Education (Merseyside)

Debate between Nick Gibb and Stephen Twigg

Wednesday 19th October 2016 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I congratulate the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) on securing this debate. I am sure he will agree that all of us in this room share the same ambition to see a country that works for everyone, in which all schools improve and every child has the opportunity to go to a good school and to fulfil their potential.

I welcome the shadow Minister to his post. This is our first debate together in Westminster, and I am sure there will be many more such occasions, with him remaining firmly on that side. Over the last six years, 600,000 new school places have been created. We have spent £5 billion on creating those new places, and we have committed a further £7 billion over the next period to create another 600,000 school places. There are 15,000 more teachers today than there were in 2010. There are 456,000 teachers in our schools, a record number. We are spending £1.3 billion in the next period, across four bursaries, to attract the best graduates into teaching and we are spending £40 billion on schools, which is a record high. Of course, all that can happen only if we have a strong economy and proper stewardship of public finances. We are addressing the historical unfairness of the school funding system. We have consulted on the principles of a national funding formula and we will move to the next stage in the autumn.

I have had the opportunity to visit probably more than 400 schools across the country over the last 12 years, and I am convinced that there are two components without which a school cannot be great. The first, of course, is high-quality teaching and leadership. A supply of high-quality teachers is needed at all levels, and we are continuing to focus on recruiting the best graduates, particularly in subjects such as science, maths and foreign languages, with the generous bursaries that I mentioned. We are ensuring that leaders have access to high-quality leadership development training, including through national professional qualifications, and we are introducing a new teaching and leadership innovation fund worth £75 million over three years. Thanks to the hard work of teachers and the reforms we have introduced over the last six years, there are now more than 1.4 million more pupils in good and outstanding schools than there were in 2010.

The second component needed for a great school is a stretching and knowledge-based curriculum. The national curriculum focuses on the key knowledge that schools should teach. It has been benchmarked against the highest-performing education systems in the world and will enable pupils to acquire a secure understanding of the key knowledge they need to go on to the next stage of their education, to contribute to our culture and to participate fully in our society.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby mentioned careers guidance. The Careers & Enterprise Company is working with local enterprise partnerships and with schools to boost employer engagement and help schools with their careers advice. The Careers & Enterprise Company’s enterprise adviser network allows it to share best practice—he asked about this—through all regions, particularly in disadvantaged and rural areas of the south-west and north-west.

The hon. Gentleman is right to ask how the new schools funding formula will affect schools in Liverpool and the Greater Merseyside area, and we are firmly committed to introducing a fair national funding formula for schools and high needs from 2018-19 onwards. We are taking the time to ensure that the formula is right. We have protected the core schools budget in real terms so that as pupil numbers increase, so will the amount of money for our schools. We are launching the second stage of the consultation in the autumn. At that stage we can say what the funding impact will be for schools in all areas.

The Government are also committed to protecting pupil premium rates for the duration of this Parliament. Schools in Liverpool are receiving more than £30 million this year through that funding stream to support the attainment of the most disadvantaged pupils.

[Stephen Twigg]

I was recently at Our Lady and St Swithin’s Catholic Primary School in Croxteth in my constituency. One issue raised there was the impact of the provision of free school meals across key stage 1, which is resulting in fewer parents informing the school that their child would have been entitled to free school meals anyway. There is therefore a decline in pupil premium figures. Is the Minister familiar with that? If so, what are the Government doing about it?

[Mr Gibb]

We often hear that, and we are encouraging schools to encourage parents to register for free school meals, even though their child gets a free school meal anyway, so that their school does not lose the funding.

The right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) mentioned St Aloysius Catholic Primary School and funding for children with special educational needs. We have committed to reforming the funding system for pupils with high needs by introducing a national funding formula from 2018 for high needs as well as for schools. In 2017 we have protected local authorities so that no area will see a reduction in its high needs funding, which is in the context of our overall protection for the core schools budget in this Parliament. We have allocated an additional £93 million of high-needs funding for 2016-17.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Twigg]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way because I realise that time is tight. Will he address the specific issue of nursery schools? I think he will agree that nursery schools often provide a fantastic start for children, particularly in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods.

[Mr Gibb]

Yes. I have been addressing that by talking about the extra money for early years. As part of the consultation, we released indicative funding rates for local authorities and indicative and average hourly funding rates for providers in each local authority area. Based on our proposal, 75% of local authority areas stand the gain funding. The indicative rates show that the impact of the proposals in the Merseyside region will be mixed. It is therefore right that we look at each local authority area, rather than the region overall.

The Government are providing supplementary funding for maintained nursery schools for at least two years, as the hon. Gentleman knows. We know that maintained nursery schools bear costs over and above other providers because of their structure, and many also provide high-quality early education to disadvantaged children. The additional funding will provide much-needed stability to the nursery sector. We will be consulting on the future of maintained nursery schools in due course.

Thanks to the academies programme, schools have been released from the constraints that too often inhibited great teaching. The autonomy provided by the structural reforms has freed schools to innovate and pursue improved evidence-based teaching methods. Rather than a centralising approach, this is actually the ultimate in devolution.

Headteachers and other system leaders have seized this opportunity. As of the beginning of this month, there are 5,758 open academies and 345 open free schools, university technical colleges and studio schools. About a fifth of primary schools and two thirds of secondary schools are now academies. As the Secretary of State said to the Select Committee on Education in September, the Government want to see all schools become academies over time, and it is our hope and expectation that schools will want to continue to take advantage of the benefits that academisation can bring both to their own school and to others in the local area and throughout the country. We will continue to convert all schools that are failing to deliver an acceptable standard of education.

Education and Adoption Bill

Debate between Nick Gibb and Stephen Twigg

Wednesday 16th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Twigg]

I shall resist the temptation to respond in detail to the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady), who made his case very powerfully. I disagree with it, for the reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), the shadow Minister, gave. The grammar schools debate is one to which, I am sure, we will return, but I want to focus on supporting the new clauses proposed from the Opposition Front Bench.

The case that my hon. Friend made is extremely powerful. It is about looking at the evidence of what has worked in this country and in other parts of the world. When I intervened on him earlier, I spoke about our experience in government with the London challenge. I want to talk a little about the London challenge, because it shows a different way of doing things from the one which the present Government are following. Academies started in London. A number of academies were created as part of the London challenge. To this day I am proud of those academies that we created in London, in places such as Hackney, which had been badly let down in the past by the education system, and I celebrate the success of schools such as Mossbourne and many others across London that have done so well as academies.

We know, however, that the evidence on academies is mixed. We have to acknowledge that. In Liverpool the schools that are struggling the most at secondary level are the sponsored academies. I do not therefore condemn them for being academies, but I recognise that they face big challenges. They tend to serve some of the areas of greatest social and economic need in the city. Simply making them academies did not, on its own, ensure that those schools would be transformed and do brilliantly. That is why I warmly welcome new clause 1, which my hon. Friend moved. The approach that was taken in the London challenge, very much under the inspirational leadership of Tim Brighouse, was to look at the evidence, broker relationships between different schools in London, recognise the diversity of social and economic conditions in different communities across London, and not to have a one-size-fits-all approach.

As a Minister I spoke to local government leaders in London about academies. Some of those councils were Labour but many were Conservative or Liberal Democrat at that time. There were different views about academies. In local authority areas in London such as Camden and Tower Hamlets that did not want to have academies, we did not take the view that they should be imposed. In both those cases, we have seen real improvement in schools over recent decades. Other authorities, such as Hackney, Southwark and Lambeth, were more open to the creation of academies and that was part of the route that we pursued.

I welcome the fact that new clause 1 recognises that we have to take a sophisticated approach that looks at all the evidence. Data are extremely important. I never have any truck with those who suggest that we can simply ignore the data about a school, but data are only one aspect of the judgment that we have to make. We must look at context and at progress, as the Government have acknowledged—the value that is being added by the school. We have to look at the history of the school and, crucially, at the quality of leadership, teaching and learning in the school. The emphasis on that in the new clause is hugely welcome.

I urge the Government to reconsider an approach which is so highly centralised from London, does not take sufficiently into account concerns in local communities, and regards academy status as the be-all and end-all, when the reality is that we have some great successes from academies and we have some wonderful schools that have chosen not to go down that route. We should celebrate those schools equally. Ministers should visit those schools equally and their role in raising standards for all in our education system should be celebrated by all of us on a cross-party basis.

I look at the primary schools in my constituency, in West Derby in Liverpool, many of which do a fantastic job. I have spoken previously of Ranworth Square school in Norris Green, which has one of the highest levels of deprivation in the country but consistently delivers good results for the children at 11. It is not an academy, it has fantastic leadership and it works well with other schools and with the local authority. Changing that school’s status would make no fundamental difference. Why does the school succeed? It is because it has great leadership, great teaching, and great relationships with the community and with other schools. Sometimes the change that comes through academy status can be transformational. I referred to some of the brilliant examples in London, and it is important that we remind ourselves of them.

Much analysis has been done of the London challenge. It was not all good and all successful, but the main feature of the analyses that I have seen, with which I certainly concur, is that the London challenge worked because it was collaborative and based on evidence. It was collaborative across schools and across communities. Local authorities were involved, but the schools were very much in the driving seat, working with us in central Government. We need that kind of approach elsewhere. Something that works in a capital city cannot be replicated in every part of the country.

That is why the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, and cabinet member Nick Small have decided that we are going to have a Liverpool challenge. They have asked me to chair it. I will be working with schools, business, the further education college, the universities and others. This will be across the piece. Academy schools, local authority schools, faith schools and church schools are a particularly important component of education in the city. The aim is absolutely to raise standards for all young people in the schools. We have seen a big improvement in many of our cities, including Liverpool, over the past two decades, but in recent years we have had a drop-off in our secondary results, with Liverpool falling a bit behind some other cities. The mayor of Liverpool recognised that and has asked for this piece of work to happen.

I mention this because that kind of approach still has value. It is rooted in the community and in local democratic leadership, but it is also rooted in recognising that we have a big challenge on standards. There is no denial of that in the approach being taken.

[The Minister for Schools (Mr Nick Gibb)]

I genuinely wish the hon. Gentleman every success in his chairing of the Liverpool challenge. Does he accept, though, that the approach taken in the multi-academy trust system is designed specifically to replicate that kind of approach but within a chain of academies, not necessarily inner-city, up and down the country?

[Stephen Twigg]

I do recognise that. A number of multi-academy trusts have proved hugely successful, and I praise their work. However, we must also recognise that some academy chains have not been successful. That is why I support the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) advocating inspection of academy chains on the same basis as Ofsted inspection of local authorities. That is a really important principle. The good or outstanding multi-academy trusts have nothing to fear from my hon. Friend’s amendment, but in the same way that we have challenged local authorities that have not succeeded in education in the past, we must challenge academies and academy chains.

The evidence now shows that we have seen some real improvement in our schools, particularly in cities and notably in London, but we still have some enormous challenges in coastal areas. I encourage the Government and my own party to look at this. Many coastal areas that have faced serious economic decline and big social challenges now have some of the poorest-performing schools; they may be coasting schools or schools with some of the poorest results. It is vital that we tackle that in the same way that the previous Labour Government sought to tackle underperformance in schools in our cities.

I hope that we can do that as this debate moves forward. It will be best done in a collaborative way that challenges the schools and works with them, because that is the way that works. It has worked with the London challenge, and the black country and Manchester challenges, and I hope it will work with the Liverpool challenge in which I am so pleased to have been asked to play my part.