Catholic Schools (Admissions)

Debate between Damian Hinds and Barry Sheerman

Wednesday 30th April 2014 Westminster Hall

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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—

Early Childhood Development

Debate between Damian Hinds and Barry Sheerman

Thursday 30th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds]

Clearly, there is a link—a range of studies suggest different ways in which that link manifests itself—and I do not think that any commentator argues about its existence, but there is nothing inevitable about that; it ought to be possible to equalise children’s life chances. Of course, there are examples of both brilliant and awful parenting in every income bracket. Children’s development is no respecter of the home they happen to have been born into. As the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) says,

“it is primarily parents who shape their children’s outcomes—a healthy pregnancy, good mental health, the way that they parent and whether the home environment is educational”.

As he and many others say, what parents do is much more important than who they are.

Home life is difficult territory for the state. I suggest that we need to think harder about how to communicate what is known about successful, positive ways to parent—a quite substantial body of evidence—in a way that does not come across as, and in fact is not, telling people how to bring up their children.

Geography, as well as income group, reveals other interesting differences in early child development. There is a particular difference in London. When people are told this, they assume that child development is worse in London than elsewhere, because of all the issues in a big city like this. However, that is not so. There was another report last week about the different school results of children growing up in London, versus those growing up elsewhere. That is often attributed to the London Challenge, which started in 2003. There are a number of reasons to believe that the London Challenge was not the sole or primary cause of those improvements. One reason to disbelieve that is that the difference in attainment scores for disadvantaged children is apparent way before they get to secondary school; in fact, it is apparent even in pre-school assessments: on average, disadvantaged children in London seem to do about 20% better on the “good level of development” scale than disadvantaged children in the rest of the country. A bunch of things are different about London children and families.

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

Excuse my missing the beginning of the hon. Gentleman’s speech, Mr Weir. As someone who was involved in the London Challenge, I should like to know what the relationship is. I am not clear about that. If it was not the London Challenge, what made the difference?

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman asks a big question. I do not want to test your patience, Mr Weir, by debating the London Challenge, rather than early child development. I will talk in a minute about societal differences that may or may not be driving factors. The honest answer is that we do not know, but there are reasons to disbelieve that the simple explanation for London’s improvement is the London Challenge. First, the differences are apparent long before children reach secondary school, and the hon. Gentleman will recall that it only started in 2003. Secondly, when translated from London to the black country and Manchester, there were not the same results. Thirdly, so many other things that are different about London are worth looking into.