School Funding Formula

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

I agree.

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

Yet again, my hon. Friend is leading off the debate—in 10 years in the House, I have raised this matter only eight times, so I stand behind him in that respect. Does he agree that the Government did the right thing last year by closing the gap a little but that we need all parties to commit to a new funding formula in the next Parliament, as the Conservative party has done, to ensure that we have a fair and just settlement, not just in rhetoric but in reality?

[Mr Walker]

I absolutely agree with the Chairman of the Education Committee and join him in that plea to all parties to deliver a fair funding formula, as has been promised.

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

It is a pleasure to follow both the excellent speakers whom we have heard so far. We all agree on the need for a fair and transparent system. As has been said, much of that is in the eye of the beholder. However, the Ministers in the last Government whom I lobbied knew perfectly well that the system was not fair, although they did not have the political courage to face down their own people and say, “We are going to have to redistribute your funds to areas that we do not typically represent, because that is obviously fair.” This is not just about perception. I have never heard anyone attempt to explain why the present system is fair, because they cannot do so. The system is not fair. It is time for someone to recognise the need to do the right thing regardless of party-political interest, which may be something of a challenge.

I am delighted that the Conservative party is committed to a new national funding formula, and I am also pleased that the F40 group is presenting detailed proposals. Its members have worked out who will be losers and who will be winners, to narrow the gaps. Whichever party is in government, whichever system is used to fund schools and regardless of whether 16 to 19-year-olds are protected, money will be tight, so we must have the courage to do the right thing, and then find a way of explaining it to people and carrying them with us.

The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) was right to say that we must do what all fair-minded people would recognise as the right thing. I say that on behalf of the people in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the area I represent. It is rural, coastal and absolutely has the problems the chief inspector of Ofsted has identified, yet from this coming year, although it will have slightly more money thanks to the £390 million, it will be the lowest-funded area in the country. If the Minister gets a chance to do so in his time-limited five-minute speech, perhaps he will say something about the technicality by which, because of our high needs block funding, we got a disproportionately small amount of that £390 million, to add to our existing inequities.

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[Mr Laws]

That is certainly a sensible principle, and it is exactly what we have tried to do through many of our reforms.

Throughout the Parliament we have introduced major reforms that have improved the fairness and simplicity of the system and laid the essential foundation stones to allow us, the two coalition parties, to introduce a full national funding formula in future. The major reforms we have made are changes to the local funding system, and changes to the way in which we fund disadvantage, with the introduction of the pupil premium and minimum funding levels. Time does not allow me to speak in detail about the first two changes, but I would like briefly to say something about the third—minimum funding levels.

We introduced minimum funding levels last year. I thank not only all the Members who lobbied for that change in the system but the excellent officials in our Department who worked hard, over a sustained period, on the new model. This Government have introduced the first reforms to the distribution of funding between local areas in over a decade. In 2015-16, every local area will attract a minimum level of funding for each of its pupils and schools. The £390 million increase in funding that we introduced as part of minimum funding levels represents a huge step towards removing the historical unfairness of the schools funding system. It ensures an immediate boost to the least fairly funded authorities and puts us in a much better position to implement a national funding formula in the next Parliament. All the logic of the reforms we have made indicates that they should be baselined into funding in the next Parliament. I can certainly make that commitment on behalf of my party; it is for others to make commitments on behalf of their parties.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister give way on that point?

[Mr Laws]

I will not, I am afraid, because of the lack of time.

In the next Parliament, multi-year spending plans will allow us to give certainty to local authorities and schools about how we transition to a national funding formula. Meanwhile, no local authority or school will lose out from the introduction of minimum funding levels from 2015-16, but about four in 10 areas will gain. We have already heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester, whose area gains some £100 per pupil—an increase of just over 2%—as a result of the changes for which he lobbied. My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon has been a great campaigner on this issue for many years and has helped to secure an uplift of about 5% in his part of the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge has helped to secure a huge increase of about 8% for funding in his part of England—an additional £311 per pupil that will make a massive difference to schools. This is only one step in the transition to fairer funding and a national funding formula, but it is the biggest step towards fairer schools funding in a decade.

The three major reforms over this Parliament do not, of course, complete the reform of school funding. We recognise that we still need to introduce a full formula to ensure that pupils with similar characteristics attract the same level of funding regardless of where they live. Nevertheless, I am proud that the changes we have made have delivered the big improvements that we have seen. They put us in a much better position than we were in at the beginning of this Parliament. We now have to do the important preparatory work that will be necessary to put in place a national fair funding formula in the next Parliament. We also need to review funding on deprivation to make sure that it is fair across the whole country, and that we can build on the enormous improvements made in this Parliament and the massive contribution that the pupil premium has made.

We are now in a position to finish the job of introducing, for the first time in decades, a fair funding system for schools in this country. Once we have long-term spending plans, we will be in a position to introduce, in a stable and sensible way, the full national funding system for schools for which Members have argued. Both governing parties in this House—both coalition parties—have put on the record very clearly their commitment to a national fair funding formula. Those of our constituents who care about this issue can best ensure the delivery of this policy through the choices they make—

Child Sexual Exploitation (Oxfordshire)

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

The hon. Gentleman is right that what we have seen in Oxfordshire and elsewhere are abhorrent, sickening crimes, and they are crimes. He is right to say that any of us in any position of authority feels that those are a stain on our society and must be eradicated. He is right to say that we do not want to rush into responding, but where immediate action must be taken, it is important that it is taken. That is what we have seen in Rotherham, for example, with the appointment of the commissioners. The Secretaries of State have been meeting since last autumn to discuss the Government’s response to Rotherham in particular, which will be announced at Downing street this afternoon. We have taken time and there will be further consultations coming out of the response. We have already announced reforms to children’s social work practice, and that is a long-term response about improving training. He will understand that there needs to be a mixture of responses to something as sickening as this.

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

We must do everything we can to reduce the vulnerability of the young people we have heard about today. Further to the question from the Opposition spokesman and the Secretary of State’s response, my Committee agrees about the need for excellent sex and relationship education in schools precisely to give resilience to young people, to enable them to talk about consent in a meaningful way, as one witness put it, and to tell them about age gaps and predatory behaviours so that they start to recognise those. We wrestled with how we would get the curriculum time and the investment in teacher quality if we do not make such education statutory—reluctantly, because we do not want to impose further duties on schools. We came to the conclusion that that had to be made statutory if we are to deliver it. If the Secretary of State thinks it should not be statutory, will she tell us why, or tell us what else could be done in lieu of what we suggested to make these things happen?

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank my hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee for his remarks. The Committee produced an interesting report and I know that the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), gave evidence to the Committee. We will consider the conclusions carefully. In relation to consent, it is important to know that the victims in these cases knew that they had not given consent. There was no question about consent being given. They knew that what was happening to them was absolutely wrong. Sex and relationship education is already compulsory in secondary maintained schools. Most academies and free schools also teach it, and I suspect that many primaries do so in an age-appropriate way. I was at Eastbourne academy last week talking to the students there about what they call SPHERE, which is like PSHE. The academy taught it in a fantastic way. It did not need to be told to do so; it did not need such teaching to be statutory. It was doing it because, exactly as the Chairman of the Select Committee said, it was preparing young people to be resilient.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

I can provide my hon. Friend with that reassurance. We are offering generous bursaries, including in computer science, to attract the highest quality graduates into teaching.

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

7. What assessment she has made of which of her Department’s policies since May 2010 has been most successful in achieving its original objectives.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Nicky Morgan)]

There have been many outstanding achievements during this Parliament, but I particularly highlight our reforms to raise standards in schools as a key success. This has led to more children than ever before—as I said, almost 1 million pupils—attending a school rated good or outstanding by Ofsted.

[Mr Stuart]

We currently have the fastest expanding economy in the western world, which is obviously extremely welcome, but the improvement in standards in our schools has come about because of recruitment of the best possible graduates into the profession. What more can the Government do to ensure that these graduates come into our schools, particularly those in rural and coastal areas?

[Nicky Morgan]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. We now need to see excellent teaching right the way across the system in every school. Every child’s life chances are only as good as the quality of teaching they receive. That is why the Prime Minister recently announced that our manifesto would include a national teaching service to encourage more good teachers to enter the profession and to be represented in all schools right across the country.

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[Mr Speaker]

Order. I feel sure that there will be a full debate on this matter on one of the long summer evenings that lie ahead of us.

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

T6. Will the Secretary of State commit himself to maintaining a focus on social justice and rooting for those who do not go to university? Will he reject out of hand a policy that has been described by the New Statesman as “dire”, by Martin Lewis as “financially illiterate”, and by The Times as Labour’s worst policy? Tuition fees cuts amounting to £2.7 billion would subsidise the very richest at a time when we need to do more for the very poorest.

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. We are taking money from the welfare budget to pay for apprenticeships that will set our young people up in life, while the Labour party is taking money away from pensioners in order to fund a misguided policy on tuition fees. According to the vice-chancellor of my own university, Loughborough, that policy would make 500 people redundant. Which 500 people in Loughborough does the shadow Secretary of State think should be made redundant?

Careers Advice (14 to 19-Year-Olds)

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Wednesday 25th February 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Williams. I thank the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) for securing this excellent and important debate.

I come at the matter from two perspectives. My key priority is the people of Hartlepool. There is huge potential in my constituency. We have a nuclear power station providing well-paid jobs, and there is the prospect of an additional power station in the next 10, 15 or 20 years. We have got Nissan up the road. We have got Hitachi in Newton Aycliffe. We have the largest concentration of chemical engineering anywhere in western Europe, and we have the potential for carbon capture and storage. There is massive opportunity in my local economy, and yet the Office for National Statistics report from last year on young people in the labour market shows that Hartlepool, alongside Wolverhampton, has the largest number of young people unemployed and outside education or training anywhere in England and Wales. Why is that the case? Why is there such a mismatch between potential, skill shortages and the level of youth unemployment? Careers advice has a role to play in making sure that we address that mismatch.

My second consideration is that for the last 11 months of the previous Labour Government, I was the Minister in charge of 14-to-19 reform and apprenticeships, and I had responsibility for information, advice and guidance. I was conscious that in far too many cases, careers advice was seen as a secondary activity—often even a nuisance—that took time and attention away from the core business of learning. Careers advice was often delivered as a one-off event in a single afternoon. I was keen to see a new approach, which was the purpose of the new strategy for information, advice and guidance published in October 2009. I am not suggesting that there was ever a golden age for careers guidance, but as a Minister I was keen to push it up the agenda.

As we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), the provision of careers advice to young people under this Government has got markedly worse. Reductions in funding and personnel, increases in fragmentation in the school system and organisational change, such as the dismantling of Connexions, have meant that young people often face real barriers to navigating what is on offer. Good careers advice can also be an important tool of effective social mobility. A young person should get good careers advice regardless of where they live, their background, who their parents are or who they know. That is often not the case, however, and it is a question of who they know and their connections when it comes to getting into a good career or profession.

The CBI has said that 93% young of people are not getting the careers information that they need, but good careers information, advice and guidance are needed more than ever, because the certainties of the past have gone. In my patch, my grandfather’s generation could leave school at the age of 15 on Friday and be working in the steelworks or the shipyard the following Monday, and they would stay there for 40 years. That certainty and that clear route have gone for ever. The futurist Thomas Frey has said that 60% of the best jobs in the next decade have not even been invented yet. At the same time, technology threatens a third of all UK jobs over the next 20 years, especially at the low-skilled end of the employment market. As Andreas Schleicher of the OECD has said,

“because of rapid economic and social change, schools have to prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created, technologies that have not yet been invented and problems that we don’t yet know will arise.”

In those circumstances, there needs to be much greater alignment between education policy and business and industrial policy, with effective careers advice and meaningful engagement between businesses and schools acting as the bridge, but the Government have to help. Government policy is not addressing the issue, and a narrowing of the curriculum by Ministers means that creative learning, problem solving and team building in the widest sense—enterprise education, in the widest definition, is required for the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century that will allow us to compete in the modern world—are not being championed, and careers advice is being downgraded.

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

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that there was no golden age. The careers system that he left behind at the end of the Labour Government was pretty weak. Does he agree that there has been a failure to change the incentives in order to ensure that all schools provide first-class careers advice and guidance, as a small number currently do? One of the major things is to ensure that, in places such as Hartlepool, young people get qualifications that add value. He will be delighted, as I am, to see the number of young unemployed people aged between 18 and 24 in his constituency go down from the 1,200 when he left government in 2010 to, I think, 615 according to the latest figures. That is fantastic news, and we are seeing that transformation across the country under this Government.

[Mr Wright]

The hon. Gentleman will understand that we want a universal and properly resourced careers service that is staffed by committed and professional people with the necessary breadth of knowledge and experience to be able to say, “This is what the future looks like. The potential for you, as a young person, is huge. This is what’s on offer. Let me guide you through it.” That is not happening at the moment. I have six specific, brief points.

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[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Williams. I strongly congratulate the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) on securing this debate on a crucial subject. I represent one of the youngest constituencies in the country. I can barely walk down the street, and I can certainly never visit a school or educational establishment, without young people directly raising their concerns and demands about the careers services that they want. I am here to speak for them.

I completely endorse the comments of most hon. Members who have spoken today. Young people tell me that they want face-to-face guidance when they need it. That is particularly important in my constituency because many young people do not have connections. They do not have parents with understanding and knowledge of the modern world of work. Many of them have come to this country, and perhaps their parents do not have good English.

On Monday, I was at the KPMG City academy in my constituency with my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt). A year 12 pupil told us that she wants to be a doctor but that her mother is a single parent. She said, “I don’t have the connections that some of my friends in the school have.” The school helps to provide her with the connections that help to level the playing field. KPMG and the City of London sponsor the academy, and KPMG helps to provide her with support—other pupils also have mentors through KPMG. Those business links, as my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) said, are vital.

When I talk to businesses in the community and head teachers, one of the key things they mention is linking those businesses with individual pupil achievement in the school, as well as giving pupils a view of the world of work. That is more complicated than simply careers advice, but I have always supported embedding business connections in schools, and it is one of the reasons why I am broadly in favour of the academies programme.

On careers advice more specifically, I am delighted to have worked from the outset with the charity My Big Career. We found each other because I had been working to encourage professionals in my area to become the family for young people in Hackney who do not have their own connections. I got professionals and sixth-formers into networking events, where they shared notes and found each other. Those young people made their own connections.

The redoubtable Deborah Streatfield decided to set up My Big Career because she is a professional careers adviser working in the private sector and, as well as the private school that employs her, she is often privately commissioned by parents. She realised that the careers advice in many state schools was not of the same standard, so she set up the charity. Happily, I was able to secure office space in Cardinal Pole school in my constituency, which now has an outstanding sixth form. Deborah Streatfield has been offering face-to-face advice, and it is not just her. She has been getting in volunteer careers advisers and, crucially, professionals from business who are trained to give the right kind of professional advice to pupils.

The charity also offers a results day service, which was so effective last year. Shockingly, it was the first time in Hackney’s history that pupils received a results day service from volunteers trained to go in at 7 o’clock in the morning so that young people who had missed a grade could access discussions with universities. For example, four young people who would not have got on to their nursing degree did so because of that input, which should be standard. That happened because a professional, qualified careers team was there at that point.

Young people tell me that they want such advice. For many young people, face-to-face advice is so important because they are just not getting it through other routes. The key thing about My Big Career is the service’s high-level professionalism. I echo the point raised by other colleagues that we need good, properly qualified careers advisers.

I also echo the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) about ensuring that teenagers make the right choice early on. One of the things that My Big Career has discovered is that many young people are being encouraged, quite rightly and effectively, to get a good GCSE in maths, but for many a C grade was just not enough for the course they wanted to take at university. They needed a B grade, and even many heads of maths did not understand the significance of a B grade for the future career choices of their pupils. Bright, able and capable sixth-formers were finding that that one dropped grade in GCSE maths was limiting their future career options. That goes to show that the professional understanding of good, qualified careers advisers makes a difference throughout a school, not just at 14.

The Government have thrown money at careers advice. At one level, we should accept the £20 million that has gone to the careers company, but I have serious questions about how that has been tendered and whether it is really best at national level. There is no road map for how the careers company will deliver good quality careers advice throughout our educational establishments. I hope the Minister can give us more information, because we are all desperate to know how that will help people in Hackney, Hartlepool, Scunthorpe and around the country. I want to know how we will be monitoring the independent advice and guidance provided directly by schools, because the quality varies enormously, as we have heard.

I, too, have a list of asks for the Minister. First, as the hon. Member for Eastbourne described, we want a clearer set of requirements on appropriate and good guidance. We do not have a common set of standards at the moment, and it is vital that we do. It is not fair that a young person going through a school—sometimes a very good school—might have their future completely altered by the lack of quality careers advice. We want a common standard.

Crucially, we need really good evaluation of what works and quality control. The key thing is the bit in the middle, which my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe talked about—the broker between businesses and young people. The broker could be the careers adviser, but there could be work placements. Rather than young people just being thrown at work placements that have been brokered by a careers service, they could say, “I want to do this, and I need to know who I can speak to so I can go and do that particular role.”

I represent Shoreditch, which the Prime Minister and the Chancellor called “tech city”. It is a hub for future jobs and growth in this country, but most of the jobs in Shoreditch do not exist as such. They do not have job titles, because they are so new and emerging. I can sometimes broker the connections, because of the peculiarity of an MP’s role, where we see a lot of different things. We need to make sure that our teachers and particularly our careers advisers are aware of the opportunities and can make those links. That crucial bit in the middle is the broker. When the broker finds a young person with a particular skill, the broker will know how to make the two or three phone calls that will get the young person the connection to the career opportunity that they can really learn from. We also need to see greater stability of funding so that we can be sure there is a career path for good quality careers advisers.

I welcomed the Government’s decision to include outcome data as a key part of schools. We still do not have much of an update from the Department for Education on how it is going to work. Many schools in my area feel challenged about how they are going to deal with it. I believe—I represent Shoreditch, so I would—that good, well-worked-up software that would allow alumni to be tracked and, crucially, give alumni something back in terms of networking, could be very useful. I have been talking to UBS, the bank that sponsors the Bridge Academy in Hackney. There is a real opportunity to be grabbed, but it needs to be fleshed out. I hope the Minister will do so.

I have mentioned the issues about grade B maths. Such issues underline the need for clear understanding throughout schools of how early choices can affect careers and damage career options. The Government need to ensure that that is embedded through a set of standards.

I have set out my asks. Careers advice is crucial. My young people in Hackney want action. They want to see the best provided to all and I back them in that.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

rose—

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

rose—

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

Thank you for fitting me in, Mr Williams. I am afraid I was not originally down to speak because I was chairing the Education Committee this morning.

Careers advice and guidance is such an important topic. The Select Committee produced a report. People are listening to thoughtful speeches from many colleagues, but the heart of the problem is a simple one. It does not come out in myriad reports that have been produced on the subject, or indeed in enough speeches given by colleagues in the Chamber. The problem is that there are insufficient incentives for schools to take the matter seriously. That is why 80% of them do not. It is simple: they do not have to take it seriously. No one loses their job and no one gets fired or publicly humiliated for failing to do it properly, but they do if five good GCSEs are not achieved. We therefore have to change the accountability regime and have a high-stakes environment in which someone very easily gets publicly humiliated or sacked. That is the central problem.

We need a better balance—perhaps a nudge that does not simply add further burdens on leaders within schools and colleges, but addresses the central problem. The Committee did not have any perfect solutions, but we said—I will say this to the Minister—that schools should at least be made to publish their careers plan, so that parents and employers can have a look at it. Ofsted could check in advance. Hard-working Ministers could sit in Whitehall, as I know my right hon. Friend the Minister for Schools often does late at night, and look at it on the website.

The Government helped to fund a quality in careers standard for schools. It exists, so we can make schools work towards it and keep to it. I know it is bureaucratic—a bit input-esque—but we have not got great destinations data yet and we do not have another solution, so we have to give it a nudge. Let us not have any more reports from the alphabet soup of organisations. Teach First has done one this week that has some good stuff in it, but the central issue is that schools are not incentivised to take the matter seriously, and they have perverse incentives such as filling their sixth-form places, which means they will not even let colleges in.

Let us address the incentives, get the framework right, stop faffing around with all the other talk, and we could make a real difference to the lives of children. It is worth looking at what happened under the previous Secretary of State, who, it is fair to say, was pretty dismissive of this agenda, but he was not dismissive of the need to raise standards in schools, to challenge the low standards that prevailed for too long, and to put in place a pressure on the system to get people to sit for qualifications and do a curriculum and syllabuses for exams that matter to people and were of some value. That is already starting to pay off. Combined with an economic plan that focuses on enterprise and growth, we see transformations.

I am sad to say that for those who are trying to be fair-minded, those transformations do not get properly reflected in speeches by Opposition Members. I admire enormously the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), as I do all the Opposition Members in the Chamber, but he does not mention that youth unemployment in his constituency has gone from more than 1,000 when the Labour party left office—there were more than 1,000 young people in his constituency who were scarred for life by unemployment, because we know that youth unemployment scars people for life—to 425 today. Similarly, in Hartlepool, about 600 young people’s lives have been transformed by a Government who are delivering and not just talking. The youth unemployment figure there has gone from 1,200 to 600, so another 600 young people have had their lives turned round. In south Hackney, the youth unemployment figure is down from 750 when Labour left office—750 young people just sitting there—to 250 today. That is all great news.

[Hywel Williams (in the Chair)]

Order. This debate is about careers advice and not about unemployment among young people.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) on raising this important topic. I also congratulate all the hon. Members who have spoken; their speeches demonstrate the importance of this subject.

Careers advice is “broken”; it is on “life support”; and the Government show a “reluctance” to take it seriously. Those are not my words as an Opposition Member; they are the words of the CBI and the Skills Commission. Also, the Education Committee has been fairly critical; in 2013, it described

“the worrying deterioration in the overall level of provision”.

That is all pretty damning, because careers advice is absolutely vital, as I think we have heard from everyone who has spoken today.

Young people need to know what the options are—not only which A-levels to take or which university to go to but what training they may need to become an engineer or to work in IT. They also need to know what the emerging jobs market in their area is, and what they need in order to access the full range of education and training options, as the Association of Colleges has said in its excellent report. But what have the Government done? They have pushed the responsibility for careers advice on to schools and colleges.

Schools must provide access to impartial careers advice for young people aged between 14 and 19. They are told that this advice should be independent and involve outside providers. However, the schools have a vested interest in keeping up the number of students studying A-level courses, to ensure a viable number if they have a sixth form of their own; in some cases, the survival of a school’s sixth form depends on the school keeping those students. I have heard from some sixth-form and further education colleges that they are being denied admission to schools, and consequently they are not being allowed to give the full range of options to students.

Many teachers follow the academic route so they do not have experience of the world of work, know the local economic conditions in their area or understand the range of experiences that are offered by going down the “earn and learn” route. Indeed, I have heard from some young people about the pressure they are under to stay on at school and take A-levels, rather than starting apprenticeships. One young person told me that they were ostracised by the school when they said they wanted to do an apprenticeship. Another particularly savvy young person said to me, “I’m just seen as a walking pot of money.”

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising the issue of apprenticeships. The TUC and Unionlearn have said—I think it was in the past few days—that they completely oppose the Labour party policy to abolish level 2 apprenticeships. Will the Labour party look at that policy again? Level 2 apprenticeships, where they transform income and provide high-quality training, should be retained; we must not lose this vital building block in providing support to young people.

[Yvonne Fovargue]

I will not go into that issue too far, but I will say that level 2 will not be branded as apprenticeships, and the training will certainly not be going; it will be a pre-apprenticeship. However, that is a different issue.

It is no wonder, therefore, that careers advice is simply not being provided. Three quarters of schools that Ofsted visited were not providing adequate advice—so far, not so good. And what else has happened? We have heard about the new careers and enterprise company, and a number of questions have been asked about it. I wonder whether the job it will do is already being done. The Chairman of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), who is here today, has said:

“It is clear that the…new body replicates the very role and remit of the National Careers Service...and only the leadership and governance is different”.

I would like to hear more about what will happen with that situation.

The fact is that we need more than an unenforced duty on schools, which simply leads to buck-passing. One in three teachers say they do not have the right expertise and resources to adequately provide effective information, advice and guidance. We need a complete rethink about how we deliver careers advice to young people, and rebuilding the careers advice service will be an early and vital priority for a Labour Government. Fragmentation and short-term and unsuitable initiatives are absolutely endemic. We need a careers service that is modelled around what provides the best outcomes for the young person and for the country, because young people are our future work force, as we have heard today. We need a careers service that guarantees that face-to-face, one-to-one guidance is available for all young people who need it, and that ensures that businesses and employers are linked in with it, the importance of which we heard about from my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin).

Building closer links with industry is absolutely vital, but I would like to add my support for the face-to-face guidance, as somebody who has worked in providing face-to-face advice, even if it was not in this sector. Websites can help many young people, but many more will need face-to-face contact. The level of contact may well be different: it may just involve initial contact, or there may be contact that takes young people further through the process. As Centrepoint has said, particularly young people who have little parental support, as well as those with poor literacy or who have other support needs, may need more assistance.

Working together is the other watchword. That is why I support the idea of careers hubs, which we have heard about from a number of hon. Members today. I visited the Bristol campus of South Gloucestershire and Stroud college the other month. The college has an excellent careers hub, working with schools across the area—independent schools, academies, state-controlled schools and primary schools—and providing one-to-one advice from professional careers advisers, which it employs. The college is the point of contact for all employers, it works with the local enterprise partnership, and it is considering expanding its service. It is an excellent model for the careers advice of the future. If such hubs were rolled out across the country, they could provide a single point of information about careers advice and career options in each area and employ the professional careers advisers whose work is so valuable.

Careers hubs could also co-ordinate work experience. We have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) how important work experience is for young people. Currently, however, work experience provision is another postcode lottery.

A taster session of work experience is valued by young people and employers, but not enough employers are incentivised to provide them, even though they can provide real benefits, including introducing the reality of work to young people. My daughter found that out on her first day of work. Horrified, she told me when she came home, “The manager told me what to do, and d’you know what? It wasn’t sensible!” I thought, “That’s a good life experience for you.”

Taster sessions also allow students to consider a wider range of roles than they may have been told about. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool said, young people put their toe in the water and they might not like it. However, they might like it, especially if taster sessions give them a wide range of roles to consider. It is also indisputable that if people have an early experience of work, they are less likely to end up unemployed and more likely to get better jobs and earn more money. However, at the moment less than half of young people have access to high-quality work experience. We have really fallen behind countries such as France in this regard.

We also need to work more with employers to break down some of the barriers faced by young people who are perhaps harder to place than others, including those with disabilities, in order to dispel the preconception that the employers themselves may have that those young people cannot do the jobs that are on offer. A careers hub could help those young people, as well as others who are perhaps more in the mainstream.

We believe that destination tracking is another activity that should be taken further. Schools actually have a responsibility for their pupils that goes beyond simply where they go on leaving school. A young person who goes to university and drops out in the first term because the course is unsuitable for them is not a success; a young person who takes an apprenticeship and completes it is a success, and should be celebrated as such. We therefore need to track destinations for much longer than we do now. Also, there has been a worrying rise in the number of “unknowns” recorded by the local authorities. We not know where those people are, which is a concern from a safeguarding point of view as well.

Our young people are the work force of the future, as we have heard before; we rely on them to pay and look after our pensions, basically. They need to be given every opportunity to have a worthwhile and satisfying career, and to develop their skills throughout their working lives. If we do not give them access to advice at the beginning of their working life, when they are thinking about what work to do, in order to help them navigate the confusing landscape of the world of work, which is becoming ever more confusing, we are failing them. In fact, we are not only doing that but we are jeopardising our future economic success as a country.

[The Minister for Skills and Equalities (Nick Boles)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Williams. This has been an excellent debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) on securing it and congratulate all hon. Members on their contributions. However, I am clearly not able to respond to every question asked and every point raised.

I start by observing that, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) said, there has never been a golden age of careers advice and guidance. I think we can all agree about that. He is a former Minister in this field and took office at the end of a long Government full of largesse, so I think he will have noted that large Government budgets have not proved to be the solution to the lack of advice and guidance. He made a perfunctory reference to Connexions, but nobody has come up to me, either since I was elected to Parliament or since I was appointed to this job, and mourned the scrapping of that service. There may well have been good intentions behind it, but the reality is that it achieved very little, with a relatively large budget. When we faced the largest peace time budget deficit in our history, it was a right and proper economy to make to get rid of Connexions as it was then constituted.

There was never a golden age and, certainly, the previous Government did not manage to produce a system of careers advice and guidance that led to high-quality advice for young people throughout the country and in all schools. We as a Government have recognised that, thanks to the good work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), the Chairman of the Education Committee, and others, and have taken steps to ensure that schools are more focused on their responsibilities. Hon. Members have mentioned the introduction of statutory guidance requiring schools to provide independent advice and guidance. We certainly recognise that too few schools are doing so. There were many calls from Opposition Members for proper resourcing for this. However, there is a difficulty here, because proper resourcing means more money either dedicated to or ring-fenced for the provision of careers advice and guidance and the employment of more careers advisers. In that case, Opposition Members have to answer questions—I know they never like doing so—about what other things they are going to cut, what taxes they will raise or what borrowing will be increased to provide that resourcing; otherwise, that resourcing will have to come from within the existing schools budgets.

The reality is that good schools of all kinds—grant-maintained schools, academies, and all kinds of schools—realise that it is critical for them to make an investment from their budget and employ a careers adviser or co-ordinator. Lots of different models work. Good schools realise that this is a priority and there is nothing stopping any school deciding to invest some of their resource in proper advice and guidance.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Just for the record, the Committee did not call for additional money. It recognised that, in an ideal world, it might have been a good thing, but that the most important thing was to change the incentives for schools, because the fact that 20% of schools can find the budget—they tend to be successful schools delivering outstanding academic results as well—shows that it can be done. In fact, those things are mutually enhancing.

If the Minister wanted a crude proxy for the success of the education system—I remember saying this to the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) when he was a Minister in the Labour Government—it would be how many young people end up as NEETs. I am pleased that the number in the shadow Minister’s constituency has gone from 900 when Labour left office to 140 today.

[Nick Boles]

Of course, I am always particularly grateful to my hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee. I will come on to his point on incentives, which is a good one.

Probably the most useful thing I can do for hon. Members who participated in this debate is to answer some questions about the new careers company, because I understand that although people are broadly and in principle supportive of it, they question how it will fit into the landscape and particularly what its relationship with or functions relative to the National Careers Service will be.

The key point about the new careers company is that we observed that there is no shortage of organisations offering high-quality activity. Straight after this debate I am meeting the people who run Inspiring Futures, which is an excellent programme with speakers for schools and any number of online resources. Of course, the National Careers Service provides high-quality advice to lots of young people as well as to adults. There is no shortage of provision, but schools face great difficulty understanding what is available, what is high quality and what would really meet the identified needs of their young people.

The point of the careers company, under Christine Hodgson, is to create a structure whereby every school has somebody it can ask to help it through this forest and identify the resources and the providers who will help provide a much better range of experiences and inspiration to young people. It will focus initially on mapping what is out there, because people have to know that before they can start offering guidance. It will then focus on Lord Young’s excellent idea, in his report to the Prime Minister, of appointing an enterprise adviser. That person will be a current or recently retired local executive from the public or private sector, who will be attached to a school and whose role will be to help it identify local businesses and employers that can come in to the school and provide work experience, and resources relating to programmes relevant for the school. A school will identify that local enterprise adviser with the help of their local economic partnership.

I agree with those who have said that local economic partnerships have an obvious role to play in helping schools understand who out there can help them deliver on their duty. I do not think many teachers or head teachers are failing to provide careers advice and guidance because they do not believe in it; it is because they are busy and not particularly qualified to do it. It is no criticism of them to suggest that. They need some help. As we have heard, a plethora of local business executives is only too willing to get involved. However, we need some structure of brokerage in that regard and some guidance to schools on how they can give better advice and guidance to their young people.

Those will be the two main priorities for the careers company. It will have a small pot of money of about £5 million—a small part of the £20 million—from which it will be able to back new ideas for new kinds of experience and advice and guidance. That will act more as a sort of seed fund or a venture fund. It will also work more long-term on Lord Young’s other idea, which is for an enterprise passport that would probably be an online record of all of the non-formal educational achievements of a young person—all the volunteering and holiday jobs they have done, all the clubs they have joined and all their other extracurricular achievements at school—so that employers have an objective record of the full range of a young person’s contribution to their community when judging their fitness for school.

In the final minutes of this debate I should like to focus on the point of careers advice and guidance, although I am happy to answer in writing any questions from colleagues about the careers company. The point of careers advice is to lead to a career, and the point of every career is to have a series of satisfying and fulfilling jobs. I hope that every hon. Member of every party will recognise the signal achievement of this Government, which is to have created more jobs in Yorkshire—as my right hon. Friend the Minister for Employment reminded us—than have been created in France, and to have created more jobs in the United Kingdom than have been created in the whole of the European Union.

The key to a career is having an economy that creates jobs—new jobs in new sectors, requiring new young people with new skills. Of course, they need advice and guidance, and of course they need clear data that help them understand which choice of qualifications leads to which possibilities regarding a career. However, ultimately, without an economy that is creating employment at the speed we have been doing so in this country, there is no point having even the best careers advice and guidance in the world. Right now, even with fantastic careers advice and guidance, someone who has the misfortune to be a young person in Spain will have a pretty small chance of having a fulfilling career because youth unemployment there is pushing 40%.

Let us remember the point of careers advice and guidance, which is to guide people on to a path that will give them a satisfying range of jobs in the economy, creating jobs like no other.

Young People in Care

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2015 Commons Chamber

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

I beg to move,

That this House notes the Second Report from the Education Committee, Into independence, not out of care: 16 plus care options, HC 259, and the Government’s response, HC 647; welcomes the progress made and the commitment to improve the care provided to these vulnerable young people shown in the Government’s response; regrets that the Government has not gone further by exploring with local authorities how to ban the use of bed-and-breakfast accommodation for this age group and by moving to inspect and regulate all accommodation provided to children in care; and calls on the Government to do all it can to improve the accommodation and care given to these young people.

The motion stands in my name and those of other members of the Education Committee, many of whom I see across the Chamber.

I am pleased to lead this debate and to have the opportunity to discuss our report, “Into independence, not out of care: 16 plus care options”. The reason we are here is that the issues considered in our report will have far-reaching consequences for some of the most vulnerable young people in our society. We were moved to inquire into this subject by our concern, raised during previous work on child protection, that the needs of older children in the care system were not being properly met. The horror stories we heard about children being placed in unsuitable and unsafe accommodation, often far from home, made it a matter of crucial importance for us to explore what could be done to improve the situation.

During the inquiry, we took evidence from charities and experts, from the Minister, whom it is a pleasure to see on the Front Bench, and from those closely involved in providing care services to young people but, as I think my colleagues will attest when they speak during the debate, the most important and powerful evidence we heard was from young people themselves who were in care or had previously been in care. We were grateful to those who were brave enough to come and speak to a bunch of MPs and speak about often troubling periods of their lives and about their experiences.

Our inquiry looked at the kinds of accommodation that are provided for young people aged 16 and 17 who are looked after by local authorities—young people still in care; the suitability, safety and regulatory nature of alternative accommodation; whether the “Staying Put” principle whereby young people are allowed to stay in their accommodation for a longer period should apply to those in residential children’s homes; and whether the provision of alternative accommodation should be extended to the age of 21. We made a series of recommendations in each of these areas, all of which are important and many of which were picked up by the Government response, which was published in October 2014. Others may wish to touch on some of those issues, such as “Staying Put” or ensuring that young people’s voices are heard in planning their care.

I hope the Minister will forgive me if I concentrate on two areas where we think the Government should have gone further towards making the changes that we want to see in order to deliver a vision which I know we share with the Government of improving care for these young people. In doing so, I stress the fact that as a Committee we do not doubt the Minister’s commitment to addressing the problems faced by older children in care, nor do I think that progress has not been made: it has.

For example, the new pupil premium plus has seen funding to support children in care at school increase by £1,000 per pupil. Children are covered as soon as they enter care and 10,000 more children in care now benefit, bringing the total to 50,000. The care leavers strategy that the Minister launched in late 2013, which encompasses action across a range of Departments, from the Department for Work and Pensions to housing to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, is giving care leavers a helping hand as they enter adult life. The Ofsted single inspection framework is doing a better job of drawing together data and insight into the lives of older young people and making sure that local authorities can be held to account for the provision that they give them. That is all good news.

Our disagreement today is over how fast we should now move towards tackling what my Committee sees as matters needing urgent attention: the regulation of accommodation provided to children in care, and the use of bed-and-breakfast accommodation for that age group. I shall start with bed and breakfasts. The Department for Education guidance says that bed-and-breakfast accommodation is not suitable.

One young person told us of being placed in a B and B as an emergency placement—I repeat, emergency placement—for three weeks. She was the only young person in the building and older residents would come knocking on her door asking her to join them in their rooms, which was an incredibly frightening experience. Imagine being that child, sitting behind the door, waiting for the next knock. For vulnerable young people, many of whom have self-esteem issues and who are desperate for love and attention, such an environment leaves them at the mercy of people who are keen to exploit their situation and weakness.

So why, we asked, is bed and breakfast still being used? We found that it is used mainly as emergency accommodation in cases where a young person needs shelter urgently and nothing else is available. At least, that is the reason we were given, although when we met young people as we travelled around the country we heard about people being kept there for a long time, such as the young lady I mentioned. It was argued that if the local authority did not have the option of using bed and breakfasts, then young people could be even worse off. In our report, we recommended that the Department consult local authorities in order to determine a reasonable time frame to allow them to build up capacity so that there could be a total ban on using B and Bs and they could follow the example of Wiltshire, for instance, which has built up a resource such that it does not need to use them. We also say that there should be a strengthened requirement for local authorities to commission sufficient emergency facilities.

In its response, the Department accepted our recommendation on temporary measures and asserted that there should be a limit of two working days on the time that a young person could spend in a B and B. That is welcome, but it still falls short of an outright ban. Many children enter B and B accommodation in an emergency on a Friday night, so the limit of two working days means that they could still be there on the Tuesday evening. The Government response said:

“We want to test further the arguments for and against the flexibility for local authorities to use B&B where it is the best way of meeting a young person’s needs. Over the coming months, the Department for Education will undertake work with stakeholders to better understand these issues.”

We welcome the seriousness with which the Government have taken this, but we do not think that is good enough. Young people are being failed now—as we speak—and no amount of stakeholder consultation will disguise that reality. I urge the Minister to set out what the DFE has learned from the consultation to date and when we can expect further action on this issue, with a view, in the opinion of my Committee, of moving towards an outright ban.

The other issue I want to raise is the regulation of “other arrangements” for looked-after 16 and 17-year-olds. Some Members unfamiliar with this area of policy many wonder what “other arrangements” are. They include placements in a family or domestic setting where the adults responsible for their care are not approved as foster carers; foyers, which are meant to offer integrated housing, learning and personal development services, and other kinds of supported accommodation; and placements in independent accommodation with “floating support” where housing support workers make regular visits—or are supposed to. Ofsted’s single inspection framework assesses the experiences and progress of care leavers through scrutinising a representative sample of 25 tracked cases. Individual properties or settings are not inspected. That would not be an acceptable approach towards other settings, and it should not be acceptable for the accommodation in which some of the most vulnerable, abused young people in our society are placed.

We therefore recommended that the DFE consult on a framework of individual regulatory oversight for all accommodation that falls within “other arrangements” to ensure suitability, while allowing for diversity of provision. Many will ask why, as a Conservative, I am so keen on regulation. I, and my Committee, think that children who are as vulnerable as these young people—they may have learned to have a very tough exterior, or a streetwise front, but are in fact deeply vulnerable—deserve to have their accommodation individually inspected to ensure that the injustice they have suffered so far in their lives is not compounded further by a failure of oversight by those in loco parentis, namely us.

Ministers said that they wanted to maintain what they described as the “flexibility” of current arrangements, emphasising that they will hold under-performing local authorities to account when poor practice is uncovered. However, that logic is not applied to the quality and safety of settings for children and young people across the rest of the DFE’s remit. If there were a consistent approach in saying that a sample approach delivers better outcomes, one would expect that to be found across the piece, but it is not. Childminders, foster carers, residential children’s homes, secure training centres, schools, sixth-form colleges and further education colleges—each of those is individually inspected. It cannot be right that we do not do the same for the accommodation of 16 and 17-year-olds who have had an extremely tough start in life. As a society, we owe them that.

I ask the Minister to think again, or at least to explain why he believes that a new regulatory framework will not lead to the improvements in quality that we have seen in other settings that are individually regulated by Ofsted. I know that he cares deeply in both a personal and a professional capacity about making improvements. I hope that I have fairly stated that I recognise that the Government and the Minister have made significant strides in improving outcomes for such young people. He has done a lot of great work, and I sincerely hope that he will now take further steps to ensure that young people on the cusp of leaving the care system get a fairer, safer start in life.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Further to the question from the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson), we recommended in this report that there should be greater awareness of the right of young people who leave care and get into difficulty to come back into care. The Government said that they would look into that more closely. Perhaps the Minister will reflect on that in his remarks and let us all know what progress has been made.

[Bill Esterson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point. He is absolutely right.

We made recommendations about better preparation for young people who are leaving care, including through the development of life skills. We highlighted a number of areas where support was crucial, based on the evidence that was presented to us.

The concept of instant adulthood has been raised with me. It describes the sudden change in the lives of people who have been very much looked after and who have had everything done for them and everything provided for them. It describes how corporate parenting is not working in the way we would expect for this group of young people. The concept of corporate parenting had been used as a way of identifying how we should look after such young people.

A point that has been made to me is that young people must value the support that they receive. It is not good enough for the authorities to describe what type of support should be available and who should provide it. Young people often have relationships with those they do not necessarily want supporting them, whether a social worker or somebody else they come across while they are in care. It is really important to listen to young people in deciding who is best placed to provide support for them. It is a matter of trust—I have heard that word mentioned a number of times.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for making time for this important debate. As the Chairman of the Education Committee said, the report came out of an earlier inquiry in which we found that older children are neglected in the care system. I pay tribute to the Minister for the real interest he has taken in these areas and for the way in which he has tried—and often succeeded, I think—in bringing about improvements for this group of vulnerable children. There is no doubt that he cares about these young people, and it is in that spirit that I make my speech.

In my former life, I managed many areas of education that are closely linked to social care, child protection and safeguarding, but I was always careful to stay removed from managing those areas directly, arguing to myself that I did not have the necessary expertise, and that issues such as safeguarding and child protection were better left to those who had been trained to manage them. In reality, however, there was always a healthy dollop of fear in there as well: fear that some actions that I had caused to be taken, or had recommended, would result in further harm to a child who had already been harmed by those who should have cared for them the most.

Even as an MP, when I first entered Parliament, I tried not to become too closely involved in children’s social care, but, in practice, that has proved to be impossible. Along with my fellow members of the Education Committee, I felt that, given what appeared to be a lack of interest in the Department for Education, I had a duty to ensure that 50% of our time was spent on scrutinising and challenging Government policy on children’s social care. I recognise the Minister’s input, but it often seemed that he was a lone voice in a Department that is focused almost entirely on education.

When we discuss these matters, I like to put them in context. The United Kingdom probably has one of the best records in the western world when it comes to safeguarding and child protection: we are much better at it than most—not all, but most—European countries, and we have a far better record than the United States. Even in that context, however, we still do very poorly in some areas and in respect of some children.

I think that what shocked me the most during the Committee’s investigation of areas of social care and child protection were the findings of our short inquiry into 16-plus care options. We saw placements that we considered to be unsafe. Close as I am to this subject, I did not quite realise how difficult life is for these children, and how little support they are given by us—by, for instance, the Government, Parliament and local authorities. Like others, I listened in horror to the stories of young people leaving the care system about what had been done to them and how little support they had had. That comes on top of what we are now learning about what was done to young people— many of whom were living in the care system at the time—in places such as Rochdale, Oxford and Rotherham; and we know that many other cases have yet to become public.

One of my lasting worries following the inquiry is that, while the public are shocked and morally outraged when they hear stories about such places as Rotherham, the bottom line is that we—the Government, Parliament, MPs, local authority officers, the press and the public—simply do not care enough about the children involved. If we did, these things would not happen. It is easy to blame hapless, overworked officials who often work without structures, support or adequate resources, but we are all responsible for those children, and we do not, as a society, take our responsibilities for them seriously enough.

One child, a care leaver, said to me that not only should we be providing additional funding for the education of such children, but if every child who went into care at the age of 10 was given the vote, people like us would take what happened to them seriously. Because they do not have that leverage, I doubt whether things will change very much for them—even given the recent press coverage and the moral outrage—but I always try, at least, to travel in hope.

Two facts motivated our inquiry into 16-plus care options: the fact that “other arrangements” are unsuitable, and the fact that the current “Staying Put” policy is inequitable. My fellow Committee members and I call on the Minister to address three issues as a matter of urgency. First, we ask him to outlaw the use of bed-and-breakfast accommodation for 16-plus care leavers. We have heard all the arguments from the local authority officers, and even from the Minister himself, about the need for it as a provision of last resort and for emergency use only, but we believe that, while it remains an option, it will become the default provision in far too many cases. Local authorities can plan not to use bed and breakfast for this purpose. Some of them have put real effort and resources into doing something else, something better and, in the long run, something more cost-effective for those young people.

I remember exactly the same arguments being used when the Government of the day were pushing local authorities to provide full-time education for young people who had been excluded from school. At the time, local authorities were saying, “We can’t possibly do this, we need to be able to provide part-time education in emergencies,” but the fact is that the default position then was that most children who were excluded got less than 10 hours of education and many got none. It took a Secretary of State really to lose patience with local authorities and to make it illegal, and I am glad that he did. I am a great believer in the saying that we are never as swift as when we are chased, and I am absolutely sure that some local authorities still provide hours that are below the legal limit, but the vast majority got their act together and did some proper planning, and the situation is much better as a result. Now that the situation is very clear and we have outlawed providing less than full-time education for excluded children, those children have redress. If bad local authorities are not providing that education, there is redress, and there is also a role for Ofsted.

Secondly, we are calling on the Minister to regulate 16-plus care provision. I find it unbelievable that we have stronger regulations to cover the provision of dogs homes than we do for homes for children leaving care at 16. The Minister has argued that he does not want to drive the best providers out of the market with regulation, but that is simply not going to happen, because this is lucrative. It is so lucrative that hedge funds are getting into it, but I think it is fair to say that the bottom of this market, as the Committee has seen, is not merely inadequate—that is a huge understatement—but dangerous, and it is unsafe. It puts children who are at risk—the most vulnerable of our children—at greater risk and we simply cannot allow that to continue.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech. Does she share my concern that in a market of supported accommodation, where there is no real and effective regulation, entirely unqualified people can sit there supposedly supporting some of the most vulnerable young people? When we were doing our inquiry, we heard of such people sitting boarded up in their office while the young people were rioting outside. That is the situation we are putting some young people in by failing to regulate these individuals.

[Pat Glass]

I absolutely agree and we did see some of that when we went on visits across the country.

Finally, we are calling on the Minister to extend “Staying Put” to all young people in care. It is great—and I again have to pay tribute to the Minister—that young people in foster care can remain beyond the age of 18, but in many respects those young people are the ones who are the least vulnerable and who arguably have the best outcomes, and it is now time to do the same for the others.

We are talking about a surprisingly small number of children each year. It has been said that £75 million is the sum required to deliver this. We should contrast that with the £2 billion overspend on the academies and free schools programme. If the Department can spend that virtually without comment, surely it can find the money to provide this desperately needed safety and security for this group of young people, if those young people want it—I am not saying they have to have it.

We are pleased that the Government have taken forward many of our recommendations and we ask the Minister to look again at the rest, as they are necessary steps to ensure that there are improvements in providing stability and support for young people as they move to greater independence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve McCabe]

That is exactly the point. We should concentrate on continuity and relationships. At times we are sidetracked by posts and appointments.

I want to move on to local authorities, whose responsibilities change when a young person turns 18. Too many people think that local authorities interpret that change as meaning that their responsibilities diminish, despite the fact that they have a continuing obligation to those young people until the age of 21, or 25 for those still in education and training. As we have heard several times, the Minister has recently extended the previous Government’s pilots to create a new obligation or arrangement for staying put in foster care until the age of 21. Like others, I think that that is a welcome measure, although I urge him to look at authorities that are trying to avoid paying foster rates, arguing that such arrangements are in fact board and lodging provision. I have recently been made aware that that is happening in one or two places, and the Minister will agree that that is certainly not what he had in mind.

I welcome the part of the Government’s response to the report which says that they believe that fewer young people should leave care before the age of 18 unless there are exceptional circumstances. In his reply, can the Minister say a little more about what practical steps the Government will take to translate this belief into reality? Despite personal advisers and strengthened guidance, the Committee found that young people are often given neither a choice of placement nor the opportunity to voice a preference. The Coram Group, an excellent organisation, said in its evidence:

“The young person’s views are frequently not adequately considered and advocacy support is vital to ensure this happens”.

An independent advocate is a statutory requirement, yet it is not a service that is always offered or that enough young people are made aware of.

The Government say in their response that they have given the Children’s Commissioner a new power to provide advice and assistance to individual children in receipt of social care services and to make representations on behalf of care leavers. Am I right in thinking that the commissioner has no real new powers? Is the Minister satisfied that the power to make representations is a sufficient new power for the Children’s Commissioner? The Government argue that they have strengthened the guidance on pathway planning and point to the fact that directors of children’s services are now required to sign off the arrangements for any 16 or 17-year-old leaving care. However, as we have heard from a number of speakers today, the evidence suggests that the pathway plans are weak, and one glaring omission is the failure to consider maintaining positive relationships with siblings and other people thought to be important in the young person’s life.

My hon. Friends the Members for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Stockport (Ann Coffey) both drew attention to the impact that this can have, particularly when it is almost ignored in the planning arrangements. Like others, I wonder how we can expect young people to develop into normal, well-adjusted adults if we deny them the opportunities that we take for granted for our own children and many others. I welcome the addition to the guidance on the pathway plans in this respect and I trust that the Minister will continue to focus on this area in the months ahead.

One of the inevitable results of the “Staying Put” initiative is that, as we heard, it has raised the question of those in residential care and the related issue of staying close. There appears to be a perception in some local authorities that their responsibilities decrease when a child reaches 16. That is certainly the sense among young people who feel that 16 is the cut-off point when they are required to leave care. This came across in the evidence that the Committee took. I am not sure about the equality aspect of “Staying Put” for non-foster care. I do not know whether it would withstand a legal challenge. From his previous incarnation the Minister might be much more familiar with how the law would deal with that. Aside from that, my own view is that 16 is the age for most young people to set out on their own. Like the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) I attended a recent meeting of the all-party group for looked-after children, where many of those said that even at the age of 18 they did not feel that they were ready to move on.

I know that this is a difficult matter for many people. I have some doubts about whether it is realistic for someone to continue in a children’s home to the age of 21 or beyond, although I am rather sceptical of the validity of some of the counter-arguments. Particularly on safeguarding, I tend to agree with the Every Child Leaving Care Matters group, which said that it is difficult

“to see how a young person who is settled in a children’s home and enjoys positive relationships with staff and peers should suddenly become a safeguarding risk at 18 when they never were before.”

I am keen that the Government set to work as soon as possible on addressing this matter. We have heard about some of the work involving the National Children’s Bureau, the Who Cares? Trust, Barnardo’s and others. Will the Minister tell us how much money from the innovation programme has gone into that work to date, and what time scale he is considering for further proposals indicating his plans for staying close and “Staying Put”?

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman says that he has misgivings about the extension and that some of the arguments are bogus or weak. What are his concerns? As a Committee, we made these proposals in a cross-party spirit in the hope that parties such as his would adopt them and put them in their manifestos. Why will he not be making that recommendation to his party’s manifesto group?

[Steve McCabe]

I said that I had some doubts. The hon. Member for Calder Valley said that the difference is that there is not necessarily the same stability with regard to children’s homes. The situation is not guaranteed in the same way. Fostering arrangements, by definition, tend to be stable. The turnover of staff and other children at a children’s home means that the situation may not be the same. That is my major reservation.

[Mr Stuart]

The idea of staying put, wherever it is, is that it is suitable for all concerned. The aim is not to impose it on anybody. Like our recommendation on extending care services to the age of 25 for those who are not looking for a job or training, it is there if people want it, and if it is not appropriate, there is no suggestion that it should have to happen.

[Steve McCabe]

I entirely accept the point that the Committee Chairman is making. The hon. Member for Calder Valley said that there may well be options. My point is simply that the situation is not directly comparable. I am minded that we look at this carefully. We cannot say that children in foster care get the benefit of “Staying Put” until the age of 21 and children in children’s homes are completely disregarded. That would not be acceptable, and I do not think that anyone is saying that. I am simply suggesting that the situation may be slightly different.

I want to take up the Committee’s point about the problems of making full-time education and training central to continuing support until the age of 25. We were all rather encouraged when the Minister said in Committee that he intended to rewrite the guidance so that it would be sufficiently clear that he was concerned about those who were in danger of falling through the net. So far, the rewritten guidance does not appear to have achieved that. Surely the real issue is that it is too easy for those we refer to as NEETs— not in education, employment or training—to disappear. Unless directors of children’s services and others are under a specific obligation to track and monitor these young people, there is every danger that they will fall by the wayside.

I want to turn to “other arrangements”. As we have heard, the Committee was very concerned about accommodation that it felt was not of an acceptable standard and might fail the statutory guidance tests of being suitable for the child in the light of his or her needs, including health needs, and of the responsible authority having satisfied itself as to the character and suitability of the landlord. I acknowledge that the YMCA said in evidence to the Committee that some local authorities provide a decent variety of accommodation, and I do not dismiss the fact that there are examples of success out there. However, Ofsted found significant variations in the quality and sufficiency of accommodation for care leavers. The Who Cares? Trust has also reported examples of unsafe and unsuitable accommodation. I will not go over them all, as they have been mentioned by other speakers, but they include people being threatened or assaulted; living with those with drink and drugs problems; and having dirty accommodation infested with bedbugs and cockroaches. The British Association of Social Workers has said that it is

“firmly of the view that the government needs to apply regulatory duties to all accommodation providers who accommodate looked after children in order that they are appropriately safeguarded and the provision meets acceptable standards.”

I noticed that the report highlights an interesting dilemma on regulation. It is fair to point out that one witness warned of the risk that if regulation is too onerous it will stifle creativity in support arrangements and inhibit independence projects. I was interested in Catch22’s suggestion for a national standards framework, which, if I have read the report accurately, the Committee appears to have liked. I am not sure that the Government’s proposals go anything like far enough, and I urge the Minister to reflect again on that point. About 3,000 young people are covered by other arrangements, and that is an awful lot of lives at risk.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Timpson]

Of course we want every local authority to do it, and the more that we can help them achieve that the better, but we have to consider the practicalities of a ban, bearing in mind the mixed views about how it could be implemented and the emergency situations in which bed and breakfast might be required. We must also ensure that local authorities that are falling short understand how ending the use of bed and breakfast can be achieved, and that is one purpose of the innovation programme—to spread good practice so that places such as Wiltshire and Hartlepool do not hold a secret but can impart their knowledge successfully across the country.

I can confirm that, following the Committee’s report, we have further strengthened our statutory guidance to make it clear that for 16 and 17-year-olds emergency placements in B and B should be used only in exceptional circumstances and be limited to no more than two working days. I will write to all directors of children’s services shortly on a range of matters relating to children in care and care leavers, and I will bring to their attention in that correspondence the amended guidance on bed and breakfast. It may be a good opportunity to let them know about the good practice in other parts of the country.

On 31 March, we will receive data collected on the accommodation of 19, 20 and 21-year-olds and whether it was deemed suitable, including a breakdown on bed and breakfast. For the first time next year we will collect data on 17 and 18-year-olds too, and that will help us to establish the impact of the strengthened statutory guidance on bed and breakfast. I return to the arguments made by the chief social worker and the central premise that if we have a high-quality professional body making sound decisions and backed by tailored support, no care leaver need be put in unsuitable accommodation.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The Minister said that data are collected on 19 and 20-year-olds and next year they will be collected on 17 and 18-year-olds. What is the situation for 16-year-olds?

[Mr Timpson]

I anticipated that I might be asked that question and, in his usual manner, the Chairman of the Committee has established my exact thoughts. I am told that, for technical reasons, we cannot collect data until after the age of 16 as young people are still in care before that point, but we intend to refine the data when we receive them to establish whether any 16-year-olds are in bed and breakfast. The data are collected on the young person’s birthday as opposed to at financial year end. They cannot be collected on their 16th birthday so we have to wait until their 17th birthday. We will look at how we can retrospectively analyse the data and establish how many 16-year-olds have been in bed-and-breakfast accommodation during that year. If we can refine the data in the future, we will look to do so.

Several hon. Members raised the issue of alternative accommodation. It is right that all forms of alternative accommodation—bed and breakfast, supported lodgings, foyers and so on—should provide care leavers with a safe and secure place to live. Clear legal duties require that children are placed only in accommodation that meets their needs. Ofsted, through its new single inspection framework, monitors local authorities’ performance in supporting care leavers in the round, including the quality of accommodation provided. Care leavers have access to a personal adviser who can advocate on their behalf and challenge decisions by the local authority if, for example, they believe that the accommodation provided is unsuitable.

We are considering whether further external oversight is needed of the decisions that local authorities make. I am not persuaded, having listened carefully to hon. Members, that we need to establish a new inspection regime in order to achieve our aims, and others share that view. The chief social worker, Isabelle Trowler, has said that regulating all alternative accommodation would severely limit placement choice and the ability of professionals to use their discretion. Social workers should be visiting placements on a regular basis to ensure that the accommodation remains suitable for the individual. Most critically, we already have checks and balances in place.

As I have said, Ofsted inspects the quality of support provided to care leavers as part of the single inspection framework, and independent reviewing officers consider the decisions made about a child and would, of course, be expected to raise any concerns about unsuitable accommodation placements. We need to trust and support professionals to make sound judgments in the best interests of the child, rather than creating further bureaucratic processes. Local areas already have a clear duty to ensure that children are placed only in accommodation that meets their needs and, as mentioned, we already have checks and balances in the system to ensure that the best interests of the child are met.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The Minister should not have feared my words so much that he needed to limit them quite so strictly.

One thing we should say at the end of this Parliament is that there has been a significant advance in this Parliament, against a pretty tough economic backdrop, to improve material outcomes for some of the most vulnerable children in care. That is something we should be proud of. Casting aside my impartial Select Committee hat, as a Conservative politician I have to say that, as part of this coalition Government, that is significant. Regardless of who wins the election in May, I hope we can take that forward and that we have a Minister in place as committed as this one to ensuring that we do more to look after young people whose life chances we know are horribly stunted by their time in care. We have a duty to act as their parents. We should give them the care, consideration and extended support that we would give to our own children, because the children in care are our children. We have the same responsibility to them.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House notes the Second Report from the Education Committee, Into independence, not out of care: 16 plus care options, HC 259, and the Government’s response, HC 647; welcomes the progress made and the commitment to improve the care provided to these vulnerable young people shown in the Government’s response; regrets that the Government has not gone further by exploring with local authorities how to ban the use of bed and breakfast accommodation for this age group and by moving to inspect and regulate all accommodation provided to children in care; and calls on the Government to do all it can to improve the accommodation and care given to these young people.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 19th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I think I can reassure my hon. Friend on behalf of both coalition parties that we are committed to the delivery of a fair and transparent national funding formula in the next Parliament. We have already made the first big step and I agree with him that it is vital that we deliver a full solution to this long-standing injustice, which Labour failed to tackle in its long years in office.

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

21. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) is right that we need a fairer funding formula for our schools and as part of that we need capital funding to be allocated over three years rather than one. Does the Minister agree that the long campaign for the consolidation of St Nicholas primary school in Beverley will be more likely to be realised if such a change can be effected?

[Mr Laws]

I agree with my hon. Friend that long-term capital funding is highly desirable and he will know that we have already moved to multi-year allocations of basic need funding. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I are now looking very carefully at the argument for moving to longer term allocations of other parts of the capital budget.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I am delighted to hear about the success of that school in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. I hope that other schools in the region, and in those regions where there has been underperformance, will look at was has been done there and realise that there is nothing inevitable about failure in any part of the country.

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

9. What assessment she has made of the potential merits of allowing nursery schools to become academies.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

Many maintained nursery schools are delivering high-quality early education, often in disadvantaged areas where that provision can make the greatest difference. Our aim is to improve parent access to high-quality early-years provision, enable a diverse market and ensure that nurseries are part of that market. However, the current legislation does not allow maintained nursery schools to become academies, but we will keep that under review.

[Mr Stuart]

I welcome the Minister’s response—or I think I do—that this is going to be kept under review. Too many maintained nursery schools—centres of excellence anchored, for the most part, in the poorest communities in the country—have been lost under successive Governments. Would not academy status give them the opportunity to ensure that they continue to help the Government in raising standards for all and, most importantly, closing the gap between outcomes for rich and poor?

[Mr Gyimah]

I welcome the enthusiasm of the Chairman of the Education Committee for maintained nurseries. I have visited Pen Green maintained nursery in Corby, which is an excellent example. He mentioned harnessing their quality. We have invested £5.5 million in teaching schools so that maintained nurseries can spearhead this and help to spread quality across the sector. He is right to indicate that 4,000 schools have benefited from academy status. As I said, we will keep the situation under review as opportunities arise to reconsider the legislative framework for maintained nurseries.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

As the right hon. Gentleman said at the end of his question, we already have a monitoring process, which is that Ofsted has a duty to look at the independent careers advice available to schools. I would not want to say that everything is all sorted out and that there are not patches across the country, but I would just point out that a recent survey carried out by CASCAiD, a careers advice company in my constituency, said that, I think, about 86% school students said they had already had access to some form of careers advice. He is right, however, to say that there is more we can do.

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

On Friday. alongside the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) and the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) I helped to launch the Humber careers gold standard, a new programme developed by the Humber local enterprise partnership to provide a rigorous but realistic framework to encourage the delivery of impartial, relevant and inspiring careers guidance for young people that will be rolled out across schools in the area. Will the Secretary of State encourage schools and colleges to participate in the Humber careers gold standard, and will she monitor its performance so that we can derive lessons for the nation as a whole?

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank the Chairman of the Education Committee. I encourage schools and colleges to take part in the Humber careers gold standard. I think my hon. Friend’s more general point is that there are already some exceptional schemes across the country and we need to harness them. We need to work with businesses, employer organisations, schools and colleges to ensure that such opportunities are available to all students right across the country.

Nursery Schools

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 9th September 2014 Westminster Hall

[Pat Glass]

I will discuss leadership in nursery schools shortly, but the Education Committee model suggests that nursery schools should stand at the centre of the hub-and-spokes model, providing good practice out to nursery classes across their region.

I expect the Minister to tell me in his response that primary schools are judged as a whole, that there is no separate Ofsted inspection of nursery classes in a primary school and that nursery classes cannot therefore be judged against nursery schools, but I remind him of what I just said: 90% of nursery schools are judged to be good or outstanding, with the same results in disadvantaged and affluent areas. That goes beyond what we can say about the primary sector across the country.

Of nurseries inspected between 1 January and 31 March 2014, 55% were judged outstanding in comparison with 8% of primaries and 14% of secondaries. The disparity is huge. I also remind the Minister that I do not have to rely solely on statistics to support my case; I can draw on 25 years of direct experience in education, and I know what I have seen over and over again in nursery schools.

Of nursery schools judged by Ofsted up to 30 June 2013, 58% were rated outstanding in leadership and management, which compares with 20% in primary, 29% in secondary and 39% in SEN. Nursery school provision is extremely well managed and is recognised as such by Ofsted. I ask the Minister to consider that 62% of nursery schools are in 30% of the most disadvantaged areas in England, so we are getting outstanding results and leadership despite the fact that the schools largely operate in such areas. There are a higher proportion of nursery schools in the north-east—it appears that there may be slightly fewer in future—than we would see nationally, and those nursery schools are concentrated in the most disadvantaged areas of the most disadvantaged region. Yet we are seeing incredibly good results.

Nursery schools admit children from many different backgrounds and give priority to children in social and medical needs categories. That is confirmed by the Department for Education’s survey statistics: at least 11% of children at 47% of nursery schools have special educational needs. No other category of school, except special schools, comes anywhere close to that level of admission and yet no other category of early-years provision comes close to the outcomes that nursery schools achieve with SEN pupils. Ofsted has highlighted that nursery schools have particular expertise in the teaching of young bilingual children. Children from BME backgrounds make up 33% of nursery school pupils and yet have outcomes that outperform BME children of a similar age attending nursery classes, even in the most affluent areas. The statistics really highlight the quality of the provision that nursery schools provide.

A significantly higher proportion of maintained nursery schools offer wrap-around day care provision than any other form of maintained early-years provision—just the kind of provision that the Government say that they want to support working parents and parents training for or looking for work. Nursery schools often provide it much cheaper than can be achieved in the non-maintained sector, which is one of the reasons why parents like them so much. Why on earth have successive Governments not recognised the value of nursery schools and stopped the threats to their future? It is beyond me. The Government say that they want good schools and these are the best in their sector by far.

In her last appearance before the Education Committee on 18 June, the previous Minister, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), appeared to give just two reasons why she was not wholly supportive of nursery schools. She told me that

“49 local authorities do not have any maintained nursery schools at all”

but I reminded her that that meant that 153 or 154 local authorities have at least one and that many have more. It seemed sensible to the Select Committee that local authorities and the Government should use these highly-specialised beacons of excellence to build good practice across authorities. The Minister also told me that nursery schools are expensive, and they are—this is where things do become slightly political, because it is about priorities—because they employ a head teacher, a higher proportion of graduate staff and qualified teachers. That, too, is why they are so successful.

Yes, these tried and tested, highly successful schools may be slightly more expensive than nursery classes, but they are nowhere near as expensive as the experimental, untried and untested free schools programme that the Government are pushing so hard and that has a budget overspend, at the last count, of well over a billion pounds. It is not only me who recognises the value of nursery schools and is concerned about Government policy. The British Association for Early Childhood Education described them as “beacons of high quality” and as playing

“a leading role in developing the early years work force”.

The Ofsted chief inspector’s first annual report in 2014 on early years noted:

“The only early education provision that is at least as strong, or even stronger in deprived areas compared with wealthier areas is nursery schools”.

If we are concerned about narrowing the gap and, like the Education Committee, about outcomes for white working-class children, nursery schools in deprived areas seem to be the most successful model.

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

Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the best early visits that a new Education Minister could conduct would be to the Pen Green centre, which the Committee has visited, to see the masters and PhD courses? It not only provides an excellent local service to children, many of whom are from deprived backgrounds, but also acts as a beacon of best practice and education for a much wider area—nationally and internationally. The Minister would be spending his time well.

[Pat Glass]

I agree. The Minister smiled at that, so I am assuming that he has heard of Pen Green, which is known internationally for its outstanding provision. Margy Whalley will make him feel very welcome.

Nursery schools right across the country are providing outstanding outcomes for young children and I could give the Minister a long list that would start with Pen Green, but I want to mention just two. The Rachel Keeling nursery school is situated in one of the most deprived parts of London and yet has been identified in the “The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education” report as providing high-quality early education that has a continuing influence on its young pupils’ intellectual and social development and their subsequent progress in school.

Oxclose nursery school in Washington is another one that I know well. When I was working with parents in Sunderland in the early 1990s to include children with special needs in the mainstream, we thought, rather foolishly, that we would start with the easy end of SEN—children with less significant SEN and perhaps younger children—but it never works out that way. As soon as it became known that we were looking at inclusion, I received two phone calls. One was from a 14-year-old child who had spent her life in a special school because she was in a wheelchair and had brittle bones. We would think that amazing nowadays, but it was the norm in the 1990s—it appears that if someone stepped off a path and twisted their ankle, they would end up in a special school. The girl told me that she wanted to go to university and recognised that that was much less likely to happen if she continued to attend a special school.

The second phone call was from the parent of a two-year-old with quadriplegia—he had a little bit of head movement. He was a delightful little boy and he is a delightful young man now. His mother wanted, as was absolutely her right, mainstream school provision for her child. We definitely started with the more difficult end of SEN.

I worked closely with the head teachers of the Oxclose cluster, comprising the nursery, primary and secondary schools. The only thing that they had going for them at the time was that they were on the flat and close together. By far the most important factor, however, was that the head teachers of the three schools shared my vision of what inclusive provision should be.

If the Minister goes to Pen Green, which is halfway up the country, will he please go a little further and visit the Oxclose cluster in Sunderland? If he wants to see truly amazing, inspirational and outstanding provision that will move him, he could go nowhere better. Oxclose nursery school was truly inspirational then for all its pupils and is truly inspirational today. I strongly advise the Minister to visit any of the schools mentioned or any of the 400-odd nursery schools across the country if he wants to see outstanding early-years provision. Do it quickly, because that provision is under threat.

The very future of nursery schools is under threat in an era of local authority cuts, Government pressure on schools to expand reception classes, rising infant class sizes, the expansion of foundation provision and relentless Government pressure to push more and more children into schools earlier.

Nursery schools are facing constant pressure to merge with local primaries. A recent survey of nursery schools highlighted how maintained nurseries are on a knife edge, threatened by cuts in local authority funding, based on the flawed premise that they are simply one more form of child care and pressure from Government that funding levels for all providers should be the same, with no recognition of the special provision offered or of the way in which nursery schools can and do outperform every other form of early-years provision.

More than three quarters of nursery schools in the survey said that they were concerned about their immediate future viability or that they faced imminent loss of their independence. None faced immediate closure, but many said that they were at risk of closure in future, while only 12% said that they were optimistic about their future. Yet the Department for Education’s own child care and early-years parents’ survey for 2012 to 2013 highlighted that the value of nursery schools was beyond the number of children enrolled, acknowledging the vital role that they play in training early-years professionals throughout the sector.

The number of nursery schools has gradually eroded over the past 10 to 15 years. The Government need to look at that carefully. Ministers go all over the place to look for good practice, but seem to fail to recognise that we have outstanding practice in this country and we are letting it wither on the vine. I am calling on the Government to wake up before it is too late. They must recognise how good nursery schools are and the vital contribution that they make—not only to the children whom they admit, but to the training of early-years specialists throughout the sector. I call on the Government to stop the financial and educational neglect that is leading to an unstable future.

The right hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) mentioned the financial pressure on nursery schools. In 2010 the Government rolled 14 different grants into the single funding formula and they have subsequently rolled more grants into the early-years funding formula. That is what is putting nursery schools under pressure: the refusal to acknowledge that not all nursery provision can survive on the same amount of money. It is not about being equitable across the system but about recognising where good practice is and accepting that it does need to be paid for. Let us recognise that nursery schools offer the best and most successful provision in the early-years landscape and build on that.

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

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and to follow the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), who is a distinguished member of the Education Committee. As she showed in her powerful and passionately argued speech, she is deeply informed about education and the welfare of young people.

The future of nursery education is an important issue, and one at which the Education Committee looked closely during our inquiry into Sure Start children’s centres last year. As I touched on, we visited the Pen Green centre for children and families in Corby, run, as the hon. Lady said, by the brilliant Margy Whalley. We also visited the Netherlands and Denmark in February 2013 to compare provision for early years in those countries with that in England.

The clear message we heard is that education is too important to wait until children reach school age. In particular, we concluded that if we are serious about closing the attainment gap for disadvantaged children, it is imperative that Ministers should set out coherent, long-term thinking on early years and children’s centres. It is worth asking the Minister—a central message from many of us today—not to let coherence or a desire for uniformity and equity to allow or excuse the destruction of rare, peculiar centres of excellence that do a brilliant job and that are found to be doing so by everyone who looks at them.

The Government have a vision of doing more through schools, utilising the resource, and we heard during our hearings on the children’s centres that perhaps the previous Government made an error in building entirely new things, rather than better utilising the infrastructure that they had. None the less, it is possible to allow infant schools to do more for younger children and to provide good or, I hope, excellent provision in an area, without destroying those often long-standing nursery schools that are brilliant today. That is the appeal to the Minister: not to get so caught up in coherence and uniformity that we end up, inadvertently, destroying jewels that might not be everywhere, but certainly are present and deserve to be preserved. At that point, I could sit down—

[Bill Esterson]

rose—

[Mr Stuart]

And I will, to give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Bill Esterson]

I am giving a chance for a pause for thought. The hon. Gentleman mentioned Denmark and Holland—I went on those visits—and much higher spending is clearly committed to early years in those countries, as part of the contribution of having such well-trained and excellent staff. Does he agree that that is the route we need to go down in this country? To do so, to make the case and to be accepted by Governments of whichever colour, do we need to demonstrate that that would be not only a cost, but a long-term saving?

[Mr Stuart]

I will come on to funding and raising the status of early years. If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I will come back to that, but he is right.

Nursery schools do a particularly good job of supporting children from poorer homes—that is worth saying. The Government’s educational reforms have two main aims: to raise standards for all and to close the gap in attainment. If we have things that do a peculiarly good job in looking after the interests of disadvantaged children, we should be extremely wary before risking, inadvertently or otherwise, their destruction.

Ofsted’s early-years report, published in March, stated that only just over a third of children from low-income backgrounds reach a good level of development in the early years. In some local areas, that figure is less than a fifth. Crucially, some types of provision, such as childminders, are considerably less likely to be good or outstanding in deprived areas. By contrast, Ofsted found that children from low-income families make the strongest progress when supported, as has been said, by highly qualified staff, in particular with graduate-level qualifications. Where are such staff most frequently found? In nursery schools.

To quote Ofsted’s report:

“Nursery schools have high levels of graduate level staff and perform as strongly in deprived areas as in more affluent ones.”

Of how many types of educational provision can we say that they perform as strongly in deprived areas as in more affluent ones? I cannot think of one, actually, but we have nursery schools managing to achieve that, to achieve what the previous Government and this Government want to do for social justice, delivered through education. I again make the case: let us ensure that we do not inadvertently lose them.

Despite that, the Government’s policy seems a little confused. The Education Committee expressed regret that the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Childcare and Education, now the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, showed little enthusiasm for maintained nurseries, many of which have closed over the past decade. Likewise, my Committee expressed concerns about how the Government’s ambition to create an integrated nought-to-18 teaching work force will be delivered successfully. It is important to focus on that, although it sounds like a soundbite. An integrated nought-to-18 teaching work force is the Government’s stated policy. The then Minister told us that she wanted

“to see a much greater consistency across the teaching workforce and much less of a silo between the early years and primary school”.

Who can say, in any party, that she was not right to do so?

With that in mind, Ministers have set out their plans to reduce the number of different early-years qualifications, to improve the quality of training and to raise the status and quality of the work force by replacing the current early-years professional status qualification with new grades of early-years teacher and early-years educator. Early-years teachers will be graduates and will need to meet the same entry requirements and pass the same skills tests as trainee school teachers. So far, so good: there is an inspiring vision of integrated nought-to-18 teaching work force, with an upgrading and re-engineering of the training, requirements and qualifications of those working in that sector. They will not, however, be accorded qualified teacher status in the same way as primary and secondary teachers. That is not to visit the obsession of the shadow Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), with the tiny number of people who are not qualified teachers, which seems to be a sideline in the overall education debate; it is to go to the heart of the status of those people in relation to those who work in primary schools.

My Committee concluded that the Government are right to want to increase the qualifications of the early-years work force. As Susan Gregory of Ofsted reminded us, the historic situation is that

“you need a higher qualification at entry level to work with animals than you do to work with young children.”

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful case for raising standards in early-years education, with which I wholeheartedly agree. I am interested in his comments about the new qualification. May I infer that he agrees that the Government should take action now to equalise the status of the new qualification, so that it does have qualified teacher status? It is bizarre that we have circumstances in which graduates can earn half as much for teaching those between the ages of nought and five as if they chose to teach early-years three to seven. Some early-years teachers can command twice the salary. Is that not a poor state of affairs?

[Mr Stuart]

I agree with the hon. Lady that that is an anomaly in the Government’s vision for the future. There is an inconsistency. However, I would gently chide her by saying that the money has to be found from somewhere, because there are real cost implications. If we are going to will the ends, we have to will the means, and that will mean taking tough decisions—unless people think that there is an infinite money tree somewhere. We will have to take the existing budget and orient it more to the early years. It could be said that this Government have done that in a number of ways, from abolition of the education maintenance allowance—that act was enormously unpopular—at one end to the introduction of the offer for two-year-olds and its extension from 20% to 40% at the other.

The truth is that considerably more money is being spent on early-years provision, despite overall constraints on spending. I would imagine there will a combination of some re-engineering—a lot of which will be unpopular, as anyone we take the money away from will hate us for it—and potentially finding additional funds. However, given that this supposedly austere Government are still spending over £100 billion a year more than they have coming in, I am not clear that additional funding outside the budget could easily be found.

[Bill Esterson]

I probably did not make myself clear enough in my earlier intervention. The point I was driving at is how we make the case for using money further upstream. It is about the costs of social failure that are avoided by getting early-years provision right. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if the case can be made for saving money later in life by getting early-years provision to the highest standard possible, that will deal with the point he is making?

[Mr Stuart]

Well, it will, but not for a Treasury Minister. As the hon. Gentleman will know, every Department comes along and says, “If only you gave me more money, you’d save so much later. No one would go to prison and you’d be saving money all round.” Understandably, the Treasury is a little sceptical. On that basis, we would for ever simply throw more money at the education system, because if we only provided the right start in life, we would have greater economic success and more highly skilled industries, and would live in nirvana.

The greatest thing I can say about the previous Government’s education policy is about how much they spent on education. The fruits are slow to emerge, but that is not to say that there are not benefits to be had if those resources are used well. Given the constraints we are under and the overspending by Government today, let alone five years ago, we are going to have to find the money for early-years provision from re-engineering our education budget. That could be said to be the more mature debate. It is always easy to say, “Oh no, we should just find the additional money.” The truth is that that will be very difficult.

On status, the Committee said in our report that the message that early-years teachers will not be equal to teachers in schools is “strong and unjust”. On pay, we said that it is not enough simply to set out a vision of equality with other teachers: if we accept the premise that the early years are a peculiarly critical time in a child’s development, Ministers need to set out—and this is the key point, whether it is done through finding more money or re-engineering the budget—

“a course of action…to a position where equal pay attracts equal quality”

of applicants. That is the key. We cannot have Government setting out an aim of an integrated work force, with that equality as a premise, and then failing to put in place any of the building blocks to take us there. At the moment, it seems to be all aspiration, with very little evidence of a closing of the gap. Even if it were to take 10 or 15 years, we would at least have a vision of how we were going to create a genuinely integrated work force, in which early-years teachers were given pay and status equal to that of teachers elsewhere in the education system.

At present, figures from the Pre-school Learning Alliance reveal that pre-school staff earn, on average, £17,000 a year, which is only around half as much as primary school staff, who earn an average of £33,000. The former Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk, confirmed that England has the biggest gap in salaries between those who work in nurseries and those who work in schools of any country in western Europe. As all members of the Select Committee here today, and others, know, the key issue in raising educational quality for anyone, at any time, is the quality of the teacher. That is what counts. If we pay people half the rate of what is paid to those working with children who are just a little bit older, is it any wonder that we struggle to bring in the innovators, pioneers and greatest communicators? We need to set out a plan—it would be good to hear the Opposition’s funded plan from their Front-Bench spokesperson—to bring about that outcome.

It can be no surprise that there is a continuing disparity of status between early-years and school-based teaching. The impact of that lower status is felt beyond the issue of attracting high-quality recruits into the nursery sector. Naomi Eisenstadt told us that the perceived low status of children’s centre staff can create a barrier to successful multi-agency working, adding that

“if you do not have status within the community and you ring the health agency, they are not going to ring you back.”

Delivering equal pay for early-years teachers would of course require the extra resources I have talked about.

[Alex Cunningham]

The hon. Gentleman will have heard me refer earlier to the nurseries at the North Tees and Hartlepool hospitals, which are scheduled to close. He has talked about staff. The Ofsted report on the nurseries says:

“All staff attend a wide range of training to develop their knowledge and skills”,

so there is ongoing professional development in that hospital nursery setting. Does he agree that that model should be rolled out elsewhere? Does he also share my opinion that those making the decisions on those nurseries might have benefited from the scrutiny and clinical examination that he would have given them had their decision come before our Committee?

[Mr Stuart]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. I do not know all the details surrounding that case, so I will not rush to judgment on those who made that decision, but he makes powerful points, which I hope will be heard clearly by those responsible for those centres, as they consider what they will do about them in the future.

The issue is that we either find additional money or rebalance the existing budget. Speaking for myself, that gives us yet another demonstration of why it was a poor use of over £1 billion of taxpayers’ money to offer free school meals to the children of middle-class parents who can already afford them, rather than deploying that funding in the classroom, where it could have been used to attract and retain the quality teachers who we know make such a difference to children’s attainment.

In conclusion, the Government have more to do, to ensure the survival of maintained nursery schools, to encourage the development of the network of nursery schools with children’s centres around the country and to set out a strategy to realise their proper aspiration for an integrated nought-to-18 work force.

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) on calling this important debate on an issue that I know she has long campaigned about. I will adopt her spirit and approach the debate in a non-partisan fashion. The two speeches we have heard have shown that that spirit is being maintained.

I also welcome the Minister to the Front Bench. We have had an exchange of sorts in the main Chamber, but this is our first opportunity to debate some of the issues here in Westminster Hall. I see from the profile of him in The Independent today that he and I have two things in common: first, like me, he has a passion for early-years education and the impact it can have on the life chances of children; secondly, like me, he attended Somerville college. I was in the last all-women year there, so I know that he is younger than me: he must have come in the vanguard of men who subsequently followed. On that point, I was slightly horrified to see the all-male Somerville team on this year’s “University Challenge”, but I digress.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I forgot to welcome the Minister to his place, which was very rude of me. It is a delight to see him in his position, bringing his youthful enthusiasm to the early-years sector and the challenges it brings.

[Lucy Powell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, and yes, the Minister obviously is very youthful—more so than me, clearly.

This debate on nursery schools is important because they have become the poor cousin in the sector. They fall between two stools: they are not considered to be schools in many legislative frameworks, nor are they like other nursery providers in the sector, as others have said. The Minister’s predecessor, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), had a mission and a drive to expand provision of nurseries in the school setting, something which I shared with her. However, she did not have the same zeal for nursery schools. That was a missed opportunity. I hope the Minister, as her successor, will rectify that position. I will come on to some of the things that could be done in that regard.

On the wider debate about early-years provision, the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), is absolutely right to say that high-quality, skilled, graduate-led settings are the very best that we can offer, especially for the children, in my community and many of the communities represented here today, who do not have the best start in life because they do not have the advantages—the home learning, the communication and the security at home—that many of the most advantaged children do. As policy makers, we have a responsibility to get that right.

More specifically, nursery schools are consistently the highest-graded part of the early years system, as has been said. Some 96% are graded “good” or “outstanding”, many of them in some of our most deprived communities, including my constituency. That compares with 64% of childminders and 76% of other child care providers in our community. They are the crème de la crème of the system in early years in many of our most deprived communities. As my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham said, where they exist they act as a hub of leadership across the whole provision in their area. They have a unique role in doing so. The evidence is incredibly strong that nursery schools are the beacon for the highest quality provision in the early years.

I will comment on some of the challenges that maintained nursery schools face and how we might begin to address some of them. The challenges and threats are specific, for a number of reasons. As has been said, the single funding formula was intended to create a level playing field. However, for a number of reasons nursery schools have fallen foul of the funding system. First, nursery schools have higher overheads compared with the private, voluntary and independent sector because they are required to employ qualified teachers. They also have higher costs because they are required to have specialist head teachers—something that their equivalents in the PVI sector do not have. We have already heard about the additional value that that brings to the education provided in them. For that reason, many local authorities provide nursery schools with a much higher hourly rate than some of their competitors, but that is significantly under threat, given the cuts that are coming to local authority budgets.

Yet this is an issue not just of funding, but of status in the system. Because nursery schools are seen neither as schools nor as nurseries, they cannot enjoy some of the freedoms and powers that schools enjoy. Nursery schools are not eligible for things such as the pupil premium. The Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness, asked how we could rebalance the system. I would strongly welcome the extension of the pupil premium to the early years. There is significant scope to add more value by drawing down the pupil premium earlier. However, as nursery schools cannot qualify for that money, which does not come on stream until next year in any case, they are unable to take hold of this opportunity and lead the debate on how the pupil premium can be best used in the early years. The pupil premium has huge scope for providing the kind of early intervention that my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham described.

Another anomaly is that nursery schools are unable to become academies. Nursery schools are unable to take that opportunity while we are in this dog-eat-dog world in the education sector, where all schools are trying to come together or achieve the freedoms of academy status, therefore leaving behind a smaller and smaller cohort of maintained schools and a smaller and smaller role for local authorities.

[Mr Stuart]

I am glad the hon. Lady has raised the issue of allowing nursery schools to become academies. I took a delegation of heads of nursery schools to see the Department some months ago and pressed that exact case. I hope we may hear the Minister’s thoughts on that subject. There is an opportunity to unleash places such as Pen Green and others through academy status and allow them to innovate and further expand what they do in future.

[Lucy Powell]

I am pleased to hear that the hon. Gentleman took such a delegation to see Ministers. I hope some of that is taken forward. I passionately believe that we cannot do early years on the cheap. This will require some tough decisions on how slim resources will be spent, but will allow some of the best examples of early years education in this country to have not only the extra resources that are coming into the system, but the freedoms to give them the security and allow them to have the sort of innovative, creative and leadership role that the Oxclose cluster or Martenscroft nursery school in my constituency provide in some of our most deprived areas.

In conclusion, I reiterate the points that have already been made. My party has to accept its responsibility for ignoring the potential of nursery schools during our time in office. Nursery schools provide some of the best education and provide for some of our most vulnerable children, not just those who are deprived, but those with disabilities, special educational needs and those who would elsewhere be turned down by private providers, which do not have to accept them. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham recently published a fantastic report on child care for disabled children, which is a long-forgotten issue in this area. Parents with disabled children face barriers up to 10 times greater than those without disabled children.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gyimah]

I thank the hon. Lady for making that point. I am very aware of the Education Committee’s recommendations and I will come to some of the points in a moment. As the hon. Lady rightly said, we should not just look at what other countries do, but remember to praise the good practice in this country. There is great practice and some excellent and visionary practitioners in this country. There is a lot to be proud of.

We have universal provision for three and four-year-olds in this country so every three and four-year-old is entitled to 15 hours of child care. That is a tremendous achievement. The latest “Education at a Glance” report from PISA—the programme for international student assessment—puts us in the top 10 of OECD countries, which we can be proud of. More than 90% of three and four-year-olds in this country receive 15 hours of free child care at the moment.

On targeting, the Government have introduced the free early-years entitlement for two-year-olds, which will benefit 260,000 two-year-olds from the least advantaged families in the country who will receive 15 hours of care a week. We should be proud of that, but we must be targeted in how we use finite resources.

We have also introduced the early-years pupil premium, which is £300 a year for three and four-year-olds. I assure hon. Members that maintained nursery schools will receive the early-years pupil premium from 2015 and I hope that private voluntary independent organisations and maintained nurseries will use that to help to boost their ability to attract higher-quality staff for children in nurseries.

There is a lot to be proud of, and the Government have a plan and clear priorities for the early years. However, funding for maintained nursery schools is obviously an issue, and we fund that provision through local authorities to enable them best to make decisions for parents and children. Some 49 local authorities do not have any maintained nursery schools and 43 have only one or two. Therefore, a funded approach that treats maintained nursery schools differently would not be fair to those areas. Many areas of high deprivation have good inspection results in early-years foundation stage profile outcomes. Some make use of maintained nursery schools as part of local provision, but others are doing that with high-quality nursery classes in primary schools and private providers, not large numbers of maintained nursery schools.

Maintained nursery schools play an important role in many areas, but our approach, including that to funding, must ensure that parents retain a choice of early education provision that meets their needs and, whatever their choice, that they can be assured of high-quality provision. Maintained nursery schools are more costly than other providers, but it is for local authorities to determine funding levels. There are often good reasons for higher funding levels and many local authorities have chosen to retain them with their single funding formula, indicating that most deliver excellent value for money, but they are not the only solution.

Many primary school nurseries and private and voluntary providers offer high-quality, affordable early-years provision that is good value for money, and that provision must also be funded fairly. We must ensure the highest-quality provision across the board and our policy approach and funding decisions should reflect that.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

In their response to the Select Committee’s report, the Government noted the engagement in teaching school alliances of nursery schools and said that it was collecting and sharing best practice. Can the Minister add anything now or write to me about that and whether he thinks that involvement through teaching school alliances could help by sharing that expertise with others and whether funding could be provided to allow continuation of the high-quality services we get from nursery schools?

[Mr Gyimah]

My hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee makes an excellent point, and I will write to him on that specifically. He alludes to quality and we know that a large proportion of maintained nurseries deliver outstanding provision, and in areas where maintained nursery schools rightly remain part of the answer, we want local authorities to work with them to ensure they spread their expertise. We are seeing that already. Nineteen maintained nursery schools are designated teaching schools and a further 109 are members of a teaching school alliance. I will write to the Chairman of the Select Committee with the details of how that is working. In Bristol, for example, where maintained nursery schools are linked to local primary schools and private sector providers in a teaching school alliance, they can share and disseminate best practice. That is an important way to guarantee the continued success of our best, high-quality maintained nursery schools.

Qualified teaching status and early-years teachers were mentioned by the hon. Member for North West Durham. I believe, as do all hon. Members here, that there is a need to raise the status and quality of the professionals in the early-years sector. We cannot say that early years are critical to a child’s development and not do everything we can to attract the best people into the sector. There are several ways of doing that. For example, one of my first decisions as Minister was to look at the early-years educator level 3 qualification. On literacy and numeracy, staff who qualify for level 3 must have GCSE level A to C in maths and English. We phased that in for the first year and it will be on exit, but after 2015, they will have to have that on entry to start a level 3 early educator course and to qualify.

A broader issue is attracting graduates to early-years education. QTS is one way to do so, but not the only one. We cannot set pay expectations for all early-years providers. The private voluntary independent sector is significant in the early-years sector, so we must think of ways of attracting the best graduates into the sector.

[Mr Gyimah]

The shadow Minister makes an excellent point. If people believe they were misled about a course, the first solution is to ensure that the details are communicated clearly to people when they sign up. On the broader issue of discrepancy in pay, we must look at that as it applies to the whole early-years sector, not just between primary school teachers and early-years teachers. The problem can be addressed in several ways. However, there is a more fundamental point. I was speaking to Andreas Schleicher, who presented to the Department on the PISA rankings yesterday, and raising quality is not just a question of increasing the salary; we need to ensure that we have the right sort of career progression. If we look at other countries where teachers are very motivated and excited, they have career progression built into the system as well. It is a knotty issue to get around, but it is in my in-tray and I am looking at it.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The central ask is that having set out the aspirations so clearly, the Government need to come forward with a strategy. The Minister said that what we are discussing can be done in a number of ways and that there are knotty issues, but they need to set out a strategy for how the proposals can be implemented. At least, we can then discuss it. Will he commit to producing a strategy to bring about the true integrated nought-to-18, or nought-to-19, work force the Government say they want?

[Mr Gyimah]

I thank my hon. Friend for another forceful point. As I said, it is in my in-tray. It is something that I am looking at, and at the appropriate moment, I will let him know what my thoughts are.

Ofsted assessments were also raised, I think, by the hon. Member for North West Durham. I assure her that from September 2014, Ofsted will give primary schools a separate assessment for their early-years provision.

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.