Education Bill

Geraint Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for, as ever, leaping straight on to sex—I know that it is a subject of great interest to him and to many in this House. I always feel that one should discuss money before discussing sex, because the one and the other are so intimately connected in the minds of so many Members. That is why I was so anxious to ascertain whether Opposition Members were proud of the economic record they bequeathed. I am happy to reassure my hon. Friend that I will not accept amendments in Committee that seek to make the curriculum any more prescriptive or intrusive. The Bill will enhance professional freedom and autonomy, because we recognise that it is only by doing that we can ensure that our economy and education system are fit for the 21st century. It is not only the economy that was undermined by what happened on Labour’s watch; social mobility also worsened.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Michael Gove]

In due course.

Inequality worsened under Labour and the education system exacerbated it. If we look at the gap between children eligible for free school meals and their more fortunate and privileged counterparts, we can see that as those children moved through the education system and progressed under Labour the gap between rich and poor widened.

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[Andy Burnham]

I do not accept the hon. Lady’s analysis. I went from a state school to Cambridge and my dad said to me, “It will open every door for you in life. You will just walk into any job you want.” He said that because I took some persuading to go, as I was not convinced that it would be for me. My dad was wrong, because it did not open every door. It is the networks and the conversations around the dinner party table that open the doors to those top jobs. I am talking about the people who can sort out two weeks’ work experience in the holiday period, because that is what gets people through. What further restricts opportunities for young people is the culture of unpaid internships, where young people are expected to come to London to work for free. That is beyond the reach of many working-class young people in this country, who simply cannot afford to work for free for three months in London. That is what ensures that the top jobs remain in the reach of a small social circle, as the BBC creatively and accurately reported last week.

[Geraint Davies]

My right hon. Friend may be interested to know that the chief executive of German Industry UK gave evidence to the Select Committee on Welsh Affairs on inward investment today. He commented that master plumbers in Germany have the same status as people with many degrees. Apprenticeships are crucial to driving forward the German economy, which is expanding much faster than the zero growth that we have seen under this Government. Does he agree that that is not reflected in the Government’s plans, which will result in economic slowness in comparison with our competitors?

[Andy Burnham]

I strongly agree with my hon. Friend. The diploma, which the previous Labour Government introduced, was an attempt to bridge the divide between academic qualifications and vocational qualifications, which should remain our aim. We should want all children not to choose one route or another, but to do academic subjects and learn practical skills that will serve them well through life. My worry about this Secretary of State is that he is further entrenching the divide between academic qualifications and vocational qualifications and sending a message to those who wish to pursue a vocational route that they are second best or somehow second class, which is a damaging step to take. As my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) has said, most other countries do not have such a divide, which is why I argue that this Bill takes us back to the past.

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[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

This Bill is part of a Government strategy to turn away from the direction in developing education that the previous Government took. The previous Government’s system was founded on the principle of the equal opportunity to succeed—that is rooted in the comprehensive system—which focused on supporting failing schools in deprived areas and providing some choice and flexibility. It achieved remarkable success in GCSE results and standards.

The current Government want to shift resources—in an economic climate in which ever fewer resources are available—from the most deprived areas to those already achieving or to new schools in middle-class areas. In addition, their system will centralise power in the hands of the Secretary of State sitting in Whitehall to make decisions over the future of schools he has never seen or will never care to visit. It will undermine communities and their power to influence local intervention in schools via their democratically elected councils, and replace parent choice with head teacher choice as schools achieve growing power over selection and there is shrinking accountability to parents.

Meanwhile, the ability to plan for aggregate levels of special educational needs in an area will be undermined as that will be unknown, when what we need is, for example, the screening of all two-year-olds for speech and language difficulties in order to assess the level of need and to target early so that the system is cost-effective. We have yet to see the plans for SEN as this Bill has been introduced ahead of them.

What we know instead is that schools in middle-class areas will be empowered to select parents who can make a donation to the school and to avoid pupils who might incur disproportionate costs as the system for appeal has been weakened. Unfortunately therefore, the marketised system that will emerge will naturally adjust to create sink schools, risking the creation of dumping grounds of socially and financially disadvantaged children.

The aggregate impact of these market forces will be for the school system to exaggerate and amplify social Darwinism, and to punish people for being poor by kicking away the ladder of opportunity so that society overall suffers by being less productive, more unequal and more divided. When Britain most needs a society that is strong and united, the Lib Dem-Tories are unleashing market forces in education that will create an England that is weak and divided.

Alongside this, the Sure Start infrastructure for early intervention is being systematically cut so pupils from less well-off backgrounds will enter a worse school, worse prepared. Meanwhile, in sharp contrast, across the border in Wales, despite the Lib Dem-Tory bid to reduce the financial bloodstream to the comprehensive education system, the flame of hope for fair and equal education still burns bright. Fortunately, as NHS spending is not ring-fenced in Wales and the £3 billion cost of restructuring the NHS in England will not be wasted in Wales, we will have money to invest in education and to give all our children—not just the few—the life chances they deserve, with local authorities charged with streamlined strategic responsibilities to ensure holistic success and efficiency, with schools accountable and with a refreshed focus on leadership achievements and transparency, and with a new commitment to ensuring money meant for schools is spent on schools and not for other purposes.

The appalling waste we will see in England, of letting poorer schools go to the wall and fail and close, will still be avoided in Wales by early intervention that is locally driven, and with parents empowered through local democracy, not threatened by the distant foreign voice of Whitehall muttering the drumbeat of a one-size-fits-all curriculum. Local head teachers will not be given a free rein to run schools without parent power or be forced to stick to the new Tory curriculum diet of Billy-Bunter Britain that is being prescribed. In England, in education as in the NHS, we see the arrival of a market-led system, the withdrawal of democracy, and the distant diktat of the Secretary of State, with unaccountable schools competing to attract the most well-heeled parents and the least expensive children, who will be fed an intellectually grey diet that may keep them above their neighbours locally but will relegate them below their neighbours internationally.

This ill-thought-out patchwork of measures threatens to cast the children of England adrift from the firm anchorage of hope and opportunity to float into the uncertain and treacherous waters of growing inequality and underachievement. The Bill is a rag-bag of right-wing ideas dreamt up in haste, and threatens to undermine the future of a united and prosperous England. It is incomplete both in terms of SEN and apprenticeship provision, and it fails to acknowledge the withdrawal of support from Sure Start and will lead to us ending up with a two-tier system in respect of local authority access. All this underlines the case for Wales to avoid importing this half-baked Tory-Lib Dem plan for ruining education. Thankfully, the only good aspect of it is that it will encourage the people of Wales to vote Labour this May.