Oral Answers to Questions
Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Anne Milton
Contrary to what the hon. Gentleman has said, previously the apprenticeship system is working well, and levy payers in particular—and also small businesses —are grabbing at the opportunities that apprenticeships offer. I am aware of the budgetary pressures on the system and we will make representations ahead of the spending review on that point.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Education (Damian Hinds)
Assessment means that we can ensure that pupils everywhere are getting the standard of education that they should. Of course we want pupils to do their best but that should never be at the expense of their wellbeing.
Andrea Jenkyns
Congratulations, Mr Speaker.
I recently visited a primary school in my constituency rated good by Ofsted since 2005. The headteacher brought to my attention the level of difficulty and stress that key stage 2 children face when undergoing SATs. Will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss how we can minimise exam stress for young children and would he like to complete one of the old tests with me?
Damian Hinds
I am not just saying this, but as it happens I last did one of the SATs papers—SPAG, or spelling, punctuation and grammar—on Thursday or Friday last week. As I said in an earlier answer, the point of the assessments is to assess schools and make sure that wherever children grow up they get the standard of education that they deserve. The SATs are not about testing children, and they are not public exams that will stay with children into their adult life. They are not like GCSEs: nobody in a job interview will ever ask, “What did you get in your SATs?” We trust schools and teachers to administer SATs in an appropriate way so that stress is not put on to children. I meet many teachers who do exactly that.
Education Funding
Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Gordon Henderson (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered education funding.
It is a genuine pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. As hon. Members know, there are lies, damned lies and statistics, but following the letter I received in April from the Secretary of State for Education about school results and resourcing, nationally and in Kent, I am tempted to add Department for Education briefings on school funding to that list.
To begin with a positive reaction to that three-page letter, my constituency is in Kent, so mention of our county was an encouraging start. To be fair, the letter contained information that was, on the face of it, good news. For example, 91% of children in Kent attend schools rated good or outstanding, compared with just 64% in 2010. In addition, 67% of Kent pupils reached the expected standard of reading, writing and maths at key stage 2, compared with 65% nationally. So far, so good. Except that when we consider what is happening on the ground in my constituency, those county-wide figure hide an inconvenient truth.
Let us take the standard of reading. A ward in my constituency is in the bottom 100 of 10,000 local council wards in England for adult literacy. That is an historical, long-term problem that will be solved only by targeted intervention and extra funding for adult education. A couple of years ago, I decided to try to do something about it, so as a first step I approached a local housing association to see if we could identify adults in our area who needed help. Our plan was to set up local clubs that would allow volunteer mentors to teach illiterate adults how to read and write. The stumbling block, as always, was the lack of funds. When I wrote to the Department for help, I was told that no grant funding was available. Those illiterate people in my constituency had been let down by the education system when they were at school as children, and they are still being let down by the system as adults.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that per-pupil funding has been squeezed, particularly for 16 to 18-year-olds. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government should make that a priority, especially to enhance social mobility in the areas he is discussing?
Gordon Henderson
I agree; I will come to the national funding formula later, if my hon. Friend will bear with me.
I will continue my thread about illiteracy, which is a huge problem in my constituency. We had several skills companies in my area, which taught adults basic literacy in preparation for the vocational training that they provided. Because of the new funding system for skills providers, however, which discriminates against constituencies such as mine, one of those companies has had to close and another is struggling financially.
The Secretary of State’s letter boasted that in Kent, an extra 27,300 school places have been added since 2010, including the establishment of 10 free schools, and that a further 13 new schools have been cleared to be created in coming years. Again, however, that statistic hides an inconvenient truth, which is that many schools in my constituency are bursting at the seams, particularly the secondary schools in Sittingbourne, where an already dire situation is being made worse by the ludicrous independent appeals procedure.
One of my local schools has a published admission number of 285 pupils, but because of the shortage of places in Sittingbourne secondary schools, and following a request from Kent County Council, the head agreed to increase this year’s intake to 330. In turn, Kent County Council committed to fund the building of a new classroom block to accommodate the extra 45 children. During the building work, which is due to start in the summer, four classrooms will have to be decommissioned, but despite that, the school was confident that it would be able to accommodate the additional pupils.
Then the independent appeals panel stepped in. It heard appeals from 53 parents who wanted to send their children to that school. Bizarrely, it upheld all 53 appeals, so the school is faced with finding accommodation for a total intake of 383 pupils. The knock-on effect of such a dramatic increase is horrendous. The head’s first question is, if there was room to build additional accommodation—which, incidentally, there is not—who would fund it? Nobody has been able to answer that question yet. Kent County Council has made it clear that it will not borrow any more money to fund the building of additional schools or buildings. Quite rightly, it believes that the Government should fund those schools via the basic need grant system.
Other secondary schools in Sittingbourne face a similar situation of demand outstripping the number of available places. That problem was brought about by the rapid population increase in my constituency, which was driven by Government housing targets that were imposed without any additional Government funds being allocated to ensure that the necessary infrastructure was put in place first. It is all very well for the Department to claim that 27,340 additional school places have been created in Kent, but few of those places are in the areas of most need. Frankly, without the funding to provide more schools where places are needed, the statistic is meaningless.
On funding, the Secretary of State talks in his letter about the 2019-20 national funding formula allocation to Kent and explains that the county will get £3,793 per primary pupil and £4,941 per secondary pupil. Those figures graphically illustrate the historical underfunding of Kent schools, which is put into sharp relief by the comparable funding figures in Greenwich, which are £4,907 per primary pupil and £6,698 per secondary pupil. Hon. Members might point out that Greenwich is an outer London borough with areas of deep social deprivation, but I have news for them: Kent is not entirely made up of affluent areas such as Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells. Many areas, particularly in Thanet and Swale where my constituency is, have council wards with social deprivation as deep as any found in outer London.
To take another example, I am sure that hon. Members agree that Essex is a comparable county to Kent; indeed, we are neighbours, albeit separated by the Thames estuary. Essex is due to receive £3,843 per primary pupil and £5,018 per secondary pupil. I appreciate that they are not huge differences individually, but they make a big difference to school budgets collectively. Why does the Department think that Kent pupils cost less to teach than those in Essex? They do not—indeed, the reverse is often the case—but the difference highlights a long-standing funding deficiency for Kent schools. The figures speak for themselves.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Damian Hinds
We are proud of our record in reducing the attainment gap in England, but I recognise that one always needs to go further. That starts, of course, in the early years. We are seeing progress at every stage, but there is always more we can do.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
Anne Milton
Like for like comparisons are not always appropriate, because both systems contain different elements. I am very aware of the campaign going on—the Association of Colleges and the Sixth Form Colleges Association have been doing a very good job. I need no persuasion to champion the cause of FE colleges, which have extremely complex courses to deliver and do a fantastic job. We need to get the right balance between schools and colleges. It is the case that colleges are dependent on the educational attainment of those who come in at 16, so that part of the sector matters as well.
College Funding
Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker.
Every young person should have access to an excellent education, and further education colleges play a vital role in achieving that. In my constituency of Morley and Outwood, 111 people, including myself, signed the petition. I made the decision to sign it because I recognise that more needs to be done to address and highlight this important issue. As co-chair of the all-party group on education and vice-chair of the social mobility all-party group, I understand the importance that education has as the best way to improve one’s lot in life. That is why the issue is so important and why I felt compelled to sign the petition.
The Government will have raised funding for school pupils aged five to 16 by more than 50% in real terms by 2020, compared with 2000. That is to be praised and is a record we should be proud of. However, from looking at the House of Commons Library figures, it is clear that funding for the 16 to 19 age group has fallen. The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ annual report on education spending in England stated that the equivalent of 16 to 19 student spending has fallen from £6,208 in 2010-11 to £5,698 in 2017-18. The average funding per student for the 16 to 19 age group is now less than that for secondary school-aged students and for higher education students. The IFS estimates that it is about 8% lower than spending per pupil in secondary schools. I hope that parity is something the Government will consider in their response to the debate.
The fact that local authority maintained schools, academies and sixth-form colleges have to pay VAT was mentioned. Schools and academies are subsequently reimbursed for those costs through VAT refunds; however, no such scheme exists for sixth-form colleges. That is another area that I hope the Government are looking at, because it has been argued that that anomaly places sixth-form colleges at a disadvantage.
The Sixth Form Colleges Association claims that the average sixth-form college lost about £385,000 in 2015-16 because of that anomaly, and in November 2018 the Association of Colleges argued that the Treasury should use the opportunity afforded by Brexit to extend the VAT refund scheme to all publicly funded sixth-form level education. Again, I hope that the Government are looking closely at Brexit and any dividends that it could offer.
It is not all bad news, and the Government deserve praise where it is due. Investment has been announced to strengthen education for 16 to 19-year-olds in certain academic areas. As we have heard, a further £600 for additional students participating in level 3 mathematics will be available, and two payments of £600 may be made if, for instance, a pupil is taking two years of maths study. Moreover, it was announced in the 2017 autumn Budget that £40 million of funding has been allocated to establish centres for excellence in mathematics. Ministers have also made £300 million of restructuring funding available to colleges, and half of that has already been spent.
However, I feel that my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), in his role as Chair of the Education Committee, was accurate in saying:
“Successive governments have failed to give further education the recognition it deserves for the role it plays in our national productivity puzzle.”
The Prime Minister has said that austerity is coming to an end. I hope that the Government are looking closely at this area, because it certainly needs to be addressed. We need to invest in our young people if we are to achieve our ambitions for our economy. I agree with the “Raise the Rate” campaign when its advocates say that if we are to meet our
“objectives for a strong post-Brexit economy and a socially mobile, highly educated workforce”,
we need to increase funding in this area. This is not the time to point fingers and play party politics—not with our young people’s future. Let us now increase college funding to sustainable levels and see greater parity with secondary schools.
I thank the education leaders in my constituency, including the fantastic Elliott Hudson College, which I recently visited, for the great work that it does in educating our constituents, both young and old.
Mental Health and Wellbeing in Schools
Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Layla Moran
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He makes an important point, and I will get to what the Government are suggesting in a moment. I also add a note of caution: I do not think that we should over-medicalise being an adolescent. There is a grave difference between that and ensuring that there are proper services for those on the acute end of the spectrum.
Coming back to funding cuts, one of the best bits of being a teacher in my day was having time to get know the students, and develop a level of trust with them, very often after a class was finished, or during an after-school club. Those are the kinds of things that are going. There is pressure on teachers, with cuts to the number of teaching assistants and a narrowing of the curriculum. Teachers have to teach more lessons and do more prep, meaning that they have less and less time for that critical pastoral support. What are the Government doing to measure how pastoral support in schools—the time that teachers have to spend with students—is changing?
It would be remiss in a debate such as today’s not to talk about teachers. Mental health in schools is not confined to the children; there is a crisis among teachers as well. A report by the charity Education Support Partnership, including a survey of 1,250 education professionals, showed that a huge majority—75%—of the UK’s education professionals had suffered from either mental or physical health issues in the last two years due to work. Some 50% of those who took part in the study said that they had experienced depression, anxiety or panic attacks due to work, and the charity has warned that unless urgent action is taken over rising mental health problems, there will be a severe retention and recruitment crisis. We already know that that is one of the issues that our schools are facing, and it exacerbates all the issues that I was describing regarding pastoral care.
The impact of Ofsted on the mental health of teaching professionals also needs addressing. The way in which Ofsted operates under its current inspection framework drives the wrong kinds of behaviour in schools. I believe, and the Liberal Democrats have now made this party policy, that the brand of Ofsted is so broken in the teaching profession that it needs scrapping and replacing with another inspectorate that does that job. Critically, the job of school improvement must be separated.
I sit on the Public Accounts Committee, and in a recent hearing we heard how school improvement is being lost amid academies’ governance structures and the lack of services provided at local authority level. Representatives from the Department for Education could not definitely say that it was their job, and neither could those from Ofsted. The Liberal Democrats believe that it is time to have an arm’s-length body that focuses on school improvement for all schools, no matter their governance structure, and a separate inspectorate that does that specific job.
Further to that, we need to change the framework for school inspections. It should not just be about numbers. I am the school governor at a primary school. I sit on the performance and standards committee of that school, and it is all about numbers. We are reducing children to single numbers; we look at their progress but do not allow teachers the time to look at broader issues. We believe that we should have an inspectorate that looks closely at wellbeing in schools and measures that part of what a school delivers as critically as attainment and progress. Having said that, I welcome much of what Amanda Spielman is doing in terms of drawing together the issues in education, particularly where she has spoken about the narrowing of the curriculum and off-rolling. That role is vital, so I do not want that to be lost in today’s debate.
Another thing that I want to bring up is league tables. Early in my career, during my first couple of years of teaching, in the early 2000s, I was a fresh-faced, brand-new physics teacher and I absolutely adored my job. I went into a school where I lost my faith in the profession very early on. We were teaching GCSEs and all the science students had been put up on a wall and colour coded. This was when we had A to F grade. The reds were the ones who were never going to get to the C boundary, and the greens were the ones who looked as if they were going to pass. We were told in no uncertain terms that we had to focus on the middle group, who were coloured yellow. That did not make any sense to me. I thought that I should be able to focus on those who needed it the most. When I asked why, I was told, “League tables.”
What can the Government do about league tables? I am not saying that we should get rid of any of the data; we should publish it. However, on the DFE website one of the first things that people can do is click on performance tables data. They are then encouraged to compare schools in their local area. Comparing schools is not a bad thing; parents need to have the right information. However, it should not just be about numbers; there needs to be a full sense of what the school offers, including its extra-curricular stuff and its ability to deal with wellbeing and mental health issues. That is not what people get; they either get performance tables data, or a link to the school’s Ofsted report, which, as I just mentioned, is inadequate in that form. The Liberal Democrats have therefore said that we would stop the Government doing that, even if we cannot stop the press doing it. In Ofsted’s annual report, which was published today, Amanda Spielman noted that, shamefully, thousands of children are being let down by off-rolling. The off-rolling epidemic in schools is a direct result of schools’ desire to push up numbers. It is about numbers, not about the children, and that cannot be right.
The Government are fostering a culture of senseless competition among schools, in which results from a single set of narrowly focused high-stakes exams are the be-all and end-all. That is not good enough. Amanda Spielman wrote to the Public Accounts Committee in October about the narrowing of the curriculum:
“Where we do have clearer evidence of a decline in the quality of education are in the narrowing of the curriculum in schools and an endemic pattern of prioritising data and performance results, ahead of the real substance of education…schools must work to make sure that pupils leave school with the qualifications and examination results that set them up for future success…However, our research has found evidence that an overly data-driven accountability system is narrowing what pupils are able to study and learn.”
My worry is that rather than encouraging children to flourish at every turn in their lives—which can often be one step forward and two steps back; that is how life works—we have a curriculum that encourages multiple levels of failure. It starts with baseline testing as soon as children get into schools, moves on to SATs and continues with exam after exam. Every young person whom I have asked about high-stakes testing tells me that it has got worse and worse.
I was an experienced teacher before I came into Parliament, but I am still one of the youngest MPs. We have to remember that the school system that we MPs went through is not the same as the system that students are going through now. There is much more high-stakes testing in the curriculum now, and we have to stop it, so the Liberal Democrats have committed to getting rid of SATs. We are not saying that data is not important, but we can collect it in other ways. For the record, as a physics teacher I loved exams—they were great—but they do not have to be so high-stakes. They can be part of learning well; they do not have to be the be-all and end-all. I am seriously concerned.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
I thank the hon. Lady for securing this debate. I, too, have worked in education, so I understand the challenges that our young people face. Does she agree that the Government are making a step in the right direction by ensuring that young people will be prioritised with school-based mental health support available in every part of the UK?
Layla Moran
I will come on to the Government’s proposals in a moment, but yes, I do call that a step in the right direction.
To come back to the thrust of the debate, what does my speech so far have to do with mental health? Lisa, a mum of three children in my constituency, writes:
“I had a chat with my 6-year old’s teacher about the amount of homework they get. Her response was that parents needed to see the SATS papers the children would have to sit in May. They would then understand how much work the children needed to do to reach the expected standard. The problem with the ‘expected standard’ is that it only looks at certain aspects of the curriculum and then puts children into boxes”.
If they do not meet that expected standard, they can only interpret that they have failed. Lisa goes on to say that
“putting children in boxes which suit a government body is, in my humble belief, creating mental health issues at a very early age.”
I would like our debate to focus on that toxic culture.
Let me move on to what the Government have announced. We now have a plan, at least, which I would call a step in the right direction, although it is not sufficient. We are looking at having health professionals in schools—a massive workforce of thousands. My question, which was shared with some scepticism during the Public Accounts Committee inquiry, is where those professionals will come from. The professionals whose roles we are looking to create are the same people we cannot get for nursing or midwifery, because it is the same type of person who might want to do the job.
I am seriously concerned that we are creating a parallel system, while the problem could have been solved by having school nurses in the first place. To return to the subject of funding cuts, school nurses were a valuable part of schools’ wider pastoral care. Many schools have lost their school nurses, which is a crying shame.
Andrea Jenkyns
Does the hon. Lady agree that mental health should be treated in schools with the same importance as physical health and that it should be central to the Government’s health agenda? I agree with what she says about nurses; we need to ensure that that is central to future policy.
Layla Moran
I completely agree. In fact, I would argue that if mental health is the Cinderella service in the NHS, children’s mental health is the Cinderella of the Cinderella service. That is brought into stark relief by child and adolescent mental health services across the country, although I will focus on Oxfordshire. My postbag is full of letters from parents who are desperate to get their children to CAMHS for all sorts of reasons. We have to remember that CAMHS is there for the most acute mental health needs; it does not cover the mild to moderate needs that so desperately need solving in school at an early, preventive stage. In Oxfordshire, children can wait for a referral for up to two years; extraordinarily, they are then often pushed back.
The Education Policy Institute reports that the number of referrals to specialist children’s mental health services has increased by 26% over the past five years, although the school population has increased by 3%. Something is clearly going on, whether it is lack of early intervention in schools or increased pressure.
Oral Answers to Questions
Andrea Jenkyns Excerpts(6 years, 9 months ago)
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The Minister for Higher Education (Mr Sam Gyimah)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made clear, a lot of work is being done on international students by the Migration Advisory Committee. I am happy to consider the issue of Scottish visas specifically and come back to him on it.
Andrea Jenkyns (Morley and Outwood) (Con)
Physical education is a crucial part of the school curriculum. Only last week, I visited Westerton Primary School in my constituency, which has been able to secure a minibus to allow children to attend more sport engagements. That is thanks to initiatives that have increased sport funding in schools, such as the primary PE and sport premium. I have seen the benefits of the policies on the ground. Will the Minister reassure the House that the Government will continue to support sport in schools?
