---

Education and Skills Bill

I agree with the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) that we want every school to be a good school and that leadership is important. There is still some way to go, but the Government have already gone a long way on that. One of the ways that we have done so is by providing leadership training and by funding schools better, because pupils will generally study a bit better in better buildings—the important thing is staff and ethos, but buildings help, too. However, I live in a deprived part of the country, and if the hon. Gentleman thinks that input into a school does not affect output, which seemed to be the import of his remarks, he is living in a very different world from me. The hon. Gentleman decried the need to change the admissions code so frequently and I entirely agree with him. It is most unfortunate that we have a complex admissions code and that it keeps being revised. However, the driver for those changes is that some schools—a minority, but a significant minority—keep trying to get round the admissions code. That point is not based on anecdotal evidence, such as that which he produced about how good one academy in London is; it is based on a survey that the Government conducted to find out whether schools were complying with the admissions code. Surprise, surprise, that survey sadly found that too many schools, albeit a minority, were not complying with the code. The Government are therefore unfortunately in the position of either letting schools ignore the admissions code or enforcing it and closing the loopholes that a minority of schools seek to find within it—