Lord Nash (Con)

My Lords, I add my support to what my noble friend has just said, and the comments made by the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris and Lady Blackstone. It is a matter of balance, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, between the needs of the religion and the needs of the child to receive a broad and balanced curriculum sufficient that, when they are adults, they can make choices. Certainly, when I was a Minister there were a number of unregistered settings where the children were attending very full-time, and the organisations were pleading home education as their defence. There was no way, frankly, that there were enough hours in the dark day, or the energy, for that to plausibly be happening. I also support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran. Can the Minister say why it is necessary to have these powers and these changes in relation to academies in the Bill? In five years as the Academies Minister, at no time did I feel that I needed any more powers—either those in this group or those we will discuss later—to sort out problems. Of course, we now know why these powers are in the Bill, even if we do not know why they are necessary: because the unions want them. We know that because the Secretary of State for Education told us so yesterday at the TUC conference. I must say that I admire her honesty. The unions have made a number of excellent comments recently about the dangers of smartphones and social media, because they know that they are creating considerable problems in schools for children and for their members. The fact that they have been so current on this and so strongly outspoken is very impressive, and I commend them for that. However, it is my perception that the unions are still very anti-academies, which I suggest is an out-of-date attitude. It is clear that a teacher in a good multi-academy trust has far greater career progression opportunities, far greater CPD and far more support than they could possibly have in a single school. I therefore invite the unions to consider their antipathy for academies a bit more in the context of career progression, and to support for their teachers. Of course, these powers are a power grab not just by the Secretary of State but by civil servants. I personally believe that academy, school and MAT leaders are far better placed to decide how to run their schools than officials micromanaging a system from Whitehall. We know that officials’ first pass at mass academisation after 2010 was not well managed. Having said that, there are currently a number of senior officials in the academies and regions teams in the DfE, as my noble friend Lady Berridge has alluded to, who are very experienced and for whom I have a great deal of respect, but they will not be there for ever. Given the Civil Service’s penchant for moving staff around far too much, such that they never build up any serious domain expertise, I believe that handing so much power to officials is dangerous. The Government would be far better off leaving things as they are because they are working perfectly well—we all have funding agreements and we all understand the deal—so that they can bask in the success of the academies programme, which, after all, was invented by the Labour Party. I turn to Amendment 436B specifically. New subsection (2)(g) in Clause 39(5), to do with premises, appears to say that if a school wanted to change the use of a classroom from teaching pupils to a crèche or nursery, because of a drop in roll, it would have to ask the DfE. Really? Is that what is actually meant? I ask the Minister to clarify that, please.