Fly-Grazing of Horses

Debate between Damian Hinds and Philip Hollobone

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Order. The second Division was not anticipated, so I can restart the debate earlier than advertised. The debate will continue until 4.26 pm.

[Damian Hinds]

Members will be pleased to know that I intend to accelerate my speech somewhat, because I know that several people want to speak.

As I was saying before the interruption, the problem is large and growing. Ten years ago, the RSPCA had 100 horses in its care; that figure now stands at 850, and the charity has to spend £3.5 million a year on food, board and care. The number of horses taken in has increased hugely since the peak year that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) referred to earlier. Prosecutions under the Animal Welfare Act 2006 have also risen. The debate is so important now, however, because of the risk that the problem will become much greater in England in 2014 following the enactment of the Control of Horses (Wales) Bill that is going through the Welsh Assembly.

Social Mobility

Debate between Damian Hinds and Philip Hollobone

Thursday 28th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

I am sure the world would be a very interesting place if you were the Prime Minister, Mr Crabb. To start our interesting debate this afternoon, I call Damian Hinds.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Hollobone, to see you in the Chair. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this debate on a subject that matters a great deal to many hon. Members—and, indeed, brought many hon. Members into politics, directly or indirectly.

There are many aspects to social mobility, and I am sure that hon. Members will pursue different angles. I want to focus on some of the material in the report of the all-party group on social mobility, “Seven Key Truths about Social Mobility”. We formed the group a year ago, and I thank the many hon. Members and outside organisations that have come to our sessions and contributed to the debate.

I also thank the group’s officers, particularly the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw), who is detained in the Finance Bill Committee, and the noble Lady, Baroness Tyler. She is not taking part in this debate, for obvious reasons, but I am pleased to see that she is here. I also thank the Prince’s Trust, which provides great support to our group.

We did not seek to carry out primary research, or to espouse a load of opinions, but to synthesise the material, data, statistics and intelligence on social mobility. We always knew that, coming as we do from different political traditions, it was exceedingly unlikely that we would end up agreeing on policy prescriptions, but we thought we could agree on what we disagree on, to focus the debate.

Politicians sometimes know what needs to be done, but large challenges remain for implementation. However, sometimes they do not know what needs to be done, and no one does. I want to present some of those challenges. Unlike in other debates, I will not shout out a list of demands for the Government, or ask to know about this and that. In many cases that is more of an acknowledgement of the gaps that exist and where, as a society and a political system, we need to build up the approach.

Social mobility clearly matters, and from an economist’s perspective, it matters in terms of both equity and efficiency. To put that into better terminology, it matters for social justice and for economic growth. It is self-evident that every person should be able to achieve their potential and to become fulfilled, but from the economic growth perspective, national income maximisation requires the best deployment of resources. As a nation, we cannot afford to have talent going to waste and not providing all it can.

Studies suggest that reaching international benchmarks on social mobility could be worth around £150 billion per annum on national income, or the equivalent of a one-off increase in gross domestic product of 4%. Today, we are far away from those benchmarks. There are various studies comparing social mobility in Britain with other countries with liberal democracies and advanced economies. In those studies, we are near or very near the bottom of the list. What is worse and more depressing is that that has not improved. Today’s 40-somethings, such as me, have shown less mobility on average than today’s 50-somethings. In an advanced country such as ours, we would expect social mobility to be improving every year, even if it was difficult to catch up.

Social mobility is not one subject, but three, and we tried to bring that out in our report. If two people discuss social mobility, they may leave thinking that they had agreed, and that the other person was talking about the same thing, but it often turns out that they were talking about two completely different aspects. The three subjects are three degrees of intensity, or three types of challenge.

At one end is the “breaking out” category of people who are trapped in poverty or difficult circumstances for one reason or another, and need help to access mainstream society and opportunities. At the other end of the spectrum is the category, “stars to shine”, with outstanding talent that we must ensure fulfils its potential. In the middle is everyone else, and they are the ones who are often forgotten. They are the 60%, 70% or 80% of the population who are neither severely disadvantaged nor outstandingly talented, and they are the greatest number of people.

To bring those categories to life a little, I will explain how they interact with different policy issues. With early years and the moving on up category, which includes the vast majority of children, early-years settings and their quality, and general parenting programmes, are relevant. But to address the problems in the breaking out group requires a lot more action, starting with high-intensity parenting support programmes, and, in the most extreme cases, child protection.

During the school years of the breaking out group, children must be exposed to opportunities so that they have aspiration to fulfil their potential. Children in care have a particularly difficult time in the school system, and relatively poor levels of educational attainment. Talking about grammar schools to that group is supremely irrelevant, but for a relatively small group, grammar schools, selective education, assisted places and so on are relevant. Those children are in the stars to shine category.

That is the horizontal axis and those are the different degrees of challenge. On the vertical axis, we have seven key truths. Those are not my seven key truths, or those of the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles. They emerged from the expert witnesses we heard from. One may write one’s own list with a different emphasis, but we have run our list past quite a lot of people, and no one has said it is wrong, so we have some confidence that they really are seven key truths about social mobility.

First, the point of greatest leverage is what happens between the ages of 0 and 3, right at the start of life. That means primarily at home. Secondly, the cycle may be broken through education. Thirdly, the single most important controllable factor in education is the quality of teachers and teaching. Fourthly, what happens not just at school, but after the school bell rings—in the evenings and at weekends and in the holidays—is relevant.

Fifthly, university is the most important swing factor of achievements later in life. Pre-18 attainment dictates whether someone gets there, so pre-18 attainment is key. Sixthly, people should not give up, because it is possible to get back on the ladder and to go up it. Later pathways to mobility are possible as long as the will and the support are there. Seventhly, personal resilience and emotional well-being are the missing link in the chain, and permeate those different levels and life stages.

I believe that the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles will talk about what happens after the school bell rings, and about opportunities later in life. I will talk briefly about the early years and what happens at school. I am a member of the Select Committee on Education, and it is remarkable that whenever one talks to people in education, they always blame the stage before—employers blame the colleges, universities blame the secondary schools, secondary schools blame the primary schools, and the primary schools blame the nursery schools. It is sometimes comic, because it can sometimes be predicted when that sentence will come into the conversation. However, there is an element of truth in it, which is why we said that the 0-3 life stage is the point of greatest leverage.

We have all seen the famous Leon Feinstein graph. It shows, if children’s cognitive ability is measured in the early years of life, that bright children from poor backgrounds are overtaken by less bright children from wealthy backgrounds and it is quite depressing. More recently, there has been an acceptance that that analysis has perhaps been a little over-egged and overused, but it is not totally invalidated. The central message remains: we must nurture and support families with children when they are at a very young age in order for them to reach their potential at primary school. I am talking about children being able to access the curriculum, to read and so on.

In that regard, we should welcome a number of things that the previous Government did and that the current Government have done or are doing. I am thinking of the Sure Start programme, the 12.5 hours of free care from the previous Government and, under the current Government, the keeping of the extension to 15 hours and, critically, the extension to disadvantaged two-year-olds.

However, there is something slightly depressing about all this. If we look at what I call “the Sure Start generation”, the millennium cohort—children born in 2000—we see that there has not been the narrowing of the gap between the rich and poor that, other things being equal, we would expect to see. That was one of the purposes of Sure Start in this country, as it was for the Head Start programme—a remarkably similar name—in the United States.

The standard explanation is that we are just not reaching the right families; we are not going to the places where the need is greatest. I praise certain Sure Start centres, which do outstanding outreach work, including, by the way, in my own constituency. I also welcome the current Government’s refocusing of efforts within Sure Start on the neediest families. However, it seems a little too neat to say that the gap has not narrowed only because we have not reached the places where the need is greatest. We must also consider what happens in early-years settings. The review of the early-years foundation stage is welcome, but we should not regard the job as done. We need to have a constant feedback loop of learning from what works best at all stages of education and care.

However, there is a bigger challenge yet, and that is the work force. Cathy Nutbrown’s recent report states:

“It must be a cause for concern that early years courses are often the easiest to enrol on and the courses that the students with the poorest academic records are sometimes steered towards.”

I will not argue that nursery care should be yet another “graduatised” profession, as some probably would, but we do have a work force challenge and one that it is too easy to duck or ignore. We are talking about the care of our children. We know that the countries least marred by social immobility tend to be those that have invested quite heavily in work force development at early-years level.

However, all that is comfort zone stuff compared with the really big challenge. Unless we are to accept that the age at which children go into a state care setting should get younger and younger and that the number of children doing that should get bigger and bigger, eventually we have to conclude that the point of greatest leverage—zero to three—happens mostly at home. That, of course, is painfully difficult territory for the state.

We know the things that make the difference: a healthy pregnancy, early attachment, a good diet, warm relationships, having books at home, being read to, spending time with the telly off and so on. We need to start by considering how to maximise the leverage from existing successful programmes. That involves health visitors, whose numbers are currently being expanded, but also programmes such as Bookstart and voluntary organisations such as Home Start and the great work that it does.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) may take part in the debate later and, if so, will probably talk about parent-infant partnership programmes, such as OXPIP, the Oxford Parent Infant Project, and NorPIP, the Northamptonshire Parent Infant Partnership, and some of the great work that they do on early attachment.

I welcome the support from the Government for expansion of the family-nurse partnership programme. That is a great evidence-based programme, although I think that there some concerns in the field that the family-nurse partnership is based on the American—and confusingly named—nurse-family partnership. The family-nurse partnership is almost the same as the nurse-family partnership, but not quite. We must ensure that when we have these evidence-based programmes, they are truly following the pure model. Again, as with early-years settings, we need a constant feedback loop of learning—a repository for the knowledge of what works with these programmes. That is why it is important to aspire to something along the lines of the early intervention foundation recommended by the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen).

However, just finding successful programmes is not enough. Quite often, the most successful programmes are, sadly, also the most costly, and quite often we have local programmes that work well on a small scale but may not be scalable to cope with much greater case loads. Often, too, it is the third and fourth quintiles—the families who do not have advantages but do not have severe disadvantages either—that get insufficient attention. We need affordable mass programmes that can address and help very large numbers of families. The five a day for child development programme recently recommended by CentreForum is very interesting in that regard.

Although zero to three may be the point of greatest leverage, thankfully it is not the end of the story. At school, great differences can be made to social mobility, because although statistically we see a link between parents’ income and social class and children’s income and social class, it is not actually a direct link. The links are, first, between parents’ income and social class and children’s educational attainment, and secondly, between children’s educational attainment and their own eventual income and social class. If we can break that loop and get kids from poorer backgrounds and more difficult backgrounds achieving well at school, it is perfectly possible to have outstanding social mobility.

The pupil premium, a great innovation from the Government, is a very important step, but of course it does not give the answer, only space and opportunity for the answer. It is critical to know how schools, and the education system more widely, should spend money for maximum impact. Therefore, I welcome very much the work of the Education Endowment Foundation and the Government’s support for it, and the fact that Ofsted will in future be measuring how schools are using the funds. I also welcome the Sutton Trust toolkit of strategies for effective learning, which goes through in some detail individual programmes and initiatives that work in schools to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Policy makers have to be brave and willing to take on and explode myths that for politicians are difficult to talk about—in particular, for example, on class size. There really is not any evidence that over the relevant range, reducing class sizes helps either average attainment or in terms of narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Obviously, it does at a certain point—when we are talking about 12 kids in a class—but not over the relevant range.

The single most important factor is not how many people the person at the front of the class has in their class, but who that person is; the issue is about teachers and teaching. We recently had a Select Committee inquiry. It was going to be called “What Makes a Great Teacher?” but obviously when the Committee got hold of it, we made the title much duller; it was something like “attracting, retaining, developing”—and something else—“teachers”.

What came up time and again was the importance of great teachers and great teaching. We know it when we see it. The problem is that it is very difficult to see it and know it before the teacher is already in the school and teaching. That is why one of our recommendations was to make auditioning for teaching much more prevalent before people take on teacher training.

We also said that it is too high stakes a profession in many ways. Once someone has made the commitment to do a postgraduate certification in education or a three or four-year BEd, they have basically committed themselves to following that career for life. That puts off some people, who would be outstanding teachers, from coming into the profession, but it probably also traps some people in the profession, once they have committed that time and money. In most other careers these days, people’s expectation is that they might do it for two years, five years or 10 years, but not necessarily for 30 years.

It is often said that no one forgets a great teacher, and that is true. Sadly, it is also true that most of us can also remember one or two pretty rubbish ones. As well as attracting the best teachers into teaching, we must take on the task of raising the average quality of the teachers who are already there. I repeat that most are outstanding, but we must look afresh at continuing professional development and at helping teachers with later-in-life career choices if teaching is ultimately not for them.

The individual child needs to be inspired to aspire, which is where careers advice becomes so important. It is worth saying that I did not hear many good things said about Connexions until there was talk of change, when suddenly it became the best thing ever invented. There has never been a golden age of careers advice in schools. Most people, whether they are 30, 40, 50 or 70, will relate the time when they were advised to become a florist, a caterer for the RAF or something very unlike what they ended up doing.

I do not know about other Members, but when I was 13 or 14, I did not know what I wanted to do—well, I thought I knew, but I was wrong about what I would end up doing; I have not totally given up on being a rock star though, so we will see how it goes. Often, the best advice is to keep your options open, so subject choice is an important consideration.

The English baccalaureate has its fans and critics, but it has clearly demonstrated that it can steer young people towards qualifications and subjects that keep their options most open. I remain concerned about A-levels in that regard. We have the list of the facilitating A-level subjects from the Russell group—the ones that it, to paraphrase, takes seriously in university admissions.

When I meet very bright young people in my constituency and elsewhere, I get depressed when I ask, “What subjects are you doing?” and they reply, “Physics, chemistry and law” or “Physics, chemistry and music technology” and so on. Too many young people are effectively self-selecting out of Russell group-type institutions, even though they clearly have the intelligence to be admitted. What, along E-bac lines, could be done about that at A-level?

University is the single biggest determinant in career progression in later life, and of course attainment is key to that. Much is made of the fact that although only 7% of kids attend private schools, they make up 17% of students at Russell group universities and 34% at Oxbridge. The figures are a tiny bit misleading, however, because that 7% refers to an average across all ages. If we take only the young people between the ages of 16 and 18 studying A-levels, the figure almost doubles to 13%. Of those who have passed three A-levels at grade C or above, it goes up further to 19%. For a subject combination such as maths, physics and chemistry, it is 27%.

If we ask what percentage of kids who get three As or A*s are at private school, I am afraid that the answer is 32%, which is knocking on the door of that 34% Oxbridge figure and well above the Russell group figure. There is clearly a big challenge. As part of that, and as only a part of it, we cannot dodge—as much as we, as politicians, might like to—the stars to shine question in secondary education on how we nurture outstanding talent.

The grammar schools debate is divisive. Many right hon. and hon. Members are former grammar school children, which is perhaps unsurprising given the numbers and the age profile in the House. What is more surprising is the number of people who say, “I was at a grammar school and I do not think that I would be here today had I not been”. The abolition of grammar schools was certainly well intentioned and something for which there has been consensus, implicit or explicit, across the House.

Grammar schools were better funded and in better buildings and so on than secondary moderns. There is concern that in doing away with that inequality, another inequality widened between the families who could afford to send their children to private schools and those who could not. In reality, it is not a binary question; academic tailoring is a continuum on which selection at 11 is one extreme and generic mixed-ability teaching is the other, but along the way is setting, streaming, enrichment programmes, specialisation at 14 and different types of GCSEs and so on.

When people say, “I’d like my children to go to a grammar school”, they really mean, and if you prompt them they will say, “I want my children to go to a grammar school, where the head teacher knows all the children’s names, where the teachers wear suits, and where if I walk along the corridor with a teacher and they see a piece of litter, they stoop to pick it up.”

Such things are replicable, but the tragedy is that in far too many schools we are not delivering. I would not want selection to come back to the town I live, for example; there are two outstanding secondary schools, and it would be divisive were one to be a secondary modern and the other a grammar. More widely, and particularly in a world where we have great and increasing diversity in educational provision, there could be a place, across a wider area and in every major conurbation, for an academically selective school alongside a school that specialised in sport or music and so on.

I am taking too long, so I shall accelerate and finish. We also wanted to talk in our report about the things that we do not know, and I will end on that point. We were pleased to mark down all the things that we could say, but it became abundantly clear that critical information is missing from the debate on social mobility, starting with information on innate ability.

With social mobility, we are clearly talking about equalising chances for young people and trying to hold everything else constant. It would be intellectually crazy to suggest that there was no innate ability—in other words, inherited intelligence. There is clearly some, but if we ask academics how much of a child’s ability is nature and how much is nurture—innate versus developed—they tend to say that it is somewhere between 25% and 75%. That is a huge range with which to deal, and although we will never have certainty, a little more direction on how much there is to go after would be useful.

We know that what happens out of school matters at least as much as what happens in school. When we push people to say what they would do in terms of out-of-school activities to equalise opportunities for poorer kids versus richer kids, however, they do not seem to know. They know that there are successful activities, but not quite what they are or, most importantly, how to make people do them. We frequently find that opportunities are made available in the most challenging areas, but the take-up is very small.

We are told repeatedly that non-academic skills, such as leadership, teamwork and customer empathy, are at least as important as academic achievement—the so-called non-cognitive skills. If we push people to name a non-cognitive skill and tell us how to develop it and what would be on the course, everybody dries up a little. It is a generic concept, so more clarity on what those skills are, and which ones we should develop and how, would be welcome indeed.

This vital issue has a great deal of focus and attention in the public sphere. I welcome the appointment of Alan Milburn to the new commission with Neil O’Brien as his deputy. It will give great focus and direction. I also welcome the close attention of the Government and Ministers and the involvement of the Deputy Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and, in particular, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Universities and Science. He is probably the one person who could possibly answer across the range of subject material.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for the time for this debate. At that point, I will stop.