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Children, Schools and Families

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his comments, and for his leadership on these matters over a number of years. I look forward with some trepidation to my first appearance before his Select Committee if, as I hope, he is confirmed in his current position, and I look forward to his advice and guidance in the coming years. My hon. Friend is right to make sure that we are careful about the way in which we approach the issue of reading. The Rose review provides us with the opportunity to implement this programme, and so does the ““every child a reader”” scheme. Every child learns in a different way. We need to give teachers the tools to do the job, but also to allow them to ensure that they teach each individual child, which is what our commitment to personalisation does. I also say to my hon. Friend that academies have an important role to play as part of our mainstream education policy. Our ambition is that every school should be a specialist school, a trust school or an academy, and I pay tribute to the work that he and many Labour Members have done in recent years to encourage universities to engage in our academies programme. Today, we have more than doubled the number of universities that are sponsoring academies, and over time, I hope that we can ensure that every university does so.