Academies Bill [Lords]

I was interested to hear the contribution of the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell). He spoke eloquently of the freedoms that will be presented to the schools in his constituency, but he markedly failed to give details of what those freedoms would be, as indeed has the Bill. One of the freedoms is said to relate to expansion. We all have schools in our constituencies that are oversubscribed. However, the capacity for expansion, which would enable parents in my constituency to send their children to schools with very high standards, was completely sabotaged by the Secretary of State cancelling the Building Schools for the Future programme, so capacity is still an issue. I was interested to hear the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), making a direct comparison between comprehensive state education and the independent sector. I was having a conversation with a parent only this weekend, and she told me that, in the school that her children attend, there are only 18 children in every class. If the Government are so committed to raising standards in the state sector so that they meet and pass those of the independent sector, why are they not spending their time and energy putting the necessary funding into the state system so that those class sizes could become the norm rather than the exception? The central issue is that the Bill has nothing to do with freedom for all our people; it has to do with exclusion, not inclusion. The failure to consult on these proposals across a wide range of people in the community will mean that more and more children, certainly in my constituency, will be excluded from the best that already exists. The best that already exists is from a system that was funded by my Government, and that acknowledged the need for wide consultation across the community, with services presented to all schools from a local authority, which is essential to those standards. The proposal of the Minister and the Government, however, will sabotage those standards. As I had occasion to say on Second Reading, and as I have continued to say, we will not only see standards go down in our state sector as result of the Bill, but we shall see centrally, and most reprehensibly, serious social division, of which he and every member of his collaborationist Government should be ashamed.