Education: PISA Results

Baroness Humphreys Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

We will have to beg to disagree on this because I do not see our going from seventh to 25th in literacy, from eighth to 28th in science or from fourth to 16th in maths as progress.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, referred to a war room. I look forward to him perhaps taking me to visit that school at some stage. I entirely agree on the question of leadership. I was particularly impressed when I visited the Perry Beeches schools in Birmingham, which are run by an inspirational head, Liam Nolan, and by how he has managed to turn around a number of failing schools. He has not only kept in place people who were clearly not performing well under the previous regime but promoted them to very senior positions.

I entirely agree, too, about governing bodies. Whether the school is a local authority maintained school, a church school or an academy chain, real decisions can often be made in the governing bodies and we are focusing much more on them. We have recently made it absolutely clear that governing bodies should focus on a few key things: the vision and strategy of the school, holding the head to account for the attainment and progression of pupils, the performance management of his or her staff, and the finance. We need smaller governing bodies, in many cases, but with many more of the appropriate skills.

[Baroness Humphreys (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his Statement. For many years I worked as a teacher in Wales, so it was with a great deal of sadness and disappointment that I read the PISA results for Wales today. Wales performed worse than the OECD average in all measures: maths, science and reading. Since 2009, Welsh pupils have slipped from 40th to 43rd in maths, from 30th to 38th in science, and from 38th to 41st in reading—a disastrous performance which shows Wales to be the poorest performing nation in the UK.

All this makes the ambition of Wales’s Labour First Minister to be in the top 20 by 2015 almost laughable, if it were not so serious. This is the culmination of nearly 15 years of Labour control of the struggling Welsh education system. I recognise that education is a devolved matter, but will the Minister be having discussions with Ministers from the devolved nations to ensure that standards improve throughout the United Kingdom?

[Lord Nash]

I know that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education is deeply concerned about the situation in Wales, which—quite deliberately, it seems—lacks many of the systems of accountability and rigour that we are putting in place here. My noble friend puts it extremely well: if anyone wants a case study of how not to do it, Wales seems to be it. We would be happy to have conversations with them if they were prepared to engage in conversations.