VAT: Independent Schools
Debate between Damian Hinds and Munira Wilson(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, and I am grateful for the Health Secretary’s advice—[Interruption.] I did not need coaching—you will hear that soon enough.
When I heard that today’s debate would be about schools, I thought, thank goodness, we are finally going to give the crisis in our classrooms the attention it deserves and have a long, overdue serious debate about the squeeze on school budgets, the shortage of specialist teachers, the dangerous state of many school buildings, the crisis in special educational needs provision, or the mental health of children, but no. In fairness, expecting the Conservative party suddenly to start prioritising those issues in opposition, after it spent years neglecting them in government, would be foolishly optimistic. Nevertheless, I hope that we will have the chance to debate them properly soon.
A priority for the Liberal Democrats is ensuring that every child, no matter their background, gets the support and attention that they need at school, so that they leave with the skills, confidence and resilience to be happy and successful. That means the Government investing in education as we invest in other vital infrastructure. In fact, Liberal Democrats believe that education is the single best investment we can make in our children’s potential and our country’s future. That is why in our manifesto we set out a number of ways to make that investment. We argued that putting a dedicated qualified mental health professional in every primary and secondary school was important. We argued for an increase in school and college funding per pupil, above the rate of inflation every year. We argued for school meals to be extended to all children in poverty, and for a tutoring guarantee for every disadvantaged pupil who needs extra support.
That package of investment in our state schools would improve and boost the performance and opportunities for every child, as well as closing the attainment gap that limits the life chances of too many children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Crucially, we set out in detail how it could all be paid for, including by increasing the tax on social media firms who have done so much to worsen the mental health crisis in our schools. That is a much bolder package of investment than the one this Government have set out so far, and it is paid for fairly, not by taxing parents’ own investment in their children’s education. I think the shadow Education Secretary was advocating raising income tax to invest in education—[Interruption.]
Munira Wilson
The shadow Education Secretary was suggesting to the Minister that that is where he could find some money—[Interruption.]
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Damian Hinds and Munira Wilson(7 months ago)
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Damian Hinds
I will indeed do that. My hon. Friend has brought up this subject with me and with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. There was that meeting with Mr Hardy on Friday. I know there are two separate cases around the condition improvement fund bid and the urgent capital support bid. We will continue to work with the school, and I will ensure that my hon. Friend gets that high-level meeting that she asks for.
Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)
Among other cuts, the Department for Education has quietly slipped out the announcement that it is slashing funding for Now Teach, which has supported more than 1,000 people to switch careers and retrain as secondary teachers in shortage subjects such as science, maths and modern languages. Why on earth are the Government withdrawing funding when they are missing their teacher training targets by 50% in some of these subjects, and when Now Teach has had such a brilliant track record in getting people to retrain as teachers?
Damian Hinds
First, I must say that the statistics the hon. Lady just gave on missing recruitment targets are incorrect. They are frequently repeated, but not right. We do think that career changes are an important part of people coming into this noble profession, and we are continuing with our career changes programme. We are not axing Now Teach; we are not re-procuring it, so we are not extending it again. To put it in perspective, it is roughly about 200 to 250 people in a typical year, out of about 7,000 career changes coming into teaching. We are reassessing the best way to attract more of them, because we want to grow the number of career changes coming into teaching and make sure that we go about it in the best and most productive way.
Tutoring Provision
Debate between Damian Hinds and Munira Wilson(8 months, 1 week ago)
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The Minister for Schools (Damian Hinds)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Cummins. I thank the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) for securing this important debate today. I also thank everybody who has taken part: the hon. Member herself, my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Paul Howell), the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who brought the Northern Ireland perspective, my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) and the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), who spoke for the Opposition.
The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North rightly spoke of the hard times of covid, which we all remember. Our home and professional experiences were indeed very difficult. They were also very difficult to plan for, because they were experiences that our country, like others, had not had before. I do not think it is right to say that people were slow to react. For example, I thought that what happened in respect of Oak National Academy was amazing and came together quickly. The work that teachers and headteachers did converting to virtual education and enabling home learning was remarkable, but there is no doubt that it was an incredibly hard time. International studies such as the programme for international student assessment show that the whole world, with the exception of only one or two jurisdictions, took a really big knock from covid. Almost every country took a serious hit in educational attainment from covid.
England held up relatively well. That is part of the reason why in the most recent PISA results, in mathematics for example, England was ranked 11th in the world. That is an improvement on recent times, particularly so if one looks back to the period before 2010 when England had been ranked 27th. We also saw improvements in reading and in science. In the progress in international reading literacy study 2021, primary school readers in England were ranked fourth in the world and first in the western world. However, none of that changes the fact that covid was a terrible knock to education here and elsewhere in the world.
Munira Wilson
The Minister and his colleagues talk a lot about the PISA scores, and obviously we cannot deny that evidence. He talked about the impact of the pandemic, but does he recognise that the attainment gap had been starting to dwindle? I noticed that he smarted when I mentioned that the pupil premium was a Liberal Democrat commitment that we delivered with the Conservatives in government.
Munira Wilson
Sorry, I was not wishing to make a political point. My question is: will the Minister recognise that the attainment gap was actually starting to widen again before the pandemic, and that the pandemic accelerated that trend? That is what we are all here to try to tackle through the tutoring programme.
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.
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.
Munira Wilson
I completely agree with the Minister about giving headteachers and teachers autonomy. As a Liberal, I do not believe in things being controlled from the centre, and teachers know best, but the reality of the funding situation, as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) pointed out, is that many schools are setting deficit budgets for the first time ever. We can talk about how money has gone up in cash terms, but it has not gone up in real terms. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that schools’ spending power has been reduced massively by inflationary costs.
I pointed out that the pupil premium has been cut by 14% in real terms. The tutoring fund underspent because many of the schools cannot match the funding that is available. The Minister may really believe that this is an effective, evidence-based intervention, but schools will not be able to continue without ringfenced, dedicated funding. I was told that last year when I went to visit Southwark College, which is dealing with some of the most disadvantaged pupils, who otherwise will have no life chances at all if they do not get the support they need.
Damian Hinds
On the subject of funding, including the pupil premium and the recently announced additional amounts for covering pension contributions, overall school funding next year will be £2.9 billion higher than it was in 2023-24. That will take the total to over £60 billion in 2024-25—the highest ever level in real terms per pupil.
We also remain committed to improving outcomes for students aged 16 to 19, particularly those yet to achieve their GCSE English and maths. That is a subject that came up earlier. I should stress that not having English and maths is not an impediment to starting an apprenticeship; the person just has to continue to study them while doing their apprenticeship.
I know that this subject stirs strong feelings in many people. We know that the workplace and life value of English and maths is immense, and that is why there is so much focus on those subjects as we develop the advanced British standard and in our design of the T-levels and some of the apprenticeship reforms. English and maths are so important for the futures of these young people, which is why in October we announced an additional £300 million over two years to support students who need to resit their GCSEs.
There is no rule that everybody has to resit a GCSE. Whether the person resits GCSE mathematics or takes a functional skills qualification depends on the GCSE grade that they got the first time around. The £300 million is part of what we call an initial downpayment on the development of the advanced British standard. As colleagues know, it will be a new baccalaureate-style qualification, bringing together the best of A-levels and T-levels in a single qualification and ending the artificial distinction between academic and vocational for good.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Twickenham for securing this debate, and to everybody who has been and continues to be involved in the national tutoring programme and the 16 to 19 programme. Tutoring can have a transformational effect on pupils’ and students’ attainment, and I am proud that the Department’s flagship tutoring programmes have been supporting so many in catch-up following covid-19. I thank everyone who has taken part in this debate, all the schools and colleges that have participated in these programmes, all the tutors—including the volunteer tutors—who have delivered them, and of course all the pupils and students for engaging so enthusiastically.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Damian Hinds and Munira Wilson(10 months ago)
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Damian Hinds
Of course, there are multiple layers to mental health support. The mental health support teams programme, which we are rolling out gradually across the country, continues to expand. At the end of March 2023, 35% of pupils in school or further education were covered by that, including 47% at secondary. When the figures for this year come out, I expect them to be higher. Unlike the Opposition, we are putting mental health support not only into secondary schools but into primary schools, where it can make a big difference.
Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)
The reality for mental health support teams in schools is that funding is not guaranteed beyond 2025, and the coverage is patchy. Earlier this month I heard about a teenager in a secondary school in my constituency who has not attended for four months because of mental ill health. The school is convinced that if there were dedicated, qualified mental health practitioners in secondary and primary schools, attendance would improve. Will the Minister back my ten-minute rule Bill to commit to exactly that duty, to be paid for by trebling the tax on social media companies, which so often are at the root of those problems?
Damian Hinds
The hon. Member identifies important problems. There are important links between mental ill health prevalence and non-attendance. We will see benefits from the offer to all state schools and colleges of a grant to train a senior mental health lead, as well as the wider mental health support teams that I mentioned.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Damian Hinds and Munira Wilson(11 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Damian Hinds
I value all those activities that my hon. Friend sets out that schools undertake for their children. Like her, I represent a rural constituency—indeed, we have next-door constituencies. I recognise what she says about small rural schools. Inspections have an important role to play, but Ofsted also has the flexibility in the framework to take account of the particular position of smaller schools.
Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)
Teacher workloads are being exacerbated by teacher vacancies that schools are struggling to fill, and funding pressures are resulting in cuts to support staff, who often support the most vulnerable and needy children. That is leading to an exodus of teachers from our schools. Just last week, we saw the staggering figures from the Government that teacher training recruitment targets have been missed by a whopping 50% in our secondary schools, with the sharpest fall in maths, which is allegedly a priority for the Prime Minister. How bad does it have to get before the Government will produce and implement a proper workforce strategy?
Damian Hinds
I can confirm that there are 27,000 more teachers and 60,000 more teaching assistants in our schools compared with 2010. We have the most talented generation of teachers ever, and we continue to focus on a strong recruitment and retention strategy, so that we continue to get the best talent to teach our children.