Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman said last month that new legal powers were needed to help it tackle unregistered schools. In launching the inspectorate's 2017 annual report she described the current legislative framework as "not adequate".
But junior education minister Lord Agnew of Oulton, in response to a parliamentary question by Labour peer Lord Warner, said the government has no plans to strengthen Ofsted's powers.
Agnew said that since a specialist Ofsted taskforce was set up with Department for Education funding in January 2016, the inspectorate has already been successfully tackling illegal schools.
He pointed to latest Ofsted figures showing that from the taskforce's launch to August 2017 the inspectorate had identified 38 unregistered schools and 34 of them are no longer operating illegally, with the remaining four still under investigation as of August 2017.
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