Schools White Paper

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State add to the guarantee that he seemed to give earlier that no school would lose as a result of the pupil premium? Will he give me a guarantee that no inner-city school in Manchester will suffer either a relative or an absolute loss of funding as a result of his proposals?

[Michael Gove]

No school will suffer as a result of our proposals. It will, of course, be for Manchester as a local authority to decide, when it receives its funding, how it will allocate it in consultation with its schools forum. Some schools—this happens every year—have declining rolls and sometimes have to adjust their budgets because of that, but the pupil premium itself means more money, particularly for the poorest.