Chris Skidmore
Main Page: Chris Skidmore (Conservative - Kingswood)Department Debates - View all Chris Skidmore's debates with the Department for Education
(10 years ago)
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Michael Gove
One of the things I have learned from Sweden is that their free schools outperform other schools in Sweden; the more free schools there are in the municipality, the stronger the educational performance of it. Sadly, Sweden has not benefited as we have from the full panoply of educational reforms needed to drive up standards. Sweden does not have an independent and authoritative inspectorate like our Ofsted under Sir Michael Wilshaw’s leadership; and Sweden does not have the programme of externally set and externally marked assessments such as those we have at the ages of 11 and 16 in order to ensure that all schools are held accountable.
Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)
Given that eight out of 10 new free schools have opened in areas where there is a shortage of places or areas of deprivation, does the Secretary of State disagree with the shadow Secretary of State’s view that these are simply a
“vanity project for yummy mummies”?
Michael Gove
My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and he is not alone in backing free schools. Andrew Adonis has pointed out that free schools are actually a Labour invention. He, a genuine reformer, said that
“the issue for Labour is how we take them forward, not whether we are for or against them.”
The problem is that when we listen to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), we do not know from one day to the next whether Labour is for or against free schools, taking us backwards, not forwards.