Tutoring Provision

Debate between Damian Hinds and Jonathan Gullis

Tuesday 19th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds]

Let us not pursue the thing about the pupil premium. That happened to be in both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat plans for Government ahead of 2010. The two parties worked well together in coalition, and that is a good thing that we should welcome. There had been progress on the disadvantage gap. It is also true, as I was just saying, that covid hit the whole world, but it also hit different groups of children differentially, and we are still seeing the effects of that in the disadvantage gap. I will come back to that.

Tutoring has been a key part of our recovery plan, and I thank everybody who has been involved in it: the tutors, the tutoring organisations, the teachers and teaching assistants, and everybody else who has made it possible. My hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield mentioned the particular role and contribution of volunteers, and I join him in that. It is a very special thing to do.

The national tutoring programme is not necessarily what always comes to mind when the person in the street thinks of tutoring. A lot of it, as the hon. Member for Twickenham alluded to, is small group work; it is not just one to one. Although very important work has been done by outside tutoring organisations, most of the work on the national tutoring programme has been done by existing staff in schools. We have committed £1.4 billion to the four-year life of the national tutoring programme in schools and colleges, and invested in the 16 to 19 tuition fund.

For the second year of the programme—my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North referred to this—funding has gone directly to schools. That has enabled schools to choose the right approach for them and their children through the use of their own staff, accessing quality-assured tuition partners or employing an academic mentor. We created the find a tuition partner service to put schools in touch with those opportunities, and also provided training through the Education Development Trust for staff, including teaching assistants who deliver tutoring.

Nearly 5 million courses have been started since the NTP launched in November 2020, and 46% of the pupils tutored last year had been eligible for free school meals in the past six years. That is the “ever 6” measure—a measure of disadvantage. The 16 to 19 tuition fund will also have delivered hundreds of thousands of courses.

The tutoring programme has been part of the wider £5 billion education recovery funding, which is made up of the £1.4 billion for tutoring, £400 million for aspects of teacher training, £800 million for additional time in 16 to 19, and nearly £2 billion directly to schools for evidence-based interventions appropriate to pupils’ needs.

The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North rightly mentioned speech and language interventions. I can tell her that already two thirds of primary schools have benefited—211,000 year R children so far—from our investment in the Nuffield early language intervention programme. The evidence suggests that the programme assists children in making four months’ worth of additional progress, while children eligible for free school meals make greater progress of seven months.

Covid hit the world, including us. It did not hit every discipline in exactly the same way. Some of us will recognise from our own time at home with children that some things were easier to do than others. Reading at key stage 2 and junior school held up pretty well during covid. Maths has now improved and the standard is now close to what it was in the years before covid. Writing is still behind, although we have had a 2% improvement since last year.

Big challenges remain. No one denies that the No. 1 issue is attendance. This almost sounds trite, but there is an obvious link between being at school and the attainment achieved. It bears repeating that even if there are difficulties in having many children in school, we really have to work on attendance. As well as the overall attainment effect of attendance, there is a differential factor between the cohort of pupils as a whole and disadvantaged pupils; in other words, there is a bit more absence in the latter group than the former. There is also a link—some studies say it plays a really big part—between attendance and the attainment gap, which makes it doubly important that we work on attendance.

As colleagues know, schools are doing many things brilliantly, as are local authorities and others, to try to get attendance back up to pre-covid levels. Obviously, every child needs to be off school at some time because of sickness—all of us were when we were children. That will always be true, but we need to get back to the levels we had before covid.

The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North alluded to specific things that we do around breakfast clubs. It is important to do them in a targeted way, and not just in primary school, as the Labour party plans to do, but in secondary school as well. There are issues around mental health support, which is why we are gradually rolling out the mental health support teams across the country. Again, we think that it is right to have that in both phases—it is important at both primary and secondary school—and schools are also doing an immense amount of work.

Although the national tutoring programme was always a time-limited programme post-covid, tutoring will continue to play an important role and we know that the evidence shows that tutoring is an effective, targeted approach to increase pupils’ attainment. Headteachers are best placed to decide how to invest their funding, depending on their particular circumstances and priorities, and that approach underpins our whole approach to the school system, in that we put headteachers in charge. I anticipate many schools continuing to make tutoring opportunities available to their pupils and we will continue to support schools to deliver tutoring in future, including through pupil premium funding, which will rise to more than £2.9 billion in 2024-25.

Schools decide how to use their funding, aided by the Education Endowment Foundation, which sets out good knowledge and advice on the best uses of funding for the education programmes with the most efficacy. I do not think there is a conflict between universal and highly targeted programmes. We target via the funding formula and then headteachers are best placed, armed with the knowledge from the EEF and others, to decide how to use that funding. The overall national funding formula has the disadvantage element, which next year will be a bigger proportion than has previously been the case. Then, of course, there is the pupil premium.

[Jonathan Gullis]

I have outlined in detail why I think schools need the additional funding due to the financial pressures they are under. However, if the Government are not seeking to do that—which, personally, I think is a mistake—is the Department for Education planning to somehow monitor how many schools continue to deliver tutoring and the percentage of disadvantaged pupils? Or is the Department simply not going to keep an eye on the ball after the funding ends and rely on headteachers, who will, as the Minister has rightly said, do things in the best interests of their pupils? Ultimately, that will leave us in this place with less knowledge about the spending decisions and whether the support is continuing and embedded, which was the aim of the programme when initially introduced.

[Damian Hinds]

It is absolutely appropriate to embed tutoring into schools’ wider progress, because we know from our gold standard analyser the EEF and other studies that that approach has efficacy and achieves results, although obviously it depends on how it is done. As my hon. Friend puts it, we will keep an eye on the matter, but that is not the same as specifying that Mrs Smith the headteacher should do this but not that. We think Mrs Smith should be able to decide. We also have Ofsted inspections and the results are published as part of a system that is transparent but that also empowers schools, school leaders and trusts to make those decisions.

Prison Capacity

Debate between Damian Hinds and Jonathan Gullis

Wednesday 30th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

The right hon. Lady raises an important point about probation, which is an incredibly important profession. It can be an attractive career for many people, with a real, strong sense of public service and wanting to help our whole society. We are recruiting at the moment. We need more people to join the probation service and are keen for them to do so. I hope that she will join me in encouraging that.

I think that the right hon. Lady mentioned the extended use of police cells. I want to reassure her and the House that this is not about long periods of time. It is about one or two nights for an individual. In most cases, it is one night and, the next day, that individual would be prioritised for reallocation to a prison.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

Mr Speaker, you will be aware that, in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke, we are keen to see scumbags locked up for a longer period of time. But, unfortunately, at this moment in time, 12% of the prison population are foreign national offenders. What is the Ministry of Justice doing to get those people out to serve their sentences elsewhere?

[Damian Hinds]

Foreign national offenders are a significant minority of the prison population and it is important that we have a good process to remove them. As my hon. Friend will know, in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, we changed the law to enable removal at the nine-month point rather than at 12 months. Of course, we have also signed the agreement with Albania, and we are keen to sign similar agreements with other countries in the EU and the wider world.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Damian Hinds and Jonathan Gullis

Tuesday 22nd November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

I can reassure the hon. and learned Lady that the email she speaks of was not an official Ministry of Justice or HM Prison and Probation Service email; it was from a network of staff. It does not constitute official advice. The Department is looking again at how internal communications are done. Most importantly, she will be aware of the Deputy Prime Minister’s move to ensure that in future the default assumption is that if you are a transgender woman with intact male genitalia, you will not be placed in the female estate. That is an important part of the reform package.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

Last June, six-year-old Sharlotte-Sky was killed as she was walking along the pavement near her home in Norton Green. Her killer, John Owen, had been drinking, was on drugs, was speeding, was not wearing a seatbelt and was on his mobile phone. He got an insulting six years and four months in prison. Will the Lord Chancellor meet Sharlotte’s mother Claire and me to urgently discuss sentencing guidelines, to ensure that justice is truly served next time?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Damian Hinds and Jonathan Gullis

Monday 24th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Jonathan Gullis)]

The hon. Lady knows that I am a huge admirer and fan of hers, which she may not put on any election leaflets. I can tell her that the PE and sport premium is very important to me, especially after the fantastic victory by the Lionesses. They really set the tone with the great work of making sure that sport, particularly football, is more accessible no matter people’s gender, race or anything else, so it is so important that we get this right. I am fully committed to working with the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to get that premium, and I am more than happy to meet the hon. Lady to discuss it further.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

At the end of the first full T-levels cycle, can I commend colleges, including Alton College in my constituency, for their work with employers? What more can be done by Ministers across Government to encourage more employers to come forward and offer industry placements to invest in the talent pipeline, both for their own good and for the good of our entire economy and society?