Sure Start Children’s Centres
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to take part in a debate which will, I hope, rise above semantics. I do not know whether “initiation” is a partial word or not; I suppose it depends very much on what ceremonies one has undergone earlier in life.
This debate takes place in the context of a crisis of confidence in our education system and, more broadly—if I may pick a few headings at random—in our society’s ability to raise children so that they achieve, enjoy life, are safe and healthy, make a contribution, and go on to prosper. The PISA—programme for international student assessment—tables to which the Government frequently refer indicate that, on a comparative basis, this country’s performance has declined.
The first 10 years of the last Government, between 1997 and 2007, preceded the credit crunch. I should it put on record, in my party’s interests, that the period of solid economic growth between those years had begun in 1992. During that period, the number of young people aged 16 to 24—pick your age range—who were not in employment, education or training remained about level, but once the credit crunch arrived it spiralled up, and now as many as 1 million young people may not be in apprenticeships, at college, at school or in a job. That is a pretty tragic situation.
I have always believed that those who seek a crude proxy to measure the effectiveness of an education system should consider not so much the outcomes of those who go to Oxbridge—important though that is—or those who go to universities in general as the number of young people who end up as NEETs. We engage in an annual argument about whether exams are becoming easier, and how we are placed in comparative terms. I used to point out to Labour Ministers in the Select Committee that existed under the last Government that the system of which education forms a part was intended to deliver Every Child Matters outcomes, and to ensure that young people were able to go on to prosper in life. They cannot do that—and, indeed, they are signally failing to do it—if they end up as NEETs.
As I have said, those who seek the best proxy to measure the effectiveness of society’s systems for bringing up children—which, I suppose, include families—should consider the number of NEETs. That number is at a record high, and we need to tackle it. However, we are also concerned about social mobility, and the fact that our record on teenage pregnancy, fatherless households, drug use and other issues connected with social breakdown and social failure is not good in comparison with the records of other European countries.
The intellectual running under the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government seems, ironically enough, to be being made largely by current and former Labour Members of Parliament. I am pleased to see that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) is present. Whether we cite the Field report, the Allen report on early intervention or Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility, it is clear that a huge amount of work is being done, which indicates a general consensus in the House that we should try to become more effective.
The Select Committee produced its report as the Labour Government moved towards their target for full service delivery, which was at least 3,500 centres. I believe that there are now more than 3,600. Having initially established children’s centres in the most deprived parts of the country, the Government wanted to ensure that they existed in every part of the country. While it is fair to say that they wanted to provide a universal service, their rationale for taking Sure Start everywhere was the need to reach the poorest and most disadvantaged children in areas that were not themselves generally disadvantaged. They recognised that if they focused only on the most disadvantaged areas, many children elsewhere would be missed out.
Mr Sheerman
May I ask the hon. Gentleman to think again about what he has said? According to evidence given to the Select Committee, most children from deprived backgrounds lived outside the 500 most challenging wards in the country. That was the point: more young people with deprived backgrounds lived outside than inside the targeted areas.
Mr Stuart
The hon. Gentleman is, of course, right, and if I suggested otherwise I did not mean to. I meant to say that the main driver was not the need to provide a universal service, but the need to reach poor children wherever they were. In rural constituencies such as mine, which may in general contain high levels of wealth, there are still many people from poorer families. The aim was to provide a universal service that would reach those people, but the Committee concluded that the policy had not been as effective as we should have liked it to be.
I hope that we shall learn from Ministers today about their vision of the future of children’s centres. We know that the Government agree on the importance of early intervention, and we know that they see an important role for children’s centres within that. We also know that they have rolled funding for children’s centres into the early intervention grant. They say that they are providing enough funds to keep all the existing children’s centres open, but they have not insisted that local authorities do so. Moreover, the larger fund in which they have included the funds for children’s centres has itself been reduced this year from about £2.7 billion to £2.4 billion, and from 1 April it will be 10.9% lower than the 2010-11 notional figure.
Mr Stuart
I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for that gentle and quite proper intervention—and those who wish to speak will be even more grateful.
The hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) is right. We need to ensure that the resources are used for the best purposes, not political purposes—not in order to make it look as though something has been protected, or to avoid embarrassment, but to help to look after the most vulnerable children for the long term. That is what we must all hope for.
Mr Sheerman
I intervene only because the hon. Gentleman, who is a good friend of mine, mentioned Finland and has now moved on to Holland. It is true that, although I like the Finns, I do not think that many lessons can be learned from their experience. However, he did not give the full picture of the core of the Dutch answer to NEETS, which is very successful: in Holland people cannot draw benefit until they are 27 unless they are training and learning the Dutch language.
Mr Stuart
I believe that that measure was originally introduced by the mayor of Rotterdam, who picked the 27 threshold. It was about creating incentives at a local level in order to tackle the root of the problem. The hon. Gentleman, as befits a previous Select Committee Chairman, tries again to correct me by pointing out that I did not necessarily give the full story.
Will Ministers explain the rationale for the things included in the early intervention grant? I should like to understand how they hold together. Will they take us through the finances of the grant in some detail, and tell the House whether the Government have acted on the Select Committee report recommendation that they pull together all the funding that goes into Sure Start children’s centres? How much will come through health visitors? Also, can Ministers tell us more about health visitors? One of the most important things that children’s centres can do is be more effective in outreach. The National Audit Office and the Durham university study found that, in fact, children’s centres were not as effective in that respect as they could be. The growth in health visitors could play a major part in creating a more effective outreach service that identifies such children earlier and gets them the services and support they need, so that they are school-ready.
Mindful, as ever, of your ministrations, Mr Speaker, I shall sit down.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to follow the excellent speech of the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom). I was strongly tempted to intervene at the critical point near the end of her speech when she put her finger on the real problem of localism—when she talked about the pilot that did not go ahead because of the ethics of intervening with one group but not another. The issue we are debating directly concerns children’s centres and the information that flowed from an inquiry of the Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families when I chaired it. That inquiry went back to March 2010 and I think that you might even have given evidence to it, Madam Deputy Speaker, wearing a different hat. Central to today’s discussion is whether we should have a service that guarantees certain things for every poor child in the country or whether we should leave it up to the randomness that comes when different councils with different majorities or no majority, which may lack funding and which may be urban, suburban or rural, are left to take those decisions. I come from an old-fashioned school of thought, which I hope will come back into fashion, that believes in giving guarantees to every child in the country.
Let me take the House back briefly to when I became the Chair of the Select Committee, 10 years ago. The very first inquiry was into early years. We were the first Select Committee ever to hire a psychologist, because we wanted to understand the development of a child’s brain. Everything that has been said in the debate touches exactly on that.
We were lucky enough to engage three special advisers to the Committee, led by Kathy Sylva, the wonderful former head of children’s services in Oxfordshire. Kathy Sylva did that original research showing that by 22 months a child’s brain has developed to such an extent that it is extremely difficult to compensate later for lack of stimulation during those 22 months. Members in all parts of the House—no party political points here—understand that early years intervention is critical. We must also agree that there have been some difficulties since we produced our report last March. Such a time lapse is a great advantage, because we are able to see what has happened.
Many of the 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres are new and had only just been completed when we finished our report, just before the general election. Some were older, but all centres need time to put down roots. When we are experimenting with social policy, especially in such an important area, we must bear it in mind that children’s centres need time to respond to the local community and to change their shape and nature as demands on them are made and they become better known by good professionals working in the community. There is no doubt that the maturation process is important. As all of us in the educational world know, with the best intentions, it is difficult when national policies are rolled out.
Pilots may show that something works excellently on a small scale. I have been reflecting on that. One of the few times that I failed to get a witness to come before the Select Committee was when we asked Jamie Oliver. By the time we got through his press and publicity machine, his managers and his agents, we gave up trying to get him, even to speak about school meals. We did a school meals investigation before Jamie Oliver had made his programme. Tonight there will be a Jamie Oliver programme on television about his ideal school.
I learned a lesson last summer. I took my daughter, who at that time was heavily pregnant with twin boys, and my wife to a Jamie Oliver restaurant in Kingston, and it was one of the most disappointing meals that I have ever had. I had eaten in his restaurant Fifteen and I would recommend it to anyone. It is a flagship restaurant and was a wonderful experience, but when the Jamie Oliver offer is rolled out around the country, we see the difficulties that I found in Kingston upon Thames in the summer, as we have in education when we roll out children’s centres. The pilot looks wonderful and we think we can roll it out in 100 or even 500 centres. The reason our Government moved from 500 Sure Start centres to 3,500 was that most of the poor families in our country live outside the 500 poorest wards.
Andrea Leadsom
Surely that is an argument for localism in the case of children’s centres.
Mr Sheerman
Sorry, I disagree. It is a call for greater management. When an idea is rolled out and franchised, it is essential to ensure that there is a set of standards, that people know that they are expected to reach those standards, and that those standards are delivered. May I point the hon. Lady to the remarkable work of Lord Baker when he was Secretary of State? He picked up the challenge of Jim Callaghan’s Oxford speech to Ruskin, in which Callaghan said that we needed an inspectorate to check on quality, testing and assessment to find out how children were progressing, and a national curriculum. Jim Callaghan never did anything about it, because he did not have a majority or any money. Ten years later Ken Baker did it. He knew that we had to be able to deliver nationally to a national standard.
Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is making a case for a franchised system like McDonald’s or any other burger chain, not for Sure Start centres. I have some excellent Sure Start centres in my constituency in the most deprived areas, precisely where they should be, but the programmes offered there would not work in other parts of my constituency.
Mr Sheerman
I take the hon. Lady’s point. We can disagree on that.
Let me get down to what worries me. Our report—which, if my memory serves me right, the present Chairman of the Education Committee voted against—suggested that children’s centres should be maintained. We made some helpful comments. I want to spend a little time on the Government’s response. Paragraph after paragraph, they keep saying how wonderful our report is, but when I look at their response in detail, I am worried about some of their reasons for agreeing with it.
We can all agree that evidence-based policy is good policy, and this policy of ours was the purest example of that. In all my 10 years as Chair of the Select Committee, with some wonderful colleagues—many of us turn up at debates such as this—the best policies that we saw were those based on evidence, and of all the policies in those 10 years, the clearest evidence was on early years intervention and redirecting expenditure to the early years. People carelessly think that we spend a lot of money on early years, but that is not the case. How much we spend increases as a child gets older. All the evidence shows that we have got it the wrong way round. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) often made that case, and made it to you, Madam Deputy Speaker. The money should be piled in during the early years, for the reasons that the House has heard this afternoon.
What worries me about the Government’s response to our report is whether the commitment is still there. It is all very well having the commitment, but without the money and the resources, children’s centres will start to go. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) said that his council had not yet made up its mind. I have it on good authority that my local authority, Kirklees, in which Huddersfield sits as the jewel in the crown, is reducing the number of children’s centres from 35 to 17.
Bill Esterson
Sefton council proposed reducing the number of children’s centres from 19 to seven, but I am pleased to say that, in the face of huge opposition from the hundreds of families who use the centres, it is reconsidering. My hon. Friend makes his point about the link between policy and the money made available. We could comment on manifesto pledges. I am sure he would agree that it is only by Government guaranteeing that the money is available and that it will be spent on children’s centres that there is any hope of achieving the aims set out in the Select Committee report.
Mr Sheerman
Indeed. I hope my own local authority will change its mind under pressure from those who use the excellent children’s centres in my patch. I am sure that throughout the country there will be a large number of closures of children’s centres. That will be a disgrace, because I know what good work children’s centres are doing.
May I take up a remark made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead? He visits schools and sees how important the first two years are. I used to boast that I visited more schools than any other MP, and I am trying to keep up that track record. When I visit urban schools I see the difficulties that he has identified, measured against the 10 things that children should be able to do. I visit schools with fantastic heads and children’s centres with fantastic leaders who improve children’s behaviour and performance enormously, but 40% of the children will not be in those primary schools in a year because of the churn in our schools. We do not discuss that enough.
How can children be stimulated when in many of our major towns and cities they live in totally mobile populations? It is not the old-style poverty of the coalfields and shipyards, but the poverty of churn and change. In so many of our constituencies, heads and Sure Start leaders do not know which children will come through their doors in just a few weeks, which is a real problem. However, they do know that children will often have no one at home who speaks English to support them in learning our language. When those children go home, the television will not be in English. Sometimes, because of political correctness, we turn away from the reality of what is happening in our schools.
I fear that, as the world changes and the middle east turns itself upside down, for example, even higher rates of migration will result in even higher rates of change in our schools. I am not against migration and hold no extreme views on the matter, as everyone who knows me would acknowledge, but I know that our children’s centres and primary schools in urban areas are at the front line of that change. We cannot carry on asking teachers, heads and Sure Start leaders to cope with the increasing churn and turmoil resulting from the number of new children, so few of whom have a command of English, or indeed of many of the standard requirements that we expect in schools and children’s centres. We all pick up on that point but sometimes ignore it. We ask professionals to do a job, but not all children live in the leafy suburbs or the countryside.
Stephen Lloyd
That is an important and well-made point, but does the hon. Gentleman not agree that the additional investment for increasing the number of health visitors to 4,200 is surely a good thing for a number of reasons, not least the important issue that he has addressed?
Mr Sheerman
I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman made that intervention, because I was moving on to the funding of health visitors. I am not entirely sure or comfortable about when that money will come in, because I had heard that it is not yet and that it might be in 2012; there is nothing in black and white. I would be pleased if a member of the ministerial team would let us know during the debate whether the funding is coming and whether it is from the health budget, as one Minister has told me. If that is true, it will be a real plus for the overall budget and to be welcomed.
Where the health visitors are based is also important, and I hope that they will be concentrated in children’s centres. Some of us will remember hearing the head of the Royal College of General Practitioners say in evidence to the Select Committee that half its members did not know what a children’s centre was and that the other half thought that it was just competition for health visitors. Integration and working together are important.
It is also important to consider the revolutionary step at the heart of children’s centres, which has been missed out of the debate so far. The revolutionary step is that they view a child holistically. A child is not a child with a bit of educational difficulty here and a bit of early stimulation there, or with a little health problem here and language difficulties there. The beauty of children’s centres is that a child gets all that support and evaluation in one place. Parents do not have to push a pram all over town to go to one clinic for a certain service and somewhere else for another, as my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) said. The fact is that providing a holistic service for a child delivers the best chance of giving that child the environment in which they can thrive.
While the Committee was conducting that inquiry, we were looking at young people who were not in education, employment or training. When we went to Holland, we found the Dutch experience particularly interesting, because they also looked at young people holistically. They have centres where young people can have a health evaluation and an aptitude evaluation, where employers and colleges are represented and there are seminar rooms for people who had been NEETs before gaining employment. Those centres provide an all-purpose focus for young people. When we are talking about people’s lives, it is that holistic approach that seems to work, and I recommend that what we do in children’s centres should be transferred to that older age group, as stated in our report on NEETs. Local authorities have moved in that direction, and some examples in the UK have been extremely successful.
Mr Sheerman
Not for the moment.
Many of the responses to the Committee’s report have made much play of the big society. I must confess that I actually like the idea of a big society, but I am slightly resentful of it, because I think that the Conservatives stole it from Labour—[Interruption.] I say that in a good-natured way to ensure that Conservative Members are still awake. In fact, we all believe in the big society. I believed in it even when Mrs Thatcher said that there was no such thing as society, so I have a long-term commitment to it. Throughout my whole political life I have involved myself in starting social enterprises as part of that big society, because I think that that is how our society should develop.
My worry about the big society is that it is often linked to the idea that everything should be done by volunteers. I am a little suspicious when people argue that things can be done by volunteers, because the best analysis and professional research suggests some problems with that. I refer the Minister to an interesting article—she might already know it—published in 2006 by Professor Alison Wolf, who is about to publish a report produced for the Government on 14 to 19-year-olds. As the Minister will know, Professor Wolf’s daughter, Rachel Wolf, is in charge of the free schools movement and her son, Martin Wolf, is a senior influence at the Financial Times. I listen carefully to Alison Wolf, and her 2006 article stated that the real problem with volunteering in this country is that it has been dying—first, because of the decline of organised religion, and secondly, because women now work in demanding jobs. Both men and women work in our country.
Professor Wolf also noted that the research suggesting that there is a lot of volunteering left in our communities is poor because it is based on opinion polls, and people tell fibs about how much they put back into the community when they are asked in such polls. If members of a pilot group are asked to keep a diary, the results show that the average time a person gives to volunteering is four minutes a day. If we are to base children’s centres and the big society on all of us volunteering for four minutes a day, we will still need a hell of a lot of good professionals to provide quality health and children’s care.
I shall also briefly touch on something that was central to the Government’s critique of our inquiry—the idea that we would no longer need so many hours. One absolutely fantastic thing about children’s centres in the most deprived areas was that they had to stay open 10 hours a day, 48 weeks a year. The document before me clearly states that that is now finished as an obligation and does not need to delivered. We all know that that is true, because it is in the response to the Select Committee’s report, and, in the hard-pressed and most deprived communities throughout our land, it represents the withdrawal of a guarantee that really meant something and will be sorely missed.
I do not know what my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead, who wrote his own report, would say about that withdrawal. I do not remember hearing whether he was conscious of it when he wrote his report, and I do not know whether he thinks that the fairness premium will counter-balance it, but nobody knows how the premium will work, when people will receive it or who will benefit from it.
At the heart of my concerns about the response to the Select Committee’s report is the fact that localism has become an excuse for saying, “We don’t have the confidence or the courage to say that we believe that there must be a reduction in the number of children’s centres or the services they provide, so we are going to pass it on to local authorities.” The Government must know, however, that local authorities, in straitened times with much smaller budgets, are going to cut back on children’s centres.
This Government—any Government—have a responsibility for knowing that some policies are so fundamental to the welfare of our people that we and they cannot afford to give up the guarantee and say, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. We believe in children’s centres, in a full service and in the early stimulation of children, but unfortunately those naughty people up there in Oxford, down there in Surrey or up there in the north-east happen to be short of money and it is all their responsibility.” No one can shuffle away from such responsibility. If children’s centres are cut back or cease to exist as fully integrated models, the buck stops with the Government. I hope that all parties in the House recognise that.
There is a very real problem with the final piece of evidence in the Government’s response to the Select Committee report. I was very fond of evidence-based policy, as you know Madam Deputy Speaker. On page 3 of the Government’s response, they say:
“The Government agrees with the recommendation—high quality provision leads to better outcomes for children and families. Research evidence shows that it is the quality of support which makes the difference for children's outcomes, particularly for disadvantaged children. That is why, where children's centres are providing early education and care, it should be led by either an Early Years Professional or a Qualified Teacher to ensure quality and provide expert input to the activities and services on offer.”
Do we all agree with that? I am looking at the ministerial team. Do we agree? Can I have a nod? [Interruption.] I am not going to get a nod, because they know that page 6 says:
“It is crucial that children's centres in disadvantaged areas continue to offer high-quality early education and care to support vulnerable and disadvantaged families. However, since we have removed the requirement for children's centres in disadvantaged areas to provide full day care, we do not want to be as prescriptive as the previous Government in expecting them to employ both a Qualified Teacher and an Early Years Professional. Therefore, we have removed this requirement.”
The Minister responsible for schools became very fond of one little bit of evidence in Clackmannanshire, when he was converted to synthetic phonics, but all the evidence, not just one piece in a relatively obscure part of the United Kingdom—
Mr Sheerman
No, Clackmannanshire.
One inquiry swept the Minister away to the world of synthetic phonics, and he has been there ever since, but in fact much research shows that a qualified teacher or an early years professional in an early years setting makes a substantial difference to outcomes, and this Government are taking that away.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Sarah Teather)
We are not taking that requirement away; we are taking away the requirement for both professionals.
Mr Sheerman
That is good information, but if I take the two responses together I find that the requirement is substantially weakened.
Sarah Teather
Yes, I fear that the hon. Gentleman probably has not read all the document.
Part of the problem is that in some areas—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman lets me finish, then he can shout at me. In some areas, we find that there is no need for full day care, and if there is no need, we end up subsidising full day-care places, which is not sensible. We should put that money into the evidence-based programmes that make the difference, to which the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) referred. That is where the money must go, and that is why we have taken away the requirement for full day care. There is no requirement for both professionals, but there will need to be one.
Mr Sheerman
I am sorry, but it is unkind of Ministers to suggest that I have not read the document. From a close reading of it, I have explained how those two paragraphs do not make sense. Taking away the commitments to 10 hours a day and to 48 weeks a year substantially weakens the overall offer.
Now that I have managed to get the Minister to the Dispatch Box, I wonder whether she will also tell us a little about the future mutualisation of children’s centres. The Select Committee said that it was in favour of variety and more community-responsive children’s centres. We certainly were not against diversity in the shape and nature of children’s centres throughout the country, but throwing into the response to our report something about the possibility of mutualisation, without really developing it, left us all rather puzzled. Can she enlighten us on mutualisation?
Sarah Teather
I shall pick up on those wider points when the hon. Gentleman sits down and I make my speech. I just wanted to make that clarification, but I am conscious that other Members want to speak and I am just prolonging his speech.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. That is a good point. We do not want a discussion just between the Minister and the hon. Gentleman, even though it might be of interest to other Members. Other Members are waiting to speak.
Mr Sheerman
I would never be so churlish as to suggest that the hon. Lady has not read the document.
Ten years ago, when I became Chairman of the Select Committee, we produced a report on early years. I used to go to early years settings where people were employed for £1 an hour. There was a very poor core of professionals and many volunteers, and 10 years ago there was a lot of fuss because a Labour Government introduced the national minimum wage. People told us at our inquiry that that was the end of early years, because no one would be able to afford to pay the minimum wage. Over those 10 years, everything we saw taught us that the policies that increased the professionalism of the early years resource and staff were a fantastic investment—the sort of investment that our communities and our Government should make and be proud to make. Our original report made that point very clearly, and I still believe in what we said: the children’s centre network is highly valuable, and we destroy it or undermine it at our peril.
Matthew Hancock
I listened with great interest to my hon. Friend’s passionate argument earlier, which made exactly that case. Local innovation and a local ability to respond to local events, with a national set of standards that must be met, allow money to be spent better.
I come to the central reason why I support that approach—the fact that it is about outcomes, not inputs. Tight ring-fencing is all about ensuring that the inputs go to a certain area. I understand as well as anybody how easy it is to get a headline out of writing that x million pounds is going to such and such a project—but what matters to people on the ground is not the amount of money poured in at the top, but the outcomes delivered at the bottom. The ability to improve value for public money, get better outcomes and have innovative social groups, such as the one that my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) mentioned, is, given the extremely tight fiscal environment, vital. I therefore applaud the Government’s approach in loosening ring-fencing while retaining minimum standards to allow flourishing local innovation and improve the value that we get for the hard-earned taxpayers’ money that we spend on their behalf.
In the context of spending more money on early years, and thus getting better outcomes, I also applaud the free entitlement to 15 hours of early years education for the most disadvantaged two-year-olds. That is another example of managing to get money from the older part of the age range to the younger part. I also strongly applaud the desire for increased qualifications in the work force and better leadership, especially through the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services, to ensure that we get more highly talented people into the work.
Of course, I welcome the 4,200 extra health visitors, targeted at very young age groups. I think we can all agree that the reduction in the number of health visitors in the past few years was a mistake. Reversing that and ensuring that there is universal coverage, and more health visitors, is very valuable.
Mr Sheerman
The hon. Gentleman made a good point. As soon as I realised that he was a member of the Public Accounts Committee I took great notice of his words. However, early years professionals and a qualified teacher will not be required even in the children’s centres that have full-day provision. Surely, if he believes in professionalism in the work force, he deplores that. On a visit on Friday, I found that people are giving up on the early years qualification, because they feel that it is no longer valued and will not be funded after 2012.
Matthew Hancock
It is important to have highly qualified people, but again, I would not make that mandatory for a centre because many people are highly qualified to work in and deliver early years education, but do not have the specific qualification. If people in, for example, the charity with which my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire is closely involved do not have that qualification because they have come to it through a different route, I would not want to put a barrier in their way. That does not mean that we should not have more professionally qualified people.
Mr Sheerman
Is the hon. Gentleman saying that it is okay for unqualified people to provide the professionalism in Sure Start centres? That seems to be happening in the schools sector—in free schools—recently. Do qualifications mean nothing in the profession any longer, according to the Government?
Matthew Hancock
Of course qualifications are meaningful, but does the hon. Gentleman claim that no person without the formal paper qualification is up to the job? I do not think so. Of course, a qualification is part of someone’s resumé and experience, but we should not be so bureaucratic about the piece of paper. We should look at the person’s ability and qualifications through their history.
Mr Sheerman
May I help my hon. Friend, because he has just taken an intervention from the Chairman of the current Select Committee? I have read the Government’s response to our original response and it states:
“We are aware that Durham University published a report recently which suggested that Government investment in Sure Start had not delivered improvements in early language and numeracy development. We do not share that view—the 2010 Foundation Stage Profile results showed that the proportion of young children achieving a good level of development had increased by 4 percentage points compared to 2009”.
We must therefore balance what the Government actually said against what some people think they said.
Steve Rotheram
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that point.
Secondly, the Committee urged the Government to give the programme time to bear fruit, given that even the oldest tranche of centres was only about six years old at that stage. The Committee said:
“It would be catastrophic if Children’s Centres were not afforded long-term policy stability and security of funding while evaluation is ongoing.”
Thirdly, the Committee categorically urged against the removal of ring-fencing, saying:
“We consider that it would be unwise to remove the ring-fence around Children’s Centres funding in the short or medium term; putting Centres at the mercy of local vicissitudes would risk radically different models and levels of service developing across the country, with differences out of proportion to the variation in community needs.”
Some Tory Members served on that Committee, so this was a cross-party report.
Sarah Teather
I absolutely agree. The point is that local authorities ought to have the freedom to decide whether they want to integrate these services with their youth provision. I want them to make better use of what are often fantastic assets, which are not always fully utilised. If we provide flexibility for local authorities, they will have the opportunity to do that.
Mr Sheerman
On a related point, a thread that runs through all the reports of the previous Select Committee is the importance of the professional qualification for early years professionals, and of paying and training those professionals well. There is some unhappiness at the moment because it seems that the early years qualification will be brushed aside. Will the Minister reassure us that that is not the case?
Sarah Teather
I am not sure that I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point. We are in the process of co-producing a policy statement with the Department of Health and the sector on the vision for early years and on how we will drive forward a number of changes. In particular, it will deal with quality, which I spoke about this morning at the 4Children conference. The questions include whether the existing qualifications are fit for purpose, whether we should change them and whether we should ensure that there is a greater focus on child development. We are considering those matters at the moment and we will publish the policy statement later this year. Quality is key, which is why we have asked the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services to focus on the quality of leadership in children’s centres. Children’s centres have the potential to drive forward quality, not just in their centre, but in much of the early years provision in their area. They have a great deal of potential.
I only have about four minutes left, which will make it difficult to respond to all the questions that have come up. I want to deal with one point that was raised by Labour Members, and in particular by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger). She made a number of allegations about cuts being made in proportion to need. I simply dispute her point. In fact, we used the previous Government’s funding formula to allocate most of the money in the EIG. As she will be aware, the formula
“is based on the under 5 population, weighted to reflect deprivation (based on Working Tax Credits data), rurality and the Education area cost adjustment.
Also,
“Some of the EIG has been allocated according to a youth formula. This is based on population numbers, educational attainment at Key Stage 2 and 3 and GCSE, numbers of young people not in education, employment or training…and the Education area cost adjustment.”
It simply is not fair to say that we have chosen to target cuts at areas with the greatest need—that is quite offensive. I appreciate that some hon. Members have made speeches today in order to defend councils of their own political colour, which I can understand. I also acknowledge that things are extremely difficult for many councils at the moment. I am not saying that it is easy to run a council, any more than it is easy to run the country at the moment, given the parlous state of our finances.
Many local authorities are making sensible decisions—to cluster Sure Start children’s centres and to merge back-office functions, for example. They are looking innovatively at how they can bring services together to make the best use of the assets available. We have heard from a number of hon. Members whose local authorities are managing to prioritise not only children’s centre buildings but the services that are being provided in them, to ensure that they always focus on children’s outcomes, which is absolutely vital.
The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) asked some specific questions about what the Government are doing. I have made it clear to local authorities that this issue is a priority—so much so that they have been complaining that I have placed a moral ring fence around children’s centres. We have made it clear in the guidance that local authorities have a duty to consult properly, and we have drawn their attention to the fact that, if they are using an asset for a purpose for which it is not funded, the Department is obliged to consider whether to claw back some of the money involved. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is using all those arguments in his discussions with his local council.
I was hoping to say a little about the vision for Sure Start children’s centres but, unfortunately, everyone else has spoken for so long that I have only about a minute left. Flexibility is key, and targeting the neediest families is an absolute priority for the Government, as is focusing on evidence-based programmes and making use of the reports produced for us by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead and the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen). We also want services to be brought together much more effectively, which is why we are working so closely with the Department of Health on our vision for children’s centres. I am pleased that we shall have so many more health visitors on track. Many of them will be placed in Sure Start children’s centres, and all of them will have strong links with their local centres. That is vital. Evidence shows that if health services are closely involved, the neediest families can be reached.
I was hoping to go on to speak about mutuals and the voluntary sector, but it is now 4.32, and I have to sit down. If hon. Members would like to hear more from me in future, they might want to restrain their speeches just a little. This has been an extremely useful debate, however, and I want to thank all hon. Members for their contributions.
Question deferred (Standing Order No. 54(4).
Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Vince Cable
That is an excellent suggestion, which we will pursue. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the new enterprise allowance is being trialled in Liverpool, and will give people who would otherwise face long periods of unemployment the opportunity to start their own businesses with financial support, mentoring and access to loans. It is a very good scheme, which I want to encourage and expand.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
How will the Secretary of State respond to the wonderful report on creative clusters in our country launched yesterday by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts? The report shows again that 6% of new businesses create 50% of new jobs, but that most of the clusters are in London and the south-east. As he is stripping the capacity to do anything about that in Yorkshire, which is performing at a low level, what will he do about it?
Vince Cable
As it happens, under the growth review that Ministers are conducting, yesterday we reviewed the creative industry sector to which the hon. Gentleman refers. The sector has serious problems of access to finance, because of a lack of tangible security, and issues around copyright protection. We are pursuing both those issues, and if we can crack them it will help creative industries across the country.
Education Bill
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Michael Gove
The hon. Gentleman’s own saintly behaviour while he has been in the House of Commons is an advertisement not only for religious education but for the religious education offered by the Roman Catholic Church, of which he is such a distinguished ornament—[Laughter.] He is certainly venerable, and he might be blessed and, one day, perhaps, saintly, but at the moment we will settle for ornamental. He is both ornament and use. He is formidably well informed; I know from our previous exchanges in Committee that he knows every single member of the Aberdeen team that won the European cup winners cup in Gothenburg in 1982—[Interruption.] My dad was there, as a matter of fact. [Interruption.] I am grateful. We Aberdeen fans need all the support we can get at times like this. I was going to say to the hon. Gentleman that he is misinformed on this particular point, because religious education is in the curriculum. It is a compulsory subject. Moreover, the English baccalaureate is not a compulsory measure; it is simply a performance measure that will allow us to see how many students have access to five core academic subjects. The sad fact is that only 16% of students succeeded in securing the mix of subjects that make the English baccalaureate, when every other developed country demands that its students have that suite of qualifications at 15, 16 or 17. This is another example of our falling behind.
The case for reform, as I have mentioned, is one that many Labour Members might be tempted to support. One reason they may be tempted to support it is that they will see that progressive figures from across the world are moving in the same direction as this Government. Just two weeks ago, we were privileged to have visiting the UK Mike Feinberg, the founder of the Knowledge is Power Program set of schools.
Mike Feinberg used to be an intern for Senator Paul Simon, Barack Obama’s predecessor as Senator for Illinois. Mike Feinberg, a career Democrat, was here to support our free school programme. He was joined by Joel Klein, a former Assistant Attorney-General in the Clinton Administration, and was also here to support our free school programme. They followed Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s Education Secretary, who also came here to back our free school programme. Our free school programme has also been backed by Conor Ryan, an adviser to the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough and to the former Prime Minister. He described the Labour party’s opposition to our proposals as “ridiculous”.
Conor Ryan is not a lone voice. He has been joined by Andrew Adonis, who described 400 academies as “a phenomenal achievement”. He said:
“Neither I nor Tony Blair believed that academies should be restricted to areas with failing schools. We wanted all schools to be eligible for academy status, and we were enthusiastic about the idea of entirely new schools being established on the academy model, as in Michael Gove’s Free Schools policy.”
It is not just a matter of what Conor Ryan and Andrew Adonis said, as I shall cite what Tony Blair himself said:
“In many areas of… policy, the Tories will be at their best when they are allowed to get on with it—as with reforms in education”.
I have a question for every Opposition Member: are they going to listen to the reformist Prime Minister who secured them three election victories, or are they going to go back to the atavistic class warrior instincts that will lead them to oppose this Bill? Tony Blair in his memoirs also pointed out that when a reformist Government are in power, it is very easy for an Opposition to oppose. He went on to say that when there are reforms like ours, the Opposition should support them, but he pointed out that Oppositions tend to get
“dragged almost unconsciously, almost unwillingly into wholesale opposition. It’s where the short-term market in votes is. It is where the party feels most comfortable. It’s what gets the biggest cheer. The trouble is it also chains the Opposition to positions that in the longer term look irresponsible, short-sighted, just plain wrong.”
That is Tony Blair’s verdict on the opposition of the current official Opposition Front-Bench team to this Bill—“irresponsible, short-sighted” and “just plain wrong”.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I cannot remember how many years the Secretary of State has been a Member of this House, but I would like to know how many times he voted for one of Tony Blair’s Education Bills on Second Reading, which is what he is asking us to do tonight?
Michael Gove
One of my first acts was enthusiastically to support Tony Blair’s Education Bill on Second Reading. In fact, when I was a journalist, I was always happy to support Tony Blair—rather more conspicuously than some Labour Members, including the shadow Chancellor and indeed the current Leader of the Opposition, did—and I am happy to say that our Bill, as Fiona Millar points out in The Guardian today, is in many respects one that builds on what Tony Blair wanted to do in 2005, but was thwarted by reactionaries on the Labour Benches.
That brings me to the heart of the challenge for the Opposition tonight. Will they be on the side of reform, consensus and progress in favour of a 21st-century curriculum and a 21st-century school system, or will they vote against that and put themselves in a Division Lobby thus saying no to money for early intervention, no to support for students at primary school, no to turning around our weaker schools, no to getting rid of bureaucracy and no to more good school places.
Mr Sheerman
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Is there any point in Back Benchers turning up to education debates? The Secretary of State spent 52 minutes at the Dispatch Box and this is the fourth intervention that he is making on my right hon. Friend’s speech. What is the point of the rest of us who are interested in education and who want to participate coming here at all.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
That is not a point of order but it is a good point that should be made to the House. I understand that both Front Benchers have a lot to say, but it does prevent Back Benchers from taking part in the debate. The sooner we can get on the better.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I think that all hon. Members who are interested in education struggle with the challenges of which we are all aware. We want every child in our country to fulfil their full potential and to garner from education the very best, from which many of us have benefited. I had a very happy educational experience and I wanted the same for my children and now for my growing number of grandchildren. We all want that, but the truth is that we are not doing well enough.
When Labour won the general election in 1997, I could not have been happier with the commitment of our young, new Prime Minister to education, education, education. I watched the performance of Labour Governments for 10 years as the Chair of the Select Committee on Education—indeed, it had three names in that time—and I saw them make tremendous efforts to raise standards and to innovate in order to do so. A great deal was achieved in that time through innovation, new ideas and confronting the truth that many of our young people had been given a pretty bad deal—and not only in the centres of great deprivation. When the Committee looked at Sure Start centres, we had to consider the fact that if one circles the areas of greatest poverty, one does not find the most children in poverty because most of them live outside those areas. That is why we had to have 3,500 children’s centres instead of the 500 originally envisaged. There is always this challenge of getting through to the most deprived families and constituents, and that is difficult for any Government.
I am going to be honest: much of the Bill could have come from the previous Labour Administration. I think some colleagues would agree with that. I shall not vote against its Second Reading because I want to make a plea. The longer I chaired the Select Committee, the more I realised that much of what really works comes when we have agreement across the House. One can see that from the history of educational progress in our country. It was true of the Education Act 1944, of the Callaghan speech that was taken up by Ken Baker and of later legislation.
We often throw across the Chamber allegations that the other side is being ideological— Government Members say it about the Opposition and vice versa—but I cannot find any ideology in this Bill. Indeed, if I were to vote against it, it would be because it is a bit of a mish-mash. There are some very good things in it, but there are other things that I do not really like and want to know much more about. I do not like the fact that the Government want to get rid of the Training and Development Agency for Schools, as that would be a retrograde step. I do not agree with what they have said about schools adjudicators or with giving parents less chance to challenge admissions policies and get them changed. The Select Committee worked very hard to persuade the former Government to change the powers of adjudicators and allow them to be called in more easily because we found that many schools, such as faith schools, were evading their responsibilities in terms of fairer admissions policies.
I want to be able to vote for the Bill and I am not going to vote against it today because I want to see whether we can improve it in Committee. However, I get very irritated when I hear about PISA studies and TIMSS—trends in international mathematics and science study—tables and about the OECD. I remember when the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) and I went to Paris to talk to the OECD about the PISA study. The truth is that many such evaluations are quite flaky and have changed dramatically over the years. When I chaired the Select Committee I was constantly saying that I wanted our country to be compared with other countries such as ours—large, populous countries with high migration and high turnover in inner urban schools. The United States, Germany and France, and perhaps Italy and Spain, would be fairer comparisons for the UK. On that measure, our education system has improved dramatically in the past 13 years. I do not believe the PISA studies showing a cataclysmic decline: I do not believe that is true and I do not think that Ministers believe it either. Let us have some good sense.
When do we get good policy? As you will know from a previous incarnation, Madam Deputy Speaker, it is when it is based on evidence, good research and good experience in similar countries. It is not about pulling off what the Hong Kongs and Chinas of the world have done—or Alberta, which became a country earlier today. Let us learn from countries such as ours, but let us also have high-quality expertise and research. Too many Education Departments are not good enough and they should be better. There should be much more research on why we do not get better results.
Mr Sheerman
I take the point, but the basis of those tables has changed.
When all parties have concentrated on what works and on good research, we have come up with early-years education—children’s centres and Sure Start. I applaud the idea of reaching out to two-year-olds—the Government are right about that—but not in the context of changing the commitment to Sure Start children’s centres. That is good policy based on research and what is really happening.
What if we used the same holistic method as the Dutch to tackle those not in education, employment or training, and tied it to the welfare system? In Holland, people up to the age of 27 can get no welfare benefit unless they are in training and learning the Dutch language. Why not link welfare to training here? Why not make everyone on benefits do something to improve their training, skills and employability and to learn the English language?
One of the problems that we do not consider in this country is the effect on the ability of families to support their children in schools if they have no English language themselves, the television is on in the home language, and then we suffer deprivation in our inner cities. We see a new form of poverty, not the poverty that was found in the shipbuilding and mining areas. The new kind of poverty is based on high turnover. In schools in my inner town, 40% of the children in front of the school today will not be there next year. None of the political parties has examined the new poverty in sufficient detail and come up with policies to deal with it.
Too many people in education policy want to live in a mythical golden age that never existed, but also want some ideological determination of what happens. I was taught by Michael Oakeshott, the greatest Conservative philosopher of the 20th century, who believed in the pursuit of intimations. Education policy is best when we pursue the intimations, and very often when we do that across parties. I will not vote against Second Reading tonight.
Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
Order. May I gently ask the Secretary of State to face the Chamber, so that I can be the full beneficiary of his eloquence?
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the Secretary of State bear in mind the fact that successful special educational needs provision depends very much on integration with other schools? That was the finding of the former Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families. We very much support good SEN provision, but it must be integrated with the local schools that take other kinds of children.
Michael Gove
I absolutely recognise that when we are talking about children with special educational needs, there is such a broad and complex spectrum that one solution will not fit all children. I had the opportunity to visit Redcar community college on Thursday, and I saw there an imaginative proposal to co-locate Kirkleatham Hall special school with that college. That seems to be the right solution there, but different solutions will apply elsewhere. I am very grateful to the hon. Member for Redcar (Ian Swales) for his impassioned advocacy of those two schools.
Education Maintenance Allowance
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
It is an interesting debate, but I found it hard to concentrate on the Secretary of State’s speech because I was expecting a speech that was focused particularly on the motion and on EMA, but he seemed to want to talk about almost everything else. He spoke endlessly about the economy but said little about EMA.
In my brief speech, I want to make a couple of points. First, as a former Chair of the Education Committee, I say to the current Chair that, as Nye Bevan said, it is a question of priorities, but he and I, and other hon. Members, served on the Committee when it conducted an inquiry into NEETs—one of our last inquiries under the previous Government, and I believe that the impact on NEETs of the removal of EMA will prove very much more expensive than the NEET budget.
I beg the Government to think in terms of the broader picture. The previous Government introduced EMA because we knew that if we could keep a young person on in education from 16 to 18, we had got ’em—they stayed on, and not just to go to Oxford and Cambridge, which the Secretary of State is obsessed with. The one thing that annoys me most is the obsession with which kids who had free school meals went to Oxford and Cambridge. I am a London School of Economics graduate, but I must point out that there are many much better universities than Oxford and Cambridge. There are brilliant universities—the university of Huddersfield in my constituency is fantastic. It has one of the best design and engineering departments in the country. So please, Secretary of State, do not be obsessive about Oxford and Cambridge.
The record is there to show that as a result of the successful policy of introducing EMA, many more young people—a tremendous number—now stay on from 16 to 18. They do not do all the posh things such as going to Oxford and Cambridge or the Russell Group universities, but they stay on for apprenticeships and training; they go for craft training and become technicians. The Secretary of State shares my desire to get more kids to become technicians. There is nothing wrong with that, and EMA has meant that many more have come through. We know that without EMA, many young people will be put off doing so.
With EMA, we have changed the educational culture; it is the one area in which we have done so. Kids now stay on until they are 18 and that opens up their lives to new opportunities. The abolition of EMA will change the culture back to what it was before.
Mr Sheerman
In a moment.
We must also consider the long-term implications and the unintended consequences. I pray in aid a recent report from the Equalities Commission. It showed how many young people from ethnic minorities were unemployed and the sort of employment those who worked had. For example, 25% of Pakistanis are taxi drivers. It showed how many Pakistani, Bangladeshi, black and white working-class young people have been brought into education and stay in education because of EMA. If those young people are not in education or training, they will not get jobs. The long-term cost to our communities will be frightening.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
In the local college in my constituency, 50% of young people surveyed who receive EMA have said that they are unlikely to be able to stay on in education. That is a damning indictment. Secondly, is my hon. Friend aware that it is predicted that the Government will spend some £40 million trying to cancel EMA? Young people will feel very let down if it is true that so much money will be spent doing that. It is appalling.
Mr Sheerman
My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and I agree with it, but may I press on and say two more things? The first is that when I chaired the Children, Schools and Families Committee, it always believed in evidence-based policy. That means listening to all the evidence, not just taking one bit that we like and saying, “I’ll base the policy on this,” and ignoring all the other evidence. I ask the current Chair of the Education Committee, when he has an inquiry on the subject—he will have one; it will be too late, but he will have one—to bear in mind that we always took all the evidence.
I have not heard one mention today of Professor Alison Wolf, whom the Secretary of State appointed to look at 14-to-19 education and vocational opportunities. What on earth happened to that? This is just like the increase in student fees; we are to have a White Paper, after the Government have decided what they will do about student fees. It is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. The fact is that the Secretary of State has got one of the country’s leading experts—Professor Alison Wolf from King’s College London—to look at the issue, but he will make all the major decisions that will influence how many young people stay on in further and vocational education before she brings forward her report in spring.
Michael Gove
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reminding the House that the coalition Government enjoy the support and advice of the leading figure in the world of vocational education. I am aware of two detailed reports on the effectiveness of the education maintenance allowance: the 2007 Institute for Fiscal Studies report, which showed that the allowance had a marginal impact on both attainment and attendance, and of course the National Foundation for Educational Research report, which was published in the autumn last year. Can he tell me of any other serious reports, from the NFER or anyone else, that make a contrary case?
Mr Sheerman
May I remind the Secretary of State of what one of his favourites, the Policy Exchange, said?
“The only possible remaining argument for the EMA is social justice—that young people from poorer backgrounds deserve to be supported from 16 rather than at 18. This is a pretty weak argument”.
So that is another one, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has looked again at its original research, as he well knows.
Michael Gove
Has the hon. Gentleman actually read the 2007 IFS report, or the 2010 NFER report? If he had read those, and the Policy Exchange report, he would have seen that those three serious academic reports all say that EMA does not produce the benefits that he, in his passion, would like it to.
Mr Sheerman
The IFS report, taken on its own, shows that even if only 8% to 10% of people took up EMA, that would pay for its cost, in terms of the fuller picture. Today, we are talking about the full cost and impact, and the change in the culture in our country. It is interesting; I thought that the Secretary of State was going to tell us what the hell had happened to the Alison Wolf report, and why he was introducing policy before he had even bothered to listen to the leading expert, who he has working on the issue. A lot of us have actually contributed to her inquiry. What was the point of talking to the Government, and giving one’s advice and experience, when the Government ignore it because the Secretary of State has introduced his policy before Alison Wolf introduced hers? We will wait and see what the report brings us.
We are at a pivotal moment. I think most people in the House would agree that we have to make some changes—extraordinary ones. If I sat down with a group of people who care about education in this House, and we discussed what we were to cut, we could think extraordinary things. If I were really pushed and wanted to defend EMA, I would go for larger class sizes, because there is real evidence that slightly larger class sizes do not make all that much difference. That might upset some of my colleagues, and I agree that there are priorities to be set and choices to be made, but this Secretary of State has never given us a chance to set priorities.
Mr Sheerman
I will not give way. The fact is that we could have that negotiation and discussion. It is right that there should be priorities, but removing EMA will hurt all communities, up and down the land. In my constituency of Huddersfield, two FE colleges, Kirklees college and Huddersfield New college, depend heavily on education maintenance allowances; they do a wonderful job in bringing young people who would not otherwise have the chance into education across the piece.
I am reminded that many people on the Conservative side do not actually know much about FE. [Interruption.] Listen a minute. Only last June, the Association of Colleges gave a golden award to six people who went to FE colleges. A person could not get through the Conservatives and Liberals who were gathered around Colin Firth as he got his award. He never went to university; he went to an FE college. Those people in this House who understand the wonderful job that FE colleges do will share my feeling that this is a shameful day in education policy—a day on which the Secretary of State did not have the courage to defend his arguments, but instead first used the lifebelt of taking more and more interventions to save him making a speech, and secondly went on about the broader economy. This is a shameful day, and the Secretary of State should be ashamed of it.
Further Education Lecturers
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
It is a pleasure to have secured this debate, which follows another education-related one. As I speak, hon. Members in the main Chamber are debating the education maintenance allowance, so Ministers, like the rest of us, are trying to be in two places at once.
This debate is about Government policy on the employment of further education lecturers as school teachers in schools. I am delighted to see present my predecessor as Chair of the Education Committee in its previous guise as the Children, Schools and Families Committee, the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman). I hope that he will participate. The subject is important because the importance of vocational and practical education within our education system is too often underplayed. There is also an artificial chasm between those who teach in further education and those who teach in schools at a time when we are trying to create a system such as that in health, which tries to build pathways in relation to the patient so that, instead of providing health services on the basis of institutional convenience, everything is built in relation to the patient. In exactly the same way, institutions that serve young people in education should bend and shape themselves to suit the young people’s needs, rather than the other way around.
Further education lecturers are required to work through a four-tier qualification system, culminating in qualified teacher learning and skills status. FE lecturers with QTLS accreditation may then work in schools not as teachers, but as instructors, and only as a last resort. Even though they perform essentially the same functions, instructors have a lower professional status and, usually, a lower salary than schoolteachers. The equality of esteem and the need to ensure good vocational learning are undermined by that artificial divide.
Primary and secondary teachers, on the other hand, have a qualification known as qualified teacher status. Teachers with a QTS are currently eligible to teach in the FE sector. If the potential of the Government’s schools policy is to be realised, we need the best possible teachers in the classroom providing education at any one time. The Government’s schools White Paper rightly identifies teacher quality as the most important ingredient in improving the quality of education in this country, thus encouraging social mobility and other issues of social justice that hon. Members on both sides of the House devoutly desire. The White Paper states:
“All the evidence from different education systems around the world shows that the most important factor in determining how well children do is the quality of teachers and teaching.”
Many FE lecturers are dual professionals with expertise both in their vocational subject area and in pedagogy. That expertise needs to be used in schools on an equal and fair basis in the same way as that of teachers. I hope that the Government will look to overcome the obstacles and create a single teaching qualification, effectively moving the barriers that constrain the best use of FE lecturers.
The Government’s skills strategy shows that they are committed to the promotion of technical as well as academic qualifications—I believe that that issue has just been debated in the main Chamber—to promote a variety of routes to improved employment opportunities to students. My hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning has just left the Chamber and, given his passionate espousal of the importance of craft and vocational learning, we must ensure that we make best use of our teaching work force. The skills strategy states:
“Skills are vital to our future and improving skills is essential to building sustainable growth and stronger communities. A skilled workforce is necessary to stimulate the private-sector growth that will bring new jobs and new prosperity for people all over this country.
And a strong further education and skills system is fundamental to social mobility, re-opening routes for people from wherever they begin to succeed in work, become confident through becoming accomplished and play a full part in civil society.”
The reality, however, is that there has been a lack of expansion of vocational expertise in the school work force, which fails to match the expansion of vocational curricula in schools. Schools too often do not have the appropriately experienced teachers to inspire students to excel in vocational courses.
The Children, Schools and Families Committee carried out an inquiry into teacher training in the 2009-10 Session and its report, “The Training of Teachers”, was published in January 2010. The Committee called for
“greater fluidity—and shared development opportunities—across the school and further education sectors.”
The report’s recommendations include:
“At the very least, teachers with Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills status should immediately be able to work as a qualified teacher in schools if they are teaching post-16, even post-14, pupils.”
That recommendation represents the nub of my case today, for which I hope we will have a sympathetic and constructive response from Ministers.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Like the hon. Gentleman, I rushed from the main Chamber where we have both been speaking. We are a regular double act. The recommendations of the inquiry under discussion were made by a former Select Committee—the Children, Schools and Families Committee. It was one of our later inquiries and it was very much an eye-opener for all members of the Committee. We made recommendations on improvements to teacher education and asked why we had an artificial divide whereby a schoolteacher could not teach in FE and many people teaching in FE could not teach in schools. It seems a crazy divide.
Mr Jim Hood (in the Chair)
Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman that he is supposed to be making an intervention.
Mr Sheerman
Sorry, Mr Hood. It was a very long intervention. I hope that you will call me to speak again later.
Mr Stuart
I now know—if I did not already—that my predecessor would like to speak in this debate, so his intervention served that purpose. The report’s recommendations, under the hon. Gentleman’s august chairmanship, also stated:
“In the context of the 14–19 reforms, the Department should put in place a mechanism for assessing vocational or professional qualifications as equivalent to degree status.”
It added:
“Over the longer term we recommend that the training of early years teachers, school teachers and further education teachers become harmonised through generic standards.”
That is the request that I am making today—“harmonised through generic standards.”
Those recommendations seem to have been overlooked, with FE lecturers remaining on the sidelines. Despite their obvious expertise in the vocational pathway, we are clearly ignoring the opportunity to utilise their talents in our secondary schools. My Committee is currently conducting an inquiry into behaviour and discipline in schools, and wants to ensure that we have the best possible teachers to engage with young people who perhaps find their academic studies less inspiring. Having the best possible vocational teachers is a great way of getting people re-engaged in learning to the benefit of both academic and vocational skills.
The Skills Commission published a report, “Teaching Training in Vocational Education”, in February 2010, which states:
“If we are to successfully establish and maintain a vocational pathway through 14-19 education and on to higher education, we need professionals with recent and relevant vocational knowledge and skills”
to transfer their expertise to learners. Those are common-sense words, but there is a barrier standing in their way. The report notes that
“the system as it now stands is biased towards academic education and its teachers, and fails to recognise the crucial role that vocational education and its teachers play in 14-19 education… For vocational instructors employed in schools their conditions of service are inferior to those employed as school teachers.”
It adds:
“We cannot continue to perceive vocational education to be second class and inferior to academic education. In turn, we cannot continue to label teachers of vocational education as a ‘semi-profession’… The Commission believes that, in the short-term, greater transferability between the two professional statuses must be achieved in order to realise high quality academic and vocational provision throughout 14-19 education—getting the right skills in the right place of our education system must be a priority for policymakers.”
That is why I am delighted to be participating in this debate. The report continues:
“To realise this, the Commission believes that convergence courses should be developed to facilitate transferability between QTS and QTLS. The principle of this convergence would be central to the Skills Commission’s vision for 14-19 education, and to establishing a high quality route through the 14-19 phase... The two regimes should be replaced by a unified training system and a ‘universal teaching status’.”
So why have neither the recommendations of the former Children, Schools and Families Committee nor those of the Skills Commission been implemented by the Government? It seems that there are a number of possible objections to a unified teacher status. First, teaching young adults is considered a different playing field to teaching 11 to 16-year-olds. Therefore, an individual who is teaching in further education might not have the skills and pedagogical background necessary to teach younger children. That was one of the fears before the increased flexibility pilots were started seven years ago—I am sure that the Minister is familiar with them—when the national curriculum was made more flexible, so that it included a wider variety of settings in which students could study. In practice, FE staff found that teaching groups of 14 and 15-year-olds was not so very different from teaching 16 and 17-year-olds. The skills are fundamentally the same—good lesson planning, varying the pace, involving students and so on.
A second argument is that schoolteachers might have a better grounding in the theory of teaching and pedagogy than FE teachers. Teaching degrees and the PGCE provide a grounding in the theory of teaching and pedagogy, but so does the four-stage approach to the QTLS. FE lecturers are required to gain QTLS status by successfully going through professional formation, which is, according to the Institute for Learning,
“the post-qualification process by which a teacher demonstrates through professional practice the ability to use effectively the skills and knowledge acquired whilst training to be a teacher; and the capacity to meet the occupational standards required of a teacher.”
By contrast, there are strong arguments in favour of a universal teacher status. Academic and vocational education are both important and require equally rigorous teaching. It is simply unreasonable, not to mention unfair, that FE teachers cannot go into the school environment. As I have said, it is crucial that highly skilled and experienced professionals can use that skill wherever it is most needed. The current system of teacher qualification is over-complicated and should be simplified to allow high-quality professionals to teach in both sectors.
My predecessor as Chair of the Select Committee wishes to speak, so I will bring my remarks to an early close. I have made the key points that I wanted to make, and I hope that the Minister will be able to respond positively. We need to ensure that we have a rich curriculum that regards vocational and practical learning as equally important, equally valid and equally useful as academic learning. There should be a system through which we increase academic rigour, while ensuring that the whole work force and every type of learning are treated according to their merits and that every child can access the best possible teaching whatever course they are doing at whatever time.
Mr Jim Hood (in the Chair)
Order. The hon. Gentleman who has secured the Adjournment debate has agreed to the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) saying a few words, as has the Minister, but I ask him to give the Minister adequate time to respond to the debate.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I apologise, Mr Hood. In the communication that I had with the Chairman of the Select Committee on Education, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), there was obviously confusion about which debate we were talking in. We have contributed to the debates here and in the main Chamber, so sorry for the communication difficulty and thank you, Mr Hood, for the opportunity to speak briefly. I am also grateful to the Minister for agreeing to let me contribute. I only want to speak for two minutes.
I care passionately about the matter. If we are to have a system with increasingly diverse post-14 routes—apprenticeships, people staying on in FE, people doing diplomas and more conventional vocational routes and being able to switch across from those—we need a profession that can teach across the piece post-14. I make a plea for the recommendations of the former Children, Schools and Families Committee, of which I was Chair, to be considered. I also co-chair the Skills Commission, so I wear both those hats today. I should put on the record that Baroness Sharp in the other place played a significant role in the recommendations that came out of the Skills Commission. She is a very knowledgeable person in this area. We also had great help from Policy Connect in organising that inquiry.
I am here to support the Chairman of the Select Committee. I hope that the Minister will say that there can be some positive movement on the matter. He knows that we tried to be helpful when we did our inquiry into the training of teachers, and many of the people who have read that report think that it was balanced. The report had cross-party support, and it gives people in the Department the opportunity to consider how the future of the teaching profession can get even better than it is today.
Tim Loughton
I am not aware that a full-blown interim report has been presented to Ministers. I am aware that there have been preliminary discussions between Professor Wolf and Ministers about her initial findings. I do not think that an exact date has been set for publication so far, but when my hon. Friend has the meeting with the Minister with responsibility for schools I am sure he will be able to elaborate further on the exact details.
Mr Sheerman
When Professor Wolf, who used to be on the Skills Commission with us, was appointed by the Secretary of State, was she told that half way through her report, the rug of the EMA was going to be pulled from under her feet, or was she oblivious to that fact?
Tim Loughton
I hear what my hon. Friend has said. Those comments might have been as appropriate in the previous debate in this Chamber, which involved the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, who is a Minister in both my Department and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, but I have heard what he has said and will pass those comments on along with all the comments from hon. Members this afternoon.
I am confident that the decisions that we will take in the light of Professor Wolf’s review will result in a more logical position than we have at present—we all readily acknowledge that—which will continue to improve the quality of the school teaching work force, allow schools to make the best use of teachers with experience and expertise from outside the classroom and is fair to all those who play a role in the education of young people.
May I reiterate my gratitude to my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee for the balanced, measured and informed way in which he put his comments? I undertake to pass on the points that both hon. Members have made and to urge my hon. Friend the Minister with responsibility for schools, in his greatly uncluttered diary, to find time to have a more detailed meeting with them.
Mr Sheerman
I remind the Minister that tens of thousands of young people who are 14 years old are presently being taught—not all week, but two or three days a week—in the FE sector. Studio schools, the first of which has opened in Huddersfield, will also be taking young people working in a work environment from the age of 14. It is a fact that 14-year-olds are being taught by highly qualified staff in the FE sector.
Tim Loughton
The hon. Gentleman can be duly contented that I am suitably reminded of the points that he has made and that I will pass them on to my hon. Friends as well. I thank him for his contribution.
Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Sarah Teather
I absolutely agree. That is why the Government are committed to recruiting so many new health visitors. It is also why we have doubled the family nurse partnership programme, which particularly supports very young families who are vulnerable and has been shown to have a dramatic impact on child development and that bond between parents and child.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the hon. Lady agree that cutting the money provided to Sure Start children’s centres can hardly be a good idea? Is it not a fact that the budget is shrinking, and that the budget for the new health visitors will come out of that for the children’s centres? That means an overall decline in the amount of money.
Sarah Teather
No, that is not true. The early-intervention grant is a substantial, flexible grant that contains more than enough money to maintain the network of Sure Start children’s centres. It is a deliberately flexible grant because we want local authorities to think innovatively about the way in which they link services together. I want them to use the assets that are children’s centres. I want them to make sure, for example, that they are providing family support in children’s centres and perhaps providing services for older children where that is appropriate. The flexible grant, which is larger than that for Sure Start, should allow them to do that.
Schools White Paper
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Mr Speaker
Order. Understandably, there is huge interest in this subject, so brevity from Back-Bench and Front-Bench Members alike is vital if we are to make progress.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the Secretary of State agree that it profits no one to pretend that there is a great divide between political parties when he makes a statement such as this? I congratulate him on taking on board many of the former Select Committee’s recommendations on teaching, standards and much else, but does he not share with previous Labour Front Benchers some guilt that we never addressed the problems that Tomlinson highlighted? Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that he has not addressed them, and that we funked them?
Michael Gove
I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s typically statesmanlike words. I agree that there is significant consensus across the parties on the way forward. When he was chairman of the Select Committee he did a great job of pioneering ideas. It is right to look at Mike Tomlinson’s arguments and to ensure that all children have a properly broad education. Our English baccalaureate will ensure that all children, whatever their background, have access to the best that has been thought and written academically, but we will also ensure that vocational qualifications that blend with the academic are of the highest quality. That is why we commissioned Alison Wolf, and why the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning has done so much with the launch of his skills strategy last week to raise the prestige and esteem of vocational learning.
Funding and Schools Reform
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Andy Burnham
In the 1980s, I had the misfortune to go to a comprehensive school in my hon. Friend’s constituency—a Merseyside comprehensive. It was not a great deal of fun. School sport had dried up and the buildings were appalling. It fills me with dread that my children will go to secondary school under a Tory Government. We on the Opposition Benches will campaign to ensure that another generation is not failed as others were.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I am sure my right hon. Friend will not let this occasion pass without putting right the gross calumny against our Building Schools for the Future policy. It was not a school-building policy; it was a policy to let every local authority in our land have a vision of the transformation of education right across their community. That is what the Government are killing and that is why it is important to oppose them.
Andy Burnham
My hon. Friend is right. It was a new approach and we must give credit to my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (David Miliband), who said when he was a Schools Minister, “Let’s do it differently—let’s not give out capital in a piecemeal fashion.” My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) is nodding because he was in the Department at the time. Our approach was to go to the places where aspirations were lowest and young people did not have a great expectation of what life might give them, and build the best possible learning environment. That is why we should not listen to the nonsense that is spoken from the Government Benches. Building Schools for the Future has transformed many communities. It could have done more if the Government had stuck by its needs-led approach to capital allocation.
The sad thing about the Secretary of State’s negotiating failure is that it has direct and unpleasant consequences for schools and councils. Within hours of the Chancellor’s sitting down, there were panicked phone calls asking for 40% cuts to projects that only weeks before had been approved by the Secretary of State as unaffected. Why? Because what was left of his capital budget was needed to push towards his pet projects—or as we should now more accurately say, his pet shop projects. The losers, yet again, are schools in some of the most deprived parts of the country: Sandwell, Birmingham, Salford, Leicester and Nottingham.
Andy Burnham
Listening to the responsible Minister on Monday at Education questions, one would have come to the conclusion that he had no appreciation at all of the effect the EMA could have on a young person’s life in those circumstances. I said that the Government should listen to students. I hope that they will, and that they will meet some young people who currently benefit from the EMA such as the person about whom my hon. Friend just spoke. The EMA is a lifeline. For young carers, who have been in the news this week, it represents the hope of a better future, and I hope that the Government will not wipe away their hopes and dreams.
Mr Sheerman
One of the big consultancies—I believe it was PricewaterhouseCoopers—conducted a full evaluation of the relationship between the EMA and improvements in rates of staying on and entering university, and in evidence given earlier this year to the Children, Schools and Families Committee, which I chaired, made it clear that that relationship was very positive.
Andy Burnham
I hope that the Government will take account of my hon. Friend’s point because there is good evidence to show that the policy has been a success and is helping many more young people stay on in education and achieve.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I support the Opposition motion. The Secretary of State evaded interventions from me and from several others on the Labour Benches after he said that we were “angry” that the coalition Government were introducing a pupil premium. May I inform him that the Labour Government had a pupil premium? I do not know if it was as well worked through as it should have been; it was an early policy introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) that was absorbed and no longer ring-fenced when Charles Clarke became Secretary of State. There was a pupil premium, but I would challenge the Secretary of State. He knows that the Opposition want more resources to follow people from deprived backgrounds. If he is honest with the House and in his intellectual engagement with the debate, he also knows that the most difficult thing is to find a method of ensuring that the money tracks the right people.
The Secretary of State will find it difficult, as we did with Sure Start children’s centres. We started, as he knows, with 500 in the 500 most deprived communities, but we then discovered that that left out most of the deprived children in our country so we moved the number up to 3,500. One of my concerns—and a concern of Members on both sides of the House when they talk frankly in private—is that we might see a drastic cut in the number of children’s centres, based on the idea of going back to the original intention of having 500, which would exclude most children from deprived backgrounds. That has a parallel in the pupil premium. The Opposition are arguing that the way in which the Government propose to introduce the premium means that it will fail to reach the children who are most deprived, because it is not well crafted. We understand that it is difficult for any Government to ensure that such methods work.
The one thing in the Opposition motion that I found difficult to swallow was the mention of ideology. I honestly fail to see what the Government’s ideology is. I do not see a consistent theme running through their education policy. There are bits and bobs of ideas, some of them refreshing and interesting, but when it comes to others I, and other people who have been in education for a long time, do not understand where they are coming from or where they are leading us.
As Chair of the Select Committee for nearly 10 years, I found it refreshing when a Minister came before the Committee and said that the reason for introducing a policy was that it was evidence-based. One of the most refreshing things about Tony Blair in his 1995 conference speech, in his Ruskin speech in 1996 and when he put that speech into operation in 1997, was that he was both pragmatic and open to evidence-based policy. We saw that across a raft of policies, but when the Committee looked at how policies evolved, we found that when Ministers left the evidence base they got into trouble.
The present Government seem to be basing their whole education policy on something called the big society. Many people have talked to me about what the big society means. It is very difficult to find out. What is the big society? Is it localism? It is a funny sort of localism that jumps over and disregards locally elected education authorities. That is a very different kind of localism.
How do we know that people who want free schools represent the community? We have already heard evidence that there have been some strange bids. I am not sure that the answers we heard today about faith schools were entirely convincing.
Graham Evans
Before the general election, Labour Members supported co-operative schools. Can the hon. Gentleman tell me the difference between the co-operative schools project and the Government’s free schools project?
Mr Sheerman
I was, and am, a great supporter of co-operative partnership in academies. I was a great supporter of academies, but I understood exactly what the argument for academies was under the previous Government. Under Tony Blair, it was to take first 200, and then a further 400, schools where everything else had been tried; they were usually in areas of great deprivation and everything that had been done to try to raise standards had failed. We introduced academies where we thought it was worth trying something because nothing else had worked, but now the academy model has been inverted. It is no longer about where schools are failing and real help is necessary for kids, who get only one chance for education—where we need to act quickly because we cannot wait for a laggardly local authority to get its act together. We now have a system in which any school can become an academy, and I am not sure what its theme, goal or arrival point is.
The big society does not seem to be a substitute for evidence-based policy, or to involve a clear notion of where we are going with education policy. I shall illustrate that with just one point. My concerns are not only about Sure Start and early years, but also about the fact that there is now seemingly an end to the choice that was opening up. There was real choice in our schools—the apprentice route, the skills route through the diploma, or the academic route. That opening up, with the possibility to cross over, was very refreshing, but it seems to have been killed by the new Government.
Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Michael Gove
My hon. Friend makes a great point in his characteristically forceful and eloquent way. The Government are looking at how we can ensure that the whole process of school improvement is made less bureaucratic.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the Secretary of State agree that head teachers and school governors, as well as teachers, found Teachers TV very liberating in terms of knowledge, improving school administration and teaching? Will he think again about winding up Teachers TV?
Michael Gove
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and I know how committed he is to improving continuous professional development. Our White Paper will say more about how we can do that. Teachers TV will—I think—operate in future on a commercial basis. That is one of the many ways in which outside organisations can attempt to improve education. In that respect, we will allow teachers, governors and heads to make decisions about the type of external support that they buy in to help them to improve the valuable work that they do.