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Education and Inspections Bill

Can it wait? The hon. Lady’s intervention yesterday was hardly useful. Merely a year ago, the local education authority in Reading was judged by Ofsted to be only satisfactory, and that was by a whisker. Some 40 per cent. of pupils in Reading are exported to South Oxfordshire and Woking authorities. Why? Because the performance of local schools, particularly at secondary level, has been poor historically. The fact that we float slightly above the bottom of the league tables is thanks to the performance of the grammar schools. Parents in my constituency will be angry that an MP from Bury has decided that they should not be able to exercise a choice that, in the case of Reading school, has been open to them for hundreds of years. That is unacceptable.