Educational Attainment (Disadvantaged Pupils)

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Caton.

I congratulate the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this debate. I am delighted that he continues his interest in education, although I suspect he still laments his retirement from the Education Committee. We probably agree about more things than we disagree about, and there are probably more things that unite us than divide us.

We have already heard about the importance of education. It is undeniably important, whether as a route into work, if work exists, as a means of attaining personal potential, as a mode to better understanding of the world we live in or simply as a quench for a thirst for knowledge. It is—or at least should be—a powerful tool for young people of all ages, driving social mobility and providing the foundations on which our country’s future sits.

It is crucial that we do everything in our power to ensure that our young people have unrestricted access to education of the highest quality, to safeguard the notion of equality of opportunity. Sadly, that opportunity still depends on where people were born, to whom they were born, their ethnicity, their level of affluence, what the local offer is and, of course, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) said, what their parents’ prior attainment was.

In its recent report, the all-party group on social mobility recognised a series of seven key truths on social mobility, related to education and the associated opportunities and policy challenges. Although countless factors impact on social mobility, the report identifies quality of teaching as

“the most important controllable factor”.

We are aware that the education systems we would deem to be the most successful are those that promote success at all levels for all students. We also appreciate that levels of ability are not uniform across schools, let alone across entire regions. We recognise the challenges that that issue brings; the hon. Member for East Hampshire outlined it in considerable detail. Some degree of variation in outcomes is to be expected. However, the Ofsted report of 2012-13 identified the north-east and the Yorkshire and the Humber region as having an “unacceptably large variation” in performance. I will probably be a bit parochial or regional here.

Although the primary sector in the north-east is among the best in the country, Yorkshire and the Humber has one of the highest proportions nationally of primary schools rated as being less than good. In secondary education, more than 90% of pupils in York attend a secondary school that is good or outstanding, while in Barnsley, only 40 or so miles away, that falls to just 20%.

[Julian Smith]

In analysing such issues in Yorkshire, does the hon. Gentleman feel that councils of whatever political hue have been coasting for too many years and need to get real about what they have to do, to get the performance of their schools up, and markedly?

[Alex Cunningham]

I do agree that there are examples of local authorities across the country that have not been doing the job of driving up standards that we would have hoped for. That varies throughout the country. However, in local authority areas there are still excellent schools, whether they have converted to academy status or they remain as local authority schools. It is the ones that are not doing well that the local authorities and others need to turn their attentions to.

Across the country, there are nine local authority areas, predominantly in London, where every secondary school student attends a good or outstanding institution. Yet in 13 local authority areas a majority of secondary students attend a school that is not good or outstanding. Although there are areas of high performance across the regions, they are unfortunately far from the norm.

Ofsted’s report puts it bluntly, saying that secondary schools in the north-east and Yorkshire and the Humber are among the worst in the country. That is not an observation I relish, as a north-east Member of Parliament, but it is one that we cannot afford to hide from. Those results are symptomatic of an education system that is failing many of our young people, but it is not all about the system; there is something else.

As has already been said, the Education Committee is currently examining the underachievement of white working-class children, many of whom come from impoverished working and non-working families living in areas where jobs are hard to come by and, as is the case in north-east England, regions where unemployment continues to go up. We are looking for answers to that underachievement, and we want to understand the variation across the country. Perhaps the answer is back in early years, as Governments appear to have agreed over the years.

The previous Labour Government did much for early years provision. I witnessed that in the north-east region, where they did more than ever to give children a better chance at the start of their education. However, we are still not reaching the children we need to reach, and the loss of provision is a serious concern. It is not wholly surprising that young people in the north-east and Yorkshire and the Humber are less likely to attain results above the national level in the key indicator of five good GCSEs, including English and mathematics, than young people from almost anywhere else in the country.

As I said, we have successes in the north-east. The Secretary of State for Education, in his evidence to the Education Committee last month, talked about Sunderland, Gateshead and other pockets across the region where there have been improvements. In my own backyard, the North Shore academy in my constituency has improved considerably in the past few years. The school was developed under Labour and delivered under the current Government.

Poverty is a strong and powerful player. The north-east has the highest proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals outside London, and the gap in attainment between those eligible for free school meals and those who are not is wider than the national average in primary schools. Worse still, the gap widens by the time pupils leave secondary school.

Her Majesty’s chief inspector of education, children’s services and skills may be right to assert that children in England now have the best chance they have ever had of attending a good school, but that broad remark fails to acknowledge the dramatic regional variations that are turning education into that most horrible of clichés, a postcode lottery. Indeed, Her Majesty’s chief inspector accepted as much when he described our school system as

“a tale of two nations.”

He said that the system is

“divided into lucky and unlucky children.”

“Luck” is not a word I work with, but that is what he said. He talked of an

“educational lottery that consigns some children to substandard schools and favours others”.

Her Majesty’s chief inspector is clearly right to state that too many children in our country are unlucky, but too many children from similar backgrounds and with similar abilities end up with widely different prospects because the quality of their education is not consistently good—in other words, because they grew up in different regions and attended different schools with different opportunities.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead outlined, the north-south divide means that people in the south can aspire to tremendous things, but there is not so much aspiration in the north and other regions. That is not fair. We must develop a system that minimises regional and local variations and restores fairness to our education system, ensuring that it delivers the skills and knowledge that the young people of today will need to succeed tomorrow.

We must deliver not only to some young people but to all young people. A crucial element of attaining that goal is to ensure that our teachers—their teachers—are fully equipped to do the job. The path to educational attainment, a path that every parent wants their children to follow, is guided by teachers. Nobody, apart from family, is more important in children’s lives. It is clear to me that the key to securing improved attainment for all, irrespective of the geographical fortune of social circumstance, lies in ensuring that teachers are trained to the highest standards to allow the cycle of progress to continue.

[Ian Mearns]

Outlining the importance of teachers is crucial to this debate because, for too many youngsters, the school day is an oasis of calm in an otherwise chaotic life. It is all too sad that we are asking teachers to put right an awful lot that is wrong for our youngsters.

[Alex Cunningham]

We certainly do, and I have seen some tremendous examples in my constituency and across the Stockton borough of teachers picking up a lot of education. Young children are arriving in nursery school still not knowing how to use a knife and fork, how to interact properly with children or even how to have a proper conversation. We rely on teachers tremendously, which is all the more reason why outreach through children’s centres and other organisations is so vital to helping parents and the wider family to help children to develop.

We need good teachers at all levels and in every neighbourhood, each equipped to deliver a modern education based on an up-to-date understanding of developments in teaching practice, specific subject knowledge and the latest educational tools and technology. The previous Labour Government responded to the challenge of failing education with huge investment in early years and across the primary and secondary sectors. The London challenge delivered great results, but that achievement was not reflected everywhere despite unprecedented resources in our schools.

The current Government are seeing some positive results from the pupil premium, but again the success is far from universal. I have no doubt that the social factors that my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead describes, as well as the quality of education, have to be addressed to build the desire to learn and the desire of all parents to have high expectations of their children so that they do well in a society that offers equal opportunity for good-quality jobs and careers that can ensure they have a life to enjoy, rather than simply an existence.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton. I want to start in the traditional way by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing the debate and choosing such an important issue—not just for education policy, but for the challenges the country faces. I congratulate him, too, on setting out the case in such a thoughtful, measured way. He built it strongly on recent work on educational disadvantage by the all-party group on social mobility, which he chairs, and highlighted some of the challenges that any Government will face in the coming years in dealing with low attainment and the unacceptable gap in outturns between those from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds.[Official Report, 3 March 2014, Vol. 576, c. 12MC.]

I thank other hon. Members who spoke. There were good speeches from the hon. Members for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), and interventions from my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) and the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns). I should put the hon. Member for Cardiff West out of his misery before he intervenes on me to ask about the teacher workload survey, which he has become obsessed about. I have fantastic news for him, which will make his day: it will be published, not just shortly, but on 4 March. In the very near future he will be able to see all the information and get all the answers he wants.

[Alex Cunningham]

Will the Minister give us a few headlines from the report?

[Mr Laws]

I certainly do not intend to get into trouble by falling into the hon. Gentleman’s trap and giving out information that has not yet been approved. It would be an affront to Parliament.

We have had a good debate and talked about the challenge of raising attainment and closing the gap. My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire talked in some detail about the pupil premium. Among the achievements of the coalition Government that is one of the policies I am proudest of. The pupil premium will rise next year to the full amount of funding that we said, at the beginning of the Parliament, we would allocate to it—£2.5 billion. That means an uplift, for each disadvantaged young person who receives it, of £1,300 in primary education and £935 in secondary education. That makes, and will in future make, a massive difference to the schools with the additional funding.

Contrary to what the hon. Member for Cardiff West suggested, that is on top of the existing cash protection per pupil. It is happening at a time of austerity in the public sector, which would have been necessary whichever party was in power, and when we have been deliberately controlling the cost of schools by keeping down their biggest cost—teachers’ salaries. That has not been popular with teachers, but it has enabled us to contain costs while putting in additional money. Hon. Members will be aware from visiting schools that the ones that receive a lot of pupil premium money, because they have many children who qualify for it, notice the difference even in the present tough times. In Redcar, for instance, where the local economy has never properly recovered from the recession of the 1980s, I have visited schools where 80% or 90% of the young people are entitled to the pupil premium, which enables teachers and head teachers to transform their opportunities.

[Alex Cunningham]

My hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) alluded earlier to children on the margins, particularly the children of the working poor, who are just below the threshold to qualify for the pupil premium. Are there plans to address that, particularly for areas such as the north-east, where the attainment gap is wider?

[Mr Laws]

That is an important point. Some of the ways in which we now allocate funding for disadvantage go beyond the pupil premium. They include area-based methods and prior attainment, a factor that many local authorities use. It is not only through the pupil premium that we channel money into schools. However, I am serious when I say that we are keeping under review the question of whether in future we should have a different way of targeting money at disadvantage. The hon. Member for Gateshead raised the question of free school meals targeting, and whether that is sufficient. It is worth keeping other options in mind for the future beyond the current Parliament. I was interested in his comments about the Netherlands experience of targeting money towards children whose parents do not have strong educational qualifications. We should not assume that we have the perfect method for allocating disadvantage funding at the moment, and should seek constantly to build on what we do and improve it.

The performance of disadvantaged pupils has improved across the country since the coalition Government came to power in 2010, and it improved before that. The proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals who achieve the expected standard in maths at the end of primary school has risen from 66% to 74% since 2010, and the gap between those children and their peers has narrowed by 4 percentage points. The picture is similar at key stage 4. The proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals achieving at least five A* to C grade GCSEs, including English and maths, has risen from 31% in 2010 to 38% in 2013. The gap between those youngsters on free school meals and the rest of the pupil population has narrowed. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire pointed out, however, the performance of disadvantaged pupils is different throughout the United Kingdom and throughout England.