Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Nick Gibb and Tristram Hunt(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
We have protected the core schools budget in real terms, but the system for distributing those funds, as my hon. Friend pointed out, is outdated, inefficient and unfair. That is why we consulted on the principles and the building blocks of the formula in the spring of this year. That will include sparsity as a concept, and also a fixed sum, which of course helps small schools. We will issue our detailed proposals on the design and impact of the formula for consultation in the autumn.
Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)
The key to successful educational provision in rural areas is the quality of teaching. The Labour party has long believed in having qualified teachers in our schools. One area of cross-party agreement in the last Parliament was on having a Royal College of Teaching. Will the Minister update the House on how far the Government have enacted that?
Mr Gibb
There is a Royal College of Teaching. We are meeting the initial funding costs of the Royal College of Teaching, and it is going to be a great success. I should point out that 95% of all teachers in our system have qualified teacher status and that 93% of all teachers in academies have QTS.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Nick Gibb and Tristram Hunt(9 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
I agree with my hon. Friend and the excellent Councillor Mike O’Brien, whom I know well and wish all the very best, that parents play a very important role in the governance of our schools. I fully expect that to continue as more schools become academies. High-quality governance is vital for the success of our schools, and boards need governors with the right skills to perform the role well. Many parents have the skills to make them effective governors, and boards will continue to appoint them as governors for that reason. There is nothing in the White Paper proposals to prevent academies from continuing to have elected parent governors if they wish to.
Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)
The Secretary of State sought to ban parents from becoming school governors. She has blocked Ofsted from inspecting academy chains, and she refuses to have any democratic oversight of regional school commissioners. In her final days in office, with school improvement stalled, according to the chief inspector, has she not realised that the command-and-control, “Whitehall knows best” approach to schools and education does not work?
Mr Gibb
This seems like an upside-down House: the Labour Front Benchers are on the Back Benches, and its Back Benchers are on the Front Bench. We intend to increase academy engagement with parents by creating an expectation that every academy will put in place arrangements for meaningful engagement with parents and for listening to their views and feedback.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Nick Gibb and Tristram Hunt(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Government recently set out an ambition to see a 20% increase in the number of girls’ entries to science and maths A-levels by 2020. We established, with industry, the Your Life campaign, which is designed to encourage young people, and especially girls, to choose maths and physics. We have seen a huge increase in the number of girls taking A-levels in physics, from 5,800 in 2010 to 6,800 this year, and in maths, from 28,000 in 2010 to 31,000 this year. However, there is still more to do.
Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)
In Stoke-on-Trent, we have decided to do something about the crisis in maths teaching. Will the Minister congratulate inspiring head teachers Roisin Maguire and Mark Stanyer, along with the city council and the Denise Coates Foundation, on establishing the £1 million maths excellence partnership, which was opened by Sir Michael Wilshaw last week to attract maths graduates to Stoke and to support the continuing professional development of current classroom teachers?
Education and Adoption Bill
Debate between Nick Gibb and Tristram Hunt(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
The hon. Gentleman will know what we achieved in the last Parliament. He will hear later, when the spending review is completed, what we can commit to in the next few years, not only on that issue but on a whole of range of issues across Whitehall that we have to look at in great detail.
A coasting school is one that is not consistently ensuring that children reach their potential. Clause 1 gives the Secretary of State the power to define which schools will be deemed to be coasting and therefore eligible for intervention. To assist scrutiny of the clause, we have already published draft regulations setting out our proposed definition. They provide a clear and transparent data-based definition, based on a school’s performance data over three years, rather than on a single Ofsted judgment or a snapshot of a single year’s results. Our proposed definition of a coasting school will be based on the new accountability system that comes into place from 2016, but it will be 2018 by the time three years’ data are available under the new system. We do not think it acceptable to wait so long before acting on coasting schools so we have also proposed interim measures for 2014 and 2015, based on existing metrics, so that regional schools commissioners can start to take action in 2016.
New clause 1, tabled by the hon. Members for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) and for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe), proposes an alternative approach to identifying and addressing schools that fail to ensure children reach their potential. Subsections (1) and (2) of the new clause propose to set out in legislation a new definition and put the decision about which schools are to be regarded as coasting in the hands of Ofsted and the local authority. This would remove all transparency for schools about what would constitute coasting, meaning that a school would have no certainty about whether it might be deemed to be coasting. The new clause proposes an opaque, confusing approach to the definition of a coasting school, in contrast to the clear definition that we have set out in draft regulations.
Subsection (3) of the new clause includes a number of factors that Ofsted would be required to take into account, such as the availability of teachers in the area, the number of pupils, the reliability of performance data, the socio-economic challenges and the gender balance of the pupil population of the school. I am not sure that those factors should be explicitly set out in primary legislation, because to do so would restrict the ability to respond appropriately and flexibly to the individual circumstances of a school. Regional schools commissioners will of course take into account the challenges a school faces from its intake, along with other issues, when they assess a school’s performance.
The hon. Member for Cardiff West cited a number of examples of maintained Catholic schools in Bexley that had improved their Ofsted rating without becoming sponsored academies, but he omitted to say that seven Catholic primary schools in the borough had expressed an interest in converting, including St Joseph’s, the school that he cited as previously having been judged inadequate. Both the Catholic secondary schools in the borough are already academies, including St Catherine’s, the school that he cited as providing effective support for improving the quality of the education at St Joseph’s.
Where a school does fall within the coasting definition, the regional schools commissioner’s first task will be to see whether the school has the capacity itself to raise standards. In some cases, the school’s own leadership, perhaps a recently appointed new headteacher, may have an effective plan to raise standards. In other cases, more support will be needed. Coasting schools will be able to work with other experienced headteachers, with national leaders of education, with stronger schools in the area and with other relevant experts to raise standards.
Tristram Hunt
The whole House is. I am just representing the views of my constituents, which is why I am sent here.
The Minister puts great faith in the role of regional schools commissioners. A number of my local schools in Stoke-on-Trent are in special measures and require improvement. They are not at the coasting stage; things are much more serious than that. The regional schools commissioner has failed to help to improve those schools, so why does the Minister think the RSCs will be able to sort out coasting schools, given that at the moment they cannot even sort out schools that require improvement or are in special measures?
Mr Gibb
Of course the RSCs have been established only recently, and already 60% of all secondary schools in the country have become academies and an increasing number of primary schools are now academies. The transformation of schools from the maintained sector into academisation has been phenomenally rapid. We are now moving a step further forward to ensuring that we do not just tackle failing schools. If this Bill gets through this House—I hope the hon. Gentleman will support it this evening—any failing school, including any school in his constituency that is in special measures, will automatically become an academy, have new leadership and have new sponsorship, driving forward higher standards in that school. He should be supporting the measure.
Having said that, academisation will not always be the default solution for coasting schools, because where it is clear that the existing leadership does have the capacity to improve, they will be given the support and backing to do just that. But having the discretion to make an academy order is important, even for coasting schools, as a backstop provision.
I could cite many examples where becoming a sponsored academy has helped to improve academic standards, but let me highlight just one. In January 2014, Our Lady and St Bede Roman Catholic secondary school in Stockton-on-Tees was judged as requiring improvement by Ofsted. It became an academy sponsored by the Carmel Education Trust. In 2014, only 54% of pupils achieved five or more A* to C GCSEs including English and maths. Under the new sponsorship the headteacher has reported that that figure has risen to 72% this year; which is an increase on last year of 18 percentage points in just 12 months.
Education and Adoption Bill
Debate between Nick Gibb and Tristram Hunt(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
The hon. Gentleman will just have to be patient. I will say a bit more about that later.
By strengthening our ability to turn around failing and coasting schools, the Bill will ensure that more children receive a good education, regardless of background, neighbourhood or circumstance.
The adoption system remains fragmented and inefficient. Around 180 different adoption agencies currently recruit and match adopters to children in need of a caring, stable home. That over-localised system cannot deliver the best service to some of our most vulnerable children. We are therefore introducing regional adoption agencies, which will work across local authority boundaries and in partnership with voluntary adoption agencies, to find the right homes for children without delay. That policy was supported by my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter), who spoke powerfully about the need for ongoing adoption support.
We had some excellent speakers and speeches in the debate, but we also had one not so excellent speech from the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), who wanted to know when he could see the definition of the word “coasting”. He should not be so concerned about the definition of “coasting”, because his performance today falls squarely in the “failing” category, which is very well defined. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, we intend to publish draft regulations on the definition of coasting schools for full parliamentary scrutiny in Committee. We can be clear now about the principles that will underpin the definition. This is fundamentally about social justice and a coasting school is one in which pupils are not reaching their potential. Will the hon. Gentleman support that definition?
Tristram Hunt
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. Will he now provide us with the legal definition of a coasting school, given that we are voting on his Bill in exactly 13 minutes? What is the legal definition?
Skills and Growth
Debate between Nick Gibb and Tristram Hunt(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Tristram Hunt
My hon. Friend is furiously ambitious for his constituency and the children in it. He is exactly right. The key to that is great teaching and strong leadership, making sure that young people are focusing on their academic subjects in order to get the basics right and then pursuing other academic or vocational routes.
One of the reasons we are disappointed with the Education Secretary’s approach in her new Bill is that it seems too indicative of an exhaustive, target-driven, bureaucratic, central-command approach. It is a 20th-century answer to a 21st-century problem. In the words of Steve Hilton, a great guru for the Conservative party, this marks a backwards and “Soviet” approach to education.
Higher ambitions require more substantial reform, and I am convinced that in England that requires us to explore the merits of a 14-to-19 baccalaureate system of upper secondary education, particularly now we are raising the participation age. There is an emerging consensus on that idea, and it demands closer inspection.
Tristram Hunt
The Schools Minister says there is not, but he should listen to the CBI and leading headteachers, including those on the Headteachers’ Roundtable, and to one of the great Tory Education Secretaries, Lord Baker. There is a far broader consensus on the need to rethink the purposes of upper secondary education in the light of the continued inability of the current high-stakes, teach-to-the-test, exam-factory model in order to tackle our long tale of underperformance.
I do not expect the Government to commit to that today as a point of public policy. I accept, as we did during the election, that the short-term priority is to provide heads and teachers with a degree of curriculum stability, given the rather, shall we say, frenzied pace of recent reform. Now is the time to launch—as the CBI, the voice of business, has requested, alongside the Labour party—a broader cross-party review.
Disappointingly, prior to the election the Education Secretary walked out on the cross-party talks that the Royal Society had convened to introduce some stability to the curriculum process. Now that she is back in office, I hope she will take a slightly more mature approach and support a CBI-endorsed cross-party review to look into a more ambitious settlement for secondary education that can stretch the more able students, challenge the damaging snobbery towards creative, technical and vocational pathways, and tackle our seemingly intractable low skills problem, which so cripples our productivity.
In the light of the radical skills shift required by the industrial revolution we see all around us, with the move towards a digital society, we need to answer the deeper question of what skills, knowledge and attributes our young people now need to thrive and succeed in the 21st century. Until we have a clearer answer to that question, I fear we will not find a long-term solution to the productivity woes.
I hope the Government will give serious consideration to backing this bipartisan motion, and I commend it to the House.