Schools White Paper

My Lords, I was answering the questions put by the noble Baroness. I think that she adopts a very cynical and unfair attitude to the teaching profession if she thinks that it has embraced these reforms only because of the money on the table. If she visits schools, she will find that teachers have embraced these reforms because they see them as a great opportunity for enhancing their professional status and the range of provision that their schools are able to offer. It has been the same experience with academies. It has not been the case that academies have had difficulty recruiting staff or excellent head teachers. On the contrary, well motivated staff and head teachers have welcomed the opportunity to teach in schools with a powerful sense of mission and purpose, and particularly to serve those communities that have been so badly served in educational terms in the past. The noble Baroness raised the issue of the freedoms and flexibilities of schools and I was very careful to answer that one by saying that there would not be a unilateral power to opt out of the national curriculum. I need to make that very clear. Schools and trusts will have the ability to make proposals to the Secretary of State to vary the national curriculum when they believe that they can achieve higher standards by doing so—for example, by having more flexibility over the range of subjects that is studied—but we will look very carefully at those requests and our starting position is that the national curriculum remains an entitlement for all pupils. We are very clear on the issue of admissions. All schools, including new schools, will be expected to abide by the admissions code of practice, which makes clear the range of acceptable admissions arrangements. In respect of academies and other new schools, we agree the admissions criteria with the foundations that set them up at the point of signing a funding agreement with them. There is a big debate in the education world about the merits of banding against proximity admissions, and many specialist schools, academies and other comprehensives adopt a range of different all-ability admissions policies within that spectrum. But, although there is some flexibility in admissions, the requirement that we impose is that they must be within the admissions code of practice and there must be fairness in each locality.