Secondary Education (GCSEs)

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Young people are our future, yet the value some people place on them and their achievements is extremely low. I feel that many members of the current Government must be trying to secure some kind of medal, in this Olympic year, for driving the value of our young people and their achievements to a record low. Time and again they send young people negative messages, undervalue their hard work in sitting their examinations and then, when they do well, put the boot in again by suggesting that their certificates are hardly worth the paper they are printed on.

The Secretary of State wants to drive up standards—we all do—but the actions he now proposes will effectively write off a large number of young people who need the greatest support and lower their expectations for a happy and productive life. Does he really believe that that is the way forward, or are his latest pronouncements about something else? Is he using our children and their education to create a debate in the Tory section of the Government, where attitudes are very different from those of their coalition partners? Is he just playing controversial games with our children’s future, as the newspapers suggest, as he aims to take over from a weak Prime Minister who is struggling to harness his partners and achieve the right-wing agenda he thought he would be pursuing after the general election?

The former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, axed the two-tier O-level/CSE system. She, like the president of the Liberal Democrats, recognised that it was divisive and dumped millions of young people into a second division from which they could not escape. I never thought that I could agree with such people on anything, but on this I cannot help agreeing with them both. I never thought that a son of Thatcher—perhaps a grandson—could be the one to turn against her in such a way.

The Secretary of State has said:

“The coalition Government’s education reforms are designed to raise standards in all our schools and give every child the opportunity to acquire the rigorous qualifications that will enable them to succeed in further and higher education and the world of work.”—[Official Report, 21 June 2012; Vol. 546, c. 1025.]

However, I, along with the vast majority of educational professionals, can see the opposite happening. Rather than reducing educational inequality, the reforms that those in the Tory part of the coalition propose will do the opposite. Under the new proposals, around three quarters of pupils could sit tough tests modelled on the old O-level while the remaining pupils take more straightforward qualifications modelled on traditional CSEs in subjects such as maths, English and science. But separating 75% of pupils from the other 25% will do nothing but divide children into winners and losers at the incredibly young age of 14, capping aspiration and putting up a barrier to social mobility.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), I am a member of the Education Committee and visited Singapore earlier this year. Some children there go into the elite education programme at age 12 while the others are shoved down the technical route. We visited both types of schools and found that the facilities were very good. However, I was extremely saddened to hear young people talk of themselves as the elite. They are encouraged to talk themselves up, which is good, but what about the young people who are not the elite? If the Education Secretary wants to replicate Singapore’s system here, what would that contribute to equality of opportunity?

This is not just a moral argument against segregating pupils; it is also an argument based on strong evidence. Relegating 14-year-olds to a lesser qualification brands them as underachievers and could drain both students and schools of any incentive to push for higher performance. If we move on to the CSE track a child who would otherwise be aiming for a C at GCSE, we may find that they are very likely to stop trying and not to value the qualification that they finally achieve. One third of children who score in the bottom 25% at 11 years old break out of that group by 16, but if they are placed in a second-class category at an early age they risk being written off. Quite simply, schools cannot predict with 100% accuracy the future of their pupils, and many will struggle to place children correctly.

Once again, the north-east of England will bear the brunt of the Government’s changes, as research shows that the CSE will be most prevalent in northern towns. That the Secretary of State is intent on limiting the ambitions and opportunities for people in my constituency and many others throughout our region is shameful.

While in office, Labour managed to narrow the educational gap between the rich and the poor, not through dumbing down, as Government Members like to believe, but through more investment in schools and teachers and through giving schools more freedom to innovate. Even the Secretary of State recognises that we have the best cohort of teachers ever, but that did not happen by accident. It was investment in their training, and excellent support in the classroom, that helped them to raise their game and to support our children as never before. That is what makes a real difference to our children’s education, not imposing outdated ideas that have already been shown to fail.