Lord Nash (Con)

My Lords, it is a great honour to speak after the last two speakers and I will speak in support of the amendments in the names of my noble friends Lady Barran and Lord Agnew. The speech from the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and the passion with which he spoke were a tribute to him and his team, who have done a most remarkable job. It is also a tribute to the previous Labour Government, who had the foresight to bring in people such as him to help turn around failing schools. That is why it is such a shame, as I have said before, to see this Labour Government appearing to row back on many of those proposals; I hope that is not really the case. I will not begin to try to compete with my noble friend Lady Evans, who so ably ran the free schools programme and understands so much more about it than I do. My own experience of free schools is limited to my group opening one primary school in the grounds of Pimlico Academy because we believe strongly in an all-through education, a broad education and a subject-specific education even for primary school pupils where that can be delivered efficiently. We teach Latin in our primary schools, a subject which some believe is too exclusive for children in state schools. The noble Baroness will be aware that my group, Future Academies, was appointed by the previous Government to run the Latin excellence programme, a £4 million contract to bring Latin to 40 state schools across the country which were not previously teaching it, something we were doing. Sadly, this Government binned that programme, which was a great pity, because the students love Latin; it helps them greatly with their grammar, their vocabulary and their thinking skills. I offer just one statistic. Noble Lords may be interested to know that this summer 48% of pupils at Pimlico Academy who took Latin GCSE, a subject which is thought to be very difficult, got a grade 9. I understand that there are over 50 special and AP free schools in pre-opening, or which were approved prior to October last year. We desperately need more special schools and AP schools in this country. I ask the Minister kindly to tell me how many of those are now planned to open and how many are not. If she cannot do that today, and I understand why she may not be able to do so, perhaps she would write to me with the answer.