Oral Answers to Questions

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Monday 20th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The important point about our scheme is that we are giving schools additional money to support the participation of more children in competitive sports. As the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) pointed out, we are ring-fencing schools spending in cash terms and ensuring that the pupil premium is there to help the most disadvantaged. There will also be additional funding for every secondary school to ensure that it can maintain, if it wishes, its full role in a school sport partnership. However, let me make it clear: that money is for head teachers to spend. We are making sure that the bureaucracy that tied their hands in the past goes.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

John Barker runs the school sport partnerships in Bolsover and works at Tibshelf school, which has already been mentioned today, in my constituency. If the Secretary of State could, under this new deal, give him a job running the whole Bolsover school sport partnership and provide a new school building at Tibshelf as well, he would kill two birds with one stone. The school sport partnership will be happy; the Tibshelf people will be happy; and the 100-year-old school in Tibshelf that is being held up by pit props will be replaced. Can he give that guarantee?

[Michael Gove]

I have to say that if I leave the House at the end of today having made the hon. Gentleman a happy man, I will consider my political career to have reached its peak. I seriously accept both the case that he makes for capital funding for Tibshelf school, which is in his constituency, not that of the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), and the case for support for the gentleman he mentions. I am sure that the money will be there to ensure that that gentleman can carry on his good work. As the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), made clear, capital funding is available for Derbyshire and I will ensure that capital funding is in future targeted on those areas of greatest need. There are few areas of greater need than those that the hon. Gentleman represents, and few are lucky to have such an eloquent advocate.