Education and Adoption Bill

Chris Evans Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker. I congratulate you on your re-election as Chairman of Ways and Means. It is a pleasure to follow the new hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond). I was also pleased to hear from the hon. Member for Telford (Lucy Allan), whose predecessor was and is a great friend of mine and was well liked throughout the House. He is sadly missed.

I support the amendment, because I believe that the Bill could have been much more ambitious than it is. It fails to provide a clear definition of a coasting school. A number of Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), have expressed concern about coasting schools. I am struck by the fact that the Secretary of State has come to the House and—as she has done on five previous occasions—failed to provide a definition. I do not think it right for us to have to wait until the Committee stage of a Bill that includes the term for the Government to define it. What does the amorphous word “coasting” mean? Is it based on exam results, progress measures or Ofsted ratings? What defines a coasting school? We still do not know. That strikes me as a worrying feature of the Bill.

The Bill is important, and there are parts of it that I commend, but I believe that it has not gone far enough. We need to be much more ambitious and bold when we talk about education in this country. There is a massive difference between the levels of attainment of those who are receiving free school meals and their more affluent peers, but the Bill does not address it.

In 2009, the Centre for Development and Enterprise, a South African organisation, published a report entitled “International Best Practice in Schooling Reform”. It was based on workshops that had taken place in Washington D.C. Global education experts examined more than 100 school systems across the world to establish what worked in improving education and what did not. The report concluded that giving schools more autonomy was an “ineffective reform”. In fact, it argued that

“time required by school leaders to manage and run autonomous schools takes time away from supporting teachers and supervising the system”,

to the detriment of education outcomes.

It is not a question of more funding, which evidence shows does not work past a certain level. The Bill talks of converting failing or coasting schools to academies, but it should be about meaningful reform and the following of best practice all over the world. Unfortunately, it is sadly wanting in that regard.

I believe that there are five things that we must get right if we are to ensure that our education system improves. First, there must be a new appreciation that the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. There is no more important lever for the improvement of student outcomes than teacher quality. The world’s top-performing systems recruit talented people and train them intensively. Teaching must be considered a prestigious profession and teachers must have all the support that they deserve. They should have competitive starting salaries and adequate remuneration for excellence, which can be affordable if the remuneration curve remains shallower than it is in other professions. Those who do not meet strict criteria, however, must be forced to leave teaching, or asked not to join in the first place. We should reward and support good teachers and make it significantly easier to get rid of bad ones.

Secondly, reforms must focus on improving teaching skills and changing classroom practice. According to the report from the Centre for Development and Enterprise, if teachers are given effective support and in-service training, student performance can be significantly improved within three to six years. Continuous professional development applies to other professions, so why can it not apply to teaching? Problems arise when teachers come straight out of university, do not interact with their peers and have no examples of excellence. The best systems in the world—those in Belgium, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, the Netherlands and New Zealand—improve teachers’ skills by bringing professionalism, mentoring and apprenticeships back to teaching. They have comprehensive feedback systems which enable teachers to learn from their mistakes and improve in problem areas.

In 2007, Eric Hanushek of Stanford University found that the only way to increase the economic output of school leavers was for students to learn effectively and to be taught well. We can achieve that only by supporting our teachers, and ensuring that teaching is a highly skilled, attractive career option that supports and constantly seeks to improve the people in it.

Thirdly, there is leadership. The best education systems recruit and train excellent head teachers—people with intrinsic leadership skills. I would wager that the best-performing academies are those with the best head teachers. Even in my south Wales constituency, where we have no academies, the best schools that I visit usually have the best head teachers. These people should be supported to become effective leaders, and not just effective educators. We must get this right, because without effective leadership the reforms will never be embedded.

To improve education we must look at not just the people, but the environment in which children learn, and that brings me to my fourth point. The Royal Institute of British Architects report “Building a Better Britain” makes the case that good school design could have a direct impact on reducing maintenance costs and improving student wellbeing and attainment. For example, its evidence suggests that ensuring that corridors are designed so that they are not too narrow can significantly reduce bullying. Good design of schools delivers value not just now, but in the future.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, high performance requires that every child succeeds—not just the select few in the schools chosen, but every child, everywhere. From Land’s End to John o’Groats, from Treginnis to Lowestoft, all students need to be well educated and must be given the teaching they need to fulfil their ambitions. We need standards and measures of success relevant to the needs of our country. We need effective mechanisms to help schools to achieve those standards. Pressure without support does not yield better performance. We need to make sure that targets are being met. We need to identify the obstacles to success and put in place strategies to overcome them.

To reduce wide disparities in education and in the country at large we must overcome huge challenges. We must reverse decades of socio-economic problems keeping those in poorer areas from achieving their potential. The harsh reality is that the circumstances of someone’s birth are often to their greatest detriment in terms of how well they will do at school or how well they will do in life. We can help to overcome that. We can change the sad fact that being born poor means someone is likely to stay poor, but we can do so only with great teachers, with great schools and if we make the right choices and follow the evidence. The Government had a real opportunity in this Bill to set out an ambitious plan for Britain, but, unfortunately, they have been found wanting.