Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

As I understand it, we have funded 10,000 more student places—that is no cap. The question is this: are the aspirations of young people in this country capped? The answer is, not by this Government—we want 50 per cent. of young people in universities. Would they be capped by the Conservatives? The answer is yes, because they will not support our objective; in fact, they would cut the public spending that is needed to ensure that those numbers keep rising year on year in the future. That is the difference between the two parties, and that is the point that I was making in my answer. I wanted to start my speech by talking about school reforms. As I said, in 1997, 1,600 secondary schools were below the basic benchmark; that figure is now down to just 440, from over half to less than a fifth of secondary schools. We are not satisfied, however, and our national challenge objective is to ensure that we get that number down to zero by 2011. That is why we have provided £400 million of funding and why there is extra support for those schools. Many of them, already high-performing schools that are doing well, will get there without the need for such extra support, but where schools are not on course, we will step in. The Bill challenges local authorities to tackle underperforming schools, but it also gives us the power, where they will not act, to step in and require them to take their responsibilities seriously. We will do so by requiring them to match new investment with new leadership through national challenge trusts and our academies programme. Over the past 18 months, I have given the go-ahead to 96 further academy projects, of which 43 will replace national challenge schools. We have gone from six university sponsors of academies in July 2007 to 48 sponsors today, and 12 local authorities are now sponsoring academies themselves. These schools are taking a greater proportion of disadvantaged and deprived children than the catchment area would suggest and delivering faster rising results than the average. They are proof that we can break the link between deprivation and lack of achievement. That has not happened by accident, but because we are willing to act and intervene. Since January, we have agreed to 17 new academies, and I can announce today that the Schools Minister and I have given the go-ahead to six new academy projects to replace a total of seven schools, six of which are national challenge schools, in Croydon, Wolverhampton, Sandwell and Bournemouth. I commend the academies programme to the House.