Children Not in School: National Register and Support

Ed Davey Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for all her campaigning work on the important issue of supporting families and children where imprisonment is a factor in their lives, such as when a parent is spending time in prison or is in the criminal justice system. She raises the important issue—one that I will come to in the debate—of the need to get a better sense of all the information around a child so that we can better support all children and families.

[Ed Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I will give way one final time, then I must make some progress.

[Ed Davey]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way. It is important that she has brought this critical issue to the House. Many groups of young children, as we have heard, are not in school for many reasons. One group that is particularly close to my heart is young carers. I am sure that she will know from all the evidence and analysis that, on average, young carers miss 27 days of school a year. That shows the absolutely urgent need to have a national carers strategy with a focus on young carers. Does the hon. Lady agree and will she commit her party to push that forward in government?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I agree that we absolutely must do more to support young carers, and I give the undertaking that a Labour Government would ensure that young carers’ voices, needs and rights and the support that should be made available to them are taken seriously.

Members on both sides of the House will be familiar with the view widely held by those on the Conservative Benches that whatever damage they might have done to our country, whether it be laughing in the face of voters waiting year after year for NHS treatment, as the Prime Minister did last week, the sewage that fills our rivers and seas, or the growing crisis their party has created in provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities—separate from all that—at least the education that children receive in our country is something the Conservative party has not yet damaged beyond repair. The trouble with that belief is that if it were ever true, today it is no longer.

At the end of last year, the OECD’s programme for international student assessment 2022 results came out. Conservative Members have for many years taken a keen interest in the results, which I should say at the outset are based on such a small sample in England that they may not be altogether robust—a point to which I intend to return. Close observers will have noticed that, over a number of years, the intellectual effort by the Conservative party and its apologists has moved from explaining to concealing what the results show, and from regarding them as a spur to action to taking them as an excuse for complacency. We are in a debate on an education matter, so I hope that Members across the House and you, Madam Deputy Speaker, will forgive me if I briefly adopt a didactic tone.

The PISA score for each country shows how well that country is doing at educating its children across reading, maths and science. The PISA rankings are about how well the children in that country are doing relative to children in other countries. Rather obviously, that ranking is affected by not merely how well children do in other countries, but how many other countries are involved. Going up or down the rankings need be no measure of changing outcomes for children in England, nor of any success for this Government. It is therefore the scores, not the rankings, that are the proper focus of Government attention.

It is not enough that our children are doing better than children elsewhere if they are doing worse than their older siblings, nor is it a comfort that their reading is better than that of children in another country if it is worse than their brothers and sisters. Education is not a contest between nations, but a shared endeavour in every country and across our world to give children the very best start—not some of our children, but all of them.

The PISA results showed that standards in England’s schools are going backwards in science, in reading and in maths. They may not be going backwards as fast as they are elsewhere, but the pace of failure ought not to be a source of pride. Some 14 years into a Conservative Government, they focus carefully on the rankings, not the scores, and their proudest claim is that other children for whom they are not responsible are getting an even worse education overseas.

It beggars belief—and it is no good blaming the pandemic. The pandemic was worldwide, but not every country has gone backwards. That slow failure is not a story of poor teaching, of staff not pulling their weight or of leaders not rising to the challenges they face. It is structural, reflecting choices made in Downing Street and the priorities of the Conservative party: tax breaks for private schools, not standards for state schools, and smaller bills for the super-rich, not better starts for children. The one area in which this Government excel is the creation and maintenance of fresh barriers to learning.

Schools may crumble—indeed, despite the Secretary of State’s well-publicised view of the quality of her own work, the BBC’s “Panorama” programme last night showed powerfully that schools do crumble—but nothing seems to stop Ministers putting fresh barriers in the way of our children getting the education they deserve. There are barriers because the children are neither at school nor in home education; barriers because children are not ready that day, or that year; barriers because children have not slept and cannot concentrate, do not succeed when they should and are not learning when they ought; barriers because children simply are not well; and barriers that speak to the wider failure, and the piling of expectations on schools alone that schools alone can never meet.

Child poverty’s effects do not end as the classroom door closes. The good night’s sleep, the space to do homework and the quiet undisturbed time at home are all missing from far too many of our children’s lives. As I mentioned earlier, the PISA results are based on such a small sample in England that they may not be altogether robust, and that points, indirectly, at the problems we face—the problems with which the next Labour Government will and must contend, because this Government have not, are not and will not. Teaching children who come to school does not help those who do not, supporting children we know about will not bring in the ones we do not, and the results for children who are there are not meaningful for the children who are not. That is true for PISA, true for GCSEs and true for A-levels.

Labour’s belief is simple: excellence is for everyone—not just for those who are in school every day, but for those who are not. High and rising standards must be in every school, in every classroom and for every child, but today, all too clearly, they are not. Across the autumn and spring terms last year, more than 1.5 million children were persistently absent from school. That is, roughly speaking, one in five children, or more than double the number who were absent during the same terms five years ago. If that rise goes on, the number of children persistently absent will rise to more than 2 million in 2025-26, or one in four children missing at least a day each fortnight. That is a disaster, and the Government are doing as close as they can to nothing at all.

Let me quote to the House the words of the headteacher of a state secondary school in the north-east, earlier this month:

“Today, an unremarkable Wednesday in the second week back after a two week holiday, 10% of our students are absent from school. 17% of Year 11 students, those in the most important examination year of their lives, are absent. We’ve become used to these statistics and sadly, these patterns of absence are now considered normal in schools. Indeed, our attendance is higher than national and local averages.”

Ministers will doubtless tell me they are proud of their attendance hubs, and the 10 councils in which they are set to deliver attendance mentoring. The Secretary of State might as well be proud of the water pistol she brings to a wildfire. School leaders know it is a disaster. They can see the catastrophe unfolding around them.