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Lord Hanningfield: I support the general thrust of the amendment. We shall come back to the matter with other parts of the Bill. The amendment is an important test of the situation, and I hope that the Minister can give some reassurance to the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford. The letter stated that the chief inspector would be more accountable to Parliament, but, according to the Bill, he is not. We should rectify that, and I would be interested to hear the Minister's comments on the matter.
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood: I support the thrust of the amendment. I think that I remember correctly that the original legislation in 1992 provided for the chief inspector to be accountable to Parliament. The introduction of the Secretary of State was, in part, a technicality. The chief inspector is, of course, not a Member of Parliament and there had to be a mechanism for laying the chief inspector's report before Parliament; this was the chosen mechanism.
The point about the reference to Parliament was to emphasise the independence of the inspectorate and, therefore, its independence, in at least one sense, from the Secretary of State. There is good sense in the amendment.
Lord Filkin: I shall surprise the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford, by saying that, in fact, the Bill is right. I shall try to persuade her that that is so.
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As the noble Baroness knows, Clause 2 places a general duty on the chief inspector to keep the Secretary of State informed about a number of matters, including educational standards, the quality of education and the well-being of pupils. That information is key to the Secretary of State in the discharging of her responsibilities for ensuring that education policy and provision in England are of the highest quality. She is accountable to Parliament for that. As Secretary of State for Education, she needs the service that the chief inspector provides, but that does not mean that the chief inspector is, in any sense, the puppet or servant of the Secretary of State. He provides information on the basis of his professional service to her about the state of education in the country, and she needs that in the discharge of her duties. She needs the best independent intelligence and advice to assess the impact of the Government's policies, inform the development of new ones and account for those decisions. I expect no difference between us on that.
That is not to say that Parliament should not benefit also from the independent advice of the chief inspector. As the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp of Guildford, signalled, Clause 3 specifically requires the chief inspector to produce an annual report, which must be laid before Parliament. The report is made to the Secretary of State, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, said, for exactly the reason that he gave. I shudder to describe my Secretary of State as a "vehicle", but, in this context, that is what she is in constitutional terms. That is the route by which the report comes to Parliament, which is emphasised by the fact that the Secretary of State has no power to change even a comma in the report.
Parliament receives the chief inspector's independent assessment. The annual report distils all the inspection evidence that Ofsted collects into the now familiar "state of the nation in education" report. The evidence makes an important contribution to parliamentary debate and scrutiny. One of the biennial meetings of the Select Committee on Education and Skills with the chief inspector focuses on that report, for good reason. The chief inspector also publishes over 100 thematic and subject reports each year. All contribute to parliamentary debate and the scrutiny of education policy and are therefore accessible to Parliament and, more specifically, to the Select Committee on Education and Skills as part of its functions.
The Secretary of State needs to be informed about standards and quality to perform her parliamentary function and her governmental functions, and there are mechanisms that ensure that Parliament is informed about the chief inspector's findings and can engage face-to-face with the chief inspector on those findings through the Select Committee. We believe, therefore, that the amendment is neither desirable nor necessary.
As we suspected, the amendment was triggered in part by the situation in Wales. The situation in Wales is more different in appearance than it is in reality. In Wales, the chief inspector has the general duty of
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keeping the Assembly informed about standards, quality and so on. That is a more appropriate model. However, the reference to the Assembly in the Wales equivalent to Clause 2—Clause 19—is open to misinterpretation. The Government of Wales Act 1998 does not provide for the Executive Committee of the Assembly to have a separate legal existence from the Assembly. In practice, most of the Assembly's powers are delegated to the First Minister and, therefore, to the Assembly Government. This is one such example. The position in Wales is, therefore, similar in practice to that in England.
In conclusion, I turn to the power of the inspector's contribution to parliamentary scrutiny. Since 1999, the Education and Skills Select Committee has formalised its scrutiny of Ofsted. It calls the chief inspector twice yearly to examine Ofsted's work and the issues raised by the chief inspector's annual report. It produces regular reports on such matters. The inspector's most recent appearance was in November 2004, and it is open to the Select Committee, if it wanted, to develop and enrich that engagement with the chief inspector. The executive have no power to intervene between Parliament and the chief inspector, nor should they have.
I apologise for that lengthy answer, but, in essence, that is how things are. The chief inspector is independent; he has a duty to report and give his professional judgments on the state of education to the Secretary of State. Parliament has a direct ability to engage with him and the judgments that he makes on the basis of the work that he has undertaken. That is as it should be, and that is what the legislation reflects.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford: I thank the Minister. I am better informed, and his reply was helpful. The intervention by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, indicated that there was independence in the establishment of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools of which I had not been fully cognisant.
There is an interesting difference between the position of the English Parliament and that of the Welsh Assembly. In the English Parliament, we have to use the Secretary of State as the vehicle by which we can approach Parliament, whereas, in Wales, there is a different set-up, and the Assembly can be approached directly, so to speak. In that sense, the legislation is perhaps slightly misleading because it initially gives the wrong impression. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford moved Amendment No. 6:
The noble Baroness said: This is a small amendment, but it is perhaps a fairly important one. This is an interesting issue. In Clause 2 it says,
It happens that schools have no legal identity. If schools have no legal personality, how can they provide something? The providers are the governing
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bodies of schools; they are the ones with legal identity. In law, schools cannot do anything. The issue raised in the amendment is a small but subtle point. If we change the clause to read,
one overcomes the problem that schools have no legal identities as such.
Perhaps there is too widespread a tendency to speak of schools having obligations and doing this and that. It covers up issues of who, within the school management structure, has the relevant responsibility. In turn, that leads to disguising responsibility and sometimes, as far as schools are concerned, to the overload of responsibilities. It is a rather subtle, little amendment but it has quite important repercussions.
Lord Filkin: Not for the first time, I fear it is too subtle by half for me. One tries to get one's head around what is behind an amendment and sometimes one misses.
I do not believe that there is a problem on the legal identity point because the amount of scrutiny that the Bill has had by parliamentary draftsmen and departmental lawyers would have exhibited that by now. However, I do not expect the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, to take that on trust; I believe that it deserves a really detailed and nastily complex letter on why there is no problem, which we shall supply for her.
I believe that there would be a problem if we took her advice. As we interpret the point, again with the benefit of our excellent lawyers, it would have the unintended consequence of limiting the process to what took place physically within a school and, therefore, would quite literally put out of bounds all the functions that a school undertook in the wider community, such as school trips, sports activities outside the school, work experience with local employers and so on. In other words, it would imply a physical definition on the activities of the school, which I am certain is not what the noble Baroness intended. I am sure that she will be the first to see that that is part of the wider responsibilities of a school and that a school could not always fulfil those responsibilities simply within the physical curtilage guarded by the school caretaker.
For those reasons I hope to be able to persuade her that there is no legal problem. I hope that she will accept my suggestion that, if on this occasion we did what she suggests, there might be a problem. I hope she will feel minded to withdraw the amendment.
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