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Children’s Plan

My Lords, I greatly welcome and agree entirely with the right reverend Prelate’s remarks about the importance of both the family and the voluntary sector and about seeing that the latter is able to access new resources on a level playing field, which we are anxious that it should do. I also agree with his remarks about the curriculum. He is quite right that one needs to combine necessary stability with review of areas that need to change. I assure him that that will be the case, because the person whom we have appointed to conduct the review is Sir Jim Rose, who led the review on the teaching of reading two years ago and who is an expert adviser to Sir Peter Williams’s review on the teaching of mathematics in primary school; he is a long-standing expert on primary education, as the right reverend Prelate knows. With his wisdom being brought to bear on the review, there is no danger of our introducing policies that do not have a necessary degree of continuity with other recent changes to the primary curriculum.