Schools Reform

Part of Opposition Day — [1st allotted day] – in the House of Commons at 1:43 pm on 21 November 2007.

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Photo of David Laws David Laws Shadow Secretary of State (Children, Schools and Families) 1:43, 21 November 2007

The hon. Gentleman has a great deal of experience in these matters, and he is right that other factors apart from school leadership are involved. However, getting the leadership right is the way to start getting all the other elements right, especially in failing schools. The academy programme has been useful in that it has brought into education better governance and more innovation. I am staggered that a Government who have supported that innovation should tell me in a parliamentary answer last month that, in respect of the freedoms enjoyed by academies" they had

"no plans to extend these freedoms more widely."—[ Hansard, 15 October 2007; Vol. 464, c. 890W.]

I find that baffling, and will come back to the matter later.

I want to return to the earlier questions from Michael Gove, who asked whether we were right to debate this matter today, and whether there really was any uncertainty about Government policy in this area. The Secretary of State invited us to believe that the hon. Gentleman was starting an entirely bogus debate, and that there are no grounds for believing that policy has shifted since he took over his post in the new Government.

There is, however, quite a trail of evidence that the Secretary of State is approaching the issue differently. First, in his very important first statement to the House, he turned on its head what the previous Prime Minister had been saying about standards and structures. He went right back to saying that standards, rather than structures, were the focus, and when he said that, he knew very well that the Prime Minister's predecessor had said that he believed that structural reform was vital to getting standards right. So that was a deliberate signal, and some of the newspapers and some union leaders were briefed that there would be a change.

The Government then—I have raised this issue before with the Secretary of State—turned on its head a commitment in the last Labour party manifesto, which said that they wanted every school in the maintained sector to become independent. That is no longer the Government's position; that has been confirmed in a parliamentary written answer, despite what the Secretary of State has said. There we have a cast-iron and clear change in Government policy.