School Funding Formula

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

That is certainly a sensible principle, and it is exactly what we have tried to do through many of our reforms.

Throughout the Parliament we have introduced major reforms that have improved the fairness and simplicity of the system and laid the essential foundation stones to allow us, the two coalition parties, to introduce a full national funding formula in future. The major reforms we have made are changes to the local funding system, and changes to the way in which we fund disadvantage, with the introduction of the pupil premium and minimum funding levels. Time does not allow me to speak in detail about the first two changes, but I would like briefly to say something about the third—minimum funding levels.

We introduced minimum funding levels last year. I thank not only all the Members who lobbied for that change in the system but the excellent officials in our Department who worked hard, over a sustained period, on the new model. This Government have introduced the first reforms to the distribution of funding between local areas in over a decade. In 2015-16, every local area will attract a minimum level of funding for each of its pupils and schools. The £390 million increase in funding that we introduced as part of minimum funding levels represents a huge step towards removing the historical unfairness of the schools funding system. It ensures an immediate boost to the least fairly funded authorities and puts us in a much better position to implement a national funding formula in the next Parliament. All the logic of the reforms we have made indicates that they should be baselined into funding in the next Parliament. I can certainly make that commitment on behalf of my party; it is for others to make commitments on behalf of their parties.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister give way on that point?

[Mr Laws]

I will not, I am afraid, because of the lack of time.

In the next Parliament, multi-year spending plans will allow us to give certainty to local authorities and schools about how we transition to a national funding formula. Meanwhile, no local authority or school will lose out from the introduction of minimum funding levels from 2015-16, but about four in 10 areas will gain. We have already heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester, whose area gains some £100 per pupil—an increase of just over 2%—as a result of the changes for which he lobbied. My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon has been a great campaigner on this issue for many years and has helped to secure an uplift of about 5% in his part of the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge has helped to secure a huge increase of about 8% for funding in his part of England—an additional £311 per pupil that will make a massive difference to schools. This is only one step in the transition to fairer funding and a national funding formula, but it is the biggest step towards fairer schools funding in a decade.

The three major reforms over this Parliament do not, of course, complete the reform of school funding. We recognise that we still need to introduce a full formula to ensure that pupils with similar characteristics attract the same level of funding regardless of where they live. Nevertheless, I am proud that the changes we have made have delivered the big improvements that we have seen. They put us in a much better position than we were in at the beginning of this Parliament. We now have to do the important preparatory work that will be necessary to put in place a national fair funding formula in the next Parliament. We also need to review funding on deprivation to make sure that it is fair across the whole country, and that we can build on the enormous improvements made in this Parliament and the massive contribution that the pupil premium has made.

We are now in a position to finish the job of introducing, for the first time in decades, a fair funding system for schools in this country. Once we have long-term spending plans, we will be in a position to introduce, in a stable and sensible way, the full national funding system for schools for which Members have argued. Both governing parties in this House—both coalition parties—have put on the record very clearly their commitment to a national fair funding formula. Those of our constituents who care about this issue can best ensure the delivery of this policy through the choices they make—

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Monday 19th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I think I can reassure my hon. Friend on behalf of both coalition parties that we are committed to the delivery of a fair and transparent national funding formula in the next Parliament. We have already made the first big step and I agree with him that it is vital that we deliver a full solution to this long-standing injustice, which Labour failed to tackle in its long years in office.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

21. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) is right that we need a fairer funding formula for our schools and as part of that we need capital funding to be allocated over three years rather than one. Does the Minister agree that the long campaign for the consolidation of St Nicholas primary school in Beverley will be more likely to be realised if such a change can be effected?

[Mr Laws]

I agree with my hon. Friend that long-term capital funding is highly desirable and he will know that we have already moved to multi-year allocations of basic need funding. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I are now looking very carefully at the argument for moving to longer term allocations of other parts of the capital budget.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I am delighted to hear about the success of that school in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. I hope that other schools in the region, and in those regions where there has been underperformance, will look at was has been done there and realise that there is nothing inevitable about failure in any part of the country.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

9. What assessment she has made of the potential merits of allowing nursery schools to become academies.

Social Mobility/Child Poverty Strategy

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that there is no disagreement in government. This is a very important decision to get right, for the reasons he explains, and we have no intention of undermining support for disadvantaged youngsters through the decisions we take. We have to make sure that we use the new mechanisms that will be available, including through universal credit, to target money effectively. We will be taking decisions shortly—Ministers often say that—on this matter, but in the meantime it is perfectly reasonable for him to ask questions about it, because it is important for us to get it right.

We are also taking other action to support families in the early years: for working families on universal credit, we are further increasing support for child care costs to 85%, as Alan Milburn’s commission urged us to do, making sure that for these families work will always pay; we are introducing tax-free child care; and the Deputy Prime Minister recently announced the commencement of flexible parental leave, so that all parents can get the support they need to go back to work. As the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has consistently argued, the early years are the most important years in young people’s lives. That is why we are investing so heavily to make sure that all our children get the very best start they can and why we are giving a priority in public expenditure terms to this area, even in these times of austerity.

Understandably, education in our schools system has been a major area debated today, and it is one of the Government’s big priorities. I am very proud, as a member of the coalition Government, that even in these times of austerity, when we are trying to deal with the massive deficit we inherited, that we have made the commitment to fund a pupil premium for schools. As hon. Members have said, we are focused not only on raising attainment for all school pupils, but on closing the unacceptable attainment gap between richer and poorer pupils, and we are making progress. Under this Government, poor children are doing better than ever at school. The proportion of children on free school meals and the pupil premium who are getting five good GCSEs has increased, as my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South said, from 31% when the coalition came to power to 38% now. That is a very significant increase over a relatively short period, and comes at a time when we are ensuring that there is no grade inflation in the system, which means that these improvements in recorded results are real improvements.

We are also making big improvements in narrowing the gap at key stages 2 and 4. At key stage 2, the acceleration in narrowing the gap seems to have been present since the pupil premium came in, and we need to ensure that that acceleration is sustained in future years and that it is present in both key stages 2 and 4.

As hon. Members have said, a massive amount more needs to be done in this area. It is still the case that, despite the progress, six in 10 children on free school meals fail to secure five C grades at GCSE, including English and maths. I hope that all of us across the House agree that that is entirely unacceptable in an advanced country such as Britain. As the Chair of the Select Committee pointed out so powerfully, we can see that that is unacceptable when we look at the levels of attainment and the reduction in the gap in some of the best schools where they have large numbers of disadvantaged young people. In those schools, including in areas such as inner London, the teachers and the head teachers are proving that there is nothing inevitable about this level of underperformance. There are parts of the country today where almost 80% of young people who are considered disadvantaged are failing to get those five Cs, and that is not something that any of us can accept.

We are continuing to put our money where our mouth is —through the pupil premium. Since 2011, we have invested almost £4 billion to help schools directly to address educational disadvantage. This year, the pupil premium will increase to £2.5 billion a year—the full amount that we promised in the coalition agreement. That means that children who are poor and who receive the pupil premium throughout their school career will now receive—or their schools will receive—an additional £14,000 to boost their attainment, which is a significant amount of money. Schools will be able to make powerful use of that money, and they will be informed by the mechanisms to improve education that the Education Endowment Foundation has flagged up as things that work.

I have been to schools in very disadvantaged neighbourhoods around the country, and recognise that this boost to the budget is quite transformational. With my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Ian Swales), I visited a school in his constituency with very high levels of deprivation—80% or 90% of young people were entitled to the pupil premium. It is a community that never really recovered from the de-industrialisation of the 1980s and a community where aspirations have been very low. This additional money is giving that school the opportunity to change the life chances of those young people.

Of course we have to ensure that, even though we give discretion to schools to spend this money in the way they think best, there is accountability for it. The right thing to do in the school system is to have more freedom and autonomy, but those things have to come with accountability. The accountability mechanism that we have chosen is through Ofsted. When Ofsted goes into a school, it will look to see whether the disadvantaged pupils are making good progress and it will see whether the gap is closing. If those things are happening, it will not have to ask lots of questions and it will not be wasting the time of school leaders and teachers by creating a bureaucracy around this. Where there is not progress and where the gaps are not closing, it will challenge schools. Schools that thought they might be outstanding will discover that they are not so graded because they are failing in this area. Schools that are weaker will be highlighted. Head teachers today know that this is now an important area for their school’s performance, and Ofsted will recommend pupil premium reviews by outstanding system leaders of schools that are not using this money sensibly.

Later this month, Ofsted will report on its view of how the pupil premium is being used in schools. Although I would be the first to accept that not every school is using every penny perfectly, I believe that the evidence will show that the school system increasingly does understand what this money is for and is using it and targeting it in the right way.

Another important thing that we have done is to change the accountability systems for both primary and secondary schools and in 16-to-19 provision. For too long in primary education we have set the bar too low for schools. At one stage, we accepted that 40% of young people could fail to reach the level of attainment to which we were aspiring and we now know that even that level was too modest and was, for those people who were just achieving it, a passport to failure later in life and in their educational career. We are raising the bar and we are expecting more young people to get over it.

As the Chairman of the Select Committee pointed out, by focusing more on progress and not on the C-D borderline, we are giving a real incentive to schools to value the progress made by every pupil—the B-grade students going to A, the A-grade students going to A* and, critically, the F-grade students going to E, the E-grade students going to D and the D-grade students going to C. One of the disappointments under the previous Government, in spite of the progress made in some areas of education, was that a lot of the progress was across the C-D borderline on which schools had an incentive to focus. A lot of the most disadvantaged youngsters who were not on that borderline saw almost no improvement in performance under the previous Government. They and many of the most disadvantaged communities saw precious little improvement during the last Parliament and I hope that our accountability reforms will change that.

I am optimistic. We had the pupil premium awards recently and saw some splendid best practice across the country. Schools are doing the right things, with high expectations and good teaching. That includes schools such as Mossbourne academy. The recent destinations data show that a large number of young people from those schools are going to first-class jobs and first-class educational settings, and are going on to places such as Oxford and Cambridge. More people from that school did that than was the case from some entire local authority areas, as, disgracefully, there are still some parts of the country in which no pupil at all goes on to our best universities.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The Minister will know that thanks in part to the flexibilities that this Government have introduced, there is an increasing correlation between the amount of money that schools get and their efficacy in a way that there was not in the past, which is probably a good thing. That shows the need for a new national funding formula that ensures equitable distribution of funds across the country. We do not have that now. London is doing well, and we are all delighted about that, but it is also the best-funded part of the country.

[Mr Laws]

I entirely agree. Money is of course not always the answer—if it is spent badly, for instance—but it is really important. If we did not think that money was important we would not have the pupil premium, which is about money, accountability and best practice. We must make sure that we have a fairer national funding formula. We are making the biggest step for 10 or 20 years towards fairer school funding through the minimum funding levels we are introducing, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will be able to say more about the additional funding we can give to underfunded parts of the country when our consultation concludes.

As well as addressing attainment in education for disadvantaged groups, we need to help them to secure the right jobs so that they can get on in life. Apprenticeships are at the heart of our drive to equip people of all ages with the skills employers need to grow and compete, and we are very proud that more than 1.6 million new apprenticeships have been started in this Parliament at more than 200,000 workplaces. More than 860,000 people undertook an apprenticeship in the past academic year, which is the highest recorded figure in modern history. Our new programme of traineeships will help young people to develop the skills and attributes they need to secure apprenticeships and other sustainable jobs.

We are also pleased that the work we are doing with young people means that the number not in education, employment or training has been falling. We will continue to do more to help young people from 16 to 18 and to ensure that, as a number of hon. Members have said, we have proper careers advice and guidance, and proper incentives for educational establishments to focus on destinations.

We are also helping young people in work, helping parents to find jobs and helping to ensure that take-home pay after tax increases. We are incentivising employers to take on more young people by abolishing employer national insurance contributions for most employees under 21 from April of next year. We are raising the national minimum wage to £6.50 per hour, which represents the biggest cash increase since 2008 and will increase the pay of more than 1 million people. We are cutting income tax for those on the minimum wage by almost two thirds and we have increased the personal allowance five times, from £6,475 when the coalition came to power to £10,500 in 2015-16, which is a massive support to many people on low pay in employment—people who are also, incidentally, going to benefit from the free school meals for infant-age pupils from this September, and that will also be extended for the first time to disadvantaged young people in college settings who previously, for no rational reason, were excluded from the entitlement that there was to free school meals for those in schools. I am pleased that this Government have resolved that very long-running injustice.

We are also working with business to ensure that it helps people to progress, earn more and have responsible terms and conditions. We are addressing exclusivity clauses in zero-hours contracts and are committed to the social mobility business compact. I am proud that, as a consequence of the work the Government have done and of the recovery of the economy, employment has increased by nearly 1.7 million. In just the past year unemployment is down by almost 350,000, and we have one of the highest employment rates in the history of our country.

Because we know that work is the best route out of poverty, our welfare reforms will incentivise even more people into work, and ensure that work always pays and that work pays more than benefits. We provide intensive, personalised support for parents who have been out of work for 12 months or more through the Work programme. To date, around 300,000 people on the Work programme have found lasting work. We are also supporting families with multiple disadvantages to get back to work through the troubled families programme, in order to help young people.

We cannot highlight the importance of social mobility and of tackling child poverty enough. They are central to the Government’s mission and to what the coalition hopes to achieve over our period of five years in government. Quite simply, no child should become a poor adult for the simple reason that their parents were poor.

I have set out the steps we are taking in early-years education and 16-to-19 education, and in trying to improve employment outcomes, but we know there is more to do. We have listened carefully to the proposals made by hon. Members and we are listening carefully to what comes out of Alan Milburn’s reports and the work of his commissioners. We will seek to build on the success so far, to make sure we break this unacceptable link between social backgrounds and success in life.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Monday 16th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I understand the concerns of the 16 to 19 sector. Ministers are very alive to those concerns, and we will consider them carefully before we set our final spending plans for 2015-16. I do not know whether the Labour party has made any commitments on school funding into the next Parliament, but I suggest that the hon. Lady and her hon. Friends make the same commitment that the Deputy Prime Minister has made on behalf of my party today.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

10. What steps he is taking to obtain data from HM Revenue and Customs to improve the development of destination measures for school leavers.

Al-Madinah Free School

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Thursday 17th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

The support of the Labour party for free schools did not last long, did it? I do not know how the hon. Gentleman has the nerve to come to the House. On Sunday he was going around television studios and saying that Labour was shifting its position on free schools. He said:

“We will keep those free schools going”.

Within the same set of Department for Education press cuttings in which he announced he was shifting his position in favour of free schools, we find a headline stating that Labour now plans to rein in free schools. It is complete and utter incoherence from the hon. Gentleman, and he should be ashamed.

Let me respond in detail to every single serious point the hon. Gentleman made—it will not take very long—and go back over what has happened in Al-Madinah school and the scrutiny to which it has been subjected. The school opened in September 2012. It had a pre-registration Ofsted report, as all such schools do—such a report is not sensational. In the report, Ofsted set down a number of requirements that it wanted met before the school opened. In advance of the school opening, the trust went through the requirements with the lead contact in the Department for Education. It produced certificates to show that it had done the safeguarding and first aid training, and a certificate—[Interruption.] The shadow Secretary of State ought to listen to this. The school produced a certificate authorised by the director of planning and transportation at Derby city council saying that the building was fit for occupation. After that, the Department sent an adviser to the school two months after it opened, who saw the good progress that the school was making at that stage.

In July 2013, we became aware of concerns about equalities and management issues at the school and acted immediately on that. We established an Education Funding Agency financial investigation into the school and sent our advisers to it. We asked Ofsted to bring forward its inspection, which has now taken place. Prior to receiving that inspection, the Under-Secretary of State, Lord Nash, wrote to the school setting out precisely the actions that it will take, and making it clear that its funding will not continue unless it addresses those things.

If the shadow Secretary of State is so supportive of free schools, why does he not have the responsibility to put the failure of the school into context? Seventy-five per cent. of the free schools that have opened have been rated good or outstanding by Ofsted. That is a higher proportion than the proportion of local authority schools. We did not hear that from the hon. Gentleman.

On complacency, which I believe is the allegation the hon. Gentleman makes, may I remind him of the record of the Labour Government whom he defends? At the end of their period in office, 8% of schools in this country —more than 1,500—were rated as inadequate, many had been so for years, with no action. By focusing on one school in which the Government are taking action, the hon. Gentleman is failing schools in this country, including ones that failed under the Labour Government, when little action was taken.

People listening to these exchanges and to the hon. Gentleman, and reflecting on what he said on Sunday and how he has stood on his head today, will see nothing other than total and utter opportunism and shambles from Labour’s education policy.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

The leaked Ofsted report states that

“the governors have failed the parents of this community who have placed their trust in them.”

Will Ministers intervene to replace the current board of governors with an interim executive board? Looking to the future, what steps will the Minister take to ensure that the training available to the governors of free schools properly equips them for that important role?

[Mr Laws]

I can assure the hon. Gentleman—the Chairman of the Select Committee on Education—that Lord Nash and I are taking decisive action to ensure that the school improves its leadership and governance. The hon. Gentleman will understand why I cannot go into all the details of that, although the clear requirements are set out in the letter Lord Nash wrote to the school on 8 October, which has been published.

Secondary Schools (Accountability)

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Monday 14th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I think I welcome the shadow Minister’s response to our statement. By the end of it, it was difficult to know whether he was supporting the statement or not. We will come to that in a moment. I think I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s relatively cautious approach because, from him, I take that as a sign of support, whereas from other people it might qualify as anything other than that.

I hope the hon. Gentleman will accept that we have taken time to get this right. Nobody can accuse us of rushing into the proposals. After all, we announced a consultation in this area in February. We have taken a great deal of time to get our proposals right. We have listened very carefully, including to the Chairman of the Select Committee, to a lot of the mathematics, to organisations that made representations, and to hon. Members on both sides of the House. As a consequence, the Secretary of State and I have changed the proposals that we first made. We have moved away from a threshold measure to a greater extent than was originally planned, precisely because of the perverse incentive effects that the hon. Gentleman talked about, and we think we have now got the balance right between having a proper accountability system and ensuring that that system embeds the right incentives. By having a number of key measures, we will ensure that it is not possible to game one of those and ignore all the other things that matter.

The hon. Gentleman is right that we need to encourage young people who have not mastered maths and English at 16 to go on studying those subjects, and we have announced a new core maths qualification beyond the age of 16 to ensure that young people have the opportunity to do that. We have also, through our 16-to-19 accountability consultation, paid a great deal of attention to the incentives that educational institutions will have to keep young people on course after the age of 16 and to create the right incentives. The destination measure that I have talked about today will give all educational institutions an interest in the qualifications that young people secure not only at age 16, but beyond that.

On the issue of early entries for GCSEs, I do understand that this has been controversial, but the hon. Gentleman will understand that we must pay attention to the serious warnings that we have received from Ofsted and others about the scale of increase of early entry. This summer almost a quarter of maths entries—170,000 entries —were from young people who were not at the end of key stage 4 study. Ofsted said that it found no evidence that such approaches on their own served the best interests of students in the long term. Indeed, Sir Michael Wilshaw has said that he thinks early entry hurts the chances of some children, who are not able to go on to get the best grades that they are capable of.

On future uncertainty about these frameworks, we hope very much indeed that we will be able to secure support from across the House for the proposals that we have made today, and I take the hon. Gentleman’s comments as a modest step in that direction. However, in terms of getting certainty about the degree of cross-party co-operation, it would be helpful if he could clarify some of divisions that there are now on his own side about some of the key issues. For example, one of the measures that we have said we would publish is the EBacc, and we believe we should continue to do so. The former education spokesman for the Labour party opposed the EBacc and said that it was at best an irrelevance and in some cases distorted young people’s choices. The new spokesman for the Labour party said that he supports the English baccalaureate. We want to hear from the Opposition some clarity about Labour’s position on these issues; otherwise, that will be a source of confusion.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

This announcement is extremely welcome, as the best eight measure will be an educational breakthrough in improving the accountability of secondary schools by, as the Minister rightly said, ensuring a focus on improving the education of the lowest-achieving, as well as stretching those at the top. It is to the credit of the Secretary of State and the Minister for Schools that they have listened to the submissions, that they have been prepared to take their time and that they have got this right. How will the floor target work? It is rightly based on progression, but how will it ensure that progression is fairly measured between those who serve the more able and typically prosperous parts of the population and those in the most deprived areas?

[Mr Laws]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee for his kind comments about the proposals we have announced today. I am happy to pay tribute to him for the role he has played in ensuring the improvement of the proposals between the original announcement and consultation in February and today, when the final proposals were made. He is right that the new progress measure will ensure that the attention and focus is not only, as it was in the past, on the schools with the lowest levels of attainment, but on schools that appear to have high levels of attainment but where levels of progress are extremely low. Schools have been able to coast over the past decade because their overall levels of attainment look all right, when they have actually been failing young people by not getting much better results from them.

Pupil Premium

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

It certainly is new money—I will comment on that in greater detail in a moment.

I welcome the sensible and constructive approach that the hon. Gentleman has taken. I particularly welcome the fact that he has said that he is prepared to engage with us in dealing with some serious and important issues, such as the baseline for measuring progress. It encourages me that we can have a sensible consultation process that genuinely listens and designs a system that will be better and will last for the long term.

Let me respond briefly to five points that the hon. Gentleman made in his response. First, on the Government’s inheritance, I accept that progress was made under the previous Government, particularly in some parts of the country such as London. However, our inheritance of aspirations at the end of primary level was, frankly, hopelessly low. Even today, we allow schools potentially to pass their floor targets when one third of their pupils or more fail to achieve a basic level of English and maths. Worse still, our very measure of achievement—the 4C measure—leads to more than half the youngsters who achieve just that level failing to get five good GCSEs. In other words, we have been sending out a message about what success looks like at the end of primary school which is totally wrong. Indeed, some of the best schools in the country—including St Joseph’s primary school in Camden, which the Deputy Prime Minister and I visited this morning—have already moved well beyond 4C and in many cases are aiming at much higher levels, such as 4A, 5C and so forth. The Government need to catch up with those schools, which are leading the debate in education.

The second point was about the broadness and richness of the experience in schools. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that, although the concentration on English and maths is important, we do not want that to lead to a dramatic narrowing of the curriculum. The other subjects that people take, both academic and vocational—arts, music and sport—are incredibly important. However, no one can succeed in secondary education if they cannot read and add up. No one can enjoy the opportunities in all the other subjects if they are not equipped with those basic skills. I would also refer the hon. Gentleman to the changes we have already announced in the secondary measures of accountability. We will be incentivising schools to take not just five but eight GCSEs, and we will allow that to include vocational as well as academic subjects.

The third point that the hon. Gentleman made was about whether 85% was the right level and whether we were right to set such an ambitious target now, in advance of the precise measures being introduced in 2016. I think we are right to set out those principles now. The schools that he and I are familiar with, from inner London and elsewhere, are already setting levels of aspiration of 85%, 90% or 95%, at an even higher level than 4B, which I talked about in a speech a couple of months ago, so I think that we are right to raise expectations now. For too long we have had expectations set by very low levels, which are more about the levels set for school intervention than about reasonable aspirations for all schools.

On the ranking of 11-year-olds, let me make it absolutely clear that we are not talking about publishing information about individual students at a national level. That would of course be totally wrong. What we are talking about is something that I think virtually every parent in the country will welcome, which is more information—and more meaningful information—about how their children are doing. At the moment, apart from a few people in the Department for Education and around the House, level descriptors frankly mean nothing to the average parent. Having a mark, a measure of progress and a clear sense of where their pupil is versus the rest of the cohort is only sensible. Parents could do that at the moment through the levels process, if they could actually understand that process, which is so complicated. What we are doing will help parents, but we will listen to the messages that come back in the consultation.

Finally, let me turn to the hon. Gentleman’s point about money and early intervention. What we are announcing is about doing a lot more through early intervention. The additional money for the pupil premium that the Government have delivered, even in these times of austerity, is something of which the coalition can feel incredibly proud. The levels we are setting today will mean that the additional money going to pupils from the pupil premium from their time in primary school will be £8,000 or £9,000 per pupil. That is a massive amount to help schools across the country, particularly in disadvantaged areas, to bring children up to a reasonable standard.

As for early years, the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), who leads on early years and child care, and the Deputy Prime Minister have announced a two-year offer, which extends early-years support to the most disadvantaged two-year-olds, going way beyond anything the previous Government were able to deliver. This Government have a huge amount to be proud of, in offering schools this money to support such ambitious aspirations.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

The Select Committee on Education had some outstanding head teachers before it this morning, talking about the possible setting up of a college of teaching. One point they all made was about their desire for greater continuity in policy making. I therefore congratulate the Minister on making the offer to the Opposition, and the Opposition on their response in turn, to ensure a common policy that gives stability to education. With the increase in funding for the pupil premium, will he say what role he sees for subject specialists at primary level to help to raise attainment not just in English and maths, but across the broad swathe of subjects to which he has referred?

[Mr Laws]

I welcome the comments of the Chairman of the Select Committee. He is absolutely right that we need to aim for greater continuity in education policy. After all, we are talking about young people who, even individually, will take a considerable number of years to go through the education system. We want to ensure as much cross-party consensus as possible on some of the changes, so that they last.

My hon. Friend is also absolutely right that the additional money will give primary schools the opportunity to bring in greater subject specialism, which will help to boost the quality of teaching not just in English and maths, but in all the other subjects, which are so crucial and which the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) mentioned earlier.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Monday 24th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

My right hon. Friend did not, but he would be happy to.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

Last week, the chief inspector of schools said that Ofsted’s report on unseen children painted

“a striking new picture of disadvantage and educational underachievement”.

In his speech, he said that we needed new policies and approaches to deal with underachievement in rural and coastal areas. If those policies are to succeed, they will need to be financed. Will the Minister commit today to a redistribution to rural areas, so that allocations are fairer and more equal?

[Mr Laws]

We are committed to introducing a fairer national funding formula, and we hope to be able to say more about that once we are clear about the spending review announcements later this week. We also intend to ensure, through Ofsted and the accountability measures we publish, that schools in rural, coastal and other areas that may have small proportions of young people on free school meals or entitled to the pupil premium are still under intense pressure to narrow these gaps, which are as unacceptable in rural and coastal areas as they are in our inner cities.

Examination Reform

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman has explained the need for change at GCSE and provided an analysis—an accurate one for the most part—of the legacy from the Labour party. Can he explain why abolition of one suite of GCSEs is the right response, rather than simply introducing the measures and changes he has itemised for GCSEs as they stand?

[Mr Laws]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his points and the work that the Select Committee on Education has done on this and associated areas. I believe that in some of the core subjects where we are making these changes there is value in signalling the extent to which they will be improved and varied from the existing GCSE qualifications. There is some merit in underlining—through a change in how we describe these qualifications—how fundamental the changes could be. That will also be relevant for people when they assess the suite of qualifications and their future value in the labour market.

[Mr Stuart]

rose—

[Mr Laws]

I will give way again, but then I must make some progress.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way; he is being most generous. He is right about signalling. Is there not a risk from the Government’s saying officially that GCSEs as a brand are broken and irrecoverable of sending the signal that the remaining GCSEs—most subjects—for which children will spend an awful lot of time studying are also broken? Surely he must either have plans to abolish GCSEs altogether or recognise that such signalling has risks as well as benefits?

[Mr Laws]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, and that is exactly why we say in paragraph 4.7 of the consultation paper that to

“ensure the benefits of this more rigorous approach to the English Baccalaureate subjects are felt across the whole curriculum, we will ask Ofqual to consider how these new higher standards can be used as a template for judging and accrediting a new suite of qualifications, beyond these subjects at 16, to replace GCSEs”.

I promise him—I will come to this later—that we have no intention of allowing the status of the other subjects, which are not at present in the core English baccalaureate certificate, to be downgraded. We place huge value on those subjects, and I will set out later how we will take the matter forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Laws]

I am going to have to make some progress, I am afraid.

Parents want to see their children secure a strong grasp of the core academic subjects, but they also want them to have a fully rounded education, with opportunities in the other areas that I have mentioned. We are determined to ensure that those opportunities will be available. We are committed to ensuring that pupils will be able to take good-quality qualifications in all subjects at the end of key stage 4 that are fair, rigorous and rewarding. Indeed, we said in our consultation that we would ask Ofqual to consider how the higher standards that we are proposing for core EBCs could be used as a template for judging and accrediting a new suite of qualifications at age 16 to replace current GCSEs. We acknowledge that there are subjects for which 100% reliance on formal written examinations is not the best form of assessment, and we will be working with Ofqual, the Arts Council and others to review qualifications outside the core EBacc subjects. We will make an announcement, including on a proposed timetable for reform, in due course.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

May I probe my right hon. Friend a little further on the subject of tiering? The GCSE was tiered in certain subjects, and I understand that, with the introduction of the EBCs, that will be abolished. Will he tell us what share of children took tiered GCSEs last year? What are the positive and negative implications of the loss of the tiering that was found to be necessary to provide an appropriate assessment of a child’s level of attainment?

[Mr Laws]

My hon. Friend is quite right to raise that issue. We are looking at it closely as part of the consultation. I think he would acknowledge that the principle behind our reform is absolutely right. We will look at individual subjects to ensure that the reform is deliverable and that it has the intended consequences.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Laws and Graham Stuart

Monday 3rd December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I am not sure what that gap is, but even in difficult times this Government have produced a fantastic settlement for schools and are doing what her Government never did: deliver a £2.5 billion pupil premium which will get more money to the most disadvantaged youngsters in the country.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

The Minister accepts that there are gross funding discrepancies among schools, not on the basis of need but simply because of the local authority in which a school sits. Will the Minister and the Secretary of State consider the f40 group’s appeal again and look to take action in this Parliament? Such gross unfairness cannot be allowed to last into the next Parliament.

[Mr Laws]

I agree with my hon. Friend’s points. I met representatives of the f40 group recently and had a detailed discussion. As I have already explained, we are making the first moves to introduce a national funding formula in the next spending review period. I assure my hon. Friend that in the meantime I will keep a close eye—as will the Secretary of State—on the representations that the f40 group is making about how we get a fairer funding formula.