A-Level Provision: Knowsley Metropolitan Borough

George Howarth Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) on securing this important debate on an issue that we have been concerned about, as she rightly said, for several years.

I recall that during the meeting with Lord Nash in, I think, July 2016, to which my hon. Friend referred, I suggested that what was then Knowsley Community College—it is now the merged St Helens and Knowsley Community College—should be the provider. The then Minister and his officials were very negative about the potential for that to happen. It therefore came as something of a surprise, although a pleasant one, when it was announced last year that the new A-level provision based in north Huyton in my constituency would indeed be the merged St Helens and Knowsley Community College. As my hon. Friend said, the intention at the time appeared to be to look for a provider with a strong track record in A-level provision—not necessarily in Knowsley or even Liverpool, but further afield than Knowsley. I do not want to mislead anybody. Like my hon. Friend, I am delighted that from next September there will be A-level provision at the college, but there seems to have been a change that nobody has ever explained to us between the initial meeting in July 2016 and what eventually happened.

I will be brief, because we are short of time. I welcome the fact that there will be 21 A-level subjects on offer, linked up with other qualifications, and that, as my hon. Friend said, there will be a wide range of subjects, including English literature, English language, mathematics and more specialist subjects such as politics, product design and computer science. Offering those subjects is a good step forward, although they will be not necessarily pure A-level courses but a combination of BTEC and A-levels.

I welcome the fact that there is a three-year commitment to the proposal because, given what I am about to say about the problems confronting the college, it will take three years. I also welcome the fact that, because of issues relating to Knowsley’s geography which we have talked about all along, there will be free transport arrangements, including from Halewood and Kirkby in my constituency, which will enable students to travel to the centre of the borough. Hopefully, that inducement will enable them to overcome what my hon. Friend described as insurmountable travel problems.

I want to point out something that is not generally known, which is that it is not quite true that there is no A-level provision anywhere else in Knowsley. I visited All Saints Catholic High School in my constituency last Friday, and I met a group of students—10 young women in year 11—called the scholars group. Some of them will stay on at the school to do a combination of A-level and BTEC courses. Admittedly, only the art, graphics and textiles A-level is on offer, in addition to which there are BTEC courses in business, health and social care, science, sport and performing arts. It is a relatively small sixth form, and it offers a narrow range of options.

I was very encouraged to meet those young women, together with the headteacher, and to find out what they felt about the offer that the college is putting forward. Interestingly—this is a challenge for the new arrangements—not one of those 10 young women intends to study A-levels at the newly established A-level academy in north Huyton. They intend to go to Carmel College, which as we have already heard will be part of the arrangements, although we are not clear exactly how, and to Winstanley College in Wigan—that may seem strange, but there is a connection between some schools in Kirkby and Winstanley College, and some young people are prepared to travel that far to get a good course. A couple of them hope to go to a fee-paying school—Merchant Taylors’ in Crosby, which is in Sefton —on a scholarship.

The challenge for the new college—I hope the Minister will think about how the Government might support it in this—is that the young people in year 11 have already made decisions about where they want to go, and they are understandably choosing to go to colleges that have a good track record in A-levels. That is something we need to address if those young people decide in the end to go to the college. There are a lot of advantages to the offer, and I hope that a lot of young people will take it up—we have heard that there is a lot of interest already—but I think it will take three years, which is what the plan is, before it is established on a proper footing.

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) on securing this debate. She started with the principle that good education is a right for all. That should happen everywhere—not just in areas of advantage, but in areas of disadvantage. She succinctly outlined the issues facing young people in her borough, where 45% of young people grow up in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the UK. My right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) has championed this issue for a number of years. They are MPs looking for a solution for the common good. They are not just critical of Government policy; they want to do the best for their borough. He gave some extraordinarily powerful testimony about the young people studying at All Saints and talked about what their future might look like.

My hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood rightly talked about the gap between the north and the south. Evidence from Government reviews shows that, if we draw a line from the Humber estuary to the Mersey estuary, the number of children getting five good GCSEs is about 34%. In London, the previous Labour Government and the London challenge brought the number there right up so that nowadays 50% of children receiving free school meals in London achieve five good GCSEs or more. That gap needs to be challenged. It is not just me and the Labour party saying that. The former chief inspector of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, said that

“the people of Liverpool, Manchester and the north are not being treated fairly—that their children have less of a chance of educational success than people south of the Wash.”

I do not want to talk about my constituency—although there is good provision in my city, it is being centralised to locations many miles away in certain colleges. My hon. Friend said that we are creating deserts of post-16 education in the poorest areas. That is probably the quote for today.

The further education sector educates more than 4 million people a year in England, with students shared between mandatory education and university, including those going back to education in later life. Under the coalition Government, spending on further education in sixth forms fell by 14% in real terms. Core funding is only protected in cash terms up to 2019-20. At the end of the spending review period in ’19-’20, the Institute for Fiscal Studies expects that the spending per student in further education will be just above the level 30 years ago, at the end of the 1980s.

Since 2010, the sector has faced sustained budget cuts amounting to 14% in real terms. That has had a number of serious consequences for the provision of further education, from a sharp rise in the number of providers facing a financial crisis to many reducing the number of courses they have to offer or, as in Knowsley, courses going altogether. Between 2010-11 and 2016-17, spending on 16-to-19 education fell by 17.5% in real terms.

On A-levels, as our Front-Bench team under my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) have raised time and time again, the funding that sixth-form colleges, schools and academies now receive to educate sixth formers covers the cost of delivering three A-level or equivalent qualifications and little more. According to the Sixth Form Colleges Association, the average annual funding received by sixth-form colleges and school or academy sixth forms is now only £4,531 per student. That is 21% less than the funding received to educate younger students in secondary schools, 48% less than the average university tuition fee and 70% less than the average sixth-form fee in the independent sector.

In March 2017, plans were announced to increase investment in 16-to-19 education for students studying technical courses in further education colleges. That will have no impact on the vast majority of students in sixth-form colleges, or school or academy sixth forms, as they are primarily studying academic qualifications such as A-levels.

To come back to the Knowsley situation, the essence of what has been raised today involves six secondary schools in the borough, four of which have been academised. The Gove reforms introduced by the former Education Secretary threw the sector up into the air and brought it down so that there is now little chance of local elements changing the dynamic in their boroughs, because we have lost the principle of subsidiarity in education that was enshrined by Ellen Wilkinson, the first Labour Minister of Education in ’45, when she implemented the Butler Act.

Local leaders can do very little now. Michael Wilshaw has said that he wants to see MPs, such as the MPs present today, leading the charge for higher standards and better education, but there is little that they, local leaders or even elected city-wide Mayors or council leaders can do nowadays, because the power has been brought back to Whitehall. As we have seen, however, Whitehall cannot run 24,000 schools from the centre.

[Mr Howarth]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood rightly said, Knowsley as a local borough council does not have a great deal of purchase in the situation, but it is worth placing on record the support we did get from the local authority and its officers with the Department to bring that about.

[Mike Kane]

I too praise Knowsley for all it is trying to do to get the best provision. It now has no hand in four of its schools, although it has soft power, and its direct influence is on only the two Roman Catholic schools, which are yet to be academised. They are all working as hard as they can with the Archdiocese of Liverpool.

I will finish as I began with what Michael Wilshaw, the outgoing head of Ofsted, talked about. He warned that any attempts to achieve a geographic rebalancing of the British economy would be fatally undermined if children in the north of England could not be better educated. We cannot leave the education of our young people to chance, under a veil of ignorance, just because the place they are born and brought up in has differential levels of education. My hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood is right: education is a right for all our young people, no matter where they are born and brought up or what their social circumstances are. The Government must remember that in their response today.