Downing Street Says » Education Bill

» Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Education Bill

Asked for further timings on the Education Bill, the PMOS said that it would be published in February, and would be put to the vote sometime in March.

Asked if the Prime Minister was involved in various discussions with Ministers about the content of the Bill, the PMOS replied that the Prime Minister had been throughout, and would be in the future. We did not give a running commentary on close discussions.

Asked was there any concern about the publicly expressed concerns given by people like Estelle Morris, Nick Raynsford, or Neil Kinnock about some of the aspects of the Bill that it would be more difficult for Ruth Kelly to drive through, given the recent controversy, the PMOS said people had set out their views. Last week’s NAO report had clearly illustrated the progress being made in Education, but it also illustrated why the status quo was not an option. We had to learn from what had worked in the past, and to keep developing it. What worked was if schools had an ethos which was theirs, and theirs to develop.

Equally, there was the freedom to make the kind of decisions that were necessary to develop schools and for good schools to help failing schools. What was also important was that we moved forward on the discipline front, with the measures that were contained in the Bill too. There were all sorts of reasons why we believed that this Bill helped forward the momentum. The PMOS said that the underlying message from last week was that the status quo was not an option.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.