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Education and Skills Bill

It is a pity that the Minister does not spend more time thinking about the children who have fallen back in English and maths than he does thinking about what my hon. Friend has said in Westminster Hall. My hon. Friend has been absolutely consistent in championing the cause of schoolchildren in this country, in his advocacy of higher standards and in his determination that the methodology in schools and the approach taken by teachers should maximise the chances of every child in this country. He deserves the praise of not only the Minister but the whole House for so doing. As I was saying, there has been a shocking decline in core standards among many young people, 28,000 and 140,000 of whom made no progress or fell backwards in maths and science respectively. These early years are among the most important in education; it is a tragedy that thousands of 14-year-olds have a reading age lower than 11 and that more than 40,000 young people leave school at 16 functionally illiterate and/or innumerate. Many of those young people fall into unemployment and delinquency, and they certainly fall into disengagement. We should get the figures right; the Minister got them wrong earlier. I do not want to suggest that his ideas on the issue are half-baked, but they are certainly not fully formed. You take these issues seriously, Madam Deputy Speaker, so you will know that the number of people not in education, employment or training—or NEETs—has risen by 132,000 in the past five years.