Department for Education

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon]

I very much hope so. The hon. Gentleman will look at this forensically and he will know, because we have done an extensive report on the underachievement of white working-class boys and girls, that they underperform at every stage of the education system and worse than almost every other ethnic group. Those white working-class boys and girls on free school meals do worse than every other ethnic group, bar Roma and Gypsy children, on going to university. This is where funds need to be directed. The money should be concentrated on such cohorts. It is not just white working-class boys and girls; just 7% of children in care get a decent grade in maths and English GCSE and 5% of excluded children get a decent grade in maths and English GCSE. This is where the resources, in my view, should be concentrated. We need to address these social injustices in education.

Secondly, I turn to the social injustice of disadvantage. In May, the Government announced a new Schools Bill, following the publication of the schools White Paper. Media attention and discussion has centred around the appropriate levels of departmental intervention, and I know that the Department has gutted a significant part of that Bill, but I question whether this is simply dancing on the head of a pin. Of course, academies should have autonomy—I do not dispute that—but my question, and this refers to my answer to the hon. Gentleman a moment ago, is whether the Bill misses vital opportunities to address baked-in disadvantage among the most disadvantaged pupils in our communities.

Disadvantaged groups are 18 months behind their better-off peers by the time they take their GCSEs. White working-class boys and girls on free school meals underperform at every stage of the education system compared with almost every other group. Moreover, only 17% of pupils eligible for free school meals achieve a grade 5 in their maths and English GCSE. This figure expands to just 18% of children with special educational needs, just 7% of children in care and 5% of excluded children.

Exam results are of course important, and every August they understandably hit the headlines, but I am just as worried about the impact of covid-19 on younger children. We cannot afford for our most disadvantaged children to miss that first rung on the ladder of opportunity. The building blocks for achievement must be in place well before critical exam years and, indeed, before school. I am pleased to see that resource expenditure for early years has increased by 10.6% in these estimates, although capital funding has slightly decreased.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful for the focus on disadvantage by the Chair of the Education Committee in this part of his speech. Another aspect of disadvantage is experienced by Grange Primary School in my constituency, which sees huge mobility in the young people it educates as the cost of living crisis and, crucially, the cost of renting property in my constituency—and, I suspect, across London more generally—has rocketed, leading, unfortunately, to many families moving regularly. That creates huge pressures on school staff and school budgets. Will he encourage the Department for Education to look at whether there needs to be more focus on mobility as part of the funding formula, to help what I think is a good school with great staff trying to do a particularly tough job because of that mobility issue?

[Robert Halfon]

The hon. Member makes a powerful point. We want to ensure that everyone has the same opportunities to go to “good” and “outstanding” schools. The cost of living pressures that he mentions are powerful, and I am sure that the new Secretary of State is listening.

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[Carol Monaghan]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, and it is not just about the money. As she says, it is about the value we are putting on those youngsters as well. In Scotland, that starts right from the moment when parents are given a baby box, followed by the Scottish Government’s commitment to childcare and free school meals, and now we have the Scottish child payment of £20 a week for every eligible child, which is transformational for families in need. Of course that only goes a little way towards tackling the cost of living crisis, but we know that hungry children cannot learn, so free school meals must be central to this and it would be good to see some movement on that from this Government.

We also have to look at skills for the future. No party or Government who have forced through a devastating Brexit in the middle of a pandemic can credibly claim to be focused on recovery. A fair recovery must be investment-led. At the centre of Scotland’s plan is fair work, which is why the Scottish Government have invested £500 million to support new jobs and retrain people for jobs for the future, as well as funding the young person’s guarantee of a free university, college, apprenticeship or training place for every young person. This is not about loans; it is about investment, and with 93% of our young people in training, employment or education—the highest in the UK—it is paying off.

[Gareth Thomas]

On the hon. Lady’s point about skills for the future, I am sure that she and others across the House will agree that more trade with India is essential to our economic growth in this country, so does she not think it is disappointing that there has been such a steep decline in the teaching and examinations of those who want to learn Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu, which are some of the key modern languages of India? Is there not a case for the Government to look at a discrete package—very small is all it would have to be—to help to reverse that trend? It could include support for those who teach on a Saturday, often at weekend schools, and professional development for the teachers, as well as support to pay for the cost of the places where that teaching takes place.

[Carol Monaghan]

The hon. Gentleman obviously speaks with great experience and knowledge of this area. That is knowledge I do not necessarily have, but I cannot see any problem with our young people learning languages and skills and developing links with other cultures, so this is only to be welcomed and promoted.

In Scotland we have invested more than £800 million in our further education estate since the SNP Scottish Government came to power in 2007. An equivalent investment in FE in England would be around £8 billion, not the £1.5 billion this Government have committed. It would be really good to know how the college estate in England is going to be brought up to the standards of the colleges we now have in Scotland, because we have world-leading facilities and brand-new colleges. Thousands of students are getting not just HNCs and HNDs but degrees in further education colleges such as Glasgow Clyde College in my constituency, City of Glasgow College in the centre of Glasgow and Glasgow Kelvin College in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin). I do wonder how England can hope to compete with these colleges and be truly committed to skills development without better investment.

For young people in England who want to go to university, the threat of debt is ever present. The average graduate debt—depending on the figures we look at—is somewhere between £45,000 and £50,000 for a young person in England, but what is of greater concern is the huge number of graduates who now have much higher debts than that. This year for the first time we have seen more than 6,500 graduates with debts of more than £100,000. Inflation is rocketing, and over the next few years debts will only get worse.

I raised the issue at Education questions on Monday and the Minister, now Secretary of State, responded that she had to get the right balance between the graduate and the taxpayer, but that raises a fundamental question on the purpose of education: is it about individual gain or about societal good? Nurses, doctors and teachers, who do not command great salaries, should not be expected to bear the burden of this debt in order to provide a public service. According to the IFS, 87% of graduates will not pay back their student loans within the 30-year payback period, so what do this Government do? They lower the repayment threshold and extend the payback period to 40 years. They plan to tackle graduate debt by saddling young people with ever-increasing amounts of it. That cannot be right.

My final comments are about science, technology, engineering and maths—STEM—education. I know this is something that gets strong cross-party support, but I find it concerning—I declare an interest as a physics teacher—that the Government’s own social mobility tsar has talked about girls not taking physics because they do not like the “hard maths”. I want to hear from this Government how they are going to tackle that and increase the numbers of girls in physics. We have been talking about this issue since I was a pupil at school, and things have not shifted. We have tried the carrot and it has not helped, so perhaps we now need to look at the stick if we are to get more girls into doing physics. This Government need a different approach to post-16 education funding, to provide long-term security and put the interests of learners at the heart of everything. Education must be restored as a force for public good and, as such, it must be publicly funded to provide real lifelong access for all.

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[Michelle Donelan]

I am not the only Minister to have gone on record to say that they believed it was a mistake we made as a Government to close schools, and we certainly will not do that again. I will certainly look at my hon. Friend’s suggestion.

The estimates I commend today put the power of investment behind those principles. We are opening the doors of opportunity and building an education system that focuses on where someone as an individual wants to go, not on where they came from. Excluding the student loan book impairment charges, the Department’s resources have increased by a staggering £5.4 billion and capital has increased by £1.1 billion since the estimates last year. This is the first year of our three-year spending review settlement, which provides an astonishing £18.4 billion cash increase for the Department over the Parliament. The total core schools budget is increasing to £56.8 billion by 2024-25, which is a £7 billion cash increase compared with last year. This increase in funding has been front-loaded, to get money to schools rapidly, because we want a country in which where someone is going is not determined by where they came from. That starts with the investment in the crucial early years. We are committed to an additional £170 million by 2024-25.

[Gareth Thomas]

I add my congratulations to the Secretary of State on her appointment. On the issue of her to-do list, I am sure that teacher recruitment and retention will be one thing she seeks to look at. May I raise with her the issue of the particular challenge that schools in outer London have in competing with schools from inner London for teachers? More funding is traditionally allocated to inner London than to outer London for salary costs. Will she examine that issue and recognise that living in outer London now is just as costly as living in inner London and that schools in constituencies such as mine should not be at a disadvantage compared with those in nearby or neighbouring boroughs that qualify as being inner London when it comes to offering good salary packages to teachers in the future?

[Michelle Donelan]

I will take on board the hon. Gentleman’s comments and add them to my ever-growing “to-do list”, as he so kindly puts it.

We are also investing £2.6 billion of capital between 2022 and 2025 for SEND. When it comes to supporting all of our children, young people and adults, schools and families, I am here, because I believe we must send a clear message today that their priorities are what we are focused on in this place. We are therefore making the investments required to entirely transform our further and higher education systems, towards a model that no other country has ever attempted.