Education Bill

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I agree that we need to ensure that all young people have absolute rigour in the basics in English and maths.

The Secretary of State began today by discussing a string of statistics, but he did not say how the number of young people leaving school with good GCSEs in English and maths increased considerably under the previous Government, as did the number of young people leaving school with five good GCSEs. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) entered office, some 50% of schools in this country had a record whereby kids were not leaving with five good GCSEs—it was total failure. When we left office, that figure had been massively reduced, which gives the lie to the Secretary of State’s comments at the beginning that we “failed a generation”. That was an outrageous comment, and it is not backed up by the facts.

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

My right hon. Friend might be interested in the words of Dr Christopher Ray writing in the January edition of The Old Mancunian:

“The latest wheeze from Whitehall is the English Baccalaureate, launched with a breathtaking lack of forethought by the Secretary of State for Education…MGS stands proudly at the bottom of these surreal tables—along with such other notable academic failures as St Paul’s, Eton, Winchester and King Edward’s Birmingham.”

Perhaps those are five cases where the Secretary of State can use his power to intervene.

[Andy Burnham]

As a proud Scouser, I can say that I never read The Old Mancunian. Indeed, I am surprised to find that I agree with something in it, but I do. I have visited schools recently and I have been struck by the anger and, in some cases, despair of head teachers. They have worked night and day with their staff to raise standards in their schools, and along has come a retrospectively applied league table, which has knocked the stuffing out of them. I think it is quite immoral to say to those schools, “You are now at zero: you have 0% five GCSEs under this measure,” when they were not being judged by that measure previously. That applies to all kinds of schools, many of which might ask why the Secretary of State has chosen those five subjects on which to test them. Schools are voting with their feet and young people are choosing to do other things.