Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Chris Skidmore and David Laws

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

We have delayed the increase until September 2015 to give schools and head teachers time to plan; protected the schools budget in real terms in 2015-16; and—I know that my right hon. Friend will welcome this—allocated an extra £390 million to raise school funding in the most underfunded parts of the country. All those measures mean that the increase in pension costs is affordable.

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

5. What assessment she has made of the adequacy of the provision of primary school places in a) Kingswood constituency and b) England.

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

Some 260,000 additional school places were created between May 2010 and May 2013, and we are on track to meet the extra pressures for places across the country.

[Chris Skidmore]

Since May 2010 a new 420-place primary school has been approved in Kingswood, to open in September 2015, as well as another 420 primary school places in other schools. This week, a new £5.4 million primary school has been approved for Emersons Green East. Can the Minister estimate the total amount of extra funding and investment that has gone into the Kingswood constituency for primary school places in the past four years?

[Mr Laws]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I congratulate him on his work to help us ensure additional places in his constituency. I confirm that under the previous Labour Government, £17 million was made available in his local authority area for basic need, and that has risen to £23 million in this Parliament. We have allocated another £9 million over the next two years, meaning that £32 million extra has been made available by this coalition Government for school places in my hon. Friend’s area.

School Funding

Debate between Chris Skidmore and David Laws

Thursday 13th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

Labour Members are making a lot of noise, which reflects their embarrassment at the fact that this was a problem for years under a Labour Government and they did nothing about it. I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman does not like to hear good news, but I can give him some more good news for Suffolk, whose funding will go up by more than £9 million, from £4,241 a pupil to £4,347. [Interruption.] I am sorry that Labour Members cannot take this in a measured way or accept that we are doing the right thing to deliver fair funding.

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

Under the current funding regime inherited from Labour, South Gloucestershire is the second-lowest-funded local authority in the country. I have long campaigned for there to be no difference in funding when it comes to areas of deprivation in Kingswood and in neighbouring Bristol, which—this is desperately unfair—gets £750 more per pupil. May I welcome the massive increase in funding for south Gloucestershire pupils and ask the Minister, on behalf of my constituents, what that will mean for pupils in Kingswood?

[Mr Laws]

I am happy to confirm the figure that I mentioned a moment ago to another Gloucestershire MP, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper). South Gloucestershire, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) correctly indicates, is one of the areas that have been underfunded for a long time. Under the proposals on which we are consulting, its funding will go up from the current £3,969 per pupil to an indicative figure of £4,217. That 6.3% increase is significant and I know that parents in my hon. Friend’s constituency will welcome it, even if the Labour party does not.

Secondary Schools (Accountability)

Debate between Chris Skidmore and David Laws

Monday 14th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s welcome for these announcements, but I fear that on the issue of first aid, I will be unable to give him a different answer from the one given on previous occasions by the Secretary of State. On my hon. Friend’s wider point, it is important for all serious, high-value vocational qualifications to be accessible through this route. He will know that we have taken a close look at the whole suite of vocational qualifications to make sure that there are serious equivalents because of some of the problems that arose under the last Government. If he is concerned about particular qualifications, he should write to me and I will respond in detail.

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I am honoured to be mentioned by my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). I absolutely welcome the progress measure, but on its detail, will the key stage floor target be taken at the end of year 6 or the beginning of year 7, given the overwhelming evidence and research showing that achievement at key stage 2 drops over the summer before they arrive at secondary school?

[Mr Laws]

My hon. Friend raises a very good point. We will use the end of key stage 2 data. As an expert on these matters, he may want to probe annexe B of our consultation response, which sets out in some detail how this aspect will work. We will also make sure that proper credibility pertains to all the key stage 2 data. Because it will be used to measure secondary schools’ achievement, it is even more important than it is now for this data to be fully credible and properly stress-tested.

Pupil Premium

Debate between Chris Skidmore and David Laws

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

It was a pleasure to visit my hon. Friend’s constituency and he was quite right when he wrote to me to highlight the fantastic achievements of this school, which sits in a disadvantaged community and could easily be languishing and struggling, but actually sets incredibly high aspirations, showing that it is possible for schools to deliver. The Government have recently started to publish tables of similar schools, where we look at schools with a similar composition of pupils and look at their performance against other similar schools. That process should encourage schools across the country that are not performing well to look at other schools with a similar intake that are doing a lot better, perhaps visiting them, talking to teachers and finding out what works. This type of school-to-school improvement should be enhanced by the additional measure of information that we are publishing.

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I am sure that every Member will welcome the £400 increase in the pupil premium that will benefit primary schools in every single one of our constituencies. With this extra money, however, comes the need for added accountability, as has been mentioned. The Minister says that some schools have closed the gap entirely. When it comes to outcomes for the future, does he view it as the ultimate ambition for every school to have no gap whatever between the achievement of pupils entitled to free school meals and those who are not?

[Mr Laws]

Yes, because the best-performing schools across the country have shown that there is nothing inevitable about those gaps. Many schools have closed the gaps very considerably. The important thing is to make sure that the accountability system is an intelligent one, as it would be possible to close the gap but at a very low level of attainment, while some of the schools that we wrote to this year had high levels of overall attainment but large gaps, so they should have been doing better for their youngsters. Our attention was drawn to schools where there was no gap, but where the attainment of disadvantaged youngsters was not good enough. The accountability will be for the gap, but also for the progress made by disadvantaged youngsters and the level of attainment of disadvantaged youngsters in a school compared with the national average. There will be no hiding place for schools that might otherwise have a small gap but at a very modest level of attainment.

Examination Reform

Debate between Chris Skidmore and David Laws

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

The hon. Gentleman has been listening to too much tittle-tattle. The Secretary of State and all members of the Government are committed to a credible and strengthened vocational qualifications framework. I will say more about that later.

[Chris Skidmore]

Given that we are having these confessional moments, will the right hon. Gentleman also welcome the fact that the shadow Secretary of State has endorsed in full the Wolf report, which stated that under the last Government more than 400,000 teenagers were taking vocational qualifications that were essentially a waste of time?

[Mr Laws]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. Indeed, that was the second or third of the four confessions we heard from the Opposition Front-Bench spokesman today.