Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between David Laws and Stephen Timms

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

If the hon. Gentleman is concerned about the school in his constituency, I would be happy to meet him to discuss it. We would want to remove any bureaucracy where schools are sensibly trying to draw together capital plans, but we also have the Priority School Building programme and the ongoing academies capital maintenance fund. They are satisfying the condition needs of many schools across the country.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

9. What plans she has to increase the number of apprenticeships for 16 to 18-year-olds; and if she will make a statement.

Social Mobility/Child Poverty Strategy

Debate between David Laws and Stephen Timms

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for giving us the opportunity to debate this very important and wide-ranging subject. I also thank the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), for sponsoring the debate and for opening it in such a powerful way. Their extensive speeches covered a great many of the major policy areas relating to social mobility.

I especially enjoyed the right hon. Lady’s speech. I enjoyed her challenges on some of the issues about which she thinks the Government should be doing more. I was interested to hear about her own family background, and her mother’s efforts to take all the opportunities that life presented. I congratulate her particularly on her success, and the success of her constituent, in helping to change some of what sounded like the rather backward-looking arrangements for the admission of postgraduates to Oxford university. I imagine that it is even more difficult to change the arrangements for admissions to Oxford university than it can sometimes be to change Government policy, so I think that that was something of a victory for her and her constituent.

The Government are committed to the principle that where people start in life should not determine where they end up, and that forms the basis of a huge amount of work that we are doing on both economic and social policy, which we have set out in the recent child poverty strategy and the social mobility strategy. It was good to hear not only the two opening speeches, but the speeches made by other Members including the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain), my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Simon Wright), the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and, of course, the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali). They made powerful speeches which covered different aspects of the debate, and which signalled that in all parties, whatever their philosophy and whatever their ideology, there is a strong commitment to changing society in this regard, and ensuring that there is genuine opportunity for everyone regardless of background. That national consensus comes across clearly in the foreword to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission report from the autumn of 2013, where Alan Milburn and his fellow commissioners said:

“It is part of Britain’s DNA that everyone should have a fair chance in life. Yet too often demography is destiny in our country. Being born poor often leads to a lifetime of poverty. Poor schools ease people into poor jobs. Disadvantage and advantage cascade down the generations.”

That is the challenge that we all face. The last Government faced it and we face it in this Parliament.

It is our ambition to build not only a stronger economy out of the rubble of the crash of 2008 but a fairer society, even in these challenging times. We are not only getting on with that job but making progress, as we have set out in our strategy report and as is highlighted in parts of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission report. The economy is now escaping from the worst recession in generations. We have already helped record numbers of people into work and put in place far-reaching measures to improve the educational attainment of the poorest people in society.

The right hon. Lady praised Alan Milburn and all members of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission for their work, commitment and dedication to that shared cause. I join her in thanking Alan Milburn and the commissioners for their work. She was also kind enough to praise the Government for their bravery, I think she said, in taking the novel step of setting up an independent watchdog and asking a leading former Cabinet Minister from the Labour party to chair it and to be our critical friend on those issues. That demonstrates how serious the coalition Government are about that policy agenda. We decided to take a risk in setting up a body that we fully expected would be not only a friend but a critical friend and would challenge us on our ambitions to address social injustice and create a society of real opportunity for every individual.

The Government’s child poverty strategy sets out that our approach is rigorous and evidence-based. We are focusing on sustainable solutions that will work in the long term and make our society fairer. I acknowledge that the last Government also had a strong commitment in that area. It did some important work, not least in schools policy. In the debate, we have talked about the success of London schools in the last 15 or so years. I pay tribute to former Education Secretaries and individuals such as Lord Adonis who played a large part in some of those education reforms.

It is also true that, in their strategy in this area, the last Government became very dependent on public expenditure through the benefits and tax credits system. By the end of the last Parliament, it became clear to most commentators and people in the House that the strategy of relying on ever more means-tested benefits was not sustainable in the long term, particularly in an environment where the public finances were deeply in deficit.

Therefore, we are now focusing on tackling the causes of inequality and social injustice. That is why we are putting a particular focus on some of the areas that right hon. and hon. Members have raised today: on investing in the early years, on improving the quality of our schools system, and on ensuring that people get more opportunities in work and make progress in work, rather than simply being in work on low pay. I would like to set out some of the Government’s plans in those areas and to try to respond to some of the points that right hon. and hon. Members have made.

The right hon. Lady placed a heavy emphasis on the importance of tackling disadvantage in the early years, as did a number of other Members, rightly. The Government fully share the view that, in order to address disadvantage and inequality of opportunity, we have to be able to act early on. Far too many young people start off way behind as they join our schools system. Schools then struggle to try to make good the disadvantage that has already been embedded in the early years. We have to do more in those crucial early years to prevent these gaps from opening up, so across the early years we are helping disadvantaged children to gain access to high-quality education and we are providing more help to parents who want to get back to work. Our new entitlement for the parents of the most disadvantaged 40% of two-year-olds will mean that about 260,000 disadvantaged two-year-olds will be entitled to get a Government-funded early education place from September.

Earlier this year, we also announced that from 2015-16 we will extend the pupil premium, which is having a profoundly important impact in schools, into the early years, so that we ensure that three-year-olds and four-year-olds from the most disadvantaged backgrounds can get the best start in life. That is extra money to raise the quality of teaching and pay for more qualified teaching staff, particularly in settings with a large number of disadvantaged youngsters. We have announced the consultation on that and the level of the early years pupil premium for 2015-16, and I very much hope that the party or parties in government after the next election will continue to be committed to the early-years pupil premium and to the schools pupil premium. I hope we will significantly increase the early-years pupil premium so that it is at least as great financially—if anything, I hope it is more—as the pupil premium for primary schools, on a full-time equivalent basis. We know that investment in these areas makes the biggest impact when we invest early, which is why we decided in 2014-15 to put almost all the increase in the pupil premium into the primary setting rather than into secondary education. We are also doing other good work.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

The pupil premium is based on free school meal eligibility, but we still do not know which recipients of universal credit will be entitled to free school meals for their children. We have been waiting for this decision for about three years, and I think the delay is because of a disagreement—or an inability to reach agreement—between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education. Is the Minister able to tell us when that very important policy decision will be made?