My Lords, I am delighted to open today’s debate on the achievements of academies and free schools. We know that a high-quality education system creates opportunity for all and gives every child the best chance to realise their potential, whatever their background. When we get it right, education helps young people develop the knowledge, character and resilience to succeed, no matter what life throws at them. Before I begin my remarks, I remind noble Lords that I was director of New Schools Network, a charity that was dedicated to supporting groups who wanted to set up free schools, a job of which I remain immensely proud.
I want to make clear that the focus on academies and free schools in this debate is not to ignore or undervalue the thousands of excellent maintained schools that do an outstanding job for their pupils. However, in the form of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, there is a dark cloud on the horizon for academies and free schools, hence this debate is an opportunity to remind ourselves of the positive progress made over the past 25 years and the role they have played in that success.
We have seen welcome improvements in our educational outcomes. Between 2009 and 2022, England went from 21st to seventh in the PISA league tables for maths, from 19th to ninth for reading and from 11th to ninth for science. Across the country, 90% of schools are now rated good or outstanding, compared with 68% in 2010, meaning that over 1 million more pupils are being educated in such schools. In the same period, the number of academies in England increased from 202 schools to 10,640. Reading is the building block of all learning and, thanks to the focus on synthetic phonics championed by Sir Nick Gibb, England now has the best primary school readers in the western world, with PIRLS league tables for reading rating England as the top country.
Of course, we must not be complacent. There remain significant challenges that must be addressed: closing the attainment gap for pupils on free school meals, which had narrowed before Covid; improving attendance; ensuring that SEND pupils get the quality of education they deserve; and dealing with the growing mental health crisis facing our young people, to name just a few. I recognise that not all academies, trusts or free schools have been a success or delivered the high quality of education that we would expect, so it remains imperative for us to continue to interrogate the reasons behind failures and variations in performance and ensure that we act on the lessons they teach us.
That should not diminish our pride in the improvements that have taken place thanks to the hard work of teachers, support staff, pupils and governors. Much of that success has been achieved thanks to the cross-party consensus that we have seen around education over the past 25 years, placing value on the freedom and autonomy of school leaders and teachers so that, as Tony Blair said, the school is in charge of its own destiny—counterbalanced with strong accountability and acting on evidence of what success looks like. Many of these systemic improvements have been driven by the academies programme, which has had cross-party support since it was started in 2000 by the then Labour Government, and which itself built on the city technology colleges introduced in the 1980s.
My Lords, I start by thanking the Minister, and my noble friend Lord Addington for allowing me to speak now and so be able to catch the last train to Liverpool. I will have to depart a little earlier.
I want to recognise all our schools and teachers. All our children should have the right education for them. Some wonderful things happen in academies, which the noble Baroness mentioned. Some wonderful things also happen in maintained schools, which I do not think the noble Baroness mentioned.
We want the best for all our children. Let us be very clear at the beginning: empirically, there appears to be very little difference between the education attainment achieved by local maintained schools and academy schools. Figures from the House of Lords Library suggest that, performance wise, there is very little difference. Interestingly, the Institute of Education recognised that, while multi-academy trusts accounted for some of the highest performing schools, they also had far more lower performing schools.
It is right to be looking now at the situation of academies. We have a new Government, we are having a curriculum review, and we will soon have the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill before us. There are some differences with academies, so let us understand those. First, on qualified teachers, there is a need across the country for expert teachers who follow a transparent curriculum so that parents can be assured that their children are receiving a good education. A legal teaching qualification would ensure a certain standard of teaching. I would not want my children to be taught by an unqualified teacher. Parents should have that right as well.
Let us look at the national curriculum. We call it national but it is not, because it is not taught in Scotland or Northern Ireland, and, as we have heard, academies do not have to teach it. I want a curriculum that is paramount in ensuring that children all receive a certain standard of education. It was never the intention for academies to have freedom around the national curriculum. Imposing these controls would ensure that a base is covered but would not necessarily restrict how far academies can go with their teaching. I hope the curriculum review, when it is published, will recognise that all schools need space to develop particular aspects and units of the curriculum. For example, in Liverpool, I would like schools to be able to develop further teaching on the slave trade. I would like schools to be able to develop creative subjects, which currently they are not always able to deal with.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, for enabling this vital debate. As ever, I declare my interest as a teacher in an academy in Hackney. As the noble Baroness said, this debate is in response to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, on which I shall have much more to say at Second Reading.
I have only ever taught in academies. I trained in a Catholic academy, despite the fact that I am not a Catholic. You will hear some people say how terrible academies are—that they are just fortresses of weird ideas and legalised ritual bullying. Near where we live is one of the original academies, Mossbourne Community Academy, which has a reputation for strictness and superb results. When my son was at primary school in year 6, we thought that he had no need for a strict school—but gradually, through his year, he became more and more frustrated that there were two boys in his class who were causing disruption. The teacher struggled to contain the behaviour, and the learning of the whole class was compromised. Often, the teacher would get so frustrated that he would punish the whole class for something that perhaps only one or two had done.
We were lucky enough to get our son into Mossbourne, where, because the behaviour is so good, he could actually learn his lessons; he could express an opinion and not get laughed at and he could get on with his studying in peace. There is nothing creative about background noise when you are trying to concentrate, whether it is in maths, product design or art. I was so impressed with the school that I joined it a year later, and I have been a teacher there ever since, alongside the other three of our children. There have been accusations of systemic bullying within academies, and specifically within my school, which I do not recognise. It is one of the top-performing non-selective schools in the country for value-added results. Our children are succeeding, and no child succeeds when they are unhappy.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, for securing this debate on the “achievements” of free schools and academies—although that is not the noun that I would use.
Our debate already has focused—and I suspect largely will focus—on exam results. My focus will be broader, for I, and the Green Party collectively, do not think that education should be for exams or focused primarily on future employment but should provide life skills, particularly an interest in and capacity for lifelong learning, and allow for the development of innate interests and talents, the blossoming of body and mind, that provides the foundation for a decent, healthy life for each and every child and young person. Schools should be at the centre of active, lively, flourishing communities and not the cause of massive traffic jams as parents cross the city back and forth to hunt for the “best” school.
The creation and—often forcible—spread of free schools and academies, particularly chains, which account now for more than 80% of secondary schools in England and heading towards half of primaries, has actively worked against schools meeting those goals. They have been set to compete against each other for exam results, to outdo each other with the appearance and actuality of harsh and punitive discipline, particularly in poorer communities, with competition that encourages them to expel, or shuffle out, pupils who do not fit “the brand”.
How might we judge that cross-party consensus of the past 25 years? I have one league table: the Children’s Society offers us a crucial and deeply disturbing tool in its annual study of 15 year-olds across 27 nations, on which the UK ranks bottom. Last year, 25% of UK 15 year-olds reported low life satisfaction, compared with 7% of Dutch children of the same age. Low levels of life satisfaction were at least twice as prevalent among UK 15 year-olds compared with their peers in Finland, Denmark, Romania, Portugal, Croatia and Hungary—that makes my blood boil.
My Lords, I am very disappointed with this new Bill. When, 34 years ago, Margaret Thatcher and the noble Lord, Lord Baker, came to see me to open a CTC school, I did not know much about them. I went to see the school and thought I could not do any worse. In five years, that school was twice the most improved school in the country, going from nine to 54, and 54 to 92. It was great. Then Tony Blair created academies and, with the help of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and Michael Gove, we opened about 30 more academies. Today, we have 55 academies, with 45,000 children. One in 40 children in London goes to our academies, and we have free schools as well. Those schools were all failing when we took them. Today, 73% of our schools are outstanding, against a national average of 14%. Academies are working.
We first took on schools in the primary sector about 12 years ago. We found it very important because, from looking at the records, if a child gets a good education at primary level they are likely to do better later in life. We have 22 primary schools, 18 of which are now outstanding and two are good. These are giving children a better education and a better chance in life to go on to secondary education. I must tell you about two schools. One was a primary school in Croydon. It was in special measures for 10. We took it over three and a half years ago and within two and a half years it was outstanding, with 70% of the same children in it. The inspector said, “This is one of the most improved schools I have ever seen so quickly”. We have to make sure that we give every child in this country the best education possible. With the academy group and other schools working together, we can do it. Because a child gets only one chance of getting a great education, we have to make sure that we give it to them.
I will tell you about another school, Downhills. Everybody in the Labour Party was against us, I am sorry to say, including David Lammy, who led a petition against us. He also let children come into one of our stores in Tottenham—60 children stood in that shop with banners, “Don’t let Harris have this school”. It was terrible. I went there with my wife and we were threatened that, if we went back again, something would happen to us. We put signs up outside but they took them down. They actually put concrete signs there, which cost us money to get rid of. Now that school is outstanding and oversubscribed. The Telegraph this weekend said how good it was—I promise you, none of that information came from us. The parents want their children to go to those schools, and we have to make sure that every child in this country gets the best education possible.
My Lords, how inspiring it is to follow my noble friend Lord Harris. His enthusiasm for the work of his life shines out and encourages us all. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Evans on her sparkling and enthusiastic opening to this debate.
Surrounded as I am by noble Lords on this side, I wonder whether I dare confess—but I am going to—that, when academies were first introduced by the Blair Government, I had some misgivings. However, it is true that the spirit of the academy movement—a loosening of local authority control—was already present in the creation of grant-maintained schools, specialist grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges under previous Conservative Governments.
In my professional life before politics, I had been the chief inspector of schools in a local authority. I strongly believed that the most important public service there is, namely education—also known as the future of our children——should be democratically accountable through elected bodies. But, from being in a job that meant I was in schools and colleges a lot of the time, I also knew that the excellence or otherwise of any institution, including schools, depended on the quality of the head. It was also obvious that the best heads ran the best schools because they were innovative, creative and determined to make their schools serve pupils, parents and their neighbourhoods.
However, I began to note that those heads were frequently frustrated by their inability to pursue change inside the local authority system. They needed more flexibility in recruitment and to be able to vary teachers’ pay to attract the best. They needed the opportunity to vary the curriculum to reflect the needs of their pupils and generally unleash creativity within their institutions.
When the academies movement got under way, it did indeed attract those creative and innovative heads and teachers, whose achievements have created a system in which nearly 50% of all our schools are now academies. The results—particularly when compared with those in Scotland and Wales, which pursued a different path—are more than encouraging. Since 2000 the UK has moved from 21st to seventh in the international league tables in maths, and from 11th to ninth in science. One of the most impressive achievements is the result of the requirement for failing local authority schools to become academies, thus giving those schools more support and fresh hope for children, often in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, for the future. As Tony Blair said at the 2005 Labour Party conference,
My Lords, I declare an interest in that I am the life president of the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, which promotes university technical colleges.
The Minister will be glad to know that I support many things in the Bill: money for under-fives, breakfast clubs and special educational needs. I also support the registration of home education, which is a tautology—it is more “home” than “education”. But I am not so keen on the Government’s thinking about the new curriculum. There are glimpses of what they would like to do in Clauses 40, 41 and 45. They would like maintained schools to merge with free schools and academies in order to have a broad and balanced curriculum. That will not in itself produce economic growth. Over the past few years I have learned that if you are to have economic growth you need difference, variety, choice and competition, and those are not in the Bill.
What is needed most in education today is an injection into ordinary comprehensives of strong technical and practical education. If the new schools that Ministers want to create have just a broad and balanced curriculum, there will be no space at all in the teaching week for high-quality technical and practical education. You cannot do it; you have to spend much more time than that.
That is why, over 15 years ago, Ron Dearing and I devised a new type of technical school, a university technical college. It is different because it is for 14 to 18 year-olds and has a very practical curriculum determined by local employers. It is also so different because 14 year-olds in their first term will spend two days a week either in workshops, in computer or product design, visiting local companies or having work experience there. That cannot be fitted into an obligation to do a full national curriculum. We of course teach English, maths and science to a high level. We get very good marks in T-levels and A-levels, and we are very proud of that.
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In their first phase, academies provided a catalyst for new thinking within the system, bringing in external sponsors to take over failing schools. These sponsors came from a wide range of backgrounds and provided teachers with new opportunities to develop educational strategies to raise standards. Indeed, several of my noble friends speaking today are exemplars of the passionate individuals who took advantage of this opportunity to involve themselves directly in improving the life chances of some of our most disadvantaged young people.
The coalition Government’s Academies Act 2010 expanded academy status through the system, allowing more schools to benefit from the freedoms they enjoyed and to have the flexibilities to innovate, raise standards and achieve improved outcomes for their students. The diversity in provision in the school system—led by academies, free schools and UTCs, which I am sure my noble friend Lord Baker will talk more about shortly—has enabled a level of innovation and improvement that was simply not possible under the previous local authority-controlled approach.
Led by forward-thinking heads, entrepreneurial teachers have had greater freedom and opportunity to put into practice their ideas about how to best address the specific needs of their pupils, and we can see the impact that this can have. Between 2018 and 2023, the number of maintained schools rated good or outstanding increased by 4%, whereas the equivalent rating for sponsored academies—those required to academise due to poor performance—saw a 14% improvement.
Additionally, the academisation of education has helped to improve resilience across the system, with increasing numbers of trusts around the country allowing groups of schools to work together in deep and purposeful collaboration. Multi-academy trusts such as Ark, Harris, Star Academies, Mercia Learning Trust and Dixons Academies Trust have all been instrumental in helping turn around underperforming schools through strong leadership, sharing expertise and resources, as well as taking advantage of the free school programme to set up entirely new provision in areas of need and disadvantage.
I would argue that this has led to the positive development of increased collaboration across the entire education system. The latest Confederation of School Trusts national survey indicates that 72% of academy trusts support maintained schools. The free school programme has allowed the independent and state sectors to come together to open outstanding new provision, while the UTC model has embedded employers at the very heart of technical education.
From 2010, the free school programme built further on the original success of academies. The setting up of these new schools aimed to increase choice, improve standards and, in particular, foster innovation. The programme empowered communities, teachers, academy trusts, social entrepreneurs and others to open new state schools and led to the establishment of schools which dared to think the unthinkable. Representing a huge variety of educational philosophies, curriculum approaches, faiths and communities, free schools have, I believe, helped demonstrate the value of having a genuinely diverse and autonomous school system. New schools such as XP School, Marine Academy, Reach Academy Feltham, King’s Leadership Academy and Michaela, all set up under the programme, have injected a new dynamism into the school system, offering innovative ways of delivering a high-quality education—often to some of the most disadvantaged young people in England.
Not only has the free school programme seen new mainstream schools open but new special education and alternative provision schools have added capacity and expertise to the system to help some of our most vulnerable young people. Crucially, free schools have provided parents with greater choice, which in turn has helped raise standards across the system. It is incredible to think that, in a country in which setting up, let alone building, anything new is nearly impossible, over 700 free schools have opened since 2010, creating over 373,000 new school places.
The impact of these schools has outweighed their number. They are more likely to be based in areas of deprivation and where low standards had become entrenched. At their best, free schools have not only made a significant difference to their own pupils’ education but have had an impact far beyond this, helping to raise standards and aspirations across their whole area. The London Academy of Excellence in Newham, for instance, has had a significant impact on the performance of competing sixth forms to the benefit of all local young people.
Today, 25% of free schools are rated as outstanding—the highest type of any state school—and they now outperform other types of state-funded schools at every stage of education. Regrettably, there is some uncertainty over the future of the programme, as the Education Secretary is reviewing approvals previously given to 44 free schools to open. Can the Minister give an update as to when a decision on their fate might be made, to help end this damaging uncertainty currently facing parents and teachers?
This is just a brief overview of the positive change we have seen across our education system over the last quarter of a century. As we look to the future and build on the tangible improvements we have seen in our education system, we should be looking at how all schools can benefit from the freedoms and flexibilities that have been reserved for academies, free schools and UTCs, not take them away. I must admit I am finding it quite depressing to hear of the concern felt across the education sector by those who have been involved in helping to achieve these successes but who are now asking why the foundations of those improvements are being threatened.
What is the problem that the Government are seeking to resolve through the powers in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which removes the very freedoms that have helped schools improve, tackled underperformance and given more children a better chance of a good education? It is incumbent on all of us to look at the evidence and focus policy on strengthening, not weakening, our school system. This includes learning lessons from where academies and free schools have not performed, to ensure that we can continue to drive improvements and best practice across the system.
I hope the Minister reflects on what I am sure will be outstanding contributions to today’s debate and goes back to her departmental colleagues with a renewed purpose to build on the successes of academies, free schools and UTCs, not unpick their foundations.
We should be increasing local authority powers over who can be admitted to academies. Giving them powers to restrict certain actions by academies would enable them to function as a monitoring body to hold the actions of academies accountable to government standards.
I have only to mention off-rolling as an example, where academies have almost ridden a coach and horses through admission policies by deciding that they will not have certain children in their school. When it comes to special educational needs, they say, “Oh, we haven’t got the the facilities; we haven’t got the teachers, so we won’t be admitting those children”. That is totally wrong.
Let us look at salaries. In 2023-24, the median salary for a classroom teacher in an academy was £44,870, while in an LA secondary school, it was £44,677. There is a case for paying more where there are shortage subjects; that is important. It is a scandal—and the last Government should take responsibility for this—that 400 schools in England do not have a qualified physics teacher at sixth-form level. You have only to look at shortages of specialist teachers in other subjects as well. I hope that the new Government, never mind getting to grips with the salary scales for all teachers, will make a push to get those posts filled in shortage subjects but also give an opportunity for teachers to be paid a little bit more to make sure that they are interested in teaching that subject.
After a similar debate, I took the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, and the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, around the school. The noble Earl and the noble Lord have been effusive in their praise of the school ever since.
The previous iteration of the school, Hackney Downs School, when it closed, had a 5% pass rate for either maths or English GCSE. Last year, 85% of our PP students achieved a grade 4 plus in both English and maths GCSE. Hackney is still one of the most deprived boroughs in the country, and 54% of our year 11 cohort last year were pupil premium. Tragically, one of our pupils, Pharrell Garcia, was stabbed and killed at the end of last year.
It is within this gloom that academies such as Mossbourne and the remarkable Carr Manor Community School in Leeds shine brightly in very difficult circumstances. They are a massive success story.
We have a Richard Rogers-designed, wooden-framed, stunning building that offers a varied and interesting curriculum, including courses for future medical and architectural students. My daughter does rowing in year 9, as part of her PE. So why are we trying to destroy this?
The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, described the buses Bill as
“statist and anti-enterprise. It is also mildly nostalgic and backward-looking—a sort of return to the Attlee Government”.—[Official Report, 8/1/25; col. 783.]
I would say: right sentiment, wrong Bill.
Perhaps I may end by quoting what my head teacher, Rebecca Warren, says about these plans: “It’s a disaster for disadvantaged pupils, a condescending lowering of standards that will reverse the strides made in education over the last 20 years and ruin those children who need rigour and aspiration the most. My blood is boiling. I feel a mixture of heartbreak and anger, but with a feeling of terror thrown in”.
Blame for the unhappiness and the mental health crisis that the Financial Times highlights today with figures on mental health admissions to general medical wards, reflecting what one expert described as
“a population-level increase in mental health conditions”,
is often put on the rise of social media or on concern about the future linked to the climate emergency and nature crisis. Those are factors, but they have smartphones and the climate crisis in those comparable countries too.
What about physical health? Of children aged between 11 and 15, 19% are obese, and less than half of our children and young people are meeting the recommendation of 60 minutes of daily physical activity—and 30% did less than 30 minutes a day. We also all know that education about life skills, such as first aid, cooking and nutrition, food growing, financial literacy and indeed the enjoyment of reading for pleasure, which your Lordships’ House discussed earlier today, is sadly lacking. The FT’s Christmas campaign was directed at providing financial education.
Even worse, what about those who are forced out because they do not fit in? Figures for the autumn term 2023-24 are horrifying, showing nearly 350,000 suspensions—a rate of 413 suspensions per 10,000 pupils. The rate of expulsions is up too, with 4,200 children permanently excluded in one term, up from 3,100 the previous year. Those are the formal figures: from travelling around the country, I hear many reports of informal exclusions. Parents, often of children with special educational needs, are being encouraged—strongly suggested—to take the home-schooling route, much against their will.
Then there is attendance. There is a focus on the 150,000 “severely absent” children missing 50% or more of school sessions in the last year. That has tended to look at individuals and their families, but why is school not an attractive, welcoming, nurturing place but one to be dodged at almost all costs, particularly for vulnerable pupils?
My words are not intended in any way to be a criticism of some 500,000 teachers and other school professionals, the vast majority of whom I know, from regular school visits, do their best to provide a rounded education and a healthy, caring environment, all too often in opposition to government policies and institutional structures imposed on them, and in the face of grossly inadequate funding. I acknowledge that there are many other aspects of British society that impact badly on young people’s lives, but many of the young people I talk to tell me that school is something that harmed them—that they survived. If they did indeed struggle through the experience, they endured it, waiting to escape. That is not what school should be. Yet the academisation and expansion of free schools, competing against each other, delivering large profits to private providers of goods and services and high pay to fat cat bosses, is, together with a central ideology of valuing exam factories, fundamentally failing our young people.
We have three schools in Tottenham. The two I talked about are outstanding primaries and we have a large, 1,500-pupil secondary school, sixth form and primary, which has also become outstanding. Tottenham is one of the hardest places in this country for schools and everyone who goes to one of our schools there has an outstanding education.
Interestingly, 61% of our disadvantaged sixth-form students went to university last year, and 15% of them went to a Russell group university. What a great thing that we are getting disadvantaged children into universities. The school just over the road, with which we had a lot of problems, has 600 students. It was the seventh-best school in the country, beating schools such as Eton. These are free schools—40% of the children who go to that school are on free school meals. It is the teachers and people there who make them work. They come and work Saturdays. They want to get on in life and be motivated. We have to make sure we continue that.
We need a small number of unqualified staff at our schools—for sport, music, dancing and science. We want to keep them. They are good. You are not going to get a 55 or 60 year-old man who does sport or dancing teacher qualified. We have won lots of competitions for dancing and singing—and “The Voice” and “Britain’s Got Talent”, which people have won. It is very hard to keep science teachers, and we have to make sure that we do.
Failing schools are letting people down. We have to make sure we do not let our children down. We want more academies. We want better schools for everybody. Together, we can make it work.
“the beneficiaries are not fat cats. They are some of the poorest families in the poorest parts of Britain”.
My noble friend Lord Harris has given graphic illustrations of that.
While I obviously understand the wish of a new Government to innovate, I do not know and cannot understand why they would want to limit the current powers of academies to vary the curriculum to meet the needs of the pupils in their schools. Academies, like local authority schools, are inspected by Ofsted, and any irregularities that affect pupils, disadvantaged or otherwise, would surely be picked up and dealt with. Regular Ofsted inspections should also meet the Government’s concerns about qualified teacher status and the relaxing of requirements for that status in academies.
I greatly respect the Minister. I have in my mind that last week she apologised for sometimes being grumpy. I hope I am not going to bring out a display of grumpiness from her, but I hope she will allow me to ask the obvious question: exactly what problem with academies does the new Bill seek to solve? I had always believed that academies were an area of cross-party agreement, so my hope is that this debate and the passage of the new education Bill will continue in a good spirit. Good educational standards can only benefit our children, who will bear the burden of the future.
University technical colleges are never called free schools. We are specialist schools, and we have quite remarkable results. We are so popular that we had to turn away 5,000 children last September, and we will be turning away even more this year. In Ofsted we get over 82% good and outstanding. Every year, 23% of our students who leave at 18 become apprentices, compared with only 4% at an ordinary school; 50% go to university to do STEM subjects, which is 75% better than any other state school; and the rest get local jobs. We are actually promoting economic recovery by 96% of our students going into work or higher education. That is quite a unique contribution and one that should not be sacrificed.
When we started, we focused on engineering, advanced manufacturing and computing. Now it is much more sophisticated. We now have lessons in cybersecurity with GCHQ and lessons in virtual reality, run by games companies, which involve wearing helmets on your head. With automotive companies we have CADCAM, because children have to be able to design on a screen and operate 3D printers. Most children should leave school at 18 knowing how to work a 3D printer, an essential part of all activities in Britain today.
As a result, we help economic recovery more than any other educational institution in the country. We also have a very low unemployment rate of about 4%; the national average is 13.6%. The one thing that the Government are going to have to deal with over the next 14 years is the problem of rising youth unemployment.
If the measure goes through, I hope we recognise that specialist schools such as UTCs should be exempt from the obligations to provide a broad and balanced curriculum. We do English, maths and science, but we also need time for the practical and technical work that local employers lead.