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Health and Education

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) for giving me advance notice of something this afternoon, and I think that I probably owe him an apology. He wrote to give me advance notice that he would be absent from the Chamber for his daughter's nativity play, which was very courteous of him, but I, unfortunately, did not give him advance notice of my intention to intervene on him. If I had done so, he might have had the chance to write into the script of his speech the answer to my intervention, because I have to say once again that, as has been the case time and again in the past year, what we have had from the hon. Gentleman is a well-written, erudite, humorous and insubstantial speech. I shall now move on to the substance. I want to do so by, without patronising Members, thanking them for their contributions to this excellent debate, with the exception of the speech that we have just heard. We might have some disagreements about methods, but there is common agreement that we want to do the best by the children of this country for their safety, education, well-being and happiness. There has been clear commitment to that in speeches made from all parts of the House, some of which I shall now mention. My hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson), whose Bill on information for children with special educational needs will be very important indeed, made an important speech in which she talked about training for teachers with SEN specialities. The hon. Member for Ilford, North (Mr. Scott) also talked about the importance of making sure that there is proper training in SEN for those teachers, and I thank him for his contribution. My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) made an important speech on health, and on the fact that we need to involve local communities in the management of health services. Although I do not agree with everything the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) has said, I know he is committed to the cause for which he campaigns, and I can say to him today that, following the Ofsted reports of recent weeks, we will be able to give him the detailed information that he wants on serious case review numbers. The hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Jeremy Wright) made a speech on dementia, which is not an area in which I have expertise. I know that he wants a Government strategy to be implemented sooner rather than later, but when that strategy is published, I am sure that he will contribute to the debates that follow on the important subject of how we make sure we take forward care for people with that disease. This Queen's Speech takes forward the commitments that we made in our children's plan and, one year to the day after its publication, our progress report, ““One Year On””, namely to make sure every child can succeed, to tackle all the barriers to children's progress in and out of school and to work together, and intervene early, to make sure children are safe and properly protected and that their well-being is promoted. In the Queen's Speech, we committed to set out in law the responsibility of all of us to do the following: to keep children safe through children's trusts; to establish the legal basis for our new standards regulator, Ofqual; to strengthen our intervention powers to ensure that all schools can be good schools and all local authorities can tackle underperforming schools; to give schools more power to tackle bad behaviour; and to reform the provision and funding of 16-to-19 education. Opposition Members claim that there is nothing in the Queen's Speech, but nothing could be further from the truth.