Free Schools (Funding)

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his questions. He asks where responsibility lies for a shortage of school places. The responsibility lies with the previous Government, whose Chief Secretary to the Treasury left a note to his successor saying that there was no money left. The responsibility lies with the Labour Government who, when they were in power, cut primary places—cut them—by 200,000 between 2003 and 2010. The responsibility lies with the Labour Government who cut funding for new school places by £150 million, or by 26%, between 2004 and 2009. The responsibility lies with the previous Labour Government, whose primary capital programme told local authorities to cut primary places, not to increase them.

This coalition Government have increased spending on primary school places and local authority need and, at the same time, we have provided excellent new provision through the free school programme. I note that the hon. Gentleman was silent on Labour’s position on the free school programme. Where is the consistency of Labour’s position on this policy? In May 2010, he said that free schools were a

“vanity project for yummy mummies”.

In May 2013, he reversed his position, saying that he wanted to put “rocket boosters” under the programme. In October 2013, he reversed again, saying that free schools were a “dangerous ideological experiment”. Later the same month, he said, “If you are a parent interested in setting up a free school, we will be on your side.” He has had more contorted positions on free schools than some Indian sex manuals that I could name.

The truth is that the hon. Gentleman has betrayed his inconsistency on free schools and the inconsistency in his support for the additional money that we have put in to provide not just local authorities but free school sponsors with the places that our children need.

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

I wonder whether we can clear this matter up, because the Minister for Schools appeared before the Education Committee during the school places inquiry. He said:

“We have got £12.5 billion or more for basic need that we are going to spend over the 2010 to 2021 period, which is absolutely massive. The Treasury have been very clear with us and we have been clear with them that basic need is the top priority. If we thought jointly that we couldn’t fund the basic need because of the free school programme, we would have to reduce the free school programme. But the free school programme is additional; it does not compromise our basic need objectives.”

Is the evidence that was given to the Committee correct or is what we heard in anonymous whispers over the weekend correct?

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the Chairman of the Education Committee. I absolutely confirm that the evidence shared with him was 100% correct.

Schools Funding

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 29th April 2014 Westminster Hall

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

Thank you, Mr Hollobone. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship and to follow such a powerful, well thought-out speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker); he has done a sterling job since coming to the House in 2010. The turnout today is a reflection of not only the importance of the issue to our constituents, but the leadership that he has shown. He has shown that again today, with his powerful championing of the case.

The campaign for fairer school funding has been running for at least a decade. For too long, the extra costs faced by rural authorities have not been acknowledged properly by the funding system. A whole generation of school children, in places from Devon to Northumberland, have lost out. Seven years ago this week, I led a Westminster Hall debate on this very subject and it has become no less urgent since. As everyone in the Chamber knows, for many years the school funding system in England has operated on the basis of outdated data and in accordance with political priorities that channelled funding away from rural areas and into urban ones—based on politics, not need. In the 13 March statement on school funding, the Minister for Schools hit the nail on the head when he characterised the end result as

“opaque, overly complex, and, frankly, unfair to pupils, parents and teachers.”—[Official Report, 13 March 2014; Vol. 577, c. 427.]

The inequity is recognised across the political spectrum. In an article for The Guardian earlier this month, Fiona Millar—not exactly the greatest champion of the Government’s policies—admitted that

“the differentials between London and the rest of the country, which are often rooted in historical political decisions, are simply unfair.”

If Fiona Millar can see that, the case for change across the spectrum is overwhelming and needs to be acted on.

One does not need to look far to find glaring examples; the East Riding of Yorkshire is a case in point. It is a beautiful part of the world, but it does not conform to any lazy stereotype of rural affluence. Median gross earnings are below the national average and towns such as Withernsea, Goole and Bridlington have pockets of real deprivation. Mike Furbank, head of children and young people’s services at the East Riding council, has explained:

“As a rural authority we suffer the hidden deprivations of social isolation for children living in remote communities where families have limited access to services and the wider cultural life of the area.

These deprivations are not recognised in any formula and often the ‘goldfish bowl’ view of village life makes poor families unwilling to accept support or declare their eligibility.”

[Andrew Percy]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Stuart]

With an eye on the Chair, I give way to my hon. Friend.

[Andrew Percy]

I am grateful. Obviously, I am also grateful for the extra funding for the north-east, but my hon. Friend is right to highlight the deprivation of Goole, in the East Riding part of my constituency. Does he share my shock that local Labour councillors in Goole have attacked me for campaigning on the issue and for pointing out how much less well off Goole was, compared with neighbouring Hull and Doncaster, although we have the same levels of deprivation?

[Mr Stuart]

The aim of the Rural Fair Share campaign, which I co-chair and helped to found, is certainly to ensure that fair-minded Labour Members of Parliament see the case as well. We have to ensure that the split is not partisan; we are looking for a system that takes scarce resource and allocates it on the basis of need. At a time of austerity, it is more rather than less important to get those allocations right. Such reallocations may be politically difficult, but because no more money is being thrown at the system every year, the unevenness becomes more apparent as the tide goes down and creates a more difficult challenge.

The East Riding has some good schools, but, regrettably, too many indifferent ones. Last June, Ofsted reported that in the East Riding a child has only a 66% chance of attending a good or better school, compared with 79% in England as a whole. Only 38% of secondary schools in the East Riding are rated good or outstanding, compared with 74% in neighbouring North Yorkshire. If the Minister compares the number of good or outstanding schools in the East Riding with those in neighbouring similar authorities, she will see a stark differential. In the light of those numbers, I ask her to reflect on the methodology that the Government have come up with to allocate that welcome £350 million.

I am aware that, given my position as Chair of the Education Committee, I ought to keep my language moderate, but was the person who devised the system sober? The Government have put things off; the national funding formula will come, but they have decided—politically or otherwise—that, a year before a general election, a fundamental reallocation is perhaps not politically deliverable. The interim £350 million to help the poorest-funded authorities, however, is welcome. But why is the money going to authorities in London that are not among the poorest-funded authorities? My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester touched on that, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith). We do not want to see the money stripped away from Northumberland; the Minister must have the courage, despite the publication of the allocations, to look again at the methodology.

The East Riding, because it was historically underfunded and had so many small schools, poured all the money it could into the schools block of funding and so had the lowest high-needs block in the country. The new methodology, however, looks only at the schools block. Under this intervention to help lower-funded authorities, what is the situation of the East Riding of Yorkshire—the third-lowest-funded authority overall when the whole quantum is considered? It is moving from being the third-lowest-funded authority to being the lowest-funded in the entire country. After many years of campaigning, that does not feel like a result. I ask the Minister to look again at how the money is allocated.

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[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) on securing this debate and on his speech, in which he outlined many of the problems with the current funding formula system. He was ably supported by many other hon. Members. He pointed out the reasons why the Government should spell out their longer-term intentions in relation to the national funding formula and why, although his hon. Friends might have criticised me for saying so, the Government should not hide the fact that there will be losers in the process or pretend that there will not be, just because we are a year away from a general election. I might have been criticised for saying that, but it is the truth. We must ensure that we are open and transparent about the journey that we are on in relation to a fairer funding formula for our schools.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Kevin Brennan]

In a moment. I was just about to mention the hon. Gentleman, so I will do that first before giving way briefly. Other contributors to this debate have included the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), who did in his remarks exactly what I did by pointing out that the timing of the announcement could be interpreted in a certain way if one were of a cynical bent, as some of us might be from time to time.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. He will know that in times of austerity, redistribution is harder. He said that we are on a journey. Is his party on that journey? Will he commit today to coming forward during the next Parliament, should his party form a Government, with a national funding formula that bravely reallocates funding and has losers as well as winners, in order better to match need with the funding that goes alongside it?

[Kevin Brennan]

I can absolutely confirm that we are on that journey. The last Government started the consultation process on that journey towards the end of the last Parliament, as the hon. Member for Worcester mentioned in his opening speech.

We also heard contributions from the right hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry), who mentioned Taoism in his remarks, and from the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), who mentioned Deng Xiaoping. Perhaps I can also quote Zhou Enlai, who, when asked about the effects of the French revolution, said that it was too early to tell. It is also, perhaps, a little too early to tell exactly what the outcome of the funding formula for schools will be, but we would welcome some transparency about it from the Government.

I associate myself with the remarks of the hon. Member for York Outer—

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) and the F40 group for the amazing progress that has been made on this campaign. As hon. Members have said, this long-standing issue is finally starting to be dealt with. It is down to the dedication of all right hon. and hon. Members who have attended this debate and made such eloquent contributions that we are finally making progress on this issue.

Many hon. Members have highlighted the idiosyncrasies and unfairness of the current system. I do not think that there is any disagreement about that. Our spending on education is the fifth highest in the OECD. We have protected the education budget during this Parliament, because we believe that education spending is vital for the future of our children and our nation. Nevertheless, this spending is not fairly distributed at the moment; it is unfair and inefficient. Unfortunately, this unfairness has been baked in over the years, so even when education budgets were rising significantly, it was not dealt with. We are playing catch-up at the moment, as was mentioned by a number of hon. Members, my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Karen Lumley) in particular.

My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester made the good point that the link between funding and attainment is not always clear, but that there is greater clarity in respect of those from the most deprived backgrounds. Of course, one of our main priorities as a Government is closing the gap between those on the lowest and highest incomes. We have a long tail of under-achievement in this country that has a profound impact on social mobility and our economy, and that is something that we are keen to address.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) referenced the report, “Unseen Children”, which highlighted the issues for children in rural and coastal areas in general. That is a major problem, and we need to deal with it.

My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) talked about the issues faced in her constituency. I associate myself with her comments about the terrible tragedy of the dedicated teacher, Ann Maguire, in Leeds. I went to school in Leeds. My thoughts are with her friends and her family.

I am pleased that hon. Members have recognised that the Government have provided £350 million of funding. I cannot provide the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) with additional information about his parliamentary question, but it is significant that the Government have found this additional money. We recognise that this is a priority. We are vigorously pursuing a route towards a national funding formula, which is the right way forward, and we are pressing that case. This funding represents a step towards it.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The consultation on how the £350 million is allocated closes tomorrow. It is difficult to comment once indicative allocations have been given, but is it a genuine consultation? Will the Minister consider points that have been made and, despite the political difficulties, ensure that that funding is distributed in the fairest way possible?

[Elizabeth Truss]

It is a genuine consultation. We will listen to representations, not just from today’s debate, but from discussions that we have had as a team with the F40 group. It is a difficult process, obviously. A lot of hon. Members mentioned the problems in moving towards a fair national funding formula.

A number of hon. Members mentioned that the longest journey begins with a single step. We have made that step. There are always issues with the way that a formula for minimum funding is decided; all sorts of aspects have to be considered in a formula, including sparsity, rurality, deprivation and attainment. There is no perfect formula. There will always be some local authorities that gain more and some that gain less, and even when we get to the holy grail of the national funding formula, that will be so. There has to be a formula. However, where the Government have had an opportunity to allocate new money, as with the two-year-old offer, we have allocated it completely fairly throughout the country, and done so on a per-child basis with an area cost adjustment. Where this Government have had an opportunity to allocate new money, we have done it fairly.

I am committed, as my colleagues are, to a national funding formula. It is incredibly important for equity, social mobility and for our long-term economic plan, as hon. Members have said.

I recognise the issues raised about the high-needs block and the perceived unfairness of looking at the schools block. There would be issues in looking at the entire block, as well. Because the whole situation is so complicated, with the schools block, the high-needs block and the early years block, we have taken it step by step, starting with the schools block. That matter has come through in the consultation and we will look at that.

I note the specific issues in Staffordshire, the East Riding, Leicestershire and Warrington. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat); I have seen excellent attainment in Warrington, at the Evelyn Street primary school, which I visited with him. It is a such an outstanding school that we are using it as a national case study of how to integrate early years into schools. Fantastic work is going on in Warrington, but that does not mean that Warrington should be underfunded.

I have also taken the point about the area cost adjustment, particularly about how that has benefited London authorities in particular. We have to reflect the cost of teacher salaries in different areas, but how that is reflected in the overall allocations will be under consideration in the consultation.

We have recognised sparsity, although a number of my colleagues do not think that we have recognised it enough. But it is recognised in a minimum funding level, with a grant being given per school.

I acknowledge points made about the rising costs faced by schools, whether teacher salaries or pension and energy costs. However, in difficult economic times, we have protected education spending in real terms, because we consider it a priority. The question about what we will do on education spending and the national funding formula is important for our respective parties, going forward into a future Parliament. I cannot fully announce our position on that today; we are still working on the plans.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) said that he is pleased that we are going in the right direction. It is important to acknowledge that. This has been a long time coming. We have taken steps with the £350 million, although people may not think it has been allocated in an absolutely ideal fashion. There have been detailed discussions about the modelling used for the formula. This is probably a precursor to discussions that will go on about what a fair national funding formula will look like.

I also acknowledge the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) about the positive changes that we have made in Cambridgeshire, particularly with respect to the capital budgets there.

To summarise, we have made the largest step that we can in a single year by securing the additional £350 million funding, without creating major turbulence in the system, which is a danger of moving too fast in funding reform. There is not a perfect formula. The arguments will continue about what factors are most important and what really drives the costs in schools. The Department is working on better analysis of schools’ costs, so that we can ensure that a future national funding formula properly reflects the costs, such as attracting and retaining high-quality staff in rural areas. I commit to listening to representations.

Vocational Qualifications

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

Well, Mr Speaker, it all started well. The consensus on support for the growth of apprenticeships is welcome. I also welcome the support from the Opposition Front Bench on the moves we are driving through to increase the quality of apprenticeships. Unfortunately, after a reasonably good start, the right hon. Gentleman’s speech went a bit haywire. It is pity that he suggested nothing constructive or positive. Instead, he just sniped. I, too, pay tribute to Nigel Whitehead, who has put together an impressive report on which the reforms are based, but for the right hon. Gentleman to complain about English and maths when we are putting through one of the largest ever programmes to increase English and maths requirements in vocational learning is a bit of a surprise.

We are introducing elite colleges to ensure that when we build HS2 and new nuclear power stations, local people will have the training to get those jobs, but there was not a word of support for that. It is a pity to hear the sniping, but it is welcome that in national apprenticeship week there is support from both sides of the House for the big growth in apprenticeships. They have been a big coalition success, with the number of participants doubling, and they are critical to give young people the chance to succeed instead of being on the scrap heap where the Labour party left them.

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

I welcome today’s statement. Vocational qualifications need attention, and they needed to be sorted out. As chairman of the Select Committee on Education, I try to be dispassionate, but the truth is that under the last Government we had the diploma, a massive expansion of useless vocational qualifications and, even in the boom years, young people left on the dole. It does not have to be that way. Other countries in Europe show that getting vocational education right and improving careers advice and guidance—the Government have more work to do on that—means that young people will not be destined to a life on the dole, which was their fate too often under the last Government.

[Matthew Hancock]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his work. He said that we have more work to do, and I agree wholeheartedly. We have made improvements, but bringing together the worlds of education and employment is a long-term task involving a change of culture. I welcome the fact that, in figures published last week, the number of 16 to 18-year-olds not in education, employment or training hit a record low, but every NEET is one too many and we must do more.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

I think that our minds are as one on this. I only wish that the hon. Lady had managed to convey the same message to her party’s Front Benchers when they were last in government. We strongly believe that it should become the norm in this country for young people to be able to enter either a university or an apprenticeship, that the choice should be theirs, and that our job is to provide excellent opportunities in both.

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

Last week the Edge Foundation published the results of a survey which showed that just 27% of parents thought that vocational education was a worthwhile route for their children to take. In the light of that, does the Minister agree with me, and with my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), that more needs to be done to promote understanding of the additional rigour that has been brought to vocational qualifications in general, and to apprenticeships in particular, under the present Government?

[Matthew Hancock]

I think it is not enough simply to exhort that technical and vocational education is important. We have to make sure we show that it is valued, and that it truly is valued by employers in order to change this perceptions gap, but I would also note that on the same day that that report was published evidence was published showing that applications to apprenticeships had gone up sharply again. This shows there is movement in this area—there is a culture change in this country—and support for technical and vocational education is on the rise.

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

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey).

I want to speak in support of the large group of Lords amendments that extend the scope of clauses 22 to 32 to include disabled children, as well as those with special educational needs, but I first want to place on the record my thanks and those of my Committee to the Minister for his close co-operation on the Bill over the long period of its development. His actions to improve it in response to our recommendations and those of many others have been greatly appreciated. Something about how he has conducted himself in bilateral and multilateral meetings has endeared himself to the House, which might explain why he has been given the accolade of Minister of the year. I will not seek to curse his future career with such praise any more, so I shall move swiftly on.

As has been said, when the achievements of this coalition Government are reviewed, the Bill will rank highly among them. This large group of amendments certainly strengthens the Bill. When the Education Committee conducted our pre-legislative scrutiny in the autumn of 2012, the evidence we heard made a strong case for the inclusion of disabled children, with or without SEN, in the scope of entitlement provision and education, health and care plans.

Mencap emphasised that it was undesirable that eligibility for much of the support in the Bill could be engaged only via an educational trigger, meaning that children and young people with primary health and care needs might not be identified as having SEN until they reached an educational setting. In her evidence to us, the former Minister, the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather)—sadly, she is no longer in her place—acknowledged the

“huge crossover with children with disabilities”.

The omission of reference to the disabled seemed to run directly contrary to the Government’s laudable aspiration to achieve the earliest possible intervention for those who need extra support. I am therefore delighted that the Bill has been amended in that way.

The only weakness I identify is the continued lack of regulation on the local offer for children and young people mandated by clause 30. The weight of evidence received by my Committee clearly supported the introduction of minimum standards for the local offer—the Minister referred to that earlier—which the Government have consistently resisted. I appreciate that Ministers have taken steps to increase the accountability and responsiveness of the offer made by local authorities, but I ask the Minister to undertake carefully to monitor the standards set by different local authorities across the country so that some do not duck their responsibilities, as other hon. Members have mentioned.

I want to speak in favour of Lords amendments 69 and 70. In our scrutiny report, my Committee welcomed the introduction of integrated education, health and care plans—or EHCPs, as doubtless no one will remember to call them—which are at the centre of those amendments. We were clear in paragraph 98 of our report that

“the cut-off point for EHCPs should be when educational outcomes are achieved”,

rather than by reference to any specific age. We heard from Di Roberts, the principal of Brockenhurst college, who gave the example of two learners with profound deafness: they were on marine engineering apprenticeships and had to have signers to help them with their training. They are precisely the young people who need extra support to follow their ambitions so that they can succeed in life. The Bill should not open a door to local authorities to take that support away, simply because someone needs longer to complete their education or training. A young person’s age is a comparatively superficial factor that should not be used to determine whether they would continue to benefit from an EHCP.

I want quickly to mention Lords amendment 110. It affects clause 67, which governs the new code of practice as regards special educational needs. I would be grateful if the Minister clarified when exactly the new SEN code of practice is expected to be published. I am told that it might not be published until June, which would leave very little time for the new system to come into force from September. I appreciate that it will take up to three years to migrate existing statement holders to the new code of practice, but I know that many parents would appreciate learning the latest information about the timetable.

I am aware of the time, so I shall touch on Lords amendment 128 only briefly. It will enable young people in foster care to live at home until the age of 21 if that is right for them and their foster family agrees. The Select Committee has long been concerned about the position of children who are fostered or in care, and about the accommodation and support that is provided for them. We welcome the announcement of greater support for 16 to 17-year-olds that was made by the Department last summer. This amendment continues the spirit of that work. It is both sensible and sensitive to young people’s needs. The comfort that is derived from having a family home does not end at 18. Allowing young people who may have had particularly disturbed childhoods to continue to enjoy the support of their foster family until 21 is quite simply the right thing to do. The Minister and the Government deserve to be congratulated on adopting the amendment.

I was delighted to see Lords amendment 129 included in the Bill. It inserts a duty to support pupils with medical conditions. Members from across the House will have had constituents come to them with stories of the difficulty of getting fairly straightforward and simple support for their children in school. They will have heard tales of parents having to leave work to pick up their kids and take them elsewhere. I spoke in favour of an amendment of this nature that was proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) at Report stage in the Commons last June.

I have had the opportunity to meet the Crawforth family from my constituency, most recently on a school visit a few days ago. Their son suffers from type 1 diabetes. A recent study by Diabetes UK found that 46% of young people with diabetes—almost half—do not have a health care plan for managing their condition at school. Of those who have a plan, 17% do not feel confident that it is being implemented. Those statistics concern parents up and down the country, and understandably so. Lords amendment 129 will require schools to engage directly with the families of children with serious, ongoing health concerns and to co-operate with local NHS authorities to design strategies to reduce the risks. Its inclusion strengthens the Bill.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Stuart]

There is very little time left so, if the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I will not give way.

The proposed statutory guidance under Lords amendment 129 will ensure that schools have to observe national standards. That will go a long way to ending the current lottery in respect of children’s safety at school.

Lords amendment 135 represents something of an exception to my generally positive feelings about the Bill. I want to be clear at the outset that free school meals are a matter of basic social justice and I wholeheartedly support them. However, I am wary about extending free school meals to all pupils in reception and years 1 and 2, regardless of how well off their parents are. I ask the Minister whether it would not have been better, at a time of austerity, to target the extra funding more carefully, either by extending free school meals to families whose earnings place them just above the current entitlement threshold or by providing extra funding for valuable schemes such as breakfast clubs to help the pupils who most need them. Perhaps the funding could have been used to ensure that sixth-form colleges and further education colleges are not penalised by having to pay VAT or through 18-year-olds losing funding because of pressures elsewhere in the budget. Like any Government spending, this policy has to be paid for. It might not worry our coalition partners, but this amendment means that the Government will find themselves in the bizarre position of taxing families on low and middle incomes to subsidise children from affluent homes.

There is also a wider question about the priorities in our education system. Last Friday, I visited Walkington primary school in my constituency. It is a great school. Over the past three years, thanks to the hard work of its teachers, it has moved from the 52nd to the 12th percentile in terms of progress. It has achieved that despite receiving £500 less per head than the national median funding for primary schools. Funding is a constant struggle, not just for Walkington, but for schools across my home county of the East Riding of Yorkshire, which is the area that receives the third lowest amount of funding in the country. In that context, I find it hard to believe that some of the £600 million that has been allocated to the free school meals policy could not have been better spent to promote fairer outcomes for all, wherever they may live.

[Jessica Lee (Erewash) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to be called to speak in this important debate on this important Bill. I will start by declaring an interest as a family law barrister. Over many years, I have represented parents, guardians, grandparents, children, social workers and many other people. I have no doubt that the Bill will improve the prospects of some of the most vulnerable children in our society, in particular those who are in foster care and those who are placed for adoption.

We in this House often focus on the issues that divide us, but matters such as the prospects for looked after children always unite the House, and efforts have been made across the parties and in the other place to progress the Bill in a positive way, and to work on the detail and reach our agreed position this evening. I remember fondly—as will many other hon. Members, I am sure—the many hours spent on the Bill Committee considering these important measures.

I wish briefly to highlight two points this evening. The first is the extremely positive development in part 5 of the Bill that makes provision for young people to remain, or, as the phrase goes, to “stay put”, in foster care until the age of 21. It is almost impossible for any of us to imagine how, in addition to all the challenges that young people face when considering their careers and their journey into adult life, some will have the added uncertainty of their whole home support network being in possible jeopardy.

Too often I have seen court cases involving older teenage children where, despite the best efforts of all those involved—the judiciary, solicitors, social work team and so on—and a care plan that is always carefully worded and constructed along with the legislation, there is always a concern that there is only so much the court can do. Previously, up to the age of 16 or 17 there was that uncertainty, and a gap in the provision of services. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Minister in leading on these measures. The whole House has worked extremely hard to identify those gaps and to ensure that continued provision, which is much needed for young people as they move into the adult world. The Bill will need time to be implemented, and we will also need time to evaluate and assess the success of what is being proposed. Nevertheless, I think that all involved will see tonight as a significant step forward for looked after children.

My second point is about clause 11. The House has had the benefit of the expertise of Baroness Butler-Sloss who assisted in that section of the Bill. As the former president of the family division, she may perhaps offer more expertise than most of us when it comes to understanding how the drafting of the clause may be interpreted in the family courts. I have no doubt that the starting point for all courts when considering contact and residence applications has been, and will continue to be, that children will always benefit from a relationship with both of their parents, unless there is a good reason to move away from that.

As a family practitioner I have no doubt that contact and residence cases can be the most emotive and difficult litigation for individuals to commence. Put simply, it is to do with the relationship that people have with their own flesh and blood. In advance of such cases, those around the clients involved, such as the solicitors, not only give legal advice but often take on the role of friend and confidant as they guide the parents—or increasingly the grandparents—through such litigation. That highly emotive aspect to these cases is why the drafting of the Bill is so crucial—drafting is crucial for all legislation, but it is a particular issue with this clause.

Clause 11 is entitled, “Welfare of the child: parental involvement”. That maintains the important balance of children having a meaningful relationship with both parents, but it does in some ways move away from suggesting that there is any division in terms of time, which is different from what some of the other proposed phrases may have done. That was, of course, never the intention of using a phrase such as “shared parenting”, but I understand why a parent involved in litigation might interpret the words in such a way.

I thank all those involved, including the voluntary organisations, those in the family courts and, as I said earlier, Members from across the House and the other place who have worked extremely hard on this Bill. I commend the Minister who has done extremely well in leading on this important Bill. I for one look forward to this positive and progressive Bill being granted Royal Assent.

Teaching Quality

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

The hon. Lady makes an excellent point. There has always been a role for instructors coming into a school—for example, outside experts, lecturers and those who teach sport and music—and we would retain that. However, if someone is permanently in charge of the curriculum outcomes for young people in a class, it seems to me that as a minimum they should be of qualified teacher standard. There is no way that we will block the creativity and excellence coming into schools, but we want the best possible teachers, with minimum guarantees of teaching standards, to look after the education of our young people.

The Sutton Trust and the London School of Economics have concluded that if we raised the performance of the bottom 10% of teachers only to the average we would see a marked improvement in performance in our schools. That is especially the case when we consider that disadvantaged children suffer most from poor teaching. Without home support and social capital to fall back on, children from disadvantaged backgrounds suffer disproportionately from poor teaching.

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

The hon. Gentleman has been very generous in giving way and I am grateful to him for doing so. May I ask him at the very least to nuance his policy on non-qualified teachers? I do not know whether since the last debate, three months ago, he has sought evidence on the quality of non-QTS teachers in our schools. If he has, perhaps he could share it with the House. If he has not, will he at least undertake to carry out a piece of research to consider the quality of those teachers before putting in train a system that could ultimately lead to their removal, if not sacking, from the classroom?

[Tristram Hunt]

I thank the Chair of the Education Committee for his intervention, but I am always bemused by his blind spot on this policy. He makes a curious transition from being a rather inquiring, cerebral Chair of a Select Committee to being a rather more partisan figure when he sits up on the Back Benches pursuing party policy. I would welcome research from the Education Committee on the role of qualified teacher status nationally and internationally. I know that his Committee frequently travels to Finland and Singapore, so perhaps on his next trip he could do some research into that policy area.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Under Labour policy, no state school could poach an outstanding teacher from an independent school. It would put restrictions on getting the best teachers from the independent sector into the state sector, which makes no sense at all.

I know that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central has a passion for independent schools, having attended one, but he says that he also has a passion for what he calls the “forgotten 50%”—those pursuing vocational education. One problem with his policy is that if we were to implement it, we would be going against the Wolf report on vocational education, which his two predecessors accepted. It stated:

“Many schools believe that it is impossible to bring professionals in to demonstrate/teach even part of a course without requiring the presence of…salaried teaching staff”

or qualified teaching status.

“This further reduces the incidence of high quality vocational teaching, delivered to the standards that industries actually require.”

What happened to the forgotten 50% when the hon. Gentleman was coming up with his policy? He forgot about them.

This morning, Professor Alison Wolf appeared in front of the Select Committee on Education and said:

“I would be desperately sorry if the result of this…move”—

by Labour—

“was to actually make it harder, indeed impossible, to get vocational experts into the classrooms to teach their own subject and show their own expertise, because they are the ones who motivate. The fantastic vocational teaching that you see is done by people who have actually worked in the area, can talk to kids and know what is going to happen and know where it is taking them.”

A direct result of the hon. Gentleman’s policy is to knock one of the principal props of Alison Wolf’s report, which is improving the quality of vocational and technical education for the so-called forgotten 50%—and yet he does not care.

The hon. Gentleman should listen to someone who has been Education Secretary and knows exactly the importance of bringing in the maximum amount of talent and what helping working-class children involves. When the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) was on “This Week” in October 2013, he spoke to a musician, Nicola Benedetti, about the importance of securing music teachers who had real talent. He said:

“I think music is a specialist subject. My worry is that many children won’t have the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument. If you find someone who is a great musician but they can’t spend three years getting the proper teaching qualifications, I think you should use them.”

I agree with him.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

When we questioned Alison Wolf about this issue this morning I asked her about a study, which I suggested to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) should be carried out before such a policy is implanted. She said:

“I think it’s important to do that and particularly in respect of vocational courses. I remember a case where in Texas they did something similar and the main people who got sacked were, I am afraid, what they call shop-teachers.”

Is there a danger that we will take out those who are re-engaging people in the classroom, re-engaging children and helping them with vocational courses, if the Labour party does not, at the very least, commit to a piece of research before going ahead with this policy?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is right on both counts. First, the Opposition’s policy would be destructive of high-quality technical education, and secondly, there is not a single shred of academic evidence that could be adduced by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central in support of his policy.

The hon. Gentleman talked about the importance of continuous professional development, but he did not refer to the network of teaching schools that we have established and the brilliant work they are doing. He referred to the Prince’s Teaching Institute, but did not quote what its leader, Bernice McCabe, said this week when she thanked the Government for restoring the status and prestige of teachers, which had been undermined by the previous Labour Government. He made a comparison with what the General Medical Council does with the revalidation of doctors, but what he did not do while talking about professionalism, is his homework. The whole point is that many doctors, like many lawyers, are either self-employed or in partnerships. Where they are directly employed in the public sector under management in hospitals, those who run the hospitals perform the process of revalidation, exactly like headmasters do in schools. That is not by using an external body, but by doing it internally.

I am all for making sure we have employers who are capable of ensuring high-quality continuous professional development, but the truth is that we do have them—they are called head teachers. The hon. Gentleman’s policy does not trust head teachers sufficiently. He want to undermine their autonomy over whom they can hire and whom they can fire, and he wants to undermine their autonomy to choose the type of continuous professional development and evaluation that they believe is right for their teachers.

I know that when I talk about autonomy the hon. Gentleman will say, “Aha. There he is again. Gove is talking about structures, not standards.” Indeed, in his speech he said that he believes in standards not structures. Let me quote from a book called “A Journey”, written by a mutual friend of ours:

“We had come to power in 1997 saying it was “standards not structures” that mattered…This was fine as a piece of rhetoric; and positively beneficial as a piece of politics. Unfortunately, as I began to realise when experience started to shape our thinking, it was bunkum as a piece of policy. The whole point is that structures beget standards.”

How a service is configured affects outcomes. Of all the people qualified to teach Labour politicians how to run and reform public services, there is no one better than the author of those words: Tony Blair. That is why we are implementing Blairite progressive policies, but unfortunately, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central is taking his cue lines from the National Union of Teachers and the educational establishment. That is why everyone who believes in driving quality up, reforming education, and a progressive future for children should reject this nonsensical, ungrammatical and regressive motion.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate. One hundred and forty years ago, Benjamin Disraeli said:

“Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.”—[Official Report, 15 June 1874; Vol. 219, c. 1618.]

His words are as true today as they were at the time.

I am glad that the shadow Front-Bench team grasp the central importance of teacher quality to driving up standards in our schools. However, I doubt I am alone in feeling that today we are living through the parliamentary equivalent of groundhog day. Almost exactly three months ago, the Opposition secured a debate on this topic. The House will remember that during the course of that debate I challenged the shadow Secretary of State to supply the evidence showing that employing non-qualified teacher status teachers in our state schools was damaging children’s prospects, or to provide examples of head teachers who were taking on unqualified teachers just to save money or sticking them with low-achieving children. If that evidence was produced, we could then review the impact of non-QTS teachers on educational standards and consider, on that evidence, whether to outlaw them. There was no answer to my question.

Ahead of the speech made by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), I was confident that he must have uncovered compelling new evidence on the importance of QTS—that he and his team must have been working through the night to provide devastating proof on why QTS is so vital, and why teachers without QTS should be forced out of a job. I challenged him on that again today and he had no answer.

When I asked the hon. Gentleman at least to consider conducting an inquiry to find evidence before making a decision, he suggested that I was partial because three months ago, and again today, I took issue with him on this matter. If I appeared aggressive in doing so, it was not because I sit on the Government Benches. I could list the issues on which I disagree with the Secretary of State and on which I am happy to challenge him in this House. However, when the Government are right and the Opposition are putting forward an irresponsible policy that is wrong, it is my duty to challenge it.

[Michael Gove]

I am very grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee for giving way. If there is an iron-clad link between possession of qualified teacher status and automatic success in pedagogy, why does the part of the country with the highest proportion of unqualified teachers, inner London, have the best state education, and why are two schools with 100% QTS teachers in Stoke-on-Trent in special measures?

[Mr Stuart]

I thank the Secretary of State. The point, if the shadow Secretary of State will listen, is that the evidence is anecdotal. To bring in such a change, if one believes in evidence-based policy making, the hon. Gentleman should do the work first, gather the evidence and make sure he is doing the right thing before outlawing these teachers.

Over the past 48 hours, I have asked any number of experts what studies have been conducted into the quality of QTS teachers as opposed to non-QTS teachers. I have spoken to the Education Committee Clerk to see whether the Committee is aware of any studies, to academic experts such as Alan Smithers at the university of Buckingham, an adviser to my Committee, to the Institute of Education and to Ofsted, but none could identify any empirical surveys in this area.

I turned, then, to the teaching profession itself and contacted the principals of several academies in Hull to hear about their experiences. I spoke to people such as Dr Cathy Taylor, the head of the Sirius academy, who told me that her school employed five teachers without QTS out of a total teaching strength of about 87. Those five include excellent teachers in art and maths, both of whom are completing their teaching qualifications, Members will be delighted to hear, but they also include specialists in ICT and salon services. The Sirius academy has a strong professional development programme, and Dr Taylor was clear that she would never employ more non-QTS staff than could be properly mentored within the school.

I also spoke to Andy Grace, the principal of the Boulevard academy. He does not employ non-QTS teachers on permanent contracts, but the academy employs peripatetic, non-QTS staff to provide expert tuition in fields such as sport, art and music, helping to stretch able students.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is calling for research into this subject, but he will remember that the Education Committee’s report, “Great Teachers”, urged the Government, as a matter of importance, to undertake such research. I am not aware of their having carried it out. Will he take this opportunity to repeat that request to the Secretary of State?

[Mr Stuart]

I would welcome such research, but the fundamental position of the Secretary of State is that, within a strong accountability system, we should trust head teachers. The number of non-QTS teachers is reducing. There are many fewer now than when Labour was in power, and the shadow Secretary of State’s refusal in successive debates to acknowledge that is mildly irritating. We have fewer of them and there is strong accountability, yet we keep hearing this proposal to get rid of them.

That point echoes the comments by the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson):

“If you find someone who is a great musician but they can’t spend three years getting the proper teaching qualifications, I think you should use them”.

He gets it; it is a shame that the Opposition Front-Bench team do not appear to do so. When it comes to the evidence for their campaign, the Opposition are quieter than the library of a Trappist monastery.

Is the shadow Secretary of State in favour of evidence-based policy making? I know that he would not want to score political points if it were to hurt our children’s education. He has had three months since the last debate to find evidence that non-QTS teachers are damaging schooling. He has had three months to find evidence that moving a teacher without QTS to QTS on the job improves learning in their classes. Has he found any evidence? If so, where is it? Why does he not share it with us? If he could point us in the right direction, I am sure my Committee would be happy to pursue the matter. If unqualified teachers are doing harm, let us move fast to get rid of them.

[Tristram Hunt]

The Chairman of the Select Committee will know, from the work of Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, that data from the programme for international student assessment have made it clear that educational jurisdictions with the highest qualified teachers—from Finland and South Korea to Singapore and Shanghai—perform most effectively. Can he give us the evidence that unqualified teachers are the route to improving standards and closing the attainment gap?

[Mr Stuart]

Before teachers without QTS, whose number has reduced, are removed from the system, the shadow Secretary of State needs to show why that is a good idea. When Charles Parker, the chief executive of the Baker Dearing Trust, came before the Committee this morning, he said of people who taught in university technical colleges, including those with PhDs: “They’re amazing people, they are highly professional, but they may not be highly professional in the sense of being qualified teachers.” Before they are got rid of, let us check that there are not more good than bad; let us ensure that they are not doing good. If they are doing good and the hon. Gentleman gets rid of them, it will damage not just his conscience, but the education of the children whom he is duty bound to protect.

I understand that the hon. Gentleman has to make an impact in his new brief, and to secure his place in the shadow Cabinet. It cannot be easy having to mollify the resurgent left of his party, let alone the trade unions which bankroll almost every aspect of his party’s actions. However, I urge him not to put politics ahead of the evidence, and I know that he would not put ambition ahead of principle.

For those of us on the Back Benches who are trying to work out how best to improve educational opportunities for our constituents, this debate is bizarre, and I ask the shadow Secretary of State to change his policy.

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

Although when I was shadow Secretary of State I enjoyed working on a cross-party basis with the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), I have to say that his speech was unnecessarily partisan and did not add to the merits of this important debate.

This debate is about how we can both raise the quality of education and narrow the achievement gap. We have all welcomed the improvement in results, and, in particular, the fall in the number of schools that are below the floor target. That is of huge benefit to our society and our education system. However, the Demos report, which was referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), is of great concern. It shows that if we take inner London out of the picture, we see a worsening position—a widening of the achievement gap between those from the richest backgrounds and those from the poorest—and that must be of concern to Members in all parts of the House.

How can we change the position? I think that the big challenge for all of us who have been engaged in education policy in the House, in government or in opposition, is to step back as politicians and policy makers, and to empower teachers and school leaders to lead that change. I welcome the motion, because it is about the profession leading change, and in my short speech I want to refer to some of the teaching pioneers who are already doing that.

The brilliant organisation Teaching Leaders is seeking to create the middle leaders of the future who can ensure that our schools improve, particularly those that serve the most deprived communities. ResearchED 2013 was set up as a grass-roots project by people who loved education and loved teaching, but felt detached from the education debate. They came together to create a national conference for teachers, researchers and others who were interested in how we inform the way in which we teach our children, in drawing out the best of policy theory and practice, and in finding out what works in the classroom. Then there is the long-standing and brilliant work of subject associations. When I was an Education Minister, I once went to the Geography Association’s Easter conference. Teachers were attending it voluntarily, during their Easter break, and were exchanging in a passionate way their interest in, and information about, their subject. That, I think, must be the way forward, but how can we best get to where we want to be?

There is a great deal of discussion about what happened under the last Government, but I think that we did some fantastic things to empower teachers. The Secretary of State mentioned Teach First. I am proud to have given Teach First the go-ahead when I was a Minister, 11 years ago. Its aim is to attract the best and the brightest graduates to teaching, and then to empower those teachers to use the latest research and evidence to inform their classroom practice. The sponsoring of academies was intended to ensure that the best teachers went into the schools that served the neighbourhoods with the greatest social and economic need. The London Challenge has succeeded in changing a position in which London schools were below the national average, to one in which London has the best-performing secondary schools in the country.

However, we also got some things wrong. Sometimes we were too centralist. We directed too much from Whitehall: there was too much of a “The Department knows best” approach. My former boss, Baroness Morris—Estelle Morris—said this week that the danger of such a centralised approach was that while the policy might be

“designed to empower teachers and raise the status of the profession, it was seen as being owned by the government and not by the profession itself.”

That is why I think that the movement initiated by the profession in favour of a royal college of teaching is vital, and deserves the cross-party commitment that it has attracted so far. I believe that it could represent a significant step forward for the teaching profession.

[Mr Stuart]

Will the hon. Gentleman expand on his thoughts about the college of teaching?

[Stephen Twigg]

I am grateful for the extra minute. That is what I was about to do.

It is absolutely right that the movement is independent of Government and independent of politics. I ask the Minister: if, and only if, the royal college comes to the Government to ask for financial help on start-up costs, will the Government consider providing that start-up support? We want something that is independent, but if it needs that help when it is getting set up, can they give it that support?

I want to make a point that I have made before and that is incredibly important. The countries that have been most successful in education have often forged a cross-party consensus and a wider consensus in society about education and its role. Look, for example, at Germany, and at the technical and vocational education system in Switzerland. Switzerland has a national centre for the use of evidence in education. A number of people, particularly John Dunford but also Baroness Morris, have put forward that idea, whose time has come. I called for it two years ago, when I used the title “Office for Educational Improvement” and the Secretary of State’s response was, “We already have such an office—it is called the Government.” I took that in good humour but I do not think that that is a good enough answer.

Part of the problem with education in this country, under successive Governments of different parties, is that the line between education and politics has been drawn in the wrong place. Politicians rightly decide how much money should be available, how it should be divided and the legal structure for education, but I do not think that politicians should get involved in the pedagogy and the curriculum. The professionals should lead on that and I believe that a centre for evidence could play a crucial role in delivering that. I welcome the opportunity today for a serious debate about how we enhance teacher professionalism, and promote greater continuing professional development and the opportunity for teachers themselves to lead that, but let us also say that evidence can play a much bigger role in education policy.

The morale of the teaching profession matters. It is undoubtedly the case—the Secretary of State needs to acknowledge this—that morale at the moment in school classrooms is low. Despite having this fantastic generation of teachers and results getting better, morale is low. He has to accept the point that was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) that sometimes the Secretary of State’s rhetoric, in this place and outside, has contributed to that decline in morale. I hope that that is something that he can reconsider.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Skidmore]

According to the time frame I have seen in the media, it is possibly every three years. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could say how often the revalidation process should take place. We have 500,000 teachers in place; how many of them will have to go through the process, and how often? Who will administer the process? Will it be led by Ofsted or by head teachers? Surely revalidation happens all the time—that is the role of the school leadership team and the head teacher. Adding the process of revalidation simply adds extra bureaucracy. Would the hon. Gentleman make extra resources available to schools to continue the re-evaluation process? What will the paperwork look like? These are all valid questions to which teachers watching this debate need to know the answers.

The hon. Gentleman compares teacher revalidation with what happens with doctors and consultants, but consultants’ revalidation is very different from doctors’ revalidation. Will there be a revalidation process for head teachers and one for Ofsted inspectors? All these questions need to be considered. Will teachers who fail the process lose their qualified teacher status altogether? Will there be revalidation in the private sector?

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I am enjoying my hon. Friend’s explanation of validation, and hope he can continue for another minute.

[Chris Skidmore]

I much appreciate that intervention, which came right on time.

In this debate about QTS, it is important that we as a House and the public know exactly how revalidation—or “teacher MOTs” as the process has become popularly known in the papers—will operate. What is the time frame? What are the consequences of failing the revalidation? Will it take place within schools? If so, what is the point of all this? Is it simply to slap on a party policy? I am not against revalidation, because I believe that it already exists, as we have given the school leadership team and head teachers the power to lead.

The key point here is that we trust head teachers to be commanders, captains of their ships. The shadow Secretary of State looks at me scornfully. He clearly does not believe in giving head teachers the power to run their schools. If a head teacher wants to employ a teacher without QTS, I have no problem with that, because I trust that head teacher to make the right decision, and head teachers should have that power. That is the crux of this debate and why I will oppose the motion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

It has been a good debate, although bizarrely one in which we have not been graced by the presence of the Government Minister responsible for teaching. Why is the Schools Minister not here? Is it an authorised or unauthorised absence? Will he be fined, as many parents are being fined around the country, for playing truant? We know that he is deeply conflicted about whether teachers in taxpayer-funded schools should be qualified. Last time we discussed the issue, I likened him to Odo the Shape-Shifter from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, but now having dissolved back into his bucket he seems to have re-emerged as the Invisible Man. The truth is that we have a part-time Schools Minister who is absent because he is performing his other job in the Cabinet Office of trying to hold the coalition together. He should be here in the House, answering for his policies in the Commons—even if he does not agree with his own policies, which when we last checked appeared to be his position.

The Government once tried to convince us that they understood the importance of teaching—they even released a White Paper with that title—but everything that they have done in office has been about an ideological obsession with structures and an easy headline about numbers of academies and free schools. They have undermined and neglected the teaching profession, alienated hard-working qualified professional educators and sent the morale of the profession into the cellar.

Last year, a survey conducted by YouGov found that 55% of teachers described their morale as “low” or “very low”. That figure had risen from 42% in just eight months. Sixty-nine per cent. said their morale had declined since the 2010 general election. Only 5% thought that the Government’s impact on the education system had been positive.

It may be that, for some of the lunatic fringe that the Secretary of State has employed as special advisers, those figures are fine because in their view teachers are just Marxist troublemakers, but they could not be more wrong. When YouGov asked teachers their voting intentions at the last general election, 33% said they would vote Tory, 32% Labour, and 27% Lib Dem. Actually, teachers—I think I am the only member of either Front Bench in either House who used to be a school teacher—are a politically moderate, sometimes conservative group of swing voters. However, the Secretary of State has worked his magic on them with his advisers. That important group of middle-class swing voters now says in the latest poll on teacher voting intentions by YouGov that the support among teachers for the Conservatives is down from 33% to 16%, the support for Labour is up from 32% to 57%, and the Lib Dems—actually, if their Minister cannot be bothered to turn up, I cannot be bothered to read out the figure. Let us just say that they are now neck and neck with the Greens and behind UKIP.

Teacher morale matters. Teachers’ professional status matters. The OECD has said in its PISA reports that schools in countries with high teacher morale

“tend to achieve better results”.

Teacher morale matters, not just politically but, more importantly, for the education of our country’s children. So why does the Secretary of State not understand that, by undermining the profession with his “anyone can teach” dogma, he is undermining standards in exactly the same way as they were undermined in Sweden?

[Mr Stuart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Kevin Brennan]

Not at the moment.

We all remember the Secretary of State’s infatuation with the Swedish model. He even wrote about it in The Independent newspaper, under the headline “Michael Gove: We need a Swedish education system”. He was saying that we needed free schools—eventually to be run for profit, presumably, as in Sweden—and unqualified, low-paid teachers. His praise for Sweden was effusive. He went on to say that

“what has worked in Sweden can work here.”

We do not hear much about Sweden from him now. I think I can say, without fear of being accused by the statistics authority of abusing the PISA statistics—unlike the Secretary of State, who was rapped on the knuckles for doing so when talking about the PISA statistics for this country—that Sweden has plummeted down the PISA tables after pursuing the very reform programme that the Secretary of State is now adopting in this country, including the use of unqualified teachers. Perhaps the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), might like to look at that evidence with his Committee. Sweden is now as invisible in the Secretary of State’s speeches and articles as the Schools Minister is in this debate on teaching.

It would be helpful if the Government were willing to tell us what qualifications the teachers have in the schools that are causing concern. I have asked him about the Al-Madinah free school in Derby. On 16 October last year, in response to a parliamentary question about the qualifications held by teachers in free schools, I was told:

“Data on each qualification held by each teacher is not collected.”—[Official Report, 16 October 2013; Vol. 568, c. 746W.]

I thought that that could not be right, so on 18 November 2013 I asked whether the Secretary of State would

“publish in anonymised form the qualifications held by each member of the teaching staff at the Al-Madinah Free School”

at the beginning of last September’s term. I was told:

“It would be inappropriate to publish any details until the Secretary of State for Education has concluded the next steps in this case.”—[Official Report, 18 November 2013; Vol. 570, c. 729W.]

On 6 January this year, when those next steps had been taken, I asked again for details of the qualifications. I was told that it would be “inappropriate” to publish any details of staff qualifications. On 14 January, I asked why it would be inappropriate, and received an answer simply repeating that it would be inappropriate to answer the question.

Lloyd George was once driving around north Wales and he stopped his car to ask a Welsh farmer for directions. He said, “Where am I?”, and the farmer replied, “You’re in your car.” That is exactly the method used by the Department for Education to answer parliamentary questions. The answers are short, accurate and tell us absolutely nothing that we did not already know. The Secretary of State said today that he was going to release that information, and I know that he will do so because he is a man of his word. I look forward to receiving that information tomorrow.

A YouGov poll has shown that 89% of parents do not want their child to attend a school whose teachers do not have professional teaching qualifications. Before the Secretary of State goes on again about unqualified teachers in the private sector, he might want to reflect on the fact that the latest Ofsted report shows that 13% of schools in the selective fee-paying sector were judged “inadequate”.

As our motion says, no school system can surpass the quality of its teachers. Before I finish, I want to turn briefly to the issue of the South Leeds academy. The Secretary of State has kindly passed to me the letter that he received yesterday, which he presumably solicited ahead of this debate. In the letter, the academy accepts that it placed the advert to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) has referred, but says that it was

“placed in error by a new and inexperienced clerical assistant”.

We accept that explanation. What it also says in that letter, which the Secretary of State did not highlight, is that the academy trust involved says that the School Partnership Trust Academies

“always seeks to employ teachers with qualified teaching status.”

It agrees with us, not with the Secretary of State. We should be employing teachers with qualified teacher status. He is wrong; we are right, and the SPTA agrees with us on that issue.

School Governing Bodies

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2014 Ministerial Corrections

[Elizabeth Truss]

I am not sure that that is exactly how my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) put his point. It is down to Ofsted to identify weak governing-body performance. Ultimately, it is the decision of either the Secretary of State or the local authority to replace that governing body with an interim executive board, should it not be doing what it is meant to be doing.

[Official Report, 5 December 2013, Vol. 571, c. 350-1WH.]

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister spell out how the powers of the Secretary of State and local authority to act if governance is failing differ between maintained schools and academies?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I will come to that point later in my comments, but in essence, the governing body in both cases can be replaced with an interim executive board.

[Official Report, 5 December 2013, Vol. 571, c. 352WH.]

Letter of correction from Elizabeth Truss:

Errors have been identified in the responses provided during the Westminster Hall debate on school governing bodies.

The correct responses should have been:

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 6th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

I am clear that the strength of guidance, inspiration and motivation needs to increase, and that the best place to get that motivation is from people who are in careers. We have inspirational apprentices such as Sara Underwood, who was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson), who explain the benefits of apprenticeships. I explain the benefits of apprenticeships, and it should be incumbent on all of us in the House to explain that opportunities are available to allow people to prosper.

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

4. What systems his Department has in place for management of failing academies and free schools.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove)]

The Department monitors schools through scrutiny of performance data and Ofsted reports. All free schools are visited by an education adviser in the first and fourth term of opening. Concerns are investigated immediately. It is for an academy trust to ensure that appropriate action is taken to bring about rapid improvement. If it does not, we use the intervention powers in the funding agreement.

[Mr Stuart]

The recent action taken on Al-Madinah and the Discovery New School by Lord Nash, the Under-Secretary of State, followed his setting out in detail the requirements those schools had to follow in order to turn themselves around and required his personal supervision of those schools. What role will school commissioners have in future to ensure that we no longer have Ministers trying to run schools from a desk in Whitehall?

[Michael Gove]

Inevitably, we inherited a situation in which funding agreements were the principal method of ensuring that both academies and free schools acted in conformity with the principles that all of us would expect. We are not intending to abandon the principle that it should be for Ministers to sign and, if necessary, revisit funding agreements, but a new system of regional schools commissioners working to the Office of the Schools Commissioner can ensure that we have the local intelligence that we need in order to respond more quickly, and that there is a greater number of high-quality sponsors to help drive school improvement.

School Governing Bodies

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Westminster Hall

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

It is a great pleasure and privilege to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Rosindell. It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon with the Minister and colleagues from the Select Committee on Education to discuss our report on the role of school governing bodies, which was published in July 2013. It is also a pleasure to see the shadow Minister and other colleagues in the Chamber.

The 300,000 governors across the country perform an important job, and hon. Members on both sides of the House would want to send our thanks for the service that they perform in their communities. Holding schools to account for the quality of the education that they offer to pupils is a serious responsibility, and it is not all about external bodies; it is important that governors have the skills, self-confidence and ability to fulfil that role. Many governors offer outstanding advice and service, and they devote large amounts of time and expertise to monitoring and improving the schools in their charge.

By contrast, recent events at the Al-Madinah school in Derby underscore the importance of governance and the need for robust intervention when it is failing. The school’s chair of governors, Shazia Parveen, resigned in late October, and the remaining trustees finally resigned last month. Despite the shambles over which they had been presiding, the governors of the Al-Madinah school were under no obligation to resign; nor could they have been forced to do so under current regulations. That example is extreme and unusual, but I should be grateful to the Minister if she told us whether she thinks that the current situation is satisfactory, or whether changes need to be made to the regulatory framework to ensure that such people can be replaced sooner if they are clearly failing in their duties.

There is considerable variation in the quality of governance across different types of schools. The former chief inspector stated in Ofsted’s 2010-11 annual report that governance was good or outstanding in 71% of special schools and 64% of secondary schools, but only 55% of primary schools and just 53% of pupil referral units had such a rating, which is not acceptable.

School governance has recently been scrutinised by the Government. In September 2012, Ministers introduced regulations that provide greater flexibility to the governing bodies of maintained schools to reconstitute themselves, so that they may be smaller, with an emphasis on skills as opposed to prescribed constitutions. Those new regulations are most welcome.

During our inquiry, we found that schools are not making the most of the freedoms that they have. The envisaged process for strengthening governance has not necessarily happened in many areas, and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on how the Government will encourage schools to make full use of the options available to them.

Our report makes a series recommendations that seek to improve the capacity, capability and profile of governing bodies. We said that the Government should study the effectiveness of governing bodies that are responsible for groups of schools, such as federations and academy trusts, and consider the optimum size for governing federations effectively.

Meanwhile, the recruitment and retention of governors continues to be a problem. Mike Cladingbowl of Ofsted told us that finding high-quality governors in all areas of the country represents

“a big and urgent national problem”.

We welcome the Government’s increased funding for the School Governors One-Stop Shop, which is the governor recruitment charity.

Our second recommendation is that the Government should work more closely with the CBI to recruit governors, as business is potentially an important source of capable governors. Will the Minister say something more about that? I know that the CBI is keen and is working with the Government. The CBI and other business groups are looking to get more involved. I would be interested to hear more from the Minister on that.

Linked to those issues is the fact that the barriers to recruitment must be removed. For example, the current legal requirement to give time off for the governors of maintained schools has not yet been extended to academy governors. That obvious oversight needs to be addressed. Last week, the CBI echoed our call for academy governors to receive time off to fulfil their duties. Will the Minister commit today that academy governors will be given the same time and opportunity to do their work as governors of maintained schools?

The third part of our inquiry concerns whether governors receive good training or, indeed, proper training at all. The Government told us that such training can be encouraged through Ofsted. Our report recommends that Ministers report back in due course on whether Ofsted’s intervention has been effective and, if it has not, reconsider making training mandatory for all governors.

We were also concerned by suggestions that few quality alternatives are emerging to the training that local authorities traditionally provide, which has been reduced in recent years. Ofsted and the Department for Education need to monitor the availability and quality of governor training, particularly in the context of greater academisation and reduced local authority services. If school governing bodies in the new context have even greater responsibility than under the old system, it is essential that the services to support those governing bodies and the training available to them are improved, rather than reduced, in quality and scope.

Ofsted has sharpened its focus on governance, which the Committee welcomes wholeheartedly. Part of Ofsted’s new approach, for example, is to provide a clear description within its inspection framework of the role and characteristics of high-quality governance.

We received evidence highlighting the importance of a good clerk to the success of a governing body. The evidence indicates that that should be a professional role, similar to a company secretary, and it is an important recommendation of our report. SGOSS may be ideally placed to take on the role of recruiting clerks, while simultaneously ensuring some sort of quality assurance. I would be grateful to learn whether—and if so, how—the Government intend to facilitate that process.

Clerks also need to be equipped with high-quality information and guidance. We are particularly concerned that the revised governors’ handbook, which contains less detailed guidance than the previous version, is aimed only at new governors. Will the Minister inform us of what steps, if any, have been taken to ensure that the revised handbook is relevant to governors of all levels of experience and acts as an easy access point for advice and guidance?

The fourth section of our report considers the problem of poorly performing governing bodies. We welcome the Government’s encouragement for governing bodies to undertake more self-evaluation and peer-to-peer review, using tools such as the all-party group on education governance and leadership’s 20 questions—I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) on his work on that all-party group—and other tools in the new governors’ handbook.

We also welcome Ofsted’s new data dashboard, which will help governing bodies to become more adept at using performance data effectively. It is important to note that, although the data dashboard provides an easier route to start grappling with such data, it is not the end of the road. One would hope that governors will use the data dashboard to get a feel for the issues and then delve more deeply into the data, to hold their schools effectively to account.

We remain concerned that current approaches to addressing underperformance and failure in governing bodies are insufficiently robust. Accordingly, we recommend more demanding appointment processes for the chairs of governors, accompanied by clear procedures for removing poorly performing chairs from office. We also recommend that time limits should be imposed for the implementation of interim executive boards.

We believe that Ofsted should explicitly recommend IEBs following an inspection, where deemed appropriate. If Ofsted goes in to review a school and finds the school’s governance to be fundamentally wanting, it is appropriate that Ofsted should be able to recommend the speedy replacement of the governing body with an IEB.

Ministers should investigate why so many local authorities and, indeed, the Secretary of State for Education have been reluctant to use their powers of intervention where school governance is a concern. We ask the Government to clarify the role of local authorities in school improvement, as that function will provide an important challenge to schools between Ofsted inspections, the gaps between which can be quite long under the current regime.

As an adjunct to that, we considered the relationship between governing bodies and head teachers. In its 2011 report on school governance, Ofsted noted:

“Absolute clarity about the different roles and responsibilities of the headteacher and governors underpins the most effective governance.”

However, we heard evidence that schools face difficulties in managing that relationship properly. We recommend that existing regulatory and legislative requirements should be reviewed to ensure clarity on the proper division of strategic and operational functions between head teachers and governors.

The fifth and—you will be delighted to hear, Mr Rosindell—final part of the Committee’s report considered new models of governance. Academies define their own governance procedures, subject to approval by the Secretary of State. Such freedoms for academies have led to the evolution of new models of governance, from which lessons could be learned in many cases. Our report highlighted some confusion, however, about the accountability of some academy governance models, and we made three main recommendations. First, the Government should identify the roles of governors in the different types of academy. Secondly, the Government should explain how relevant local groups, including pupils, parents and staff, should have a voice in the business of the governing body and the running of the school. Thirdly, clarity should be provided on how decisions are made in academies, along with details of where to turn should concerns arise.

I have summarised the main findings of the Committee’s report. I am pleased that the Government agree with much of what we said, but with some notable exceptions. As I have explained, our report concluded that mandatory training for all governors should be introduced if Ofsted intervention is found to be ineffective. Regrettably, the Government response was adamant that good schools

“don’t need government to mandate training.”

Will the Minister reconsider that response if it becomes apparent that the standards of training remain unacceptably inconsistent between schools?

Likewise, we recommended that Ofsted should use its power and responsibility explicitly to recommend that a governing body be replaced by an interim executive board following an inadequate inspection. The Government said that they did

“not agree that there is a need for a new role for Ofsted here… Having Ofsted make specific recommendations on the proposed solution could blur the boundary of responsibilities between the Chief Inspector, the local authority and the Secretary of State.”

Does the Minister not accept that clear advice from Ofsted might be required to prompt some local authorities to take decisive action? The Secretary of State has seemed remarkably reluctant to act, even when the most obvious evidence of failure was present. The Government rejected the notion that the Secretary of State had held back from using his powers of intervention, although I would say that the evidence suggests the opposite.

We argued for more robust appointment processes for the chairs of governors, accompanied by clear procedures for removing poorly performing chairs from office. The Government agreed, but they have no plans to give governing bodies more power to remove elected governors, so the Committee finds itself only partially satisfied.

Our report demonstrated the importance of recruiting and retaining high-quality, effective governors. It simultaneously identified the challenges in achieving such a standard. I accept that the Department for Education’s work on governance is still in development, just as the wider educational landscape is still evolving, but a continued focus on governance will be important in years to come if we are to deliver better educational outcomes for the next generation. That is ever more important in what is now designed to be a self-improving, more autonomous school system. The challenge has been laid down, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.

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[Neil Carmichael]

I assume my hon. Friend means parents on governing bodies, and I completely agree, as I have seen that behaviour myself. We should be making sure that governing bodies are truly accountable and responsible to the key stakeholders, who seem to me to be the parents. Having parents on the governing body is a great idea, but not as a specific group of parent governors—they should be people who happen to be governors and to have children. That is the way to look at the issue.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I fear my hon. Friend might be confused about interim executive boards. He seems to think that because the people on those boards are focused, dedicated, highly skilled and small in number, we can extrapolate from that the idea that all governing bodies everywhere should be small and similar in make-up to IEBs. That is simply not possible, given the weight of work required of governing bodies. That was the evidence we heard: as Professor Chris James of the university of Bath said, there is no statistical relationship between governing body effectiveness and governing body size or vacancies. I put it to my hon. Friend that there is no evidence for his view. If we could have astonishingly elite, small boards of dedicated people to put the time in, it might be a better system, but we do not have those people and they do not have the time.

[Neil Carmichael]

There are two points about the size of governing bodies. First, with a governing body of about 20, the influence of individuals is diluted. That applies to any committee system, including school governance. Secondly, it is not necessary to replicate exactly an interim executive board because that would be counter-productive. The word “interim” does not imply permanence, the word “executive” does not imply strategic decision making, and the word “board” is not commonly used in schools. The characteristics of IEBs and how they operate are important and we should think about how that might influence the way in which governing bodies will be shaped.

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[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell, on an entirely different brief from my previous one. I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), and the hon. Members who serve on that Committee for this welcome contribution to a very important subject.

As the Chair of the Committee and other hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham), have said, 300,000 volunteers serve on governing bodies—probably the largest group of volunteers working in a particular field in the whole country. I, too, pay tribute to them for the work that they do. Like a number of hon. Members in the debate, I had the opportunity to be a governor, not of a school but of a further education college, and I know how valuable that is. Hon. Members bring expertise and practical experience to the debate.

When Labour was in government, we gave greater responsibility to governing bodies. We reduced local authority interference in how governing bodies operate and made changes relating to their composition. We also started the academy programme—a targeted intervention to try to lift the performance of the worst-performing schools in the country, which were often in deprived areas, and to raise standards. Governing bodies played a very important role in that arena.

I want to take the opportunity to tell the Minister that what I have described is different from simply rebadging a school as an academy and expecting school improvement to happen automatically. It will not happen without effective interventions to try to improve standards, including having strong governance arrangements, encouraging the effective leadership and management of schools and ensuring proper accountability of governing bodies.

This report is therefore welcome and timely, particularly as we are seeing so much reform in the education system. There is so much change, including the proliferation of free schools and of course more academies, and we need to ensure that governing bodies play an effective role in this rapidly changing environment.

I shall focus on a number of the themes on which the Select Committee report makes recommendations. The Chair of the Select Committee, in particular, highlighted some of these points. First, the Select Committee recommended mandatory training for governors. This is a crucial issue. As I said, it is crucial in this time of change that we ensure proper accountability. At a time when local education authorities are losing powers of oversight and there is no clarity about what the role of a middle tier would be, it would be helpful for us to make sure that governing bodies play an important role in ensuring that accountability.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

On a point of clarification, we did not recommend that training should be mandatory. We said that that should be looked at again if it turns out that the input from Ofsted and other Government inputs do not lead to the improvement in training that we hope to see brought about in the system. That improvement would be brought about in a non-regulated way ideally.

[Rushanara Ali]

Okay; we are talking about non-regulatory training. The point is that appropriate training is vital. According to The Times Educational Supplement, 93% of the respondents to the joint survey said that this would be helpful; they supported training. That reinforces the Select Committee’s recommendation. The Government should examine the issue closely, genuinely to ensure that governors have the appropriate support and that schools get the kind of governing body that they need to respond to the challenges of running their institutions. Governors need to feel equipped and able to perform their role effectively and work towards building achievement and raising standards in schools. In the end, that is what motivates people in communities to take part in this work as volunteers. They give their time and make that contribution to see a transformation in their schools.

I therefore hope that the Minister will recognise the importance of training—other hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North, highlighted this issue—and explain how the Government will seek to address the Select Committee recommendation and ensure that governing bodies get the training that they need. The National Governors Association has also given evidence and pushed for that recommendation to be implemented.

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[Rushanara Ali]

The exemplars clearly do that. All of us will have seen schools taking on this role actively and ensuring that proper training is provided. I certainly benefited from training as a governor of a further education college. The charitable organisations that provide training to governors, not just of schools and colleges but of charities, charitable organisations and social enterprises, are vital. The question is about those schools that currently are not able or willing to provide training. How do we ensure that they step up and apply the appropriate mix of encouragement and pressure, to extend the training that is needed to get their governors to perform the kind of role that they need to perform?

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Does the hon. Lady agree that one way to encourage more training for governing bodies is to have clerks as professionals, facilitating, raising aspiration, sharing best practice and not being a member of staff from the head teacher’s department? Does she agree that the role of a clerk should become a professional role?

[Rushanara Ali]

I do, and I will come on to that point shortly, but before I deal with clerks, I want to focus on federations and multi-academy trusts. In their ideological drive to force schools into academy status regardless of the views of parents, governors and school communities, the Government have been ignoring the benefits of federations of schools as drivers of school improvement and as an opportunity for governing bodies to work more strategically. A number of hon. Members have highlighted the need to examine that area. In many cases, working together in that way—sometimes through co-operatives—can bring all the benefits for teaching and learning of a more strategic partnership, without unnecessary and sometimes painful organisational upheaval.

In my constituency, when schools have come together and worked together collaboratively—governing bodies, as well as teachers of different subjects—standards have been radically improved. We need to ensure that that happens and that the role of governing bodies is considered in that context. Will the Minister commit to supporting those local initiatives, rather than imposing models that are not necessarily fit for purpose or appropriate for local areas? Will she commit to giving groups of small schools that federate to improve outcomes the same sort of grants as multi-academy trusts receive?

On profile and recruitment, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North and the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) pointed out, governors are fulfilling a vital role voluntarily. Recruitment is a major challenge in many areas, so we must take urgent action to ensure that employers can provide the flexibility—day release or time away from work—that their staff require to make a contribution. Particularly where we want to bring in expertise from professions that may be pressured, it is vital that employers support their staff to make a contribution as a governor.

When the previous Labour Government were in power, civil servants had the scope to take a few days’ leave for their work as school governors or in similar roles, with the permission of their employer. I hope that the Government will consider how that might be done appropriately, without burdening employers and recognising that the role of school governor is crucial and that people need to be given flexibility to fulfil it properly and effectively. I hope that the Minister will set out in her response how such measures might be introduced.

As the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness has said, the Education Committee highlighted the importance of having professional clerks. The National Governors Association is campaigning for their introduction and is disappointed that the Department for Education has not set out its intention to make that happen. I hope that the Minister will reconsider and support the Education Committee’s recommendation, which will be good news to the hon. Gentleman and to me.

On accountability, there is a worrying trend in the reforms introduced by the Secretary of State. We have observed in previous debates on governance that there was an unexploded ordnance in the system and the lack of accountability would result in scandals. As we have seen in the case of the Al-Madinah free school, the Kings science academy, Barnfield federation in Luton and others, there are real concerns, and we must ensure that such incidents do not occur again.

There is concern about several other schools, and we must make sure that the school governing bodies have the appropriate power. Where the governing bodies are at fault, the system must be effective enough to intervene to ensure that the relevant action is taken to address such problems. At a time of reform when there are concerns about accountability, we must ensure that school governing boards are properly held to account and given appropriate support if they have to take action against school management to improve matters, as happened in the examples that I have given.

Performance is clearly a major issue. A balance must be struck between attracting the best possible people and ensuring that they are rooted in their communities. Recently, the Secretary of State described governors as

“Local worthies who see being a governor as a badge of status not a job of work.”

I hope that the Minister will emphasise that we should not be using such language to refer to governors, who play a vital role. I hope that she recognises the important work done by governors, the need to support them to make their contribution and the need to improve their skills and capacities, so that they can continue to make a vital difference to our education system. I hope that she will take into consideration the questions that have been raised and the points that I have made and that she will take on board the importance of improving accountability and the status of governors in schools.

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[Elizabeth Truss]

I am not sure that that is exactly how my hon. Friend put his point. It is down to Ofsted to identify weak governing-body performance. Ultimately, it is the decision of either the Secretary of State or the local authority to replace that governing body with an interim executive board, should it not be doing what it is meant to be doing.[Official Report, 6 January 2014, Vol. 573, c. 1MC.]

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister spell out how the powers of the Secretary of State and local authority to act if governance is failing differ between maintained schools and academies?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I will come to that point later in my comments, but in essence, the governing body in both cases can be replaced with an interim executive board.

Many hon. Members commented on retaining and recruiting high-quality governors. It is clearly critical that governors have the right skills to do the job. We set out clearly in the governors’ handbook the important strategic nature of the governors’ role and, as I commented, we have cut back on rules and regulations that tie governors up in red tape They now have much more flexibility in the way they operate. The best governing bodies identify explicitly the skills and competencies they need and audit regularly the skills of their current members.

There was some debate this afternoon about the size of a governing body. The Government’s view is that the size of a governing body should be no greater than it needs to be to get the necessary skills, but the No. 1 thing is that it gets the right skills. Size is secondary to ensuring that the skills are in place to do the job. My hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) pointed out what can be done locally to recruit governors. I commend him for his activities in Calder Valley to promote the role of governors with employers. He lays out a lesson for many MPs about what they should do to promote the roles of governors in their local communities. We absolutely need to get the message across that the role is valuable and will help individuals in whatever career they decide to pursue.

We have given governing bodies the power to reconstitute themselves under a more flexible framework and to become smaller and more skills focused. We agree with the Committee that not enough governing bodies are using the flexibilities at the moment. We plan to consult on whether a move to reconstitution should be mandatory by September 2015, because we do not think that enough governing bodies are doing it at the moment. It will be interesting to see the results from that consultation.

The hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) spoke extensively about training. I think we all agree that we want well trained governing bodies that are capable of exercising their role. We are keen for schools to use their budgets effectively. Ensuring that governors get the quality training they need is an effective way to do so. There might be a debate about how we achieve those objectives, but our view is that the outcomes of the Ofsted inspection process are the best way to make an assessment, rather than insisting on mandatory training, which can sometimes become a tick-box exercise. We want high-quality training and we want to know that, following that training, governors have the skills they need to do the job.

Developments in the level of training are needed, so in addition to expanding its training for chairs and aspiring chairs to offer 6,700 places by March 2015, early next year, the National College of Teaching and Leadership is launching specific training workshops for governors on understanding RAISEonline data, which my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal mentioned, driving financial efficiency in schools, and performance-related pay. Where we identify a gap in the training available, the NCTL is helping to provide it. We are continuing to expand the NCTL national leaders of governance programme, to mobilise outstanding chairs of governors to provide free peer-mentoring support for other chairs.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) talked passionately about the need for the involvement of business in governing bodies, and I could not agree more. The Government are working with the Confederation of British Industry on a campaign to promote the role of employers in freeing up employees to get more involved in governing bodies, but the issue is broader than that and about more than governance. We need more business leaders in our classrooms working with children on specific subjects. That helps children to form high aspirations about the types of role they can go into. The new national curriculum is much more flexible and will enable more business involvement. We have seen some very good developments, for example, organisations such as Mykindacrowd facilitating the new computer curriculum that is coming in.

I also agree about the role of the professional clerk. NCTL is developing and will deliver a training programme for clerks. By 2015, it will have provided training for 2,000 highly skilled professional clerks, who have a vital role on the governing body.[Official Report, 6 January 2014, Vol. 573, c. 1MC.]

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Does the Minister feel that there needs to be regulatory change? We heard tales during our inquiry of the clerk of the governing body, whose role is to hold the head to account, being someone who works in the office of a headmaster. We felt that that was not the right situation. If changing it requires regulatory change, will she consider that?

[Elizabeth Truss]

As yet, we do not feel that that requires regulatory change, but if my hon. Friend has evidence of specific issues that have arisen, I will be interested to hear about them.

A number of points were raised about accountability. As the programme for international student assessment outcomes has shown this week, autonomy and accountability are two of the key drivers in any successful education system. Lord Nash told the Select Committee that he thought the Ofsted inspection framework was the sharpest tool in the box for improving the quality of governance. I certainly think that is true. Any school failure is a failure of governance. Interim executive boards can be an effective solution in certain schools to secure a step change in the schools’ performance, through a complete change in the school’s leadership and management. IEBs are not always necessary; sometimes the governing body can self-improve—ultimately, it is up to the local authority or the Secretary of State if the school is in an Ofsted category. Where individual governors are not pulling their weight, it is a matter for the chair of governors. We would like all chairs to have annual conversations to take stock with every member of the governing body. Ultimately, it is the chair’s responsibility to ensure that members of the governing body have the skills they need to do the job.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

It has been a great pleasure to have this debate today. The Minister looks shocked and horrified at the prospect of my summing up, but I am sure she will survive. We have had contributions by hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber, and thoughtful ones at that. Many of them were from Members who not only sit on the Select Committee and hear the evidence we receive, but who, prior to that, spent many years on governing bodies themselves, trying to making a difference to schools.

In her response to the debate, the Minister said, “The future of schools is truly in governors’ hands.” The Government have made good progress in taking the role of governors seriously; I congratulate her on that. I and the other members of the Committee will be delighted that the Government will be working with the CBI, the School Governors’ One-Stop Shop and, I assume, the national college on a campaign to promote the role of governors, in order to attract more people to be governors and to make a difference by filling the empty places for governors that we have heard about.

I would not be doing my job if I did not chide the Minister on one thing, which concerns the legal requirement to release staff. At the moment, companies are obliged to release staff for maintained schools but not for academies. Now, either the Government think that that requirement is an over-regulation and it should be abolished, so that all schools are on the same playing field, or they should extend that to cover academies. I cannot see any case—intellectually or otherwise—for justifying an unlevel playing field, such as the situation we are in now. So I ask the Minister to look at that issue again.

I have one final point. My understanding, and it may well be incorrect, is that the Secretary of State does not have the power to appoint an interim executive board for an academy; they have the power only to rescind the funding agreement. However, I may be wrong about that. If it turns out that the Minister is incorrect, perhaps she could write to me, as Chair of the Select Committee, to clarify matters. That would be very helpful in ensuring that we are all on the same page on that issue.

It has been a pleasure to serve under you, Mr Rosindell, and we look forward to our next debate under Sir Alan Meale.

School Sport

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan—as the Ministers, my hon. Friends the Members for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) and for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), swap places—and to have secured the debate this afternoon, and to have colleagues from across the House who are members of the Select Committee joining me.

My Committee published our report, “School sport following London 2012: No more political football”, in July this year. As the first anniversary of the Olympic and Paralympic games approached, we wanted to hold a short inquiry into school sport. Both the 2012 games were an extraordinary display of sport’s potential to inspire, move and excite us. For young people watching, the achievements of the likes of Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah and David Weir were a tremendous example of what hard work and dedication can achieve, as well as a great advert for a healthy lifestyle.

The games represented a badly needed opportunity to turn the tide. For too many young people today, sport does not play a significant role in their lives. As a consequence, they are significantly less fit than previous generations. In November, American researchers published an ambitious new dataset, covering more than 25 million children across 28 countries. It showed that children today run a mile 90 seconds slower than their counterparts from 30 years ago. Closer to home, in this country, one in five children are now overweight or obese when they enter reception class. The figure rises to nearly one in three by the end of primary education. That gives some sense of the scale of the challenge that faces us as a nation.

We were delighted by the interest in our inquiry. Our online survey about sports provision in schools received more than 300 responses from teachers, while a similar survey of young people received nearly 800 replies. We also visited three schools in east London: Hallsville primary school and Curwen primary school in Newham; and Barking Abbey school, a sports specialist college for 11 to 18-year-olds.

What were our main conclusions about school sport? First, we concluded that just as the foundations for verbal literacy and numeracy are established in the primary years of school, so too must the foundations of “physical literacy” be established. School is the one place where all young people have access to sporting activities, and it is where a lifelong sporting habit can be formed and built upon, which should be a priority for every pupil.

The Government’s position on school sport, as outlined in December 2010, emphasised the role of competitive sport. However, many witnesses told us that a focus on competition discourages some children, particularly girls. The Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation has reported that as many as half of girls are currently put off being active by their experiences of PE and sport in school. It is not that schools should not offer competitive sport—far from it. They should offer both competitive and non-competitive sporting opportunities, to ensure that sport provision appeals and is accessible to all pupils.

Our second conclusion was about how school sport is delivered. Pupils’ opportunities to become involved in school sports are often limited by a lack of facilities. For example, we were concerned about the availability of accessible swimming pools, especially as a recent survey by the Amateur Swimming Association found that around half of children aged between 7 and 11 could not swim 25 metres. Think about that; it is a truly sobering statistic.

That issue could be tackled through partnerships between schools to promote the sharing of facilities and, where possible, by encouraging private schools to make their pools available to local state schools. However, fruitful co-operation between schools is not simply a question of sharing physical resources; it also involves co-operating to set up sporting events. School sport partnerships were highly regarded by many witnesses. Their main strength lay in the links and networks that they created, particularly between school sport and community sport—the clubs in the communities around schools.

Evidence suggests that the Government’s decision to end funding for SSPs has had a negative impact on young people’s opportunities to access competitive sport in school. The Smith Institute reports that a third of schools have experienced a decrease in school sports since the end of the ring-fenced funding for SSPs. In our report, we recommended that the Government should devise a new strategy for school sport, building on the many positive elements of the SSP model. Can the Minister provide us with an update today on whether the Government intend to take such a strategy forward and, if so, on when we can expect it?

Our third finding related to the quality of sport teaching in schools. Ofsted has found that PE teaching needs improvement in 30% of the primary schools that it visited, and as I said earlier, it is at primary level that we need to get high-quality sport teaching in place, to build the positive attitudes, habits and interests for lifelong sporting activity. Research by the Youth Sport Trust shows that many primary teachers lack the confidence and competence to deliver PE properly.

In particular, we were very concerned by the discovery that many mainstream schools are unable to provide sport for disabled children, who are too often sent to the library instead of participating in sport. Initial teacher training for primary school teachers should include a more substantial course on PE, including PE for children with disabilities or special needs. When the Minister responds, I would be grateful to him if he clarified what action he will take to ensure that new teachers receive the training that they need, particularly at primary level, to deliver the transformation that the figures that I mentioned at the beginning of my speech show is clearly required.

If all these things are to take place, the right funding framework needs to be in place. The fourth conclusion of our report was that the Government need to ensure that sustained funding is available for school sport. Successive Governments have failed to provide long-term stability in this area, and the coalition should avoid falling into the same trap. The SSPs, which I have already mentioned, were undeniably expensive, and it is worth remembering that the previous Labour Government’s plan was not that SSPs should continue; they had planned for SSPs to come to an end.

The Government now propose to introduce the primary sport premium, which was announced in March this year. We believe that this programme is correctly focused on the primary phase of education. However, it is due to last for only two years. That is simply not long enough for schools to develop lasting provision. If the primary sport premium is not extended, this very worthwhile idea risks becoming yet another short-term fix.

Must we wait for a major sports event to be hosted in this country before the then Government announce some short-term measure? Occasional attempts at pump-priming or, more cynically, headline grabbing, are simply not good enough. We are also concerned that head teachers lack simple guidance on using this funding in the best way to meet the needs of their pupils and staff. Will the Minister therefore promise to look into how funding can be arranged for the long term? Will he also tell us what progress has been made on providing detailed guidance for schools, so that they can make the most of the primary sport premium in the time that it has left?

Of course, improving school sport is not simply a question of funding. Our fifth finding was that schools need to be made more accountable for their PE and sport provision. That would prevent resources from being diverted to areas on which schools are measured and held to account. Schools are rightly strongly held to account for the outcomes of their pupils, but where something is not a central focus for the school, it will be put to the side, and that happens all too often with sport.

Until 2010, schools were required to report on the number of pupils who participated in at least two hours a week of PE or sport. We acknowledge criticisms that that measure did not capture information about the quality of pupil engagement—it was not perfect—but we are concerned that, without some measure of activity, schools are not fully accountable for whether their pupils receive a decent amount of exercise. At the moment, it is highly unlikely that a head teacher will find their job under threat because they have failed woefully to provide for their pupils’ physical needs, so they concentrate entirely on the academic. We therefore recommended that schools be required to report annually on their website the proportion of children involved in at least two hours of core PE each week. If the Minister has alternative proposals, we would like to hear them, but sport at the moment goes by the bye, and that cannot be allowed to continue.

Beyond the time spent on PE and sport, the need to monitor the quality of teaching and provision was a theme that ran through all the evidence that we received. The Youth Sport Trust told us about school games kitemarks, which have been introduced to measure the quality of provision in schools. Schools should be encouraged to achieve such quality marks, but they should check that the scheme that they enter is sufficiently rigorous and meaningful.

I have summarised our main recommendations. Five months on from our report, where do we stand? I confess to being rather disappointed. Although the Government response to our report was broadly supportive, it avoided committing to specific actions or a changed agenda. It did not address our concern about the need for a longer-term funding commitment—quite the contrary. Nor did Ministers make any conclusive statements about their plans to improve schools’ access to sport facilities. Regarding our concern that schools need to be more accountable for the quality and quantity of sport provided, the response implied satisfaction with current accountability structures. Like many Government Members and possibly Opposition Members, I do not want unnecessary bureaucracy and regulation, but in a schools system driven by the outcomes on which schools are measured and held to account, we must ensure that important factors such as sport do not lose out, as they do today.

The Government response is all the more disappointing because, last month, the House of Lords Committee on Olympic and Paralympic Legacy published a report that largely echoed our concerns. It found that an exclusive focus on competitive sport risks discouraging some children from participating. That may be controversial in the Daily Mail, but I do not think that it is controversial with anyone who has had any experience of working with different children. The Committee reported that the difference in participation between young people with a limiting disability and those without is “unacceptably stark”. Its report highlighted the need for teachers, particularly in primary schools, to have specific training and skills to teach PE, and it called on the Government to conduct a review of initial training for specialist PE teachers. Their lordships also identified the importance of co-operation between schools, particularly between primary and secondary schools.

There is, therefore, great consensus about what needs to happen and about what is at stake. This summer, Public Health England reported that 70% of young people do not undertake the recommended one hour’s physical activity each day. What we do to address that lies in our hands. Sport is important for all our children, not just future Olympic hopefuls. I am optimistic that London 2012 can have a long-term legacy, but we need to do more to ensure that the promise that the games would “inspire a generation” is honoured in fact, not just in words.

If that is to happen, there is a challenge for every part of the system. Schools need to offer competitive and non-competitive sporting opportunities to maximise participation. The Government need to commit to longer-term funding provision and to hold schools properly to account. Teachers need to be properly trained, so they are confident in delivering high-quality PE and school sport. That is not rocket science, but it will require sustained funding, focus and ministerial support. In other words, it will require precisely the qualities that made the London Olympics such a success and that could now revitalise sport in our schools if Ministers take this opportunity.

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Sir Alan.

I congratulate the Select Committee on its excellent investigation into school sport. The report is important. It is very sad that we are having this debate. The Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), set out the case powerfully, and I pay tribute to him for his comments. There was a great festival of sport in 2012. After winning the bid in 2005, we talked a great deal about the need to build a legacy by using the opportunity to inspire a generation. Sadly, the foundation on which we should have been inspiring that generation—the structure through which we delivered school sport—was taken away. I commend the Select Committee on what it has done.

Modesty forbids me from commending the report published by the Smith Institute, which the Chair mentioned, because I edited it and wrote the foreword. A number of eminent people wrote essays in the report on how we should structure the future of school and community sport to try to put right what has clearly gone horribly wrong.

We have heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson), and from the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker), and there is broad consensus that school sport partnerships worked, that wider benefits come from people being involved in sport, and that there is a need for a long-term, coherent plan to take us forward on sports. That consensus is evident in the report and in the comments made today. It is worth considering the history, because the Government’s thinking has been inconsistent for some time.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

School sport partnerships were a characteristically very expensive and temporary arrangement by the previous Government, so it is not as if this Government have dismantled a long-term vision and framework. We have moved from one expensive and patchy system to another. Successive Governments have failed to provide the long-term framework and vision that we need.

[Clive Efford]

I am reluctant to differ with the hon. Gentleman, but school sport partnerships were in place for some time and had a major effect on participation in sport. I would accept his point if we had moved smoothly from one system to the other, but that is not what happened.

Prior to the general election, the then shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Mr Hunt), who is now Health Secretary, and the then shadow Sports Minister, the right hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Hugh Robertson), produced a document, “Extending Opportunities: A Conservative policy paper on sport.” Two things were mentioned in relation to school sports. First:

“The school environment provides the majority of children with their first experiences of sport. This experience is likely to govern their approach to sport for the rest of their lives.”

The document goes on to address the contribution of school sport partnerships. On the same page, the document states that the Conservative party would:

“Re-examine Building Schools for the Future to see how sports provision can be enhanced.”

I mention that document because the sad thing is that as soon as the Government came into office, both Building Schools for the Future, which, as the document recognises, improved school facilities, and the funding for school sport partnerships were taken away. That announcement was made in October 2010, and it was almost the kiss of death for two key elements of delivering sport in our schools. There is no doubt that Building Schools for the Future improved facilities in our schools; we could have used it to build a framework for delivering excellent sport provision, both competitive and non-competitive, in our schools. There was inconsistency between what the Government said before the election, and what they did after it.

It is also worth setting out what the school sport partnerships achieved, because in 2002 the PE and school sport survey highlighted that only one child in four was doing two hours of PE a week. Under the school sport partnerships, by 2007-08, the figure had increased to 90%. In fact, the success of school sport partnerships led in that year to steps being taken to introduce a target of three hours of PE a week, and the five-hour commitment meant that almost 55% of children were doing at least three hours of PE a week and were moving towards the five-hour commitment.

We set very challenging, but achievable, targets as a measure of our ambition. We wanted to get 2 million more people active and, by 2012, we wanted 60% of children to do five hours of PE a week during curriculum time and after school. Before the election, the then shadow Sports Minister said on Radio 5 Live that he thought it would be wrong to dismantle school sport partnerships after 13 years of work, and that his party would build on the partnerships. The Conservative party’s “Sport in schools” policy briefing note stated that schools would be

“free to enter as many or as few sports as they want, and there would be preliminary city and county heats, perhaps using the School Sport Partnerships infrastructure”.

Again, we see what the party went on to do.

The Conservative policy also states:

“We will also publish data about schools’ sports facilities and their provision of competitive sporting opportunities”.

In opposition, the Conservative party committed to introducing competitive sport in schools and went on and did it. The current Government built on the school games introduced by the previous Government, which is an excellent example of what can be achieved for sport in our schools, and I support what they have achieved, but as has been pointed out, the funding has a limited time scale, which makes me question whether it will exist in the long term. A consistent criticism—of both the previous and current Governments, I grant—is that what we need is some form of long-term planning. If the Government are to produce figures for participation in competitive sport, surely it follows that they should provide statistics on non-competitive sport, too, so that parents may have a clear idea of exactly what they can expect from physical and recreational activity provided to their children at school.

In 2010, money was taken away from the school sport partnerships with no consultation and no planning whatever. We have heard what Jonathan Edwards thought about that, and at the time many others were highly critical of what the Secretary of State for Education did without considering the consequences or putting anything else in place. That is a key point. The Secretary of State wrote to Baroness Campbell of Loughborough:

“I can confirm therefore that the Department will not continue to provide ring-fenced funding for school sport partnerships. I am also announcing that the Department is lifting, immediately, the many requirements of the previous Government's PE and Sport Strategy, so giving schools the clarity and freedom to concentrate on competitive school sport.”

He continued with a list:

“I am removing the need for schools to:

Plan and implement their part of a ‘five hour offer’”—

so the five-hour offer was off the agenda—

“Collect information about every pupil for an annual survey;”—

so we had no idea what was going on in schools—

“Deliver a range of new Government sport initiatives each year;”—

if we are trying to get uniformity of delivery across schools, why would one want that?—and

“Report termly to the Youth Sport Trust on various performance indicators”.

I might actually sympathise with that last one, because the Youth Sport Trust was heavy on data collection, but that does not justify the Government taking away all its funding and that of school sport partnerships in the way that they did. Everyone has said that the partnerships were a foundation on which we could have built. If things were wrong, we could have altered or reformed them to make them more effective.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Timpson]

Absolutely. As in other areas of a child’s life—internet safety, for example—parental involvement and responsibility have to form part of the solution, so that whether children are in or out of school they get the same message. We have heard about some recent cases of over-exuberance among parents on the touchline, when perhaps they have taken that responsibility a little too far, but we want to see parents more involved in holding schools to account, as well as in helping the schools to deliver sport and PE, so that their children get the best opportunities.

That is one of the reasons why, as part of the sport premium, schools have to publish on their website how they are spending it and what impact it is having, so that parents can see for themselves, form judgments and ask questions about whether it is doing what it set out to do. In answer to another question from the hon. Member for Eltham, that would include competitive and non-competitive sport in that school—it is not only competitive sport that will be part of that transparency.

To dwell on the history is always an interesting exercise when discussing school sport. I do not wish to chastise the hon. Gentleman for wanting to return to many of those issues, but it would be healthier for our children if we concentrated on the future and on where we can find joint enterprise to build on some fantastic work being done out there, spreading it more widely and making it more sustainable. That is why the cornerstone of our approach is the focus on improving provision in primary schools. I welcome the broad support for that both in this debate and more widely. Since September 2012, I have, with officials in the Department, spent a lot of time talking to head teachers, national governing bodies, Youth Sport Trust, Sport England, the Association for Physical Education and others, so as to understand where the money could have the greatest impact. The overwhelming consensus was that we should channel our energies towards the primary level.

That is why from autumn this year primary head teachers across the country have started to receive additional funding to improve the provision of PE and sport in their schools. The money is ring-fenced. The hon. Member for Eltham said that the Government’s philosophy is to give head teachers the freedom to spend money in the way they think is best for their pupils. This additional funding fulfils that objective, but the ring-fencing makes it clear how high a priority we place on ensuring that PE and sport in schools is of the highest possible calibre.

That is backed up by the fact that PE and sports provision is and will continue to be inspected by Ofsted, which is briefing all its inspectors on how to do that. There have also been changes to the school inspection handbook. I have seen for myself some of the section 5 inspection reports, in which far more prominence is already being given to the evaluation of how the school sport premium is being spent. I saw a report for a primary school in my own constituency that has clubbed together with other schools to bring in a full-time specialist PE teacher. The teacher spends one day a week in each of the four primary schools and on the fifth day goes to those pupils who need extra catch-up so that they can get to the level we all want to see.

My hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) reminded us that the head teacher of a typical primary school will receive £9,250 to spend on sport provision between now and the summer term. The hon. Member for Sefton Central astutely observed that the premium has now been extended in the autumn statement to a third year, to include 2015-16. I do not for a minute want to suggest that my hon. Friend the Chairman of the Education Committee has not had his eye on the ball: to be absolutely fair to him, he attended the previous debate in this Chamber and the extension is in paragraph 2.164 of the autumn statement, so he is forgiven for failing on this occasion to have spotted such a hugely important announcement.

That announcement is an unequivocal demonstration of the importance that we attach to the embedding of school sport and PE in children’s lives. I am happy to repeat what I told the Select Committee: I want to keep pushing the issue within Government. Although it is often one of the most difficult exercises across Government, an important aspect of the cross-Government strategy on the issue has been pulling in funding and ongoing commitment from three Departments. I chair a regular ministerial group on school sport, which includes Youth Sport Trust, Sport England, the Association for Physical Education, Ofsted and others. There continues to be a joint commitment on funding and other resources.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Does the Minister think that the move of public health responsibility to local authorities might have a part to play in engendering a greater focus on youth sport and school sport in particular?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Graham Stuart]

This has been a great debate and an unusual one. We have ended with the Minister stating that he wants the model of the primary sport premium to be sustained as the Government’s objective. The Opposition spokesman has offered to work with the Minister, and the Minister has said how much he would welcome that—exactly the message that people involved in sport want to hear. We all collectively look forward to seeing a long-term approach to sport in our schools that turns around our children’s lives and ensures that the next generation is healthier, rather than less healthy, than the one that went before.

Question put and agreed to.

PISA Results

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his comments. He taxed me for demonstrating partisanship and indulging in personal attacks. I am glad that we had the opportunity to witness four minutes entirely free from those sins.

First, let me turn to the whole question of qualified teachers. It is the case that there are now fewer unqualified teachers in our schools than under Labour. In 2009, there were 17,400 unqualified teachers, in 2010, just before Labour left office, there were 17,800 and there are now only 14,800, a significant reduction. Indeed, those teachers who are now joining the profession are better qualified than ever before. In 2009, just before the Labour party lost office, only 61% of teachers had a 2:1 or better as their undergraduate degree. Under the coalition Government, the figure is 74%, which is a clear improvement that has been driven by the changes that we have introduced. It has been reinforced by the introduction of the school direct system, which I invited the hon. Gentleman to applaud and welcome—he declined to do so—and which has secured even more top graduates with a 2:1 or better, including a first, in our schools.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned Sweden. Unfortunately, it is the case that in Sweden results have slid, but as I said earlier, not only do we need to grant greater autonomy, as has been done for school leaders in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and elsewhere, but we need a more rigorous system of accountability. We heard nothing from him on how we would improve accountability. There was no indication as to whether or not he supports, as he has indicated in the past, our English baccalaureate measure. There was no indication from him, as there has been in the past, as to whether or not he supports A-level reform, and there was no indication, as there has been in the past, that he believes in a rigorous academic curriculum for all. The terrible truth about the situation that we face in our schools is that Labour does not have a strong record to defend, and it does not have a strong policy to advance. That is why the coalition Government are committed to reform, and that is why, I am afraid, the hon. Gentleman must do better.

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

Today’s figures are extremely sobering. They are an indictment of the previous Government’s education policy. There was a massive investment in education, a huge effort was put into education, and we went nowhere. We need to hear from the Secretary of State how his reforms will ensure that in future years—probably not so early as three years from now, but six years from now—we see the change that we require. In particular, will he tell us what he can do to promote maths and science for girls, because we cannot have so many females left behind in this country?

[Michael Gove]

I thank the Chairman of the Select Committee on Education for his wise words. He is absolutely right—there was a significant increase in investment and, as I mentioned in my statement, we have one of the most socially just systems of education funding in the developed world. However, we did not move forward as we should have done. My hon. Friend asks, of course, when we will see the fruits of our reform programme. As Andreas Schleicher of the OECD asked yesterday: is it too early on the basis of these results to judge the coalition reforms? Absolutely, we could not possibly judge the coalition Government on these results, he said. We are “moving from” ideas “to implementation”, and 2015 would be the very earliest.

My hon. Friend makes the vital point that we need to do more to promote mathematics and science. The English baccalaureate does that. The increased emphasis in many academies and free schools that have opened under the Government does that, but there is still more that we can do, and I shall meet representatives from higher education and our best schools just before Christmas to see what we can do to encourage more girls to do even better in mathematics and science.