Education and Social Mobility

Debate between Lord Austin of Dudley and John Redwood

Tuesday 22nd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood]

I do not think that we will get a better team by training them less, and no longer giving them any kind of elite education. I think that Opposition Members are being very obtuse.

Let me try a different argument. The Opposition’s second argument against grammar schools is that in Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, where we have some good grammar schools, all the other schools must be suffering. Opposition Members write off and write down the many excellent comprehensive schools in areas that have access to grammar school places, in a quite unrealistic and unpleasant way.

I know my own area better than Buckinghamshire. We do not have any grammar schools in my constituency, but there are two excellent grammar schools just over the border in Reading, a girls’ school and a boys’ school, which take some of our brightest and academically most gifted pupils from the Wokingham area. Our comprehensive schools in Wokingham also contain great, academically gifted children. Those children, at the top of those schools, do not have to compete with the children at the grammar, and they go on to compete very successfully and get good places at elite universities. Opposition Members should not write off those schools, or pretend that they are some kind of failed secondary modern.

I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) reminded us that there are some very good secondary modern schools whose pupils achieve great things. My hon. Friend himself achieved great things before coming to the House, and some will consider it a great achievement that he is in the House now. I think that that shows that no one should write off any whole category of school. As an Opposition Member pointed out in a more honest moment, what really matters in a school is the talent of the teaching force and the good will and working spirit of the pupils. The two play off each other. That can be found in a good comprehensive, and it can be found in a good grammar school.

The Opposition must understand that we are not trying to create a series of schools for failures. We want to have great schools for everyone. We believe that selecting some pupils on the basis of academic ability and giving them elite academic training can make sense for them, but it does not write off the other schools.

[Ian Austin]

I am not at all opposed to giving the brightest pupils an elite education. That is not why I am worried about grammar schools. I am worried about grammar schools because they do not solve the central problems that our education system faces. Michael Wilshaw has said that we have “a mediocre education system”. When it comes to the vast majority of pupils, we are falling behind out international competitors. In a modern economy in which the innovation sector is creating jobs at 30 times the rate of the rest of the economy, we need to exploit the talents of all our young people. That is why I am worried about grammar schools.

[John Redwood]

I opened my speech with exactly that comment. I think that that is common ground. However, selecting some people who are good at football or good at academic subjects does not prevent us from providing a good education for everyone else. If we want to have more Nobel prize winners in the future, we should bear in mind that they are likely to be attending the great universities in our country. Do we not want to feed those great universities with the best possible talent from our schooling system, and should not those talented people have been given an education that stretches them and takes them further along the road to great work before they reach the universities? The most successful people at university have often had an extremely good education beforehand. They are self-starters, and understand the importance of that.

Living Standards

Debate between Lord Austin of Dudley and John Redwood

Monday 5th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Ian Austin]

What advice would the right hon. Gentleman give to a constituent of his, earning perhaps £42,000 or £42,500, who has three children, is working hard, getting on in life and wants to do better, but who is offered a pay rise that would take them into the 40p tax band? They would then face the difficult choice between taking a promotion that they have worked hard to get and losing thousands of pounds in child benefit. What would he advise them to do?

[Mr Redwood]

That is a very good example of the problem one can get into, and that is why I wish my right hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench every success in dealing with what we can all see is a problem, but I am not recommending to them that they give up and say that somebody on £200,000 a year should still be able to get full child benefit. That is not the right answer, and I should hope that Labour might sympathise with that proposition and agree, but I am grateful that some Opposition Members are now coming round to my view that high marginal rates of tax and of benefit withdrawal, at all levels of income, are a disincentive.

Just as Government Front Benchers are rightly trying to tackle the very serious problem at the lower end, perhaps with some support from Labour, they should have some sympathy for people in the middle of the income scale, where the situation can be equally unpleasant and difficult for families struggling to meet their bills. Sometimes Opposition Members forget that, although people in my constituency tend to have a higher average income than many of the average incomes in their constituencies, my constituents’ housing costs, their travel costs and other factors in their cost of living mean that they need higher incomes in order to have the same living standard as those whose houses are half the price or less, because housing is a very big component.

The Labour party has rightly said that it would be wonderful if we could tax the banks more, and I again find myself in agreement with that. It is an immediately attractive proposition. We all know that banks are pretty unpopular, and we like to think of them as very rich, so it would be good if we could tax them more. Unfortunately, Labour is wrong to suggest that the Government have just offered another tax break to some banks by cutting the marginal rate of corporation tax. The reason we are getting so little tax out of them is nothing to do with a small drop in the corporation tax rate; it is that two of the biggest banks, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds HBOS, are loss-making, so it does not matter what corporation tax rate we set, because they are not going to pay a penny of it. That is a disgrace, but it is where we have got to because of the disasters and problems in bank management over recent years.

Worse still, we are in the position whereby, if those banks do start to make money—it is true that the losses have been much reduced in the past year and they might start to make money—they will not be about to pay any tax, because they have such huge inherited losses from the period under Labour when they plunged into massive deficit and got into a disastrous position.