Catholic Schools (Admissions)

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 30th April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin. As we gather today to discuss matters of education and those who dedicate their lives to it, all our thoughts and prayers are naturally with the family of Ann Maguire and all the children and staff at Corpus Christi Catholic college in Leeds.

This debate was originally in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier). He secured the debate, but he sends his apologies for being unable to attend owing to a long-standing engagement at the Ministry of Defence in Glasgow for his work on reserves. I am grateful to him for the opportunity to speak in his place and to Mr Speaker for allowing the transfer.

The Catholic Church is this country’s largest provider of secondary education, and it is the second biggest name in primary education. Altogether, the Catholic Church educates more than 800,000 children in more than 2,000 schools. The Catholic Church has always seen education as vital to the formation and development of the whole person, and historically it has prioritised the building of schools in England, even over building churches.

At their heart, Catholic schools always have a mission to provide for underprivileged children and serve a Catholic population that has primarily been made up of many waves of immigrants from France, Ireland, south Asia, the Philippines, Africa, eastern Europe and elsewhere. Under the Education Act 1944 —the Butler Act—Catholic schools became voluntary-aided schools, part of the state system but with a distinct Catholic ethos guaranteed through various legal protections. Unlike the Church of England, which is the established Church in this country, the Catholic Church has always established its schools primarily to educate Catholic children and puts substantial resources into that effort. These days, the figure is some £20 million a year.

Catholic schools today are high performers in the state sector. On average, they get higher Ofsted ratings for overall effectiveness, pastoral care and various other criteria. Their results are above average at the ages of seven, 11 and 16, and they perform strongly on value-added measures. Such schools are also plugged into their local communities. At secondary level, two in five Catholic schools are judged by Ofsted to be making an outstanding contribution to their local community, which compares with one in four schools overall. A key question is whether all that is just a coincidence and, if not, what the driving factors are behind that performance.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on standing in for the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier), who secured this debate. I often hear from a small number of constituents that they feel Catholic schools must be selecting only the cream of pupils. Would the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) like to put on record his observations on that point?

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

I will happily do so: I contend that the ethos and character of Catholic schools, although they are not the only factors, are key contributors to the performance of such schools in all senses. It is categorically not the case that Catholic schools get better results by being some sort of middle-class filtering service.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I, too, congratulate the hon. Gentleman on introducing this debate. I associate myself with his remarks on the tragedy in Leeds, which is close to my constituency. It is an awful thing to happen.

I press the hon. Gentleman on the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello). When I chaired the Select Committee on Education, we found real evidence that many Christian schools, both Catholic and Anglican—I am an active Christian myself—manage to get far fewer people from poorer backgrounds than one would expect from any interpretation of the population both inside and outside the Catholic community. There is evidence, and surely the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) must worry about that.

[Damian Hinds]

That would be a worry. I never had the privilege of serving under the hon. Gentleman’s distinguished chairmanship of the Education Committee, although when I subsequently served on the Committee, we had a session on similar matters, and we did not find that to be the case. Depending on our point of view and the point that one is trying to make, we can draw boundaries around schools in different ways. We can draw an immediate boundary or a wider boundary. A little later, I will go through some of the actual statistics on the intake of Catholic schools.

[Mr Sheerman]

The hon. Gentleman is being kind in giving way again. The Education Committee’s report—I am looking at the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner), who was a member of the Committee at the time—recommended a mandatory code for admissions, which made a difference. Under the mandatory code, schools have to obey a fair admissions policy. That is why, when the Education Committee returned to the matter, many of the problems had been resolved.

[Damian Hinds]

Catholic schools and all maintained, state-funded schools are, of course, subject to fair admissions procedures, which I will address later.

[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend bear in mind that some areas have no boundaries other than the sea? The Isle of Wight has the best secondary school, a Catholic-Anglican school, and it can be chosen by anyone.

[Damian Hinds]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s unique geographical perspective. This comes up time and again, and I will shortly address some of those instances, but on the key point of whether Catholic schools are some sort of filtering device for middle-class, wealthy and bright kids, the answer is no. That would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the demographic profile of this country’s Catholic population, the location of those schools and the communities that they serve.

There is a school about a mile from here across the river that may be a contender for England’s most diverse school: St Anne’s Catholic primary school in SE11. The school’s pupils come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. Half of key stage 2 pupils are classed as disadvantaged, with most coming from the immediate wards, which are among the poorest in London. The school’s deprivation indicator is in the top 10%, but there are also families from higher income brackets. Altogether, pupils speak 32 different mother tongues, and 99% of pupils have English as an additional language, which is what we used to call English as a foreign language. The one thing that almost all pupils have in common is their faith, with more than 95% being baptised Catholics.

That is a striking example—that is why we politicians use such examples—but overall the profile of Catholic schools is more diverse than schools in the maintained sector in general. At primary level, the proportion of schools at which more than 5% of pupils do not speak English as their mother tongue is 57% for Catholic schools and 38% for schools overall. Some 34.5% of Catholic primary school pupils are from ethnic minority backgrounds, compared with 28.5% in the maintained sector as a whole; at secondary level, the figures are 30% for Catholic schools and 24% for other schools.

The proportion of children on free school meals at Catholic schools is somewhat lower on average than at other schools, and there are various explanations for that, but I do not think we know the answer conclusively. One thing that we do know conclusively is that pupils at Catholic schools tend to come from poorer places than children at schools in general. At secondary level, 17% of children at Catholic schools are from the most deprived wards, compared with 12% for schools overall. At both primary and secondary, Catholic schools over-index in the bottom four deciles and under-index in the top six deciles.

The diversity of Catholic schools, notwithstanding the water boundaries of some places, is partly due to the potential for much larger catchment areas. Typically, a Catholic school may have a catchment area 10 times the size of a typical community school’s catchment area. I saw a bit of that in my own schooling. The school that I went to in south Manchester had kids from leafy north Cheshire, but it also had kids from Stretford, Old Trafford, Stockport and Warrington. It really had a very wide intake.

Schools must comply with the schools admissions code, and over-subscription policies mean that Catholic schools typically give priority to Catholic children over the wider area and welcome others where there is remaining capacity. That system enables more parents who desire a Catholic education for their children to get one, bearing in mind that it is a minority religion in this country, so the population is likely to be more sparsely spread.

As has been mentioned, the admissions criteria of faith schools make regular media space-fillers. Headlines have included, “Faith schools ‘biased towards middle classes’”, “Faith schools ‘skewing admissions rules’” and, “Faith school admissions ‘unfair to immigrants’”. Those came respectively from the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian after the publication of the schools adjudicator report in 2010. As was alluded to, we had the chief adjudicator into the Education Committee to discuss that report, which was extremely fair and balanced and made hardly any reference to faith schools. Somehow, between the publication of that report, the press conference and journalists filing their copy, the story became about bell ringing, schools insisting that parents clean churches and giving priority to white middle-class families. I do not know about you, Mr Dobbin, but I struggle to think of many Catholic churches that even have a bell tower. Anyone saying that people who clean churches having priority somehow advantages white middle-class families has a poor understanding of the demographics of those who clean churches.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that the London Oratory school withdrew that requirement from its admissions criteria as a result of the adjudicator’s ruling?

[Damian Hinds]

I will tell the hon. Gentleman what I acknowledge: there are 2,000 Catholic schools in this country, and one of them is the London Oratory school. When these stories come up, they always centre on literally a handful of schools, virtually all of which are in west or south-west London. They are in no way representative of Catholic education as a whole, whether in location, resident population or type of school and so on.

[Mr Sheerman]

We all know why London Oratory became so well known: Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, sent his children there. I always defended that, because he was, as I understand it, the first Prime Minister ever to send his children to a state school. To put the record straight for anyone reading the report of this debate, before the reforms, when I was Chair of the Education Committee, the crucial thing was not just the number of children on free school meals, but the numbers of looked-after children and children with special educational needs. Things have not much improved, but I have to put on record, as a lay canon at Wakefield cathedral, that we often found that Anglican schools were worse than Catholic schools.

[Damian Hinds]

That is probably a road that we do not want to go down today. Overall, notwithstanding the poster child cases that can be found on occasion—

[Kevin Brennan]

You mentioned the cleaning.

[Damian Hinds]

I say gently to the shadow Minister that that was represented as faith schools plural, not as one school where it was the case. The figures speak for themselves. In 2010, 337 Catholic secondary schools made 54,830 offers of a place to year 7 pupils. The number of complaints to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator about the application of the admissions code in Catholic schools was nine. In fact, there were proportionally fewer complaints about Catholic schools than there were for schools of no denomination.

There is a view that no admissions procedure or criteria should include a religious element and that if these are high-quality, sought-after schools, they should be made available equally to all, so that more people, or at least people living closer to the school, would benefit. I contend that that misses the point of what makes Catholic schools distinctive and sought after. If they were open to all, they would lose their distinctive character—not immediately, but over time.

Schools can withstand some variety, which is a good thing, in admissions. The proportion of non-Catholic children at Catholic schools today is 30%, which is probably higher than most people realise. A 50% cap on admissions would gradually erode that character in two ways. It would not only erode it directly by diluting the religious nature of the school’s population, but indirectly, because Catholic parents would cease to see a distinction between those schools and entirely non-denominational schools, as my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban) effectively argued in a recent debate in this place. Put simply, a half-Catholic school is not the same thing as a Catholic school.

The 50% cap is not in the coalition agreement, but is an interpretation of some of its wording. We would probably all agree that it was well-intentioned, because there is concern about diversity, inclusiveness and mixing in schools, and I understand the sensitivities around those topics. As I hope that I have demonstrated, Catholic schools are more diverse than the average, with mixing beyond that available in the average school. The cap is inhibiting the creation of new quality schools that will be just as sought after. It is clear that the 50% cap directly precludes the creation of Catholic free schools, because the Catholic Church feels unable to support, with all the implications of commitment that that brings, new so-called Catholic schools that would in the end have to turn away some families seeking a Catholic education for their children in favour of others who happen to live a little closer to the school.

There is an alternative, which is to create a new voluntary-aided school that can subsequently convert to an academy, and the same result could be had that way. That is not an impossible route to pursue, but there are two problems with it. First, it is a somewhat convoluted approach to reach that end, inevitably carrying additional inefficiencies and costs. Secondly, it is not as straightforward as a free school application, because voluntary-aided applications do not have the same priority as free school applications. The applicants for the new voluntary-aided school at Richmond experienced a legal challenge from the British Humanist Association, which claimed that the Government had to look first at free school applications that would have the 50% cap. That legal challenge failed, but it is inevitable that parents will feel some uncertainty about what will happen with future openings. That could affect the number of applications and the viability of such a new school.

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned that voluntary-aided schools do not have the same priority as new free schools. Why?

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman is a man of letters, and he will understand that I can answer the question only in the sense of why I said that, which is because it is my understanding. It is for the Minister to talk about how these things work in practice, and he might want to contend that point.

I have some questions for the Minister. First, has the Department made projections of demand for Catholic places at schools, the growth or otherwise in the Catholic population and the propensity of parents of those children to seek a Catholic school? Secondly, has the effect of the 50% cap on applications for faith-based schools been assessed? Thirdly, would the Department consider a pilot of a Catholic free school without the 50% cap? Fourthly, is it possible to construct a new fast-track, voluntary-aided through to converter academy route that would effectively be a single process?

In conclusion, Catholic schools are a key part of the education landscape in this country, and have been for a long time. They are diverse—more diverse, in fact, than the average—and that diversity includes already having a substantial proportion of non-Catholic children. They also have something special about them, and that specialness comes at least partly as a direct result of their religious nature.

[Robert Flello]

The hon. Gentleman is being extremely generous with his time. On that point, it is the special nature of Catholic schools that appeals to many people of other religions. For example, in Stoke-on-Trent, a large proportion of the Muslim community want their children to go to the local Catholic school because of its Catholic nature. That might seem a little bizarre at first, but that is the reality.

[Damian Hinds]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman entirely. Many Catholic schools have large numbers of children of other faiths. As I came to my close, the point I was making was that the specialness of Catholic schools comes at least partly as a direct result of their religious nature. I suggest that that helps to promote cohesion and community spirit, rather than detract from it. That specialness would inevitably be eroded over time by enforcing a lower cap on admissions made on the basis of faith.

As Cardinal Vincent Nichols—as he is now—said in 2006, when faced with a not entirely similar proposal,

“Catholic schools make a positive and clear contribution, and do so in an open and proven manner. They are part of the solution. They should not be undermined.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

No, it is not, and it will not be Labour policy. For the very reasons I have outlined, I do not think that is in any way necessary—but it is necessary that there should be fair admissions, which is the point that I am making. All schools, when they are criticised by the schools adjudicator, should not try to evade the issue. They should take it seriously and ensure that their admissions policies are meeting the criteria.

Yesterday, the former Secretary of State for Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), issued a report for the Labour Front-Bench team. I will read a short bit from it, to put it on the record—although it is a consultation, it is essentially an outline of the position that Labour are taking regarding admissions. We said that

“whilst the Office of the Schools Adjudicator…annual report noted that only 10% of Local Authorities objected to the arrangements of other admission authorities in their area, the OSA has separate evidence of much more widespread non-compliance. This review recommends that the School Admissions Code is strengthened by removing the possibility of individual schools ‘opting-out’ of the locally agreed admissions framework. This would not prevent changes to arrangements locally or agreed experimentation by Admissions Authorities, but would avoid the detrimental impact of rogue action with one school damaging the admissions of other schools in the locality. This recommendation does not interfere with the role of diocesan authorities, academies or schools as their own ‘Admissions Authority’, but reinforces the necessity of agreed and coherent arrangements within the relevant local area.”

It is important to put that statement on the record, because there are concerns about the watering down of the role of the schools adjudicator by the current Government and about the continuing disintegration and fragmentation of the school system as a result of the Government’s academisation and free school policy. I commend the document to hon. Members, if they would like to read it further.

[Damian Hinds]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reading out the passage from the document, and I apologise if this is just me being hard-of-understanding, but could he explain what it means in practical terms?

[Kevin Brennan]

Yes, I can. It means that Labour will, as we previously pledged, strengthen the role of the schools adjudicator to make sure not only that admissions arrangements are fair, but that when the schools adjudicator makes a ruling, the changes are put in place—if necessary, by the schools adjudicator. I will explain that with a further quote from the document:

“It will be necessary to strengthen the OSA and re-instate its power to change admission arrangements directly on upholding an objection (rather than merely issue a ruling).”

That was a source of great contention earlier in this Parliament, when the Government removed the power of the adjudicator and effectively made it extremely difficult for parents, when they have objections to admissions arrangements, to get those changed.

[Damian Hinds]

To be clear, does that mean that in the case of faith schools, in the Labour party’s outline plans, the definition of practising a religion—or an element, I suppose, of practising a religion—would fall further towards the Office of the Schools Adjudicator and away from diocesan authorities?

[Kevin Brennan]

It need not affect in any way the essence of practising a religion, but where there are requirements—as in the case discussed earlier—for people, for example, to undertake cleaning, the Office of the Schools Adjudicator could rule that that was an unfair part of an admissions policy.

[Damian Hinds]

Forget bell ringing and cleaning—let us talk about late baptism for a moment. As a practical example, could the Office of the Schools Adjudicator decide that children having had a late baptism should not count, in a sense, as being Catholic in the same way as those who had infant baptisms?

[Kevin Brennan]

I am sufficiently well versed in Catholic theology to know that there is no distinction between Catholics, regardless of when they were baptised. Of course that would not be applicable; it would be ludicrous if that were the case.

This has been a very good debate. It is extremely important that we have an opportunity to air these subjects. I want to place on the record my support and praise for the work of Catholic schools throughout the country and to commend, as I said, the Catholic Education Service for the serious engagement that it has had with the issue in relation to admissions. I ask the Minister to respond to the questions that hon. Members have raised about the 50% rule with regard to free schools and to give an answer about why voluntary aided schools cannot be set up as quickly and easily as free schools under this Government’s policy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Laws]

I am coming directly to that point. I think that there is a significant difference between schools funded by taxpayers, who have the right to access schools that are, in many cases, their local schools; and schools chosen by parents who seek paid-for private education. I will go on to explain how the 50% works in practice, because it is not quite as some hon. Members have described. The Government are taking forward the principle that was in place under the academy provision created by the previous Government, so there is consistency between the 50% approach that we have taken and the previous situation. The 50% cap represents a balance between providing places for parents who want their children to be educated in line with their faith, and preserving the inclusive, broad local community focus of the school so that local parents, who may not be of that faith, can exercise their choice over state-funded schooling.

We have no reason to believe that the balance is not working effectively. Proposer groups, representing many different faiths and none, still come forward and are keen to set up free schools. Those schools are proving popular with parents. The 50% limit on faith admissions does not mean that Catholic children must be turned away once the school has reached the 50% threshold. A faith free school may end up recruiting more than 50% of pupils who share its faith as long as no more than half the places were allocated on the basis of faith. Other Catholic children have the same opportunity as all other applicants to access the remaining 50% of places, which are allocated according to the other over-subscription criteria.

We do not believe that a 50% limit on faith admissions is incompatible with the provision of high-quality faith education. Church and other faith free schools have the freedom to deliver religious education and collective worship according to the tenets of their faith and to appoint teaching staff and leaders by reference to faith. Not all Church and faith schools, even those with a faith priority in their admission arrangements, admit only children of their faith. If a faith school is under-subscribed, the school must admit all children who apply, regardless of their faith.

Many Church and faith schools choose not to adopt faith-based admission arrangements. The Catholic Education Service’s data show that the average proportion of Catholic pupils in its maintained schools is 70%, and its independent schools have an even larger proportion of non-Catholic pupils. I have been looking during the debate at the percentage of Catholic pupils in Catholic schools, which ranges from 72.8% of Catholic pupils in Catholic primary schools to 42.6% of Catholic pupils in Catholic sixth-form colleges. In the independent sector, only 36.4% of pupils in Catholic schools are Catholic. Only 5% of maintained Catholic schools and colleges—100 institutions—have entirely Catholic pupils, and 20% of Catholic schools, or 401, are already operating with half of their student body composed of non-Catholic children.

I do not believe, however—I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire agrees—that the 95% of schools that do not have a fully Catholic population are not providing a high-quality Catholic education for all their pupils. Indeed, the attainment levels of Catholic schools bear that out. Many of us who have been in Catholic schools know that a school can have a large proportion of non-Catholic pupils and still maintain its faith principles. The Government and I are clear that that is one of the conditions under which non-Catholic or non-faith pupils enter Catholic or faith schools.

[Damian Hinds]

Does not what the Minister sets out raise an obvious question? If such diversity already exists, and if large numbers—30%—of pupils at Catholic schools are non-Catholic, why is there a need to impose a cap? Such a cap would come into play in places where there is a large Catholic population over a slightly wider area. Children would not be turned away for being Catholic but, inevitably, other children who happened to live a little closer to the school would be preferred in their place.

[Mr Laws]

There are two separate points. I sought to make the first point by addressing the question that my hon. Friend raised in his speech about whether it was possible to have a Catholic ethos and education in a school in which a large number of pupils were not Catholic. If he agrees that it is possible to retain that ethos, I welcome that. I come back to the issue of there being two competing rights in a state-funded school system: people’s right to choose to have their children educated in the way that they wish, and the right of taxpayers who live near state-funded schools to have some ability to access them despite the over-representation of people from the faith that the system allows.

Oral Answers to Questions

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Monday 24th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)]

I agree that that is an issue. Information provided recently by the OECD’s programme for international student assessment showed that girls have as much confidence as boys at the age of five but begin to lose that confidence as they proceed through the education system, and that that contributes to feelings of anxiety about mathematics. One of the things that we must all do is end the culture in which saying “I am rubbish at maths” is acceptable, whereas it is not OK to say “I am no good at reading.” What is needed is a “can do” approach to mathematics. Our new maths hubs programme—there are 30 hubs across the country—will promote best practice in teaching, so that we can close the gap between girls and boys.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

The Secretary of State recently saw basketball being taught in Mandarin at Bohunt school in my constituency. Will he join me in commending Bohunt on its immersion programme, and how can we get more people studying this strategically important language?

[Michael Gove]

I hugely enjoyed my visit to Bohunt school, an absolutely outstanding school. When the Financial Times visited it, it said that it was easily better—like so many state schools—than independent schools. One of the great things I saw today when I visited Chobham academy in Newham was a year 7 class being taught Mandarin through total immersion. The transformation of modern foreign language teaching over the last couple of years is a wonder to behold, and the commitment of so many of our modern foreign language teachers to extending Mandarin, Spanish and French teaching is vital to ensure that this country escapes the insularity that, sadly, afflicted us in the Labour years.

School Funding

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for welcoming this announcement. In the paper on which we will consult, Sutton is among the top five authorities that we consider to be under-funded and is therefore among the top five beneficiaries. He will know that the funding rate in Sutton is £4,360 at present; under the proposal we are consulting on, it will rise to £4,637, which is an increase of 6.4%.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the combination of fairer area funding, the pupil premium and the protection of the overall schools budget amply demonstrates the Government’s commitment to investing strongly in our nation’s future, while targeting additional resources transparently at the places where they are most needed?

[Mr Laws]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. I am incredibly proud of what we will have done on school funding by the end of this Parliament. At a time of austerity, we have put a massive amount into deprivation funding, which has helped constituencies across the country and the most disadvantaged areas in particular. Now we are dealing with the long-standing injustice of other areas having been short-changed.

Educational Attainment (Disadvantaged Pupils)

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton.

There is in this country a large gap in educational attainment between children from richer homes and those from poorer homes as measured by eligibility for free school meals. As the Minister has said on a number of occasions, closing that gap is a moral imperative. I am proud of the Government’s commitment on that front, and of the fact that every time Ministers discuss raising standards in education the issue is always both increasing overall attainment and closing the gap between rich and poor. There have been many initiatives on that matter, and I am sure that there will be more, but probably the biggest change of all is how the pupil premium structurally funds schools. That has at least three effects. First, it ensures that schools in disadvantaged areas are better resourced; secondly, it funds specific programmes and interventions; and thirdly, it makes pupils who are eligible for free school meals more attractive—as it were—to schools.

The key problem is that opportunity in Britain is still not evenly spread. Much continues to depend on the type of family and income bracket that someone is born into. Of course, today we are discussing the fact that opportunity also has much to do with where someone is born. There are several aspects to that, and I am going to touch on three. First is the straightforward fact that there is variation in attainment for disadvantaged children both within and between regions, and that seems to happen differentially for primary and secondary phases. Secondly, there is the perhaps counterintuitive problem of being born poor into a relatively wealthy area. Thirdly, there is my main focus: outperformance at the top end and the increasing exceptionalism of London.

I will talk first about the overall variation within and between regions, although we must be careful when we talk about regions because, in a sense, they are not really anything—they are just administrative constructs; geographical niceties. Nevertheless, there does seem to be some sort of regional pattern. If we look at the proportion of children who get five or more GCSEs at grade C or above, including English and maths, we see that there is significant variation between regions. That variation is more marked, however, in children eligible for free school meals. On both counts—children overall and disadvantaged children—London tops the table. Versus the rest, it is ahead by 3% overall and by 16% for disadvantaged children specifically.

There are also variations between individual areas within regions. In a number of local authorities, more than 55% of children eligible for free school meals achieve five or more GCSEs at grade C or above: Newham, Redbridge, Lambeth, Tower Hamlets, Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea. At the other end of the scale, in 14 authorities, fewer than 25% of children achieve that benchmark. Those areas are liberally scattered throughout the country—north, south, east and west. The important point is that all the top performers are in London and the poorest performers are all over the place.

[Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

I apologise to my hon. Friend for missing the start of his speech. Our challenge in North Yorkshire is that the overall performance of schools is good, but only 33.9% of children eligible for free school meals achieve five GCSEs at grade C or above.

[Damian Hinds]

Indeed; there are issues of that nature—a wide variation—throughout the country. Sometimes it makes sense to look at this issue at the regional level—for my hon. Friend, that would be Yorkshire and the Humber—and in other cases it makes sense to look at individual local authorities. Sometimes we must actually drill down lower still.

In general and on average, if a child lives in a richer area they are more likely to go to a school judged good or outstanding by Ofsted than if they live in a poorer area. Ofsted’s report last year, “Unseen children”, highlights that point well. The report shows that the gap between the proportion of schools judged good or outstanding for leadership and management in the poorest parts relative to the wealthiest parts is biggest for primary schools in the south-east and east midlands, and biggest for secondary schools in Yorkshire and the Humber and the north-east. It is interesting that the report highlights how different areas have the biggest gap for primary and secondary schools. The area with the starkest difference is probably the north-east, which has the biggest gap of all between the proportion of secondary schools judged good or outstanding for leadership and management, whereas for primary schools it is the top performer in the entire country. The blended average of those two gaps ends up being quite good.

Another problem is the fact that within otherwise wealthy areas there is a danger that poorer children can be overlooked. I said at the start of my speech that it is counterintuitive in many ways, but it seems to be true—at least to an extent—at both school and area level, that a child from a disadvantaged background is best off being in a place where there are either hardly any other children in that category or loads of them. They are worse off if they are somewhere in the middle range.

Ofsted has just started publishing regional-level reports, and of the south-east it said that

“the poor performance of small numbers of pupils entitled to free school meals is lost in the midst of otherwise strong performance by 16-year-olds.”

Of course, there are exceptions, and I was delighted to note that one of the schools singled out in that report as doing particularly well in that regard was Bohunt school in my constituency, which the Secretary of State visited a couple of weeks ago. Nevertheless, there is a problem in the south-east overall with children eligible for free school meals. The report says that

“pupils eligible for free school meals in the South East attain at levels below the national figure for similar pupils in every single local authority in the region.”

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. I realise that education is a devolved matter for Northern Ireland, but he is painting an image mirrored across all regions of the United Kingdom. North and west Belfast are the worst areas we have in Northern Ireland for numbers of children eligible for free school meals, perhaps because of the troubles. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me that every child, whatever their background, deserves a proper education?

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman is of course quite right. He will understand that I cannot comment in detail on the figures for Belfast, but I agree with his sentiment. In fact, one could argue that the worse off and more difficult a child’s background, the greater the moral imperative for politicians to ensure that a good school is made available.

A number of questions arise on within-school underperformance. How should the pupil premium be used? If a school has relatively small numbers of disadvantaged children, what is the best way to use pupil premium moneys to benefit them? We know that, in general, whole school improvement programmes tend to disproportionately benefit the better off—although they may be beneficial overall, they are less likely to be beneficial in closing the gap. When a school has smaller numbers of disadvantaged children, specific, targeted interventions become quite difficult. Interventions are presumably not targeted at pupils because they are entitled to free school meals—that would be both difficult and rather divisive, and not something we would want.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

Therein lies the problem. Schools are entitled to a pupil premium for children receiving free school meals. Therefore, there is a problem in some poorer neighbourhoods. Because of housing tenure and type, lots of youngsters who are not entitled to the pupil premium or free school meals but who are still in relatively low-income and deprived households live cheek by jowl with kids who do generate the pupil premium, and they often have as many educational problems as the youngsters entitled to funding.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman raises a good point. There are a number of aspects to what he says. One is that free school meals entitlement is by definition a cliff-edge measure—children are either entitled or they are not—so, as he points out, crossing that line does not actually change whether a child is advantaged rather than disadvantaged. There can be a disconnect. Being on free school meals is not an indication per se that a pupil will not do well at school. The converse of what he says is that, as we know, lots of children entitled to free school meals do stunningly well at school.

[Ian Mearns]

On that point, I am a member of the Select Committee on Education. We visited the Netherlands last year, where the system considers the prior educational attainment of the parents in determining whether a child should attract additional funding in school. That is not perfect, any more than free school meals, but it seems to have some inherent sense behind it, because it is about the richness of the cultural experience of the child’s home life as well as the richness of the education that they get in school.

[Damian Hinds]

I will return to the educational attainment of parents when I discuss London specifically. The hon. Gentleman touches on something that I was about to mention. Entitlement to free schools and other measures of disadvantage are often correlated with certain clear indicators that children are less likely to do well at school, particularly those involving the home learning environment—whether there are books at home and so on.

Clearly, at system level, it makes sense to use the gap between free school meal recipients and others to chart our progress. Although entitlement to free school meals is not a perfect measure, it is the best we have in terms of accuracy. However, now that we have the new progress measure, which tracks the progress of each attainment group at entry and as they go through school, I wonder whether, particularly in secondary school, it would make more sense to use that as the primary measure in closing the gap, so that when students arrive at secondary school, whatever their prior attainment, we ensure that all schools are stretching all children to the best of their abilities.

I have numerous questions about between-school and between-area underperformance. The most obvious is how to get the best leaders and leadership support into the places where they are needed most, and how to incentivise great teachers into the areas that need them most. As I mentioned earlier, there is a vexing pattern. Certain areas are good either at primary or secondary, but not both simultaneously. Sorry; I should not say that they are not good, but hon. Members know what I mean. The proportion of schools judged good or outstanding is in primary or secondary, but not both.

I am pleased that this gives me an opportunity to say that within the south-east, Hampshire is an exception. I pay tribute to John Coughlan and his team. Hampshire is rated relatively well in both primary and secondary education. Overall, if all regions could reach their own internal benchmark—in other words, whether they are outstanding at the primary or secondary level, if they could get the other phase of education up to the same level—that would mean many thousands more pupils were attending a good or outstanding school.

Turning to London, I have already mentioned the gap at GCSE level between London and the rest of the country, and how London outperforms considerably when it comes to poorer children. In fact, it starts a lot earlier than GCSEs, and the effect persists a long time after age 16. It seems that in London, even before school begins, poorer children outperform children in the rest of the country at the early years foundation stage, to the extent that one can talk about a three-year-old outperforming. They pull away as they progress to infant and junior school, and by the time they reach age 15 and 16, they are almost 50% more likely than children outside London to get five or more good GCSEs, they are twice as likely as disadvantaged children elsewhere to go to university and, depending on which numbers one looks at, they are perhaps up to four times as likely to end up going to a Russell Group university, although the numbers are still small—one in 25 rather than one in 100.

Why is that? There was a thing called the London challenge. Whenever the outperformance of London comes up, the most obvious thing to say is, “London does well because of the London challenge.” Is that true? I have absolutely no doubt that the London challenge has been beneficial, and it is also true that there is a fuzzy boundary around it. In the period from about 2000 until now, many initiatives have either happened first in London before spreading elsewhere or been specific to London. They may or may not have been merchandised as part of the London challenge, but in a broader sense it could be said that they were.

But—it is an important “but”—there are a number of reasons to believe that the London challenge is not the sole or primary cause of London’s educational outperformance. The first and most important reason is that the year in which London’s GCSE performance caught up with the rest of the country was 2003, the year when the London challenge started. By definition, all the kids who did their GCSEs in 2003 had spent their entire life not in the London challenge. Politically, 2003 was a good year to start a programme focused on making London better, because from there everything was going up. The second reason is that after the initial London challenge, when it was extended to Greater Manchester and the black country, it did not translate as well. There were some improvements in performance, but not nearly on the same scale as in London.

[Ian Mearns]

The hon. Gentleman is right about the starting date for the London challenge, but the London challenge came on the back of other initiatives instigated by the previous Government, such as excellence in cities. Those programmes also occurred in other parts of the country, but they were not followed by the London challenge.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right. I acknowledged that there were a number of initiatives before 2003, and others that were not necessarily branded as the London challenge, but could more broadly be said to have been part of it. He is right that a number of things were done elsewhere, but the simple fact is that after all of that, and with the ability to copy from London anything that anyone would want to copy, we still have a 16 percentage point gap in GCSE performance among disadvantaged pupils between those who happen to have been born in London and those who happen to have been born in the rest of the country.

[Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)]

I am in the awkward position of trying to avoid questions to prompt the Minister that he will no doubt be asked at tomorrow’s meeting as well. Can I plant something for the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) to consider as he goes through his analysis of the situation? Where does a national strategy as a remedy fit in with the general direction of travel towards greater autonomy within schools?

[Damian Hinds]

There is always a balance. I suppose it partly depends on one’s political tradition, where one comes from and what one tends to think works. We could say that the London challenge had a bit of both. On one hand, one area, Greater London, was doing its own thing, and within that, there was plenty of innovation in individual schools, which were encouraged to innovate, but on the other, it had system-wide leadership. There is always a tension and a balance.

The third reason to doubt that the London challenge was the sole or primary cause of the improvements is that the difference between children on free school meals and others was so marked, and the London challenge was not solely about children on free school meals or poorer children. The fourth reason is that it seems that London’s poorer pupils may already be ahead before school has even begun. There are so many other things that are different about London that we owe it to ourselves to at least examine them and consider what role they may have played.

[Ian Mearns]

The hon. Gentleman has not yet covered one factor that I am convinced has an impact. The Greater London area employment market is such that it is much easier to have achievable employment ambition and aspiration than it is in other parts of the country. In areas such as the north-east, where unemployment has continued to rise and youth unemployment is still growing, ambition and aspiration are difficult for many, because they do not see light at the end of the tunnel.

[Damian Hinds]

Can we hold that point? I will come back to it a wee bit later.

If the difference is not the London challenge alone—I totally acknowledge the beneficial effects of many of the programmes within it—is it simply more money? Of course, whenever we mention London’s outperformance, people say, “Oh, they get more money.” Yes, London schools get more money, but when we adjust that for deprivation, we discover that the difference is not quite as big as it at first appeared. In other words, when comparing the high number of free school meals in London with those in the rest of the country, the funding premium is not quite as large, although costs are higher in London, which is why there has historically been higher funding.

If we were to say it is just about having more money, we would have to say what more money has bought. Since I started working on this subject, people have told me that class sizes in London are smaller, but they are not. Bizarrely, they are slightly bigger than in the rest of the country, except at key stage 3. There is not a higher proportion of teaching assistants. Teachers are paid more, as are people in lots of occupations and professions in London, because of London weighting, but the difference in pay for the average London teacher versus the average teacher elsewhere is less than advertised. According to the ads, someone can earn up to 25% more as a newly qualified teacher in London, but the actual difference in take-home pay is on average smaller, because London teachers are younger and further down the pay scales.

What is different? I shall come to some of the things that the hon. Member for Gateshead mentioned. First, all sorts of things about the city are different compared with other parts of the country. The employment market is different, as he rightly says, which manifests itself in different ways. There are differential rates of unemployment, and youth unemployment in London remains concerning. In addition, there is the visibility of opportunities. If someone is travelling on buses and underground trains, they will be interacting with all the adverts, the people and all the rest of it. There is the cultural capital of the city—the museums and art galleries—and the pull factor of more university places. There are more university places per head of population in London than in other cities, and most people travel only a short distance from home to go to university. Everything is nearer. That helps with school choice—children go across local authority boundaries to go to school—and it helps schools wishing to co-operate with one another.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I have read the report by the hon. Gentleman’s all-party group on social mobility. It is a fascinating, interesting and detailed piece of work, and I congratulate him on it. However, all the factors that he has mentioned have not changed in the past 15 years. London is no further away from anywhere else than it was 15 years ago. I presume he will go on to explain what he thinks has changed.

[Damian Hinds]

The shadow Minister is such a nice man. He has read “Capital Mobility”, the report by the all-party group. I did not realise he had also read the sheet of paper in front of me, which states that many of those things were also true when London was the problem child of British education, before it became the poster child. Although such factors are relevant, we cannot ascribe the difference in London performance specifically to them.

The population make-up of London is one massive change and a massive difference. London is diverse on a scale unknown in the rest of the United Kingdom—indeed, unknown in most of the rest of the world. London’s state secondary schools are now 32% white British by ethnic origin, and the statistic for kids just starting secondary school is extraordinary: 48% do not have English as their mother tongue. An even more surprising statistic is that children with English as an additional language come very close in performance by GCSEs to children who have English as their mother tongue, and in London they beat them—in GCSEs in London, children who do not speak English as their mother tongue very slightly outperform those who do. That raises difficult questions.

I do not want to pre-empt tomorrow’s Committee meeting, at which, sadly, I will not be able to join my Opposition compadres, but I know the Minister will be appearing before the Committee to talk about the performance of white working class pupils. It is true that all ethnic groups do better in London than they do outside—spectacularly so in the case of children of Pakistani origin. There is a 14% gap between the performance of pupils of Pakistani origin in London versus the rest of the country.

There are other relevant differences in London, some of which might be driven by differences and diversity in ethnicity and religion, such as larger families and older, better educated mothers. Surprisingly, it is estimated that parents in London are slightly more likely to be married than parents outside London. It is slightly odd that we can only estimate that, but that is another question altogether. There are more families with a parent at home. There is less use of formal child care, slightly lower participation in free school provision, and slightly more use of tutors. One would normally associate such things with lower educational attainment, particularly in terms of early years participation, which again raises important, difficult and challenging questions.

What is different and what might we be able to have an impact on, given that we cannot have much impact on the composition of the population? London teachers are more diverse, more likely to have been educated abroad, more likely to be full time, and, before somebody says it, a bit less likely to have qualified teacher status—given the sorts of numbers we are talking about, I do not think that that is particularly relevant.

Teachers are also a little less likely to be on upper pay scales or the advanced skill scale and more likely to be on the main pay scales. Within the London challenge, there were various recruitment initiatives, which included addressing housing problems. One of those initiatives was Teach First. Opinions vary and sometimes teachers get wound up if we bang on too much about Teach First, but Teach First teachers can have a positive, disruptive impact as they come into schools, observe existing teachers, bring ideas of their own, swap things around and so on. Some 48% of Teach First teachers are still in London, and I think there is an opportunity to spread that scheme more widely.

There was a big focus on leadership in the London challenge. It was about supporting leaders in schools and ensuring that they were paid properly. As an aside, primary schools in London are on average a lot bigger than primary schools outside, and I wonder whether that means it is possible to afford more by way of leadership. Alongside that support and remuneration was intense scrutiny and what people close to the London challenge operation would describe as verging on ruthlessness to ensure that schools were being run absolutely as well as they could be. That was all facilitated by an intense use of data and what are called families of schools, whereby someone could compare their school to others in similar circumstances, so they could see what was really possible.

London also over-indexed greatly on sponsored academies. Compared with the rest of the country, London is much more likely to have sponsored academies. That relatively small number of schools had a disproportionately larger impact on the overall performance of London as a whole, because the results tended to go from very low to very good.

Where does all that leave us? I should like to put a number of things to the Minister. I do not pretend for a moment to have all the answers, or even most of them, but some things are obvious challenges. First, on attracting the best teachers, we know that most people stay in their home region. That puts a premium on marketing intensely the teaching profession to high performers within the areas and regions where they are most needed, at school-leaver level and university graduate level.

Secondly, there has to be a big opportunity for Teach First outside London. That is happening, or starting to happen, already. There is now a focus on Bournemouth, which is welcome. We need to bear in mind why 48% of Teach First teachers were in London. One reason is that the programme started there. Another is that, of course, young people like to move to London; that cannot be changed very much. Another big factor is the network effect: knowing that other new graduates are doing the same programme in schools relatively nearby and so having social and support networks. Some co-ordinated, geographically-focused expansion of Teach First would be smart.

There are always questions in some schools about what the pupil premium can be used for. What is the Minister’s attitude to schools in heavily disadvantaged areas using it to pay teachers more, to attract the best? Alongside attracting the best teachers, there is also the matter of getting top leadership to the areas where it is needed most. In that regard, I look to the growth of initiatives such as Future Leaders. I wonder whether the incentives are enough. Can those be looked at, to ensure that they are sufficient and that they persuade people to go where they are most needed?

I turn to geographical patterns. There can sometimes be an over-supply of national education leaders in areas away from schools where their support would be most beneficial. I wonder whether it is possible to improve that situation by using technology, for example.

[Julian Smith]

On attracting talent, does my hon. Friend agree that, as well as the Government’s coming up with initiatives, we need to encourage schools and local authorities to cast the net wider? Again, coming back to North Yorkshire, it is a challenge to get local authority education department leaders or heads from outside the region. We need to get the schools and council to work harder to achieve that.

[Damian Hinds]

My hon. Friend is right. An intense marketing effort, leaving no stone unturned in the search for talent, is absolutely essential.

Having mentioned people, let me speak more broadly. We need to be impatient on behalf of the places where the academies revolution has not happened. In London, we have seen what it can do. There needs, through whatever means, to be a lot more push on that issue in parts of the country where the change has not happened.

There are some specifics from the London challenge. Are we using data enough outside London—particularly in identifying families of schools, so that each school can compare itself with others? Although the term “sub-regional strategies” always gives me a bit of a rash, I wonder about the role of system-wide leadership. When I am talking to teachers and head teachers about the London challenge, they always talk about the person who led it and his assistant and immediate team. I wonder about the balance that must be struck between individual school autonomy, which I am a great supporter of, and having a sense of shared ownership and system leadership.

I started by commending the Government’s twin approach to education, in respect of raising overall attainment and narrowing the gap. It is right that we do both; it is no good equalising performance around some sort of acceptable average. A lot has been done, but the gap is still wide. There is much more to do in our quest for the combination of social justice and economic efficiency which is social mobility or opportunity for all.

There is a lot going for us in that quest. We have unprecedented amounts of data at our fingertips as well as international benchmarking and case studies. Schools have been set free to innovate, and we have the Early Intervention Foundation and the Education Endowment Foundation. There is certainly the political will from the Minister and his colleagues. However, quite a lot of questions remain. As I said, I certainly do not have all the answers and I am concerned that some of the answers do not yet exist. However, we need to keep asking questions, including about how one area of the country can learn from another. That is the focus of this debate, which I hope will play a small but useful role in that quest.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct.

I appreciate that the civil service’s work load may be great. I understand that in the most recent survey of civil servants in the Department, many of them expressed concern about how they are being treated. However, a year is a reasonable period, after a survey has been completed, to publish it. In this day and age, the Department does not need to analyse the data; it should just publish them. Others, including the Education Committee, the hon. Member for East Hampshire, who is thorough in his research, as we have seen today, and many others in the blogosphere so loved by the Secretary of State for Education, will tell us what they conclude the survey to say. Will the Minister commit today to publish the survey, in the interest of letting us know what is happening with teachers; whether the Government are getting it right in doing what they said they wanted to do in their White Paper a few years ago, which is to give proper status to the importance of teaching; and whether the work force are well motivated by the Government’s policies? I hope that he will tell us in his conclusion when he will publish the report, with the emphasis on “when”.

The London factor was mentioned a lot in this debate. There is considerable evidence of the impact of the London challenge. I accept what the hon. Member for East Hampshire said in his remarks—that that is not the only factor we should consider regarding the performance of London’s schools, which have outperformed schools in other parts of the country and are the most improved schools in the country—but the London challenge is undoubtedly an important part of the London factor.

An Ofsted report published in 2010 found the London challenge to be a great success. The report attributed that to a number of factors:

“Clear, consistent leadership…Improvement programmes which matched strategies to the needs of individual schools…Strategic deployment of support from the London Leadership Strategy…Successful heads mentoring head teachers in target schools…Sensitive matching of partners under the leadership of LC advisers…Support, ‘without strings attached and without conflicts of interest’, from local authorities…external consultants or teaching schools aimed at raising the quality of teaching and learning…Collaboration between schools and grouping schools in families…Continuing development programmes for teachers…Teachers being committed to all London children not just those in their own school…The development of robust tracking systems to monitor children’s progress.”

Those kinds of factors are the ones we should be seeking to replicate across the country. I have a concern—I put it no more strongly than that, in this more academic forum this morning—that elements of the Government’s approach to education policy are militating against the ability to achieve the 10 key factors that were identified in the Ofsted report.

[Damian Hinds]

Just out of interest—this is not meant to be a political challenge—regarding all the things the hon. Gentleman mentioned that could be replicated, the Labour Government tried to do that in 2008 in the black country and in Manchester. I am interested in his analysis of why there was no read-across.

[Kevin Brennan]

I think there was some read-across, particularly in Manchester, where it worked better than elsewhere. I do not think the policy was given enough time. This Government were wrong to abandon that approach when they came in, in favour of a wholesale structural and cultural revolution, rather than looking at those key factors and attempting more effectively to replicate them. The system has been endangered by wholesale atomisation—the creation of this kind of Govian archipelago of schools across the country that are not well connected.

What the London challenge tells us—I sense sometimes that the Schools Minister may have some sympathy with this point—is that, while autonomy at school level is important, it should be provided within a collaborative system and a culture of collaboration, with highly qualified and well motivated professionals working together in the interests of all the children in that particular area. That was the lesson from the Ofsted report, which should be returned to and should become our mantra in trying to improve schools across the country. We should not simply rely on the idea that changing the sign at the front of the school and introducing academies and free schools will solve all our problems. It will not, and any intelligent analysis will show that.

We accept that we now have a variety of different types of schools, but let us re-introduce into the system the values of the London challenge that have been shown to be valuable in raising standards. That is not to say that everything from London is replicable across the country, due to many of the factors mentioned by the hon. Member for East Hampshire, but it is clear that they are key features of the London challenge that worked, and features of school systems in other parts of the world that show them to be a success.

I am conscious of time and I want to leave the Minister with time to respond, so I will briefly say a few more things. We have not heard much today about the importance of early years. I am not going to speak extensively about what the previous Government did on that; it has already been mentioned by other colleagues. We welcome and support—in fact, we proposed this—the extension of early years to two-year-olds. However, we need to do much more on that, and we need to have a much better offer for parents, particularly in relation to child care. We have already proposed a primary child care guarantee and extending free child care for three and four-year-olds from 15 hours to 24 hours per week. The Government ought to consider those proposals.

The pupil premium has been mentioned. Let us be clear: it was not really a premium, in the sense that it did not constitute any extra money in the system. When in opposition, the Schools Minister had said that there would be additional money—

Oral Answers to Questions

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

Free schools are being targeted at areas of basic need and where standards are low. We are trying to ensure that the free schools programme complements the Government’s work to provide school places and raise standards throughout the country.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

18. What assessment he has made of the potential role of schools in building character and resilience in young people.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Mr Edward Timpson)]

Schools play an important role in providing character-building activities for their pupils. Sports clubs, orchestras and choirs, school plays, cadet forces and debating competitions all help to build character and give children opportunities to flourish. Schools are best placed to determine the needs of their pupils and how best to meet them.

[Damian Hinds]

Given that welcome emphasis on character building for all, may I commend to the Minister—and subtly plug—a report out tomorrow on character and resilience by the all-party group on social mobility? Will he consider more ways to develop these crucial traits throughout childhood, and in and out of school?

[Mr Speaker]

Not that subtly.

Teaching Quality

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Bill Esterson]

My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) talked about London Challenge and the huge success that happened right across London. Does my right hon. Friend agree that one way of addressing the problems in Wolverhampton would be to have that whole system and a thorough investment in skills?

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

They have had it.

[Bill Esterson]

The hon. Gentleman says that they have had it. I am talking on a much more extensive scale.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), my erstwhile colleague on the Education Committee, who spoke passionately and, for the most part, compellingly. I agree entirely that teaching is a noble profession and a vocation.

I also agree with three key aspects of Labour’s motion. First, it is obviously right that the quality and effectiveness of a school system cannot exceed the quality and effectiveness of the teachers in it. Secondly, those teachers must be able to access the best possible training and ongoing development, and not just in subject knowledge, but in classroom management, lesson planning, progress tracking and all the other things that are so important. Thirdly, I agree about the importance of validating and revalidating teachers’ effectiveness, because if we want to raise the bar and improve the overall level, we cannot wait for a turnaround in all the generations of teachers. I disagree on exactly where and how that validation should happen, however, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore).

There are also three important deficiencies in the motion. First, in its headline emphasis on qualified teacher status, it refers to a very small proportion of teachers. It is often said that no one forgets a great teacher. Sadly, most of us can also remember at least one who was pretty rubbish. I mean that not as a value judgment or a political point, but as a statement of fact; some teachers are better than others, and some are just not very good at teaching. That person we remember was almost certainly a qualified teacher. According to the 2012 work force survey, 96.5% of teachers were qualified, which means 3.5% were not, and the figure is now lower than it was under the previous Government. As the Secretary of State pointed out, the part of the country that does best in education is the part with the highest proportion of non-qualified teachers, and—to add another little fact—four fifths of them are not on a route towards QTS.

Secondly, the motion is logically inconsistent. If QTS is an irreplaceable standard that every teacher should reach before being let loose in the classroom, how can it possibly be acceptable to have someone teaching who has only just begun the route towards QTS? Thirdly, the motion’s critical deficiency is that it conflates two words that sound a bit the same but are completely different: “qualifications” and “quality.” I note that the conflation extends even to the hallowed institution of our democracy, the Order Paper, because two days ago it referred to a debate on teacher qualifications, but today that has morphed seamlessly into a debate on teacher quality. Either subject would have been an important and interesting subject for debate, but they are completely different topics. That is the fundamental problem here.

I do not expect a sudden flood of teachers who have not done a PGCE or other qualification to come into teaching. When Mary Beard appeared before the Education Committee, she talked about Jamie’s dream school—I hate to bring it up again—and, when asked what she would have done differently, said, “A bit of training would have been nice before going in to teach the kids.” What an understatement. Of course, an individual going into teaching, let along the school and the parents, wants to know that they have been properly trained to cope with the situation.

There are, however, circumstances in which somebody has a lot to give, and in which taking the necessary time out for full retraining—something like a PGCE—would put them off. They might be someone who has taught for years in a private school, a university lecturer, a business leader who goes in part-time to do lessons in entrepreneurship, or an artist, musician or actor with unique skills and creativity. I want such things to be available to kids in our state system.

Private schools educate only 7% of children in this country, but they account for 32% of AAAs at A-level. There are differences between private and state schools, the biggest of which is in the resources of money and facilities that are available. One of the others is the freedom accorded head teachers, reporting to governors, about who they employ and how they run their school. We have a rigorous accountability regime for exams, Ofsted and pupil choice. Within that framework, a head teacher, reporting to their board of governors, should be able to decide the direction in which their school goes. There are things we should focus on to improve teacher quality.

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the focus should be on the quality of education for children in schools, as opposed to the quality of delivering paperwork to be revalidated?

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds]

I absolutely agree.

We can do other things further to raise teacher quality; that is what the title of this debate turned out to be. The first of those concerns Teach First, which accounts for a relatively small proportion of the overall teaching work force. It is heavily concentrated—half of all Teach First teachers are there—in London, which has come up more than once today. It has what I call a positive disruptive influence in schools in bringing in new ideas, in new teachers learning from teachers it already employs and those teachers learning from new ones and, importantly, in increasing the pool for recruitment and selection. Head teachers often say that having more people, including fresh graduates, applying for jobs helps them a lot. We need greatly to expand Teach First outside London.

[Chris Skidmore]

Does my hon. Friend welcome the fact that when, this morning, I met and spoke to the chief executive officer of Teach First, Brett Wigdortz, he talked about its tremendous success in the city close to my constituency, Bristol? Teach First has now established centres there, so regionalisation is taking place as we speak.

[Damian Hinds]

I very much welcome that. Teach First is also doing good work in Bournemouth, a coastal town that has had particular issues. We should look at what impact it has had there—

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

And in Ipswich.

[Damian Hinds]

And in Ipswich, but I want that to be done on a big scale in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and all the other places where we can make a big difference. We now have Teach Next, and it would be nice to have “Teach Later” so that people towards the end of their careers in business or academia who want to come back and give something back to schools can do so.

The second critical thing we could do is further to develop performance management and performance pay. That has been well covered by other hon. Members and, as time is short, I will not bang on about it.

The final thing I want to mention—I apologise to erstwhile Select Committee colleagues, because I have frequently banged on about this in the past—is how teaching is such a high stakes profession and is such a high stakes commitment to make. When people do their PGCE or undergraduate degree, the assumption is that they will do the job for life. There are very few careers left in this country for which that is the case.

We ask, “How can you tell a great teacher?” The answer is that we cannot: we cannot tell from a paper qualification, QTS, degree results or anything else, but we know it when we see it. That also goes for the individual considering teaching. We need a heavy emphasis in teacher training and accreditation on classroom performance. We also need more taster sessions, in which sixth-formers or undergraduates considering doing an undergraduate education degree or a PGCE get an opportunity to teach in a classroom and figure out if it is right for them.

PISA Results

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

It is absolutely right that we encourage more men to consider teaching, particularly in primary schools, as an aspirational profession. I am delighted that there has been an increase in the number of highly talented men entering primary teaching.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Although it may be politically attractive to try to scare people with the red herring of unqualified teachers, is this not really a question of trusting heads? Non-qualified teacher status teachers have long existed in the state sector, but they are relatively few in number and fewer now than under the previous Government. As it happens, the most improved region—London—employs the most.

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes a characteristically well-informed point. One of the revealing things over the past 50 minutes or so is that some Labour MPs have been wise enough to acknowledge that there is a great deal of common ground between both parties on the need to reform our schools system, but those Labour MPs who have asked critical questions have criticised us on only one thing and they have used statistics that, I am afraid, simply mislead.

Oral Answers to Questions

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

I am going to execute the plan that we set out last month. I welcome the hon. Lady to her post. The best way to solve careers advice is not to insist on a bureaucratic system of requirements, but to ensure that people in the workplace are closer to education and that schools communicate with employers, so that those who deliver careers advice understand the careers on which they are advising.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Does the Minister share my experience that it is quite unusual to hear someone of any age spontaneously talking about the excellent careers advice they received, and even rarer to meet someone who is in the job that they were once advised was for them? Is not the best advice often to keep one’s options open by choosing valuable, trusted subjects, hence the EBacc and TechBac?

Qualified Teachers

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I welcome you to the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is the first time I have spoken since your elevation.

I congratulate all hon. Members who have participated in this interesting debate. We would have liked to have explored the technical and legal sides of qualified teacher status more, but time was limited, as it often is on these occasions.

This is essentially a simple debate on a straightforward motion concerning a proposition supported by the majority of Members of this House, so it ought to pass. We have been spared complication by not debating the coalition Government’s position. However, for those interested in the context, that position is still worth checking, if only for its comedy value. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time in the history of the House of Commons that a Government have tabled a satirical amendment. I will not go there, Madam Deputy Speaker, because you would rule me out of order if I did. What we have is confirmation of what I said at the outset, namely that the Deputy Prime Minister and his colleagues believe that

“all schools should employ teachers with Qualified Teacher Status”.

If they believe that, the motion should pass.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

rose—

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

rose—

Secondary Schools (Accountability)

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. One of the deficiencies of the existing accountability regime is that it is too easy for schools in comfortable catchment areas to coast and to fail to deliver for many of their pupils. They are not in the spotlight at present; they will be in the future.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Of all this Government’s school reforms, is this perhaps the most significant in terms of its breadth of impact right across education, ensuring that teachers’ efforts on behalf of all pupils are fully recognised? Does the Minister anticipate a warm welcome from teachers, who will be able to do what they entered this noble profession to do: to deliver a broad education free from the artificial constraints of the C/D borderline?

[Mr Laws]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I believe that today’s announcement has so far been warmly welcomed by teachers’ organisations and others. It will allow a good measure of accountability—an intelligent accountability that drives the right results and the right behaviours at all schools.