Schools (Brighton and Hove)
(10 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
This evening I want to pay tribute to the incredible work being done in schools in Brighton and Hove. Last year the city’s young people got their best ever GCSE results. This year the key stage 2 results were in the top quarter in the country and 54% of A-level students got A* to B grades, an improvement in results for the third year running. Brighton and Hove was also named top local authority in the country for tackling homophobia in schools. That really is a track record to be proud of, so I want to applaud the many teachers and other staff who make such achievements possible.
However, those achievements have been reached in spite of Government policy, not because of it. Research from the National Union of Teachers reveals the extent to which Ministers have been taking teachers for granted. The NUT found that 87% of teachers said that they know one or more teachers who have left the profession because of work load; that 90% of teachers have themselves considered leaving the profession because of work load; and that 96% said their work load has had negative consequences for their family or personal life.
Tonight I want to do two things: first, to share some of what I have been told by local teachers about the daily reality behind those statistics, and to ask the Department of Education and the Secretary of State to start listening to teachers and to review their current policies; and secondly, to make the case for statutory PSHE—personal, social, health and economic education—teaching in all state-funded schools. I have a private Member’s Bill before the House designed to achieve exactly that. I very much welcome the Minister’s views on that proposal.
On the experience of local teachers, I would like to quote extensively from what they have told me, because it is important that the Minister hears their words directly and that those words are put on the parliamentary record. One teacher told me:
“I am a 29 year old teacher who has taught for three years. I have a first class degree in English and enjoy being in the classroom. However, I am likely going to leave the profession at the end of this year as I find the workload overwhelming.”
One retired teacher said this:
“Right up to my last day I was in school at 7.00-7.15 am and did not leave till I was thrown out by the caretaker at 6.00 pm—dragging bags of planning or marking etc with me to complete at home. When I worked full time I also worked every Sunday afternoon and evening. Some of this was on tasks I felt were important for my teaching but latterly most of the work was on required tasks that I just could not fit into my 5 X 10-11 hour days!!!”
She goes on to say that one of the many downsides is that valuable clubs and after-school activities are at risk of being abandoned because teachers simply cannot fit them in, as much as they would like to.
Teaching is hard work. As one teacher put it to me:
“If we get education wrong, it impacts on all other areas of society and we cannot allow this to happen for the sake of our children and country’s future.”
The teachers I meet are not afraid of this hard work—indeed, they relish it—but they are frustrated by what they see as the unnecessary burdens imposed on them which conspire to make a tough job far tougher. A particular bugbear, which is at the heart of the issues about work load, is that, in their view, there is far too much testing and far too many targets. Here is what one teacher has to say:
“We are in real danger of turning schools into exam factories. In my five years of teaching, I have noted a marked increase in the amount of assessment required in the class to the detriment of lesson content, practicals and innovative lessons. A number of times already this academic year, I have had to cancel planned lessons in order to generate meaningless data to populate spreadsheets for senior members of staff. While assessment and feedback are a mandatory element of learning, I believe that the learning experience should be inspirational and innovative while promoting creativity and yet constant streams of testing go against this.”
The issue of constant changes and the lack of an evidence-based approach is another recurring theme. One teacher who has been in the profession for five years told me:
“My problem is that it feels like constant meddling with a system that has not had chance to properly test an idea. It feels like being a football manager who has to get yearly results each lesson otherwise he will be sacked.”
There is also deep concern about what lies behind the constant new policy initiatives, with many teachers arguing that the Department for Education has lost sight of its primary purpose. One told me:
“Despite being an ‘outstanding’ advanced skills maths teacher incredibly passionate about making learning maths engaging and relevant I have left the classroom, which saddens me daily. I love teaching and hope to one day return to the system when learning and children, rather than profit-making and Government agenda, is at the heart of our education system.”
The spectre of competition is always there, and performance-related pay, in particular, is adding insult to injury. One teacher writes:
“Most of us don’t want payment for results. We want a fair pay for a good job and poor teachers should be managed to get better or leave. Some teachers who are benefitting from performance related pay may see things differently, my niece in her second year of teaching was given a 25% rise or £5000 to keep her but even she says she cannot keep up the pace of work/amount of hours put in for long.”
Another local teacher says:
“What makes for the best outcomes with the children is teamwork—teachers working together for the good of the children. It is certainly not achieved through teachers being locked away in their classrooms desperately trying to push children up through the levels to ensure the security of their own future.”
An OECD report from May 2012 called “Does performance-based pay improve teaching?” concluded:
“A look at the overall picture”—
of OECD nations—
“reveals no relationship between average student performance in a country and the use of performance-based pay schemes.”
That underscores what teachers are telling me, based on their experience of being in classrooms and of how best to help students fulfil their potential.
What strikes me most about the messages from teachers is that, despite all the difficulties they face, the vast majority remain convinced of the power of education to transform every young life. Indeed, it is the opportunity to help children and young people to engage, question and discover that keeps them going. Above all, the teachers I meet recognise that teaching should be about giving children a chance to succeed. As one teacher put it:
“We need to see an end to this misguided notion that children are all the same and will progress in exactly the same way. Teaching them this early on in life that they are failures because they have not made what the government deems satisfactory progress is criminal and fosters feelings of inadequacy. We already know that how children feel about learning has a huge bearing on how much progress they make in the future.”
He concluded:
“I’m not suggesting we don’t push and support children to be all that they can be, but the current system does not promote positive self esteem and positive attitudes to learning and it’s getting worse. I want to sow the seeds for lifelong learning in my classroom and not turn people off it because, as kids put it, they’re ‘no good’. Learners are not closed systems, but individuals affected by a wide range of factors; social, emotional and developmental.”
That teacher’s last point brings me on to the second issue I want to raise. PSHE may sound like a dry acronym, but behind the title lies a subject that is vital for all children. PSHE encompasses many issues—everything from teaching life-saving CPR, tackling homophobic language in schools, understanding how to be responsible with money, tackling a controversial news story that is trending on social media and sweeping around the playground, to discussing the difference between an abusive and a respectful relationship.
PSHE involves learning about relationships, respect and responsibilities. It has always been important, but children today are bombarded with information in ever evolving ways and what happens in the classroom simply is not keeping up. For example, the latest guidance on sex and relationships education—just one aspect of PSHE—was produced 14 years ago by the Department for Education, before the mass use of mobile phones, the internet and the rise of social media.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has shown that girls and boys are gleaning distorted and inaccurate information about sex and relationships via online porn. Children face issues such as sexting and the pressure to document their lives and relationships online and in chatrooms. Childline has found that 60% of 13 to 18-year-olds had been asked to share a sexual image or video of themselves. One in three girls say they experience groping or unwanted touching at school. Yet not all our children are getting a chance to learn how to negotiate this complex landscape of communication and information.
The horrors of children being raped and abused in Rotherham and elsewhere, yet ignored by those with the power to help them, have sickened all of us, as have the revelations about historical child abuse—an issue I have worked on with colleagues across the House, lobbying the Home Secretary for a robust inquiry into the cases. Good PSHE has a role to play in helping children learn how to stay safe, and that is why it has been flagged up by a number of studies on how to protect children.
Schools in Brighton and Hove, strongly backed by Brighton and Hove city council, have been working to deliver outstanding PSHE, and their work is truly inspiring. For example, Patcham high school in my constituency has adopted a whole-school approach to PSHE, backed by the full commitment of the head and staff. It is a core part of the school’s ethos. The young people at Patcham learn to debate and discuss sensitive and difficult subjects, with each other and their teachers, in an extremely thoughtful and intelligent way. Difficult issues such as mental ill-health, emotional bullying and relationship abuse are discussed, using creative and engaging teaching tools. The school facilitates pupils’ consideration of complicated issues and, crucially, helps them to think for themselves. There is no brushing of important and controversial matters under the carpet and hoping for the best. The positive impact of this approach on the students shines through.
Yet this quality of PSHE is not available to all children. Ofsted’s most recent PSHE report, “Not yet good enough”, found that PSHE teaching required improvement in no fewer than 40% of schools. A PSHE Association survey of 40 local authority leads suggests that 52% of teachers—more than half of them—are not adequately trained in PSHE, and that they are not getting the help they need to make improvements. Statutory status is therefore key. As long as PSHE remains a non-statutory and non-examined subject, with a low priority in the Ofsted framework, there will be virtually no coverage of PSHE in teacher training. In school, PSHE teachers are not given the curriculum time or training that they need.
Those are the reasons why I have presented a private Member’s Bill, which is before the House, to make teaching PSHE a statutory requirement in all state-funded schools. Since presenting the Bill, I have found widespread support for this principle. Teachers want PSHE. There is strong backing from the teaching unions, including the NAHT, which represents head teachers. Statutory PSHE is not seen as a burden, but as something that helps. Teachers need and want access to good training and support to deliver quality PSHE across a range of topics, and statutory PSHE would provide that.
Parents, too, want PSHE. To take the example of sex and relationship education again, 88% of the parents of school-aged pupils want age-appropriate SRE to be taught in schools. YouGov and the PSHE Association have found that 90% of parents believe schools should teach children about mental health and emotional well-being. Young people want PSHE. Members of the UK Youth Parliament are among those who have repeatedly made that clear.
This subject is not as controversial as it perhaps once was. The tide is changing. Members may remember that The Telegraph has run the excellent Wonder Women campaign for better sex education. One of the reasons that there is such strong backing for statutory PSHE from both heads and teachers is that it has the potential to aid academic success and employability. All children deserve a curriculum that promotes resilience, physical and mental health and life skills, and one that teaches about equality. My Bill is about an entitlement for all children and about ensuring that teachers have access to the training, resources and support they need to teach this vital subject according to their students’ particular needs. It is about listening to teachers and benefiting from their insight into what works in our schools.
I very much appreciate the fact that the Minister has listened to me, and I look forward to his response on everything I have said about how teachers are now under such enormous pressures in our schools and on whether he can indicate any support for my Bill.
Before I finish, I want to do one last and perhaps rather unorthodox thing, Mr Speaker, which is to share a few verses from a poem by a local poet, Ros Barber, who is also very involved with the teaching profession. What she writes in the three stanzas I will read sums up what is at stake in education today. Teachers up and down the country, and certainly in my constituency in Brighton and Hove, have a real concern, which I hope I have conveyed, that creativity is being squeezed out of our schools by endless testing and assessment. That is something that we need to review and act on. The poem says:
“I believe that a British state education is the best in the world.
How else can a love of reading be learned than by
never immersing a child in a whole book but rather chopping
powerful and moving stories into meaningless chunks
of text contained within the safe bounds of Literacy Hour.
I believe that a British state education is the best in the world.
That children should be taught to the test and only
what they need to make the school look good, for better
that a school is seen to perform well in the league tables
than that a child retain any natural curiosity or love of learning.
I believe that a British state education is the best in the world.
What better way to teach your citizens that life is a trial
than abandon creativity, load ten year olds with homework,
stretch the school day? Existence is too short to waste childhood
in climbing trees, in games, in unstructured play.”
I very much hope that that is not the future for our schools, but I very much fear that that will be a vision of schools in this country unless the Government change direction, start listening to teachers and, crucially, allow teachers to teach.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on securing this important debate. She has covered a wide range of topics, and I will attempt to address the issues she raised.
The Government’s plan for education has been to raise academic standards, to improve behaviour in our schools and to close the attainment gap between those from richer and poorer backgrounds. We want all young people to leave school ready for life in modern Britain, whether it be through going to university, via an apprenticeship or in the world of work.
Under this Government’s reforms, we have seen the number of students in Brighton and Hove achieving five or more GCSEs or equivalent at A* to C, including English and mathematics, rise from 49.1% in 2010 to 62.6% in 2013. The hon. Lady is absolutely right to congratulate the pupils and schools in her constituency on that achievement because it is, in fact, 3.4 percentage points higher than the average for all schools in England. This excellent result for Brighton and Hove is exemplified by schools such as the Cardinal Newman Catholic school, the Blatchington Mill school and sixth-form college and the Dorothy Stringer school, which were all rated “good” by Ofsted, with 73% of the pupils in those schools achieving five or more GCSEs or equivalent at A* to C, including English and mathematics.
Similarly, the proportion of pupils achieving level 4 or above in reading, writing and maths in primary schools has risen from 74% in 2012 to 79% in 2013, while at key stage 1, there have been some excellent results in Brighton and Hove, including those of the Balfour primary school, which helped every single one of its pupils to achieve level 2 or higher in reading, writing and maths, and the Downs infant school, where 99% of its pupils achieved level 2 or higher in reading, writing and maths.
The hon. Lady raised the issue of teacher morale, and I can tell her that this Government place enormous value and trust in the professionalism and skills of the teaching profession. We now have our best-ever teachers working in our schools, the vast majority of whom put in a considerable amount of additional time and effort with the sole motivation of improving the life chances of children and young people. We are determined to ensure that we continue to have a high-quality, effective and motivated teaching profession.
Having said that, I share the hon. Lady’s concerns about the work load. The OECD TALIS—Teaching and Learning International Survey—showed that, on average, teachers in this country work 46 hours a week, compared with the OECD average of 38 hours, while the teacher diary surveys show even more hours worked. This is something that I and this Government are keen to do something about. We need to tackle what I would regard as this excessive work load on our teaching profession in our state-funded schools. I share, too, the concern of the hon. Lady, and of the teacher she quoted in her speech, about assessment and the over-obsession with data collection. I agree that something needs to be done about that.
On over-examination, the hon. Lady again made a valid point, and this Government have tried to address it. That is why we ended the modular nature of GCSEs and A-levels, because it was leading to students taking bite-sized pieces over and over again to push up the grade they could achieve. We were seeing multiple entries, retakes and early entries in those exams. I hope that, over time, our reforms will see fewer exams being taken at the most important age group for education, ranging between 15 and 18.
The hon. Lady raised the issue of teacher pay, too. We know that high-performing teachers drive up pupil attainment, and we need a system that recognises that. A recent report by the Reform think-tank argued that performance-related pay does work and that its introduction in schools will drive up standards, strengthening the link between performance and pay, which is fundamental. We want highly performing teachers to be properly rewarded for their impact on pupil achievements, but I do not think how we assess performance-related pay should be a mechanical link directed only to one or two measures. There should be a wide range of measures for head teachers to assess in respect of the teachers working in their schools.
Governors are generally supportive of performance-related pay. The National Governors Association supports the increased flexibility that governing bodies have been given to link an element of teachers’ pay to their performance, because most governors would like to be able to pay good teachers more. In a recent survey, 60% of governors who expressed a view agreed with the statement:
“Tying teachers’ pay more closely with their performance is likely to improve pupils’ attainment”.
Caroline Lucas
I am grateful for the thoughtful response that the Minister is giving. Does he share my concern that performance-related pay can greatly undermine teamwork if teachers are judged simply on what they contribute individually? In fact, what someone contributes in English has a knock-on effect in many other subjects. The best teaching is therefore about teamwork.
Mr Gibb
Again, I agree with the hon. Lady. When judging a professional within a firm of accountants or lawyers, one looks not just at one or two metrics, but at the contribution that they make to the whole operation. A good performance-related pay system would look at the contribution that a member of staff makes to the school as a whole. That could include mentoring and training teachers, extra-curricular activities and so on. It would look at their whole contribution to the school and there would not be a simplistic direct link to test results. That is down to the professionalism of the head teacher. I am confident that we will have well-run performance-related pay systems, rather than the type of system that the hon. Lady fears.
We need to ensure that we raise academic standards in this country and close the attainment gap. That is why the introduction of phonics, which she hinted at a criticism of, was important. It has raised the standards of reading. In 2012, 58% of pupils achieved the expected standard in reading. That has risen to 74% this year. That amounts to 102,000 six-year-olds who are reading more effectively today than they would have done, had we not introduced that important part of our education plan to raise academic standards.
The hon. Lady is a tireless promoter of the importance of good PSHE. I listened carefully to the example of good PSHE teaching that she cited from a school in her constituency. I know that she will talk to the Secretary of State later this week about her Bill. We agree that PSHE is important. We believe that all schools should teach PSHE, drawing on good practice like the example that she cited. We outlined that expectation in the introduction to the framework to the new national curriculum.
The hon. Lady is correct that good-quality relationships education is an important part of preparing young people for life in modern Britain. That is why we are committed to working with schools and other experts to ensure that young people receive age-appropriate information that allows them to make informed choices and to stay safe. Preventing violence against women is a topic that schools may include in PSHE. Maintained secondary schools are legally required to teach sex and relationships education, and we also expect academies to do so. To help support teachers, we have set up a new expert subject group on PSHE, which comprises lead professionals in PSHE practice. It will clarify the key areas on which teachers most need further support and produce new resources where necessary.
The hon. Lady said that the guidance on sex and relationships education is becoming outdated. I welcome the supplementary advice for schools, “Sex and relationships education (SRE) for the 21st century”, which was published recently by the PSHE Association, the Sex Education Forum and Brook. The advice helpfully addresses the changes in technology and legislation since 2000, and equips teachers to help protect children and young people from inappropriate online content and online bullying, harassment and exploitation.
The hon. Lady also spoke about sexual content on the internet. As she will know, children’s online safety is paramount. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre has an important role. As a UK law enforcement body, it can apply the full range of policing powers in tackling the sexual abuse of children. CEOP has also developed a specific educational resource designed for use by teachers to tackle sexting.
Caroline Lucas
I have two very quick questions. First, I am grateful that the Minister recognises the problem of excessive work load in schools, but will he give concrete proposals on addressing it? Secondly, I am grateful that he has said that PSHE should be taught in all state schools but, if so, will the Government consider the opportunity to make it a statutory requirement?
Mr Gibb
We keep all curriculum issues and statutory requirements under review. On managing the work load, we are conducting deep-dive surveys into what affects teacher work load. We have asked the teacher and head teacher unions to help us to identify areas of teachers’ regular work load to see where we can make changes to ease it. We are determined to do so. The hon. Lady is right that we cannot have the teaching profession weighed down by unnecessary, bureaucratic work. By the way, we have swept away 21,000 pages of guidance and regulation that was imposed on teachers, but we need to do more to ensure that that release of bureaucratic burdens filters through to the chalk face, or the interactive white board face, of our schools.
On that note, if I have not answered any of the issues raised by the hon. Lady, I am sure we can correspond after the debate.
Question put and agreed to.