Secondary Education (GCSEs)

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes a characteristically acute point. One problem with the current system is that GCSEs are not, in many cases, adequate preparation for A-levels, and A-levels are not adequate preparation for university, particularly when our students are compared with those from other jurisdictions. That is because, notwithstanding the incremental improvement in state education over the past 15 years, other countries have reformed their education systems faster than we have reformed ours. We have to match them and that means reform.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Michael Gove]

I am happy to give way to the Chairman of the Select Committee on Education.

[Mr Stuart]

The Secretary of State wants more rigorous exams that more people pass. That is an aspiration that we would all share, but it is not immediately obvious how it is to be brought about. Today, 42% of children do not get five good GCSEs including English and maths. If we make the tests more difficult, it is not immediately obvious how more people will pass them. I welcome that he is aiming higher and that we will have more rigour, but we need more detail. He is very good at explaining what is wrong with what Labour did, and I agree with every word, but he is not so good at giving us the detail of precisely what this Government plan to do.

[Michael Gove]

It is perfectly clear what we need to do to get more children to pass more exams: we must press ahead with the reforms that we have introduced to create more academies and free schools, to get better teachers in our schools, to have continuous professional development in which we invest in the very best people, to expand the Teach First programme, and to ensure that we have a relentless focus on raising the bar. Complacency on performance in our schools will lead us only to continue to be backmarkers. One point I would make to the Chair of the Education Committee and the House is that some schools manage to do every bit as well as schools in Singapore by getting 80% or more of their students to five good GCSEs or equivalents. We should ask ourselves why more schools are not doing as well as them. The whole point of the Government’s education reforms is to ensure that we raise standards for all.

The Chair of the Committee asked what the Government will do to change things. We have already taken some steps. We have banned modules and re-sits, and introduced the English baccalaureate to put a stress on rigorous subjects. It is not clear whether the Opposition agree with us. We have explicitly said that we believe there is a case for one exam board per subject in English, maths and science. The Opposition inched towards agreeing with us, and I hope we can reach a consensus.

One problem I have in attempting to tease out where the Opposition stand in order to build the consensus we all want is that whenever the Government put forward a case for reform, it is difficult to know where the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby stands.

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[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, and to rebut allegations of fatalism thrown at me by the Secretary of State. I hope I am no more of a fatalist than he is. I have observed in many of our debates that able politicians, on both sides of the House, are brilliant at describing and critiquing the inheritance from the Labour party and at painting a picture of the kind of country we would like to be, but our job in this House is to address the third aspect and examine the route map to get from position A—not very good—to position B, or nirvana and where we want to be. Too often in our education debates in this Chamber, we spend an awful lot of time on aspects one and two, and not a lot on the third aspect.

Following the Secretary of State’s speech, I am a little clearer about what his plans are. I think he has said—I hope he will intervene on me if I am incorrect—that the Daily Mail was mistaken, and that there is not going to be a return to a two-tier system. He did not, for whatever reason, try to spell this out, but it sounded as if he was talking about a more rigorous GCSE. It is progress that the Labour spokesman, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), acknowledges that there was grade inflation during his party’s time in office, and the Secretary of State makes powerful points about equivalences. The Government have certainly had my support in tackling that and in tightening up in various ways, such as by removing entirely the vocational qualifications that Alison Wolf identified as offering no real labour value to people.

So what is the vision? If we were just talking about a more rigorous GCSE with a removal of the perverse incentives to dumb down over time—it has now been acknowledged that that was the case, even by Labour—I think there would almost be cross-House consensus. There is a recognition by Labour that it did not get everything right, even if Labour Members cannot quite bring themselves to say that yet; it is fair enough for the Secretary of State to tease the shadow Secretary of State for his failure to do so. It seems that the Labour party is beginning to recognise that a lot of the Secretary of State’s moves towards rigour have been correct. However, if we are to have a beefed-up GCSE, and if we are not moving towards a system that is more two-tier than what we have now, I would like to see more detail. I know that a consultation paper is coming, but it seems disappointing that we did not get more detail from the Secretary of State today.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Stuart]

I give way to my hon. Friend.

[Dr Lewis]

I am very grateful to the Chairman of the Education Committee for giving me the opportunity to ask the question that I was hoping to ask of the Secretary of State. Given that both sides now seem to accept that there has been a problem of grade inflation, could we pay a little bit of attention to the marks that underlie the grades? One of the problems that I felt many years ago with the introduction of grades for O-levels, rather than marks, was that it did not matter if somebody got 70%, 80% or 90%: anybody who reached a certain level—70%, I think—still got the same top grade. This was the beginning of an inflationary process. Would not the stating of actual marks—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Thank you. That is quite enough. That is a very long intervention in a very short debate.

[Mr Stuart]

Fortunately, my hon. Friend takes me to the issue I wanted to address next, which is the administration of examinations. Unfortunately, however, I am unable to comment on that now. The Education Committee has conducted a long inquiry into precisely that issue, looking at the trade-offs between a single board, competition between boards, franchising by subject and various other ways of cutting it. We have concluded our report, but because of the examination season—whoever leaked this story to the press last week was obviously less sensitive than us to the fact that children were taking exams—we decided to delay the publication of our report until 3 July. So, I am afraid that, until then, I cannot engage in that issue. However, we have looked at it in depth, and I hope I am not in contempt of Parliament if I say that the Committee came up with a unanimous recommendation and report. I hope that those on both sides of the House will wait until at least 3 July before allowing any of their opinions to solidify further.

If the Secretary of State is talking about a more rigorous GCSE system—whether it is given a new name or not—which is effectively a single examination system, as we have now, that would rather destroy the entire premise of my speech, leaving me short for words.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Time for a coffee.

[Mr Stuart]

Time for a coffee and to let others speak.

However, over the last two years the Government have made a series of announcements looking to put greater rigour into the system. They announced the ending of modularisation of GCSEs, tackling the culture of re-sits, ending equivalences and promoting the English baccalaureate, which, of course, rewards those students who achieve good GCSEs in English, maths, two sciences, a language and either history or geography. However, at the end of that process, if the leak is to be believed—I am in a state of confusion now—they suddenly announced the scrapping of GCSEs altogether. That does not seem terribly coherent.

Just last June the Secretary of State said the following about GCSEs:

“So next year the floor will rise to 40 per cent and my aspiration is that by 2015 we will be able to raise it to 50 per cent. There is no reason—if we work together—that by the end of this parliament every young person in the country can’t be educated in a school where at least half of students reach this basic academic standard.”

He went on to say:

“A GCSE floor standard is about providing a basic minimum expectation to young people that their school will equip them for further education and employment.”

That was the direction of travel then; suddenly, a year later—if we are to believe the Daily Mail—that has been scrapped. On the other hand, if I understood correctly what the Secretary of State said today, that was an entirely false idea and there is no plan to do such a thing at all.

[Kevin Brennan]

I think we are all trying to decipher what the Secretary of State said. Is it the hon. Gentleman’s understanding that the Secretary of State said that he would expect 80% of pupils to sit this new single-paper GCSE, and if so, what does he think ought to happen to the other 20%?

[Mr Stuart]

As I have said, I think that increased rigour throughout the system is necessary and important. I think that the accountability system for schools needs to be changed so that it does not have perverse outcomes, such as putting people on courses that lead nowhere but allow the institution to meet its benchmark—we on the Committee have been critics of that for some time. Perhaps the announcement, or the leak, suggests a change in view by the Secretary of State on that front.

If we look across the system, where we need more rigour and we need to ensure that we end the perverse incentives, we find that the biggest problem we face in a global knowledge economy, where the first rung of the ladder keeps rising up, is what we do about people who are not getting those basic skills and that basic education. The Government have two priorities for education: raising standards for all; and closing the gap. Those are right, but when setting priorities it is terribly important to show what the top priority is. I am yet to understand how the changes specifically will help the least able, but then again I am unclear as to what exactly the proposal is—even if I have not quite fallen to the level of the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), who of course got so confused about percentages last week.

[Kevin Brennan]

I did get a grade A O-level—

[Mr Stuart]

That is a lot better than I did, so I will leave it there.

Ofqual now has a statutory duty to ensure two things, one of which is that we maintain standards over time. We shall see whether it does its job right; it is relatively newly empowered and we need to give it the chance to see whether it can reverse this grade inflation and keep us up there with our international competition. Has it said that there needs to be a restructuring of the examination system, not necessarily the administration of it, but the whole quality of it and the possible tiering of it? I would like to hear from the Secretary of State about that.

I have only a minute left, so I shall finish by repeating that the central problem is what we do about the young people, all too many of whom are now not in education, employment or training—NEET—and are being left behind. A more rigorous system is great, but the only way to raise standards ultimately—this is the only thing that matters in education—is through quality of teaching. We need to ensure consistent, high-quality teaching and an excellent institution for everyone, everywhere. At the moment, there are all sorts of incentives in the accountability system to focus on borderline pupils at the expense of those at the bottom, and within the system for people to move from a school that is very challenging to one in the leafier suburbs—a much more congenial place for many people to teach in. We need to look at re-gearing our whole system in a way that the Labour Government failed to do, despite efforts in that direction, to ensure that we provide opportunity for all, because both socially and economically we cannot afford to have so many children left behind, unable to get on the first rung of the economic ladder and thus be full members of our society. If any proposals from the Secretary of State are driven by that central insight, he can certainly look forward to my support.

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[Damian Hinds]

I am sorry, but I am running very short of time.

There is a bunch of complications in this two-tier system—for example, it applies to some subjects but not others, and there are even subjects for which students can enter one paper at foundation level and still score a grade B or A. There might be good reasons for all that, but one thing this system is not is clear. I understand the argument that all must have prizes, and in some ways that seems like a good thing, but it does young people no favours to kid them that the worth of the qualifications they are taking is greater than it really is. Instead, we must strive so that all merit prizes. We should aspire to the vast majority of children getting those key subjects aged 15 and 16, but as I said in reply to the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), there must be the facility to return to them at age 16 to 18. One of the key points in the Wolf report was the lack of post-16 focus in our country compared with others on English and maths in particular—subjects that command a huge premium in the workplace.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Damian Hinds]

I am sorry, but I cannot.

For our country, we need world-class exams to win in the fiercely competitive new global economy. For our young people, we need worthwhile qualifications with the right breadth, depth and usefulness that will serve them well in their work and in their life.

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[Dan Rogerson]

The hon. Gentleman is welcome to the Chamber. We look forward to interjections from him.

What was presumably billed, as Opposition day debates are, as a good knockabout seems to have collapsed into consensus. I am left feeling that I agree with much of what has been said from both sides of the House about the way forward in terms of rigour and a genuine consultation and re-examination of the examination system. I am left disagreeing only with the Daily Mail, a situation in which I often find myself, so it is reassuring territory for me.

If we are to consider the key points of the debate, we should look at what was floated in that esteemed publication as a bid to end the GCSE and restore the O-level and a qualification equivalent to the CSE. It is a little like those debates about selection, in which one hears a lot about grammar schools but not so much about secondary moderns. That is not to say that there are not excellent schools out there which are now no doubt called comprehensives or academies, but which once upon a time were known as secondary moderns. They are doing good work in areas where selection still exists, but that it not a position that my party would seek to push forward.

I was delighted to hear the Secretary of State at the Dispatch Box talking about a thorough examination of the GCSE, what it is, what it offers, how testing it is of young people, and its ability to stretch young people at all levels of ability, so that we celebrate the fact that not everyone will get an A*, and for those who were at one time predicted to get an F in some subject but who manage to get a D, that is a real success for them.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

We are raising the participation age by looking to use the extra years up to 17 and 18 to deliver a basic and rigorous standard. The most successful state school in the country, which I think is Lawrence Sheriff school in Rugby, uses a three-year course for its GCSEs and gets a tremendously high level of success. Perhaps it would be helpful to find out more about how education can be structured so that children can keep on learning until they get to that very high standard.

[Dan Rogerson]

The Chairman of the Select Committee said that he had to rewrite his speech. He has clearly been doing that and has made an additional contribution to the debate. I welcome his intervention.

The debate is about how we can ensure that all young people are stretched by the system—that they are driven forward, that they are inspired and that they can aspire to reach the very best. That is what teachers, head teachers and their parents want for them. It is clear that there has been grade inflation, a topic that has been covered by several right hon. and hon. Members. People are perhaps being given the impression that there is an endless arc upon which we will see results improve. We had a brief discussion about the Deputy Prime Minister’s progress at the Rio summit and the issues there of exponential growth without due consideration being given to sustainability. Perhaps what we are talking about in this debate is sustainability in the examination system.

When the Secretary of State came to the Dispatch Box last week to respond to an urgent question from the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), we had a slightly more Daily Mail-influenced discussion across the House, as the news was hot off the press. The Secretary of State at that point was clearly responding to the leak, from wherever it came, and was not able to present a more thorough position, as he has done today. He ruled out the idea of returning to the 1950s with the O-level and the CSE, and instead proposed re-examining the GCSE and moving forward. I welcome that.

The proposal relating to examination boards seems to be moving forward to consultation. I can see the strengths of a system in which a board concentrates on a particular subject area. There are those of us who might be surprised not to see the Secretary of State looking at a more market-based solution. The proposal could be said to be a little centrally directed, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) pointed out, young people are increasingly moving with their families to other parts of the country. If they join a school or college part-way through a course where the syllabus is different from their previous course, that presents problems. There have been one or two examples where the head teacher of an academy, who is responsible for admissions, has said that they are not able to take a young person on a course offered at their institution because the syllabus is different. Perhaps progress could be made in that respect.

These issues would need close examination to ensure that a range of courses was available so that all young people are inspired by what is on offer. There must be no sad homogenisation, and teachers must have the scope to ensure that they cover a broad curriculum.

We have an opportunity to look closely at the issue of rigour. I am delighted that we are not moving towards a wholesale change of the system, which could prove to be a distraction. As a Government the coalition has rightly moved to lift burdens on teachers and to remove unnecessary bureaucracy. Teachers want from us the support to use the skills that they have acquired. The Secretary of State was absolutely right to point out that we have a fantastic generation of teachers out there inspiring and working with young people. They do not want another upheaval and change; they want the confidence to know that the examinations to which they are submitting their students will be correct, robust and a fair assessment of those young people’s attainment, and, in some senses, of the attainment of the school or college in supporting those young people to the best of their potential.

I am delighted to say that the motion hangs on the words of the Deputy Prime Minister, unlike the shadow Minister, who sadly is not hanging on the words that I am offering to the Chamber. He clearly was hanging on the words of the Deputy Prime Minister last week, and it is good to see that the Opposition take such close account of what he has to say, as they did earlier this afternoon. The motion talks about a Government proposal to do certain things, which, as has become clear, the Government are not proposing to do. Therefore, it would be entirely the wrong thing to support a motion based on such a false premise. On the other hand, we have an amendment, around which I hope the House can coalesce, which talks about rigour and the need to ensure that there is a broad-based curriculum focused on the key areas of study and encouraging all young people to aspire to the best of their potential, and tackling social mobility, as the coalition agreement and the Government have set out to do, to ensure that all young people, no matter where they start out, are given every opportunity to achieve the very best for them and for their communities.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

An interesting outcome of this debate was texting my office to ask how many people—I realise that as Chair of the Select Committee I should know this—take these foundation GCSEs. The answer I got back is that that information is not collected by the Department for Education or by the exam boards. Go figure.

[Tristram Hunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. That is why I found the discussion about employers knowing the difference between a C at GCSE at different levels attained wholly fallacious. If the big problem of educational attainment is the long tail of under-achievement, the measures to combat that need to be there for all. There is no evidence to suggest that dividing at 14 will help that. We had an interesting contribution today on some of the neurological evidence of the potential for growth from 14 to 16. What we do have evidence for is how overwhelming it will be for the poor and those from socio-economically challenged backgrounds who will be condemned to the new CSEs. That is why the 1980s Conservative Government abandoned this policy. In 1985, Sir Keith Joseph, who became Lord Joseph, unveiled evidence that there is a

“strong association between low achievement and the poverty-related factors of poor housing, single-parent families and a low proportion of children in higher socio-economic groups”.

This policy of division was too divisive even for Sir Keith.

We also hear that with the new O-levels there will be no national curriculum—although a back-door one because of a single qualification authority. This strikes me as a rather strange route to developing the kind of curriculum we want, drawing on a wide knowledge base. It also flies in the face of the Secretary of State’s ambitions to create a national narrative of British history, to teach in all our schools a single notion of British history that imbues notions of citizenship which develops a—rather Whiggish in my view—conception of the British past that all will share. They will not all share that if there is no national curriculum. The greater the division between schools, the greater the division in the teaching of history. Any ambition to teach a cohesive notion of citizenship through the teaching of history is totally undone by the elimination of a cohesive national curriculum.

Internal reforms of the GCSE would be welcome. Clampdown on grade inflation and the proposals vis-à-vis the examinations board are to be welcomed. An end to generalised humanities GCSEs—the merging of history and geography—are to be welcomed. We can learn from the international GCSE, the I-bac. But all that can be achieved within the current system. That is the tragedy of what the Secretary of State is up to.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Gavin Barwell]

I will not take interventions, for reasons of time.

I do not want to go back to a CSE system, but we need the radical reform of our GCSEs in order to bring back a degree of academic rigour. The Education Committee Chairman made a very important point to the Secretary of the State about how raising the threshold will raise the number of people who succeed. I believe passionately, as a parent and from my experience of visiting schools, that paradoxically if we raise the threshold we will find that young people respond to it. That is the experience of schools that have switched to the IGCSE exam.

In the briefing pack for this debate, I saw some research from King’s college, London, showing the decline in maths over the past 30 years, with many 14-year-olds not understanding concepts such as algebra and ratios. I am not satisfied that my nine-year-old is stretched at his primary school, so I work with him on his maths at home, and he has already grasped those topics. I do not think that he is especially bright or clever, but I passionately believe that our young people are full of talent, and if they are pushed and stretched they will respond.

We also need to acknowledge that at 16 years old the right outcome for all our young people is not necessarily to sit a full suite of academic qualifications. For years and years this country has lacked a proper, respected vocational alternative, but if we secure such an alternative, we should not deride it as part of a two-tier system in which people doing vocational qualifications are somehow failures or second best.