Achievement Gap in Reading

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 4th September 2014 Commons Chamber

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

It is a great pleasure to take part in the debate and I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) for securing it and giving such a powerful and morally charged opening address. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), the former shadow Secretary of State, and I congratulate him on his speech and him and his noble Friend Baroness Morris on their efforts in Liverpool. That is just the kind of sustained focus that can enrich people’s lives and make a serious contribution to the economic success of the area. I also want to thank the Backbench Business Committee for choosing this issue for Members to discuss.

As has been mentioned, white working class children fare particularly badly. A central finding of the Select Committee on Education’s recent report “Underachievement in Education by White Working Class Children”, published in June, was that

“the attainment ‘gap’ between those children eligible for free school meals and the remainder is wider for white British…children than for”

any other major ethnic group. Although, as has been said, boys perform worse than girls in any ethnicity or group, poor white children—that is probably a fairer expression than “working class”—both boys and girls have the lowest level of achievement in this country. That is something I want to highlight today.

My Committee heard that the gap is visible as early as age five. For white British children, who are the lowest-performing ethnic group in early years, the attainment gap already stands at 24% by that age. By the age of five, their future trajectory has been established. The gap then widens to 32.2% at key stage 4. Although the proportion of white British children on free school meals achieving the key stage 4 benchmark has almost doubled over the past seven years, it is still only around half as high as the number of non-free-school-meals white British children who succeed by that measure. That disparity is far too wide.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole set out, the foundations of that learning are the ability to read and getting that right in the early years. Too many children from disadvantaged homes are being failed—allowed to progress through school without the skills that they need to secure good jobs. By comparison, the achievement gaps for children of Indian, Bangladeshi and black African ethnicities have all shrunk. The free-school-meals performance gap for Indian children closed by almost 7% between 2006 and 2013, whereas for white British children it hardly altered. Those statistics show that improvement is none the less possible, but the challenge of assisting disadvantaged white children still requires serious attention.

The Government deserve credit. The Secretary of State and her predecessor have made it a mission to roll back what was termed

“the soft bigotry of low expectations”.

They have enabled schools to lengthen the school day. One of the strongest features of the previous Secretary of State was a stubborn refusal to accept that being born poor should mean that a child will fail at school. Efforts are being made on a number of fronts to challenge that. That is why the curriculum and accountability systems have been altered. There has been encouragement of the study of the more rigorous subjects through the English baccalaureate, because those more rigorous subjects were seen as having greater value; they acted as keys to other opportunity, and if they were closed off to the children of poorer families, they would close off opportunity.

I had concerns about the way in which the English baccalaureate was introduced, and whether it really would benefit the most disadvantaged young people, because I thought the most telling feature of our Committee’s report on the EBacc years ago was a graph that showed that despite a big drop in the number of young people from poorer families sitting the EBacc subjects, the number passing them had not altered a great deal. The fear was that although the intentions were sound, pushing lots of children into courses that they were not going to pass would do them little good.

However, the data that I have obtained from the Department show that as the proportion of free-school-meals pupils who were entered for the English baccalaureate doubled, from 9% to 18%, between 2011-12 and 2012-13, thanks to the then Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb)—properly returned to the Front Bench, I have to say—and his colleagues, so the proportion achieving the qualification rose from 5% to 9%. There has been an increase in quantity without a collapse in the percentage achieving a qualification. The introduction of the pupil premium and its extension to early years education are also important measures.

I have less than a minute to go, so I shall put aside my notes. Although we have frequently mentioned this, it deserves to be reiterated again and again that closing the gap is not just an educational question; it is not just that it is ridiculous that some children, just because their families are poor, should end up doing badly at school. It does not have to be that way, because we know that in other countries it is not that way. There is always a gap: if a child comes from a disadvantaged home, the likelihood is—not individually, but statistically—that there will be a gap, but it is greater in this country than in many others. We need to close it. Why do we need to close it? Obviously for educational reasons, but, as has been said, there is an economic impact. The figures, which are probably rather conservative, show that the impact of providing people with a higher-quality education is immense. In the couple of seconds I have left, I reiterate the importance of quality teachers and ensuring that they are distributed where they are most needed, and getting incentives right for them.

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

My apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker, for my slightly late arrival. When the annunciator screen suddenly changes, it is quite a trek to get here on time from the fifth floor of Portcullis House. I also apologise to the right hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), who brilliantly achieved getting this debate.

I do not want to repeat what other people have said, so I shall rattle through some of my pet theories. Four of us in the Chamber served together on the Children, Schools and Families Committee; we know each other well. This terrible gap in achievement starts very young, and too often we are not honest with parents about what happens in the antenatal and perinatal period. Fetal alcohol syndrome is well known: a pattern of mental and physical deficiencies caused by drinking while pregnant, it is seen physically in stunted growth, small head circumference, skin folds at the corner of the eye, small eye openings, short nose and thin upper lip, and mentally in damage to the central nervous system and brain that can lead to the loss of fine motor skills, hearing loss and poor hand-eye co-ordination. Smoking and drug taking during pregnancy also have an effect. That is relevant to the achievement gap because all the evidence shows that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to have parents who drank or smoked during pregnancy. We need better education and support for parents of all backgrounds, and we have to be absolutely blunt with our constituents—be honest about what damage is done before a child is even born.

As has already been said, early years stimulation is important. Many of us learned at the knee of Professor Kathy Sylva, of Jesus college, Oxford. She guided me around primary schools, which I knew little about. She taught me how to read a primary school and a classroom. She took us to Denmark and showed us how having highly motivated, well-paid and well-trained people in early years is absolutely brilliant, and when people are low paid, not trained and lacking in the relevant skills, they do not make the difference to children’s lives that they should do. Good, well-trained, well-paid staff—it is not rocket science. People say it is expensive, but if they can do it in Denmark, why can we not do it here?

I will finish on something that still bugs me from my days as Chair of the Children, Schools and Families Committee—something on which the present Chair of the Education Committee and I disagreed in those days. I am very worried that we do not know where a number of children in our country are or what stimulation and schooling they are getting. I am really worried about home schooling. In my constituency and others, I find a lax attitude to home schooling, and the ease with which people can say a child is being home schooled is dangerous territory. When it was confined to a small number of middle-class families who thought their child might be bullied at school and needed that home support, it was perhaps something we could tolerate, but I always thought that we ought to know where every child is in this country—

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Sheerman]

I will not, because I have only six minutes. I always thought that we ought to know where every child is in this country, how it is being supported, how it is being stimulated and how it is being treated. I am increasingly concerned about the large number of children now being home schooled. Their number is growing rapidly.

I am also worried that people from a strong faith background are choosing to use home schooling. I see it going on in my own community and know it is going on in other communities. I have a lot of evidence that the home school is not genuinely in the home, and the children are ending up in scruffy little back rooms being taught in a way that I do not approve of. I believe that we should know what children are being taught and how they are being taught.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Stuart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Sheerman]

I will, very briefly.

[Mr Stuart]

I think the hon. Gentleman will get an extra minute if he is lucky. May I say to him that I do not believe he does have an evidence base of any sort for these slurs against home-educating families up and down the country? Why do we not seek a point of agreement that what we should do is try to establish a better evidence base about what is happening in home schooling? If we did that, we could talk on the basis of evidence, rather than slur and anecdote.

[Mr Sheerman]

When the hon. Gentleman and I were on the Select Committee looking at this subject we disagreed, and we will continue to do so. The increasing evidence of the larger number of home schooled children is a worry in any society. This week, we had a statement on what was happening to children in one town. I believe we have a duty as parliamentarians to know where every child is, what the curriculum is and what the qualifications are of the people looking after them.

I do not want to make this too party political, but one of the things that we know worked with disadvantaged children was good Sure Start programmes and good children’s centres that were available to support those who did not have much of a home environment—who did not even have the English language at home, where the television was on in a foreign language—and went to school ill prepared to start learning. Those children’s centres were based on evidence and research by people such as Kathy Sylva and Naomi Eisenstadt. Where they are well staffed and well resourced, they make a magnificent difference to the lives of children in the very deprived communities we are talking about. My research shows that about a third have closed down since 2010, and many are under-resourced and do not have the facilities they used to have.

Any Government elected at the next election have to go back to the concept of children’s centres and Sure Start. They were not perfect and can be improved—everything can be improved—but I want to see little children in those children’s centres, run by highly qualified, highly motivated, well-paid people. When I first became Chairman of the Select Committee, I used to go to schools before the introduction of the minimum wage, and people said, “It’s terrible. The minimum wage will ruin early years care because we are only paying £1 an hour.” I believe that with the minimum wage, the transformation of early years education is halfway there, and we want to go the rest of the distance.