Educational Attainment: Boys

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for raising this question. It is a perennial problem facing our education system. Across all parties and groups there is a wish to solve it but so far there is not a lot of evidence that any of us have succeeded. The more we can focus on it, the better. I am grateful for the opportunity today to contribute.

I used to be an optimist about this. The noble Lord mentioned that boys’ attainment fell away in the 1980s. I remember that period well: it was when I was a secondary school teacher. I think what happened is that girls’ attainment improved while boys’ attainment stood still and that is when the gap started. In a strange way, I have always taken comfort from that fact. When I was Education Minister, we saw the performance of children from ethnic groups improve so that it overtook white children, who got left behind. I had seen that as optimistic, thinking that if we could do it for girls and ethnic groups we could do it for those boys, too. Until fairly recently, I thought that was probably the approach we ought to adopt, with focused targets on boys to try and replicate what happened in raising the attainment of other underachieving groups.

I have begun to change my mind on that, partly because we have a much stronger schools system than we had. We have better school leaders and better-quality teachers, yet we have not made that difference. It has not worked. Sitting around just saying, “Focus on boys and have another load of initiatives”, with £1 million spent here and there will not work. I am much more persuaded now—it is a more complex argument and a greater challenge to achieve—that the whole of the gender difference is wound up in the income difference. I take the phrase from the Social Mobility Commission, which says:

“The income gap is larger than either the ethnicity gap or the gender gap”.


I thought we could overcome that by focusing on boys but do not believe so any longer. The way we must go now to close the gap between girls and boys is to take on that big issue of the income gap. If we do that, we will raise standards everywhere and boys will rise with that.

I do not say that there is no issue with boys. This debate is about underachievement of boys in the state system but there is also underachievement of boys in the independent sector—I am not sure why they have been squeezed out of this debate—and from wealthy backgrounds. However, when you look at the nub of the problem, the hard edge is among poor boys. Whatever we do for poor boys would help other underachieving boys as well.

We could get drowned in statistics—I entirely agree with that—but I offer this set of statistics because they support my argument. Girls who do not get free school meals, so more affluent girls above the measure of poverty, are 107% more likely to gain five good GCSEs than free-school-meal girls. Boys who do not get free school meals are 135% more likely to gain five good GCSEs. So there is an issue about boys and girls. If you look at the difference between free-school-meal boys and girls, it is only 33%. If you get even for poverty, the gender gap is 33%. If you plonk poverty back into the measure through free school meals, the gap is 107% for girls and 135% for boys. There must be a message in there that the gender gap is real but it is accentuated and made worse because, at its core, this is about poverty.

We must address the wider educational and inequality arguments and issues that face us. The most interesting set of statistics I found in the Library briefing on this—I could have sat for a week looking at all the statistics; they are fascinating and contradictory, which is one of the problems—is where gender gap by local area was looked at. We know that the largest gender gap is in St Helens, South Tyneside and Darlington. The lowest gender gaps are in Richmond upon Thames, Calderdale and North Somerset. I say no more. It is bound in with poverty. On the next page, one sees something interesting. The most deprived local authority in the country is Tower Hamlets, whose gender gap is 15%. That is too large, but it is only a percentage point away from the second-least deprived local authority in England, which is Rutland. My analysis of that is that Tower Hamlets has overall good standards. There has been good, solid school improvement. It is a high-achieving borough, even though it is an area of high deprivation.

Somewhere in that lies the answer. If you get school improvement right—we now know a lot about this, which we did not know years ago—you close those gaps. You close the poverty gap and you close the gender gap. My marker in trying to address this is that first we have to address poverty. That is not beyond the Minister’s brief, because it is not beyond anybody’s brief. If you address poverty, that will solve the gender gap. Secondly—and this is where I share my conclusion with the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield—we need to look at the barriers that are caused by being poor. This is about high expectations, social capital and, predominantly, early years education and language development. It is about having a space to study and role models. This is a big issue and I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss it. We do not have a good track record in tackling it, but I think that we now know enough about school improvement to take us further forward.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 21 in this group, which is in my name and those of my noble friend Lord Storey and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and add my support to Amendments 2 and 3 to which the noble Lord, Lord Watson, has just spoken. Our amendment came out of discussions with the CBI, which has a great deal of interest and expertise in the future of apprenticeships—indeed, its engagement is vital to the success of this scheme. It expressed the concerns of its members that the new institute will need monitoring and overview, particularly in its early days.

The amendment aims to ensure that there is regular reporting back to the Secretary of State on the quality of apprenticeships and technical education, calling for,

“a response … containing any actions to be taken as a result”.

Those “any actions” are particularly important because having action plans in response will surely make the difference. There needs to be ongoing communication. There is a weight of responsibility on the institute and high expectations that it will be a real engine for change and will counter generations of undervaluing practical, work-based skills. We need to ensure that there is transparency and accountability from the Government over the quality of technical and further education, and this amendment would help to ensure that the very welcome focus on the technical and further education sector is not lost after the Bill passes into law. I look forward to a positive response from the Minister.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments. They are very reasonable and it is difficult to find too many reasons for opposing them other than bureaucracy. When you weigh it up, the argument comes down very much on the side of the amendments on this occasion and not on the side of bureaucracy.

This is primarily about delivering good-quality apprenticeships for young people and adults. We all know that one of the challenges is to change the public discourse about apprenticeships and vocational training, and we are going to have to work really hard if that is to happen. When I look back at the reforms in schools over the past two decades, one of the changes that enabled us to have a more effective public discourse and empower people to ask the right questions, both for members of their own family and in general, was the availability of data. I hear good-quality conversations now from parents, teachers and young people about education, and that is because they have the information to ask the questions and have the debate.

However, I do not think it is there with apprenticeships and technical education. We do not have it yet, and we have a responsibility, if this system is to work, to build up the data and language so that the public can have a proper conversation and monitor what is going on with apprenticeships. Certainly in the medium term, this amendment would help deliver that. It would put information in the public domain every year, and in time, if not immediately, that would lead to discussion and debate. That has to be good for raising the profile of this area of education as well as holding the institute to account for what it is delivering.

I accept that entirely, but also want to emphasise a different point. Has the Minister wondered whether this does not in some way reflect the annual HMCI report, which is laid before Parliament and on which there is always a public debate? It gets on the “Today” programme, bits of information get into the newspapers and the media, and it becomes part of the national conversation that we have about schools. So having this information in the public domain is the right thing to do for accountability. But it would also help with the cultural change that we have to bring about to have a public debate about this area of education. This is not unreasonable. I can see that in years to come—say, in five years’ time—we might want to review the minutiae and the details. I do not think we ought to be committed to this for ever and a day, but I cannot see that the value of starting the practice of having an annual report, monitoring progress and building up confidence and awareness, would be outweighed by any bureaucratic burden that it might place on organisations.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, has just said. As the House knows, I run the Good Schools Guide. We do what we can to spread information about apprenticeships, but that is extremely difficult because the amount of information available is not good. For universities, by comparison, there is one single source of information. Now, I do not wish the Government to hire UCAS to do apprenticeships, because UCAS is an extremely difficult organisation to deal with and does not let data out to anyone, but something like it which was a single point of information would really help schoolkids and schools because ordinary teachers, let alone career teachers, do not have time to learn their way around 150 different university apprenticeships, let alone all the others. They need a coherent source of information. There is a habit among employers of letting information out only in the two weeks when they want to hire apprentices, rather than all around the year when potential apprentices want to be looking. They are not adjusted to that kind of marketing yet; they are recruiting in penny numbers rather than the tens of thousands, as universities are. There are all sorts of reasons why we need more information and support.

If you want to know where children have gone on to from school, schools will give you—at least English schools will; Scottish schools are more tiresome—a long list of university courses that their students have got on to. Nowhere can you find those data for apprenticeships. You can get data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency so you can publish information from there if you want, but there is no equivalent available for apprenticeships. That makes the whole business of upping the status of apprenticeships, and of technical education generally, much harder than it needs to be. So while I hold no brief for the exact drafting of the two Labour amendments, I am very much with the spirit of them.

On the amendment that followed from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, there is scope for upping the prestige of the Institute for Apprenticeships in this way. It gives it that much more visibility in public, that much more right to comment and that much more right to be heard. At a time when there is going to be a lot of change, a lot of difficult decisions taken and a lot of need for what is going on to be in the public eye so that things that are not quite right get caught early and commented on early rather than being relegated to the pages of a few specialist magazines, an increase in prestige, as suggested in this amendment, is an excellent idea.

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[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I would like to ask a question that has just come to mind, mainly because I tabled a similar amendment in Committee. Amendment 17 is far better because it allows a flexibility that we did not have before, and having it in the Bill would help to raise the profile of careers education during Ofsted inspections, so I am happy to support it. No doubt the Minister will let us know what the framework already says, but I think the intent is fine.

I support 100% the point that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has been making about young people’s access to careers education. I have no problem with the way in which Amendments 8 and 9 were described, and in fact I have supported such amendments on previous occasions. However, it has struck me that although it is the right of the student to have access to the information, it is not the right of the person to go into the school. I know that sounds like a fine difference, but I wonder whether the Minister might reflect on that and give some assurance that, although a head would not have the right to deny the information and access to the school from someone who was giving that information, they would retain their right as head of the school to choose who talked to their students.

The quality of a speaker is very important. If I were a head teacher, I would not want someone who I knew was a bad speaker and did not engage the children successfully or in a professional manner to have access to my school, even if they might be talking about something whose content was very important. Indeed, one of the reasons for not doing that would be because they would put the information over badly. My years of teaching experience might be from a long time ago, but I remember some horror stories of outside visitors coming into schools who just did not have the skills to engage and talk to children and young people. I am not opposed at all to the amendments, but I do not think we have discussed the right of the head to retain control over who is speaking to his or her students. I would like that to be considered, without taking away from the intent of the amendments we have discussed.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak on Amendment 17, but I was on the Social Mobility Select Committee along with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the issue of careers guidance came up very strongly throughout our year of investigations and featured strongly in recommendation 2. Our report came out in April last year and the government response was published in July. I would like to read part of that response and then refer to a piece of evidence that we received from Sir Michael Wilshaw. The response, and I am cutting away a lot of it, says that,

“we will make the Gatsby benchmarks the focus of the statutory guidance that supports schools and colleges to implement the careers duty. This is in direct response to calls from schools to make it clear what government is expecting from them in terms of careers education”.

The tone of the response is pretty clear: the Government are saying, more or less, “Yes, we will do more”. It makes no sense, then, not to measure it, and I agree wholly with what the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said. I distinctly remember that Sir Michael Wilshaw made it very clear in his excellent evidence that Ofsted is already carrying out the assessment work on careers guidance, so not to include it in the marking scheme seems not to be using the fullness of the evidence and the data that are being gathered. Accordingly, I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the whole of Amendment 17.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, as we embark on three days of Committee on the Technical and Further Education Bill, I must admit that I have been caught slightly unawares by the changed groupings that have been issued, further to those circulated yesterday. So I may have to edit as I go along on some of those to which I shall speak.

Be that as it may, the first group comprises Amendments 1, 4, 5 and 19—though not Amendment 17, as I had thought—and is mainly about the quality of outcomes. That concerns not only the input to but the outcomes of the apprenticeships that are a central part of the Bill. I say “outcomes” because outputs and outcomes are not necessarily the same thing, a point we want to stress with Amendment 1. Despite some progress in recent years, the situation for those young people who remain not in employment, education or training remains of some concern and we cannot be complacent about the job that still needs to be done to deal with many of the 16 to 24 year-olds in what is known as the NEET category.

As my noble friend Lord Hunt and I said at Second Reading, the focus for the Government’s target of 3 million apprenticeships must be high standards, not simply a concentration on meeting what was, after all, rather an arbitrary figure. Ministers must now choose either to honour their pledge to increase the quality of apprenticeship training or allow themselves to be consumed by the need to hit those targets. Last year the Public Accounts Committee emphasised the need for the Government to be unrelenting in their focus on the quality of apprenticeships and we believe that this is very much the key. While the temptation may exist to water down apprenticeship standards to hit the 3 million target, such short-termism would ultimately prove counterproductive. Unless there is an increase in quality, people will continue to look down their noses at apprenticeships and technical education when they should be viewed with the same respect as other forms of further education, such as university degrees.

Young people themselves are very keen to ensure that their apprenticeships are marked by quality. In last year’s Industry Apprentice Council survey, their main concern was quality because industry apprentices rightly see their apprenticeships as badges of honour—as, it is to be hoped, do their employers. It was satisfying to learn that nearly nine out of 10 level 2 and 3 apprentices were satisfied with their apprenticeships, but with such an increase planned it is essential that the satisfaction rate is maintained.

Given the new routes and standards for technical education and apprenticeship expansion, it is vital to track the outcomes for each group. The last two years’ apprenticeship evaluations showed small increases in the proportion that had completed their apprenticeships and were in work, but monitoring those trends is important. Related to that is monitoring progression and pay, which is not just important but very important. Apprentices have talked about a number of positive impacts in the workplace, but that does not always translate into pay or promotion benefits. Some 46% of apprentices received a pay rise after completing their apprenticeship and 50% had been promoted. Both figures represented an increase, and we certainly hope that trend will continue because it is important that young people who have worked hard to complete their apprenticeships are made to feel that it has been worth while. If they do not have that sense, perhaps because they feel that they have to some extent been exploited, demoralisation can set in, and that can dissuade the next cohort.

This issue was highlighted in last month’s report by the Low Pay Commission, which revealed that 18% of apprentices were being paid less than their legal entitlement. It is vital that these headlines do not act as a deterrent for non-graduate groups going into professions, and do not deter future young people from taking up apprenticeships. We believe that when the apprenticeship levy comes into force in April, tackling issues concerning exploitation should be a priority for the new Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.

Preventing such misbehaviour will require a strong regulator with power to punish instances of non-compliance on minimum pay. I repeat: this is a legal entitlement and there should be no exceptions under any circumstances. I accept that the Government very much hold to that view and I am certain that the institute will be told that it is an important part of its operation. Without that, the potential for further long-term harm to the reputation of apprenticeships is considerable. Research undertaken last year by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants showed that apprenticeships face something of an image problem among many 16 to 18 year-olds. More than half the young people polled thought that apprenticeship routes would lead to their earning less over the course of their careers than if they studied at university. Apprenticeships are still seen as the poor relation when compared to traditional forms of higher education. If the Bill achieves anything by helping to reduce that perception, it will, in that sense alone, have been something of a success.

The duties that we place on the institute by the amendment are not onerous. Surely the Secretary of State would expect nothing less than an annual report from the institute on the quality of outcomes of completed apprenticeships. My question is: why not include that provision in the Bill? It follows, particularly while the Government are in pursuit of the 3 million target, that Parliament should have the opportunity to receive and debate the report. If the Government are serious about quality trumping quantity—I have done it again and I no longer feel comfortable using that word; I should have said “quality triumphing over quantity”—we should ensure maximum transparency in that regard.

Those sentiments dovetail with our Amendment 4 on standards and are a natural fit with new Section ZA11 on page 22 of the Bill, which sets out how the institute should publish standards in relation to the 15 occupations highlighted by my noble friend Lord Sainsbury in his seminal report. It is, of course, important to differentiate between quality and standards—terms that are often wrongly used interchangeably. It will be for the institute to set and maintain standards, while Ofsted and, in respect of maths and English, Ofqual, will have the task of ensuring that quality is widely established and then maintained. It is to be hoped that all the organisations charged with oversight will not overlap too much. I say “too much” because some overlap is preferable to gaps being allowed to develop through which who knows what might fall. To a significant extent, this is a question of resources and it will be the Government’s duty to ensure that staffing levels and resources of other kinds are not held at levels that restrict the effectiveness of any of the oversight bodies, particularly the institute.

Some surprise has been expressed by organisations in the sector at what Amendment 5 is intended to achieve. Let me be clear: first and foremost, it is concerned with achieving the best quality of teaching in further education institutions. No one would gainsay that, but before one can claim quality, one must have a means of measuring it. That is not to say that no measurement is currently undertaken, nor have there been suggestions that teaching quality in further education is poor. However, the detail we have is less than is available in higher education and, as noble Lords will know, when the teaching excellence framework is introduced in universities, the level of scrutiny will increase. We believe simply that, warts and all, the use of some sort of metrics would be advantageous, and Amendment 5 is not prescriptive as to what they might be. We simply call on the Secretary of State to bring forward a scheme to be operated by the Quality Assessment Committee of the Office for Students to ensure good-quality teaching in the further education sector. We also advocate a simple pass/fail outcome, with no suggestion of the cumbersome and ultimately unhelpful gold, silver and bronze scheme suggested for higher education. This would assist in achieving consistent levels of quality, with a broader aim of allowing the sector to build a relatively focused group of qualifications that carry the recognisability and acceptance of GCSEs and A-levels. People know what they are getting with those qualifications and the ultimate aim should be for something similar to develop with technical qualifications.

Finally, Amendment 19 would require the institute to publish apprenticeship assessment plans for all standards. Recent analysis of real-time experience shows that number-crunching on the government figures published last October suggested that there are no approved awarding organisations for over 40% of learner starts on the new apprentice standards. That is surely a matter for concern, although moving from a framework to standards involves moving down a road that will not, by any means, always be smooth. But apprentices on the standards will have to face end-point assessments for the first time and those assessments have to be carried out by organisations that have been cleared for the task by government or Skills Funding Agency-registered apprentice assessment organisations. Is the Minister confident that this will happen and that it will happen evenly across the country?

There is a degree of uncertainty about how this will evolve and what role the institute will have in relation to, say, Ofqual. Because of that it is important that we have transparency on who is being cleared and who is doing the clearing. As this process strengthens and multiplies, as it needs to do to meet all the government targets, the Government will have to pay close attention to the issue of capacity; otherwise, they will find themselves in a logjam of standards approvals as early as the middle of next year. That is the point at which any Government of any political persuasion, when they have the Opposition and other stakeholders bearing down on them, might be tempted to cut corners. Clearly, we do not want to see that but, like other stakeholders, we want to see what progress is taking place in real time. That is why we have tabled these amendments. I beg to move.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak this early but I support these amendments. The desire across all parties in the Committee to achieve high standards in apprenticeships is unquestioned. We know that is what needs to be done. We know that is what we have failed to do in the past. I think the jury is still out on whether or not the Bill will achieve that.

We know from experience that new structures do not always achieve the ends that we want. There is a real danger in politics that because structures are the things we can control, that is where we put our emphasis. It is the one thing we can do. We do not teach, we do not mark, we do not assess; we can give funding and we can build structures. Sometimes there is a danger that we persuade ourselves that as long as in our mind and on paper the structure looks right, all will be well and things will be delivered. The education system is littered with gaps between the intentions of the structures and the reality of what is being delivered to children and young people. If you look at any part of our education and skills system, nowhere is that more the case than in skills and apprenticeships. We do not have a strong basis on which to build. We are not building on a record of high standards.

To be honest, you have to be as old as I am to remember the day when apprenticeships were generally thought of by the public as being high-quality training that did young boys and girls good in terms of the opportunities they had for life. Anyone a bit younger than me has an impression of an apprenticeship as being second best, not wanted—perhaps okay for someone else’s child but certainly not for mine.

Throughout the Bill the testing of whether we have done enough to ensure high standards is crucial to what happens in the future. The Government have a real quandary about how to deal with it—whether to go for the 3 million target or for standards. I feel certain that at some point along the line those two really good ambitions—nothing wrong with either of them—will come into conflict with each other. It is important as we go through the Bill that we put in some measures to make sure we are monitoring the standards and outputs of these new structures that we are putting into place.

Amendments 1 and 4 do that. Why would we not want to know what is happening to people who have taken the initial apprenticeship route? Why would we not want to know what employers think of people they might recruit? Why would we not want to know what the students themselves thought of their apprenticeships? I do not doubt for a moment that the Government have plans for how to get that feedback. Indeed, I know that to be the case because they are not silly; of course they will want feedback.

My noble friend on the Front Bench made a crucial comment: this is as much about building trust with the public and the people involved in apprenticeships, both employers and users, as it is about anything else. It is not enough for the Government to collect the statistics and then amend structures or legislation on the back of them. This is not a highly charged Bill politically and there is a great deal of good will across both Houses of Parliament to make sure it succeeds. Our joint endeavour is to build confidence and trust among teachers, parents, employers and learners. Even if the Minister wants to amend it in some way, because we could have lots of arguments about the detail of the information to be collected, this is a reasonable amendment. Its aim and thrust would stand us in good stead in the Bill we are now considering and I support it.

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It is really important that we bear in mind that our schools are hugely stretched and that at 16 to 19, and indeed at other ages, they are clearly underresourced. This is something that officials and Ministers will agree is not going to change in a hurry. Therefore, before we pass anything like this into law, we really need to think about what needs to be made very clear and where we want schools and colleges to place their attention, and not create artificial barriers to following through on the intent of making sure that every young person gets the advice they need, by diverting more attention and resource into meeting formal requirements, which, because they are in primary legislation, we will not get rid of for at least a decade, if ever.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 11, to which I have added my name. I have some concerns about Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which I will mention. I do not want to go over the arguments again except to add weight of numbers to the strength of the arguments we have heard from other Members today. I do not disagree with anything that has been said, I just want to make two or three points which perhaps have not been made or have not been made frequently enough. I hope I will not speak for long.

First, I hope the Minister will be really clear about when this careers strategy is about to appear. We have been promised it for a very long time and I think I saw something by his colleague who leads in the department for this piece of legislation about it coming later in the year. Given that it is about two years since a careers strategy was promised, I am not sure why a Bill such as this, which will fail unless there is good-quality careers education, is coming so far in advance of the careers education strategy. They should go hand in hand. We would not be having this debate if we had the careers education strategy. I think a lot of these amendments have been tabled in sheer frustration. We almost panic because we know it is such a weak area of our system and we are about to pass the Bill with no effective careers education system. We need to know when the strategy will arrive and we need to understand why it has been delayed. If there is a problem, we need to know about it. I worry about that.

Secondly, I agree with the information bit but that in itself is not careers education. There are two parts to this. We need the information but then we need to make the decision. As a young person—or even an older person—just having information is not sufficient. The skill of making the right decision is far more complicated. You can let as many people into the school to give information about as wide a range of jobs as you can, but when they leave at the end of the day, it is the teacher who is there with the young person when the decision is made. That is a very important other part of this situation. Information by itself will not necessarily change the young person’s mind—it might but it might not.

There are three big influences on the child in making the decision: their parents, their friends and their teachers. The strategy must encompass and reflect that. We cannot squeeze teachers out of careers education. We can bring people with a wide range of knowledge and experience into the classroom, but teachers will have an important impact on the decisions reached because they are the pastoral carers and they spend an awful lot of time with young people. We have been critical of teachers, and rightly so, but we need a careers strategy that supports them in the job they are being asked to do. We do not want to give them the impression that we want them out of this business. They have an important role to play in supporting young people to make the right, effective and appropriate decision.

Thirdly, we are moaning about schools—I do not disagree with a word my noble friend said; he made this point brilliantly—but the incentives the Government have put into the system are causing the problems. What do we do? We moan at the teachers. We are complaining about the schools responding in an entirely predictable and understandable way to the incentives that we have put into the system—including me in my time. The answer to that is to change the incentives, but we want to leave the incentives in place and change the behaviour. That will not work. Where is the discussion about changing the incentives because that is the surest way of changing behaviour? I agree absolutely with the noble Lord, Lord Baker, that the UTCs are a force for good. They had a difficult birth and baptism but they are still a major player in the field. In a way, they encapsulate the problems of the incentives in the system. Their very existence is threatened because we have the wrong incentives, and I say that collectively of politics and Parliament. The case he has made about having access to young people is strong, but other things need to be done as well.

My only concern about Amendment 61 is that it is too easy to say, “Leave it to Ofsted. It cannot be a good school unless it has good careers education provision”. We always say that, and then every 10 years we have to prune what we ask Ofsted to inspect. We pile so much on to Ofsted. With every new initiative that is introduced we say, “Let’s get Ofsted to inspect it”. That is how the relationship between schools and Ofsted breaks down; the inspectors are always seen as the bearer of the big stick. I want to turn the amendment the other way around. We are saying that if a school does not have good careers education, it will go into “requires improvement” or “special measures” because those are the only two categories left. There are implications in that for a college that we ought to be aware of if Ofsted is to be used as the lever in this. It is a bit mean, or premature, to put a college into the “requires improvement” or “special measures” category because it has not got right a plank of policy that we have not got right either. It behoves us to get our bit right before we say to any educational provider, “If you don’t get this right”—despite the fact that we have not—“you will go into ‘requires improvement’ or ‘special measures’ and the consequences will be big”.

I say to the Minister that we would not be having this conversation if we had more information about the Government’s plans for the careers strategy. It is a big and dangerous hole at the moment and therefore I strongly support the amendments, with the caveat about Amendment 61.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the incentive I would like to see is schools being allowed to take credit for the performance of the children they let go into technical education. If a child might get only Ds in history and English but they are good for an A* in BTEC business, and the school can get credit for that, the school’s interests will align with the child. It would also be a good thing for the performance tables. We have superb data because it is easy enough to collect them, but why should a school be penalised for a kid who arrives in the year before GCSEs, having had a dreadful education beforehand? That is not fair; nor is it fair that a school which has really looked after a child and brought them on to the point where they have the get up and go to attend a UTC then gets no credit for it. If a school feels that the best interests of the child will align with the way it is going to appear in the tables, there is a real hope for making progress in this area. We should be doing this anyway to ensure equity between schools, so I hope that this is a direction we might consider going in.

I like the amendment about a technical version of UCAS, which is immensely helpful to schools. Everything is in one place and it would all look and feel the same. You know how it works and what is required and it becomes easy to provide support and advice for the children using it.

Apprenticeships are a great challenge. Companies have a horrible habit of not admitting they have apprenticeship places until about two weeks before they want people to apply. They suddenly appear, enough people apply, and they disappear again. This is not the way in which a school can work or how young people should be asked to work. We have to discipline companies to make it clear in good time that they are open to apprenticeships so that people who are interested can see what is on offer year round and put their names down. I know that it will never be a regular cycle such as UCAS, but we need to discipline the system so that it works in the interests of children, and something like UCAS would help. A UCAS system would also provide a place to find all the information. If someone is looking for an apprenticeship they might not cotton on to who the education provider is, who to go to, which Ofsted report applies, where to look to find the outcomes, and other data that will tell them whether a particular apprenticeship is worth while. Something like UCAS would draw all that together. I would not actually use UCAS. It is a horrible institution that believes in making as much money as possible from the students passing through its system and it is run in the interests of universities rather than kids. But as a concept it is great, and we really ought to see whether we can do something along those lines.

It is high time that Amendment 11 was brought in. We all know how badly schools can behave. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, says that it is a matter of incentives as well. Let us have a structure which provides the stick and the carrot—this is the stick. Let us have a system where schools know that they are expected to do things. I presume that access means physical access. It cannot just be, “Well, we’ll pass your emails on”. Clearly the access will be moderated by the school and the teacher will sit down with the kid afterwards and tell them where they need to be really careful about such and such. However, at least it is progress in the right direction.

I hope that we might look at expanding subsection (3). There are some really important intermediary organisations which perform a function in this area. To name just one—Women in Construction. It performs a specialist job and looks after a particular subset of pupils, and it is doing that in a co-ordinated way, which makes it much better than your average local FE college, let alone a building company that happens to have some apprentices. Giving access to some of these collaborative organisations is a very useful supplement to the direct education and apprenticeship providers.

Turning to the carrot element again, there are other ways of doing this, and that is what my Amendment 34A seeks to achieve. It would allow money to flow to schools and organisations and would open up in a positive way the pipeline between what is going on in the creation of technical opportunity and the kids in schools.

There is a lot beyond what appears in Amendment 1l and schools are doing much that is positive. They invite people in to talk, and make arrangements for internships and work experience placements for their children. A lot of organisations are helping, but it is an immense burden on a school at a time when we are facing something like an 8% cash reduction for schools over the next three years. It is a hell of a thing to ask a school to add to its functions without in any way adding to its budget.

Technical and Further Education Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 1st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register of interests. I chair the education advisory board for McDonald’s, which oversees its apprenticeship programme. I too welcome the Bill and hope it is not just optimism that at last, we are going to do something about this: I hope this is the time for legislation that really moves apprenticeships and technical education forward. Like my Front-Bench spokesperson, I will want to look at some of the detail of the Bill, but we wish it well and hope it changes the world for a huge section of our community.

I share a previous speaker’s analysis of why the Bill is so badly needed, in terms of the productivity rate and how we have let down so many young people and adults who wanted to succeed. For all the strength of our education system, we have failed to get technical, vocational—I do not mind that word—and apprenticeship education right. It is the only area of our education system where we used to do better years ago than we do now. I do not buy into the idea that education used to be better 20 or 30 years ago, but this area probably was better 40 or 50 years ago. We need to rediscover the good things that happened then and shape them for the world in which we live.

The concern I would like to explore with the Minister today and in Committee is whether the Government are absolutely sure about how these proposals differ from previous attempts. It is not that Governments have done nothing for the last 20 years—they have put resources, leadership, energy and legislative time into trying to make things happen, but it has not been good enough. The success has not been there, such that we can say, “The job is done”. Looking back at my role at the Department for Education and Skills, and at what we thought the sector skills councils would do when we launched them towards the end of my time as Secretary of State, I would just pick out these words from 2002 to 2006. The councils would be “employer-led industry or business sector-based”. They would be “charged with identifying the sector’s present and future skills needs, ensuring that qualifications and training meet these needs” and “place employers and workplace centre stage”. There is not a world of difference between those words and the publicity for this Bill, which I have heard the Minister—believing it—say out loud.

I do not want us to get this wrong again, and it behoves us to be clear about what is different now. This is not the first time we have had an employer-led skills programme, tried to do apprenticeships, or let business work out the framework for technical and vocational qualifications; but previously, we did not do it well enough. I want to be sure that we learn from that during the Bill’s passage. I hope the collective memory of the Department for Education is still strong and that it and the Minister have gone through what was successful and what did not work, because he does not need to start from scratch. He needs to build on what we have learned and our successes.

One thing that makes me optimistic is that there is a helpful national climate. As we all know, sometimes in politics, timing is everything. You introduce something at one point and it does not fly. You introduce it at another and it has wind behind its sails and makes a real difference. In the world at large, I think there is now a greater acceptance that technical and apprenticeship routes to employment, and life chances, are good and could be better. We have not got to the stage where everybody wants their children to do that rather than go to university, but there are now chinks in the argument—it is a good choice for young people.

I acknowledge the Government’s support: they have put this issue high on their agenda. From what I hear from the Minister in the House today, his boss the Secretary of State, and others, they mean to get this issue right. It is not an also-ran in the Department for Education, and that is important. Established organisations such as the university technology colleges, founded by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, were not around when we tried this 10 years ago, and I hope they will enable us to get it right.

So I am optimistic, but we have to be rigorous in asking ourselves some difficult questions. This might be an opportunity to get this right. If the noble Baroness, Lady Woolf, thinks this is a better chance of getting it right than we have ever had before, then I feel optimistic, because her judgment and wisdom in this area have been second to none. I am glad that she feels that this could provide a good way forward.

I welcome the institute, but it is nothing more than bricks and mortar, and I want to better understand how it, the people who have been employed to do a job, and a mission letter from the Secretary of State will bring reality to our dreams, visions and hope for change. The Minister will know that if we have learned anything over the years, it is that setting up a building and a structure and naming something does not change anything. If there was a failure of the academies programme, it was believing that if you made a school an academy, it would change what happened there. The success was that over 10 or 15 years, we have learned that you have to do more than change the name and create a new structure or organisation.

In Committee, I want to explore the nitty-gritty of what the institute may be. These are not big-label items, but I always worry when we open new organisations and do not close old ones. If you read the White Paper, there are an awful lot of players on the field. I have this picture of a power struggle: who has the power, who has the influence? Even without that, there is the treading on each other’s toes in an effort to do good. Who will be off the field? If we have a new body that is costing money and leading apprenticeships and technical education, who has lost responsibility? Who will not do what they were going to do before, and what is the nature of the relationship between them?

Assessment looks similarly messy. The fact that you can ask myriad people to assess your apprenticeship and technical education outcomes makes me nervous of the market approach that the noble Baroness, Lady Woolf, and the Sainsbury report criticised. Are we sure that that system, which seems to have more than one assessor, will be tight and robust and will play high, not low?

I am not sure what the technical education certificate is and what currency it will have. Who will get it and for what reason, and who will know what it means? That is something else I would like to look at in Committee. One point about which I feel strongly and which has not been raised before is the contradiction between courses that are flexible and courses that have clarity. Our probably most successful exam systems, such as A-levels and GCSEs, are really clear and incredibly inflexible. They are clear because we know what they stand for. People know what they have to do. They know what the certificate is. It has currency and people can say, “I’ve got an A-level; I’ve got a GCSE”. Everybody knows what that means.

The minute flexibility is put into that, we lose some of the clarity. One of the problems over the years for those of us who have tried to make progress in this area is that we have tried to bring in flexibility but have lost the clarity. We have not built a common language for the wider community. When I read the Sainsbury report I thought that it had gone for clarity, and said, “Wow, at least it is settled: we are going for clarity”. But according to the background commentary, there is potential to move between the two—the academic route and the technical route. That is going for flexibility, so I want to explore with the Minister in Committee exactly what the Government intend and whether they have managed to square the circle, which no one else has, and have flexibility and clarity at the same time.

My other question is very much for the Government as well. Do they intend to place a responsibility on the new institute to deliver apprenticeship targets in terms of numbers? At the end of the day, we always have to trade quality for quantity when setting ourselves a target. I cannot think of many examples where the Government have set a target and reached it without compromising quality. That tends not to happen. We know that targets determine behaviour and some of those behaviours threaten quality.

If the institute comes back to the Government and says, “Well, Minister, we have delivered exceptional quality but we have not reached your numerical target of 3 million”, what will the response be? Putting my cards on the table, I would go for quality and would not complain about the quantity. I would not stand up and complain about not hitting the target, but I would be furious if the target had been achieved and quality had been compromised.

I shall finish by describing what is missing from the Bill. It is a strange little Bill—an oddity. It looks as though it has lost its best friends, and I feel really sorry for it in that sense. I am smiling, but in a way, that is the error we have always made with this sector of education. The Minister will know what a disaster stand-alone academies were. Stand-alone vocation courses and apprenticeships will be a disaster as well, unless we link them into schools and higher education. That is about progression and a route through.

The Government have missed a chance here. It would have been great to have this as part of the Higher Education and Research Bill—we could have seen the link through to degree-level apprenticeships and university. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, will agree that it would have been great to seize the opportunity to end the national curriculum at age 14 in schools and open up a proper, coherent, cohesive, exceptionally well-funded, really high-status 14 to 19-year old education system in which a lot of the concerns I have raised would cease to exist. We have some bold ideas, but the worry is that we are making them fit into a structure where they are not at home. An approach for 14 to 19 year-olds has been made to fit for 16 to 19 year-olds and it does not, quite.

I wish the Bill well, and I hope it does what we want it to do. There will be interesting Committee and Report stages, and I do not doubt the Minister’s determination and wish to handle things well. Importantly, there is no great political divide on this issue. In the light of our experience and commitment, I hope the Bill will leave this place in a better state.

Social Mobility Committee Report

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, it was a privilege to serve on the Select Committee. I join others in thanking my noble friend Lady Corston for her excellent leadership and presentation of our report. I join with her in thanking the officials who supported us, and the witnesses. In that sense, it was a joy to be a part of the committee because it worked so smoothly. I pay tribute, as she did, to the young people who gave evidence. That had an impact on all of us. Their words are threaded throughout the report’s recommendations, as they should be.

Before I get on to what I was going to say, I want to take up something the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said. I am about to agree with almost everything he said. In fact, I am about to concentrate on the thing he concentrated on. With his permission, I have to correct him on Birmingham because I would not want people to be misled. Michael Wilshaw did not say what the noble Lord said he said about the Birmingham education system—he has not asked for it to be taken over by the department. After the so-called Trojan horse scandal two years ago, a school-led organisation called the Birmingham Education Partnership was handed the legal responsibilities of the Department for Education related to school improvement. I happened to chair it, which is why I know that to be the case. It is now in its second year of operation. I think Ofsted will now say that things are improving in Birmingham as far as schools are concerned. I pay tribute to the school-led Birmingham Education Partnership, which has brought that about. Michael Wilshaw did say what the noble Lord said about Birmingham social care. That is perhaps where the misunderstanding has arisen. I would not want a story in the Birmingham Evening Mail tomorrow to say that Sir Michael said its schools were not of good quality.

Returning to the Select Committee report, it is worth thinking about the young adults the report is about. They are exactly the “just about managing”. When we talk about untapped talent we worry a lot about the young people with A-levels who do not get to Russell group universities and go to one of our other 100-odd universities. I reckon there is more unfulfilled potential and lack of skills capacity for our nation in the 53% who are in the middle than there is with students who go to university, but not Russell group universities. When we talk about productivity and not having the skills we need, it is this group that needs to be given the opportunity. When we talk about not delivering for this group, it is not just a question of their life chances, aspirations and all that that means; there is a fault in the system of the way we run the country. They ought not to be ignored, not just because it matters for them, but because it matters for all of us.

I say at the start that we should not assume that all this 53% should take vocational studies and that that would be suitable for them. Many of them should pursue academic careers. The point of our report is that they should have the choice. Many of them do not have it.

At the core of the report is the statement:

“Our recommendations support the development of a coherent and navigable transition system for those aged 14–24”.

Why vocational education is so important in this context is that everything we have ever done in vocational education has not worked as a system of transition. Every element of our education support system either does not work for vocational education or works less well than it does for academic education. If we look at the curriculum, qualifications and assessment, we see that we constantly change them, they are not understood and they are not a commonly known currency. In terms of place of learning, such children are moved from pillar to post—from further education to school and, very often, back and forth in years 10 and 11. On continuity of teachers, children have to have both lecturers and teachers to gain the skills they need. Careers guidance does not work for them. The education areas that they access are not as well financed as others.

The best way of understanding that is to make a comparison with children who follow an academic curriculum. If you follow an academic curriculum, you have all the continuity and coherence that you need. Indeed, if you are educated in a public school, you are very often in the same school from five to 18, with the same teachers, the same cohort of peers and the same pedagogy working towards the same end. If you talk to your teachers for careers guidance there, you are talking to somebody whom you are about to follow on the same track throughout life. It is amazing how for the most confident and highest-achieving group of people we give tremendous coherence and continuity; for those who often struggle, we give the least continuity and the least coherence. That for me is the most important thing. Unless we can solve it, nothing else matters. All the recommendations in the report and all the small changes that we try to make will not work if they are plonked into a system that is not coherent. That is where I agree so much with the noble Lord, Lord Baker. Unless we get rid of this big barrier at 16, nothing else will change.

That is why I join other speakers in saying how very disappointing is the Government’s response to the report. In response to the call for greater coherence, it states:

“The Government’s education policy … ensures transition from early years right through a young person’s education and onto work”.

No, it does not; it does not do that at all. At every single join, whether it is from infant to primary, primary to secondary or whatever, it is not good or cohesive. But the biggest join that does not work is at 14, 16 and 19. If we have a Government who believe that what we have at the moment works, we may as well not have written the report, because none of it will work unless we are prepared strategically, robustly and bravely to look at that 14-to-19 structure.

When we saw good evidence of what works—when we talked to university technical colleges, to some further education providers who were really trying to help with 14 to 19, and, to some extent, to studio schools —we found that what was making it most difficult for those good initiatives to work was that the system was working against them. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, talked about what works with UTCs. There are things about UTCs that do not work. It is really difficult to fill some of them. It is difficult to persuade some schools to let children go, for understandable reasons, at the end of year 10, because a UTC is trying to be a 14-to-19 school in an 11-to-16, 16-to-18 education system. All that the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said could be even better if he was working with an education system that was 14 to 19 and not 14 to 18 with a big join at the age of 16.

The point that I want to make has been made so often and I have never heard a government response as to why we cannot do it: 16 transition is out of date. The only mention the Government make of that in their response is to tell us that they are going to make GCSEs more robust and rigorous. That will make the problem worse, because if they insist on making the exam at age 16 very robust, very high-stakes, very rigorous and very important to schools’ accountability, the whole school system will concentrate on what happens at 16. What 14 to 19 becomes is 14 to 16 with a pause and a concentration on GCSE, and an effort to pick up the pieces for two more years from 16 to 18. The proposal is quite clear: speed up the national curriculum—because it could do with being speeded up—and finish it at 14. There would then be an end-of-national-curriculum examination—call it a GCSE; call it robust; call it rigorous; call it what you want, but have it at 14. At that point, let us then have some proper pathways from 14 to 19 that are academic, vocational and naturally bring coherence, through which many of our good initiatives such as the university technical colleges and the work of further education could flourish. I invite the Minister to explain why that is not possible and why those issues were not addressed in the department’s response, which the predecessor Secretary of State signed off.

The Government deserve to be criticised for their response to the report, but, quite honestly, my Government did not get this right anyway. There comes a time when all politicians know that they have struggled with this area and all we want now is to get it right. There is no feeling of having to criticise the others. I will criticise my record on this—it was not as good the record in lots of other areas on which we delivered. There is an opportunity and there is good will. The report we are discussing today gives a framework to move forward, as long as the Government are brave enough to take the risk.

Social Mobility

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for introducing this debate. I had the pleasure of serving with him on the Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility. I know of his passionate interest in this subject, and I congratulate him on the way that he has introduced it. He has given us an insight into the extent of this problem and its importance. I also add my welcome to his for the noble Baroness, Lady Couttie, and say that I look forward to her maiden speech and wish her well during her time in the House.

To some extent, social mobility is a challenge of our time. Perhaps for the first time, there is political agreement across the spectrum that it needs to be addressed and we need to do better than we have done in the past. In truth, whatever we think about our country, whatever our achievements, and however proud we are of what we do, the fact that our social mobility record does not compare well with our competitors overshadows those achievements and makes us not the sort of country that we would want to live in. That underpins our need and desire to try to improve in this area.

As the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, said, social mobility covers a wide area of issues. In the time that I have available, I am mainly going to concentrate on one, but I just wanted to acknowledge two other areas before I move on to that. First, we very often see social mobility as an issue for education and an issue about youth. It is not: we should live in a country where adults have the opportunity to be socially mobile as well, even if they did not have the opportunities during their youth. That falls to the area of skills and reskilling and giving people opportunities throughout their lives to achieve their potential and do as well as they can. Secondly, I am conscious that many children and young people achieve grades but find that they do not have the opportunities available to others because of their backgrounds. I acknowledge that that is a problem: it is about a change in culture throughout society, not just about what we can do in this House and through legislation.

I turn to my main area of concentration: those children who do not achieve in school and therefore do not experience the problem of having the grades but not getting the opportunities after that. If you look at the policies of both political parties for the last 20 years, you cannot say that there have not been attempts through the school system to try to increase and improve social mobility. Every policy that is launched now is introduced in the name of social mobility—in the name of giving those left behind a better chance and of closing the attainment gap. So it should be: that is a challenge that falls to education in schools. I acknowledge that success: today in schools throughout this country, there are young people who have been given opportunities through the school system, who are socially mobile and who will go to university and have the skills and opportunity to achieve what they want to achieve.

However, we are at risk of assuming that schools can solve the problem by themselves. I worry that, in answer to the question “What should we do about social mobility?”, too many people say, “We have to improve schools”. I know that we have to improve schools and that a failure to close the attainment gap in schools is a failure of the school system. I do not shy away from that, but I know that schools do not cause the problem in the first place. We should not shy away from that either. They are asked to address and remedy an endemic problem in our society: what they inherit with children at the age of five is a difference in attainment that is clear from the age of 18 months. Look at those geographical areas that underperform at GCSE and A-level, that we bemoan do not get as many children to university as we would like. When you look at what we call school readiness in that area, you find that that is low as well. We know that standards in schools are low in the north-east, but guess where school readiness is also low: in the north-east. We know that achievement is good in London boroughs, and—guess what—when you look at school readiness measures, they are actually far better in London than in other parts of the country. Let us be clear what we mean by school readiness. It is to be able to listen, to speak, to pay attention, to handle objects, to move confidently, to have self-confidence, and to have social skills. It is those basics that any person needs if they are to stand a chance of doing well throughout life and throughout school.

We know a lot about that group that does not have school readiness. We know that those children are more likely to be poor and more likely to come from families that have ill-health and low skills—not all lazy and dependent on benefits. We know that by the age of five, they will know fewer words than people from middle-class families; that their social and physical skills will be less developed; that their mothers are less likely to have attended antenatal classes; and that their parents are less likely to have accessed what we might call enrichment activities between the child’s age of nought and five. The Government have to ask themselves whether they are doing enough to address the needs of this age group. In truth, all Governments have a tendency to put their efforts, emphasis, money and resources on schools. As somebody who is passionate about schools—and I spent my ministerial time concentrating on schools—I am not inviting the Minister to stop focusing on schools. However, I invite him to consider that the way in which he could most help schools to close the attainment gap is to do more for the age of nought to five.

When I look at what the Government are doing on this, I acknowledge that they have put more money into childcare; I acknowledge the pupil premium, which was part of the coalition. However, the Commission on Social Mobility and Poverty says that the efforts to improve the school readiness of the poorest children are unco-ordinated, confused and patchy.

We know that despite the importance of this nought-to-five period, it is where our least-qualified and lowest-paid teachers are, and where there is less stability. Both the Minister and I could probably quote the floor targets for key stage 1 to GCSE and A-level. I also know by heart the underperforming local authorities or the type of school that is the most underachieving. I think I know what his targets are for every stage of school. I do not know what his targets are for the other years, what he is doing about children’s centres that are falling behind, or what the emergency intervention strategy of the Government is for nought-to-five provision that is not coming up to scratch. When I look through the DfE website, I cannot see a speech the present Secretary of State has made about early years, four or five months into her office. I will stand corrected if the Minister tells me that I am wrong.

Again, the best way to raise standards with some of our children in some of the most challenging schools from the most challenging backgrounds is to reduce the development gap between children when they start school. I very much hope that the Minister might consider adopting that as a target and working toward achieving it.

Schools

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister will know from both his role and his close involvement in academies in London that London is the highest-performing region in our country and the best place to be poor if you want to go to a high-status university. Will the Minister explain what lessons the Government took from the success of London that led them to focus on more selective and grammar schools as a way of giving more opportunities to working-class children?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right. London has been a great success story. It started under the Labour Government with the London Challenge and their academies programme, which we have sought to continue. Of course, there are quite a few schools in London that are selective in one way or another. It is also fair to say that it is much easier to attract teachers in London than in many of the areas of the country where we see these underperforming schools. Although there are many lessons to be learned from London, there are still many coastal towns and former mining villages in this country that seem to have struggled, partly because of intergenerational unemployment and partly because they struggle to attract really good teachers. It is those kinds of issues that we are really keen to focus on.

Teachers: Academies and Free Schools

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for bringing this debate to the House. It is important, and I start by saying that I agreed with the thrust of his arguments. Although I might quibble over a detail or two, I am basically on his side on this issue. I also look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Finn. I know that she brings a wealth of policy experience and advice to this House and I look forward to watching how she changes from being an adviser to a policymaker. I wish her well and look forward to her speech.

I will start on quite a generous note, given that I agree with the thrust of the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I understand or accept some of the assumptions and concerns that underpin this policy; I faced these things when I was in the noble Lord’s position as an Education Minister. I cannot argue that there are not individuals with a set of skills, usually around subject knowledge, whom I would welcome teaching my children if I had children, or teaching in my school if I was a head teacher. Why would I not want my child to be coached by somebody who is a marvellous football coach or taught music by a marvellous musician? Why would I not assume that the skills and knowledge of a recently trained coder are probably more up to date than those of the IT technology teacher who trained 10 years ago? I accept that and I would like to think that there is a way of bringing those people’s skills to our classroom. However, I fundamentally disagree with the way that the Government have brought this about by saying that teachers in academies and free schools do not need any qualifications at all.

Let us be clear what that means. If we assume that the White Paper that was launched in June is still government policy—I am not sure about that—we will in four years reach a situation where every school is an academy or every school is a free school. That means that every school, no matter whether it is good or bad, whether it has a strong or a weak head or has been rated outstanding or failing in its Ofsted inspection, will be allowed to employ people to teach any subject to any group of people, in any context and in any environment.

That is what we have; that law has been made to accommodate the wish to get a small number of people with specialist skills into the classroom. That is what I am against, and that is why this is such a dangerous policy. It is so dangerous because, whatever else we disagree on across this House, I think that we have all come to the knowledge and understanding that the quality of teaching matters. Call a school what you like, but at the end of the day, the school leader and the school teacher will make the difference.

I have already acknowledged that subject matter is important. You can have all the pedagogical skills in the world but, if you do not know your subject, you are not going to be a good teacher. But the reverse is true as well. You can have all the knowledge in the world but, if you do not know the pedagogy, you are not going to be a good teacher. If you do not know how to keep discipline, you are not going to be a good teacher; if you do not know the skill of asking questions of children in different ways, you are not going to be a good teacher; if you do not know about special educational needs and the needs of statemented children, you are not going to be a good teacher; if you do not know how to assess and feed back, which evidence shows to be the most important thing for a teacher to do well, you will not make a good teacher.

My argument is that you can bring somebody with specialist knowledge into a school, but the other things that make them a good teacher will be things they learn through training to be a teacher. That is what you learn when you get qualified teacher status. I know very few people who could come to the classroom with both the specialist knowledge and all those sets of skills. Essentially, that is why I am so opposed to this policy.

We live in a time when the qualifications of a profession mark out the way that society views it. Many of our top professions require people to have the highest qualifications. For example, they take people from Russell group universities and want people with first-class degrees. Whether or not that makes them better at their job is irrelevant to this argument. It is a mark of the value that society places on the job that they do. Why would we not want the same for the people who teach the next generation? Why would we not want to send the message that they are so important that they need a qualification to do the job? The only senior job I can think of for which you do not need a qualification is that of politician. If this is about making all teachers as skilled, knowledgeable and good as politicians, perhaps that is another reason to think again.

In a way, the Government have acknowledged this. Chapter 2 of the White Paper published in June was particularly good: “Great teachers—everywhere they’re needed”. If you look at the policies in that chapter, you will find few with which I would argue: replace qualified teacher status with a stronger, more challenging accreditation; have only excellent heads approving sign-off for people who get QTS; strengthen training providers; increase ITT content; introduce a qualification for school leaders. All that is in the Government’s White Paper on what makes a good school and what makes a good teacher. If it is so important that it is in a policy document, how can the Government follow that up by saying that it is not needed by everybody who enters the teaching profession?

There are ways in which we can allow people with specialist knowledge and attributes to quickly get a QTS. I do not want to put them through slow routes that bore them and keep them out of the classroom longer than necessary. In my day in the department, we had the graduate teacher route and the registered teacher route, both of which were abolished by the coalition Government. Those routes meant that, if you had that subject knowledge, you could go into a school straight away but would train and get your QTS at the end of one or two years. That is the debate that we should be having about how we can fast-track into the classroom people with a good level of knowledge but without teaching knowledge.

I welcome anybody who wants to come into teaching and has something to offer children. But anybody who wants to enter one of the most important professions in this country should put their hand up and say that they are prepared to get the qualification that society deems important for doing that job. So having looked at both sides—those who are becoming teachers and the Government as the safeguarder of standards—I think that no one should be allowed in our schools if they do not have QTS, or if they are not at least working towards getting it in the foreseeable future.

Education: English Baccalaureate

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl. Lord Clancarty, for securing this debate. It is very timely given the end of the consultation on the next phase of the English baccalaureate. I join him in inviting the Minister to take note of this debate as part of the responses to the consultation. I agree with everything that the noble Earl said and I do not want to repeat it. Having said that, I think I understand where the Government are coming from as well. That is my starting point.

I am not against maths, English, science, foreign languages, history or geography. I am not against action to promote their learning and to cherish what they offer to the nation. However, I am worried about the way that has been done and the situation in which we now find ourselves.

I remember that when I was first in the job that the Minister is now in, I learned a valuable lesson which sounds easy but escapes your mind. If you say that you have a priority, you are saying two things: first, that I have a priority and, secondly, that I give less priority to the other things. That has been the problem with this story about the English baccalaureate.

I am giving the Government the benefit of the doubt. I do not think they are against music, art, drama, psychology or religious education. I suspect that they access these subjects for their own children and those they care for, so I do not think they are against them. However, I think they have forgotten the point about priorities. When they say that these subjects are important, what is heard is that the other subjects are not important. We should know by now that the English school system will act on that message with a rigour that is unmatched anywhere else in the world. That, therefore, is the problem with picking up the consequences of something that, by itself, was not a bad thing to want.

So we have a problem. One of the problems now is that schools are spending too much time talking about the curriculum and assessment, and how they can fiddle their staffing and their curriculum to get more points through the English baccalaureate. I have sat in too many conversations in the last two to three months where time has been spent on the adjustments that will need to be made to the curriculum to get a higher level in the English baccalaureate. That time should have been spent on teaching, learning and getting better outcomes from students in the classroom. So there is a problem and there is a consequence. The noble Earl made that quite clear.

We are bound by the national curriculum to offer a broad and balanced curriculum. We do not have one. This English baccalaureate is not a broad and balanced curriculum and that, by law, is what we are meant to be achieving. When I tabled a summer debate on the literacy and numeracy strategy, I said, “There is nothing to stop schools doing art, drama and all those things”, and I suspect the Minister may say the same. However, the reality is that schools are not doing so and are losing the facilities needed. The teachers are not being recruited. The time is not being made available.

We have, therefore, two problems. We have people spending time responding to the English baccalaureate and also reality that they are taking teachers away. It is no good the Secretary of State quoting in the consultation King Solomon Academy or Whitmore High School. It is great—fantastic—that they do this and offer the arts as well. However, we cannot have a school system where the law is made up on the assumption that everyone will do the things that Ministers think they should be able to do. On that basis, we should have no need for a school improvement system.

It is not that we are against the subjects of which the Minister is in favour. My question to him is twofold. He has made two mistakes. He has assumed that it is best to pursue a rounded academic curriculum and that these subjects define that. If that is what he believes, he has to defend his belief against all the evidence that shows that it is not the case. Secondly, he has gone back on the most sensible move that, 18 months ago, his Government made towards the Progress 8 measurement. Why on earth has he done so, producing a document two or three months ago that introduces five new accountability measures, all of which involve the English baccalaureate?

Education and Adoption Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Wednesday 16th December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 15C and 16A. I guess that every Member of the House who has children thought long and hard about the school they wanted to send their children to. Finding the right school to meet the needs of a child at both primary and secondary level is crucial. In some cases where there is no suitable school, or which they think is not suitable, parents have gone to the free school movement and established their own schools. In other cases parents with the resources to do so choose to buy a school place in the independent sector. The choice of a school has been a hugely important part of our education system.

As I said in Committee, when a school closes or changes in nature, it is traumatic for the children, traumatic for the parents, and certainly traumatic for the staff. So what are we going to do? Going back to the previous debate, let us consider a school that is failing. The regional schools commissioner, who by the way is not regional and certainly not local, can decide that the school will close and that a sponsor for a new school will be found. There will be no discussion or consultation with parents. It might well be that the school that the regional schools commissioner puts forward is not the school the parent wants—but tough. For a long time, parental choice has been ingrained in, and has been an important part of, our education system. Various Secretaries of State, both Labour and Conservative, have enshrined the idea of parental choice and parental involvement. Surely, it is right that a parent has the opportunity to express their views.

Following Committee stage, I am pleased that the Minister has made some progress in this regard. He chooses to use the word “communication” and not consultation. When the regional schools commissioner has identified an academy sponsor to take over a school eligible for intervention, the sponsor must communicate to parents information about plans to improve the school. When the regional commissioner decides that a school is failing, will they write to every parent telling them what is happening and what will happen so that they have an understanding of why and when? The letter says that there will be guidance as regards schools causing concern and that they may, if they wish to, have a meeting or they may choose just to write to parents. Would it not be a good idea to specify clearly what should be expected of sponsors when taking over a school so that parents have that information?

Crucially, parents want more involvement in education. They want a say in their child’s schooling—everyone here has wanted a say in our child’s schooling. The selection of the sponsor is critical to the child’s future. Not all sponsors, as the Sutton Trust shows, are as effective as others, particularly, for example, in supporting disadvantaged pupils. I shall give an example of where consultation works. The line we have constantly heard—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, repeated it—is that a single day in a failing school is a day too long for that child. A single day in the wrong school is too much for that child. A single day in a school which the parents are unhappy with, or has had foisted on them, is too long. Let me give an example of parents who were consulted and made a change. It happened at a primary school in Medway with a large number of pupils who had special needs. They were not opposed to academisation but they were opposed to the sponsor proposed by the DfE. After consultation, and no doubt a short campaign, the academy withdrew. Presumably, it realised that it had not got the wherewithal to deal with that situation.

The other argument against consultation has been the line that it can drag on for months and years, et cetera, which of course is wrong. But it does not mean that there cannot be a very quick consultation over a few months so that the parents are involved. I hope that even at this late stage the Minister might consider how important consultation is to parents and their children.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak only briefly on the amendment because the issue of consultation has been covered in an earlier group. I will make two or three points. For me, consultation is not the most important part of the Bill, but it is an important point of principle. Once we decide something today, it will probably set the pattern for future ways we deal with schools, so it is worth spending some time on.

My first point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, about the now famous phrase that noble Lords have used during the passage of the Bill: “A day in a school that is failing is a day too long”. I am not sure why the consequence of that is that parents should be denied consultation; it should be that the education system gets its act together. Let us say that three years go by in a coasting school—a school is inadequate. It is not a case of who is to blame, but if you ask what went wrong—it could have been poor leadership; something that Ofsted missed; we could have missed the data; we may not have acted quickly enough; support put in might have been at the wrong point at the wrong time—of all the people who could have got it wrong, it probably was not parents. Yet the bit of the system that we change at this point is, “Well, we won’t consult parents”—almost as though they will be the problem, rather than the potential solution. This is not a huge point, but we have to ask why, if a child should not be in a failing school for a day longer, the education system responsible for that should just carry on working and why parents should be squeezed out.

The noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, made another point about this terrible phrase, “We are where we are”. It is one of my least favourite phrases, but we are where we are. Over the last 20 years, one of the features that we have put in our education system, which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, just mentioned, is the increasing involvement of parents. I think the noble Lord, Lord True, mentioned what happened in consultation in the grant-maintained days. It is true that it was not a pretty sight, but, believe it or not, that was nearly 30 years ago. Lots of things have happened since then. Whether it is setting up free schools, parents’ right to call in Ofsted inspectors, or the mooted idea that parents should have the right to demand the curriculum, to sack the head or whatever, there has been a trend over the last 20 years of giving parents a louder voice, not only in the education of their own child, which is paramount, but in the education structure their child is in. Whether we like it or not, we are where we are with parental consultation. We have to make a really strong case, given the climate in which we are working, that parents should be excluded on this.

Under new Section 2A(2), introduced by the Minister’s Amendment 24, in a case of a failing school where the academy sponsor has not delivered the goods and must hold some responsibility, and where the department is taking action, the proprietor must be given an opportunity to make representations before the academy sponsor is changed. That is a big issue. If we write into primary legislation that an academy proprietor that has not done a good job—that is why the organisation has been moved out—must have an opportunity to make representations, I am not sure why would want to strike out of legislation the opportunity for parents to make representations as well.

Consulting parents is rarely a bad thing, but it calls for sensitivity and determination, because I do not believe that parents always get it right. I do not agree with the amendment that there should be a plebiscite in all cases and that we should take the action that parents vote for. However, it should be part of this important process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Storey]

I will speak also to Amendment 25. I am concerned that the whole tenor of this discussion has almost been, if I may characterise it in this way, along the lines of maintained schools against academies. As we know, there are some fantastic academies; we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Harris, about his schools, which I know to be highly successful. However, I am sure that he will agree with me that just as there are successful academies, there are also some failing academies, which over the years have caused a number of raised eyebrows and concerns. Equally, there are some very good maintained schools and some maintained schools which need sorting out. Whether that is done through an academy route or other means, it needs to happen.

I will first deal briefly with Amendment 25, which is about the inspection of academy chains. We know from media that Michael Wilshaw, our Chief Inspector of Schools, was very keen that the head offices of academy chains were inspected. Why? It is because academy chains deal not just with individual schools but with finance and governance, and all those important issues. Just as we would inspect local authorities that provide services and finance for schools, the same should surely be true of academy chains.

We have seen examples of academy chains where, perhaps because we have not had our finger on the pulse of the financial situation and the governance of those academy chains, we have seen all sorts of concerns. I was going to go through them all, but I have decided to cut short what I am saying. I understand that we can inspect individual schools in batches in academy chains but I will be interested to hear from the Minister in his reply how we can be assured that the issues of finance and other governance matters are dealt with correctly.

Amendment 15D, again, follows the discussion on the previous amendments. Over the next 12 months or two years, thousands of schools will potentially need to find academy sponsors because they are failing, or are coasting and becoming failing, or because academies themselves fail and have to find other new academy sponsors. That will put a tremendous pressure on the system. In this amendment we are saying that if there is a suitable maintained school which has value added above the national average, why not use that school and provide its expertise? It is clear and simple. If we are about ensuring, as we heard in the previous debates, that the pupil gets the best possible schooling and teaching, and if an academy sponsor is not available, why not use a council-maintained school?

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

My Lords, I will speak on a specific issue to follow up something I raised in Committee and to make reference to a note I received from the Minister’s office this afternoon, which I wanted to put on the record.

On this amendment, considering the difficulty there sometimes is in finding sponsors, we raised in Committee that this is a problem with a number of sponsors and the length of time it has taken in some instances to match a school to a sponsor. The Minister kindly responded to my point in Committee when I asked what the target was for doing the match. He said that there was a 12-week turnover and that 48 schools had not met that 12-week target. That is very reasonable. To get a sponsor matched with a school within 12 weeks is not unreasonable, and I would not complain.

I wrote to the Minister’s office about a month ago asking for a breakdown of how long the schools had been waiting that were in the 48 that had exceeded the time limit. I got a message by email only at the start of this debate. To tell noble Lords the truth, I am quite prepared to sit down and be told that I have read it wrongly, because I find the statistics rather worrying. If that is the case, I apologise in advance and will make sure that the correction is on the record. Of the 48 schools that were just inadequate, which exceeded the 12-week brokerage time, 16 took six to 12 months, 19 took 12 to 18 months, 12 took 18 to 24 months, and one took over 24 months. Therefore the department took over two years to find a suitable sponsor for one school which had been judged inadequate. A quick add-up shows that 32 took over one year. We have heard all about “A child shall not stay in a school that’s failing them for one day longer than necessary”, but who is responsible for that? Who is responsible for those children in that one school where it took the department over two years to find a sponsor? Who is responsible for the 32 that took over 12 months to find a sponsor? I am making a political point, but I am worried about the path we are going along, which has this as the only route and only solution for inadequate schools. Now we will add to it a whole lot more coasting schools and thereby increase the demand for sponsors, and the department seems to be failing miserably in delivering the sponsors in sufficient time. That leads me to conclude as regards this amendment that perhaps we need to look at alternative ways of finding sponsors and support if we go ahead.

Can the Minister ask his officials to convert the email to me into a letter to all Members of the Committee and place a copy in the House so that it can be seen alongside other correspondence which has been part of the consideration of the Bill?

[Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)]

Will the noble Baroness accept that the appointment of the regional schools commissioners has very much changed the landscape? The regional schools commissioners, who will be responsible for finding suitable sponsors, will know their patch, so to speak; they will know the sponsors that are available in the area and will be much quicker. There will not be the long delay there was in a very hard-pressed and overstretched central department in the Department for Education.

Very briefly, on Amendment 25, I am not sure exactly how Ofsted could inspect a sponsor. A sponsor is a business, with its finance, administration and human resources. That is not Ofsted’s business. Ofsted inspects education, not what a sponsor does, so I find that puzzling in the extreme.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley]

Those figures are from November of this year, and the regional schools commissioners had already been in place. If demand is increased, the regional schools commissioners will be exceptionally overworked, and I am not as optimistic as the noble Baroness that they will solve the problem.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, surely the point is that the RSCs still cover a huge area. When we debated this matter in Grand Committee, we were told by the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, that there were 778 approved sponsors and about 20% were waiting to be matched with schools, but we were not told about the long delays. In our earlier debate we were told that a one-day delay would have a crucial impact on the lives of children, and I understood that argument. However, it appears that the great academisation process in itself induces months of delay in certain places and for certain schools.

I would be glad if the Minister would take away and consider the amendment between now and Third Reading. All it is saying is that there may be some circumstances where there is no suitable academy—and that is why it is taking so long—and a local authority or a maintained school might have a role to play. I would have thought that the Minister could give this a little consideration.