As long as there are people in education making excuses for failure, cursing future generations with a culture of low expectations, denying children access to the best that has been thought and written, because Nemo and the Mister Men are more relevant, the battle needs to be joined.

I'm a decentralizer. I believe in trusting professionals.

I believed we needed someone who would be able to build a team, lead and unite. I hoped that person would be Boris Johnson.

We need a national ambition to build hundreds of thousands of new homes a year, both private and socially-rented - led by someone who will not take no for an answer and who will push for diggers in the ground and homes for all come what may.

One of reasons I was able to go to university was because of the sacrifices my family made.

You come home to find your 17-year-old daughter engrossed in a book. Which would delight you more - if it were 'Twilight' or 'Middlemarch?'

One of the problems we've had is that the ICT curriculum in the past has been written for a subject that is changing all the time. I think that what we should have is computer science in the future - and how it fits in to the curriculum is something we need to be talking to scientists, to experts in coding and to young people about.