Oral Answers to Questions

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Willetts]

We are, of course committed to publishing a White Paper on our proposals, but I can tell the hon. Gentleman that they will ensure that power in our higher education system resides with the student, which is where it should reside. Universities will have to respond to the choices and preferences of students, and we believe that about a quarter of graduates will contribute less under our proposals than they do under the system left to us by the last Government.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Methwold high school in my constituency is developing a pioneering plan to offer university of London degrees. It will be a first, particularly in a rural community. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a great way of increasing participation and aspiration, and would he be willing to meet me along with a delegation from Methwold high school?

[Mr Willetts]

I think I read an interesting article about that important initiative in Times Higher Education the other day. I congratulate my hon. Friend on drawing the House’s attention to it.

We are committed to broadening participation in higher education. That is what our £150 million scholarship scheme is all about, and initiatives such as the one described by my hon. Friend are very valuable.

Oral Answers to Questions

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I will give the Secretary of State a chance to calm down by calling Elizabeth Truss.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Following the introduction of modular mathematics GCSE this September, which is down to the previous Government and is widely thought to be a worse preparation for A-levels than previous courses, what steps is the Secretary of State taking to ensure that the twin maths GCSEs are going to be rigorous, linear and observed by academics and learned societies?

[Michael Gove]

Our White Paper will reveal several steps that we will be taking to improve the learning of mathematics, and one of the key questions we will be asking at GCSE level is how a Government who left a £155 billion deficit can have the temerity to ask for more public spending.

Oral Answers to Questions

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

Yes, primary schools should continue with the current primary curriculum. The details and timings will be announced later in the year, but I assure the hon. Lady that there will be plenty of lead time available to schools to implement the new curriculum. We do not want what the previous Government had, which was “initiativitis”. Schools received new initiatives every two weeks, and lever arch files full of prescriptive instructions about how to teach were disseminated to all our schools.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Will the Minister comment on the fact that many primary schools appear to be teaching multiple methods for basic mathematical problems, which has been set out through the national strategies, rather than achieving fluency in key methods, which enables those pupils to go on and achieve and where countries such as Flanders and Finland have proved so successful?

[Mr Gibb]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for her passion about the way maths is taught in our schools. Of course, how children are taught is a pedagogical matter, which should be left to the professionalism of teachers, but what is taught and when will be matters for the national curriculum review.

Academies Bill [Lords]

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Vernon Coaker]

I do not disagree with that. Again, the freedom for a school to determine the appropriate mix between teachers, teaching assistants and other staff as well as the appropriate delivery method is a matter for the school. The Chair of the Select Committee is right to say that. However, it does not negate the fact—I think he was making this point, too—that alongside that there is a need for some sort of co-ordinating mechanism. He is quite right that there is a need for balance and there will be debate and discussion about where that balance should be and where the line should be drawn. However, part of the problem is that, as I said yesterday, this is a bit of a leap in the dark. We are almost being asked to take a leap in the dark and being told, “Don’t worry, it will be okay.” There are some fundamental questions that Ministers have been unable to answer, even though they have the best of intentions, because the Bill is permissive and just says, “Well, we’ll allow this to happen but we are not quite sure where it will go.”

A number of concerns were raised by different organisations. We have heard concerns from the Adolescent and Children’s Trust about children in care and about how these services will be met. It is seeking assurances about looked-after children and young people in academies, and it says that it wants recognition from the Government that there is a need for a local agency to assess need and to plan and cost education support services and that necessary resources must be not only identified but ring-fenced.

The Association of Educational Psychologists has also written to us, extremely concerned about some of the changes to local education funding and about how we can ensure the protection of educational psychologists if all the money goes to the schools. The National Autistic Society has made many of the same points about protecting young people in schools. TreeHouse, another charity for autism, is concerned about what it will mean if funds and resources are devolved to individual schools.

Then we come to funding. The Local Government Association states in its briefing, which all Members will have received, that

“90% of funding for schools goes, via the local authority, directly to schools with the remainder allocated back to schools following consultation with schools through the local Schools Forum…Around 20% of this ‘central spending’ goes to private, voluntary or independent nurseries, and the majority of the rest (60%) is used to provide services for pupils with special educational needs, and those who are excluded from mainstream education…In the debate around the advantages to schools of seeking academy status much has been made of the advantage to schools of retaining this 10% of ‘central spending’. However, it is important to understand that this is funding to meet the need of the pupils with the greatest needs. It is crucial that this funding is distributed in a way that does not unfairly benefit academies over maintained schools.”

I do not know whether hon. Members have had a chance to look at the Government’s impact assessment, but tucked away, where it states that local authorities will face a reduction in the moneys that they receive for the provision of such services as it will be distributed to schools, it states the assumption that the savings to local authorities in administration costs will be negligible. So, although they will have fewer resources to provide for special educational needs in an area, they will not make any savings from an administrative point of view either.

It is also totally unclear exactly how all this will be worked out. What will a school that chooses to become an academy receive? I know there is a ready reckoner on the Department’s website, but will the Minister explain how it works? [Interruption.] That was not done yesterday: we asked, but there was no time to do it, so I am asking again today because I think we would all like to know how the ready reckoner works so that schools can understand what they will receive.

What proportion of the money that those schools receive would have gone to local authorities to provide, centrally, services for children with special educational needs? What proportion of the additional money they receive will go to schools and will not be retained centrally by local authorities? How will that be worked out given that every school that is fast-tracked to academy status is outstanding and has, as the Centre for Economic Performance has said, lower numbers of pupils with SEN?

How will schools that have a lower incidence of SEN and that apply to become academies be funded? Will it be on a per pupil basis or a needs basis? If schools are funded on a per pupil basis rather than on a needs basis, big schools with a low incidence of SEN that convert to academies will receive exceptionally high amounts of money that would previously have been retained centrally to provide SEN services to the pupils and children across the local education area who needed them. Why did The Times publish an article on 12 June saying that there was considerable confusion among local authorities and schools about how much money schools would receive? Why are some local authorities saying that when they add together all the amounts that the ready reckoner comes up with as being distributed to schools on the basis of centrally provided services the total is sometimes more than they receive? We need some explanation from the Minister about that.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Are not the SEN requirements on the new academies more stringent than those for the academies that were opened under the previous Government?

[Vernon Coaker]

The hon. Lady will know that I praised the Government at the beginning of my speech for making some amendments in the House of Lords. The amendment that applied measures in the Education Act 1996 to academies was a good one, as were the amendments that introduced paragraph 8A and subsection (6). I shall not argue with her about that.

[Elizabeth Truss]

Is not the hon. Gentleman essentially saying that the previous arrangements worked for the existing academies and that the new arrangements are even better?

[Vernon Coaker]

I am saying that the existing state of play is not good enough and that the amendment that was made in the House of Lords to apply the 1996 Act to academies was a good one. We are debating the further changes that the Bill will make to delegate funding straight to schools rather than via local authorities—money that would have been retained centrally to provide services. Government Members—not only Front Benchers, but Members such as the hon. Lady—need to explain how SEN services that are currently provided centrally will be protected if all that money is delegated out to schools. How will that work? The point of this Committee is to understand the Government’s thinking about how that will happen.

Academies Bill [Lords]

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Monday 19th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

As the hon. Gentleman will hear later, the statistics are rather sharp on the difference between academies and the rest of the maintained sector. Moreover, the academies were unwilling to divulge the difference between academic qualifications and academic equivalent qualifications in vocational subjects.

Let us be clear that we are not debating the relative merits of academic versus vocational education. The equivalent qualifications sold as vocational are, in fact, rarely so. Many academy pupils are directed towards what might be described as semi-vocational or semi-academic subjects that do not provide the rigorous technical training that might lead to an apprenticeship but are simply weaker versions of GCSEs, such as BTEC science or OCR national certificates in information and communications technology.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Did not the Labour Government put in place the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, with its dogma of equivalence that made those subjects equivalent in the first place and give head teachers the incentives to treat those qualifications equally?

[Mr Hunt]

Clearly, the hon. Lady has not discovered the new politics. This is not about party political point scoring. [Interruption.] As I said at the beginning of my speech, this is about what children learn in our schools, and Government Members would do well to remember that amid their guffawing. Although a BTEC can officially be worth two GCSEs, or an OCR national certificate worth four GCSEs, that equation is not necessarily accepted by further or higher education colleges or other academic institutions, so often the pupil is short-changed even as grade results are inflated.

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) mentioned speed and several other hon. Members have referred to impatience. Yes, we are impatient because we have had 13 years of failed education policies, which have not delivered for the poorest in our society. Education spending per pupil doubled from 1997 to 2009, yet the trajectory of improvement in GCSE results has not changed since the mid-1990s. According to the international league tables of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment—PISA—we still have a massive difference between the top and bottom achievers.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady accept that one of the reasons why so many Labour Members feel strongly about the speed with which the Bill is going through is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) said, that schools are the heart of communities and, unless they are consulted, the heart will be ripped out of them and children will be let down in the process?

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss]

I care about pupils in the schools and whether they achieve what they need to and should achieve. They have been let down by 13 years of failed policies. I shall outline exactly why they have been let down, why teachers are not empowered to teach in the way they see fit and why the teaching profession has been denigrated.

[Shabana Mahmood]

Does the hon. Lady accept that there is a difference between having a policy, wanting to get it on the statute book as quickly as possible and feeling passionately about it—I have no doubt that she feels passionately about it—and bypassing proper scrutiny in a Bill Committee and giving people outside and in the House time to scrutinise it fully and ascertain its impact?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thought that what is happening today and later this week was scrutiny—though not very much, looking at the Opposition Benches.

Whatever some Labour Members have said, the Bill is a continuation of one of the previous Labour Government’s successful policies, which allowed a few schools to become academies. We have therefore seen such a policy work. However, the vast majority of the money that the previous Government spent was not spent wisely. The money for academies was the small proportion that was spent wisely, but we experienced a huge increase in centralisation and bureaucracy under the previous Government. A vast array of quangos was set up—for example, the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency; Ofqual; the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency; Partnerships for Schools, and Every Child Matters. A whole series of strategies and interventions took place.

[Shabana Mahmood]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Elizabeth Truss]

No, I want to continue with my point, and I have already given way to the hon. Lady.

Every strategy dictated to teachers what they should do. That took away decision making from the teaching profession and teachers’ ability to lead the class in the way they saw fit. The curriculum became increasingly prescriptive, with bodies such as the QCDA and Ofqual devising examinations that were more modulised and standardised. Instead of encouraging every child to learn and develop a love of a subject and educating each child’s mind, teachers were encouraged to teach to the test. Labour Members proclaim results as improvements, but much of that was to do with the fact that, as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) said, teachers were rewarded on results.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that Labour Members have gone—[Hon. Members: “They’ve gone.”] Indeed, they have gone—there are but five left. Does my hon. Friend agree that they have gone from being anti-Tory in 1997 to a Blairite conversion, which they now disdain, to all talking Balls?

[Elizabeth Truss]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. However, the Opposition seem confused. One Labour Member has argued for more academic qualifications while others have said that the qualifications that the Labour Government introduced were fantastic. They cannot agree. They have not come up with a consistent approach to our proposed legislation. The principle of autonomy has been heavily road tested and proved successful in the small minority of schools in which it has been implemented. The previous Government should have set up more academies, but instead, they competed in all the centralising tendencies, on which the previous Education Secretary was particularly keen.

The teaching unions have also been involved in centralising the system. In 2003, there were agreements between the teaching unions and the Government about how teachers operate in the classroom, how their lessons are covered, and what preparation and assessment work they do. There are such practices in no other job. There has been a vast increase in teaching assistants and cover supervisors. That is not to say that I am against those people, but decisions should be up to head teachers and not governed by a weight of paperwork from Whitehall.

There was glimmer of light—several hon. Members on these Benches have referred to the former Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair—with the academies programme. Yet the academies were a trickle rather than a flood. We had only 200 schools out of a total of 3,000 that could have become academies. In 2007, when the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) took over as Secretary of State for Education, rather than openly oppose the academies programme, he made it increasingly difficult for schools to become academies and restricted the arrangements for, for example, the curriculum. Those arrangements were made much tighter.

[Mr Ward]

As I tried to say in my speech, if the freedoms—staffing, curriculum, release from all the paperwork and so on—are so useful, why do we not extend them to every maintained school? Why is structure important? The main improvements that took place through the national challenge did not require a change in structure. An individual interim executive board in a school that is in special measures turns a school round without a change in structure. Why are hon. Members so obsessed with structure?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I think the answer is that there are so many national regulations. I am concerned about that rather than local authorities, which have often been put under pressure by the national Government. For example, I referred to the 2003 terms and conditions agreement between the teaching unions and the Government. Schools need the ability to make decisions, to have agreements between teachers and head teachers and to make their own work force arrangements. I would like more schools to take up the opportunity offered—it is the way forward. I think that it empowers teachers, who often enjoy their jobs more. I have visited several academies, and teachers’ excitement, engagement and motivation are visible.

The opportunity provided by the fact that we will have more schools than the 200-odd we have at the moment will attract more people into the profession. Interestingly, someone asked whether the teaching unions could become involved in academies. Rather than being a roadblock to reform, it would be helpful if the teaching unions supported academies. That would bring huge benefits to teachers. We would probably see better rewards for teachers in the long term, and we would certainly see more professional autonomy for them and a greater respect and esteem for the profession, which would be helpful for the unions in the long term.

I urge Ministers not to heed the calls to slow down—I am sure that they will not—because we have waited long enough for academy schools that serve not just a few people. I applaud existing academies, but the children in our country who do not go to them have waited long enough for a good education. The Opposition are complacent about our education. We are not succeeding; we are failing internationally. There is a huge gap between the attainment of top students and low-achieving students. The Conservatives’ motivation is to close that gap, and I urge the Government to carry on.

Oral Answers to Questions

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend raises a good point. False accusations against teachers can have a devastating effect on the careers of those teachers. We intend to introduce anonymity for such teachers and will announce more details of that in due course.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove)]

I thank my hon. Friend for her question. I have today placed a letter in the House of Commons Library detailing how the £670 million of spending reductions in my Department will be implemented. There will be reductions of £359 million in a variety of programmes, including the ending of “Who Do We Think We Are?” week, which started under my predecessor. Given his article in The Observer yesterday, in which he sought to win his party’s leadership by outflanking the leader of the Conservative party on both immigration and Euroscepticism—something not done since Enoch Powell was a Member of the House—I hope that those cuts will be of interest to the House.

I am also today lifting restrictions that have stopped state schools offering the international general certificate of secondary education qualification in key subjects. That means that, from September, state-funded schools will be free to teach a wide range of those respected and valued qualifications, putting them, at last, on a level playing field with independent schools.

[Mr Speaker]

I am sorry to tell the Secretary of State that his answer was too long, but I know that he will not repeat it at Question Time next month.

[Elizabeth Truss]

I congratulate the Secretary of State on starting his spending cuts with abolishing the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, which I believe is partly responsible for undermining academic standards in science and maths A-levels and GCSEs. What does he plan to put in its place to ensure that pupils are properly prepared for university and for work?