The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for giving us the opportunity to debate this very important and wide-ranging subject. I also thank the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), for sponsoring the debate and for opening it in such a powerful way. Their extensive speeches covered a great many of the major policy areas relating to social mobility.
I especially enjoyed the right hon. Lady’s speech. I enjoyed her challenges on some of the issues about which she thinks the Government should be doing more. I was interested to hear about her own family background, and her mother’s efforts to take all the opportunities that life presented. I congratulate her particularly on her success, and the success of her constituent, in helping to change some of what sounded like the rather backward-looking arrangements for the admission of postgraduates to Oxford university. I imagine that it is even more difficult to change the arrangements for admissions to Oxford university than it can sometimes be to change Government policy, so I think that that was something of a victory for her and her constituent.
The Government are committed to the principle that where people start in life should not determine where they end up, and that forms the basis of a huge amount of work that we are doing on both economic and social policy, which we have set out in the recent child poverty strategy and the social mobility strategy. It was good to hear not only the two opening speeches, but the speeches made by other Members including the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain), my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Simon Wright), the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and, of course, the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali). They made powerful speeches which covered different aspects of the debate, and which signalled that in all parties, whatever their philosophy and whatever their ideology, there is a strong commitment to changing society in this regard, and ensuring that there is genuine opportunity for everyone regardless of background. That national consensus comes across clearly in the foreword to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission report from the autumn of 2013, where Alan Milburn and his fellow commissioners said:
“It is part of Britain’s DNA that everyone should have a fair chance in life. Yet too often demography is destiny in our country. Being born poor often leads to a lifetime of poverty. Poor schools ease people into poor jobs. Disadvantage and advantage cascade down the generations.”
That is the challenge that we all face. The last Government faced it and we face it in this Parliament.
It is our ambition to build not only a stronger economy out of the rubble of the crash of 2008 but a fairer society, even in these challenging times. We are not only getting on with that job but making progress, as we have set out in our strategy report and as is highlighted in parts of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission report. The economy is now escaping from the worst recession in generations. We have already helped record numbers of people into work and put in place far-reaching measures to improve the educational attainment of the poorest people in society.
The right hon. Lady praised Alan Milburn and all members of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission for their work, commitment and dedication to that shared cause. I join her in thanking Alan Milburn and the commissioners for their work. She was also kind enough to praise the Government for their bravery, I think she said, in taking the novel step of setting up an independent watchdog and asking a leading former Cabinet Minister from the Labour party to chair it and to be our critical friend on those issues. That demonstrates how serious the coalition Government are about that policy agenda. We decided to take a risk in setting up a body that we fully expected would be not only a friend but a critical friend and would challenge us on our ambitions to address social injustice and create a society of real opportunity for every individual.
The Government’s child poverty strategy sets out that our approach is rigorous and evidence-based. We are focusing on sustainable solutions that will work in the long term and make our society fairer. I acknowledge that the last Government also had a strong commitment in that area. It did some important work, not least in schools policy. In the debate, we have talked about the success of London schools in the last 15 or so years. I pay tribute to former Education Secretaries and individuals such as Lord Adonis who played a large part in some of those education reforms.
It is also true that, in their strategy in this area, the last Government became very dependent on public expenditure through the benefits and tax credits system. By the end of the last Parliament, it became clear to most commentators and people in the House that the strategy of relying on ever more means-tested benefits was not sustainable in the long term, particularly in an environment where the public finances were deeply in deficit.
Therefore, we are now focusing on tackling the causes of inequality and social injustice. That is why we are putting a particular focus on some of the areas that right hon. and hon. Members have raised today: on investing in the early years, on improving the quality of our schools system, and on ensuring that people get more opportunities in work and make progress in work, rather than simply being in work on low pay. I would like to set out some of the Government’s plans in those areas and to try to respond to some of the points that right hon. and hon. Members have made.
The right hon. Lady placed a heavy emphasis on the importance of tackling disadvantage in the early years, as did a number of other Members, rightly. The Government fully share the view that, in order to address disadvantage and inequality of opportunity, we have to be able to act early on. Far too many young people start off way behind as they join our schools system. Schools then struggle to try to make good the disadvantage that has already been embedded in the early years. We have to do more in those crucial early years to prevent these gaps from opening up, so across the early years we are helping disadvantaged children to gain access to high-quality education and we are providing more help to parents who want to get back to work. Our new entitlement for the parents of the most disadvantaged 40% of two-year-olds will mean that about 260,000 disadvantaged two-year-olds will be entitled to get a Government-funded early education place from September.
Earlier this year, we also announced that from 2015-16 we will extend the pupil premium, which is having a profoundly important impact in schools, into the early years, so that we ensure that three-year-olds and four-year-olds from the most disadvantaged backgrounds can get the best start in life. That is extra money to raise the quality of teaching and pay for more qualified teaching staff, particularly in settings with a large number of disadvantaged youngsters. We have announced the consultation on that and the level of the early years pupil premium for 2015-16, and I very much hope that the party or parties in government after the next election will continue to be committed to the early-years pupil premium and to the schools pupil premium. I hope we will significantly increase the early-years pupil premium so that it is at least as great financially—if anything, I hope it is more—as the pupil premium for primary schools, on a full-time equivalent basis. We know that investment in these areas makes the biggest impact when we invest early, which is why we decided in 2014-15 to put almost all the increase in the pupil premium into the primary setting rather than into secondary education. We are also doing other good work.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
The pupil premium is based on free school meal eligibility, but we still do not know which recipients of universal credit will be entitled to free school meals for their children. We have been waiting for this decision for about three years, and I think the delay is because of a disagreement—or an inability to reach agreement—between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education. Is the Minister able to tell us when that very important policy decision will be made?
Mr Laws
I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that there is no disagreement in government. This is a very important decision to get right, for the reasons he explains, and we have no intention of undermining support for disadvantaged youngsters through the decisions we take. We have to make sure that we use the new mechanisms that will be available, including through universal credit, to target money effectively. We will be taking decisions shortly—Ministers often say that—on this matter, but in the meantime it is perfectly reasonable for him to ask questions about it, because it is important for us to get it right.
We are also taking other action to support families in the early years: for working families on universal credit, we are further increasing support for child care costs to 85%, as Alan Milburn’s commission urged us to do, making sure that for these families work will always pay; we are introducing tax-free child care; and the Deputy Prime Minister recently announced the commencement of flexible parental leave, so that all parents can get the support they need to go back to work. As the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has consistently argued, the early years are the most important years in young people’s lives. That is why we are investing so heavily to make sure that all our children get the very best start they can and why we are giving a priority in public expenditure terms to this area, even in these times of austerity.
Understandably, education in our schools system has been a major area debated today, and it is one of the Government’s big priorities. I am very proud, as a member of the coalition Government, that even in these times of austerity, when we are trying to deal with the massive deficit we inherited, that we have made the commitment to fund a pupil premium for schools. As hon. Members have said, we are focused not only on raising attainment for all school pupils, but on closing the unacceptable attainment gap between richer and poorer pupils, and we are making progress. Under this Government, poor children are doing better than ever at school. The proportion of children on free school meals and the pupil premium who are getting five good GCSEs has increased, as my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South said, from 31% when the coalition came to power to 38% now. That is a very significant increase over a relatively short period, and comes at a time when we are ensuring that there is no grade inflation in the system, which means that these improvements in recorded results are real improvements.
We are also making big improvements in narrowing the gap at key stages 2 and 4. At key stage 2, the acceleration in narrowing the gap seems to have been present since the pupil premium came in, and we need to ensure that that acceleration is sustained in future years and that it is present in both key stages 2 and 4.
As hon. Members have said, a massive amount more needs to be done in this area. It is still the case that, despite the progress, six in 10 children on free school meals fail to secure five C grades at GCSE, including English and maths. I hope that all of us across the House agree that that is entirely unacceptable in an advanced country such as Britain. As the Chair of the Select Committee pointed out so powerfully, we can see that that is unacceptable when we look at the levels of attainment and the reduction in the gap in some of the best schools where they have large numbers of disadvantaged young people. In those schools, including in areas such as inner London, the teachers and the head teachers are proving that there is nothing inevitable about this level of underperformance. There are parts of the country today where almost 80% of young people who are considered disadvantaged are failing to get those five Cs, and that is not something that any of us can accept.
We are continuing to put our money where our mouth is —through the pupil premium. Since 2011, we have invested almost £4 billion to help schools directly to address educational disadvantage. This year, the pupil premium will increase to £2.5 billion a year—the full amount that we promised in the coalition agreement. That means that children who are poor and who receive the pupil premium throughout their school career will now receive—or their schools will receive—an additional £14,000 to boost their attainment, which is a significant amount of money. Schools will be able to make powerful use of that money, and they will be informed by the mechanisms to improve education that the Education Endowment Foundation has flagged up as things that work.
I have been to schools in very disadvantaged neighbourhoods around the country, and recognise that this boost to the budget is quite transformational. With my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Ian Swales), I visited a school in his constituency with very high levels of deprivation—80% or 90% of young people were entitled to the pupil premium. It is a community that never really recovered from the de-industrialisation of the 1980s and a community where aspirations have been very low. This additional money is giving that school the opportunity to change the life chances of those young people.
Of course we have to ensure that, even though we give discretion to schools to spend this money in the way they think best, there is accountability for it. The right thing to do in the school system is to have more freedom and autonomy, but those things have to come with accountability. The accountability mechanism that we have chosen is through Ofsted. When Ofsted goes into a school, it will look to see whether the disadvantaged pupils are making good progress and it will see whether the gap is closing. If those things are happening, it will not have to ask lots of questions and it will not be wasting the time of school leaders and teachers by creating a bureaucracy around this. Where there is not progress and where the gaps are not closing, it will challenge schools. Schools that thought they might be outstanding will discover that they are not so graded because they are failing in this area. Schools that are weaker will be highlighted. Head teachers today know that this is now an important area for their school’s performance, and Ofsted will recommend pupil premium reviews by outstanding system leaders of schools that are not using this money sensibly.
Later this month, Ofsted will report on its view of how the pupil premium is being used in schools. Although I would be the first to accept that not every school is using every penny perfectly, I believe that the evidence will show that the school system increasingly does understand what this money is for and is using it and targeting it in the right way.
Another important thing that we have done is to change the accountability systems for both primary and secondary schools and in 16-to-19 provision. For too long in primary education we have set the bar too low for schools. At one stage, we accepted that 40% of young people could fail to reach the level of attainment to which we were aspiring and we now know that even that level was too modest and was, for those people who were just achieving it, a passport to failure later in life and in their educational career. We are raising the bar and we are expecting more young people to get over it.
As the Chairman of the Select Committee pointed out, by focusing more on progress and not on the C-D borderline, we are giving a real incentive to schools to value the progress made by every pupil—the B-grade students going to A, the A-grade students going to A* and, critically, the F-grade students going to E, the E-grade students going to D and the D-grade students going to C. One of the disappointments under the previous Government, in spite of the progress made in some areas of education, was that a lot of the progress was across the C-D borderline on which schools had an incentive to focus. A lot of the most disadvantaged youngsters who were not on that borderline saw almost no improvement in performance under the previous Government. They and many of the most disadvantaged communities saw precious little improvement during the last Parliament and I hope that our accountability reforms will change that.
I am optimistic. We had the pupil premium awards recently and saw some splendid best practice across the country. Schools are doing the right things, with high expectations and good teaching. That includes schools such as Mossbourne academy. The recent destinations data show that a large number of young people from those schools are going to first-class jobs and first-class educational settings, and are going on to places such as Oxford and Cambridge. More people from that school did that than was the case from some entire local authority areas, as, disgracefully, there are still some parts of the country in which no pupil at all goes on to our best universities.
Mr Graham Stuart
The Minister will know that thanks in part to the flexibilities that this Government have introduced, there is an increasing correlation between the amount of money that schools get and their efficacy in a way that there was not in the past, which is probably a good thing. That shows the need for a new national funding formula that ensures equitable distribution of funds across the country. We do not have that now. London is doing well, and we are all delighted about that, but it is also the best-funded part of the country.
Mr Laws
I entirely agree. Money is of course not always the answer—if it is spent badly, for instance—but it is really important. If we did not think that money was important we would not have the pupil premium, which is about money, accountability and best practice. We must make sure that we have a fairer national funding formula. We are making the biggest step for 10 or 20 years towards fairer school funding through the minimum funding levels we are introducing, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will be able to say more about the additional funding we can give to underfunded parts of the country when our consultation concludes.
As well as addressing attainment in education for disadvantaged groups, we need to help them to secure the right jobs so that they can get on in life. Apprenticeships are at the heart of our drive to equip people of all ages with the skills employers need to grow and compete, and we are very proud that more than 1.6 million new apprenticeships have been started in this Parliament at more than 200,000 workplaces. More than 860,000 people undertook an apprenticeship in the past academic year, which is the highest recorded figure in modern history. Our new programme of traineeships will help young people to develop the skills and attributes they need to secure apprenticeships and other sustainable jobs.
We are also pleased that the work we are doing with young people means that the number not in education, employment or training has been falling. We will continue to do more to help young people from 16 to 18 and to ensure that, as a number of hon. Members have said, we have proper careers advice and guidance, and proper incentives for educational establishments to focus on destinations.
We are also helping young people in work, helping parents to find jobs and helping to ensure that take-home pay after tax increases. We are incentivising employers to take on more young people by abolishing employer national insurance contributions for most employees under 21 from April of next year. We are raising the national minimum wage to £6.50 per hour, which represents the biggest cash increase since 2008 and will increase the pay of more than 1 million people. We are cutting income tax for those on the minimum wage by almost two thirds and we have increased the personal allowance five times, from £6,475 when the coalition came to power to £10,500 in 2015-16, which is a massive support to many people on low pay in employment—people who are also, incidentally, going to benefit from the free school meals for infant-age pupils from this September, and that will also be extended for the first time to disadvantaged young people in college settings who previously, for no rational reason, were excluded from the entitlement that there was to free school meals for those in schools. I am pleased that this Government have resolved that very long-running injustice.
We are also working with business to ensure that it helps people to progress, earn more and have responsible terms and conditions. We are addressing exclusivity clauses in zero-hours contracts and are committed to the social mobility business compact. I am proud that, as a consequence of the work the Government have done and of the recovery of the economy, employment has increased by nearly 1.7 million. In just the past year unemployment is down by almost 350,000, and we have one of the highest employment rates in the history of our country.
Because we know that work is the best route out of poverty, our welfare reforms will incentivise even more people into work, and ensure that work always pays and that work pays more than benefits. We provide intensive, personalised support for parents who have been out of work for 12 months or more through the Work programme. To date, around 300,000 people on the Work programme have found lasting work. We are also supporting families with multiple disadvantages to get back to work through the troubled families programme, in order to help young people.
We cannot highlight the importance of social mobility and of tackling child poverty enough. They are central to the Government’s mission and to what the coalition hopes to achieve over our period of five years in government. Quite simply, no child should become a poor adult for the simple reason that their parents were poor.
I have set out the steps we are taking in early-years education and 16-to-19 education, and in trying to improve employment outcomes, but we know there is more to do. We have listened carefully to the proposals made by hon. Members and we are listening carefully to what comes out of Alan Milburn’s reports and the work of his commissioners. We will seek to build on the success so far, to make sure we break this unacceptable link between social backgrounds and success in life.