Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andrew Percy and Chris Skidmore

Monday 20th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Skidmore]

Students pay nothing back until they start earning £25,725 a year, and that will rise to £26,575 from April 2020. It is important to understand that the number of people from disadvantaged backgrounds going to university has risen by 62% since 2009, and the Government are committed to looking at interest rates in future as part of the Conservative manifesto’s proposals.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

As a working-class lad who went to university and who voted against the tripling of tuition fees, I urge my hon. Friend to ignore the class warfare of the hon. Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana). Was not the one thing I was wrong about in that 2010 vote that it would put working-class kids off, because the evidence is that it has had the exact opposite effect?

[Chris Skidmore]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that essential point. Participation has risen year on year. Individuals are going through the school system, increasing the standard of their skills, and deciding that they want to take up HE as a route to future opportunities. However, we recognise that there must also be future opportunities within the FE system, which is why we want to ensure that every pupil in the post-18 education system is able to benefit for the future.

Teaching Quality

Debate between Andrew Percy and Chris Skidmore

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I echo the remarks made by the shadow Secretary of State, who said that we should put our differences aside and start the debate in the spirit of bipartisanship. It might be helpful to put on the record what we can welcome and agree on. We can welcome the fact that the number of unqualified teachers has fallen by 3,000 since 2010, down 20% from a high of 18,600 in 2010. We can also welcome the fact that the proportion of unqualified teachers has dropped in academies from 9.6% of all teachers in 2010 to 4.8% today. The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) was absolutely right to talk about Teach First as one of the great successes of the previous Government, and it is booming. In 2015, there will be 2,000 graduates from Teach First, four times as many as in 2010. This year, the No. 1 destination for Oxbridge graduates is teaching, and we should all be very proud of that fact.

We should welcome the establishment of School Direct, under which 9,580 teachers are being trained in a school setting. The success of School Direct is highlighted by the fact that demand far exceeds the number of places. There was demand for 17,700 places, so I hope that the scheme will grow. It has been proven to have a far better retention rate than a university-based PGCE.

We should welcome the 363 teaching schools that have been established, just as we should all welcome the fact that the Government have limited the number of resits for teacher training tests in English and maths. Previously, people could take that test—and someone did—50 times. We are ensuring that the PGCE qualification is far more rigorous than it has been. We should welcome that, just as I welcome the statistic that has already been mentioned: the proportion of teachers with degrees at 2:1 or higher rose from 48% in 1998 to 62% in 2010 and is now at 71%. That is a collaborative success between this Government and the previous Government in driving up standards in teacher training and teacher qualifications.

I also welcome the shadow Secretary of State’s support for performance-related pay to reward excellent teachers. He has done that in the face of opposition from unions and from some of his Back Benchers. It is a brave stance and he deserves credit for it.

For all our agreement, we are stuck on one problem like it is a broken record. We had this debate back in October, and the shadow Secretary of State seems to fall into a dogmatic, ideological approach that could come from the pages of George Orwell, saying “QTS good, non-QTS bad,” as though QTS has magical properties and bestowing it on teachers will somehow make them excellent. We know that we cannot bottle good teaching and inspiring teachers by slapping on “QTS”. Such a requirement would also restrict the very head teacher freedoms mentioned by the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby that we want to encourage.

[Andrew Percy]

Does my hon. Friend find it bizarre that we hear a lot of noise from the Opposition about how we should be following international examples such as Finland and Singapore, which have very high teaching standards, when in fact the non-PGCE QTS qualification that teachers would gain under the shadow Secretary of State’s policies would not qualify as a teaching qualification in those countries?

[Chris Skidmore]

That is a good point and I welcome its being placed on the record.

Another problem is the Labour party’s definition of “working toward QTS” including a two-year cut-off. I would appreciate the shadow Secretary of State putting it on the record whether the axe would come down at the end of that period. Would the 14,000 who are still unqualified simply lose their jobs because they had not gained QTS in that period?

There is an elephant in the room in this debate in respect of QTS, which is that there are plenty of bad teachers who have QTS. The problem is that defining a good teacher as one who has QTS is nothing short of protectionism. The General Teaching Council estimated under the previous Government that there were 17,000 teachers with QTS who were underperforming and should not be in the classroom, but in the past 15 years, and even up to this day, we see bad teachers not being removed from the classroom or sacked, but instead being managed out. Up to 2010, only 18 teachers had been removed altogether from the teaching profession for poor teaching standards. What we see is this “dance of the lemons”—teachers moving from one school to another, into deprived areas, which are the areas that suffer the most. That is a national scandal. We need transparency—

Immigration

Debate between Andrew Percy and Chris Skidmore

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Skidmore]

Absolutely. The lesson that all three parties learned from the general election was that the issue needed to be debated. Happily, it was debated at the end of the general election, although it should have been brought forward sooner. It is clear to me that it is only right and responsible for us to act now to protect our public services and local infrastructure. It is clear that we can no longer go on as we were, with a policy of uncontrolled immigration and net migration reaching almost 200,000.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is entirely right that we need to look at limiting immigration. In my constituency, particularly in Goole, the biggest influx has come from eastern Europe. Does he agree that the failure of the previous Government to limit EU immigration, as they could and should have done, has helped to fuel national concerns about immigration?

[Chris Skidmore]

I certainly recognise that, back in 2004, the previous Government failed to address the problem of transitional controls when negotiating with the EU. If the EU is to expand, the current Government will ensure that those controls are put in place, as is absolutely necessary.

I certainly welcome the current plans to halve the net migration figure—currently 200,000—by 2015 and also the cap on annual non-EU immigration. We can have a debate today on what the figure for the cap should be, but I believe that it must be in the tens of thousands, drastically lower than the hundreds of thousands that we were witnessing until recently.

Above all, as a Government and a Parliament, we must send out a clear message. My constituents in Kingswood want a Government who are finally in control of their immigration policy—a Government who are policing their borders and standing up for the British people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Skidmore]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point, which the right hon. Member for Birkenhead made very effectively. We are not here to criticise what happened decades before. There are many people who have arrived in this country, paid their taxes and who are British citizens. We are also standing up for and defending their rights when we debate how to control immigration.

It is not bigoted to be genuinely concerned about the future of our nation and its future generation—those young people who are in desperate need of jobs and employment. The hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) raised the issue of business. We need to listen to the voice of business if we are to succeed in bringing about an economic recovery, especially those in international industries who choose Britain as their base. That is why, when a cap is placed on immigration next year, we must be sure that those who are allowed into this country are only those whom this country needs and who have expertise from which we will benefit.

[Andrew Percy]

Does my hon. Friend agree that through our membership of the European Union we are now in the strange position whereby we are putting limits on people coming here from nations such as Canada and Australia, where the skills base is the same and the qualifications are equally recognised, but we are completely unable to control immigration from countries across eastern Europe, where there are different cultures, skills bases and qualifications?

[Chris Skidmore]

We have certainly been left with a legacy, and we have to play the cards that we have been dealt. I might like things to have been different, if that were possible. However, we must accept that the European Union covers 47% of our trade and is therefore a major player that we have to deal with, and we need to operate within that framework in terms of border controls.