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Lord Lucas (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 10 September 2025

Debate

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Contribution

My noble friend of course runs a good academy trust. Where things are not so good, you can get a lot of variability between the schools that append themselves to a trust. So this has to be judged on the occasion: you cannot just say you we will inspect the middle and not the outside; if the middle is not functioning well, the outside can really be very up and down. I will add a couple of thoughts. First, I do not like the idea from the noble Lord, Lord Knight, of local authorities appointing. The way you gather good people together is by having a few excellent people in the middle who want other excellent people around them. Then you have Ofsted, or whoever, saying “Is this working?”. Local authorities just tend to appoint anybody, and those people do not turn up or know enough. Where I have seen local authorities appointing boards, it has been uniformly a disaster.

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