Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 4th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this Bill, which is a very good use of a Private Member’s Bill, and I congratulate Mark Jenkinson on introducing it and for the work he did in the House of Commons. I also thank and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on how he introduced it. I want to broadly support it—there is absolutely nothing there with which I disagree—but it gives us the opportunity to discuss a few issues and that is what I want to do.

First, I probably ought to declare an interest. In my work with the Birmingham Education Partnership, we have a contract with the Careers & Enterprise Company. I wish that to be noted.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, may be interested to know that in Birmingham, it is the school-led Birmingham Education Partnership that has the contract with the CEC, not the LEP. When he is looking at future ways of delivering, he may wish to reflect on that and I would be very happy to discuss it with him—and, indeed, the Minister—if that was appropriate.

I want to talk about two areas. First, part of the legislation includes academies—big congratulations to Mark Jenkinson on achieving that. I cannot remember how many times I have tried to include academies in other legislation. I was always told that it was not needed because it was part of the funding agreement. I see this not only as important in the light of the careers education Bill, but—as far as I can remember—it is the first time the Government have made the move and said yes, academies can be affected and influenced by the legislation as well. I have never quite understood why, if you are a child who goes to an academy, you should be denied something that Parliament thinks is good to teach children. This is a really good move and I welcome it.

The main point I wish to make concerns the substance of what might happen now that we have got careers education and guidance going into year 7, which is undoubtedly a good thing. This House has a good record of discussing careers education. We have discussed it in its own right and as part of legislation many times. I worry about the same thing every time we discuss it and that is what I want to address: we are at risk of seeing careers education as merely providing information and widening the horizons of young people. This is absolutely vital. You cannot decide to be something if you do not know it exists. The more you see it, the more you talk about it and the more you talk to people who do that job, the more likely you are to be motivated to try to achieve it. That is where our discussions tend to stop. With respect, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, mentioned it and I do not disagree at all, but my own experience as a teacher and a person teaches me that it is not all that needs to happen if we are to achieve what we want to achieve.

Really, there are three parts and we ignore the last two. First, the children need the information. Secondly, they then need to make a decision that it might be for them—and that is so difficult. I look at my own life and there are lots of times when I have had the information, but I have not been able to work out the decision in a way that has been the right way forward. I taught children like that; it was not that they lacked the information, but they lacked the skills to align it to their strengths and weaknesses and then make the decision. The third part is that even if you make the decision that that is what you want to do, taking that first step to do it is really tough. How many times have we wanted to do something, known it is the right thing, but not known how or not been confident enough to take that first step along the road to achieving it? I think of children who do not have a lot of support at home and come from areas of significant deprivation: of course they need their horizons broadening. But it is at those next two steps where they often fall back. They have not got the skills, or they are not helped to make an effective decision, and when they do make the decision, they need someone by their side to give them the confidence to start the journey to try to achieve their dreams.

I am not for a minute saying that is not in the Bill, but I worry that when we talk about this aspect of education, we concentrate a lot on giving children the opportunity to see more people in jobs they may want to do and then leave them floundering because we do not help them with the skills to make the decision and the confidence to move forward.

On the whole, however, I again congratulate Mark Jenkinson and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and I very much hope that this will become a part of our national curriculum.

Higher Education Reform

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I apologise to the House if I was not completely clear in my earlier answer. I hoped and intended to refer to both the quality of jobs and the further education opportunities. Absolutely, our R&D is critical for the future of the country, and the quality of our thinking and debate, which I know the noble Baroness supports profoundly, is also really important. This is not just about jobs. But equally, I was made aware of six computing courses where the dropout rate is over 40%. Is that not something we should look at, compared with other courses where the dropout rate is much lower?

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

I understand why the Government want to make sure that students have the skills they need to manage the course, but there has been a lot of concern caused by the minimum eligibility requirements. Can the Minister confirm that the important thing is that the students have the skills they need to do the course, not that they have GCSE English or maths at level 4? The two things are not the same.

Secondly, successive policy papers from this Government have undermined the creative sector within universities. They have very much encouraged, and I agree with it, maths, science and engineering. I notice that humanities get a mention in this Statement; that is the first time for a long time. But in this policy document, what is there that will nurture and help to progress the creative industries in our universities, which are very much wanted by the economy and employers?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

In relation to the point about skills, on one level, of course, I cannot disagree—I never enjoy disagreeing with the noble Baroness. Of course, people should have the skills they need to access their degree. However, in the majority of cases, if not the vast majority, English and/or maths at GCSE level may well be necessary for the course that they are aiming to do. I stress that this is a consultation; we genuinely have not taken a view on it. There has been a great deal of focus in the media, in the other place and in your Lordships’ House tonight on the GCSE requirement. We will also be consulting on whether one should reintroduce a minimum A-level requirement. But our focus on foundation degrees and on additional opportunities to achieve the levels in English and maths are also part of how we will make sure that this happens.

Initial Teacher Training

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I thank and congratulate my noble friend Lady Donaghy on bringing forward this debate. It is a big issue and the changes that the Government are proposing are worthy of more debate and consideration than they have given us the opportunity of in this House and the other place. This is an important debate.

Nothing in education is as important as teacher training and retention. If one does not have good-quality teachers teaching effectively, none of one’s other aims, ambitions and aspirations gets anywhere. This issue is crucial. The Government are right to look at how we can improve teacher training. It is not perfect and I would not stand here and argue that everything that has happened in the past should be maintained. I also agree with the point that they put forward that we ought to move to evidence-based practice. I am a great admirer of the Education Endowment Foundation; I count myself as one of its biggest supporters.

I am therefore with the Government on looking at the issue. However, I have significant concerns and criticisms of how they have handled it and where we are now. Essentially, this is a fragile system. I cannot think of any other of the great professions—teaching is a great profession—that has to train its practitioners in 38 weeks, 28 of which must be in a school. In any other profession that one cares to look at, training takes more than a year—perhaps four, five or six years. Teaching has to do it in 38 weeks and that makes the system fragile. At the core of this issue is the partnership between higher education institutions and schools. Both are essential.



My biggest concern is that the Government have managed, throughout this set of reforms and their previous announcements over the last few years, to give the impression that higher education does not have a significant contribution to make to the training of teachers. Both are important. Schools are crucial—students must be in schools to learn from best practice, to practise and hone their skills and to be familiar with working with children—but they also need experience of higher education. Teaching is not a technical job; it is a craft, in a way, but it is also more than that. Like any other profession, it has a history and an intellectual and academic background. Where we have got to now and how we got here due to the changes that happened in the past are crucial questions if you are going to be an effective teacher and take us forward.

The biggest problem with the plans put forward by the Government is that they give the impression that we need to train student teachers in what the evidence says is effective pedagogy at this moment in time. There is one promise you can make: that evidence will not be the same in 10 years’, five years’ or even one year’s time. Students should know what is best practice now and should be trained and educated in what pedagogical practice is proven to work, but they also have to have the background, skills and attitudes so that they can critique it and know where those ideas have come from, because they are the people who will develop the next best practice in pedagogy. Their research, their ability to evaluate their own practice and their understanding of how we got here and how we need to move forward require a set of skills that go beyond craft training. I do not object to students learning what evidence shows is good pedagogy at the moment—I am a great believer that pedagogy is all-important—but to bring through a generation of teachers who do not have that wider intellectual and economic academic underpinning to take us forward to the next stage of development is very remiss.

If we have learned one thing from the pandemic, it is that the context in which children live and learn has an impact on how well they do. Everyone knows now that the children’s social and home background affects the way that they learn, their emotional well-being determines how well they will do at school, and their psychological state of being has an influence on how effective teachers can be with them. All that learning about those academic disciplines must be part of teacher training.

Something else that universities can offer are links with other university departments. How good would it be if departments of universities that look at health, sociology or psychology could input into teacher training? I am not saying that that is more important than learning in the classroom, nor that it should be instead of learning about how to keep order in a classroom, but I am saying that for any teacher to be a full professional they must do both. When I look at the Government’s proposals, I cannot see that there is any valuing of those things that I think universities can do more effectively than schools.

We have to remember that these two key partners in educating students to be teachers could both drop out and we could not do anything about it. Schools do not have to train teachers; it is not part of their core business, in a way, and they could decide that they have other priorities. Universities do not have to offer PGCE programmes and could choose to make more money by offering courses of a different nature. The most worrying aspect is that these reforms have brought about a risk regarding the future involvement of both parties. First, for schools, capacity, recovering from the pandemic, helping children to catch up and all that they have to do in terms of providing mentors and getting the early-years framework off the ground could lead to too many of them saying, “We’ve got enough on our plate. We’re not going to do the teacher training bit.”

Secondly, universities and higher education are feeling undervalued. Some of this nation’s greatest universities are about to drop out of teacher training because they do not feel that their interests are valued or that the way they want to do things is acknowledged by the Government. They are not going to offer a course that has so little flexibility for them that they feel they are betraying the way that they approach education—and none of those people actually make much money out of teacher training.

I share the Minister’s and the Government’s ambition to get this right and to do better, but this approach is not perfect and there are real risks. I invite a more open approach with the partners—before we have gone too far and lost too much.

Professor Kathleen Stock: Resignation

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I am happy to share my noble friend’s suggestion with the Secretary of State, but I know that he would also support the independence and autonomy of universities. The Government are seeking to make crystal clear their duties in relation to freedom of speech and how those can be enforced.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, one of the most disturbing aspects of what Professor Stock has had to endure is that some academic staff seem to have encouraged students to behave in a way that is quite contrary to the purpose of being at university. If higher education stops being a place for open debate and discussion, we as a nation really do have problems. But, sadly, Professor Stock is not the only person in this position, and, while I welcome the report that she has announced on the University of Sussex, noble Lords and the Minister will be aware of named people who are going through this as well. What can she do now to make sure that, in several weeks’ time, we are not having a debate about further resignations from university posts?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right. The Government have been crystal clear about their view on these issues. We have heard today about the investigation on the part of the Office for Students, which will, I am sure, cause other university leaders to reflect. Perhaps your Lordships might consider the number of amendments to the Bill, when it comes to your Lordships’ House.

Relationship Education Lessons in Schools

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 16th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Lord made several points. If the school he referred to, where he feels the Government’s response has been too slow, is Parkfield School, I can reassure him that we have been actively involved behind the scenes and in the school. The regional schools commissioner in Birmingham has been to that school weekly, and often daily. I think I am correct in saying that a mediator was hired to try to bring about consensus between parents and the school. A lot has gone on. Our view has been that publicity for these disputes is simply oxygen for the bigots who want to promote their own position. While we may not have been seen to be publicly active, we have been active behind the scenes.

On the important question on governing body support, it is a requirement under the new regulations that a school publishes its policy on RSE on its website. To get to that position, the governing body will need to have supported it.

On the broader question of navigating the modern world, that is why these RSE regulations are so important. It is nearly 20 years since they were last properly updated—before social media or smartphones existed. All the issues they bring to children are being addressed. I will write to the noble Lord to confirm whether the two subjects he raised are included.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I offer support to the schools and teachers concerned in this difficult situation. I hear what the Minister says and welcome the efforts that have been made. I chair Birmingham Education Partnership, so I am aware of the distress and difficulties this is causing in the city. For all those efforts, five or six months into this dispute, schools and communities are still fragmented. The educational environment in which we want young children to learn is not available to them. How optimistic is the Minister that things will be resolved by the time the children come back to school at the start of the autumn term and that they will be able to go to school freely and learn as we would wish? What else will his department do over the coming six weeks to achieve that?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I share the concerns of the noble Baroness about these disputes. I am sure she will know, from human experience, that the longer they drag on the more entrenched people become. We remain optimistic that there will be agreement at Parkfield before the end of term, but I will not make myself a hostage to fortune by guaranteeing it. We are doing everything we can to bring the parties together. In the past few days we have made public statements supporting teachers, particularly in Birmingham, where these issues seem most sensitive. We will become more vocal if we need to and ensure that we give them the support they deserve.

School Exclusion: Timpson Review

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, without sounding complacent, I think it is important to give some perspective to the current exclusion rate. It is about the same as it was 10 years ago; it improved but it has got worse in the last three years. I do not want to paint a picture of there being a crisis. I accept that we are concerned, and we are doing something about it, but it would be wrong to suggest that there is a crisis. Regarding attendance, we have made quite a lot of improvement. The persistent absence rates have dropped quite a lot. Looking again at a 10-year ranking, in 2006-07, 24.9% of secondary schools had persistent absence of more than 10%; that is now down to just under 14% of secondary schools, and that is while raising the bar to make it a harder judgment. So attendance is improving. I do not have the specific information on Charlie Taylor’s work; I am happy to write to the noble Baroness. The Tom Bennett review will be in a similar vein, showing schools best practice and how to manage children in these situations.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the report. I think Edward Timpson is highly regarded across all sides of the House, and this is a thorough piece of work on which we should build. Having said that, I am disappointed in the Government’s response. It seems very woolly, with rather a lot of waffle. The recommendations tend to be about rewriting guidance and setting up a committee. Looking quickly through them, I honestly cannot see much that is new. There is not one big—or even small—idea that I would see as fresh thinking in response to a good report.

In particular—I ask the Minister to have a look—behaviour partnerships were abolished in 2010 by Michael Gove as part of his bonfire of the quangos. As the Minister is setting them up again, perhaps he could look at the good practice followed under the last years of the Labour Government. If my memory serves me right—it may not—I think the Labour Government also had a proposal whereby the examination performance of excluded children stayed for two years with the school from which they had been excluded. That must have been got rid of at some point by the Conservatives or the coalition. Can the Minister reassure us that he will learn from that and will not reinvent the wheel?

My main point is that I am not sure whether or not we are talking about fixed-term exclusions. When we talk about 85% of schools not excluding, that does not include the many schools who have fixed-term exclusions; these run at 500 times more than permanent exclusions at some 2,000 per day. Will the Minister tell us whether what he has said applies to fixed-term exclusions? I am interested in two figures. First, how many children who are eventually permanently excluded have already gone through a series of fixed-term exclusions? I bet it is almost every single one of them. Secondly, does he have the figures on exclusion by type of school—that is, maintained schools and academies?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, asks about the difference between permanent and fixed-term exclusions. She is right; I have been quoting the figures for permanent exclusions, because that is the final sanction that exists for a school.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

I asked how many of the children given fixed-term exclusions were then permanently excluded.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I accept that there is a ladder of escalation, which starts with sanctions that gradually move up in their impact. I disagree slightly with the noble Baroness on the strength of the recommendations in the Timpson report. For me, the stand-out recommendation is number 14:

“DfE should make schools responsible for the children they exclude and accountable for their educational outcomes”.


This has the potential to be a very powerful change, but Timpson has cautioned us to be careful in how we implement it, because of the adverse behaviours that it might create.

Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I share the right reverend Prelate’s concerns about rural schools. We have particular funding pots within the overall formula—sparsity funding, for example—which give a typical small rural primary school an additional £135,000 a year and a small secondary school £175,000. We are committed to the various ongoing training programmes. Only this morning, I was addressing a group of some 80 people involved in professional development training and encouraging them in what they were doing. I absolutely support what the right reverend Prelate has said.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I broadly welcome the announcement. There is a lot in it that offers hope for the future. The challenge will be in implementing it. I think it is overclaimed. I do not think it is the biggest change since teaching became an all-degree profession. Indeed, there are not many individual proposals that have not done the rounds before, so it is worth learning from them. The advanced skills teacher has been redesigned under a different title.

I have two questions. I very much welcome the protected time that will be offered for new teachers. I listened to what the Minister said about the amount of money that will be put into the system. Can he confirm that it will be ring-fenced when it gets to school level? Otherwise, in times of diminishing budgets, it will not get spent on the purpose for which it was intended. Secondly, how is he going to overcome the problem of making excellent schools that are not academies part of the school-led improvement system if he is going to give a lot more power to multi-academy trusts?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I will have to write to the noble Baroness to confirm whether the money will be ring-fenced at school level. Certainly, our preference is to give autonomy to schools, but I will check on it and come back to her. Support is aimed beyond academies at all state schools. Only just over 50% of pupils are in academies today, so it is not our intention to see those still in the local authority system left behind.

Free Schools: Educational Standards

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for bringing the debate to the House. It is good to have an education debate; we do not get as many of them these days as we used to.

I want to put on record the noble Lord’s commitment to the policy. I know that he believes in it and has put a lot of his own resources, effort and ability into trying to make it work. I will say that up front because in the next six and a half minutes, I will not support totally what he said. I also join him in thanking the schools he mentioned that have been successful in the free schools movement. We should welcome every good new school that we can get into the system. We cannot be against more good schools. That is the starting point. However, beyond that, I did not recognise the picture of this policy drawn by the noble Lord.

The title of the debate gives away the problem we have with the Government’s approach to free schools. It invites us to celebrate free schools’ contribution to raising standards. We owe it to the nation to do more than that. We owe it to our nation and its children to be more open-minded, not blind to the weaknesses and faults as well. The problem with free schools is that the Government have been too committed to them from the start and have lost any ability to be neutral or objective about their progress. While I acknowledge the success that there has been, I want to raise the other things that have happened in the free school movement.

Let us be clear what we are talking about when it comes to free schools. They do not exist in statute; they are essentially academies—no more, no less; there is no more legislation. They were set up to bring in new providers and parent-led schools, to increase competition and to promote innovation. Over the years of their existence, not one of them has delivered on the ambitions of their proposers at the start of the free school journey.

Increasingly, new providers are existing MATs. In the past three years of the policy, more than 80% of free schools have been just expansions of existing multi-academy trust schools. That has been at the expense of parent-led schools. The number of parents opening schools has dropped drastically during the past three years. As for competition, free schools will become the default model for the schools system in England. If you open a new school, it will have to be a free school. It is going to be a monopoly; it is a default system; it is not somebody trying to change the system but what every new school will be.

Belonging to an organisation that sponsored free schools, my experience of them is that what we have now is the most tightly controlled, most measured, most weighed, most monitored, most structured and most supported set of schools in the whole schools system. If anyone here has sat around a table discussing the progress of a free school, they will know that you have educational advisers from the DfE, people from the regional schools commission, people from the funding agency and, in the background, people from the New Schools Network. There are more paid bureaucrats around that table than in any other educational situation. I do not mind that. If that is the way to bring about success, let us go for it—but let us not pretend that these schools are free; let us not pretend that they are being allowed to get on with it.

As the noble Lord, Lord Nash, has just said, perhaps the Government should have been even more prescriptive. Gone is the autonomy, gone is the “stand-alone”, gone is the “get on with it”, gone is the “get bureaucracy out of it” and gone is the idea that the centre does not know best; what we have is that the centre apparently does know best and will do what it takes to make sure that those schools thrive. That is fair enough if that is what you are promoting—but for heaven’s sake change the title. These are not free schools, and they are no badge for anyone who believes that schools should be autonomous.

The schools are not without failures—every type of school structure will have them. Eighty-six projects did not start and we spent millions of pounds on them. Forty-two projects that started have closed—we have wasted money—and 15 schools that started have been re-brokered. If this is what we have to spend to find out what works in education, I could defend that, but what I find indefensible is somebody standing up in a debate about free schools and not acknowledging that failure. We need to learn from that failure; we need to know why the Government are spending 19% above value rates for properties in London; we need to know why £8 million was spent on a site for a UTC that never opened; we need to know why more than 50 free schools have closed and kids have had to be sent outside. Again, there is no open analysis or realistic evaluation of the progress that has been made. I shall not go through the costs, but if any local authority had spent so much money to so little effect, as central government has done on some aspects of its free schools, the commissioners would have been through the door. There is no arguing against that.

The problem is that the Government have been blinded to the weaknesses of free schools. They set them up not as a pilot to see what worked, or as an open approach where they asked, “What can we learn to put to the rest of the system?”; they set them up determined that this should be the dominant structure within the English schools system, and the evidence is not there. Where it has been good, it has presented an ideal situation for some schools—a small number of schools —to be incredibly imaginative, and every system needs a place for incubators where innovation can work. I think free schools have offered that to some extent, but they have not proven themselves as a model that should be rolled out so that every school is a free school.

Quite simply, for far too long politicians throughout all parties and generations have looked at school structure as a way of guaranteeing success for every child and every school, and it does not work. It did not work with comprehensives, it did not work with academies, it does not work with free schools and it will not work with any one structure. What works is good leaders, strong teachers, good support and effective governance, and there is nothing about free schools that guarantees more of that. If we are intent on delivering high standards for every child, let us look honestly and openly at what in all parts of our system brings the best leadership, the strongest teaching, the most effective governance and the most support from parents. If we get that right, we will do it. Some of that has been exhibited in some free schools, but it has also been exhibited in a lot of academies, comprehensive schools and local authority maintained schools. That is the problem. Free schools are an interesting experiment but they are not a blueprint for the future of our school system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I rather agree with my noble friend that the Opposition seem to have gone on a journey. When free schools were originally mooted under my noble friend’s tenure we were told that no one was capable of creating one other than the Government. We have put paid to that myth.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

How can the Minister say that when he inherited an academy programme introduced by the Labour Government, which had the noble Lord, Lord Harris, and other people sponsoring schools, not local authorities? It is an inaccurate description of what went on.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

There were 200 out of some 22,000 schools. My noble friend Lord Harris was not a parent. We certainly built on the early foundations that Labour created in the academies programme, but there was not a great deal of evidence in those early 200 of parental involvement in their creation. Specifically, the programme went on after very experienced, dedicated people such as my noble friends Lord Nash and Lord Harris, became involved. They were well beyond parental age at the point.

Schools: Funding

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

That this House takes note of the impact on schools of Her Majesty’s Government’s approach to school funding.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the register of interests as chair of the Birmingham Education Partnership. I suspect that there will be differences of opinion during the debate. I hope there will be and that is as it should be, but I acknowledge and accept that every person in this House, no matter their view on school funding, values education, understands its importance, and would have the highest ambitions for our children and nation. Indeed, that is what makes this such an important topic to debate. We all know of its importance and we all know what happens when we get it wrong.

I also do not think that funding by itself will solve all our problems. I know it depends on how the money is spent, good leadership and good-quality teaching, but without money those things cannot happen. I am not one to say, “Give schools money and everything will be right”, but when I talk to teachers, visit schools and read what is happening I see that there is a crisis out there. Teachers are saying that it is the biggest problem they face. It makes a difference to what and how we can teach children, the pressures on teachers in a very demanding job, and, in the end, the prosperity of our country and the strength of our families and communities.

What is most worrying about this topic is that that sense of crisis and the reality of what is happening in schools is not reflected in what we hear from Ministers. It seems we have a Government who are not yet at the stage of acknowledging that there is a problem. If we achieve nothing else in the debate, if I could hear the Minister say, “I acknowledge that there is a problem and I am going to try to do something about it”, it would be well worth having.

I do not now trust what the Government say about statistics on school funding. On five separate occasions, the UK Statistics Authority has pulled Ministers up for misusing statistics. Let us look to organisations that are neutral and can give us impartial advice about what is happening. The Institute for Fiscal Studies and the National Audit Office say that, after a period of sustained increased funding from the previous Labour Government, they now find that this generation of teachers is the first for 15 years to have to run schools and teach at a time of diminishing budgets. Over 2016 we saw a real-terms drop in funding per pupil in schools of 8%. If you have been a teacher for the last 15 to 20 years you will have seen a 50% increase between 2001 and 2010 under the previous Labour Government, funding held steady and protected by the coalition Government, and an 8% real-terms cut since this Tory Government came in in 2015. Within those groups, some children and some sectors have suffered far more than others. The sector for 16 to 18 year- olds in particular has had a raw deal: down by 8% for them in further education, but in school sixth forms the amount of the cut is 20% in the last few years. That is what people are having to deal with in schools and the impact on the learning of those children can only be imagined.

I also want to draw attention to what is happening in special educational needs. I know from my experience that the money in the high-needs funding block is going nowhere to meet the demands placed on it. The LGA is doing a report at the moment the initial findings of which show a shortfall of £536 million in this financial year. Put that alongside the area where the Government claim they are doing good work—capital funding—and we can see that that is a problem as well. The Government say that they are tackling the problem of shortfall of places and building more schools, but they are actually shifting the money from the maintenance of school buildings for all schools, putting it into pet projects such as free schools and academies, and saying that that is creating the extra places. We have seen the budget for maintenance of schools fall from £4.7 billion to £2.4 billion. But it is worse than that: what has happened with the capital money is that of all the free schools that have opened, 54 have closed. That includes 12 UTCs and some studio schools as well. So even where they have invested money in the creation of new places and building new schools, we find that they have squandered that money. There has been poor stewardship of the money spent. Even the recent annual academy accounts show a £2 million operating debt as well.

This is not a blip or a little problem in schools that has to be dealt with along with everything else that is happening. It is a crisis, both in revenue funding and in capital funding, and there is no hope on the horizon that things will get better. It draws the energy out of what is going on in our schools. It saps the enthusiasm of our school leaders and our teachers. What saps the enthusiasm most is when the teachers hear the Government telling them that there is no problem. All that does is to create mistrust and resentment between politics—our business—and teaching and education, the jobs that we are supposed to be supporting.

This should not be a debate about figures, in truth—about, across the House, whose statistics we can believe. It should not be about trading £1 billion for another £1 billion. It should look at the consequences in schools of that cut in funding. That is what I want to look at. One thing we have to remember is that 80% of money spent on schools is spent on staffing. If you have to find cuts to your budget, it is very tough to do anything but cut the money you spend on teachers, support staff and clerical staff: that is where we have seen the biggest cuts. When the department inquired of teachers what they were doing to manage the cuts in expenditure, they said that they were replacing experienced, highly paid teachers with younger, less experienced teachers. They said that they were putting more teachers on temporary contracts rather than permanent ones, senior staff are teaching more, non-senior staff are losing more of their non-contact time and teaching larger classes, and there is less teaching of non-EBacc subjects. All that not only drains teachers’ energy, it means that the learning experiences that our children get are not as good as they should be.

I looked at what the Government are doing on teacher workload. They have a toolkit for this, a toolkit for that and a bit of advice for the other, but all those good attempts to reduce teacher workload count for nothing if we place more work on teachers because of the funding crisis. It is no good giving them a toolkit to improve communication or a bit of advice as to how to save time on marking if, day by day and week by week, we give them less contact time, more children to teach and more pressures because of less money.

I acknowledge one thing that the Government are doing which we did not take on: to try to change the funding formula. Good luck with that, because it is a job that probably needs doing. But to try to do it with one hand, during a time of making school budgets fall with the other hand, probably makes that nigh on impossible without asking some schools to suffer a great deal. Money matters. All the political parties that we represent have “We pledge more funding” in their manifestos. I have never heard of a competition between the political parties as to how they can raise school standards with less money. That is not a debate we have, so money matters. We pledged money, as did the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. Look at London Challenge and the pupil premium: that shows what can be done if you marry together extra funding of a sizeable amount, target it well and ensure that you work with teachers and school leaders to deliver the best for children. All that is a long, long way from the funding for the “little extras” that came out in the Chancellor’s Budget—but that is the sole response we have had to what is happening at the moment.

I want to remind people about the context in which we are asking schools to work. There is not a generation of schoolteachers of whom more has been asked than the generation in our schools now. Very often, it is we who ask them to do these extra jobs and they pick up the consequences of our policies and decisions in schools. This is the first generation which has been asked to succeed with every child, when previous generations were not. It is schools that pick up the pieces from increasing poverty, broken families and fractured communities. It is schools that have to work out how to bring up the next generation in a world which is globalising rapidly, and how teaching and learning changes with the digital revolution that faces us. Whatever the answers are to all those questions—I do not claim to know them—there needs to be investment in the schools and their teachers, in the fabric of their buildings and the equipment they use. There needs to be thought and investment in time and in space.

Quite frankly, if politics is about choice then the Government are making the wrong choices as far as school funding is concerned. It is never the right choice not to invest in the future, whatever the circumstances. It is never the right choice for business, commerce and industry because their success depends in part on schools getting it right now. It is never the best choice for individuals, families or communities because we know that education can be the key to giving them strength, enabling them to raise their heads and then to not only fulfil their individual potential but be stronger contributors to the world in which they live. We have now seen almost a decade of falling budgets. If your Lordships think about it, that will have been most of some children’s time in school. It is not fair or right that their schooling years should be during a time of diminishing budgets.

What I want to know, and what I think the nation wants to know, from this debate is simply: what are the Government going to do about it? We need to know that they understand the problem and acknowledge the consequences of their decisions and actions. We need to know that they will be champions in government of the teaching profession and all who care within education to try to turn this around. I would like to be reassured about the level of fight taking place as the next spending review approaches, so that there will not be another decade of this happening and children suffering.

I have always thought that education is a joint business, and I think that view would be shared across the House. We all have something to put in because we all get something out. It is up to families and parents, as it is to every citizen and business. There is not a soul without a role to play as a citizen in our country. However, politicians and politics have a role that no one else has. One of their roles is to make sure that our education system is funded well enough to do the things which we ask it to do for individuals, and ensure our country’s prosperity as we go into the future. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who contributed to the debate. I do not think that I have ever been in a debate where there has been universal opposition to the position taken by the Government. Not one Member on either side of the House spoke wholeheartedly in favour of the Government’s approach to schools funding. That if nothing else should make the Government and Ministers think again. Every noble Lord who contributed to this debate has contributed to previous education debates. They have real experience in the real world and they have brought their expertise to our debate today—on SEN, rural schools, smaller schools, teacher shortage and supply, creativity in the broader curriculum, and the knowledge they have as a chair of governors who knows their school well.

I spend some time on that because they, like me, must feel very disappointed that the concerns they brought up on behalf of teachers, pupils, parents and wider society seem to have cut no ice with the Minister. I know that his is a tough job and that he has to defend the Government’s position. But my objective at the start of this debate was to secure some acknowledgement that things are going wrong. I have not heard that, and it is disappointing.

I will not answer all the points, because the Minister spoke for a long time and mentioned a lot of small points. I will take up just two or three. Please do not quote the five to 16 funding. If you are a head in a secondary 11 to 18 school and you have a 20% cut in sixth-form funding, it does you no good to be told by the Minister that the five to 16 funding is not bad. It is that difference between the reality in schools and the rhetoric of Ministers that adds to the pressure on school funding and the crisis it has given us.

Schools do not exist in isolation. Cuts in local authority work, cuts to educational psychology, the increase in poverty, and the lack of money in early years all add to the pressures on schools. I did not hear from the Minister that he understood that—and that concerns me. However, I do think that the Minister is right to offer best practice to the Government. It is easy to laugh at a little idea that a Government Minister puts to schools. I will not do that, because it is right. If we can learn from good tips and hints, there is nothing wrong with that; we should continue to allow one school to learn from another.

However, this debate was not about that. It was not about marginal extras. It was about the fundamental level of funding that goes into our schools—and that was not addressed. The only solution to our funding crisis in schools that the Minister is not prepared to countenance is giving them more money—and that is a problem.

I welcome the debate, and of course I welcome the way in which the Minister listened carefully and the thoroughness with which he tried to answer every issue raised by Members. I am grateful for the extra time he gave us in responding to the debate. It shows his care and concern for the job that he has. I do not doubt for a minute his determination to deliver what he said: high standards for every pupil. I just wish he would work with the rest of us who share his passion so that together we can try to get more funding for schools. If we do not do that, he will find in retrospect that his time in office was more of a disappointment than it might have been.

Motion agreed.

Schools that Work for Everyone Consultation

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey]

And if that does not happen?

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I was just going to finish my answer to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on his question about capital. To put the £50 million sum in perspective, we are spending over £1 billion a year on basic-need increases across the country. I am not saying it is a trivial sum but I do not want people to think that we are literally raiding the pot for ordinary schools. Against that also, the capital allocation for schools in this spending round is £23.5 billion.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, that was a pretty poor Statement and a poor response to the original consultation paper. In the original paper, the Minister talked about selective schools having to help with non-selective education if they were to justify their position. In that consultation paper, he outlined the possibility of a number of sanctions that would take place if grammar schools did not do their bit to help non-selective schools in the area. In the Statement that he has just made, there is no mention of sanctions. If selective schools that are expanding do not play their part in raising standards across their area, will he impose sanctions, as was his intention in the original consultation paper?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, there is no intention to impose sanctions at this stage, but the very fact that we have made a short-term announcement on the allocation of capital is sending a message to the grammar school sector that if it does not play by the unwritten rules of increasing its access, it will not be able to carry on with any future expansion. I think this follows the approach that we have taken with universities, with the very big programme of universities spending nearly £200 million a year on widening access, and similar principles apply in this situation.