Social Mobility Commission: State of the Nation Report

Debate between Baroness Morgan of Cotes and Nick Clegg

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clegg]

The hon. Gentleman is entirely right. I have gone on a bit of a journey on this: I have always had a somewhat kneejerk liberal reaction of slight squeamishness and reticence about the idea of politicians, the Government, Whitehall and public policy experts seeking to tweak or improve how parents choose to raise their children, which I intuitively think is no business of politicians, but I agree with the evidence. Much like the right hon. Member for Loughborough, I agree on almost nothing with the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) on many issues, but on this I think that he led the pack in saying that this is something that politicians need to grapple with, although we need to do so with care.

The first page of the summary of the report recommends that the Government should introduce

“a new parental support package, including a guarantee of help if a child’s 2 to 2½-year check shows that they are falling behind.”

I entirely agree with that. Public policy is inching towards greater involvement in an area that many folk have previously felt should be kept immune from such interventions.

I want to make one more point about early years that I am sure everyone here is aware of. It is unglamorous, rather fiddly and difficult to fix, but it is acutely important: it is the quality of early years provision. The pay and status of early years teachers are real problems. We do not have enough men going into early years teaching. Pay is very low, and there is no qualified teacher status. As the Government seek to expand the entitlements for three and four-year-olds, it is terrifically important that quantity does not come at the further cost of diminished quality. If the Minister can tell us how the quality, status and—in the long run—pay of early years teachers can be improved, so much the better.

I also want to talk about money. In those glory days back in 2010, I intervened aggressively in internal discussions when we had to announce what was in many ways the fateful comprehensive spending review setting out all sorts of unappetising cuts. I insisted that the per-pupil and indexed core budgets for schools should be protected. Those budgets needed to be protected in terms of prices and of pupil numbers, not least so that we could then add on the pupil premium in a meaningful way and ensure that it added genuine value.

I look now at the trouble the Government are getting into, and yes, a lot of this is complex. A lot is to do with the higgledy-piggledy, unjust, idiosyncratic way in which schools have had their budgets allocated to them over many decades, but some of it is pretty obvious. The Government simply cannot cancel the £600 million education services grant, as they did shortly after the 2015 general election, while protecting the per-pupil allocation only in cash terms and not in real terms and while diverting hundreds of millions of pounds to free schools—many of which are doing a great job, but frankly, far too many of which have been opened in places where there is no desperate need for extra places—and possibly compounding that error by spending hundreds of millions of extra pounds on new selective schools, and then ask schools to shoulder their own newly increased national insurance and pension contributions and, in some cases, apprenticeship levy costs, and, on top of that, introduce a national funding formula with no additional money to make that work. If they do all that, they are bound to get into terrible trouble.

I do not say this in a spirit of recrimination, but the Government should not be surprised that they are encountering huge resistance to these plans across the House and huge disquiet from parents, headteachers and governors up and down the country. There is a limit to how much they can keep expecting improved performance from a schools system that is being put under those multiple and entirely self-inflicted financial stresses and strains.

I know a little bit about this because, in the coalition Government, we looked exhaustively at the case for introducing a national funding formula. In principle, the case for doing so is impeccable; of course it is. The current situation is woefully unfair. There are many non-metropolitan schools, smaller rural schools, suburban schools, schools in the shires and so on that have received far less funding over a long period. However, the problem is that if we introduce a national funding formula in a way that does not raise the overall financial tide for all schools, what happens is exactly what is happening now. The schools that think they are going to gain pots and pots of money are disappointed at how little they gain, and those that are going to lose will lose an unacceptably large amount of money. No one is pleased.

The one issue in this debate on which I disagree with the right hon. Member for Loughborough is that, if I understand it correctly, her solution is to adjust the deprivation calculation buried within all the numbers in the national funding formula, which—all credit to the Minister and his Department—is a bona fide attempt to protect the funding to the poorest. The right hon. Lady will no doubt correct me if I am wrong, but one way to try to square the circle is to take a little money from the deprivation allocation and raise the floor or the minimum amount—

[Nicky Morgan]

rose—

[Mr Clegg]

Have I got it wrong?

[Nicky Morgan]

The intricacies of the national funding formula are probably not quite right for this debate, but the right hon. Gentleman wants to consider the different grades of deprivation and how they are funded. Of course, there is the pupil premium outside the national funding formula, but there is also the income deprivation affecting children index, or IDACI, which looks not only at the overall deprivation weighting, but the weighting within the different deprivation gradients. That needs to be reconsidered and the Department needs to rerun the numbers.

[Mr Clegg]

I am grateful for that explanation. I will not try to improve upon the technical proficiency and expertise that the right hon. Lady has just displayed, because I cannot match her for that. I hope in many ways that she has just made my point, which is that we are condemned to fiddling around in the undergrowth to shift a little bit of money here or there to try to square a circle.

We came to the conclusion in the coalition—the Minister may remember—that it is not possible to introduce a national funding formula in a way that is just and fair if it is not pump-primed with a lot of money. I cannot remember whether it was in 2013 or 2014, but we did the next best thing, which was to use about £400 million as a stopgap measure—the Minister may have announced it at the time—to target the underfunding of the most underfunded schools. I plead with the Minister to learn from the past and, because I doubt whether any new money will be forthcoming from the Treasury, do that again. It is not ideal. It is a stopgap. It is temporary, but it is much better to allocate targeted resources to the schools that rightly complain about having been most hard done by under the current funding formula than to annoy and upset everyone in the way that the Government appear destined to do if they carry on with their current trajectory. That is my helpful suggestion for a way out for the Government from this politically invidious position in which they find themselves.

My final point has been made already, but it is worth repeating and relates to the importance of evidence-based policy. It really should not have to be restated that when we consider something as precious and as important as how we design the education system for our children, we should always be led not by dogma, ideology or personal hobbyhorses, but by the evidence. I do not want go over many of the points made earlier, but this old idea of improved selection perplexes me—that is the politest way of putting it. No international, national or local evidence whatsoever is being wheeled out. If the evidence is not there, let me at least make a political plea: the proposal is not actually popular with parents. Opinion polls show that older voters like it, particularly those who remember grammar schools in the old way, but parents, who actually have to make invidious choices about where to send their children, hate it.

The Government appear to have forgotten why previous Governments, including previous Conservative Governments, stopped the expansion of selection. It was precisely because they were encountering such resistance from their own voters, who do not like it. I ask people in the Westminster and Whitehall village why on earth we are proceeding with something that parents do not like, for which there is no evidence and for which there is no manifesto commitment at all. I do not remember the Conservatives populating our television screens in the run-up to the 2015 general election saying, “And we will introduce grammar schools.” There is no mandate for it. I am told—the Minister will not be able to confirm this—that one unelected political apparatchik in No. 10 went to a grammar school and has apparently persuaded the Prime Minister that they are therefore a good idea.

I am sure that it is not as simple as that, but surely it cannot be the case that the whole of Whitehall is being led by the nose because of the personal prejudices of one unelected political appointee in No. 10. I have to put on record this magnificent quote from Russell Hobby, the leader of the National Association of Head Teachers, writing in The Times Educational Supplement:

“In no other sector would this be acceptable. If the minister for health proposed to increase state funding for homeopathy on the basis that it did wonders for his uncle’s irritable bowel back in the 1970s—and must, therefore, be right for everyone today—there would be an uproar. This is a precise metaphor for the expansion of grammar schools. It is educational homeopathy.”

I hope that the Minister, who of course will not be able to disagree with the new orthodoxy, will none the less privately go to the Secretary of State for Education, and to the other powers that be in Whitehall, to stop the fetish for selection before it gets this Government into terrible trouble.

Where does the evidence suggest that we should do more? I am not exactly declaring an interest, but I chair a cross-party commission for the Social Market Foundation—there are Labour and Conservative Members on the commission—and we are looking at some of the key evidence-based drivers of increases in, and the existence of, inequality in the education system. One of our most striking early conclusions from the data we have seen and our original research—we will be producing a concluding report in the next month or two—is, I should think, intuitively obvious to us all, much like the importance of early years.

There is an intimate relationship between educational underperformance in some of the more deprived parts of the country, and the high teacher turnover and lack of experienced teachers in those schools. It really is very striking. The proportion of unqualified teachers working in primary schools with the highest concentrations of pupils on free school meals is 4%, but it is half that in the most affluent quintile. There is a similar pattern in secondary schools, where 5% of teachers in the richest schools, if I can put it like that, are unqualified, compared with 9% in the poorest schools. Schools that serve the most disadvantaged communities also experience far higher levels of teacher turnover than neighbouring, more advantaged schools.

This policy challenge, which does not detonate with the same attention and fury from the media as selection and so on, is a mundane but, none the less, crucial one. What can we do to attract highly qualified teachers to those parts of the country to which they are not presently attracted and/or to make sure that teachers in those schools stay and are supported to improve their own experience and qualifications? The Department for Education is looking at that, and I very much hope that—as we all continue to grapple with the elusive problem of how to build an open society in which people can go as far as their talents, application and dreams take them, rather than having their life fortunes determined by the circumstances of their birth—it is one of the many areas in which the Government will seek to make a positive intervention in the years ahead.