Academies Bill [Lords]

That is the position in every school at the moment. PSHE is not a statutory requirement in any maintained school or academy. The essence of our reforms is to give parents greater choice—a genuine choice, not the faux choice that parents in many areas now face when they have been denied their first choice of school. The thrust of the Bill, and of the Government's education policy more generally, is to give parents more choice by providing a diverse range of schools to which they can send their children. They will then be able to find a school with the education orthodoxy and philosophy that they agree with, and that could also involve subjects such as PSHE. Amendment 30 seeks clarity about the arrangements for the very youngest in our schools. I hope that I can reassure hon. Members that the amendment is not needed, because the requirements it seeks are already in place. It seeks to ensure that the provisions in the Childcare Act 2006 relating to learning and development, welfare and assessment will apply to every academy that provides for the very youngest children. However, the Act already provides for that. Section 40 requires all schools to deliver the early years foundation stage if they provide for pupils aged three to the end of the academic year in which they turn five. That includes independent schools. The Act does not use the word ““academy””, but academies are legally categorised as independent schools, and all schools providing for the under-threes—academies, independent and maintained schools—are required to register with Ofsted and to deliver the early years foundation stage. There is a limited number of exemptions from that requirement, such as when the provision is for a very short amount of time per day, but the requirement applies to all providers, and there is no difference for academies. I should also point out that the Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) announced on 6 July an independent review of the early years foundation stage, which will report in the spring of 2011. It will look at precisely the areas that hon. Members—the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana R. Johnson) in particular—wish to deal with in the amendment. I hope that that provides further reassurance. Amendment 26 would require all new academies to teach PSHE—I will give the hon. Lady that—as a statutory subject. This issue was debated at length in Committee and on Report in the other place, and no one doubts the importance of children learning these essential skills for life. However, we know that many academies are teaching PSHE right now and teaching it very well. There is no reason to believe that academies teach PSHE any less well than maintained schools, or that a maintained school that becomes an academy will suddenly teach it less well. The key point is that if we make PSHE a statutory part of the curriculum in academies, it will mean imposing greater requirements on academies in this respect than on maintained schools, where PSHE is not a statutory subject. We are not in the business of reducing freedoms for academies; that is not the direction we want the academies programme to be travelling in. In addition, it does not make sense to single out PSHE and place it on a statutory footing, while not doing so for other subjects. That does not seem the right thing to do in this circumstance.