Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Laws and John Pugh

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

4. What assessment she has made of the effect of pension changes on school budgets; and if she will make a statement.

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

The employer contribution rates for the teachers’ pension scheme will increase by 2.3 percentage points following the recommendation to reform public sector pensions by the former Labour Minister, Lord Hutton of Furness. That will ensure that high-quality teacher pensions remain sustainable and affordable.

[John Pugh]

That is reassuring, but why are so many secondary heads in my constituency alarmed by the prospect of increased national insurance contributions?

[Mr Laws]

We have delayed the increase until September 2015 to give schools and head teachers time to plan; protected the schools budget in real terms in 2015-16; and—I know that my right hon. Friend will welcome this—allocated an extra £390 million to raise school funding in the most underfunded parts of the country. All those measures mean that the increase in pension costs is affordable.

Catholic Schools (Admissions)

Debate between David Laws and John Pugh

Wednesday 30th April 2014 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin. I join other hon. Members in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) on securing the debate and my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on taking on the mantle so well and setting out his concerns so clearly. I also join him in the comments that he made at the beginning of his speech about the tragedy that has occurred in Leeds. It is on the minds of all hon. Members. Our condolences are very much with the relatives of the teacher who died, and our thoughts are with the governors, teachers and pupils at that school.

We have had an extensive debate, with good participation from a number of hon. Members. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (John Pugh) and the hon. Members for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello), for Fareham (Mr Hoban), for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) and for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) for their contributions. We have had good representation from those of the Catholic faith here today. They even seem to have got through to the Front Benches, because I also have to declare an interest, having been educated only at Catholic schools—at a Catholic state primary school and an independent Catholic secondary school. I think that I can therefore speak with a bit of knowledge and some sympathy for the points made by hon. Members.

I want to place on record the fact that the Government recognise the important contribution that the Churches and faith schools—schools of all faiths—make to our education system. About one third of the schools in England are Church or faith schools and, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire said, about 10% of all schools are Roman Catholic. These schools are usually popular with parents and include some of the highest-performing schools in the country. Catholic schools in particular generally outperform other types of state school. Last year, at primary level, 81% of pupils in Catholic schools achieved level 4 and above in reading, writing and maths at key stage 2, compared with 75% of pupils at all state schools. At secondary level, 67% of students secured five good GCSEs, including English and maths, in contrast to 61% of students at all state schools in 2013.

A number of hon. Members have commented on the composition by deprivation of pupils in Catholic schools compared with other schools. Obviously, that is a complicated issue, because the fact that there are differences between schools in their disadvantaged cohorts does not necessarily prove that there has been an attempt by schools to skew their intake in one way or the other. The underlying demographics of the area and the people who want to access the faith schools may mean that they are represented in different ways from the national average in terms of their deprivation characteristics. It is worth noting that the proportions of pupils eligible for free school meals in Roman Catholic schools are not notably different from the percentages of all pupils who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

[John Pugh]

The Minister has just profiled the difference between Catholic schools and other kinds of school in terms of educational achievement, but to the credit of a lot of Catholic schools, they also have very good pastoral arrangements. Has the Department any data showing, for example, the number of exclusions from Catholic schools as opposed to other sorts of school? My instinct is that they are rather better at catering for pupils who have problematic histories than normal state schools.

Teachers Pay

Debate between David Laws and John Pugh

Tuesday 18th September 2012 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (John Pugh) for the kind comments that he made at the beginning of his speech, and I congratulate him on securing this important debate. As he mentioned a number of times, the issue is incredibly important for many people across the country, particularly in the north and in his constituency, and he will understand that it is an issue throughout much of the country beyond the south-east, including the area that I represent in the south-west of England. The Government acknowledge how sensitive it is for many people who work and do extremely important tasks within the public sector.

My hon. Friend has raised the issue at an important moment. As the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), mentioned, the School Teachers Review Body is considering the issues and will report relatively shortly. I think the shadow Minister said that he was expecting the response on 20 September. The latest information available to me indicates that it is more likely to be published towards the end of October. The shadow Minister will be aware from his own experiences in Government that the report will be made initially to the Secretary of State, who will then have to decide when to publish the evidence, alongside the Government’s response to the recommendations. I have no doubt that my hon. Friend and the shadow Minister will be assiduous in considering the evidence base and the response and following up with any issues and observations they have.

Before I go into the detail of my response to my hon. Friend, I should say that I agree with him on two strategic observations that he made about this debate. It is incredibly important that measures should be evidence-based. There is a lot of prejudice on different sides of the debate about issues of flexibility in pay, regional pay and local pay, but there is complete agreement between my hon. Friend and the Government that it must be evidence-based. He mentioned that he published his own report on the issues, bringing to the surface some of the evidence available on the issue of regional and local pay, even though it is not uncontested territory.

My hon. Friend referred earlier to having tabled a question to the Department about the regional variations in quality of teaching measured by the Ofsted framework. From my recollection of the last few days, he can expect a letter from the chief inspector on that issue pretty soon. I will be interested to hear his analysis after he has looked through the information, which I think will be quite detailed. It will perhaps take the debate further.

He and the shadow Minister made an important point. We acknowledge that education is an area in which the Government cannot simply press a button in Westminster or Whitehall and create particular policy responses across the country. There are 23,500 schools in this country, and education is delivered not by Ministers but by the people who teach in schools, head teachers and all the others who contribute in educational settings. Motivating and inspiring those people, and supporting them in the common aspiration of improving the education of young people, involves a partnership between the Government and those who serve in education. We are conscious of the need to keep them motivated and to make them understand that the Government want to support them in doing their job as effectively as possible.

The shadow Minister indicated that he is concerned about morale in some areas of the teaching profession. I have no doubt that there are various different propositions to make in this area. From my own visits to many schools across the country, particularly in my own constituency having taken on this role only recently, I think a lot of teachers and head teachers acknowledge that the Government, in difficult financial times, have put in place a good financial settlement for schools, given the pressures on other areas, including the pupil premium, which is ensuring that schools, particularly in disadvantaged areas, have the funding needed to tackle some of the challenges they face.

Before I respond to my hon. Friend, I would like to say that I am grateful to the shadow Minister for his kind comments about me taking up this role. I look forward to working with him as co-operatively as I can, and as the usual cross-party niceties allow. I would also like, as I did when I spoke a few days ago in the House, to pick up on his comments about the three Education Ministers who left in the reshuffle. I think he was indicating and hinting that those three individuals were passionate about their work and were regarded as very strong in the areas they championed. I think all hon. Members wish them all the best for the future, whether they agreed with every one of their policy proposals or not. I have no doubt that all three will go on contributing to the debate about education and children’s services.

In preparation for the debate, I read with interest my hon. Friend’s recent paper on the subject of regional and local pay. As I indicated, it is an important and timely contribution to a timely and topical debate. I will address some of the points he raised in that paper, as well as the points that came up in his speech. First, however, it is important and useful to set out, to some extent, the approach the Government are taking on reforms to teachers pay and the debate about regional and local pay across the public sector.

In the autumn statement in November 2011, the Chancellor said that pay review bodies would be asked to consider how and if public sector pay could be made more responsive to local labour markets. He then wrote to pay review bodies in December 2011. His letter to the School Teachers Review Body said:

“there is substantial evidence that the difference between public and private sector wages varies considerably between local labour markets. This has the potential to hurt private sector businesses that need to compete with higher public wages; lead to unfair variations in public sector service quality; and reduce the number of jobs that the public sector can support for any given level of expenditure.”

Those are some of the suggestions that my hon. Friend was commenting on in the debate and in his paper.

As my hon. Friend will be aware, there are already four geographical pay bands—the shadow Minister commented on this—that apply to teachers pay: inner London, outer London, the London fringe, and the rest of England and Wales. The current pay bands have rigid boundaries, which at the point they were devised took account of areas that historically had higher teacher vacancy rates and costs of living. The starting salary for classroom teachers is £21,588 in the England and Wales pay band and £27,000 in the inner London pay band. I think I am right in saying that all parties across the House, and my hon. Friend, acknowledge that there are some areas where there are very high costs, and where not having a degree of flexibility in pay would mean that it would be very difficult to recruit people who worked in those areas. Many of us are very passionate about ensuring that young people, particularly in areas such as inner London where there are big challenges in many schools, should have very high quality teachers and they should not be penalised as a consequence of teachers not being able to live and teach in those areas. The debate, then, is not whether there should be any element of regional variation within the system of teachers pay, but whether we should have different or greater variation.

The single most important determinant of a good education is for every child to have access to a good teacher. The available evidence suggests that the main driver of variation in student achievement at school is the quality of the teachers. The effects of high-quality teaching are especially significant for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, and research from the Sutton Trust has suggested that poor pupils may lose out on a whole year’s worth of education if they spend a year in a class with a poorly performing teacher, when compared with the education that they would have received from a very good teacher. International evidence shows that the top performing school systems consistently attract more able people into the teaching profession, leading to better pupil outcomes. That is a reason why the pay incentives and the overall levels of pay have to be right, as my hon. Friend would agree. Competitive salaries, in line with other local graduate professions, help to ensure that high-quality graduates are attracted into and retained within the teaching profession across the country.

[John Pugh]

The Minister is suggesting, and I agree, that teachers in disadvantaged areas have probably greater potential to make a difference to children’s lives. It is relatively unsurprising, then, that value added is identified in those areas of relative deprivation, as the Propper data show.

[Mr Laws]

That is a good point, but it is perhaps not the whole debate. I will explain why as I proceed through the comments that I have to make.

Recent research from the OECD showed that our teachers are amongst the best paid of all OECD countries. There was an improvement under the previous Government, which we welcome—that is good news. However, alongside ensuring that salaries are competitive we need to consider the case for arrangements for teachers pay that drive up the quality of teaching by rewarding good performance; giving schools as much freedom as possible to spend their money sensibly as they see fit to meet their pupils’ needs; ensuring the best teachers are incentivised to work in the most challenging schools, as my hon. Friend has acknowledged; and ensuring—an important point both for and against the argument for regional pay—the best value for money for the taxpayer in the money that it is allocated. That is why the Secretary of State, responding to the Chancellor, has asked the experts, the School Teachers Review Body, to consider how reforms to the teachers pay system might support schools and head teachers to recruit and retain the best quality teachers. That is in line with the approach being taken for other public sector work forces and will ensure that any changes that are made—this is my hon. Friend’s concern—must be based on the best evidence available.

In his remit letter to the STRB, the Secretary of State asked it to consider a number of factors: first, how we might reduce rigidity within the pay system so that it best supports the recruitment and retention of high quality teachers in all schools; secondly, how teachers pay could be better linked to performance and whether there are existing barriers to that within the current system; and thirdly, whether to make teachers pay more flexible following the commitment in the 2011 autumn statement to ask pay review bodies to consider how public sector pay can be made more responsive to local market conditions. The question of how teachers’ pay can be made more responsive to local labour markets is only one of the things—an important point that I want to draw out from today’s debate—that the Secretary of State has asked the STRB to consider, and it is important that I set out all of the issues on which the Secretary of State has asked for recommendations.

To support the STRB’s consideration of its remit, the Secretary of State submitted written evidence. The STRB has also taken into account evidence from bodies representing employers of teachers, school governors, and teacher and head teacher unions. The Secretary of State’s evidence raised concerns that under the current system the rate at which teachers are paid is more closely associated with the time they have served as a teacher than it is with their performance in the classroom. Almost every teacher on the main pay scale progresses to the next spine point each year, and almost half of qualified teachers across all pay scales are on a higher spine point than the previous year.

Our analysis of vacancy rates shows that some schools find it more difficult to recruit and retain teachers than others. There are different vacancy rates between different regions, between local authorities in the same region, and between schools in the same local authority. There are also differences in vacancy rates between subjects, as my hon. Friend is aware. For example, there are above average vacancies in English and mathematics posts, but below average vacancy rates in the arts and humanities. Where vacancies are filled, some subjects are significantly more likely to be taught by non-specialist teachers, which is a major concern. For example, 21% of physics lessons are taught by non-specialist teachers, compared with 10% of history lessons.

The Secretary of State’s evidence to the STRB suggested five options for reform that it may wish to consider, illustrating the range of approaches that are available to it when making its recommendations. In late October, following careful consideration of all the evidence submitted, the STRB will make its recommendations to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State has stated his intention to then issue a second remit to the STRB that may ask it to produce more detailed recommendations, or to consider further issues on which it has not yet reported. Hon. Members will be pleased to know that no decisions have been made and the Government remain open-minded about these reforms.

My hon. Friend’s paper and his speech clearly set out a number of key arguments made in the recent debate about regional pay for public sector workers. I should like briefly to touch on some of the issues that he highlighted. I remind him that issues relating to how public sector pay reflects the local labour market will be considered alongside other priorities, which I mentioned earlier.

[John Pugh]

Will the Minister consider the following point? We have used the expression “responsive to the local labour market” all the way through, as though we know in every case what the local labour market or the pool of workers is that we are pulling from. It would be useful to have an additional piece of research figuring out, when, say, a school head teacher or head of department post is advertised, the actual field of applicants. Where do they come from and how do people move between one area and another? In teaching, people at a certain level are prepared to move appreciable distances. Often in an advertisement in the paper, a school is appealing to the labour market of the whole nation, not just the local labour market. We cannot talk as though the local labour market is a fixed thing that we always understand.