Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

Our brief discussion on this group of amendments has been useful and interesting. Let me repeat and put on record that academies are an essential part of the Government's educational reform programme. They play a significant role in the improvement of educational standards in many of the poorest areas of our country and they have been, in most part, very successful. The fact that we now have 200 academies across the country with a commitment to extending that to 400 academies by 2011 is an extremely important statement of what the Government are seeking to achieve. I regularly meet academies and speak to the sponsors. I, along with the Secretary of State and other members of the DCSF ministerial team, do all we can to expand and develop the programme. I referred the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) to the argument about the need for academies to be developed more quickly as though they are the answer in every situation, because one or two Conservative authorities across the country—or perhaps more—are not following the policy that he has just articulated. If it is, indeed, Conservative party policy that every school should be an academy and that they should be the answer to educational deprivation and underachievement all across the country, he needs to speak to one or two local authorities and tell them that. I have to tell him that in one or two cases where we are seeking to provide an academy solution to a problem, it is not Labour authorities, the DCSF or me or my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State who are preventing that from happening; it is one or two people from his own party.