Education and Adoption Bill — House of Lords, 2015-12-01
Topic: Education
Kathryn Pinnock (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I apologise for missing the opening part of this discussion on Report. Amendment 1 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Storey has a distinct purpose, which is one that I raised in Committee. Schools are a locally delivered service and that will not change, even with the implementation of the Government’s desire that all schools become academies. Consequently, once school-specific processes have been exhausted, parents tend to seek redress for their concerns about a particular school from a local body. Currently, parents see their local authority as that body. Already, in my experience as a local councillor, parents seeking to take a complaint about their local school to the next level turn to the council only to find, where it is an academy, that this is no longer within the remit of LAs The second reason for tabling this amendment is that schools are a major spender of public money. More than 50% of a local authority’s revenue spending is on schools. Where is the local accountability for that expenditure, especially as the number of academies increases and their diversity grows? Sadly, there have been a number of high-profile failures of financial governance in the academy sector, which includes some serious allegations of fraud, some of which have been proven; for instance, in schools in Bradford and County Durham. They are not the only ones. The Education Funding Agency has issued financial notices to improve on several academy chains, including the Academies Enterprise Trust, which was served with a notice only last year. Therefore there are already examples of the failure of local accountability to highlight issues of concern about public expenditure on something as important as education and schools Multi-academy trusts, which seem to be the current favoured way forward, are accountable only to the Education Funding Agency and the Secretary of State for their strategic and financial performance. Governance models in multi-academy trusts ensure that the sponsor or sponsoring body controls the trust. The strategic direction and decisions on the school’s budget are, crucially, in the hands of the directors of the trust and the trust members, who are self-appointed and accountable for their actions only via agreements signed with the Department for Education. In this model there is no accountability to the local community, which the academy and the academy trust serves, and no accountability to local parents for the investment in the education of their children. This amendment seeks to address some of those concerns In 2006, the Government established local authority health scrutiny committees. The scrutiny committees comprise both elected councillors and co-optees with relevant experience in the health sector. The purpose is to provide a public forum where local NHS bodies—hospital trusts or commissioning groups—can present policy changes which are discussed and are subject to questioning from the perspective of the local community. In other forums they are questioned as regards their financial position or their general direction—as regards trusts—from a clinical commissioning point of view. However, the local community has the opportunity through the scrutiny committee to raise issues of concern, such as access to the services that are going to be provided. In my experience, health scrutiny committees can add value by providing access to strategic leadership across the sector and by enabling generalised complaints and concerns about the service to be given a local and public hearing. I suggest that local education scrutiny committees would fill a vacuum by providing a process, based on this sort of model, to have a forum for discussing issues pertinent to the local community One of the keys to success in schools is harnessing the support of the local community they serve. The risk in the multi-academy trust model is that the schools become more remote from the communities they serve. I suggest that a successful multi-academy trust would welcome the opportunity of a public platform where it could demonstrate transparency in its decision-making and respond to questions from local people regarding performance. A scrutiny model would also enable the regional schools commissioner to report back via a local public forum. I hope that the Minister will be able to respond positively and constructively to this proposal. I beg to move.