Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Bob Russell and Nick Gibb

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

Schools play an important part in identifying young carers and offering them appropriate support. To assist them in that endeavour, the Department has been working with the Children’s Society and the Carers Trust to share tools and good practice with schools, including a free access e-learning module for school staff. The Department of Health is also training school nurses to support young carers at school.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Is it still the case that, for the purpose of drawing up school league tables, a pupil in hospital receiving treatment for cancer would be marked as absent?

[Mr Gibb]

Schools use various codes to report absences. In the case of any illness, chronic or otherwise, there is a specific code. Schools are not judged on the absence levels of pupils who are suffering chronic or other illnesses.

History Teaching

Debate between Bob Russell and Nick Gibb

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gibb]

There are all kinds of reasons why the decline has happened. It could be, for example, because of the move to a more skills-based approach. History might be regarded as a tougher subject in which to achieve the grades that a school feels that it needs to achieve to maintain or increase its position in the school league tables. We have had a concern for a number of years about the move to what are called softer subjects in order to boost league table positions, and history could well have been a victim of that process.

The new national curriculum will be based on a body of essential knowledge that children should be expected to acquire in key subjects during the course of their school career. It will embody for all children their cultural and scientific inheritance, and it will enhance their understanding of the world around them and expose them to the best that has been thought and written. We are engaging with a wide range of academics, teachers and other interested parties to ensure that the new national curriculum compares favourably with those of the highest performing countries in the world.

[Sir Bob Russell]

As yet there has been no reference to the importance of local history being taught in our schools. How will that fit in, when schools are clearly being directed towards history that fits the exams?

[Mr Gibb]

Those are precisely the issues for consideration by the national curriculum review.

I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood would like history to be compulsory to 16, which is one of the things that the national curriculum review will consider. As I said at the outset, it is clear that some subjects, such as history, which all pupils should have a good grasp of, have been less popular choices at GCSE. The Government therefore want to encourage more children to take up history beyond the age of 14, particularly among disadvantaged pupils and certain ethnic groups. That is why we introduced the English baccalaureate, which will recognise the work of pupils who achieve an A* to C in maths, English, two sciences, a language and either history or geography, to encourage more widespread take-up of those core subjects, which provide a sound basis for academic progress.

The English baccalaureate has already had a significant impact on the take-up of history: according to a NatCen survey of nearly 700 schools, 39% of pupils sitting GCSEs in 2013 in the schools responding will be taking history GCSE, up eight percentage points and back to the 1995 level of history uptake. There are clear benefits to pupils in taking the subjects combined in the E-bac. Pupils who have achieved that combination of subjects have proved more likely to progress to A-level than those with similar attainment in different subjects in the past. They have also attempted a greater number of A-levels and achieved better results. We are also committed to restoring confidence in GCSEs as rigorous and valued qualifications. We will reform GCSEs to ensure that they are more keenly focused on essential knowledge in those key subjects, and with exams at the end of the course to support good teaching and in-depth study.

To refer to the questions of the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), what we want to achieve from the national curriculum review is a curriculum that is so good that the academies will want to adopt it, albeit not being compulsory. The national curriculum also does feed in to statutory testing, in maths and English at the end of key stage 2 and the GCSE specifications.

Academies Bill [Lords]

Debate between Bob Russell and Nick Gibb

Monday 26th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

We have had an interesting week of debates on the Bill, and I thank all hon. Members who took part, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) and for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe), who made their maiden speeches during these debates. I should also like to thank the Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather), for her help, and the right hon. and hon. Members on the Opposition Front Bench for their careful and thorough scrutiny of the Bill.

I thank officials in the Department for the long hours that they have spent on the Bill during its passage through the other place and this House, and for their support of my right hon. and hon. Friends. We should also thank the Chairs of the Committee: Mr Evans, Mr Caton, you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and Ms Primarolo, whom my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Mr Hancock) lovingly referred to as “Miss P”. I am grateful to my noble Friend Lord Hill, who skilfully steered the Bill through the other place just days after being appointed a Minister, and to my hon. Friends and noble Friends who have improved the Bill and the model funding agreement in both the other place and this House.

Throughout the process we have been keen to listen to concerns, particularly, though not exclusively, those of our partners in the Liberal Democrat part of the coalition. Amendments in the other place have given children with special educational needs greater rights to admission to academies than existed in previous academies legislation, and new requirements for funding for low-incidence special needs have been added. New duties to consult have been included in clauses 5 and 10, and the Secretary of State will now be obliged by statute to take into account the impact on other schools of any new school established under the Bill. That is now in clause 9.

My noble Friends have added greater parliamentary accountability through an annual report to Parliament, which will also enable us to analyse issues of concern to my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson), such as the viability of primary schools that opt for academy status. He made a compelling case for increasing the number of parent governors, so as I mentioned earlier, the model funding agreement will be changed to increase the number from one to two. Opposition Members have successfully ensured that the funding agreement includes a requirement for looked-after children to have a designated member of staff.

[Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Will the two parent governors be elected by other parents or appointed?

[Mr Gibb]

My understanding is that they will be elected, but if I am proved wrong I will write to my hon. Friend.

After 22 hours in Committee and nine hours on Report in the other place between 7 June and 13 July, and after 19 and a half hours of Second Reading and Committee in this House, not including this afternoon and evening, we finally reach Third Reading of a Bill that, in the words of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State,

“grants greater autonomy to individual schools…gives more freedom to teachers and…injects a new level of dynamism into a programme that has been proven to raise standards for all children and for the disadvantaged most of all.”—[Official Report, 19 July 2010; Vol. 514, c. 24.]

I shall start by saying what the Bill is not about. It is not about a “full-scale assault” on comprehensive education—a ludicrous claim by the shadow Secretary of State in The Guardian on Saturday. We believe in comprehensive education and are committed to it, and the Bill will strengthen it. Nor is it about scrapping the admissions code, another spurious claim about the Government’s education policies by the shadow Secretary of State. We are committed to fair admissions through the code, and all academies will be bound by it through the model funding agreement.

Nor is this Bill about the creation of a two-tier education system. Two tiers are what we have today—the best performing state schools and the worst. The independent sector, which educates just 8% of children, is responsible for 44% of all A* grades in GCSE French. It educates just 10% of 16-18 year olds, but is responsible for 35% of all A grades in A-level physics.

The Bill offers all schools the opportunity to acquire the kind of professional freedoms that have proved so successful not only in the independent sector, but in the city technology colleges and in academies. After 20 years of independence, CTCs are among the most successful schools in the country. On average, in those schools, 82% achieve five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and maths. In those academies that have been open long enough to have had GCSE results in 2008 and 2009, a third have GCSE results that improved by 15 percentage points compared with their predecessor schools.

There have been 1,958 expressions of interest from schools in all parts of the country. Of those 1,071 are from schools graded outstanding by Ofsted. Many of the heads and governing bodies of those schools are hungry for the freedoms in the academies legislation that the previous Administration introduced. They are in a hurry to have them by September and, for those schools that are ready and able, so are we.

We are in a hurry because we do not think that it is right that 40% of 11-year-olds leave primary school still struggling with reading, writing and maths. It is not acceptable that nearly three quarters of pupils eligible for free school meals fail to get five or more GCSEs or equivalents at grades A* to C, including English and maths, or that 42% of those eligible for free school meals fail to achieve a single GCSE above grade D.

I know that there are some concerns among hon. Members of all parties about the future role of local authorities if all schools become academies. However, I should point out that there are 203 academies out of 3,300 secondary schools and some 17,000 primary schools. It will be many years, if at all, before all those schools acquire academy status. The Bill is permissive, not prescriptive or mandatory. We see a new and stronger role for local authorities emerging over the years as champions of parents and pupils, challenging rather than defending underperforming schools. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has established a ministerial advisory group to take that forward and written to all education authorities seeking views.

The Bill is the first step in the coalition’s ambitious plans to raise standards in all our schools. We want parents not to have to worry about the quality of education that their children will receive at their local school. We want behaviour in all schools to be as good as in the best. That is why we are clarifying and strengthening teachers’ powers and abolishing the statutory requirement for 24 hours’ notice for detentions. We want a teaching profession with renewed morale and confidence, no longer struggling under the yoke of monthly Government initiatives and ever-demanding bureaucratic requirements.

The Bill is about trusting the professionalism of teachers and head teachers. It is about innovation and excellence, about giving parents a genuine choice and children the opportunity for a better future. It is a short Bill, but its impact will be long lasting. I commend it to the House.