Munira Wilson

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement and I thank Professor Becky Francis for her important work on the review. I welcome much of what has been announced today. As with free school meals and maintenance grants, this Secretary of State seems to enjoy adopting Liberal Democrat policies. I particularly welcome more enrichment activities and citizenship education, including financial and media literacy. But today, many headteachers across the country will be asking about the how. How will we fund this when budgets are already overstretched? With specialist recruitment targets missed year after year, including in physics, computer science and music, how will we find the subject specialists to deliver the new curriculum, not least the right to triple science at GCSE? Can the Secretary of State set out how she will protect time for other subjects, given the welcome new enrichment entitlement? Has she considered using money from falling school rolls to perhaps fund a longer school day? Turning to the Secretary of State’s claims about breadth, instead of scrapping the EBacc did she consider broadening it? Having gone explicitly against Professor Francis’s recommendation to leave Progress 8 unchanged, the Government actually risk narrowing choice. The new Progress 8 model pits languages against creative arts for the first time. These two changes put together could mean the death of languages in our state schools. The review missed the opportunity to broaden A-levels. The UK is an outlier in this regard. Combined with the defunding of the international baccalaureate in state schools, I worry that the Secretary of State’s legacy will be that breadth becomes the preserve of the privately educated.