Financial Education

Debate between Andrew Percy and Kevin Brennan

Thursday 15th December 2011 Commons Chamber

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

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate and I am pleased to see that so many Members have attended, particularly on the Government side of the Chamber, and especially on a day on which there is a one-line Whip and, apparently, a by-election. It is good to have so many people here to debate this important issue. I am also pleased to follow both the Minister and the shadow Minister. I thank the Minister, in particular, for his warm words about our report and for the assurances he has given us about the role it will play in the curriculum review. I also thank the shadow Minister for his warm words, although I think he was trying to push at the edges of political point-scoring—

[Kevin Brennan]

It is my job.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Percy]

I am certainly not, as my hon. Friend interjects, the bard from Brigg. It is not going to happen, alas.

To return to the report, I thank the Minister for meeting me and my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) shortly before its publication. The Minister will recall that I said that if the Government did not take it seriously, I might well end up dousing myself in petrol and setting myself on fire, but I will not have to make that protest any more, not least because I cannot afford the petrol at the current prices and because we have had a positive response.

I thank all my friends on both sides of the House who sat on our inquiry. They included my hon. Friends the Members for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) and for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw) and the hon. Member for Darlington (Mrs Chapman), as well as myself and my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon. It was a thoroughly valuable experience and I think we all enjoyed taking part in a cross-party inquiry on such an important issue. Because we conducted it in the way we did, on Select Committee terms and by hearing evidence, I think we all felt that the hours we spent doing that were probably some of our most valuable since getting elected. One can wonder whether a lot that goes on in here is having any impact or making any difference, particularly in some people’s cases, but on this issue we all felt that the experience was valuable and that we were engaged in something important.

Some hon. Members will have read our report, which is very comprehensive. I am not allowed to use props so I shall not hold it up. As can be seen from the executive summary, we have recommended that this subject should form part of the national curriculum. We want it to be compulsory across schools, and I shall say something about the mechanics of that in a moment. It is important to get some statistics into the debate about why this is so important. As people who have read our executive summary will have seen, it states that, according to a learndirect study:

“Two-thirds of people in the UK feel too confused to make the right choices about their money and more than a third say they don’t have the right skills to properly manage their cash.”

Sadly, we have seen higher and higher levels of insolvency in recent years, and we know that personal debt levels have exploded in the past 10 or 15 years.

I am not part of the generation about whom my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon spoke. I am part of the generation after, having got on the housing market only last year but with considerable debts, which I have spoken about before. I am not one of those who will see the big increases in house prices that will take care of all those nasty credit card debts.

Let me explain why I got involved in all this. It has been a good partnership with my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon because he is extremely financially competent, as anyone who knows him will know. Having shared a flat with him, along with another of our hon. Friends, I can certainly attest to his competency in all things financial—and perhaps to his being frugal as well. I am the antithesis of that, having made some incredibly bad financial decisions when I left school and went to university, including getting on the conveyor belt of credit card debt while at university and getting student loans even though that was the year before tuition fees came in. So I left university with an awful lot of debt and then did two years of postgraduate study, which I funded myself, which meant getting into even more debt. I am still paying off those debts today, and I do not mind the education side of them—it is all those other lifestyle debts that one builds up on credit cards that I am still lumbered with to this day.

It has been good to have a partnership of two people with different experiences of managing their debt looking at this issue. I was proud to be in the top set of my comprehensive school in Hull. I was quite bright and managed to get a GCSE in maths at grade C although I have always struggled with maths. I got good A-levels, a degree and postgraduate qualifications but I am still completely and utterly incapable of working out interest payments, APR and all the rest of it. I could not tell you what I pay in mortgage interest, Mr Deputy Speaker—I just pay up every month. I suppose I am an example of the people we have talked about and at whom the report is aimed. This is not moralising about debt. We have been very clear: this is not about saying that people should not get into debt or about educating people never to get into debt; it is about providing people with appropriate skills.

[Kevin Brennan]

Is the hon. Gentleman at all worried that he has put his name to a report that includes a recommendation that would bar him from teaching in a primary school?

[Andrew Percy]

I understand that that would not be applied retrospectively—and a very sound recommendation it is on those terms. I shall come on to that in a moment, because I taught in a primary school the year before I was elected, and I had to teach maths. That experience has led me to the conclusion that we should absolutely ensure that primary school teachers have better maths qualifications. Although I did not do them a disservice, the children I taught would have benefited from being taught by somebody who had not struggled with maths as I did. I managed to scrape a GCSE C grade. That is why we have supported the minimum grade of B for primary school teachers.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon outlined most of our recommendations and stole quite a lot of my speech in the process. He also talked about the inquiry process and stole my three bullet points on that too. I have been left with something to say, however. It is important to remind ourselves why this subject is so important. A lot of the research that we looked at in preparing the report was quite frightening. The situation out there is even worse than I expected. Research by EdComs in June 2009 found that by the time children reach the age of 17, more than half of them are or have already been in debt. A YouGov survey in 2008 found that 70% of 18 to 24-year-olds were already in debt. As we have heard, with tuition fees and the way life is today, that figure will not go down any time soon.

A survey by M&S Money found that some 14 to 18-year-olds are given no help with basic money matters by their parents. Indeed, 19% of parents have never discussed with teenagers how to spend money, and 32% have yet to discuss how to budget or even describe what a budget is. Most telling of all is the report compiled in March this year by Credit Action which found that a lack of financial education has cost Brits nearly £250 million in bank charges and penalties alone. I know that we are all grateful to Martin Lewis for helping us to get our money back in those matters.

The lack of financial education is a growing problem. We seem to be sending young people out into the world, which is increasingly financially complex, without providing them with the skills they need. I support the Government’s drive to reduce burdens on schools, to slim down the curriculum and to mandate less to schools, but in that process we must never allow ourselves to scale down to the extent that we remove the basic capabilities that we expect our young people to have when they leave school. Our view is that the financial education component should be a key measure.

I listened to the shadow Minister’s comments about PSHE. We gave some consideration to that. One of the big fights in our inquiry, not only between panel members but between those who gave evidence to us, was about whether financial education should just sit in PSHE. As a former practitioner who was expected to deliver PSHE, I felt strongly that it was not suitable, not least because it is not examined. As the hon. Gentleman, as a former teacher, will know, and indeed as head teachers told us during the inquiry, if a subject is not examined, schools do not necessarily accord it the importance they should.

For three years, I taught in a very difficult school in Hull, in one of the most deprived catchments in the country. I had to deliver PSHE, but we had so many other pressures on us to raise standards, such as working with grade C-D borderline kids so that in the next year’s league tables we would do a little better and would not be picked out by the local media as the worst-performing school. In better-performing—dare I say it?—more middle-class schools, teachers may be able to indulge themselves a little more in developing the PSHE curriculum because they do not have quite the same pressures on them. However, I am afraid that in a lot of schools, despite the professionalism of teachers, the subject often takes a back seat. When the Arun Youth Council and My Money Young Advisers came to give evidence, I asked one young person, “What do you think of PSHE?” His response was, “Well, it’s a bit of a doss.” Sadly, that is the situation in a lot of schools. Some fantastic work is being done across the country in PSHE, and we were provided with evidence of that and told about it by other young people. Although PSHE is important and must be part of the solution, we concluded that financial education had to be examined so that schools place the necessary emphasis on it.

We made it clear that there should be a financial education element within maths that can be clearly defined and packaged to young people. It is not simply a case of putting in a few questions that look like they are about financial education, as the shadow Minister said. It is about packaging a lot of the education and skills that are already there and saying clearly to young people, “This is financial education, and this is why we are doing it.” We can also help to improve the importance placed on PSHE, which is already taught in schools, because it will be used to support the drive for standards in mathematics. I think that that provides a real opportunity to raise the profile and importance of PSHE across the country.

I will give a couple of examples from our report to demonstrate this. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon said, we did not want to come up with a wishy-washy report that said it would be easy to have financial education, knock on the Minister’s door and have him say, “Thank you very much. It looks lovely, but I am afraid that it’s not going to happen.” Therefore, we have tried to work in the direction of Government policy and to provide practical solutions.

Members who have looked at the report will have seen that on page 38 we demonstrate clearly where in the maths curriculum the financial education elements can fit nicely—we are grateful for the help we had from mathematicians. Those have been split into three headings: money and transactions; risk and reward; and financial landscape. The money and transactions elements includes being able to do compound interest calculations with a calculator or spreadsheet, to set up a spreadsheet to do calculations involving percentages and to use foreign exchange rate information to make calculations. For financial landscape, the competencies include the ability to do reverse percentage calculations and to work out an inflation rate for a given time period, which is very important and something we hear a lot about. That involves real maths skills, not wishy-washy stuff at all.

That can be supported over in the PSHE curriculum by talking to young people about the products that they might have to make choices about. For example, we can talk to them about managing money, budgeting, the subjective issues of risk and reward and what is right for them in particular situations. That is not something we felt could fit easily into one or other area, which is why the solution we have come up with is deliverable within the current curriculum without putting extra pressures on schools.

One of the recommendations that has been referred to is that of having a co-ordinator on this in schools, and that should be someone from the senior leadership team within the school. That is important, because one of the big drivers when I first started teaching in the early 2000s was the drive towards more cross-curricular working, and it happened for a bit and then we lost focus on it. Having someone at a sufficiently senior level within the school to drive that cross-curricular agenda and link the two subjects is important, and the educational professionals who came to speak to us were very supportive of that approach.

Health and Social Care Bill (Programme) (No. 2)

Debate between Andrew Percy and Kevin Brennan

Tuesday 21st June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. That has already been discussed. The key thing now is to debate the parts of the Bill that the Government have said they intend to amend, and perhaps that will mean that we can debate them in more depth. I want to know what the provisions are going to be to prevent cherry-picking. The shadow Secretary of State said that this is an attempt by the Government to break up the NHS and bring in market forces. I would not want to be a member of any political party that attempted to do that, so I want to know about the Government amendments.

[Kevin Brennan]

I respect the hon. Gentleman’s respect for Parliament and therefore put to him what I said earlier: on a point of principle, is it not wrong that the Government should be able to select the parts of the Bill that they want to have scrutinised and not allow Members from all parts of the House an opportunity to do so? Does that not set an extremely dangerous precedent?

[Andrew Percy]

We have discussed where these procedures come from and who is accountable for them, and that certainly cannot be laid at the door of this Government. Over the past few months, we have heard first that there has been too much delay, and now that there is not enough delay.

As we have heard, professionals in the health service and the public have been saying that they wanted to know where we were heading and that they needed some clarity. The Government wanted that brought to an end, and they have had their listening exercise. On that basis alone, although I do not like the idea of curtailing debate, I hope that we can get on with this so that we all know what the changes are going to be, and that we end up with an NHS that is on a stable footing for the long term and do not have any more reorganisation for a considerable time.

Religious Education

Debate between Andrew Percy and Kevin Brennan

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on securing this debate, which has been most interesting. The hon. Lady acknowledged the considerable progress on religious education that was made under the previous Government; as she has said, the numbers have quadrupled. She made an extremely thoughtful speech on the teaching of religious education, with particular emphasis on the E-bac.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) on her speech. I also congratulate her on getting a timely reply to her letter from the Secretary of State for Education, which is a rare thing. The hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) called for a two-out-of-three option on the E-bac. It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s response.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) made a passionate speech about her Catholic religious background. As ever, the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) was donnish and scholarly in his observations. He seemed to be putting forward a case for the compulsory teaching of philosophy rather than of religion.

My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) reminded us that the Church is disestablished in Wales, but he admirably resisted the temptation to use the word “antidisestablishmentarianism”, which showed a great deal of restraint, which I do not possess. My hon. Friend preached respect rather than tolerance, which is an interesting distinction.

The hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main), a former teacher, spoke with passion. Incidentally, my school—St Alban’s RC comprehensive school at Pontypool —is obviously named after the same martyr as her city. The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) acknowledged the progress made under the previous Labour Government, saying that four times as many are now studying RE at A-level. The hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) urged the Minister to repent on the matter of E-bac. The hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) is obviously a man of great faith; he must be to support Grimsby Town football club.

Finally, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) accused schools of cheating. It was slightly over the top, even for him, to say of schools that enter pupils for exams that are available and properly set out by the examination boards that they are cheating. I would be interested to know which schools in his constituency he thinks are cheats, and which teachers and head teachers. I am sure that he will list them all later.

It is right for me to say something about what the previous Government did to improve RE teaching in our schools. We invested £1 million in an RE action plan during our last three years. We wanted to improve the quality of teaching and learning of religious education, with revised guidance and a review of resources, support and materials for teachers. We wanted to strengthen the role of RE in the curriculum, and we worked closely with the key stakeholders to deliver that plan. The previous Government, like this Government, were supportive of religious education being taught in our schools, and we were supportive of it being broadly Christian in character. However, it is extremely important that pupils should be taught about different religions, not least in the multi-faith world which we live in and which is reflected in so many of our constituencies.

The previous Labour Government were right to do that, and I do not think that there has been any particular deliberate change in emphasis by the present Government. However, a number of Members spoke about the impact of the English baccalaureate on the teaching of RE. That policy comes under the famous “nudge” theory. I have said it before, and I shall say it again, but if we nudge people with a loaded gun the consequences are obvious. The consequence of the loaded gun of the English baccalaureate for the teaching of RE in schools is becoming clear.

I wonder what the Secretary of State thought would happen to the teaching of RE when he announced the English baccalaureate. It was done in a rush, without consultation and without deep thought being given to it. Was he emphasising the importance of teaching the core academic subjects? Was he setting his own exam test that he could not fail? He knows that in a few years’ time the impact of nudging people in that way—of saying that schools will be judged on how they do in the E-bac—would be a rush, a diversion, of schools’ resources into the teaching of those subjects. The inevitable consequence, which he desires, is that he would be able to say at the end of his parliamentary term, “I have succeeded, because more people are studying the subjects that I have decided are important.”

What will be the consequences for RE? As the hon. Member for St Albans has said, The Times Educational Supplement of 4 February 2011 published a survey by the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education, which had gathered 800 responses from state and independent schools. It was reported that the survey had

“found planned cuts to both short and full-course GCSEs in religious studies from this September. In some cases schools are reported to be ignoring their statutory duty to offer RE at all.”

That was the result of the rushed and ill-considered introduction of the English baccalaureate by the Secretary of State.

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

rose—

[Kevin Brennan]

Because the hon. Gentleman did not speak earlier, I shall give way.

[Andrew Percy]

The hon. Gentleman is entirely correct. For the last two decades we have seen that schools will always teach to whatever they are measured on. The real risk of the English baccalaureate being drawn so narrowly is as the hon. Gentleman says. It is happening in my constituency; head teachers tell me that they are doing exactly that—rushing resources to the subjects that contribute to the E-bac to the detriment of all other subjects.

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Gentleman, like me, is an ex-teacher and speaks from experience. He knows the impact of directives, missives or advice from the Department for Education.

The Times Educational Supplement of 13 May—last Friday—stated in its magazine:

“Even though RE is a statutory subject, the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education…has warned that some headteachers are allocating less, or no, time to RE. A poll of nearly 800 schools in January found that 30 per cent have cut time for RE. With less time devoted to their subject, and potentially fewer pupils and funding, there are fears about job losses in non-EBac subjects.”

That, of course, includes RE. The article then states:

“With RE, the DfE argues that because it is a statutory subject, it will be protected. In the past, Mr Gove has said that ‘high-quality religious education is a characteristic of the very best schools; faith schools and non-faith schools’. But the RE community is not convinced. Mike Castelli, who sits on the RE Council of England and Wales and is principal lecturer in education at Roehampton University, is under no illusions that the statutory nature of the subject will protect its importance in school. ‘What secured it was Ofsted inspections, but Ofsted now doesn't report on the curriculum in detail,’ he says. ‘Therefore there’s no comeback to headteachers who decide they don’t want to put RE on at GCSE level. The fact that RE is statutory is not doing what the Government thinks it is doing.”

I could go on, but there is not enough time. I say to the Schools Minister that the situation is the result of ill-considered, non-evidence-based policy being introduced without consultation. The Government should drop this approach to making education policy. The Minister is not malevolent, but misguided. He will have to do a U-turn, and he is lucky that he will have to do it with regard to RE, because he knows that, in this case, for sinners redemption is available.