At Prime Minister’s Questions, the Conservative leader argued that the government’s Schools Bill would cut pay for teachers in academies, close down routes into teaching and block failing schools from automatically becoming academies.

Sir Keir Starmer said academies had been introduced by the previous Labour government and were “here to stay”.

He said it was a “disgrace” that Tory MPs opposed the bill, which also aims to protect vulnerable children, set up breakfast clubs and limit uniform costs.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is a wide-ranging bill which includes measures to create a register of children who are not in school and allow local authorities to intervene if a child’s home environment is assessed as unsuitable or unsafe.

However, it is the changes to academies’ freedoms which have come under most political scrutiny.

Badenoch used all six of her questions at PMQs to ask about the bill.

She argued that academies – first introduced in the late 2000s – had led to improved performances by children in England, adding “poor children in England now do better than wealthier children in Wales”.

She told MPs the government’s changes were “wrecking a cross-party consensus that lasted for decades”.

“Teachers and parents will be horrified at just how bad this bill is. Even his own MPs may not realise it, but the bill will cut teachers’ pay.”

Sir Keir replied that it was important for schools to have flexibility on pay and that the government had introduced an amendment to the bill “to achieve that aim”.

Currently, academies, which are independent of local authorities, have the power to decide how much to spend on teachers’ salaries.

The original wording of the bill would have changed this but for the last few weeks Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has repeated the line “there will be a floor, no ceiling” on pay.

On Tuesday evening, the government agreed to amend the wording in the bill. Instead, academies will have to have “due regard” to the national pay agreements.

Following PMQs, a Downing Street spokesman said the amendment to the bill was “a sensible step to clarify our ambition for teachers’ pay and conditions”.

“The amendment makes very clear the government’s intention to set a floor on pay but no ceiling so that all state school teachers can rely on the core pay offer,” he added.

The Confederation of School Trusts welcomed the changes – but said there were still parts of the bill that concerned them, including restrictions on bringing people with specialist subject knowledge (but not a specific formal teaching qualification) into the classroom.

Badenoch told the Commons that the bill implies “doctors are not sufficiently qualified to teach biology, that Olympic medallists can not teach PE”, and asked why the prime minister was closing routes into teaching.

“She knows that’s not right,” Sir Keir replied but added that it “should not be extraordinary” to suggest that teachers in schools should be qualified.

Badenoch also criticised the bill for removing a guarantee that failing schools would automatically be turned into academies.

“It is an attack on excellence. It is an attack on higher standards. It is an attack on aspiration,” she said.

Sir Keir said his government was committed to academies and repeated his attack on Conservative MPs for voting against a bill which included “vital protections for children”.

“The bill benefits children who need the nourishment of a breakfast club, the bill benefits the families that can’t afford uniforms, the bill benefits the children who are currently out of school and nobody knows where they are, the bill benefits the children who could be taken out of school by abusers if this bill doesn’t go through.”

He said the opposition leader should “change her mind” and back the measures.

The subject of academies is one where the Conservatives are united and keen to defend their record, with one shadow cabinet minister telling the BBC: “It’s one of the few clear success stories we have to tell.”

Academy schools were first introduced under Sir Tony Blair and enthusiastically expanded by the Conservatives when they came to power in 2010.

So far only one Labour MP – Siobhain McDonagh – has publicly criticised the bill, however it is privately causing significant anxiety among Labour MPs, generally on the right of the party, who are proud of academies.

These are predominantly MPs who are loyal to the government anyway and would not vote against this legislation, which is expected to become law by spring.

In the earlier interview, Patel also declined to apologise for a rise in the numbers coming to the UK which took place when she was home secretary.

Speaking to The Sun’s Never Mind The Ballots, Patel, now shadow foreign secretary, said it was “totally distortionary” to suggest the government in which she served had thrown open the UK’s borders.

Her party leader Kemi Badenoch appeared to distance herself from the remarks, with her spokesman saying the Conservatives would “tell the truth about the mistakes we made”.

“While the last Conservative government may have tried to control numbers, we did not deliver,” he added.

Last year, shortly after becoming leader, Badenoch held a press conference in which she said the rise in immigration had been “a collective failure of political leaders from all parties over decades… but on behalf of the Conservative party, as the new leader, it is right that I accept responsibility and say truthfully, we got this wrong.”

Figures released in 2024 showed net migration to the UK hit a record 906,000 in the year to June 2023, before falling to 728,000 the following year.

Immigration rose sharply under the points-based system for work visas, introduced after Brexit.

Challenged on the figures in an interview on Thursday, Patel – who was home secretary between 2019 and 2022 – sought to defend the Conservative’s record on immigration.

She said the points-based system had allowed the government to control the flow of immigration based on “what our economy needs and what it doesn’t need”.

Asked if she should apologise to voters who were told Brexit would lead to a reduction in immigration, Patel said: “I did not mislead them”.

“We made it quite clear it would be people from the rest of the world, people with skills” coming into the UK post-Brexit, she added.

She said many people came to the UK on health and social care visas, adding: “Are we now saying we don’t need those people in our NHS?”

However, she also said she was “not fine” with big rises in immigration and argued that the previous government should have done more to train people in the UK instead of relying on foreign labour to fill gaps in sectors such as farming.

Asked why that had not happened, she said: “That’s a very good question that should have been posed to [environment ministers] and to others.

“I was doing other national security issues – the job of the home secretary.”

Responding to the interview, Labour labelled the Conservatives “out of touch” and said Patel “seems proud of her central role in the Tory open-border experiment”.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage said the Conservatives had a “disastrous record on immigration – and would do it again”.

A few hours after the interview was broadcast, Patel posted a message on social media in which she said: “The immigration system in our country is not fit for purpose.

“As I said in the interview, I was not happy about the high numbers while the Conservatives were in government.

“Our party is now under new leadership and it is important we learn from our mistakes and how we can do things better.”