Social Mobility Commission: State of the Nation Report

David Burrowes Excerpts

Thursday 23rd March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to draw attention to sixth-form colleges. All the data show what great outcomes they deliver for a comprehensive intake of pupils. Indeed, Loreto sixth-form college in my constituency is one of the top 5% in the country in terms of outcomes for its pupils, and it is in the heart of inner-city Manchester.

New analysis by Professor Simon Burgess and a team of academics shows that poor, bright children are much less likely to attend grammar schools than more affluent children who are not as bright. In England, the best performing boroughs are comprehensive. For example, London, which I have mentioned, outperforms selective areas and the national average in its top GCSE results. In contrast, the attainment gap is worse than the national average in eight out of nine fully selective areas, so the evidence is pretty overwhelming.

I am sure that when he rises to speak later, the Minister will repeat the one fact that he is particularly keen on —of course, there is another one that he likes about modern foreign languages—which is that in grammar schools, the tiny number of children on free school meals do better than all the other children in the country on free school meals. What the Government fail to tell us is that the children who get into grammar schools are already highly able, by definition, so the Government are not comparing like with like. In fact, highly able children do just as well in good and outstanding comprehensive schools as their counterparts do in grammar schools.

The grammar school policy is wrong in itself when it comes to social mobility, but it is also a huge distraction. I am setting out an agenda, which is shared by the Social Mobility Commission and other hon. Members, around the early years, schools, post-16 and other areas. That agenda would keep any Minister or Department extremely busy, but the Government have also embarked on other major overhauls, including the new national fair funding formula—that has caused much consternation on both sides of the House—the biggest reform of GCSEs in a generation, new SATs, the creation of hundreds of thousands of new school places to deal with the massive increase in demand, and a reduction in the amount of funding and number of teachers per pupil. The divisive pursuit of more selection in grammars will require huge political capital and a great deal of officials’ attention, and it will mean that all the other really important work, some of which the Government have already embarked on, will fail.

I do not think that we would be having this debate about grammars and selection if we had done more in recent years to create a cross-party consensus on what needs to be done to tackle the lack of social mobility. Our intention in this debate is to look at and develop an understanding of what works, and to build a broad consensus.

[Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)]

I apologise for not being around for the beginning of the hon. Lady’s speech. When it comes to building consensus, if she were willing to cross the Rubicon in terms of more selective education, would it not be a good idea to focus it on the opportunity areas and coldspots that the Social Mobility Commission has highlighted?

[Lucy Powell]

I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman is saying that he thinks that selection would work in such areas. There is no evidence for that at all, especially when I look at the fantastic schools in my constituency. My constituency has some of the highest levels of deprivation in the country—I think it is the second ranking constituency for child poverty in the whole country—but I have some outstanding schools that get amazing results in a comprehensive setting. I do not understand how selection will help them; it will simply make their job all the more difficult.

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[Mr Burrowes]

We may well disagree on some of the principles and practice, but if there is to be increased opportunity for selective education, would not the best place to focus it be in the areas of most need—those opportunity areas coldspots highlighted by the Social Mobility Commission?

[Lucy Powell]

No, I disagree fundamentally. As we have seen historically and evidentially, opportunity areas such as the London challenge work when we bring schools together and encourage them to collaborate, rather than creating an environment of competition. Such areas work when we ensure that they have the best teachers, the right resources and strong, collective leadership. Bringing a selective agenda into that ecosystem will work against all those core principles.

I think that there is a broad consensus about what needs to be done, and I hope that we can devote political time, and the time of Ministers and officials, to that. The important things are: quality in the early years; targeting resources; creating and developing opportunity areas; getting the best teachers where they are needed; developing a skills strategy focused on jobs; creating job opportunities and access to the best jobs; and securing progress through those jobs for the many, not the few.

[Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)]

I echo the words of the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) and of many other speakers in the House today in paying tribute to those who lost their lives or were injured yesterday, and to the House staff for keeping us safe. It is very important that the House’s business has resumed today. As the Prime Minister said earlier, yesterday was an attack on democracy. It is therefore important that our democracy should continue unabated today, and where better to start than on so important an issue as social mobility?

I was just looking at Twitter, as you do, and I see that somebody has tweeted, “How can there be a debate this afternoon if everyone agrees?” I suspect many of us spend our time trying to explain why everybody disagrees in this place, and why we are busy arguing and falling out with each other, so on the whole I think it is rather nice to have a debate in which people can broadly agree that there is an issue with social mobility in this country that we all want to tackle.

I thank the hon. Lady and the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) for co-sponsoring this debate, and I thank all those outside the House who have sent briefings to Members sharing their thoughts on today’s debate. The November 2016 Social Mobility Commission report said:

“Britain has a deep social mobility problem which is getting worse for an entire generation of young people”.

The Teach First briefing for this debate says:

“Failing to improve low levels of social mobility will cost the UK economy up to £14billion a year by 2050, or an additional four per cent of GDP.”

Frankly, we cannot afford not to tackle it.

I want to talk about three things: Britain’s social contract; schools, to pick up some of the issues that the hon. Member for Manchester Central has mentioned; and social capital. Every generation expects there to be greater opportunities for their children and grandchildren. In Britain at the moment, that social contract and the expectation of social mobility has broken down in parts of our country and among some groups of people. Education is a key driver of social mobility—I know that the Minister is committed to this, because I have had the privilege of working alongside him—but in the parts of the country that most need social mobility, there is often little educational aspiration, and underperformance is entrenched. I agree that tackling that should be the focus of this Government’s education policy, rather than having yet another discussion about expanding selection.

Last year’s vote and the rise of populism not just in this country but elsewhere, including in the United States, was a cry showing that our social contract has broken down. As I have said, each generation expects better opportunities for the next, but I think we should be honest in saying—I know this from my casework, but also from talking to friends and family—that that is not how many people see life today. There is pressure on housing services, and housing is unaffordable for the next generation in many parts of this country. The labour market feels incredibly insecure, but also very demanding, which has a knock-on effect.

The hon. Lady mentioned the numbers of words that children from different backgrounds know by the age of three. There is some very interesting research in the Social Mobility Commission report about the number of minutes each day that parents from different backgrounds spend interacting with their younger children. People working long hours in an insecure job will inevitably have less time to interact with their children than those not in that position. What can we do to help with that?

[Mr Burrowes]

I thank my right hon. Friend for highlighting the issue of parental contact, but may I focus on contact with fathers? The Government have made great strides in trying to ensure greater opportunities in work, but we must also look at how to create greater opportunities to ensure that fathers are not only in contact but are involved in their children’s upbringing. I saw from clients in the criminal justice system that one of the prevailing factors for them was either an absent father or a father who was not involved in their lives.

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The importance of families and of having two parents or two important role models in life—and of both boys and girls having a strong male role model—should not be underestimated. It is no secret that I disagree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) on some policy issues, but the work that he did at the Centre for Social Justice and the work that my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) is doing now on the importance of family relationships and public policy should not be underestimated.

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[Nicky Morgan]

I agree. It is not that parents do not want the best for their child. If you ask most parents on the birth of a child, they want their child to be happy, healthy and successful in life. I will talk about extra-curricular activities shortly because again, there is a social injustice in access to those activities. The hon. Lady is right about support. All the nagging that middle-class parents do about homework, or chivvying children to read more books, often does not happen elsewhere, not for lack of wanting to do it but perhaps because it was not done to those parents. Going into a child’s school and challenging teachers is anathema to someone who has had a very unhappy school experience. Attendance at parents’ evenings is indicative of the support that children get at home.

Aspiration is about aiming high for young people. I did not have a chance to look up the name of the school, so I apologise for not remembering it, but I went to a fantastic primary school in Northamptonshire, where a high proportion of children had free school meals, but it was working with the Royal Shakespeare Company and every child had access to Shakespeare and his language. I heard the tiniest children talk about Shakespeare’s characters and watched the older children perform complicated scenes—I would have had difficulty remembering all those lines, but they were doing brilliantly. The headteacher there had high aspirations. He said, “All my children will be able to do this and benefit and learn.” They were doing incredibly well.

I pay tribute to the National Association of Head Teachers for setting up its “Primary Futures” campaign, which is about getting adults into schools to talk about their careers and broaden horizons. When I was in the DFE, we set up the Careers & Enterprise Company. Broadening horizons, and aspirational and inspirational careers advice, are important. There will be a difference of opinion in the House about work experience, which we have debated. One week’s dry work experience in an office will not necessarily set the flame alight, but I remember talking to some apprentices, who told me that a week at Rolls-Royce, where they could see how the maths they were learning would be applied in the workplace, does set the flame alight. People then go back to school more determined to do better in their maths classes.

There is a changing labour market. In the article at the weekend that the hon. Member for Manchester Central and I wrote, we talked about the number of high-skilled jobs that will be around. The Teach First briefing says that, by 2022, the British economy is expected to experience a shortage of 3 million workers to fill 15 million high-skilled jobs. At the same time, there will be 5 million more low-skilled workers than there are low-skilled jobs. I did not want to mention the “B” word this afternoon—it is very nice not to be talking about the European Union—but, if we are to change our immigration policy in this country and have fewer people coming in from overseas, we must ensure that all our young people are training for the labour market of the 21st century.

That is my problem with the Government’s focus on introducing more selection. We do not live in a world where we need only the top 20% or 30% to be highly skilled. We need everybody to have access to a knowledge-rich, excellent academic curriculum. A renewed battle over selection distracts from what is needed in our education to deal with the demands of a 21st-century labour market, to give everyone a chance to close social divisions, and to build a consistently strong school system.

Research from the Education Policy Institute talks about the negative effects on those who live in the most selective areas but who do not attend grammar schools. The negative effects emerge around the point when selective places are available for around 70% of high-attaining pupils. The research says that there are five times as many high-quality non-selective schools in England as there are grammar schools.

Every child is entitled to an academic curriculum. Like the Minister, I have seen some great schools in some very unexpected places. I remember my visit to King Solomon Academy in London—the Minister will have been there too—and to the Rushey Mead in Leicester. They have a higher proportion of children on free school meals but are doing incredibly well in terms of the exam results they are achieving. I also pay tribute to the Harris academies and Ark in Portsmouth.

The hon. Member for Manchester Central mentioned the secondary heads in Surrey who had written about selection. The Leicestershire secondary heads, too, wrote to the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Education. Impressively, every single headteacher in Leicestershire signed the letter. If the Minister has not seen it, I hope he can get hold of a copy. One paragraph states:

“As professionals who have dedicated our lives to educating children across Leicestershire, our concern is for all the children in our region. Removing the most able pupils in our schools will have a negative impact on those who remain. Removing the option of ambitious, all ability comprehensives, with a scarcity of academic role models, will impact most particularly on the least affluent and least able. Therein lies the most significant injustice of this policy.”

Academic attainment is important and we should set high aspirations and ambitions for all pupils, but pupils in the best schools gain something else, and I want all pupils to gain it. This was one of the things I tried to champion when I was in the Department for Education. I am thinking of the character traits—persistence, resilience, self-confidence, self-esteem—and the values and virtues of integrity, honesty and whatever it might be, that help to build a whole pupil. I was at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in north London recently. The school focuses on building social capital among its pupils. It is conscious of the fact that its pupils will have to compete with the independent school down the road. I visited the King’s Leadership Academy in Warrington, which is a new free school, now over-subscribed, where behaviour is excellent, and where aspirations are incredibly high. All the young people are trained for leadership. Kings Langley School in Hertfordshire and Gordano School near Bristol are fantastic schools—I could go on.

Educating young people is about not just what happens in the classroom, but access to other schemes. I pay tribute to the former Prime Minister and the current Government for their focus on the National Citizen Service and other schemes: social action, volunteering, uniformed activities such as the cadets, the guides and the scouts, and the Duke of Edinburgh award. They all help to build up experience and confidence in young people. Those of us who have been employers and have interviewed see the ability of some young people to walk through our door, look us in the eye and shake us by the hand. Some children are taught that and encouraged in school, but some are not. These things matter in helping young people to get on.

I mentioned extracurricular activities. The commission’s report specifically talks about the effect different social backgrounds have on how people participate:

“One study found that 43 per cent of children whose mother had a postgraduate degree had music lessons, compared with just 6 per cent of children whose mother had no qualifications. At the age of 11, 85 per cent of children whose mother had an undergraduate degree participated in organised sport outside of school, compared with 56 per cent of children whose mother had no formal qualifications.”

I was very pleased that in last year’s Budget the then Chancellor announced funding for a longer school day. It would be helpful to know what emphasis the Department will place on that to help schools provide such activities. It is not necessarily about the schools themselves providing the activities; it could be enabling all young people in their schools to take up a place and participate.

[Mr Burrowes]

I very much support what my right hon. Friend says, particularly about social capital and building character through education. The Government have committed to a statutory requirement for relationships education. Many children, sadly, come from a background of conflict, trauma and survival. There is now the opportunity to provide them with the building blocks that others receive outside school to build resilience, self-esteem and respect for others, and help to build that character which is so vital for their long term future.

[Nicky Morgan]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I was very pleased to support his amendment on sex and relationships education, and I am very pleased that the Government have taken that on board and accepted an amendment to the Children and Social Work Bill. He is right to say that. One of the most important characteristics is resilience, or to use the awful phrase, stickability and bouncebackability: the ability to deal with what life throws at them and not be blown off course. Anything that schools, adult role models and other organisations can do, in addition to families, to help young people to develop that characteristic will go at least part of the way to building the more resilient and confident young people we need for the 21st century.

I do not think we will all agree with everything in the commission’s report, but it shows that we have a problem with social mobility. For those of us who are one nation politicians, that should make us very uncomfortable. There is talk of a meritocracy, but the difficulty is this: who decides who has merit? I would prefer to say that everyone has potential, but that in some cases the keys to unlocking that potential are more readily available to some than others. Today’s debate is about working out what those keys are and how they are handed out, and about building a consensus, or perhaps cross-party momentum, on how to do just that. But it has to be about more than words. Much has been done by this Government and by previous Governments, but there is much more to do if we are to show how we are going to renew our broken social contract and build real social mobility in this country.

[Mr Nick Clegg (Sheffield, Hallam) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) and the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) for the cross-party collaboration and work that has secured this debate on this all-important subject. In time-honoured Westminster fashion, there is an inverse relationship between the importance of a subject and the level of attendance, but that does not mean we should not persist. I join them, and everyone who has spoken today, in expressing my condolences to the family and friends of those injured and killed in yesterday’s horrific attack. I would like to pay my own heartfelt tribute to, and admiration for, the emergency services and the police who work so tirelessly, as they did yesterday, to keep us safe.

There is a choice that hangs like a backcloth to this debate: do we want to live in a closed society in which people are, in effect, told to know their place, or do we want to live in an open society in which people are able to choose their place? There is, I hope, an unarguable cross-party consensus that we should aspire to the latter.

I am delighted that the Social Mobility Commission, under the chairmanship of Alan Milburn, produces these excellent annual reports. I would say that, because I set up the commission: I announced its establishment on 5 April 2011, and we subsequently legislated for it. On the same day—it is interesting to look back on this—I announced the introduction of a new set of indicators that would help Whitehall to judge whether social mobility was being progressed or not. I also established a ministerial committee on the subject, which I chaired for many years.

At the time, all those things were new. Whitehall did not have a set of indicators, and we did not have a Social Mobility Commission. Extraordinarily, when I entered the Government I discovered that there were interns working in Whitehall and paid by the taxpayer who were judged purely on the basis of who they knew. Even in the heart of Government. prior to 2011, people were being given a leg-up because of who they knew rather than what they knew. It is fantastic that, in the intervening five or six years, social mobility has become a regular feature of the annual cycle of announcements.

I remember the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, observing to me rather ruefully that he thought I might have made a mistake by insisting that a member of the Opposition should chair the precursor of the Social Mobility Commission, because the first report produced by Alan Milburn and his colleagues had been critical of something that the coalition Government had done. I said to him, “That is the whole point: we need an institution that is independent of Government and contains people who will be fearless in their criticisms of any Government of whatever political persuasion, and which”—this is guaranteed by law—“reports to Parliament, not to the Government.”

The commission has—I will put it politely—had its wings clipped a little by the present Government. Shortly after the last election, the Government announced that they would remove the child poverty remit from what was formerly called the Child Poverty and Social Mobility Commission. I very much hope, and I am sure the Minister will reassure us, that that is not the first step in an attempt to make the commission in any way more docile, or less ferocious, in its all-important work.

I want to dwell on three issues, all of which are touched on in the annual report that the commission produced last November, and many of which have already been touched on by my co-sponsors. The first, the role of early years support, was highlighted by the hon. Member for Manchester Central, to whom I pay tribute, because she has made it a personal mission and has done so in an admirable way.

I think we all know this intuitively as parents, but, crucially, over the last decade or so, the academic evidence —from neuroscience to research done by educationists—has confirmed the axiomatic importance of what happens to a child’s brain, a child’s ability to learn, a child’s willingness to learn, a child’s willingness and ability to adhere to authority, a child’s ability to mix with other children, and so on. So much of that, of course, is formed, or not fostered, in the home, but a huge amount can be fostered, or neglected, in the early years and pre-school support that is given to our children.

There are two matters that concern me slightly. What I am probably most proud of from my time in government was the initiative that we took to provide 15 hours a week of pre-school support for two-year-olds. No Government had done that before: all early years and pre-school support had previously been confined to three and four-year-olds. I was keen for us to act on the evidence that the earlier we start—and, crucially, the earlier we start with those from the most deprived families—the greater the multiplier effect on children’s subsequent educational performance. So we introduced that measure. It initially applied to two-year-olds whose families were in the lowest 20% income bracket, but we later doubled that to 40%. That is where it stays to this day: there is a 15-hour entitlement for two-year-old toddlers from families that fall into the 40% lowest income families category.

The Government have now embarked upon a dramatic expansion of the entitlement for three and four-year-olds. I say, as someone who did not get into the bunfight between the two larger parties in the last general election, that that was—let us not beat about the bush—frankly because of a great Dutch auction in which the Labour and Conservative parties at the last election tried to outdo each other on how much they could improve the 15-hour entitlement for three and four-year-olds: at first it was 20 hours, then it was 25, then 30, and so it went on.

The Government will encounter terrific difficulties in delivering this expanded entitlement in a sustainable, high-quality way. That is worrying enough, but, this being a cross-party debate, I simply make a plea to us all to pause and consider whether, in a time of constrained resources when we have to make choices, this is really the most sensible use of scarce resources, given the importance of early years. The expansion of a universal entitlement from 15 hours to 30 hours for three and four-year-olds does absolutely nothing to build on this ground-breaking initiative of providing early-years support for two-year-olds. It also does nothing to bridge a gap that we will, as a society, have to bridge one day: the gap in a child’s development, which can be perilous, between the point at which mum and dad, or mum or dad, go back to work and the point at which the child can enjoy the state-funded allocation of early-years pre-school support devoted to him and her—which, if they do not come from those lower income families, comes not at two, but at three and four.

We have this gap at that age. I know nothing about neuroscience, but I am told that this is when the brain does the most extraordinary things and forms at a pace that is barely repeated at any other point in life—although I am also told that some neuroscientists say that they think rewiring might happen later, in the early teens. Certainly, judging by my teenagers, there is a lot of rewiring going on, most of it devoted to staring at an iPad.

We all know that early-years is one of the most important engines of social mobility, and we all know that money does not grow on trees. A decision has been taken—I think because of a non-evidence-based rush to double up again and again on a universal entitlement for three and four-year-olds—not to build on the ground-breaking initiative provided to two-year-olds. However, the early evidence—I would love to hear whether the Minister can share any of the evidence that I assume the Department for Education is accumulating—shows promising results for the knock-on effect on the two-year-old entitlement, and we have this persistent gap between the point at which many parents have to go back to work and the point at which their children can be put into a setting where they receive some of those entitlements.

I therefore make a plea to the Government. I am not for a moment imagining that they are going to say, “Absolutely, the right hon. Member for Sheffield Hallam is right and we will stop entirely the direction of travel and orient policy in a different direction,” but the challenge remains. We need to continue to target resources earlier and at children from the most deprived families, and we are not doing that right now.

[Mr Burrowes]

In a spirit of consensus, I would point out that one of the successes of the coalition Government was the focus on early years and the early years foundation stage, which came not least out of the work of the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith). There is growing evidence, not least through the Department for Work and Pensions programme on parenting, of the quality of the relationship between parents having a huge impact on children’s long-term wellbeing, mental health and life chances. There should be a focus on that. There is a lot of well-evaluated evidence from the parents as partners programmes showing that we need to focus on these quality relationships all the way through as providing the foundation for long-term prospects.

[Mr Clegg]

The hon. Gentleman is entirely right. I have gone on a bit of a journey on this: I have always had a somewhat kneejerk liberal reaction of slight squeamishness and reticence about the idea of politicians, the Government, Whitehall and public policy experts seeking to tweak or improve how parents choose to raise their children, which I intuitively think is no business of politicians, but I agree with the evidence. Much like the right hon. Member for Loughborough, I agree on almost nothing with the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) on many issues, but on this I think that he led the pack in saying that this is something that politicians need to grapple with, although we need to do so with care.

The first page of the summary of the report recommends that the Government should introduce

“a new parental support package, including a guarantee of help if a child’s 2 to 2½-year check shows that they are falling behind.”

I entirely agree with that. Public policy is inching towards greater involvement in an area that many folk have previously felt should be kept immune from such interventions.

I want to make one more point about early years that I am sure everyone here is aware of. It is unglamorous, rather fiddly and difficult to fix, but it is acutely important: it is the quality of early years provision. The pay and status of early years teachers are real problems. We do not have enough men going into early years teaching. Pay is very low, and there is no qualified teacher status. As the Government seek to expand the entitlements for three and four-year-olds, it is terrifically important that quantity does not come at the further cost of diminished quality. If the Minister can tell us how the quality, status and—in the long run—pay of early years teachers can be improved, so much the better.

I also want to talk about money. In those glory days back in 2010, I intervened aggressively in internal discussions when we had to announce what was in many ways the fateful comprehensive spending review setting out all sorts of unappetising cuts. I insisted that the per-pupil and indexed core budgets for schools should be protected. Those budgets needed to be protected in terms of prices and of pupil numbers, not least so that we could then add on the pupil premium in a meaningful way and ensure that it added genuine value.

I look now at the trouble the Government are getting into, and yes, a lot of this is complex. A lot is to do with the higgledy-piggledy, unjust, idiosyncratic way in which schools have had their budgets allocated to them over many decades, but some of it is pretty obvious. The Government simply cannot cancel the £600 million education services grant, as they did shortly after the 2015 general election, while protecting the per-pupil allocation only in cash terms and not in real terms and while diverting hundreds of millions of pounds to free schools—many of which are doing a great job, but frankly, far too many of which have been opened in places where there is no desperate need for extra places—and possibly compounding that error by spending hundreds of millions of extra pounds on new selective schools, and then ask schools to shoulder their own newly increased national insurance and pension contributions and, in some cases, apprenticeship levy costs, and, on top of that, introduce a national funding formula with no additional money to make that work. If they do all that, they are bound to get into terrible trouble.

I do not say this in a spirit of recrimination, but the Government should not be surprised that they are encountering huge resistance to these plans across the House and huge disquiet from parents, headteachers and governors up and down the country. There is a limit to how much they can keep expecting improved performance from a schools system that is being put under those multiple and entirely self-inflicted financial stresses and strains.

I know a little bit about this because, in the coalition Government, we looked exhaustively at the case for introducing a national funding formula. In principle, the case for doing so is impeccable; of course it is. The current situation is woefully unfair. There are many non-metropolitan schools, smaller rural schools, suburban schools, schools in the shires and so on that have received far less funding over a long period. However, the problem is that if we introduce a national funding formula in a way that does not raise the overall financial tide for all schools, what happens is exactly what is happening now. The schools that think they are going to gain pots and pots of money are disappointed at how little they gain, and those that are going to lose will lose an unacceptably large amount of money. No one is pleased.

The one issue in this debate on which I disagree with the right hon. Member for Loughborough is that, if I understand it correctly, her solution is to adjust the deprivation calculation buried within all the numbers in the national funding formula, which—all credit to the Minister and his Department—is a bona fide attempt to protect the funding to the poorest. The right hon. Lady will no doubt correct me if I am wrong, but one way to try to square the circle is to take a little money from the deprivation allocation and raise the floor or the minimum amount—