Diana Johnson
Main Page: Diana Johnson (Labour - Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham)Department Debates - View all Diana Johnson's debates with the Department for Education
(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Elizabeth Truss
Of course I will be extremely interested to see what the Select Committee report says on the subject. We do need good careers guidance, but we also need a system where students have an incentive to take subjects that will prove of value to them later in life. That is the whole point of the English baccalaureate.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove)
More than 5,000 schools across the country are closed today as a result of adverse weather conditions. Thanks to changes that this Government have made, no school that ensures that it is open will be penalised if individual students cannot make it to school on that day. I hope that as a result more and more schools will recognise that while the decision on whether to remain open or closed is a matter for the head teacher, everything can and should be done to ensure that all children get access to a good education.
Diana Johnson
After the revelations about Jimmy Savile, Cyril Smith and other appalling cases, is it not time for the Secretary of State to stop dragging his feet over personal, social, health and economic education, causing its teaching over the past two years to decline, and instead to help equip our young people to better resist the efforts of predatory paedophiles?
Michael Gove
The hon. Lady is absolutely right that given their scale the recent revelations about the extent of child abuse and child grooming are uniquely worrying. In a speech that I gave to the Institute for Public Policy Research just before Christmas, I outlined a series of steps that my Department has taken, and will take, in order to deal with this.