Nadhim Zahawi
Main Page: Nadhim Zahawi (Conservative - Stratford-on-Avon)Department Debates - View all Nadhim Zahawi's debates with the Department for Education
(13 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning (Mr John Hayes)
In short, I would be happy to meet the hon. Gentleman and his representatives. He knows, as does the whole House, that I am a champion for sixth form colleges and FE colleges, and I would be happy to make that clearer when we meet.
Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)
T9. Has my right hon. Friend read the OECD’s latest report on the state of the UK education system? It says that “educational performance remains static, uneven and strongly related to parents’ income and background”and:“Despite sharply rising school spending per pupil during the last ten years, improvements in schooling outcomes have been limited in the United Kingdom.”Is that not a sad indictment of the past 13 years of Labour?
Michael Gove
I read the OECD report with a mounting sense of sadness. It made the case forcefully by the deployment of facts and argument in a remorseless fashion that under the previous Government, for all the welcome additional spending on schools, standards had not risen to anything like the expected level. It was also striking that that report endorsed the case for the coalition’s commitment to spending more on the disadvantaged, the coalition’s commitment to creating free schools, and the coalition’s commitment to overhauling the league table system. For a respected international institution to give such a resounding thumbs-down to the previous Government and thumbs-up to the coalition Government is—