Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 20th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend raises a very good point. However one wants to describe the previous Labour Government’s record, it is clear that we have fallen in the international educational attainment rankings, and that is why our White Paper focuses on reducing the bureaucracy that confronts our schools. We want to trust professionals and to increase the autonomy of schools. In our White Paper, we have a real focus on behaviour, on raising standards of reading, on raising the quality of the curriculum and on reviewing the national curriculum—should I go on Mr Speaker?—in all the policy areas that we intend to implement over the coming years in order to improve the quality of education in this country and to see a rise in our international rankings.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

12. What discussions he had with Baroness Campbell and the Youth Sport Trust during his review of school sports policy.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove)]

Baroness Campbell and the Youth Sport Trust have been closely involved in developing our proposals to create an Olympic and Paralympic-style school sport competition. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is leading that work and has held regular meetings with a range of interested bodies, including the Youth Sport Trust. Ministers and officials from this Department attend those meetings. My officials and I have had a range of discussions with Baroness Campbell in the course of developing our wider proposals for school sport, and we are delighted that she, like so many others, supports our new approach to school sports, with a new emphasis on encouraging participation in competitive sports.

[Clive Efford]

This is a very humiliating day for the Secretary of State. He wrote a letter to Baroness Campbell, saying that he would spend the £162 million in funding for school sport through schools, but we now know that he has secured only less than half that money. So, it was his intention to pass on those cuts and make schools responsible for them, not to take responsibility for them himself. If Baroness Campbell is so involved in developing school sport, why did it take 600,000 people to sign a petition before he even met her? Should he not get up at that Dispatch Box and apologise?

[Michael Gove]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question, but he should do his homework first. I met Baroness Campbell on two occasions before we made our announcement: I enjoyed dinner with her and I enjoyed meeting her when we were launching our school sports Olympics at a school sport partnership in south-east London. I subsequently met Baroness Campbell and many other sports people. I have been meeting more sports people in the course of the past two weeks than I might have anticipated at this time of year, and every one of those conversations has been fruitful and constructive. As a result of those conversations, we have ensured that we are able to strip out the bureaucracy that characterised the worst of the previous Government’s legacy and concentrate on building on the best. That is why not just Baroness Campbell but Dame Kelly Holmes has said that our approach to school sport is right. In the spirit of seasonal good cheer, I hope that the rest of the House will get behind those two fantastic female standard-bearers for sport.