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Children, Schools and Families

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his questions and for—I think—his support. I hope that, in time, we may be able to forge a rather more progressive consensus, perhaps between the two of us. He should be relaxed—I am not about to offer him a job....Given that the hon. Gentleman is a man of some means, were he to want to sponsor an academy, I would be happy to take an application. However, unfortunately, he does not qualify as a high performing academic institution so the £2 million contribution would still apply to him. Let me answer the hon. Gentleman’s questions. It is our commitment, which the Conservative party will not match, to increase state spending per pupil to the current amount of private spending per pupil. Parents would expect and want us to do that. Our spending review provides for making progress towards that goal. It is our ambition to increase spending to that extent, but we cannot do that if we have to cut spending to pay for either a £21 billion tax-cutting package or capital gains tax reforms. It is important to ensure a disciplined approach to spending. The new initiatives that I announced today mean new money from our Department’s spending review settlement up to 2011. The hon. Gentleman made an important point about the pupil’s premium. My hon. Friend the Minister for Schools and Learners has already made it clear that, in our funding settlement for schools, we will continue to target deprivation but try to do that in a more sophisticated way through using tax credit data, in which the hon. Gentleman will have some interest. I said that the best teachers practise personalisation. We want to give more teachers the training and resources to do so, but it is up to individual teachers in the classroom and individual schools. Throughout the country, the best schools—those in our ““every child a reader”” pilot, which have made the fastest progress at primary level—have established school-based, personalised learning and tracking projects. The best trusts are those that share information between schools on the way in which to effect local personalisation. We do not, therefore, have a centralising agenda. Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked me about my statement on academies. Just to make it absolutely clear, I said that all academies now actively collaborate with schools and colleges. All academies replacing local authorities proceed with local authority endorsement at the feasibility stage now, and there is already a duty to consult local authorities at the funding agreement stage. I have made my announcement to the House first, not the newspapers. The newspapers did not get that right and I am happy to take this opportunity to correct them.