Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Elizabeth Truss and Annette Brooke

Monday 16th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

T6. We are in the third year of phonics tests for six-year-olds, and I understand that the tests have shown an improvement in decoding skills. What action will the Minister take to ensure that we are stimulating the enjoyment of reading?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)]

Last year’s results from the progress in international reading literacy study—PIRLS—showed that the number of children in this country who are reading for enjoyment is going up; it has resumed considerably over the past few years. We have fantastic schemes to encourage students to read, such as the summer reading challenge. This year’s challenge is the mythical maze, which will challenge children to find their way around a labyrinth and introduce them to fantastical creatures from the world of legend and mythology.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Elizabeth Truss and Annette Brooke

Monday 24th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

That is why we are making it very clear to school nurseries that they are able to charge for extra hours and they can open from 8 until 6 to provide parents with that service. As I said, 45% of all early-years places in London are in school nurseries. There is huge potential there to get better service from our existing assets.

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

I welcome the new advice on the summer-born starting school at age 5 in a reception class, but are Ministers aware of just how varied the response to parental requests is between different school admission authorities, and what action will they take?

Child Care

Debate between Elizabeth Truss and Annette Brooke

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

I have just answered the hon. Gentleman’s question.

I was talking about why Labour made such a mess of child care. It piled red tape on schools and nurseries, making it harder for them to expand. Furthermore, even though parents like flexible, affordable, home-based care, the number of childminders halved under Labour, because of the level of regulation, the difficulty of becoming a childminder and the fact that the funding system was skewed towards nurseries and away from childminders.

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

I often challenged the previous Government on the collapse in the number of childminders, and I would be interested to hear what innovative ideas the Minister has for expanding this important child care provision.

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank my hon. Friend for her points and I note her consistent support for home-based child care and the important help it can offer.

School Starting Age

Debate between Elizabeth Truss and Annette Brooke

Wednesday 4th September 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) on securing this debate and on her campaign, including the early-day motion, on the issue of summer-born children. I absolutely share the concerns that she has raised about the issues affecting those children. In the Department for Education, summer-born children are heavily represented—I was born in July and the Secretary of State was born in August, although we both went to primary school in Scotland, where the cut-off dates are slightly different.

My hon. Friend made a variety of points, encompassing some of the overall issues about the school system and the early-years system, as well as the specific issue of the admissions code. What we are seeking to do with our education reforms is to increase the level of flexibility that head teachers and teachers have—for example, over how they implement the school curriculum—so that children are not pushed through material that they are not yet ready for and so that more care is taken about the individual’s level of capacity at a stage of learning.

We are also trying to remove some of the barriers between early years and school, so that there is not a sudden jump between them but rather a continuum of age-appropriate learning for children. Those changes are also important in ensuring that each child is treated as an individual rather than as part of a block of children who are pushed through the system.

The statutory school admissions code allows for flexibility in school starting dates, as my hon. Friend pointed out. It requires school admission authorities to provide for the admission of children in the September following their fourth birthday, so that the maximum amount of reception education is available to all children. However, children do not reach compulsory school age until after their fifth birthday, and no parent is obliged to send their child to school before then.

As my hon. Friend pointed out, we released new guidance this summer, making it much clearer to schools about where their responsibilities lie and where the responsibilities of local authorities lie. We need to allow some time for that new guidance to filter through and to ensure that all local authorities and schools understand it. Nevertheless, in that guidance we certainly addressed some of the concerns that she has raised today.

What we want to do is to empower parents to be more demanding about how their child’s level of development is reflected in whether they join reception or year 1 when they enter school after reaching the compulsory school age. My hon. Friend made valid points about issues such as child care costs and other children in the family, which will also have an effect on the decision that parents reach, but I do not think that we can impose a solution from Whitehall.

The way to do things is to empower parents and ensure, first, that they have the complaints and appeals procedures at their disposal and, secondly, that the DFE is following up on those procedures. We have a working group on admissions, which is monitoring this issue. As a Department, we will also be monitoring any complaints made by parents, such as the one that my hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma) mentioned in his speech, and following up to ensure that our guidance is being adhered to.

At the moment, we do not have data that would demonstrate how many parents of summer-born children request that their child is admitted to the reception class at the age of five, or how many of those requests are granted. That is something that I will look into, to see whether it is possible to get more information to understand what might be the scale of the problem. However, like my hon. Friend, we are concerned about the level of correspondence that we are having on this issue and the level of complaints about it, which is precisely why we issued the new guidance to clarify the situation for schools and local authorities.

The point about flexibility is important, because all children are different. Some children may benefit from entering year 1 as soon as they reach the compulsory school age, while others would benefit from entering reception. It should be the parents who are the primary decision-makers when it comes to deciding which route is most appropriate for their child and which environment will enable their child to thrive.

[Annette Brooke]

If someone sends their child to an independent school, it is clearly available to them to decide which year group they go into. When it is really in the best interests of the child, I want that flexibility to apply to all parents, right through to a situation where perhaps there are disadvantages in the background. So I welcome the Minister’s words, but I would just like her to be a little more proactive as well as responsive to the problem.

[Elizabeth Truss]

We are absolutely clear that parents should be able to say to a school, “We want our child, who is aged five, to enter reception”, if they feel that that is in the best interests of their child. That is what we are elucidating in the new guidance that we issued this summer and that is what we will be following up on with local authorities and schools.

One of the reasons why we issued the new guidance is that we felt that earlier guidance was misunderstood and that it was not necessarily clear enough. I also agree with my hon. Friend’s comment earlier about the “floodgates”. Like her, we do not think that the new guidance will open the “floodgates”; we think that it is about schools being responsive to parental needs and that there are not a massive number of complications in doing that. We want schools to be responsive to parental needs. However, only the parents of a limited group of children—those born between April and August—can lawfully delay entry by a full year. It is those children we are talking about in this debate.

I agree with what my hon. Friend said about the research evidence on summer-born children. We know that they have lower average attainment than their older peers. The attainment deficit decreases over time as they progress through the key stages, but it persists throughout their schooling. Absolute age is the dominant reason for that but it is not the only reason, and there is a statistically significant effect from the starting age or the length of schooling. That is why we want to give maximum flexibility.

I have mentioned the non-statutory advice that we issued on 29 July. We make it absolutely clear that there is no statutory barrier to children being educated outside of their normal year group and that it is unlawful for an admissions authority to have a blanket policy that children are never admitted outside of their normal age group. We make that very clear in the guidance.

I note from my hon. Friend’s comments that she feels that some of that guidance should be clearer, and that is certainly something we can look at. However, the new guidance is considerably clearer than the earlier guidance. We say that the following factors should be taken into account when making a decision about entry: the impact on the child of entering year 1 without having first attended reception class; whether a prematurely born child would naturally have fallen into the lower age group if they had been born on time; and whether delayed social, emotional or physical development is affecting the child’s readiness for school.

Of course, the guidance has just been issued—no doubt partly due to the campaign by my hon. Friend and her colleagues—and we will need to see how it affects behaviour and the level of complaints that we receive.