Oral Answers to Questions

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Timpson]

I commend my hon. Friend for taking up the challenge on behalf of young carers in her constituency. I know they have been particularly active in helping to design and commission many of the services across the country for young carers. To help raise awareness and to encourage good practice in schools, we are working with the Children’s Society and the Carers Trust to provide teachers with the tools—the training and guidance—they need to recognise and support young carers as early as possible.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

15. How many applications for academy status from community primary schools have been declined by his Department. [Official Report, 28 February 2014, Vol. 576, c. 1MC.]

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

Eighty.

[Mr Slaughter]

I thank the Secretary of State for that succinct answer. The reason I ask is that tonight Hammersmith and Fulham’s Conservative council is set to vote for the closure of Sulivan primary school in Fulham, which is rated in the top 2% in the country, in order to give its site to a free school. Sulivan’s last hope is the Secretary of State, so will he agree with the London Diocesan Board for Schools, which wants to take Sulivan into its family of schools as an academy, that it is

“unusual to close successful schools with growing rolls”,

and save Sulivan school?

[Michael Gove]

I admire good local authorities, and Hammersmith and Fulham’s is one of the best, so the decisions it quite properly takes outside the hon. Gentleman’s constituency and in that of my hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands) I would entirely support. As for creating a free school in Hammersmith and Fulham, why should a former public schoolboy such as the hon. Gentleman, who benefited from the independence of a great school such as Latymer upper, wish to deny such high standards to others? Is it that the hypocrisy—forgive me, the double standards—of the Labour Front-Bench team now extends to the Back Benchers, too?