Lord Lexden
Main Page: Lord Lexden (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Lexden's debates with the Department for Education
(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Nash
We will be responding in due course on the recommendations and will, of course, focus very much on opportunity areas—to take the noble Baroness’s point about the situation outside London. I agree entirely with the conclusions. The Sutton Trust tells us that the 7% of the population educated privately gets nearly 60% of the top jobs in this country. We have to do better than that. I will be delighted to meet with the noble Baroness.
Lord Lexden (Con)
Will my noble friend agree that a useful contribution to assisting low-income families could be made through the provision of large numbers of free places at independent schools under partnership arrangements between the Government and schools themselves?
Lord Nash
As my noble friend knows, we are very keen to encourage partnership arrangements between independent schools and the state sector, and we are in active discussions with them about that. We are considering all the proposals we have had—some 7,000—as a result of our consultation document, and we will react to those shortly.