Disadvantaged Children

Eric Ollerenshaw Excerpts

Thursday 20th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

I join other hon. Members in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this debate, and I hope that they will pay attention to what he says later, because he has more ideas on how to progress this matter, which is key to many of us across the House. I shall try to keep to his principle of seeing this as a cross-party effort. As an ex-teacher, I have learned lessons today from legal experts and about early intervention.

I want to talk about an aspect of disadvantage that has not been mentioned yet. I am glad to see the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) in her place, because she has fought for this for a number of years. We talk about poverty, but there is also disadvantage in regard to race and culture. Year in, year out, she has gone on about the underperformance of black boys in particular, but, after all this time, there is still underperformance among children of Pakistani, Bengali and Kurdish origin. I do not know how many reports on that subject have come through the system.

As I said, I am an ex-history teacher, and it might seem that I am giving the House a history lesson, although I hope that things can be learned from history. My speech might bring back reminiscences of an old history teacher. I want to say something about my experience. I do not think there is anyone here who cannot think back to either a teacher or a school that made a difference to them. I support the Secretary of State when he said that

“our schools should be engines of social mobility”.

After 27 years in teaching, I passionately believe that to be the case. I went to a grammar school, and before Members raise their eyes to the ceiling, let me assure them that I am not going to give them a lecture about bringing back grammar schools across the country. My constituency does, however, have the advantage of having the very successful Lancaster royal grammar school for boys and Lancaster girls’ grammar school, which I shall say more about later.

I have 27 years’ experience of teaching in comprehensives, 25 of them in social priority schools. The lessons that I have learned apply to Governments of all persuasions, because they are all tempted to take certain actions. Comprehensives were supposed to be the vehicle for raising social mobility. When I started teaching in them, I was told that they would be the grammar schools for everyone. Then, certain schemes were introduced, including mixed-ability classes and special needs. Then we had special needs teaching in the classroom, and special needs teaching outside it. Then came integrated studies, environmental studies and humanities.

Often, more than 50% of the children whom professionals in those schools were dealing with were entitled to free school meals. Often, for more than 50% of them English was a second language. That is still the case in some of those schools today, although that has not yet been mentioned. Those factors existed alongside all the other problems that hon. Members have pointed out. Every few years, a Government scheme would be introduced in which the teacher was taken out of the classroom and trained to do something new. Any teacher dealing with circumstances of disadvantage will say that the key thing is how much stability, security and aspiration can be given to those children. Why is it that the most way-out education experiments are always done for the lowest achievers and the most disadvantaged?

[Andrew Percy]

It is precisely this issue of having initiative after initiative after initiative that we must end. One particularly damaging example from recent years, given the important role teachers can play in young people’s lives, was hiving off the pastoral role of teachers to other people working in schools. That left teachers simply to deliver the curriculum, never to nurture the children. This provides another example of the constant “initiativitis” from which we must move.

[Eric Ollerenshaw]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. It is always the schools undergoing initiatives that need the greatest stability. That is why I welcome the Secretary of State’s reform of the national curriculum, which will put real history and geography back into it. When those schools attained the achievement and stability they wanted and lifted their pupils A to C grades, they faced another problem. When the students left the school or entered university, the subjects they had studied were not counted as equal to other subjects learned in the more advantaged schools. This happened for the best of intentions, but it amounted to underselling. In my experience, however, with security, good teaching and, particularly, a good head teacher, there is nothing those children cannot achieve. They can match anybody and should be given the right to do so. That means having the right to learn the same subjects that are taught in the best schools. That would provide a level playing field and support could be continued through the system.

I want to give Ministers a case study from Lancaster. In 2003, with the best intentions, the previous Government set up an excellent cluster in Lancashire that linked the primary schools—Bowerham, Dallas Road, Willow Lane, Ridge and Moorside—with the following secondary schools: the Central Lancaster High school, Lancaster Royal Boys’ grammar, Lancaster Girls’ grammar and nine other schools in Morecambe. Teachers had to apply to participate in the initiative, which was conducted under a programme called “Excellence in Cities”, combined with another called the behaviour improvement programme. Civil servants draw up these initiatives, but teachers have to deal with the applications. What this achieved for those schools was, I think, roughly £1 million extra a year, which went to providing learning mentors.

The scheme was abolished in 2008—after just five years. After a few years, the Government no longer even measured the success of the scheme, but it can be measured. Performance at key stage 2 consistently went up year on year above the county average, while exclusions went down far below the county average—and there were some tough primary schools in this cohort. Attendance was also above the county average. Despite the achievements, it was stopped. We were told that the money was being moved to the school development grant. The poor heads were told that they had to reapply to go through the new system, which they did successfully. If we move to the present, we find that the school development grant has been amalgamated into the general schools grant. A successful system, therefore, which stopped being measured—except by the schools—has been moved, moved and moved again by all Governments.

I believe that this case study provides an example of what the pupil premium can achieve. In my view, the schools can get money through the pupil premium, but it is a year away. There are now 12 months in between, during which the whole system might well collapse. There is a gap in the process of one policy following another policy, which has happened before. It provides a warning to the coalition parties. If we want seriously to achieve things, it is not good enough just to agree to great schemes. What is important is what the schemes do on the ground and their impact on the teachers. That brings me back to my point about the teachers who are trying to create stability for what we call the most disadvantaged pupils—the very children who need that stability. I hope that we can continue monitoring these aspects, which will be key to any and every Government.

I acknowledge what the previous Government did with, for instance, academies and Sure Start, but we will have a job to do in tying up the pupil premium and what is left of the education maintenance allowance with the national scholarship for students. We need to tie up that golden thread to maintain support for disadvantaged children in every sector of education, and I hope the Government will pick that up and drive with it.

The lessons that I learn from history are that not only must this issue be dealt with—and it can be dealt with through the provision of good schools and good teachers—but we should pursue it beyond the next month and the next scheme.