Educational Settings

Clive Efford Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Williamson]

My right hon. Friend poses a challenge, and as the father of two teenage daughters I am acutely aware of youngsters’ desire to socialise, but what we are facing in this country is not normal. It is not something any of us have seen in our childhood, and it is not a situation any of us would like to see or be in, and we need to accept that everyone has to exhibit a different set of behaviours to be able to stem this virus. That comes with challenges, but we are only taking the steps we are taking because we believe they will go towards ensuring that this virus does not spread as widely as it could.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

We have 48 hours before schools close, and we have no clear list of who is going to be able to send their children to school next week or after the Easter holidays. We have known for several weeks that we were going to reach this stage, so can the Secretary of State say what preparations he has made with local education authorities and schools to help draw up these lists and set out a plan to keep schools open? I think this is the right move, but I do not think the preparations have been done.

[Gavin Williamson]

The hon. Gentleman will probably have heard my response earlier: the list of key workers will be published tomorrow. That will be available for schools, and we are very conscious that we need to get that information to all schools as quickly as possible.

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

21. What plans he has to introduce routine Ofsted inspections for outstanding schools; and if he will make a statement.

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

We are considering the Public Account Committee’s recent recommendation that we review the exemption and will respond formally in December. Ofsted assesses the risks in all schools, including outstanding schools, and has the power to inspect any school if it has concerns.

[Clive Efford]

What confidence can parents in my constituency and others have in the Minister’s claim that 86% of schools are either outstanding or good when many have not been inspected for six years and some for as long as 11?

[Nick Gibb]

Ofsted assesses the triggers that will cause an inspection to happen even where a school is judged as outstanding and exempt from inspection—for example, if a school’s results fall, complaints are received from parents or there are safeguarding concerns. All those are triggers that will cause an inspection to happen even in an outstanding school. The hon. Gentleman can be confident, therefore, that a school that is judged good or outstanding is good or outstanding.

Schools That Work For Everyone

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

Voluntary-aided schools have been around since before my hon. Friend and I were born. There are thousands of them in the country and they play an important role in local communities.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

The pupil premium has been in existence for seven years now, yet the percentage of pupils in grammar schools receiving free school meals is less than 2.5% on average. What evidence is there that grammar schools play any role in social mobility or have any intention of doing so?

[Damian Hinds]

There are some particularly striking examples of individual schools that have gone rather further, including the Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham. We know that when children from disadvantaged backgrounds go to selective schools, they make more rapid progress. I want more children to have that opportunity.

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 19th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I certainly join my hon. Friend in his thanks, and I would actually like to meet him to look at what other support we can provide. I also commend the director of children’s services at Northamptonshire County Council for doing an excellent job in very difficult circumstances.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Based on Government statistics, 63 schools in my borough will lose funding of £300,000 per annum between 2015 and 2020. Can the Minister tell me what happened to the Prime Minister’s promise to maintain pupil funding?

[Nick Gibb]

No school in the country will lose funding under the new national funding formula. The minimum that schools will receive is an extra 0.5% increase, and that will be for schools that have been receiving more than that funding formula would produce. Therefore, no school will lose funding. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, there have been cost pressures in recent years, but we are helping schools to deal with them through school efficiency advisers and buying schemes to enable them to marshal their resources as efficiently as possible.

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 6th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills (Anne Milton)]

T-levels are long-awaited. We are starting down that road—the first few will come online in 2020, and there will be more in 2021 and 2022. I know that there is a great deal of interest in them, particularly from that sector.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State confirm that £1.5 billion has been taken out of school budgets since 2015, leading to a real-terms cut in per-pupil funding, which is contrary to what the Conservatives promised in their 2015 manifesto?

Schools: National Funding Formula

Clive Efford Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

We built a growth factor into the formula. We believe the formula will address growth better than the current system, which simply considers historical data. We will make projections and seek to compensate local authorities on the basis of accurate data, rather than just pure long-term historical projections, and that is important. It is one of the many reasons why this is a good step forward.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State has to accept that taking £2.7 billion out of education since 2015 and putting £1.3 billion back in leaves a £1.4 billion hole. That means schools are missing out. Will she undertake to write to every Member of the House with the per-pupil funding for each school, comparing the 2015 funding with the outcome of today’s announcement?

[Justine Greening]

We will be publishing a lot of data following this statement; the hon. Gentleman will have more than enough to look at. The point of introducing a funding formula is to make sure that schools that have been underfunded can start to catch up and to provide stability for better-funded schools. That is precisely what we are doing, and I am proud that we are able to achieve it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

We rely on the expertise of the School Teachers Review Body and the extensive and thorough review carried out by it. It has made recommendations, which we have accepted, that the main pay bands should increase by 2%—the minimum and maximum—and that the bands for more senior teachers should increase by 1%.

There are 15,500 more teachers today than when Labour left office in 2010. We are meeting 93% of the target of recruiting graduates into teacher training. More returners are coming back into teaching in 2016 than in 2011, and more people came into teaching than left last year.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

15. What plans she has to help recruit and retain teaching assistants in schools; and if she will make a statement.

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

Responsibility for the recruitment and retention of teaching assistants rests at the local level with headteachers and school employers, who are best placed to use their professional judgment to recruit and retain teaching assistants to best meet the needs of their schools and pupils.

[Clive Efford]

That answer is simply not good enough. Low pay is a barrier to the recruitment and retention of teaching assistants. Figures from the GMB’s pay pinch report, taking the consumer prices index into consideration, show that a higher level teaching assistant has lost £9,200 over the past seven years and that that will rise to over £12,000 by 2020 unless something is done about the public sector pay cap. Is it not time that we stopped hearing weasel words from the Government about how much they value those staff and that they started to pay them the rate for the job?

[Nick Gibb]

We do value teachers and teaching assistants. They do a good job of phenomenally challenging work in our schools, which is why we have 1.5 million more pupils in good or outstanding schools today than we did in 2010. The hon. Gentleman is wrong about the number of teaching assistants, which has been increasing year on year. Today, there are 265,600 full-time equivalent teaching assistants in state-funded schools.

Schools Update

Clive Efford Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Pursuant to the plethora of points of order that I took on the subject of HS2 from right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House immediately after questions, I can inform the House that the Secretary of State for Transport would like to make a statement at the moment of interruption—that is to say, at 10 pm—this evening. I have acceded to that request on the basis that the official Opposition are content to hear the statement at that time, and I have received that assurance. There will be a statement, I believe entitled “HS2 Update”, at the moment of interruption tonight. I hope that that is helpful to the House.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

In December last year, the National Audit Office said that the Secretary of State’s Department was expecting 8% cuts, which is equivalent to £3 billion, in our school budgets—no one else but her Department. The figure was £24 million across Greenwich schools, which is the equivalent of 672 teachers. She went into the last general election saying that my schools were overfunded. Does she still believe that?

[Justine Greening]

I do not believe we did say that, but what I can say is that the hon. Gentleman’s schools will now get a better settlement under the national funding formula than they would have got under his party.

School Funding

Clive Efford Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I want to make some progress.

Let us consider the context.

“Britain has a deep social mobility problem, and for this generation in particular, it is getting worse not better”—

as a result of—

“an unfair education system, a two-tier labour market, an imbalanced economy, and an unaffordable housing market.”

That was the conclusion of the Government’s own Social Mobility Commission. And what about our education system?

“We still have too many underperforming schools and low overall levels of numeracy and literacy. England remains the only OECD country where 16 to 24-year-olds are no more literate or numerate than 55 to 64-year-olds.”

Again, that is not my conclusion, but that of the Government’s own industrial strategy Green Paper, which quite rightly makes it clear just how central education is to our economy, especially following Brexit.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is talking about the broken pledge on increasing funding for schools. Is she aware that 74 out of 77 schools—that is 96% of them—face real-terms cuts of more than £200,000 by 2019? How is that defensible? How is it evidence of a Government who care about education?

[Angela Rayner]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend—there is no justification for these cuts.

The Secretary of State has, of course, unveiled the proposed solution, her so-called national fair funding formula, which she presented to her Back Benchers as a kind of reverse distribution. On the Government’s own figures, they are quite literally robbing Peterborough to pay for Poole, but it will not take long for Members on both sides of the House to discover that not only is there nothing fair about the proposed funding formula but that it will not make up for overall real-terms cuts. Concerns about what that means for our constituents are shared on both sides of the House. The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) has said that his message to the Minister for School Standards is:

“I don’t get this and I don’t think it’s particularly fair.”

I hope that we will see the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle in the Chamber this afternoon and that he will put his concerns forward. I hope he will speak.

The hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady) has said:

“Every secondary school in Trafford will lose funding, even though it is one of the places famously underfunded for education.”

Perhaps we will hear from him, too. The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), who of course co-chairs the f40 group of historically underfunded local education authorities, said just this morning:

“The bottom line is that it’s created some distorted outcomes which we think require some significant remodelling.”

No wonder he is concerned, because nearly half of the f40 group face further cuts, rather than increases, under the Minister’s national funding fiddle.

Of course there is one Government Member who seems quite happy to accept the cuts in her own constituency: the Secretary of State herself. Schools in her own constituency are set to lose some 15% of their funding per pupil. Perhaps she will be lobbying herself.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justine Greening]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The formula recognises that different schools face different costs, particularly in rural areas, so the sparsity factor recognises that rural schools often have a higher cost base. That sits alongside a lump-sum element that is built into the formula to make sure that schools have the money that they need to be able to function effectively. Colleagues in rural seats will recognise that small rural schools have gained an average of 1.3% under the formula. Primary schools in sparse communities will gain 5.3% on average.

[Clive Efford]

There was a manifesto commitment to increase school spending per capita, but secondary schools in Greenwich face the prospect of having to make on average £1 million savings between now and 2019, with primary schools saving more than £200,000 each. Some 74 out of 77 schools face those cuts. Is that consistent with what the Conservative party told parents in my borough before the election?

[Justine Greening]

We said that we would protect the core schools budget in real terms, and that is exactly what we are doing. In relation to the hon. Gentleman’s local community, the change in the funding formula partly reflects the fact that, for a long time, we have used deprivation data that are simply out of date. It is important that we use up-to-date deprivation factors. For example, in 2005, 28% of children in London were on free school meals. That percentage has now fallen to 17%. It is right that we make sure that we have consistent investment for children from deprived communities, because that is where the attainment gap has opened up. It is also important that funding is spread fairly using up-to-date information.

New Grammar Schools

Clive Efford Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

My hon. Friend makes his point very well, and he will be aware that we are developing our proposals on reforming the funding formula for schools. I know he will want to represent his community as we do that, but it is important that we get more equitable funding for pupils than we currently have.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

It has been a trait of this Tory Government that they steal the language of the left to cover up the mean and regressive policies they introduce, using terms like “social mobility” when they mean quite the opposite. All the empirical evidence shows that investment in early-years does more to move children forward than any form of selection at 11 could ever justify, so does the Secretary of State regret closing 800 Sure Start centres? Should we not be investing there, rather than having this pointless debate about bringing back selection?

[Justine Greening]

I do not accept this either/or characterisation of policy. What we need to do is improve education at every stage of a child’s life, including early- years.