Funding and Schools Reform

Lord Evans of Rainow Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

I had the good fortune to meet head teachers from my hon. Friend’s constituency very soon after I came into this job. They told me how that cluster of free schools could undermine other local schools. I am at a loss, and I wonder whether the Secretary of State can help me. Why is a school specialising in Latin exactly what Acton needs? I am yet to be persuaded that that is the best route for modern education in west London.

I mentioned outdoor space. A good example of schools achieving more together than they can alone is sport. School sports partnerships are a wonderful example of schools working together. The Australians have described our system as world class. I urge the Secretary of State to think again on that. School sports partnerships, which created a new delivery system for school sport, have worked well and given more opportunities to young people. I hope that he is open to the arguments of Darren Campbell and others who are pleading with him to keep that infrastructure rather than dismantle it.

My worry is that in the long term the free school experiment will lead to a much more segregated schools system—a splintered system in which narrow social groups impart a narrow world view. Are we heading towards an unaccountable free-for-all in our local education systems? Experience in Sweden suggests that the Secretary of State’s schools will have a negative impact on standards.

[Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andy Burnham]

I will not.

I have never heard how that negative impact will be addressed in the Secretary of State’s world view, in which schools are free to fail. I am worried that he is creating a world where each school exists within a walled garden, with no obligation to other schools. The local authority co-ordinating role is important, and I cannot see why the Government want simply to wipe it away with a national funding formula. Local authorities look out for the needs of all children within an area, including the vulnerable and the voiceless. Who will speak up for them in his brave new world?

My vision is of a truly comprehensive education system, in which there is diversity of provision, and in which we help all children to be the best that they can be. I want a collaborative rather than a competitive system, and I want all schools to recognise their obligations to each other. I am worried that the Secretary of State is creating an elitist education system.

We fear that Sure Start centres are about to close, and we heard today that the pupil premium will take money from some of the most deprived communities in our country. We have just had a debate on how the Government’s policy on EMA could depress aspirations, particularly those of working-class kids. We have heard that the Secretary of State, in closed meetings in Westminster, has nodded and winked to the effect that his foot is hovering over the pedal when it comes to allowing more selection and allowing grammar schools to use the free school route to set up more grammar schools. He needs to come clean on those things. Does he want to create a more elitist system, where opportunities exist for the few but not the many?

That is the Opposition’s critique of the Secretary of State. We have had broken promises and free market reforms with no evidence, and there is a whiff of elitism in everything the Department introduces. That spells danger for our schools. We need a plan not just for some schools, but for all schools. That is what our motion is about, and I commend it to the House.

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[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I support the Opposition motion. The Secretary of State evaded interventions from me and from several others on the Labour Benches after he said that we were “angry” that the coalition Government were introducing a pupil premium. May I inform him that the Labour Government had a pupil premium? I do not know if it was as well worked through as it should have been; it was an early policy introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) that was absorbed and no longer ring-fenced when Charles Clarke became Secretary of State. There was a pupil premium, but I would challenge the Secretary of State. He knows that the Opposition want more resources to follow people from deprived backgrounds. If he is honest with the House and in his intellectual engagement with the debate, he also knows that the most difficult thing is to find a method of ensuring that the money tracks the right people.

The Secretary of State will find it difficult, as we did with Sure Start children’s centres. We started, as he knows, with 500 in the 500 most deprived communities, but we then discovered that that left out most of the deprived children in our country so we moved the number up to 3,500. One of my concerns—and a concern of Members on both sides of the House when they talk frankly in private—is that we might see a drastic cut in the number of children’s centres, based on the idea of going back to the original intention of having 500, which would exclude most children from deprived backgrounds. That has a parallel in the pupil premium. The Opposition are arguing that the way in which the Government propose to introduce the premium means that it will fail to reach the children who are most deprived, because it is not well crafted. We understand that it is difficult for any Government to ensure that such methods work.

The one thing in the Opposition motion that I found difficult to swallow was the mention of ideology. I honestly fail to see what the Government’s ideology is. I do not see a consistent theme running through their education policy. There are bits and bobs of ideas, some of them refreshing and interesting, but when it comes to others I, and other people who have been in education for a long time, do not understand where they are coming from or where they are leading us.

As Chair of the Select Committee for nearly 10 years, I found it refreshing when a Minister came before the Committee and said that the reason for introducing a policy was that it was evidence-based. One of the most refreshing things about Tony Blair in his 1995 conference speech, in his Ruskin speech in 1996 and when he put that speech into operation in 1997, was that he was both pragmatic and open to evidence-based policy. We saw that across a raft of policies, but when the Committee looked at how policies evolved, we found that when Ministers left the evidence base they got into trouble.

The present Government seem to be basing their whole education policy on something called the big society. Many people have talked to me about what the big society means. It is very difficult to find out. What is the big society? Is it localism? It is a funny sort of localism that jumps over and disregards locally elected education authorities. That is a very different kind of localism.

How do we know that people who want free schools represent the community? We have already heard evidence that there have been some strange bids. I am not sure that the answers we heard today about faith schools were entirely convincing.

[Graham Evans]

Before the general election, Labour Members supported co-operative schools. Can the hon. Gentleman tell me the difference between the co-operative schools project and the Government’s free schools project?

[Mr Sheerman]

I was, and am, a great supporter of co-operative partnership in academies. I was a great supporter of academies, but I understood exactly what the argument for academies was under the previous Government. Under Tony Blair, it was to take first 200, and then a further 400, schools where everything else had been tried; they were usually in areas of great deprivation and everything that had been done to try to raise standards had failed. We introduced academies where we thought it was worth trying something because nothing else had worked, but now the academy model has been inverted. It is no longer about where schools are failing and real help is necessary for kids, who get only one chance for education—where we need to act quickly because we cannot wait for a laggardly local authority to get its act together. We now have a system in which any school can become an academy, and I am not sure what its theme, goal or arrival point is.

The big society does not seem to be a substitute for evidence-based policy, or to involve a clear notion of where we are going with education policy. I shall illustrate that with just one point. My concerns are not only about Sure Start and early years, but also about the fact that there is now seemingly an end to the choice that was opening up. There was real choice in our schools—the apprentice route, the skills route through the diploma, or the academic route. That opening up, with the possibility to cross over, was very refreshing, but it seems to have been killed by the new Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

I welcome the contribution of the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), the Chair of the Select Committee, and his comments about the importance of investment in improving attainment and standards, but it is also important to recognise that the previous Labour Government not only put in the money but achieved results. I did not recognise the hon. Gentleman’s characterisation of what happened. GCSE results and others improved, and there was a big increase in further and higher education results.

My family was fortunate enough to have access to Sure Start when a centre opened where we lived. It benefited not just my family but the other families who used it. They told me in great detail the difference that it had made to the younger children, when compared with older children who had not had such an opportunity in a Sure Start centre or in any other pioneering family centres that preceded it. The difference can be seen many years later in the attitudes, behaviour and achievement of the younger children, who are now teenagers, compared with their slightly older brothers and sisters, who had no such support in the early years. I know from that evidence the importance of Sure State to children who live in deprived areas, which explains people’s concerns about Sure Start’s future.

The Secretary of State did not answer the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) made about concerns regarding the future of Sure Start, but perhaps he will do so in his closing remarks. I know from my experience and that of many others who have benefited that, of all the previous Government’s achievements, the improvement in the quality of lives and the outcomes for children and families, just through Sure Start, is beyond measure.

The education maintenance allowance benefited many young people who stayed in education. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats suggested in their manifesto that they understood that. They promised to support the EMA, as did the Conservatives, because they saw the improvement in staying-on rates, and the predicted decline by some organisations in staying on of 10% or 12% is worrying. In Sefton, 80% of young people receive EMA, and from talking to them I know the number who say that they will not bother going to college any more without the £30 or £50 a week is frightening. I hope the Government reconsider the limits they are placing on support to young people.

I asked the Secretary of State about the pupil premium, about which the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Library make similar points. The rise in the numbers of children going to school means that, despite the pupil premium and the increase in the overall money for schools, the real-terms effect is a cut for 87% of secondary schools and 60% of primary schools. That cannot be what the Secretary of State intended, and the impact on areas of deprivation, to which the hon. Member for Redditch (Karen Lumley) referred, is worrying.

I accept that we need to look after people in pockets of deprivation in the more affluent areas, but it is important to ensure that people in the larger areas of deprivation, such as those in Merseyside and our other large cities, are protected. Unless we do that, the outcomes and many other aspects of life for children who most need our help will decline significantly.

[Graham Evans]

My constituency is on the periphery of Merseyside and Cheshire. I want to address the needs of those in pockets of social deprivation, which you have just brushed aside. Those numbers add up. I appreciate, and have a lot of sympathy with, the issues that you have in Merseyside—indeed, I support your case—but you cannot ignore those numbers because when you put them into the comprehensive—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. First, the hon. Gentleman should not, by now, be using the word “you”. Secondly, interventions should be brief, not mini-speeches. Other Members are waiting to contribute to the debate.