Academies Bill [Lords]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. My notes tell me that this information came from a National Union of Teachers briefing. I imagine that the NUT is up to date with what is being taught in schools, but I am happy to check that and come back. This teaching has been going on, as it does in other countries where academies are fully fledged, such as the United States. So it certainly is not outside the realms of possibility that not only is it continuing in that particular academy, but that it is happening in a widespread fashion in a number of academies. The point is that there is nothing in the Bill to stop this happening. Even if it has stopped over the past few weeks or months at one particular academy, there is nothing to prevent it from happening again. That is the real concern. It beggars belief that the Minister in the other place said that although he shared the concerns raised about creationism,"““one of the core aims of the policy is precisely that the Secretary of State should not dictate to academies what they should teach…I fully accept that if you trust people things do go wrong, but that is the direction that we want to try to go in.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 July 2007; Vol. 720, c. 299.]" I commend him on his honesty at least, but the substance of what he said is very worrying. Although, at the moment, the national curriculum does not include statutory sex and relationships education, it does ensure that maintained faith schools teach sexual reproduction as part of the science syllabus. Nothing in the new, deregulated system proposed by this Bill would oblige religious academies to do the same. Personal, social and health education—PSHE—was debated at length in the other place, yet we see no Government move on it as yet. Instead, the Government argued that making PSHE a curriculum requirement under the Bill was not the right way to go, as the best place to consider this was in the forthcoming national curriculum review. Yet, of course, the Government want academies to be free of the national curriculum.