Member

Amendments 440 and 442 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, seek to exempt from Clause 47 academies that were judged good or equivalent by Ofsted in the previous three years. The implicit premise is that teaching the national curriculum is a burden from which good schools should be released. But it is not—the national curriculum provides stability and certainty for schools and parents, without limiting the scope for any school to deliver the best for its pupils. Further, Ofsted no longer issues single-headline judgments, which did not provide fair and accurate assessments of overall school performance across a range of areas. We really could not support the idea of encouraging schools to make fundamental changes to their entire curriculum on the basis of those judgments.