Oral Answers to Questions

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Dinenage]

I challenge all the things the hon. Lady said. We are not stripping funding from nursery schools; the supplementary funding of £55 million a year is part of the record investment in childcare of £6 billion a year by 2020. That is more than any Government have ever spent.

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

With respect, I think the Minister is missing the point. This is not simply a question of childcare; it is a question of quality early education, and that is about narrowing the gap between the most disadvantaged and the rest. Could she go further and tell the House what maintained nursery schools, which employ teachers and other staff who want to carry on working for them, will do after this two-year period? It is no good schools knowing that they have security for two years—they need more than that.

[Caroline Dinenage]

I would say that we have made 6 billion points about how important we regard the sector to be. The hon. Lady is right that it does need to know about its future, but it does not make sense to make decisions about the future funding of maintained nursery schools before we have consulted on what that future should be. We will be consulting on that future, and we will make an announcement shortly.

Grammar and Faith Schools

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy]

Many children and young people, not just in the right hon. Lady’s area but around the country, will be extremely disappointed by that response. The idea that in 2016 any child is better off by being segregated and branded a failure at the age of 11, or that we are better off as a country with that system, is particularly backward-looking.

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent opening speech. Is she aware that Buckinghamshire has the largest gap in educational attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their peers of any borough in the country? Is that a record that the House should applaud?

[Lisa Nandy]

It is absolutely not a record that any Member of the House should applaud, as the chief inspector made clear only a few days ago.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Carmichael]

I thank the hon. Lady very much for that interesting intervention. She is right about two things. The first is the specific point about children’s mental health being put under pressure in certain circumstances. However, there is also the wider issue of the mental health of young people, and we need to think carefully about that, because there is evidence that the number of children being affected by mental health issues is rising, and rising too fast. That is something that the Committee, which I note the hon. Lady is not a member of, will consider in due course.

I want to finish this section of my speech, on Professor Jesson’s observation. If grammar schools are introduced as new schools, they really must make a contribution to surrounding schools and feeder schools. One way for us to achieve that—rather than simply saying that we will punish grammar schools because they are not doing something we want to do and that those punishments will include, for example, no right to expand further—is to say that such schools should be part of a multi-academy trust. If they are going to be new schools, and if we insist on having them, they should be absolutely responsible for, and indeed charged with the task of, making sure that the schools around them are really improved through direct action.

[Lucy Powell]

I thank the Chairman of the Select Committee for being so generous in allowing interventions. As I am not going to mention this in my speech in a moment, may I ask whether he is aware of the example of Bright Futures—just one of a number of examples—which emanated from a very good grammar school in the Trafford local authority area? It was then expanded to take on other schools, especially those with a high proportion of disadvantaged children, but it has palpably failed to turn those schools around, because it found that its expertise in dealing with highly able, highly advantaged children is not transferable to some more disadvantaged areas.

[Neil Carmichael]

I am aware of the goings on in Trafford. The Select Committee went up there to look not at grammar schools or any other schools but at aspects of child protection. However, I did notice what was going on, and I take the hon. Lady’s point.

The Committee noted that the current selective system favours children whose parents can afford to pay for tutoring, and that observation is absolutely right. One witness told us that entrance tests presuppose that a child’s ability is fixed, and we all know, if we have children, that that just is not the case. We have to have a testing system that takes into account the fact that children develop at different paces and in different ways, and one of the many problems with the testing systems we have had in the past is that they do not do that.

The evidence suggests that it would be extremely difficult to create a tutor-proof test, and we explored that in some detail in the Committee this morning. One suggestion is to bump up children on free school meals by a certain number of points to equalise things. That effectively proves that any test can be fixed to achieve any aim, so we have to be really careful about how we shape such a testing process. The Government really have to look at how a test would be shaped and calibrated to achieve the outcomes they suggest they wish to see. That test would be further complicated if the Government would, as they have suggested in the Green Paper, like different age groups to go through it. We could be talking about not just 11-year-olds, but 14-year-olds or 16-year-olds, for example, so different tests might be required for different years, and that is something that will need to be considered.

The Minister told us that the Government are

“trying to end the correlation between disadvantaged backgrounds and poor performance…we want to break that link and that is what is driving our reforms.”

We, on the other hand, emphasised that what is important, beyond more choice, is improving outcomes. We have to be very careful about this. Outcomes matter most, and we should be using them to measure the schools system, rather than simply saying, “Aha, there’s plenty of choice.” Choice is a mechanism, not an outcome, and we must not confuse the two. If we do, we lose sight of what is most important, which is equipping our young people to leave school, leave college and benefit from the opportunities that they ought to be benefiting from.

I asked the Department for Education’s chief scientific adviser about this issue. I always like asking such people questions because they can, in normal circumstances, isolate evidence, have control periods, and get down to what is really making the difference—although one can hardly do that in a school, as he acknowledged. He told us that this policy,

“like all policies, requires improvement”.

I thought that was helpful, because it does, but he also acknowledged the consultation process that we are now going through. It is absolutely right that we have a period of consultation on this proposal and on other aspects of the education system.

The Committee heard some powerful evidence from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which was already in the news because of the forecasts connected to Brexit and the implications of falling taxable income. The institute told us something we already know—that the economy is completely different from what it was several decades ago. The sorts of young people we need are not academics and workers but we need them all to have skills. We know that because the evidence shows that we can produce only half the number of engineers we need each and every year and that one of the driving forces of migration has been a shortage of skills in our economy. We will all be aware of firms or professional bodies in our constituencies that cannot recruit the people that they need. We therefore know that the institute is right.

That is why our education system must reach into every home with excellence. This is about making sure that every school can safely take on a pupil and guarantee them a first-class education. It is not about lifting some pupils out of a system because they are of one type or have a certain advantage. It is about making sure that we provide opportunities for all children—excellence everywhere, which is, I think, the title, or at least part of the title, of a White Paper that we have considered. Let me reinforce that point by referring to the work of the OECD, which has already been cited. We know that the OECD likes autonomy, because it has told our Committee so several times, but it is not keen on selectivity. If we value the work that that independent organisation does in making international comparisons—I certainly do—then we should take some account of what it says. It is not particularly complimentary about the idea of having pupil selection, and we should remember that.

As I have said before, we need to have a large number of options for young people at secondary level. I describe that as fluidity—the fluidity for a young person to make the choices that they might want to make as they start thinking about their career options. That is why I am so keen on, for example, university technical colleges. It was terrible that during the ’60s and ’70s only 2% of any year group could get into a technical school. It is necessary to have good secondary schools in groups, so that they can help each other and give young people the opportunity to choose the direction of travel that suits them, on the basis of their aptitudes and ambitions, their knowledge of the economy and their employment opportunities. That is life fulfilment at its best.

It is really important that we link those things to what I said at the beginning about social mobility and economic productivity. Without both those objectives working effectively together and supporting each other, we will not make a success of anything in our country because we will be wasting talent and abandoning people. Instead, we must make sure that we use all our talents and do not leave people behind. That is what the education system should be about, that is why we are having this debate, and why the Minister is wise to have this consultation period. I hope that he responds to some of the points I have made.

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am very pleased to speak in this debate. It is the first opportunity I have had to speak in an education debate since I resigned from the shadow education brief. Almost a year ago, I led opposition to Government plans to open a so-called annexe of a grammar school in Kent. I cannot quite believe that in 2016 Britain we are seriously contemplating a return to selection at 11, given all the progress in education that we have made over the past 20 years.

Before I get to the meat of this debate, and why I believe that grammar schools will take backwards the agenda of opportunity for everybody that the Prime Minister says she supports, I want to mention social mobility, which the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), spoke about. Too often, social mobility is thought of in terms of plucking the one or two lucky ones out of disadvantage and taking them to the top—the “council house to the Cabinet table” journey. This understanding is really unhelpful when looking at the deep-seated challenges that our country’s education system faces and the complex policy solutions required to overcome them. Social mobility is, and should be, about people, starting as children, being able to make economic and social progress, unconfined by the disadvantages they begin with and achieving to their full potential.

The barriers to this in Britain today are manifold. In education, as the hon. Gentleman said, the long tail of underachievement and the educational attainment gap between the disadvantaged and their peers, which is now widening, not narrowing, under this Government, should be the focus of public policy, as it has been for the past two decades. A concerted strategy for narrowing the skills gap and the productivity gap would boost social mobility for the many. Breaking down the social barriers in accessing opportunities in work and in life is also key. None of these fundamental and deep-rooted problems is addressed by a policy that focuses entirely on the already high attainers and the already advantaged getting a more elite education. The Prime Minister says that she wants opportunity for everyone and every child to be able to get as far as their talents and hard work will take them. I agree with those aims, as would, I am sure, all of us in this House today, but her means are entirely wrong. Not only would the reintroduction of grammar schools push this agenda backwards and be “retrograde”, as the chief inspector of schools describes it, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) said, the policies and interventions that do work will also go backwards under this Government.

Let us now look at both these issues. First, on academic selection and the reintroduction of grammar schools, the evidence is clear, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and others have said. Internationally, the systems in countries that make greater gains for children in the bottom half of the income distribution are comprehensive, not selective. That is why the OECD has concluded that countries with selective education systems perform less well on average than countries with more comprehensive systems. In England, the highest performing boroughs are comprehensive. London, for example, outperforms both selective areas and the national average in its bottom and top results at GCSE. By contrast, the attainment gap is worse than the national average in eight out of nine fully selective areas.

[Mr Gibb]

May I point out to the hon. Lady that seven London boroughs are either fully or partially selective?

[Lucy Powell]

These are figures that the House of Commons of Library has produced for me today on grammar schools and fully selective areas, and the Minister will be aware of them.

In Kent and Medway, poorer children lag behind while richer children move ahead, and the losses at the bottom are much larger than the gains at the top. That pattern is a feature of selective areas in England. Let us compare fully selective Kent with comprehensive London. Just 27% of children eligible for free school meals in Kent achieve five good GCSEs, while the national figure is 33% and the figure for London is 45%. I have to ask the Government yet again: why not focus on sharing the good practice of London, rather than spreading the poorer practice of Kent?

Furthermore, disadvantaged children in selective areas do worse for the rest of their lives. The practice of coaching children to pass the 11-plus in selective areas is rife, as we have heard. That is why the proportion of disadvantaged children at grammar schools is so extremely and embarrassingly low—just 2.6% of kids on free school meals attend grammar schools. Overall, grammars admit four to five times as many children who went to independent and prep schools than children who are eligible for free school meals.

That is why Lord David Willetts, the former Conservative Minister, has described grammar schools as an

“arms race of private tuition for rich parents”.

Any parent would understand why that is the case. Of course most parents would want their children to go to a school full of clever children where their social networks would be developed, where it is easier to recruit and retain teachers and where success helps to breed further success. However, the majority of their kids will not get in. To suggest that the very existence of grammar schools does not disrupt the wider education system and outcomes for everybody else—the 80% who do not get in—is plain wrong. That is why, in today’s papers, school leaders in Conservative Surrey have said that they are vehemently opposed to grammar schools. They echo the many concerns raised by others about the impact of creaming off the brightest and the best and stigmatising the rest.

We, as policymakers, should be leading the debate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan has said, we should be shouting from the rooftops about how great many more of today’s schools are. The top-performing comprehensives, which take in many thousands more poorer children than the grammar schools do, are just as good as, if not better than, the best grammars. Those comprehensive schools provide opportunity, stretch and good outcomes for all children, not just for a few. As I said at the start of my remarks, it is particularly important in today’s world that social networks and community cohesion should be available to everybody, and comprehensives offer those things.

I am really proud of the fact that I went to a local comprehensive school in Manchester. In fact, my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan attended the same school. But hon. Members should be under no illusion simply because we have made it this far. In the era when we attended that school—Parrs Wood High School—too many children were failed. We had some great teachers, but education was poorly resourced and too many children were allowed to slip through the net.

I am proud that my eldest child now attends the same school. It is a truly comprehensive school, in which 40% of kids are on free school meals, and it achieved its best ever results this year, with 72% of children gaining five A* to C grades in subjects including English and maths. Like many of the best comprehensives, it has a strong gifted and talented programme—pretty much dropped by this Government when they came in—and fluid streaming and setting in many subjects. That is what the best schools do: they stretch all kids as they develop and create a school-wide ethos of success and achievement.

Even though education was not so great in my day, it mattered hugely to my peers and to kids from all backgrounds that they could mix socially and academically, raising aspiration and attainment for everybody. The dozens of Manchester school kids whom I meet every week can see that I went to a local comprehensive school, just as they do. They can see that there is no barrier to what they can achieve. What a damning verdict it would be on our country if we went back to an era when we told four out of every five children at the age of 11 that there was a cap on their potential and that only the grammar school kids could go far.

I could give Members many examples of outstanding secondary schools across Manchester today that are delivering real progress for huge numbers of disadvantaged kids: Wright Robinson College, Trinity High School, Manchester Enterprise Academy and Whalley Range High School—the list could go on. That is why the Education Policy Institute found that the overall improvements in education over the last 20 years, including the sponsored academy programme, have had a much more significant impact on attainment among disadvantaged children than any expansion of grammar schools could possibly have.

We are all sitting here and asking the same question: why are the Government proposing to bring back grammar schools, when the evidence is so clear? One can only assume that the decision is based on ideology and not on sound policy. In pursuit of this ideology, Ministers have scrabbled together a pretty flimsy Green Paper and cherry-picked a few bits of—I am sorry for the pun—selective evidence. First, they cling to research that shows that the tiny number of children on free school meals who get into grammar schools do better than those who do not. What a deeply dubious argument. Not only is that tiny number not comparable with the huge number of children who are not at grammars, but, by definition, those few children are already high attainers at key stage 2. If we look at the top attainers at key stage 2 from all backgrounds, we see that they do just as well at the best comprehensives as they do at grammar schools.

[Mr Gibb]

The point I was trying to make earlier was that that is not the case. Of the children who leave primary school having achieved level 5 in the key stage 2 SATS, 78% of those who attend grammar schools go on to get the EBacc, but only 52% of those who go to a non-selective school achieve the EBacc. So those children do not achieve as highly in non-selective schools as they do in selective schools.

[Lucy Powell]

If the Minister is basing an entire, huge change in education public policy on the narrow measure of modern foreign languages at GCSE, good luck to him. As he knows, we cannot compare a tiny number of pupils—I think it is 3,000—who are on free school meals in grammar schools with the tens of thousands of high achieving children on free school meals in other schools. Schools in which three or four children out of 700 are on free school meals face a completely different challenge from that faced by schools such as most of those in my constituency, where 70% or 80% of kids are on free school meals. The challenge for the latter schools in educating children on free school meals is significantly greater. The Minister is not comparing like with like, and he knows it.

Those who are not high achievers at 11—the vast majority of children, who do not get that level 5—do better in comprehensive systems than in selective ones. The Government also argue that by changing the nature of selection and somehow making getting into grammar schools tutor-proof will solve the problems. We have already heard how difficult that is, but I beg to differ in any case. If the Government are pushing forward with this policy on that basis, why not enforce a requirement on today’s grammar schools to take a larger number of children on free school meals? They should do that first and prove their point, if they are so confident of their argument, and then they should come back to the House in two or three years’ time and show us that it is possible to narrow the gap in selective areas.

The Prime Minister’s final straw in justifying the policy was that

“it is wrong that we have a system in this country where a law prevents the opening or expansion of good schools.”—[Official Report, 19 October 2016; Vol. 615, c. 806.]

She seems to see no irony whatsoever in the fact that her Government has banned the opening of good schools by anybody other than a free school sponsor, which has led to the school place crisis and a system that is in utter chaos.

I almost find it depressing that we again have to rehearse these arguments when the overwhelming evidence is clear. The evidence base for policies and interventions that work and that tackle the educational attainment gap has also become much clearer. Let us recap what they are: quality in early years, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West said; a deep pool of excellent teachers; and adequate resources targeted at closing the gap and providing opportunity for all. I will look at what is happening in each of those areas under this Government.

For early years, yes, more resources have gone in, as the importance of affordable childcare becomes a political imperative and an economic necessity. I welcome the focus on enabling more parents to work, but the critical issue of quality early education in narrowing the gap has taken a backward step. We know that by the age of five, the developmental gap between disadvantaged children and their peers is already very clear—it is equivalent to at least 15 months—yet what is happening today is the opposite of what is needed to close the gap. Remarkably, in many parts of the country, after years of focus by the previous Labour Government and many councils, we have some of the highest-quality early years provision in some of the most deprived communities—the silver bullet of education—through many maintained nursery schools and free places in school nurseries. Yet in an attempt to deliver its pledge of 30 hours free childcare for working parents—by definition, they are more likely to be better off—the Government are prohibiting councils from investing in quality or subsidising places for non-working parents. I could go into many more reasons why the quality of early years provision is going backwards.

As hon. Members have mentioned, there is a growing teacher supply crisis in this country today. Unless urgent action is taken to address this acute problem, any other education policy is meaningless and will fail. We all know that the kids who pay the highest price when teacher supply falls, and therefore quality falls, are those who are least advantaged and least able to help themselves at home.

Finally, on resources, there have been welcome increases in education budgets during the past 20 years. Schools have been able to use additional targeted interventions, such as the pupil premium, to level the playing field in everything from one-to-one tuition and support to paying for uniforms, music lessons and school trips for kids who would not otherwise be able to afford them. However, I know from talking to heads in my area that with the biggest cuts to school budgets in a generation—about 8% during this Parliament—it is exactly such support that is going first.

Any Government who purport to have an interest in educational equality and social mobility must look seriously and quickly at these pressing issues, before we even get to those involving technical education and skills, and access to jobs. Such an agenda would keep any Minister busy, so why, after six months of unnecessary distraction with the forced academisation agenda, which has now been dropped, are Ministers creating yet another unnecessary upheaval in school structures? This time, support for their proposals is even more narrow, the evidence base even more flimsy and the outcomes even more divisive. It is time for the Government to drop these damaging proposals and get back to the task of investing in early years education, addressing the teacher supply crisis and stopping the harmful cuts to school budgets.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kate Green]

I will be very honest with the hon. Gentleman: I do not know. I just feel that a system that says to parents, “Don’t bother putting your child forward because they have no chance of succeeding,” is not a very good system either. What that headteacher told me gives the lie to what he suggests. She said that parents felt under pressure to put their child forward for the assessment even when they knew that they were unlikely to succeed. The disappointment is being compounded by a great deal of wasted effort and pain. He is right about the complexities around who applies and what happens when they do, but there is something very troubling about a graph that shows that only children from the richest parts of the borough have a high chance of entry into grammar schools. I suspect that their having supportive parents, and lots of assets in their home to support their learning through educational toys, reading, educational trips and leisure activities and so on, is the reason why they have a higher chance of getting into grammar schools. I do not negate what he says, but I strongly suspect that it is those wider social factors and family resources that dispose children from the richer parts of the boroughs to have a higher chance of entering grammar schools.

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech about her experiences in Trafford, but further to the intervention from the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen), is she aware that the more selective an area—the higher the concentration of grammar schools—the wider the attainment gap? Conservative Members like to argue that if only there were more grammar schools, more poorer children would attend them, but that does not stack up against the evidence.

[Kate Green]

Headteachers in my borough believe that if there were more grammar schools, by definition there would be more secondary modern-equivalent schools, too, and that for every grammar school we create, we will have to create four secondary moderns, unless the ratios of children in grammar and non-grammar schools are to change.

The Minister indicated that there would be a range of different schools available to students, such as technical schools or schools with different specialisms, and I welcome that, but we have had the latter for many years, under the academy system introduced by Labour. I already have specialist sports, science and art academies in my constituency. We do not have to overlay that with academic selection to ensure a different emphasis in the education that children receive, and we must not use division to exacerbate the attainment gap.

I want to speak about a group of children who really lose out in Trafford: children with special educational needs and disabilities, who have not been mentioned much this afternoon. In a written answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) on 2 November, the Minister appeared to say that the Government were not tracking the number of SEND children in grammar schools. I am surprised if that is the case. If I misunderstood the thrust of his answer, I would very much welcome his correcting me. I am certainly disturbed if we are not following the engagement of those children and their experience in the selective system.

I can tell the Minister and the House that the numbers of children with special educational needs and disabilities in grammar schools in Trafford are shockingly low. Based on the May 2016 school census figures, we had a grammar school population in my borough of 7,539 children, 224 of whom were receiving SEN support, and just 20 had education, health and care plans or statements in place—just 20 out of more than 7,500 kids. I have seen some figures subsequently that suggest that the numbers could be even lower now.

In practice, therefore, the selective system is clearly not working and not serving SEND children in our borough. The system is not working for them. It does not work for them in a number of different ways. First, for the children and their families, the entrance exam process is very stressful—compounded, I must say, in Trafford by the fact that each grammar school sets its own entrance exam. There is not a common 11-plus across the borough—each school has its own tests—so children sit, and quite often fail, not just one, but two, three or four tests. On top of that, they will have received intensive tutoring in advance of taking those tests, where their parents can afford it, that starts for many children from the age of nine or even younger, putting incredible stress on those families and children in preparation for those tests.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) on securing the debate, which is very timely, and on her impassioned speech.

Labour is obviously committed to an education system for everyone, not just a select few, and we will oppose this regressive policy of grammar school expansion every step of the way. The Prime Minister spoke about delivering for everyone, but what matters is what she does, and her actions reveal the Government’s true colours: working in the interests of the few while everyone else is left behind; in one breath talking of creating a “great meritocracy”, and in the next announcing a return to grammar schools.

However, it is not just Opposition Members who oppose the policy. Grammar schools will not improve the lives of the many. As the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) has just pointed out, it is not desirable to fail children at the age of 11. Even the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that rejecting the stale old grammars debate was a “key test” of whether the Conservative party was fit for government. He described the debate as “backward looking”, “completely delusional”, and “an electoral albatross”. He rightly pointed out that parents wanted us to do something about the standards in many of the 3,000 secondary schools, rather than tying ourselves in knots over the return of grammar schools.

The chief inspector of schools, Michael Wilshaw, has said:

“The notion that the poor stand to benefit from the return of grammar schools strikes me as quite palpable tosh and nonsense—and is very clearly refuted by the London experience.”

A number of Members have alluded to that experience today. The implementation of the London challenge fund revolutionised education in the capital, but, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan, other schemes, such as Greater Manchester’s, were cut in 2010 as a result of austerity measures.

The Conservative Chair of the Education Select Committee, the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), who spoke so well today, told Radio 4’s “The Westminster Hour” recently:

“We have serious issues about social mobility, in particular white working-class young people”

—that, too, was mentioned by the hon. Member for Southport—

“and I don’t think that having more grammar schools is going to help them.”

Lord Willetts, the former Universities Minister, who is now the chair of the think-tank the Resolution Foundation, said that he had not changed his views since the Conservatives were in opposition and that the evidence suggested that they had failed to help disadvantaged children.

Fewer than 3% of children on free school meals attend grammar schools. My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) spoke eloquently about social mobility in that context. Only today, as we have heard, every headteacher in Surrey signed a letter to the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State opposing the expansion of grammar schools. The Government, however, are simply not listening, even though there is no evidence to support the policy.

I mentioned austerity a little earlier. According to the National Union of Teachers and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, England’s schools are experiencing the largest real-terms funding cuts for more than a generation. As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan, schools face unprecedented pressures, and, as we heard from the hon. Member for Stroud, the Government have yet to announce when they will consult on the fair funding formula. In real terms, schools will lose a huge amount of money, rising to £2.5 billion a year by 2020, and 92% of schools will have their funding cut. The average cut for primary schools will be £96,500, and the average cut for secondary schools will be £290,000. The average loss per primary school pupil will be £401, and the average loss per secondary school pupil will be £365. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that school budgets will have fallen by 8% over the course of this Parliament. The budget was protected only in cash terms, rather than in real terms, so the schools budget is at the mercy of rising pressures, pupil numbers and the impact of inflation on true value.

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech on the issues facing schools today. On the budget, is he aware of the impact of the issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) about fewer children now being in receipt of free school meals and therefore the pupil premium? As a result, the budgetary pressures are greatest on schools in the most deprived areas, and the families themselves are often no better off despite not requiring free school meals and the pupil premium.

[Mike Kane]

That is an excellent point. Schools in poorer areas are certainly feeling the budgetary pressures. Traditionally, we had a system of subsidiarity in education funding, but this Government are trying to pull that away. On top of the figures I have just given, schools are now worried about being further punished in the fair funding formula that the Government have yet to consult on.

The freedom to practise faith and to educate children in a faith—or not—of our choosing is one of the cornerstones of the free and diverse democratic society we enjoy. The right hon. Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman) made a strong defence of faith and faith schools in our system. The grammar school row has been a distraction from the lifting of the 50% cap rule on faith schools. This policy was brought in by the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove). One of his first acts as Education Secretary was to require all new schools of a religious character to be open to admitting 50% of pupils from outside their faith. The measure was aimed primarily at Muslim schools, but paradoxically it had almost no impact on them. The right hon. Lady alluded to this point when she talked about the situation in Blackburn. This measure did, however, prevent the expansion of other faith schools, which has led to real shortages and a lack of choice in many parts of the country. The policy has been an abject failure. Governments must consider more sensible approaches to integration, such as establishing effective twinning arrangements with schools of different faiths, considering setting up mixed-faith academy trusts, and considering that a member of a different faith or none can sit on a governing body.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for School Standards (Mr Nick Gibb)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) on securing this welcome and important debate on a crucial issue facing our country.

The Government are determined to deliver the good school places this country needs. Since 2010, more than 1.4 million more pupils are in good or outstanding schools, and we have created over half a million new school places in that period, in direct contradiction to the last Labour Government, who cut 200,000 primary school places at a time when the birth rate was increasing.

Yet too often, parents do not have the choice of a good school place for their child. In 65 local authorities, fewer than half of children have access to a good or outstanding secondary school within three miles of their home. For these pupils, the chance of getting the best education depends not on talent or hard work, but on where they live and how much money their parents have.

The focus of the Government under this Administration and the previous one has been on driving up standards in schools, so that every child receives the education they need to reach their potential. Thanks to the hard work of hundreds of thousands of teachers and the reforms we have introduced over the past six years, our school system has improved dramatically.

The Government have reformed the primary curriculum, so that it is on a par with the best in the world. Evidence-based teaching practice such as “maths mastery” and “systematic synthetic phonics” is revolutionising the way primary pupils are being taught maths and how to read. This year, as a result of our reforms, 147,000 more year 1 pupils are on-track to becoming fluent readers than in 2012.

[Lucy Powell]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Gibb]

I am happy to give way the shadow shadow Secretary of State.

[Lucy Powell]

The Minister is highly amusing. On a more serious point, I am sure I will disagree with much in his speech, but I have to take issue with him if he is coming to this House to talk about this year’s SATs results. Is he pleased that after the chaos and confusion he has caused in this year’s SATs, at key stage 2 we saw a drop in the proportion of those meeting national expectations from over 80% to just 53%? Is he happy with that appalling drop in results?

[Mr Gibb]

The standards are significantly higher, and schools are raising their game and adapting to the new significantly higher standards. Some 66% of primary school pupils reach the expected standard in the reading tests and 70% reach the expected standard in maths. The hon. Lady is right that the combined reading, writing and maths result came to 53% but that is for the first year of the significantly more demanding SATs, based on a significantly more demanding national curriculum that puts our school system on a par with the best education systems in the world. That is the way to prepare young people for life in modern Britain and life in a globalised competitive world.

[Lucy Powell]

Many parents and teachers listening will be aghast at that. I give the Minister one more opportunity to apologise to teachers and parents for the fact that the Government did not embed those changes properly and did not give enough time to teachers and that the poor kids who have just left year 6 have now been branded as not reaching the national expectation. There is no difference from the children or the teaching of the year before, but because of the difference he personally has made, those results have dropped by 30%. Will he apologise for that?

[Mr Gibb]

But the children are better educated as a consequence of a national curriculum that is more demanding and that requires children to become fluent readers and to understand grammar, punctuation and spelling, and to do long division and long multiplication instead of chunking and the grid method. Children will leave primary school better educated—more fluent readers and more fluent in arithmetic—as a consequence of our reforms.

These reforms do take time to embed, however. We published that new curriculum in 2013, and it became law in September 2014, but of course it will take some schools longer than others to adapt to it. But one thing I am sure of is that teachers up and down this country are conscientious; they are working hard and are responding very well to a brilliant, more demanding new curriculum.

In secondary education, we have ended grade inflation and empowered teachers and headteachers to deal with poor behaviour. We have also removed GCSE equivalents and prioritised the teaching of core academic subjects, so that more children are taught the knowledge they need to flourish. But we need to do more. There are still more than 1 million children in schools that are not good enough, and that is why we are consulting on a range of measures to look at more ways to increase the number of good school places. We want to tap into the knowledge and expertise of this country’s world-leading universities and independent schools. We want to remove the restrictive regulations that are preventing more children from going to a high-quality faith school. We also want to end the ban on opening new grammar schools.

Faith schools make up around a third of all mainstream schools in England. As the Second Church Estates Commissioner, my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman) said, the Church has 4,700 schools. Faith schools are more likely than non-faith schools to be rated as good or outstanding, with 89% of primary faith schools reaching those standards. The current rule, designed to promote inclusion by limiting the proportion of pupils that oversubscribed new faith free schools can admit on the basis of faith, has not worked to combat segregation. Worse, this burdensome regulation has become a barrier to some faith groups opening new schools. Most markedly, it is preventing the establishment of new Catholic schools. The absurdity of the current rule is exposed when we consider that Catholic schools are more ethnically diverse than other faith schools, more likely to be located in deprived communities and more likely to be rated good or outstanding by Ofsted. There is growing demand for them in this country. If this restrictive regulation is removed, the Catholic Church hopes to open up to 45 new schools by 2020, and the Church of England has said that it hopes to open up to 100 new schools in a similar timeframe.

With this greater freedom will come strict rules to ensure that every new faith school operates in a way that supports British values. We will also explore ways to use the school system to promote greater integration within our society, such as requiring new faith schools to establish twinning arrangements with other schools not of their faith. The Government are also consulting on lifting the ban on more grammar school places being created. Ofsted rates 99% of grammar school places as good or better, and 82% are rated outstanding. In a school system where over a million pupils are not getting the education they need and deserve, it cannot be right to prevent more good and outstanding selective school places from being created.

[Lucy Powell]

On that point, will the Minister look at the ban imposed by his Government on good and outstanding local authority schools opening new schools? Will he also ensure that maintained nursery schools— 98% of which are also good or outstanding—can open new schools? That, too, has been banned by his Government.

[Mr Gibb]

We want a diverse education system. At the moment, 40% of secondary schools and nearly 80% of primary schools are still run by local authorities. We want to open that up to create a more diverse system of education with more providers coming in. That includes providers such as the West London Free School, which the Opposition have severely criticised. It is providing very high-quality education. There are other examples of such a diverse system bringing in new providers, establishing parent groups and enabling teachers to establish their own schools. This is raising academic standards right across the system. We are proposing to scrap the ban on new grammar schools and to allow them to open where parents want them, with strict conditions to ensure that they improve standards for pupils across the school system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lucy Powell]

The Minister is using the flimsiest of evidence of how already high-attaining children have managed to break through all the barriers to get themselves to a grammar school in the first place—only 3,000 children in the entire country are on free school meals at a grammar school—to expand the policy. It is the most dubious use of evidence I have ever seen. He has not answered a single point raised by any Opposition Member about the wealth of evidence about selective systems as a whole and the widening attainment gap that they create. Bright Futures is a selective academy trust in Manchester that has palpably failed to transfer any good practice to Cedar Mount Academy, the other school that it was given in Manchester. When will the Government do something about that?

[Mr Gibb]

On that last point, I will write to the hon. Lady. There is nothing flimsy about the evidence that says that progress made in grammar schools is plus 0.33, which is way above the zero figure nationally. We want a higher proportion of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and from low-income families to be going into grammar schools and selective education—that is our objective. That was never the objective of, or what was delivered by, the last Labour Government. We intend to address that issue; we acknowledge it and are taking action to deal with it. As well as the Oxford and Cambridge evidence, the other evidence I have cited compares level 5 pupils at grammar schools and at comprehensive schools; I am talking about all pupils, not just pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, and those in the grammar schools are significantly outperforming those others. [Interruption.]

It is a pity to interrupt the diatribe made by the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) from a sedentary position, but may I just conclude by saying that this policy is not about returning to the binary system of the 1950s and 1960s, where the alternative to the grammar school was a secondary modern where pupils often did not even sit exams or take qualifications? Our reforms to the education system over the past six years have meant that 85% of schools are now good or outstanding, but we want 100% of schools to be that. We want areas of the country with poor academic results—for example, Blackpool, where just 9.2% of pupils achieve the English baccalaureate; Knowsley, where the figure is 10.4%, Middlesbrough, where it is 10.4%, Isle of Wight, where it is 13.3% and Hartlepool, where it is 13.7%—to be matching areas such as Southwark, whose figure is 35.6%, York, whose figure is 35%, and selective areas such as Sutton, where 45.8% achieve this. We want all those areas to achieve even higher levels of EBacc attainment, but the lowest-performing areas are our concern. Establishing new selective schools and new high-performing faith schools will help drive up academic standards in those areas. It cannot be right that in 65 local districts fewer than half of the secondary school age pupils are within 3 miles of a good secondary school. It cannot be right that there are still 1.25 million pupils in schools that are simply not good enough.

The motion asks this House to note the Government’s proposals to expand the role of grammar and faith schools, as set out in our consultation document “Schools that work for everyone” and

“calls on the Government to conduct a full assessment of the evidence”.

That is what we have done; that is what we continue to do; and that is what we will do as we consider all the responses to the consultation document when that consultation closes on 12 December. Hon. Members should be under no misapprehension: this Government are determined to ensure that every child has the quality of education that helps them fulfil their potential. That is the drive behind all our reforms over the past six years, and it is the objective behind the proposals to end the ban on new grammar schools and the restrictions on new good school places in our faith schools.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

In wishing her a very happy birthday, I call Lucy Powell.

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I have made a special journey down here today to ask the Secretary of State a question. There is another group of schools that offers real social mobility and in which the education gap is the most narrowed. More than 98% of these schools are rated good or outstanding, yet they are in the areas of highest deprivation and the majority of their children are eligible for free school meals. They are our much-valued nursery schools, but their funding is putting their ongoing viability at risk. Would it not be better if she focused on their continued attainment, rather than on grammar schools?

[Justine Greening]

I agree with the hon. Lady that early years provision is a vital part of the education system, which is precisely why we have been consulting on how we can have a sensible approach to its funding, but I disagree with her characterisation that we are cutting funding. That is simply not correct.

Schools that work for Everyone

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

I can assure my right hon. Friend of that, and I thank him for his comments. He was a Secretary of State who was willing to press on with difficult decisions to get the best outcome for Britain’s children, and he was absolutely right to do so. Failure comes from failing to address the difficult questions that we need to ask ourselves to improve England’s education system. We are prepared to address those questions, and we are putting our proposals out in a consultation document, which is effectively a Green Paper.

As my right hon. Friend says, innovation is happening across the system. We can look at the maths school that King’s College London has set up, or at the Harris Westminster college, or further afield at the work of the University of Brighton and the University of Exeter, which are truly showing how they can work with their local school system and more broadly to raise attainment. We should learn from them and expand the impact of universities, not contract it.

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Let us have the debate, but let us have it based on evidence. What evidence does the Secretary of State have that the reintroduction of selection would work? All the evidence that I can find shows that it would not. Areas that have selection have a wider attainment gap than those that do not, disadvantaged children do not get into grammar schools and poorer kids do worse. In contrast, the highest-performing areas, where the gap has closed dramatically, particularly under the Labour Government, are comprehensive areas. Perhaps the Secretary of State would do better focusing her efforts on how we can spread the good practice of places such as London rather than on importing the much poorer practice of somewhere such as Kent.

[Justine Greening]

It would be helpful if the Labour Front Benchers, and maybe individual Labour MPs, set out exactly where they stand on removing existing grammars. That is not clear to me, but as I understand it, that is the Labour party’s proposal. From the hon. Lady’s comments, perhaps we can assume that she wants to end all existing selection. If she is not prepared to make that argument, it is hard for her to argue against the status quo while simultaneously saying that we are wrong to consider reforming it. I think that is her position.

The reality is that many grammar schools, such as Bournemouth school, are doing important work to prioritise getting children on the pupil premium into grammar schools. We know from evidence from the Sutton Trust that when children on free school meals get into grammars, they do disproportionately well. The same evidence also showed that there was no discernible lessening of attainment among children outside the grammar system.

Of course, we are not in a binary system now. Our schools have overwhelmingly improved over the past six years, and many more schools of all kinds are now good or outstanding. The sense that children not in a grammar are somehow consigned to an education system that is failing them is simply wrong, but in some schools in some parts of the country, children do not have access to a good school place. We should not accept that. Our proposals today and the debate that we are starting are aimed at looking at how we can tackle it, and they sit alongside a much broader series of policy reforms. We will push on and change those circumstances, unlike the Labour party, which does not even seem to want to have a debate in the first place.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. My Ministers and I want to ensure that all schools receive their fair share of funding. South Gloucestershire and Stroud College has indeed been successful in applying to open the SGS Pegasus free school. Free schools form an integral part of the Government’s education policy to improve choice and drive up standards in schooling.

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I did not expect to be on the Back Benches today, having resigned from a job that I relished doing over the past few months, but we are where we are.

Yesterday on the television, the Secretary of State again presented the illusion that school budgets have been protected over the course of this Parliament, yet she and I both know that school budgets are facing significant cuts in real terms, which are having a huge impact on the frontline. Given that the Chancellor has all but abandoned his fiscal approach, will she be the first person at his door to ensure that our schools have the real-terms budget protection they need?

[Nicky Morgan]

I pay tribute to the hon. Lady, because I could see how much she loved doing her job as shadow Secretary of State for Education. The truth is that we have protected the overall schools budget in real terms. This year, the core schools budget will be over £40 billion, which is the highest amount on record.

Education, Skills and Training

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

This is the climbdown Queen’s Speech or the “as much as we can muster together” Queen’s Speech. It is a Queen’s Speech so fearful of its own destiny—or should I say demise?—that it seeks hardly any powers at all. Nowhere is that more stark than in its flimsy offerings on education and skills.

The Prime Minister said only a few weeks ago that

“academies for all…will be in the Queen’s Speech.”—[Official Report, 27 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 1422.]

Yet the word “academy” did not even appear in Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech.

The Government had one big idea for education: to force all schools, against their wishes, to become academies. That has been dropped as quickly as it was unveiled to shore up the Chancellor’s lacklustre Budget. There remains a schools Bill, but it is hardly worth the paper it is written on and raises more questions than it answers. If that is the sum total of the new thinking of the first Conservative majority Government in more than 20 years, their education policy is in a very dire state indeed. In the process, their flip-flopping has wasted the valuable time and energy not just of the Department, which is failing to get the basics right, but of school leaders, parents and teachers around the country, who are in open revolt at the Government’s approach.

What a crying shame that after so many years of real progress in education by successive Governments, particularly the last Labour one, this Government are now presiding over a school system in crisis. It is mired by chaos and confusion created by incessant ministerial meddling, and the basics of sufficiency in quality teachers, school places and budgets are woefully lacking. For the first time in a long time, education is right back up there as an issue of public concern.

As we have heard in the excellent speeches by my hon. Friends the Members for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) and for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), and by many Conservative Members, there is relief at the Government’s decision to U-turn on forced academisation. However, the Government seem to have missed the point of the wide alliance that their plans have forged. It is not simply about the politically inept idea of compelling already good and outstanding schools to become academies against their wishes; it is about wider concerns about the desire for a fully academised system—without the underpinning evidence, capacity or robust oversight and accountability—leading to many more Perry Beeches or E-ACTs. Many of those concerns remain, but the Government have failed to address any of them or to produce any clear evidence. Vague assertions and loose statistics that have no correlation to cause and effect simply will not do.

The evidence remains patchy. Analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that only three of the biggest academy chains got a positive value-added rating and that just one of the 26 biggest primary sponsors achieved results above the national average. In areas where there is still underachievement at GCSE, most or all secondary schools are already academies. The highest-performing part of our school system is in primary, where more than 80% of schools are maintained and rated good or outstanding, and where most of the Education Secretary’s 1.4 million good new places have been created. There is simply no evidence that academisation in itself leads to school improvement. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) made many of those points, and my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper) made some excellent points about the fragmented and poor planning that the school system creates. That is why we now have a shell of a schools Bill and a Government with absolutely nothing else to say. I ask the Secretary of State again to get the independent analysis, take stock, ensure that best practice—not worst practice—is being spread and develop high-quality chains to take on more schools before seeking more powers to accelerate academisation.

I support the Secretary of State’s plans to require maths to be taught until the age of 18. Indeed, I think that that should be extended to English, too. But her ambition will fail completely if she does not take urgent action to tackle the chronic shortage of teachers, particularly in maths.

[Margaret Greenwood]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s failure to get to grips with the retention of schoolteachers is hurtling us towards crisis?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lucy Powell]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend’s excellent point. The shortage of teachers is the biggest issue facing education today, and the Government have only recently begun to acknowledge that there is a problem.

Cuts to further education will make the Government’s agenda more difficult. As the Chair of the Science and Technology Committee pointed out, STEM subjects are critical if we are to compete in the digital, automated new economy. Yet the Government are taking us backwards, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) said in her excellent speech. They must heed warnings from the OECD that the Secretary of State’s new maths curriculum is

“a mile wide and an inch deep”

and that it will fail to equip young people with the critical and conceptual thinking required to succeed in the new economy. My former schoolmate in Manchester, my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), gave an inspiring speech on the future skills needed for the new economy.

One thread of the new legislative programme that the Government just about managed to muster was that of their so-called life chances agenda. Although I and everyone in the House share these aims, the record and reality of this Government fly in the face of that agenda. It is almost laughable. Yes, let us support social workers by lifting the quality and the status of the profession, and let us enable quicker adoption for those who want to give vulnerable children a great start in life. We also welcome the care leavers covenant. But let us not kid ourselves that the context has not got much, much harder. Huge cuts to children’s services, the decimation of Sure Start centres and family support services, reduced tax credits, increased housing and childcare costs and a growth in insecure work have put many more families in crisis or on the brink, as has the Government’s failure to tackle child poverty, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) pointed out. It is no wonder that the attainment gap between the disadvantaged and their peers has widened under this Government. That is the measure of the Government’s life chances record.

As we have heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) and for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq), and others, scrapping maintenance grants and increasing tuition fees will not help the life chances of the disadvantaged either. The failure to prioritise adult skills and 16-to-19 education will not help people to better themselves, as we heard in a very personal speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner). Ministers need a reality check if they think that tired rhetoric will turn into results. That point was brilliantly made by my hon. Friend—my good friend—the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman).

The biggest tragedy lies in the measures that the Government could have proposed for this Session. They could have had widespread support for raising life chances. They could have had real powers for local authorities on school place planning, incentives for teacher recruitment and retention, and a childcare strategy focused on quality or real measures to raise standards in our schools. The Secretary of State would have had strong support if, in her discussions with the Chancellor, she had focused on ensuring that schools were properly resourced rather than on forced academisation.

The Secretary of State talks of fair funding, which we support, but she does so in the context of real and significant school budget cuts. If we talk to any headteacher, they will tell us what they are cutting: extracurricular activities, one-to-one tuition, teaching assistants, life-expanding school trips and visits and so on—all the things that should be at the heart of a life chances agenda. I recently visited a school in my constituency, a primary school in Moss Side, that had put on a Shakespeare play at the local theatre, but the headteacher will not be able to arrange that next year because of the budget cuts she faces.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Nicky Morgan)]

indicated dissent.

[Lucy Powell]

The right hon. Lady shakes her head, but that is the reality on the ground. I could give her a number of examples of that happening in every part of the country.

The Government could have ensured a robust and consistent testing and assessment framework. Instead, we have seen chaos and confusion—calamity after calamity on SATs with baseline testing being abandoned, and new and radically different GCSEs still not ready just weeks before they are due to begin. Today’s kids are guinea pigs for the Government’s chaotic experiments. In every other public sphere, Ministers are championing devolution, yet in education they are going in the opposite direction.

[Margaret Greenwood]

My hon. Friend is being very generous with her time. Does she agree with a point put to me on Friday by a senior police officer on Merseyside that the Government are failing to provide an education that develops our children, particularly those who are not going to gain high academic qualifications, and that that is spilling over in the creation of lots of problems for our police and social services?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point about the narrowing of the curriculum that we have seen under this Government.

This week’s IPPR North report warns of the growing regional divide. As my hon. Friends the Members for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) and for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods) highlighted, Ministers cannot build a northern powerhouse or a midlands engine of growth if they take away the levers that communities are using to tackle the deep-rooted causes of low attainment. However, the real headline of the report is just how well London has done. Why is that? It is—to name but a few reasons—because of the London challenge, significant resources and the development of a pool of world-class teachers. The Government seem to be ignoring all those lessons. Indeed, they are putting such achievements at risk by taking away further resources.

This is a programme from a Government who are unable to persuade even their own Members of the merits of their proposals, who are out of ideas for schools and education and who talk of improved life chances but whose actions make life much harder for those with the least. The Government’s education record has been one of structural change at the expense of standards, chronic teacher shortages, a schools places crisis, falling budgets and assessment in complete and utter meltdown. Their own record is now coming home to roost, and on it they will be judged.

“Educational Excellence Everywhere”: Academies

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance notice of her statement. It is good to see that, despite her best efforts, this U-turn is getting the airing it deserves today. What she announced on Friday was a significant and welcome climbdown. However she wants to dress it up, dropping her desire to force all schools to become academies by her arbitrary deadline of 2022 is a key concession. School leaders should take it as a clear signal that the foot is off their throat and that they should not feel they need to jump before being pushed. In achieving this welcome move, I thank the broad alliance who joined us in making the arguments: the head teachers, who made their collective voice clear last weekend, parents, governors, teachers, local government leaders, and hon. Members from across the House, who made thoughtful and important interventions over recent weeks. Given the scale and breadth of the opposition to her plans and the huge sense of panic and upheaval that they caused school leaders, the Secretary of State might have shown a little more humility in her statement today. If I were her, I would at least apologise.

After the Secretary of State’s statement today, we are all left even more confused about what her policy actually is. She says that her aim remains the same, but without the means. Although she has conceded on the politically daft idea of forcing good and outstanding schools to become academies against their wishes, she still holds the ambition that all schools will become academies, but she failed to make a single decent argument as to why that ambition is desirable in the first place. Perhaps this is because, despite her claiming to be in listening mode, the Secretary of State has her fingers in her ears and is out of touch with heads, parents and teachers.

The Secretary of State has failed to address the serious concerns that have been raised. Where is her evidence that academisation is the panacea for school improvement? Where is the choice, autonomy or innovation in a one-size-fits-all approach? Is there sufficient capacity and accountability in the academies system to ensure that best practice, not poor practice, is being spread? Those questions remain as she seeks further powers to speed up the pace of academisation.

On school improvement, the Secretary of State must now take stock of the evidence. The Education Committee recommended that she do just that. Sir Michael Wilshaw found serious concerns in many chains. Research by the Sutton Trust found a mixed picture of performance in academy chains. There is no evidence at all that academisation in and of itself leads to school improvement. Indeed, analysis published today by PwC shows that—[Interruption.] Government Members might want to listen to this. The analysis shows that only three of the biggest academy chains got a positive value-added rating and—this is quite startling—just one of the 26 biggest primary sponsors achieved results above the national average. While there is much excellence, the Secretary of State must not continue making dubious arguments about cause and effect without the evidence.

The concerns about a “one-size-fits-all” policy, as expressed by Councillor Paul Carter, chair of the County Councils Network, still apply, as do those about “distant, unaccountable bureaucracies” expressed by the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady). As Lord Kenneth Baker said, there are real issues on the capacity within multi-academy trusts to take on a new wave of academies. Today, the Secretary of State also failed to answer the key question of parents and their right to remain on governing bodies of academies.|

Perhaps the biggest concern we all have is about the Secretary of State’s direction and her fixation with structures not standards. While chaos reigns all around her, and while heads are dealing with what they describe as “very challenging times”, she wants to put all the energies of her Department into more structural change, for which there is little evidence, insufficient capacity and inadequate accountability. Would she not be better advised sorting out the utter chaos besetting primary assessment and standard assessments tests, ensuring the massively behind-schedule new GCSEs are delivered well and on time, dealing with the chronic teacher shortages she has caused or getting a proper strategy for local place planning? Alternatively, instead of simply doing the Chancellor’s bidding, perhaps she could fight for some school budgets, which are facing real-terms cuts for the first time in 20 years. We all want to see educational excellence everywhere, but the Secretary of State is presiding over a chaotic mess, dragging schools backwards, and her ambitions for further structural change are at best a distraction—at worst they will damage standards.

[Nicky Morgan]

The shadow Education Secretary was as constructive and positive as always, but let me deal with some of the issues she raised. She asked about the support for academies. She will know about this, if she has read the evidence I gave to the recent hearing of the Select Committee on Education, where we went through this in great detail. I am sure she has also seen the very long letter I sent to the National Union of Teachers about the international evidence, but let me just give two statistics: primary sponsored academies are making substantial gains, with the percentage of pupils achieving the expected level in reading and writing and maths at the end of key stage 2 having risen by four percentage points last year; and those academies open for just one academic year having seen their results improve by five percentage points. She asked about the views of the chief inspector—[Interruption.] I am sure that if she has—[Interruption.]

Oral Answers to Questions

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

The fair distribution of funding is a priority for this Government. As we have already heard, fair funding will ensure that every school is allocated funding fairly and transparently according to need. I can reassure my hon. Friend that the formula we propose includes a lump sum payment for every school, with extra sparsity funding to support our smallest and most remote schools so that every child can access an excellent education.

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

This weekend, the Conservative-led County Councils Network added its very strong opposition to the Secretary of State’s plans to force all schools to become academies, adding to that already expressed by the National Association of Head Teachers, the Association of School and College Leaders, parents, the National Governors Association, leading names in the academies programme such as the chief executive of the Harris Foundation and the Freedom and Autonomy for Schools National Association, as well as a growing number of her own Back Benchers. It is hardly a list of what she might call—or, in fact, what she just called—the vested interests. Can she therefore clarify today for those who have these very serious concerns whether she will bring forward legislation to force good and outstanding schools to become academies against their wishes?

[Nicky Morgan]

I have already set out very clearly our desire to make sure that every child gets the best start in life. We believe that academies, as the House has heard from other Conservative Members, are absolutely the right vehicle for innovation on curriculum, pay and freedom for headteachers. I wonder whether the hon. Lady in her vocal opposition has taken account of the writer on the Labour teachers blog, who said that

“we have people on the left describing thousands of schools, in fact a majority of secondary schools, and the hundreds of thousands of teachers who work in them, in terms that are so unjust as to be deceitful.”

Is that how the hon. Lady wants to be taken?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I simply point out to the Secretary of State that she is not responsible for what is written on Labour blogs and that there is a shortage of time on topical questions. We must press on, without extraneous matters being introduced.

[Lucy Powell]

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

The Secretary of State may not appreciate what a huge amount of upheaval, uncertainty and, frankly, panic she has caused by her announcement. Headteachers are already facing huge challenges trying to work around her botched new SATs tests, her massively behind-schedule new GCSEs and her real-terms cuts to school budgets, and those heads need and deserve more clarity from the Secretary of State than we have heard so far. Let me remind the right hon. Lady that she already has powers to turn underperforming schools into academies and that good and outstanding schools can already choose to convert, so the only remaining power she needs to deliver her objectives is to force any good or outstanding school that does not want to become an academy to do so. Is it still her intention to ask Parliament for these new powers—yes or no?

[Nicky Morgan]

I have been very clear that I will not be the Secretary of State who leaves undone the job of making our school system as strong as possible for the benefit of all pupils. I hope that as she visits schools up and down the country, the hon. Lady includes visiting those that are already taking advantage of the new academy freedoms. Amanda Bennett from the Greetland primary academy in Halifax said, for example:

“As an academy we have had the freedoms to explore the specific needs of the children in our care—so our curriculum progression, pitch and expectations are able to adapt when we want them to, to respond to our changing needs. This has allowed us to be consistently in the top performing schools nationally.”

Conservative Members are all for improving opportunities and life chances for all children. Is it not interesting that we never hear the hon. Lady talk about pupils or standards, because she is so obsessed with one chapter in the White Paper?

Schools White Paper

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that every child deserves an excellent education; notes that the Government is proposing to force all primary and secondary schools in England to become academies as part of multi-academy trusts or chains by 2022 at the latest; further notes that the vast majority of schools affected by this policy will be primary schools, over 80 per cent of which are already rated good and outstanding; notes that there are outstanding academies and excellent community schools but also poor examples of both types of such school; further notes the Fourth Report from the Education Committee, Academies and free schools, Session 2014-15, HC 258, which highlights that there is no evidence that academisation in and of itself leads to school improvement; notes that the Schools White Paper proposes the removal of parent governors from school governing bodies which will reduce the genuine involvement of parents and communities in local schools; and calls on the Government to put these proposals on hold as there is insufficient evidence that they will raise standards.

I am pleased that we have secured this debate following the Government’s rushed publication of their schools White Paper, which has caused much concern among parents, communities, heads, teachers and others. The main and most controversial proposal is to force all schools to become academies and the vast majority into multi-academy trusts or chains by 2022. That is the proposal on which we have decided to focus this debate, because we believe that the plans are deeply flawed, are not supported by evidence, have already caused huge disruption in schools, and notably, seem to have very few supporters.

There is a growing alliance of those with concerns, including Conservative Members and local government leaders, as well as leading headteacher unions such as the National Association of Head Teachers and the Association of School and College Leaders. It is my intention that this debate be used as an opportunity to air such concerns, and I hope that the Secretary of State will listen carefully, put the plans on hold, and not plough on regardless.

There are elements of the White Paper that we can support, such as the independent college of teaching, but we cannot support the main thrust of forced, wholesale academisation.

The Government’s plan has been met with such concern, even by the very school leaders they claim to be supporting, because it is a bad policy with no evidence base. It is yet another policy from this Government that is obsessed with school structures instead of standards. What is more, given the very real pressures faced by schools today—including huge teacher shortages, real-terms cuts to school budgets for the first time in 20 years and major overhauls to curriculums, assessments and exams—the idea that heads should spend time, money and energy on a £1.3 billion top-down reorganisation of our schools system is, at best, a distraction and, at worst, will have a very damaging impact on school standards.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

I declare an interest as a governor of Denton West End primary academy in my constituency. The point is that that school chose to become an academy because parents and teachers decided that that was the best model for school improvement. Should not we also respect the parents and teachers at those schools that wish to remain under local authority control?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point, which I will come on to make myself shortly.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the proposal could lead to more school closures in the public sector? More importantly, we might face difficulties recruiting teachers. The £1.9 billion could have been better spent on public services rather than on an ideological argument.

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend echoes the concerns raised by the NAHT union in a memo it sent this morning to all MPs.

The Tory obsession with school structures has completely missed the point. Just as there are some excellent academies, there are some excellent community schools. There are also some poor academies and some poor community schools. No type of school has a monopoly on excellence. We need to build an education system that provides an excellent education for all children, rather than pitting one type of school against another. Nearly a month has passed since the Chancellor made the announcement, but we have yet to hear any answers to the question “Why?” When schools that want to become academies can already do so, as my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) has said, and when schools that the Government deem to be failing or coasting can already be put into an academy chain, why force all others? This is not about school improvement, nor is it about autonomy and freedoms. The multi-academy trust model is in its infancy, and real questions are emerging about accountability, probity, capacity and, for some, standards.

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Lucy Powell]

I will make some progress, because a lot of people want to speak. I will take interventions shortly.

Let us look at each of the Government’s arguments in turn. First, the Government say that this is about school improvement. Let us look at the evidence. The vast majority of schools that will be affected by the policy will be primary schools, of which more than 17% are already academies. Of those that are not, more than 80% are already rated good or outstanding. In secondary, where more than two thirds of schools are already academies, there are more failing academies than non-academies. In places such as Doncaster, Bexley and north-east Lincolnshire, where school improvement remains a real concern, all the secondary schools are already academies.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Would she care to reflect on performance in Greenwich, which has become one of the highest-performing education authorities in the country without the enforced academisation of a single primary school, and in which only three secondary schools have become academies? That performance has been achieved without enforced academisation. Parents in our borough are concerned about why they have been removed from the process and will not be consulted about changes to their schools.

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point.

[Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)]

Is my hon. Friend aware that we have an absurd situation in Coventry North West? The Secretary of State refused to meet me about this, but she is aware of it. After having been encouraged to become an academy, Woodlands underwent forced academisation a couple of years ago. Woodlands Academy is not doing well, but instead of putting in an intervention team, as the Prime Minister indicated at Question Time, the academy is being closed and another one is being started a mile up the road. What a waste of resources.

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point.

Only today, Ofsted has reported that the performance of secondary schools in Reading is “not strong”. Eight out 10 secondary schools in Reading are already academies and are directly accountable to the Secretary of State. Why has she failed to improve those academies, and what is the Government’s school improvement strategy for that and other areas?

[Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lucy Powell]

I will take some interventions later, but I am going to make some progress.

The Government claim that there are more children today in good or outstanding schools than there were in 2010, as proof that academisation leads to school improvement. However, the Secretary of State knows that, as ever, she is being selective with her figures. The truth is that the vast majority of those new good and outstanding places are in primary schools, where academisation is limited. Moreover, according to Ofsted, the number of pupils in inadequate secondary schools has risen by a staggering 60% over the last four years where academisation has taken hold significantly. Not for the first time, the Government’s selective use of statistics and their dubious link between cause and effect do not withstand any scrutiny. Perhaps that is why the Conservative majority Select Committee on Education recently concluded, after an extensive inquiry:

“Current evidence does not allow us to draw conclusions on whether academies in themselves are a positive force for change”

and:

“There is…no convincing evidence of the impact of academy status on attainment”.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I declare an interest as the chairman of governors of Goole Academy, an academy school that is doing very well. In north Lincolnshire, we have had a big academisation programme, and we have gone from having 38% of kids in good and outstanding schools to having 92% of children in such schools. Although I may agree with some of the points that the hon. Lady has made, will she confirm that the Labour party’s position is to support academies? Her speech so far has seemed very anti-academies, and that concerns me as a governor of one.

[Lucy Powell]

Not at all. As I made clear in my opening remarks, there are some excellent academies and other types of schools. Academisation can be an ingredient of a wider school improvement programme, but the overall evidence is underwhelming at best.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Lucy Powell]

I am going to make some progress.

Although the Sutton Trust found excellence in a small number of academy chains, it found that the majority were underperforming. Not only is the forced academisation programme evidently not about school improvement, but the Government’s drive on it may greatly diminish what capacity there is in the system for school improvement. The regional schools commissioners, their officials, the energies of school leaders and local authorities will now, as we are already seeing, shift almost entirely away from schools that need improvement towards creating trusts and changing the legal status of a huge number of schools, most of which are already performing well. Indeed, the national schools commissioner and the Department for Education have not even acquired the powers they sought from Parliament in the Education and Adoption Act 2016—they will get them on Monday —to put more schools they deem to be coasting into academy chains. Was that piece of legislation therefore a complete waste of time?

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is talking about coasting schools. In the NHS, which had a huge reorganisation that nobody voted for, performance absolutely went down while people had to deal with that big reorganisation. Is she worried, as I am, that this is heading in the same direction? If there is a big reorganisation that nobody has voted for, performance in our schools and the achievement of our children will fall away.

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The Government, as they have no other ideas, seem to enjoy such reorganisations.

I will shortly return to some of the very real concerns about the performance of academy chains, but I first want to look at another of the Government’s arguments for forced academisation, which is that it is about autonomy and freedoms. This Government say they are for choice in education. Choice? What choice is there in a one-size-fits-all policy? What is autonomous about forcing a high-performing school into an academy chain? Will the Secretary of State promise that every outstanding school leader who wants their school to remain as it is can do so? No, she cannot. Where is the autonomy for the small village school, which the White Paper makes clear cannot be a stand-alone academy? I see some nods from Conservative Members to these points. Perhaps this is why even one of the Secretary of State’s main allies, Toby Young, has described this policy as Stalinist. The curriculum and other freedoms described by the Government could easily be given to all schools without the need for a change to legal status.

[Mr Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is talking about autonomy and democratic control. We have a model of that in the form of co-operative schools, in which parents, pupils and school leaders all work together. Why does she think they should be forced to academise?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes another excellent point.

On curriculum freedoms, the Secretary of State and I both know that the autonomy the Tories say they are providing just does not exist. During the past five years, parts of the curriculum have been personally drafted by the Education Secretary and then circulated for sign-off among Cabinet Ministers. This sort of ministerial diktat on the curriculum puts schools into a straitjacket. In fact, what we are actually seeing with academisation is a further narrowing of curriculums as schools aim to improve their Ofsted judgments on an increasingly narrow set of measurements.

While the academy programme was originally about bringing new partners and innovation into the system, a wholesale academisation programme will undoubtedly create an increasingly sclerotic and one-dimensional system. It is no wonder that the chief executive of England’s largest academy chain, Academy Enterprise Trust, recently admitted that there is in fact less autonomy for schools in multi-academy trusts than there is for local authority schools.

[Steve Brine]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lucy Powell]

If the hon. Gentleman wants to comment on that, I am more than happy for him to do so.

[Steve Brine]

No, my intervention is not about that, but I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. She is being very generous with her—or probably our—time. She asks us to support the motion on the Order Paper, which is in her name and that of the Leader of the Opposition. This point came up at Prime Minister’s Question Time earlier. She says that the White Paper proposes the removal of parent governors from school governing bodies, but paragraph 3.31 on page 51 of the White Paper makes it very clear that it will not do so. Clearly, she did not have an opportunity to clarify that during PMQs, but will she now take the opportunity to strike that phrase from the motion?

[Lucy Powell]

I am happy to clarify that the Government propose to remove the requirement for parent governors. If the hon. Gentleman wants to have a semantic debate about that, it is in the White Paper, on the page to which he referred. The Secretary of State will have the opportunity to talk about that in a moment.

That brings me to the evidence for and the performance of multi-academy trusts—MATs—or chains as they have become better known. It may come as a surprise to many Conservative Members that the Government’s free school and academy agenda has quietly but significantly shifted in policy and practice from stand-alone academies to MAT or chain models. That shift was made clear in the White Paper, in which the policy preference is emphatically for schools to become part of chains. Indeed, Department for Education guidance issued yesterday said:

“We expect that most schools will form or join multi-academy trusts as they become academies.”

There is evidence that schools do better working collaboratively with clusters of schools, especially where they are clustered geographically, as many do in local authority areas.

However, the evidence for the performance of chains so far is mixed. There are some notably good academy chains, but there are many more that are not good. Of the 850 current MATs or chains, only 20 have been assessed, and just three have proved more effective than non-academies. The chief inspector of schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, wrote to the Secretary of State only a week before the Budget highlighting “serious weaknesses” in academy chains. He went on to say that, in many cases,

“academy chains are worse than the worst performing local authorities they seek to replace”.

To continue with forced academisation of all schools after such a damning letter is frankly irresponsible.

There are major questions for the Government on capacity too. Academy chains are in their infancy and clearly require a closer look, yet the Government want them to take on thousands more schools. Maybe that is why the Secretary of State cannot rule out poorly performing chains being given otherwise good schools under the proposals. One of the main reasons why the track record of many chains is not good is the dearth of any real oversight or accountability.

I share the concerns expressed by many Members of all parties, including my near neighbour, the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady), who said that we are in danger of creating distant, unaccountable bureaucracies for schools. That the Department for Education, via its small group of schools commissioners, can provide robust oversight and accountability of all schools in the country, is frankly for the birds. It is an impossible job, and it is also not desirable.

The Secretary of State seems hell-bent on cutting out communities, and cutting out parents from having any say over how their child’s school is run. First, let us take the Tories’ plan to scrap the requirement for parents to sit on governing bodies. Abolishing parent governors and removing any role for parents in choosing whether their child’s school becomes an academy and what type of academy it becomes has unsurprisingly been met with a huge outcry. I understand that the Secretary of State wants to take this opportunity to clarify that parents can still be governors. However, as she well knows, under her plans, there will no longer be a requirement for governing bodies to have them. I do not think that that is the kind of clarification parents are looking for. Perhaps she would like to take the opportunity to go further. In any case, she and I both know that in a world of academy chains, the role of the individual school governing body is greatly diminished and key decisions are taken by the two new levels: the board of trustees and the member board above that; bodies that are all too often appointed by the head or the chief executive whom they are supposed to be holding to account.

If we want to avoid more scandals such as Perry Beaches, Kings Science Academy and E-ACT, to name just a few, and if schools are genuinely to be held to account, we need a much more robust governance regime than remote trustee boards appointed by their executive, held to account only by a regional schools commissioner, who is responsible for overseeing thousands of schools.

There are also very real issues on the ground about accountability and responsibility for excluded children, placing children with SEN and admission policies. They all have very real problems under the fragmented schools system. Such a system of oversight also needs to have recourse to the needs of the local community. We cannot have a situation where the needs of the local area are not considered, such as the case of Knowsley, where the last A-level provision across the entire borough is about to be lost, based on a decision taken by one school. There has to be a better-joined up approach to school improvement and local oversight, involving school leaders and councils as well as parents.

The Government claim to lead the devolution revolution, so their centralisation of schools is both wrong-headed and contradictory. In places like my own, Greater Manchester, the Chancellor talks of releasing the combined authority and elected Mayor to create a northern powerhouse. That the skills and education of the next generation are being taken away at the same time shows what a sham that project is.

That point leads me to one last argument the Government make, which is that it would be simpler to have one funding system. That argument is nonsense and certainly does not support the £1.3 billion reorganisation of the schools system that is being proposed. It is also disingenuous of the Government to link the proposals to the fair funding consultation. There is broad support for a fairer funding model, as long as deprived areas and areas that require improvement do not lose out. Forcing all schools to become academies does not need to be linked to that.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

The shadow Secretary of State was absolutely right to say at the start of her remarks that this should not be a debate about quality. Does she agree that if we reach a certain tipping point in the number of schools recognising the direction of travel and academising, it is sensible to have a discussion about what, if any, future role there should be for LEAs as we understand them, and what the future of education planning will be for the next 20 or 30 years? It seems to me that we have arrived at that tipping point and so it is right to have that debate.

[Lucy Powell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments, but disagree that we have reached that tipping point. We certainly have not done so with primary schools, as only 17% are academies. A longer-term look would be welcome, but an arbitrary timetable set by the Chancellor and Prime Minister as part of their legacy is a totally false track. For decades, we have had a multifaceted funding arrangement for our schools. There is no real reason why that cannot continue.

The proposal to force all schools to become academies and part of academy chains is a costly reorganisation that schools do not want or need. Heads are dealing with some very real and big challenges, such as teacher shortages, significant real-terms cuts to their budgets, flux and chaos in assessment, and insufficient school places. Asking them to take time out to change their legal status and to become an academy against their wishes is wrong, and will impact on standards.

This agenda is not about school improvement, as most of the schools affected are already good or outstanding. It is not about more autonomy or more choice, as a one-size-fits-all approach is being forced on all schools. It is not about parents, as they are being cut out of the picture. It is not about devolution, but centralisation. There are real and serious concerns about capacity, oversight and accountability under the Secretary of State’s plans.

There is a growing alliance of heads, governors, parents, teachers, politicians from all parties and many of the original advocates of the academy programme against forced wholesale academisation. Yet this Government, who used to say they were all for choice, profess to be about standards and claim they are on the side of parents and schools, seem to be ploughing on regardless, without a single coherent argument or a shred of credible evidence to support them. They still have time to listen, pause and reflect, and today’s debate gives them a chance to do just that. I commend the motion to the House.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point.

[Lucy Powell]

rose—

[Nicky Morgan]

Let me answer the point and then I will invite the shadow Education Secretary to clarify what the Opposition motion actually says. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There are two errors in the motion. The first is that it says we are abolishing the role of parent governors. We absolutely are not. The second is that we will force all schools to join multi-academy trusts. That is also not the case.

[Lucy Powell]

This may be a semantic argument, but does it not say in the White Paper that the Secretary of State is removing the requirement for parent governors? Is the Secretary of State removing the requirement—yes or no?

[Nicky Morgan]

Let me just remind the hon. Lady what her motion says. [Interruption.] Opposition Members do not want to listen.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lucy Powell Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank my hon. Friend very much, and I am delighted that we are making progress on this important issue. Is it not typical that it takes a majority Conservative Government to do that? I urge my hon. Friend to encourage his constituents and schools in his constituency, such as John Taylor High School, which I recently had the pleasure of visiting, to ensure that they take part in this important consultation.

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

As the MP for the home of British cycling, may I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the amazing success of the British cycling team in the track world championships last week? On the day before International Women’s Day, the incredible Laura Trott should be singled out for her medal haul. Let us hope she is paid as much as her male colleagues, if not more—something that the Secretary of State does not seem very good at achieving for women in her own Department.

There will be 156 new GCSE and A-level specifications taught from September. With just 17 teaching weeks left of this school year, how many of those are ready?

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank the hon. Lady. Is it not typical that she identifies an issue—the gender pay gap—which her party did nothing to address when it was in power? It is this party that is publishing the regulations to make sure that public sector and private sector organisations will disclose that. The gap is not widening; it is narrowing. I join her in congratulating the cycling team, including Laura Trott, on their tremendous achievements. Ofqual is working with the exam boards to make sure that all the specifications are ready. I understand that more than 65 are now ready, but there is further information on that to be made public by Ofqual.

[Lucy Powell]

That is right: just 65 or 66 of the 156 specifications are ready—less than half. Core EBacc subjects, such as sciences and modern foreign languages, are still to be approved. The Government’s own workload challenge promised teachers a lead-in time of one year for significant changes to qualifications, but as matters stand teachers will have just weeks or no time at all to prepare for these huge changes. Is not the truth that the Government’s fixation with micromanaging every part of the curriculum—including, we hear this week, the use of exclamation marks—is causing the delay, and that they are way behind with these new exams? It is no wonder we have a teacher shortage.

[Nicky Morgan]

The exam boards have already published the specifications and assessment materials in draft. They are working their way through to make sure that the specifications are ready to be published. We want to give teachers as much notice as possible—[Interruption.] Is it not typical that the Opposition need to learn the lesson that the Vote Leave campaign needs to learn as well—that if they talk about the negatives all the time, they will find that those are self-fulfilling? If they want to set out an alternative, they need to do that with some policies. What we on the Government Benches are doing is raising the standards of our qualifications. I met Ofqual last week to talk about specifications. It is making progress. [Interruption.] Either the hon. Lady wants to raise standards in our education system or she does not. By the nature of her question, she clearly does not.