Schools White Paper

Robin Walker Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The higher education budget is the province of my colleagues the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the right hon. Member for Twickenham (Vince Cable), and the Minister for Universities and Science, my right hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr Willetts). We support higher education through the money that is spent by the Training and Development Agency for teachers. We want to ensure that that money is spent on attracting more highly qualified people into teaching, and in the next few months we will present proposals explaining exactly how we will support high-performing institutions, whether they are higher education institutions or schools.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his excellent White Paper and especially on the pupil premium, which will benefit many people in my constituency. Christopher Whitehead language college in my constituency, which is an outstanding school, is shortly to launch Mandarin classes. Will the Secretary of State expand on what the White Paper offers to improve the depth, breadth and quality of language teaching in our schools?

[Michael Gove]

I have been working with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills to ensure that we can help more people studying modern languages, particularly Mandarin and strategic subjects, into teaching. I was fortunate enough to be in China with my right hon. Friend two weeks ago, when we received funding from the Confucius Institute to ensure that there will be 1,000 new trained teachers of Mandarin, and that the fantastic work being done in the school in my hon. Friend’s constituency is spread more widely.