Education (Merseyside)

Conor McGinn Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2016 Westminster Hall

[Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)]

You might recall, Sir Roger, that during the Finance Bill Committee, as a Whip I was grateful for your guidance in my silent role. I hope that will continue now that I am trying to find my voice from the Back Benches.

First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) on securing this debate. I am grateful to him for enabling us to discuss these important matters. Too often, policy discussions are London-centric. This debate provides a good opportunity to highlight the great work being done in Merseyside and my constituency of St Helens North, and also to raise concerns about aspects of current Government policy and the detrimental impact it is having in our city region.

I want to focus my brief remarks on further and higher education and apprenticeships, but at the start let me say something about early-years education and funding. As other hon. Members have said, we know that early childhood is a crucial stage of life in terms of a child’s physical, intellectual, emotional and social development. It is a time when children need high-quality personal care and learning experiences.

In answer to a recent parliamentary question that I asked the Secretary of State for Education, it was revealed that three and four-year-old children in St Helens get almost £1 an hour less spent on them than children in the rest of the country: 21% below the national average. St Helens gets just £3.61 per child per hour from central Government towards the education of three and four-year-olds compared with the national average of £4.56 per hour spent on each child in England. With the exception of the Liverpool City Council area, the entire Merseyside region fares badly. The extreme cuts to local government, which will mean that by 2020 my council area in St Helens will have had its grant cut by more than it collects in council tax, merely exacerbate the problem of underfunding for children in St Helens. They should have the same rights and get the same opportunities as those in the rest of England, and that means they should have the same amount spent on them.

At the other end of the educational journey for young people, there are 10 further education and sixth- form colleges on Merseyside providing high-quality education and training to 57,000 students. St Helens College, if I might humbly say, is one of the best in the entire north-west and we are very proud to have it in our borough. Statistics from the national Association of Colleges show that the economic return to taxpayers from colleges on Merseyside is £5.40 for every £1 invested, and Merseyside colleges work with a huge range of employers to meet their needs: 5,500 in the city region and nearly 10,000 nationally. Although the excellent work undertaken by colleges should be commended, the system is under immense pressure.

Various issues currently affect colleges and schools in the region and their ability to meet the Government’s ambition of a good education that works for all. Chief among them, of course, is funding. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, school spending is expected to fall by at least 7% in real terms by 2020, which would be the largest fall over any period since the 1970s. That has left St Helens College and schools in my constituency facing something close to mission impossible as they struggle to cope with a large increase in student numbers, leaving staff under huge pressure. This is at a time when there is a chronic shortage of teachers across education after six years of missed Government targets for recruiting new trainees and with a hugely demoralised profession. The number of teachers quitting—some 50,000 last year—is at a record high. Our teachers should be valued and supported; they should not have their reputation and their profession traduced by the Government.

Skilled jobs and apprenticeships are an important part of education in my constituency and are a vital route into employment. They give an opportunity to learn and develop skills for the workplace while earning a living. St Helens chamber of commerce—one of the best in the country—supports local employers to deliver good quality apprenticeships. There are still concerns over the take-up of apprenticeships among 16 to 18-year-olds in Merseyside, and we need to ensure that the apprenticeships on offer are of a high quality and provide young people with the training and skills that they need.

As well as vocational training and apprenticeships, for many in the region, going on to university or higher education is the chosen route to employment. However, statistics that I have obtained show that the percentage of young people in St Helens going on to higher education has dropped by more than 6% since 2012, and the percentage of children from disadvantaged backgrounds on free school meals going on to further education has dropped by 21%. That is deeply concerning because the Government’s own assessment shows that the cuts will have a disproportionate effect on disabled people, women, older learners and people from industrial areas such as St Helens. The Government talk a good game about aspiration and creating a northern powerhouse, but in terms of encouraging people into higher education, that seems to be little more than rhetoric, certainly for the people in St Helens.

I will conclude shortly and allow colleagues the opportunity to speak. It is clear that more needs to be done so that people in St Helens North and the whole of Merseyside get the good-quality education they deserve. The area-based review of further education currently being undertaken will hopefully identify the shortfalls and offer solutions. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram), Labour’s candidate for mayor of the city region, is passionate about education and creating opportunities, and I look forward to working with him to progress this agenda in all parts of the region, which I know he is committed to.

There should be fair and equal funding for children and young people across the country. Merseyside should not be left behind. I will work constructively with anyone who has a commitment to education and who wants to give children and young people the best start in life, but I am bound to say that the current Tory education policies are failing children, parents and teachers. While the Government obsess about school structures and bringing back selective education, budgets are falling. There are chronic teacher shortages and not enough school places. A good education should not be a privilege. It is every child’s right. I will continue to campaign in this House and in St Helens so that children and young people in my constituency and across Merseyside get the education to which they are entitled and which they deserve.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

I am delighted to speak on this important issue, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) on securing this important debate. Often in Britain, and all too often on Merseyside, the place where people are born seems to determine where they end up in life, but education is a tool that offers young people the hope of going on to achieve their full potential. It can provide the ladder of opportunity for the next generation and education policy should primarily be designed to do that. It should not be a political football for any Minister or Secretary of State, attempting to impose a narrow sense of ideological entitlement on others. Schools in my constituency, and indeed across our city region, are proud of what they have achieved. The tireless work of our teachers, governors and staff has been mentioned by many hon. Members today. They devote their lives to getting the best out of children, but it has to be said that educational attainment is stronger in some areas of the city region than others.

I note the criticism of the mayor of Liverpool, Mayor Anderson, by the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh), but the city mayor has been asked to achieve something with one hand tied behind his back, partly because of some savage cuts inflicted by the coalition Government of which the hon. Gentleman was a member.

[Conor McGinn]

Surely not!

[Steve Rotheram]

Surely yes.

The excellent work of many in our schools is often hamstrung by factors outside their control. Research by the House of Commons Library suggests that in my constituency just 38% of students get five A* to C GCSEs, including English and maths. With a national average of 53.8% that puts us well behind, but that in no way reflects the effort of the schools and teachers. Although it is only 10 miles away, Wirral’s figure is seven percentage points above the national average, at 61%. It is easy to imply that schools need to do more and be better, as the Prime Minister said today. There has not been a Secretary of State in the past 50 years who has not trotted out the tired old mantra that we need more good schools, but improvement cannot be achieved without the collaborative efforts of parents, teachers and governors and, most importantly, it cannot be achieved without the Government’s political will to invest fully in children’s future.

For far too many pupils there is poverty of aspiration. In many cases we have failed to convince young people from working-class backgrounds that they can be the doctors, nurses and lawyers and even, God forbid, the political leaders of tomorrow. I bet that that is not the case in many of the schools that many on the Government Front Bench went to. The Government’s idea of harking back to the 1950s and an elitist education system by returning to the dreaded 11-plus will do nothing to increase the life chances of the majority of young people.

The grammar school system is designed to achieve the best not for all but for the selected few. How can the Prime Minister advocate grammar schools when she stood on the steps of Downing Street a few weeks ago and promised the British people that she would lead a Government that works for everyone? Grammar schools will segregate, not educate. They will polarise communities, not promote social cohesion. Grammar schools would once again stifle the prospects of many of the children who would inevitably see themselves as failures if they did not pass the entrance exam. As Ofsted’s chief inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw put it, grammar schools will “put the clock back”. The desire for selection at 11 years old tells us all we need to know about the Government and how they see our precious education system. It is a microcosm of their entire political ideology. It will deliver for the few, not the many.

As my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby highlighted, teachers have voiced their concerns about upcoming Government proposals such as the prospect of a national funding formula and the added pressure to offer a more restricted curriculum because of the baccalaureate and progress 8. However, the new devolution deals provide an opportunity to transfer decision making and accountability to a local level. We currently face a situation in which the Government seek to devolve powers over industrial strategy and economic growth to metro mayors while fragmenting delivery and centralising accountability in the education system. That does not make sense. We have a ludicrous situation in which local education authorities continue to have statutory responsibilities under legislation such as the Education Act 1996 while having been deprived of any levers to pull to fulfil those duties and influence outcomes. For example, every secondary school in Knowsley is now an academy and is therefore much more accountable to the Secretary of State, through the schools commissioner, than to locally elected politicians, but—guess what?—local politicians get the blame when they are threatened with the withdrawal of A-level provision in the borough.

The problem in Merseyside is not the level of attainment of the top 20%; it is the level of attainment of the rest. We need an education system that lifts the attainment of all, not just those who are gifted and talented. That is why I am calling for the return of an element of local accountability. Education provides the building blocks for achieving the economic success we so desperately need, so the Minister should make the regional schools commissioner accountable to the metro mayor. I would appreciate it if he would address that issue specifically. That would afford the incoming metro mayor—and here I must declare an interest, Sir Roger—the opportunity to create a city region education strategy that could work collaboratively as the catalyst for sharing best practice. If elected metro mayor, I will introduce a pathways to excellence programme in our city region and help to raise educational attainment in each of the six districts, lifting the level of aspiration across all our communities, with no borough and no child left behind.

As metro mayor I want to harness the pool of talent that we have. I want to attract global businesses to locate into our area, offering the high-skilled, high-paid, high-aspiration jobs we need, as well as developing the new businesses that will lift our economy. However, developing a world-class workforce has to start at an early stage, and that has to be in our schools. The metro mayor does not have the responsibility, through the devolved powers they can use, to affect that, which is why we need a joined-up, consistent devolutionary approach between the Government’s industrial and education policies. I hope the Minister specifically addresses that point when he gets to his feet.