What contribution the find your talent scheme will make to ensuring that children receive five hours of culture each week.

The find your talent programme of 10 pilots will trial ways of offering children and young people a range of high quality cultural experiences for five hours a week, in and out of school. We are seeking applications from partnerships across the country. The pilots will give us the information that we need to make decisions about rolling out the offer nationally.

Will my right hon. Friend give the time scale for the pilots and say a little more about them and whether areas such as West Lancashire will be eligible for such schemes?

Local partnerships have until 7 April to submit their bids, but we have already received more than 50 expressions of interest in the find your talent programme, which is a tremendous endorsement of the scheme's principles. It is important that in setting up the pilots we ensure that different parts of the country with different characteristics are chosen, so that we can consider how best to make arts activities and cultural activities available to all children in that area. I very much hope that my hon. Friend will work with her local organisations to make such a proposal.

I was tempted to ask the Secretary of State whether he thinks that the Proms could count towards to the five hours of culture, but I should like to ask him about a more serious point. Does he think that culture is something that can be quantified and enforced through targets or is there a risk that such a scheme will undermine the essence of culture, which is surely about quality, not about curriculum box ticking?

What is important is that this is not about five hours of curriculum time, but about young people having the chance to take part in a range of activities, both within the school day and beyond it. It is absolutely right that we should set the highest possible aspirations in that regard. I was at school in the 1980s, and I remember lots of after-school activity simply drying up, not to be reinstated at that time.

It was a Labour council.

It was not Labour councils but a Conservative Government who were responsible at that time.

We should not limit our ambitions about the possibilities that we can put before young people. The worst thing that we could do is be narrow-minded or too downbeat about what we can achieve. Let us aim high and see whether we can give young people the full range of possibilities.

I spent last evening in the Birmingham symphony hall, listening to Staffordshire Sings, where hundreds of young people—180 of them from the Tamworth constituency alone—presented a varied orchestral and choral programme. It was a marvellous event for those young people. Will he take the opportunity to congratulate Staffordshire on what it is doing and see how we can tie that into the find your talent scheme and roll it out across the country?

I will certainly take up my hon. Friend's invitation to look further at what Staffordshire is doing. What is important about initiatives such as that mentioned by my hon. Friend is that while some young people who take part will develop an interest and passion for singing that lasts throughout their lives, others, simply by participating, will develop greater self-confidence and better communication skills and feel that they are capable of performing in front of an audience. It does not matter whether people go on to develop a particular talent, because taking part in itself gives young people good life skills that stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives.