Member

The noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, and I may need to have a longer conversation about this, but I absolutely agree with her that the average academy and the average maintained school show very similar outcomes. However, two things are worth reflecting on. First, as she understands extremely well, most of the very challenging schools—about 23% of our secondaries—were sponsored academies, so, within that academy school pool, we got some deprived and challenged communities, some challenging schools with staffing issues and all the things that the noble Baroness understands better than I do. Secondly, if you look at the distribution of those results, in particular for single-academy trusts, you see that the very highest-performing schools in the country sit at the top end of academies while the very lowest-performing sit at the bottom.