Term-time Holidays

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right. This is about social justice. When parents with income take their children out of school to go to Florida, that sends a message to everyone that school attendance is not important. There is no circumstance in which a trip to Disney World can be regarded as educational.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am very fond of the Minister and have always thought that he has a touch of the Dickens novel about him. Is it not a very serious and fundamental problem that we still squeeze the summer holidays into a six-week period, during which British Airways charges the earth to go anywhere and Center Parcs trebles its rates? We need to tackle that very serious problem, for everyone’s benefit. I have constituents who face great pressure from the Muslim community, especially from Pakistan, to take their children out, and they are the very children who have been suffering. I am on the side of being tough, but let us look at the issue in a more fundamental way.

[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Gentleman, for whom I have huge admiration for his work as the former chair of the Education Committee, is right. We need to look at these issues in a more fundamental way. That is why we have given academies the freedom to set their term dates. I say to the hon. Gentleman and, indeed, to my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) that they should be helping to co-ordinate schools so that they set different term dates that help their own tourism industries.

“Educational Excellence Everywhere”: Academies

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank my hon. Friend for the conversations that we have had. I know that he is absolutely committed to high educational standards. He is extremely fortunate to represent a very high-performing local authority. He and I both want all children in the country to have the same opportunities as children in his constituency.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Secretary of State might know that in the early days of the idea of academies, I was of some help to the then Government in refining their method, and it was a good method: where schools were failing, we used academies to make sure that we ended that quickly. The method that the Secretary of State is extolling is a perversion of the academy model that we introduced. I say in sorrow rather than anger that the model of education that she is giving this country is doomed to fail.

[Nicky Morgan]

This model of education is giving 1.4 million more children the opportunity to be in a good or outstanding school. We want to go further.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[George Freeman]

I would be delighted to work with my hon. Friend and with other Ministers in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Work and Pensions, and I commend him for his leadership on this excellent initiative.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

When will the Government follow the example of Leicester City football club and try to get into the premiership on this question? There are so many talented people on the autism spectrum desperate and waiting for a job, many of them in regions such as Yorkshire, yet we are faced with uncertainty for everyone—apprentices, people with autism—because of this great cloud that is the possibility of our leaving the EU. No one is investing or hiring.

[George Freeman]

Even for me, it would be a stretch to delve into the EU on this question. The Government are investing £100 million a year in the Access to Work scheme, helping 36,000 people with disabilities into work, so we are absolutely committed to this agenda. People with autism have a lot to offer in the workplace, and we are serious about giving them opportunities.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

Ministers regularly travel overseas and meet other Education Ministers to discuss our reforms and any reforms that they are introducing. In 2014 we introduced an ambitious national curriculum to match the best education systems around the world. We are reforming GCSEs, A-levels and primary school assessment to represent a new gold standard, and, as my hon. Friend said, to enable students to compete with their peers in the world’s best schools systems.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I hope that the Secretary of State gets this right, as we have made a lot of mistakes in the past by comparing our system of education with those of countries that are very unlike ours, such as Finland and parts of China. The fact is that the results from the programme for international student assessment can be very misleading, so will she be very careful about which systems she compares ours with as the best?

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am told by the House of Commons Library that I have been in the House for 41 Budget debates. I have not spoken in all of them, but I have a lot of experience of Budgets and Budget debates. They are always such high octane occasions: the Budget comes out and then there is usually a fundamental disagreement across the Benches. I have always believed, however, that we never really know what a Budget contains, or how it has been received, until we at least get to the Sunday papers. Let us wait for the Sundays to see how it is going down, and wait even longer to see how it will affect the people we represent.

In the run-up to the Budget, one of the most interesting speeches I heard was from someone who is a very classy journalist, Andrew Neil. Many people think, well he is humorous and he has “The Politics Show” and so on, but he used to be the editor of The Sunday Times. He has a sharp intellect. I heard him speak to the Engineering Employers’ Federation only two or three weeks ago. His analysis was chilling: the world economy, as the Chancellor himself said, is in a febrile and delicate state. If we look at what is happening with Putin in Russia, what has happened in the middle east and the lack of leadership in the United States, with the possibility of a President Trump, it is an unstable and worrying world. He said that if people think the UK leaving the EU would be just a little local ripple, they should think again. It could well lead to a breakdown in the world economy. I believe that that analysis is correct.

I get on quite well with the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) on a personal level. I do not know what people do in North Somerset, but I represent a university town. We in this country receive more research income from Europe than any other country per capita. The other day we could not find anyone in the higher education world to speak in favour of Brexit. Not only do we have all that research money and research partnerships, we have, because of the English language, the tremendous stimulus of many European students coming to this country. I do not want to detain the House on this point, but I believe we are successful, will be successful and have to be successful in Europe. We have been successful in Europe. We have been weathering the storm, but that is largely because of our own efforts within Europe.

I would like to say, very briefly, something about what was not in the Budget. I know that that is permissible under the rules. The missing element is health. Dr Mark Porter, chair of the British Medical Association Council, said earlier this week that George Osborne should use Wednesday’s Budget to stop the NHS heading to “financial ruin”. He said there is a

“complete mismatch between the Government’s promise of extra funding and the reality on the ground…If the Chancellor squanders this chance the NHS will continue to slide further into financial ruin.”

We are told that the NHS is ring-fenced. The truth is that one third of hospital trusts across the country are in deadly distress and trouble. My local hospital serves the big university town of Huddersfield and one of the biggest urban areas in the country, Kirklees. Unless we win the fight, we are likely, very shortly, to not only lose accident and emergency for the whole of Kirklees—Dewsbury, Huddersfield, Holmfirth; it is a very big area—but not have a major, proper hospital.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

My hon. Friend says there was nothing in the Budget about health, but there was a stealth tax on the NHS. It was the announcement that employers’ contributions to pensions, including in the NHS, will increase. That will be another burden on the budgets of his local health trusts and mine.

[Mr Sheerman]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point and I absolutely agree with him. I spoke to the chief executive of my local trust the other day—I would like the right hon. Member for North Somerset to listen to this—and he said that if it was not for the Spanish nurses we have been able to recruit from Spain, we could not provide a service in the hospital.

[Dr Fox]

I regard that as an entirely irrelevant argument. We would be able to employ whoever we wanted outside the European Union. The difference is that we would be making that choice, rather than having the numbers imposed on us by free movement.

[Mr Sheerman]

Moving on—the House would expect me, after 10 years as Chair of the Education Committee, to say something about education today. I am very concerned about the proposal for the academisation of all our schools. I spent a lot of time with the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, talking about academies. The previous Labour Government created academies because none of us in this House should put up with the underachievement of young people. If we know that there are towns, cities and coastal communities where kids are not getting the opportunity to find that spark to realise their potential and get good qualifications, and, through those qualifications, gain entry into a good life, we should all be ashamed of ourselves—on all Benches in this House. That is the fact of the matter.

Too often, however, Governments look for a holy grail or silver bullet to produce good standards across the country in a hurry. I do not believe that such a holy grail or silver bullet exists. My experience as an amateur historian looking at the history of education policy leads me to believe something quite revolutionary: we do better on education policy when we co-operate across these Benches, rather than when we are ideological and fight over education policy. Forced academisation and the finishing of local education authorities as a real power in the land are deeply damaging to the future of education, deeply damaging to local government and deeply damaging to our local democracy.

The Government say they are in favour of giving power to the people. If we keep taking resources and functions away from local government, what will be the point of local government? Local government must have local roots. The right hon. Member for North Somerset said the same thing just now, in relation to his opposition to the big elected mayors. I have an open mind on that, but if we take away functions from local authorities, we have no trust in them. Good local authorities have been brilliant at education. They have produced some of the greatest educators and experts on education that this country has ever known. If we get rid of that wonderful core of people and cease to have them coming into the system, we will do great damage to the future of education. Many of those people have been very fine chief inspectors, including two of the recent ones. We need to fight for a real, accountable education system. There was even a high degree of co-operation and agreement across the House on the need for comprehensive education. Indeed, Mrs Thatcher, as Secretary of State for Education, made more schools comprehensive than any other Secretary of State.

The way things are going under this Government, we will have a top-down, tiny Education Department in London with 20,000 schools and just the inspectorate. Time and time again, we will have crises in our schools, as we had in Birmingham. We will then have to have a firefighting exercise. We will have to find a former chief inspector of schools to sort it out. I believe the Budget should not have been about education. That is the job of the Secretary of State for Education. It is not up to the Chancellor to make these decisions; these decisions should have been made independently. If we make a highly ideological divide between those people in favour of academies and those against them, it will damage not only our education system but our young people who deserve the very finest education for their lives.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend speaks with experience: he is a distinguished former pension fund manager—a very important service that the UK industry provides. He is right that the EU’s financial services passport means that financial services firms authorised in the UK can provide their services across the EU, without the need for further authorisations. That is, of course, a significant benefit that they receive. Services represent almost 80% of our economy, and access to the world’s largest single market helps them to create thousands of British jobs.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Secretary of State must know that however good the growth in services exported from this country is—and we all applaud it—it must go hand in hand with an increase in manufacturing. Is he not worried that Syngenta—one of our leading agritech companies—will be taken over by ChemChina, backed by the Chinese Government? What will that do for our competitiveness and our supply chains? Why will he not meet a cross-party group of MPs that has begged to meet him?

[Sajid Javid]

Of course the hon. Gentleman is right about the importance of manufacturing in our economy, which is why it has increased in terms of output, employment and value since 2010. The company he mentions, Syngenta, has itself said that there should be no change in its footprint in terms of employment—in fact, we expect that to increase. Also, when it comes to foreign investment in British industry, I see that as a vote of confidence. Since companies such as Jaguar Land Rover have received foreign investment, employment has gone up threefold, and that is great for British manufacturing.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

That is precisely what is happening. The local enterprise partnerships are working closely with the careers and enterprise companies because we want to ensure that there is a connection between employers and schools so that a generation of young people inspired by technology can get to know what jobs are available in the technology sector, where, incidentally, earnings are on average 19% higher than for those not working in that sector.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the Minister agree that no Prime Minister was more passionate about science, technology and mathematics and their power to liberate individuals’ potential than Harold Wilson? Does he further agree that Harold Wilson set up the Open University and all those polytechnics that became our new universities in order to help in that process of changing our culture? Can we not now liberate the universities to do more in partnership with schools to get this culture change that Harold Wilson worked so hard to achieve?

[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Gentleman seemed to get a bigger cheer for mentioning Harold Wilson than he would have done if he had mentioned the current leader of the Labour party. I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, however, about the importance of inspiring young people. University technical colleges have been established to do precisely that, and we have seen a huge increase in the number of young people taking STEM A-levels, with the number taking maths A-level going up by 18% so that some 82,000 young people are now taking it. It has become the single most popular A-level choice, while both physics and chemistry A-level entries have increased by 15%.

Education and Adoption Bill

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nic Dakin]

I think everybody recognises the very good work that Sir Michael Wilshaw has done, but he lays down a challenge to us all when it comes to connecting what we want to do in a way that empowers local communities. In a sense, that is one of the things missing from this Bill.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

To follow that up with another quick intervention, does my hon. Friend agree that too few MPs get involved in school improvement in the local area? Many MPs of all parties talk about schools as though they were experts, but they do not roll up their sleeves and do what our hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) is doing—actually trying to make a difference on the ground.

[Nic Dakin]

I always listen carefully to what the former Chair of the Education Committee has to say, and he is right on this occasion. We all have a leadership role in our communities when it comes to supporting our schools and colleges and ensuring that they deliver.

This is the second occasion on which AET and E-ACT—the two largest multi-academy trusts in the country, responsible between them for 85 schools—have received significant criticism from the Independent Schools Inspectorate. That is telling. The Secretary of State is ultimately responsible for holding academies to account, but, two years after Ofsted’s warning that the trusts were failing to raise standards, we are again being told that their schools are not delivering for many pupils. I am sure we all agree that that is not good enough, and that it illustrates the size of the challenge.

Parents have a fundamental wish to be involved in their children’s education. A recent survey by PTA-UK found that 97% of parents wanted to be consulted when big changes were made to how their schools were run. When a school becomes a sponsored academy and the sponsor is chosen, that represents a big change and a big deal. Parents have an important role to play in challenging—and helping—school communities to improve, and their views should be taken into account at such important moments.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

The east midlands have also been accommodated, as colleagues will have noticed.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

12. What steps he is taking to support start-up manufacturing businesses.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Life Sciences (George Freeman)]

As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has made clear, the Government continue to turn around the historic decline in manufacturing that took place under the last Labour Government. In the autumn statement and in the speech that my right hon. Friend is making today, we are setting out our commitment to manufacturing. There will be £300 million for the high- value manufacturing catapult centre—[Interruption.] Perhaps Labour Members would listen. That £300 million programme will benefit the seven catapult centres in the United Kingdom.

We have doubled capital allowances for manufacturing companies, and we have put £1 billion into the aerospace and automotive industries at the Advanced Propulsion Centre, which includes a range of measures for small businesses. That is probably why the all-party parliamentary manufacturing group, which is chaired by the hon. and distinguished Gentleman, has said:

“British manufacturing is currently enjoying a resurgence, together with a reinvigorated interest in industrial policy.”

[Mr Sheerman]

That report was published before the last Budget. In fact, the manufacturing sector is astonished at the way in which this Secretary of State has waved the white flag at the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He has sneaked out the abolition of the Business Growth Service, sneaked out the abolition of the Manufacturing Advisory Service, and sneaked out the end of the GrowthAccelerator programme. Where is the industrial policy of this country, and what happened to the march of the makers?

[George Freeman]

I can tell the hon. Gentleman that the march of the makers is working. That is why we are leading the fastest-growing economy in Europe; it is why, interestingly, unemployment in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency is down by 60% and youth unemployment is down by 10%; it is why we continue to finance small businesses, which have received £2.5 billion through the British Business Bank and £35,000 in loans; and it is why we have doubled small business rate relief. From now on, 405,000 businesses will pay no rates at all. It is for those reasons that our economy is growing fastest—and that comes after 13 years during which manufacturing, under a Labour Government, fell to an historic low.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

I am very happy to join my hon. Friend in congratulating Mrs Flannery, the headteacher of Eatock Primary School. In fact, I recently wrote to her to congratulate her and her staff on their exemplary key stage 2 results, as 100% of the pupils are making at least expected progress in reading, writing and maths.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I bring the Minister down to earth? He trumpets the successes of this Government’s education policy, but the fact is that every time the chief inspector speaks he says that the Government are failing to deliver the best possible education for our children up and down the country?

[Mr Gibb]

I do not recognise the statements from Sir Michael Wilshaw that the hon. Gentleman is citing. As a former Chair of the Education Committee, he should know better. We are determined to see excellence in every part of the country. Where there are patches where schools are not performing, whether in rural or coastal areas, we are taking action swiftly, and certainly more swiftly than the Government he supported before 2010.