correctly assessed that the child’s needs are too great for that school or any mainstream school to manage the child safely. One shocking case I saw as chief inspector related to a girl who was raped by a boy who had come to her school on a managed move and, worse, the receiving school had not been informed by either the LA or the sending school of the boy’s known history of serious sexual misconduct. No school should be levered into putting other children at risk in this way.

If the LA directs the child to one of its own schools, it still has direct responsibility for the child, but if it can direct the child to an academy, it has offloaded the problem, at least in part. There is an obvious incentive for local authorities to use this power to offload the most difficult children and leave academies to shoulder a disproportionate responsibility for the most difficult and even dangerous children, and to inflict the greatest risk on the other children and staff in those academies.

Let us also consider the point that, while a decision will relate to a single child, good schools also have to consider how many children with behavioural problems they can manage and support properly without destroying the very strengths that make them able to work effectively with such children. I have seen already how difficult this is for local authorities in the context of SEND. Local authorities control EHCPs, which name a school to which that child should be admitted. In theory, it is parents who choose that school, but in practice, local authorities have significant influence over those parent choices, and some local authorities have perhaps on occasion found it convenient to encourage parents to choose academies rather than maintained schools, or at the very least to not discourage them from doing so.

As a result, some popular and successful academies have at times found themselves facing real difficulties. I know of cases where local authorities expected a school to fill more than one-third of its year 7 places with children requiring intensive individual support, many of them for behavioural problems. This would have turned those schools into de facto special schools without the wider infrastructure and support that we expect of special schools.

It is in fact extraordinarily difficult for local authorities to be impartial between mainstream schools and academies. For this reason, I strongly support my noble friend’s Amendment 452ZA, requiring local authorities to act impartially between maintained schools and academies. It will still be difficult in practice, but the principle should be explicit in the Act.

Similarly, my noble friend’s Amendment 453A to Clause 56 and Amendments 457A and 457B seek to ensure that changes to school admission numbers are made in the interests of children and parents, rather than the administrative convenience of the local authority. Again, these decisions will always be hard and will never please everyone, but it is right and important that children’s needs are explicitly put first: otherwise, it is sadly all too certain that, with the shrinking birth cohort, some excellent schools will see their admissions restricted while mediocre schools carry on. My noble friend Lord Agnew’s Amendment 454 gives some protection to this principle. I hope the Government will see how unfortunate this would be and will take steps to guard against it.