Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Willetts]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his ingenuity in pursuing that constituency case, about which we have corresponded. Just as he was with the Pfizer case at Sandwich, he is a persistent hon. Member and I congratulate him on that. However, we believe that if we were to take the ingenious approach he proposes, it might mean that the 10,000 undergraduates currently benefiting from financial support lose it.

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

18. What assessment he has made of the difficulties faced by apprentices aged 19 and over in obtaining adequate funding for level 3 qualifications.

[The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning (Mr John Hayes)]

The Government are investing significantly in adult apprenticeships, with earmarked investment of £679 million in 2011-12. We rely on employers coming forward to make places available and many more are doing so every day, week and month. There were 114,900 starts in 2010-11—nearly twice as many as in the previous year—for those aged over 19.

[Mr Stuart]

The Minister not only champions apprenticeships but facilitates their delivery and I congratulate him on that. May I ask him to consider introducing a flexible three-year contract for young apprenticeships, with a break clause after year 2, so that there is an equalisation of funding for young apprenticeships on courses both before and after their 19th birthdays?

[Mr Hayes]

Knowing my hon. Friend’s expertise and commitment to this subject, when I saw his question I spoke to my officials and got an interesting response from them. I think that if we better estimate at the outset people’s prospects of progression, we may well be able to take account of what my hon. Friend says. I invite him, as I did earlier, to come to the Department to talk that through and to see what changes we can make to remove any disincentives of the kind to which he refers.

New Schools

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

May I thank the hon. Gentleman for his generous words and welcome him back to the Front Bench? He was a superb Minister in the Department for Education. Like Lord Adonis and the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), he was a reformist in government and I am more than happy to underline my appreciation for the work that he did. He is the third shadow Education Secretary whom I have faced across the Dispatch Box. His two predecessors indulged in raucous opportunistic assaults on our reform programme and were promoted as a consequence. I realise that there is now a battle between ambition and principle in the hon. Gentleman’s breast. I know that he will choose principle, as he always has done throughout his political career.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the support that he has given to the university technical colleges. They are emphatically a cross-party achievement. Lord Adonis played a part. I think others, including the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), acted as fairy godfathers to the project. I am delighted that UTCs have their support.

It is important to recognise that the English baccalaureate is there to ensure that students pursue the sort of subjects that will get them into universities. The great advantage of university technical colleges is that they also have that link with higher education institutions that help to raise aspiration for all. There is no single tool that will raise aspiration in all our communities. We have to use whatever tools are to hand. I believe that the English baccalaureate, as so many head teachers are demonstrating, helps alongside high quality vocational education, to raise aspirations and increase the number of students going into higher education.

The hon. Gentleman said that when he was looking at free schools, he wanted to apply a series of tests. The tests that he asked me to apply are: will they extend opportunity, will they drive up standards, will they have a fair admissions policy and will they close the attainment gap? Those are four sensible tests, and I would add a fifth—can they ensure that we have a low-cost way of adding capacity to our school system so that exactly the solution to the problem that he alluded to, the need for good school places, was found at the lowest possible cost?

The hon. Gentleman asked me about capital and drew attention to the difficulties that we have with capital in the Department for Education. These difficulties, I am afraid, are a consequence of economic decisions that were taken while he was out of the House by his successors in the Labour Government, and they landed us with a poisoned economic legacy. We are doing our very best to deal with it, and one of the things that we can do is ensure that we get more schools more cheaply. That is why I am so delighted that as well as the additional sums that have been made available for school repair, and as well as the additional sums that we are making available for new schools, the free schools programme has seen schools being delivered at a unit cost lower than was the case under the Labour Government’s school building programme.

Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked me whether I regretted not getting the same settlement for the Department for Education as other Government Departments. No, I do not regret it. I am delighted that we secured the same level of funding in cash terms for education as the previous Government had secured. I am delighted that we had the best revenue deal of any domestic Department, apart from the Department of Health. I am overjoyed that, thanks to the support of our coalition partners, there is £2.5 billion of additional money going in the pupil premium to the very poorest schools. It is additional money being spent in a progressive cause, and it is deliverable only thanks to the leadership shown by two parties working together in the national interest.

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

The Secretary of State is bringing choice and diversity to our education system while seeing off his shadow at the same time.

For too many 14-year-olds school is an ordeal from which they learn and benefit not at all. I welcome the support for more UTCs, but for those who do not have the choice of a UTC, what steps will the Secretary of State take to ensure that young 14-year-olds can go to college instead of school if they wish?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, which is that we need to think hard about the paths that those from the age of 14 will follow. One of the things that I believe we can do is ensure that high quality further education colleges make available their resources, whether through sponsoring underperforming schools or allowing lecturers or others from FE colleges to operate in schools. Following on from the Wolf report, we have already changed the law to allow that to happen. But there is more that can be done to integrate the great work that FE colleges and schools do.

Careers Service (Young People)

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend puts her question very well. The Government have got their priorities completely and utterly wrong. If I were a young person watching these proceedings tonight, I would be asking why since the coalition Government came to power they had singled out young people for this barrage of cuts. Do they think that young people are an easy touch? I do not know, but that is what I would be asking if I were them. I would also be asking what an elected police commissioner was going to do to improve life in the community. Very little, I would suggest. I return to the point that I was making earlier. If Government Members do not think that an impersonal, remote service is good enough for their children, they should not accept such a service for anyone else’s children in their constituency.

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

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) said, everyone in the House would like to see high-quality careers advice, but a little humility might be required all round, not least from representatives of the previous Government, under whom the number of young people not in employment increased in this country despite the fact that it fell in other OECD countries. Furthermore, as their own report showed, at the end of their term in office, the standard of careers advice for young people was palpably poor. Does the shadow Secretary of State agree with the Government’s intention to take the decision making down to school level and let the school decide what is most appropriate? In many cases, that will involve face-to-face advice, although I do share his desire to see greater resources allocated to that.

[Andy Burnham]

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for his question. He calls for humility, but I acknowledged at the beginning of the debate that we did not get the Connexions service perfect and that we were prepared to work with the Government. I pay tribute to him in leading the Select Committee’s production of a very good report that comes to the right conclusions on this issue. It is possible for schools, with sufficient support, to provide face-to-face advice, although I do not think that he or I would want to go back to the days when the PE teacher or some other member of staff was responsible for giving careers advice and did not do a particularly good job of it. We need independent, good-quality, face-to-face advice.

There is an important point to be made about conflicts of interest. At 16, young people face choices about whether to go on to further education college or sixth-form college, or whether to stay at their school. It is important, in the highly competitive world that the Government are creating, that the careers adviser in the school should not have a vested interest in advising the young person to stay there if that would not be the best option for them. That needs to be thought through, but, without a transition plan, we have no means of judging what will happen. The Government have simply not provided us with any detail.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Twigg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. I was going to make a similar point later, but she has made it very powerfully.

The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, who is not here this evening, has been cautious in his criticism of the previous Government’s programmes, and rightly so. Of course, as Members on both sides of the House have said, there were serious imperfections with Connexions and Next Step, but we must be careful not to write off the positive features and the important work of many talented and committed professionals who have worked, as some still do, in those programmes.

Today, in advance of tonight’s debate, I spoke to people in some of the secondary schools in my constituency. Those at St John Bosco school in Croxteth told me about the work they have been doing with the Aimhigher programme. They have drawn particularly on the importance of the role of face-to-face contact by employing a graduate mentor to assist the girls at the school with their university applications and career development. This is a school in a very deprived neighbourhood that has an excellent reputation and a high percentage of its girls going on to university.

Cardinal Heenan school for boys has pioneered a particularly innovative approach to careers advice. I want to commend Dave Forshaw, the head teacher, and his team for their industry day programme, which I have had the opportunity to visit on two occasions. The programme draws on alumni, partners and a range of local organisations to deliver rich and effective careers advice, starting in year 7. Its recent industry days have had contributions from a former pupil of the school, the actor Ian Hart, who appeared in the Harry Potter films, as well as local and national journalists, sports professionals, solicitors, accountants and others. West Derby school has adopted a similar approach and held its first careers convention last year.

I cite those examples because they demonstrate two important points. The first is the critical importance of giving information and advice at an early age. Too often, these things are left too late. The second is the importance of drawing on expertise, including among the alumni of the schools themselves, to inspire young people.

The head teachers of those schools said to me today that quality careers advice needs resources. They are very concerned about what they see as a potential shift in policy away from face-to-face interaction to online and telephone-based services. My right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State set out the research published by Unison that was done at the university of Derby, which shows the sheer scale of the cuts in careers services up and down the country. That is the backdrop for this important debate.

Some of this debate has focused on low-cost solutions and how effective they are in delivery. I would like to bring the House’s attention to the work of an organisation called Future First. It has done excellent research on careers services. Like the head teachers of the schools in my constituency that I have cited, it emphasises that careers advice cannot be reduced to online information and telephone services. A complementary model is surely the best way forward. Future First seeks to increase social mobility by building communities of alumni around state schools to inspire young people about their futures.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is giving a passionate speech. He has just said that careers advice should be complementary, and I agree. However, the Opposition motion does not say that the Government should seek to find additional funds to provide face-to-face careers advice; it says that all young people should be provided with face-to-face careers advice whether they need it or not. That does not sound complementary; it sounds like the cumbersome over-specified and overly expensive processes that we saw too much of under the previous Government.

[Stephen Twigg]

Not at all. What I mean by complementary, and what I understand Future First to mean by complementary, is that we need face-to-face advice, but that that is not enough. We also need the other projects to which I and other Members have referred.

School Funding Reform

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. A great many right hon. and hon. Members are seeking to catch my eye, but I remind the House that there is another statement to follow and a series of very heavily subscribed debates to take place under the auspices of the Backbench Business Committee, as a consequence of which there is a premium on brevity from Back and Front Bench alike.

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

I welcome the statement from the Secretary of State. Too many areas, particularly rural areas, have suffered from grossly inequitable funding for too long. I welcome what the Secretary of State said because rural areas have additional costs, which are not met by current funding. Can he assure the House that we will not falter in moving to fairer funding and we will put real need ahead of political convenience in bringing forward a national funding formula in due course?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct.

School Closures (Thursday)

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I was grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for the constructive way in which he began his response, but I think that, on reflection, he will consider the way in which he concluded it to be irresponsible at this time. The whole House wants to see people keeping level heads and maintaining an even temper at this time, and the fact that he chose to ratchet up the rhetoric in that way was not appropriate.

I am grateful to him for supporting the direction of Lord Hutton’s reforms and for his initial words about the responsibility of all local authorities and heads to keep schools open in order to ensure that we do everything possible to minimise disruption. Because teachers are employed by local authorities and individual heads, individual local authorities and heads have to depend on teachers telling them whether they will be on strike before making contingency arrangements. That is a direct consequence of the labour laws that we inherited from the right hon. Gentleman’s Government. If he believes that those laws should change, and that we should reform trade union laws, I should like to know about it.

The right hon. Gentleman asked us to update Members of the House with data, and we will do so. At the first available opportunity when the data are reliable, we will share them with hon. Members, with local authorities and with individual parents. He also asked us to do everything possible to keep children safe and secure. The safety of children is always my first concern, and that is why I want to see schools remain open, and why I have written to local authorities and outlined the flexibilities that they have. It is also why I have drawn their attention to the statutory guidance that covers health and safety and child protection.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to the 3% surcharge that is being placed on pensions. As a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, he should be aware that every aspect of the pension reform that we are bringing forward is a direct result of the dire mess in which he and his colleagues left our economy. If people want to know why our pensions have to be reformed, they need only look at the financial mess that was made—[Interruption.] I am afraid that the intemperate response coming from the Opposition Benches reinforces the guilty consciences on that side of the House.

The right hon. Gentleman also quoted from a speech that I gave to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. It is important that he not mislead the House or anyone listening—[Hon. Members: “Oh!”] I am sure that he would never do so intentionally, which is why I hope that he will stress that the proposals that we are putting forward respect the accrued rights of all those who have been in state pension schemes up until this moment—[Hon. Members: “Withdraw.”] I know that he would wish to make that clear.

The right hon. Gentleman also said that, in the last year of the Labour Government, we had the lowest number ever of days lost to strike action. The truth is that, in the past year under this coalition Government, we have lost even fewer days to strike action. If we are to maintain that record, we need calm on both sides of the House, and not the pandering to the union gallery that we heard at the end of the right hon. Gentleman’s comments.

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

Does the Secretary of State agree that it is irresponsible for union leaders in the teaching unions who are on six-figure salaries to lead teachers out on strike when two thirds of their members did not even vote in the ballot? Does he also agree that this action will undermine and damage the education of children and the status of the teaching profession?

[Michael Gove]

We all listen with respect to the Select Committee, and its Chairman is quite right. The general secretaries of those trade unions have, throughout their careers, shown a commitment to improving state education. I therefore believe that their motives are right in most circumstances. On this occasion, however, they have made a mistake and they should acknowledge it.

Munro Report

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon]

rose—

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

rose—

[Tim Loughton]

I will give way to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and then to my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), but after that I would quite like to make some progress; otherwise nobody else will get in.

[Tim Loughton]

I am grateful. I am planning a visit to Belfast next month, and if the hon. Gentleman’s colleague would like to meet me, I would be delighted.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

When the Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families looked into the training of social workers in the last Parliament, it found that they could find themselves dealing with the most acute and difficult children’s cases having had placements in their training that did not involve children’s social work at all. They went from having no experience at all to the front line. Has the Minister been able to do anything about that yet, and if not will he tell the House what he will do about it?

[Tim Loughton]

The Chairman of the Select Committee on Education again makes a very good point and he has a good deal of expertise in this matter. It is completely self-defeating for newly recruited social workers to be turfed in at the deep end on tier 3 or 4 cases—serious cases—with little experience or expertise. How demoralising is that, let alone the danger it poses for the vulnerable children who need to have the appropriate level of support?

A number of things need to be done and they are being done. We need to ensure that we have the right calibre of people coming out of universities with degrees in social work. In the first year after their qualification, they should be given on-the-job guidance and training, preferably by people with great expertise. They should be eased into jobs at an appropriate rate in appropriate circumstances. My hon. Friend raises a very important point. Virtually every week I speak to social workers and visit children’s services departments—I make a point of seeing social workers on the front line—but I have met too many who are given challenges for which they are not appropriately equipped at that stage.

I should like to make progress now because I am keen for other hon. Members to contribute and I have a few more points to make. I got up to recommendation 10—I do not know why recommendation 9 brought about the pause that it did. Recommendation 10 is that the Government should place a duty on local authorities and statutory partners to secure the sufficient provision of local early help services for children, young people and families. That is very appropriate to the early intervention work that the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) has been doing for the Department.

Recommendation 11 is that the social work reform board’s professional capabilities framework should incorporate the capabilities necessary for child and family social work. That is precisely the point that the Chairman of the Education Committee just raised. That framework should explicitly inform social work qualification training, postgraduate professional development and performance appraisal.

Recommendation 12 is that employers and higher education institutions should work together so that social work students are prepared for the challenges of child protection work, including through better quality placements.

Recommendation 13 is that local authorities and their partners should start an ongoing process to review and redesign the ways in which child and family social work is delivered.

Recommendation 14—I am almost there without taking another intervention—is that local authorities should designate a principal child and family social worker who can report the views and experiences of the front line to all levels of management. I have too often seen good social workers, who have built up good reputations and who are really good hands-on, get promoted, become managers and get stuck behind a desk. In that way, we lose front-line expertise. Some models, such as the one in Hackney, mean that people can gain seniority within their profession but not lose contact with people at the sharp end and the families that they entered the profession to help.

The 15th and final recommendation is that a chief social worker should be created to advise the Government and to bring the voice of the profession to policy. That was discussed recently in relation to the Health and Social Care Bill, and it was a recommendation of my report back in 2007.

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[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady is right and will know that we have been doing a lot of work on adoption. I have set up a ministerial advisory group with all sorts of people, and we have issued new guidance, as I said earlier. We need to balance timeliness with appropriateness to ensure that where it is clear—it is not always so—that an adoptive placement is the best way forward and in the best interests of the child, we get on with it.

There are, I have to say, some people who, usually because of excessive addiction to drugs and alcohol and a complete failure to rehabilitate, will never be able safely to bring up children in their care. I have sat in family courts and seen parents—usually single mothers— have their ninth, 10th or 11th child taken into the care system. If that parent’s situation has not improved, can we be sure that it will ever improve? Need we take that risk, and wait years while a child is kept in an abusive situation? Again, those decisions require the judgment of Solomon, which is why I will shortly be holding a round-table meeting with a group of judges from the family court, directors of children services and chairmen of adoption panels to consider how we can make the adoption process better, more efficient, more robust and fairer; to ensure that we are making the right decisions for the too many children who are left in the system and could benefit from adoption; and to ensure that we are not taking into adoption children for whom it is not appropriate. I know that there are concerns there as well.

Finally, we need to remember in our policies the particular needs of vulnerable young people and the fact that they have the same right to enjoy the rich experiences of growing up, the transition to adulthood and becoming valuable members of society as those lucky enough to be part of safe, loving and stable birth families of their own. I recognise that it is vital for the sensible policy put forward by Professor Munro to be backed up by proper investment. As my hon. Friends will be aware, the Government have already announced some funding to support work force development, but the real cost is the cost of failure. The current system needs fixing. Because it needs fixing, huge amounts of resource are wasted. One local authority that has been working with Professor Munro and the review team as a “journey authority” calculated that around 50% of its children’s social care workers’ time is wasted in nugatory activity that does not add to the quality of service or outcomes, which is something that the authority is now starting to recoup—a resounding endorsement of the need to eliminate unnecessary red tape if ever there was one.

Few things are more important than helping and protecting vulnerable children and young people. In our first year in government, we have shown in the wide range of actions that we have taken—on child protection, children in care, adoption, fostering and dealing with the sexual exploitation of children—that we are deeply committed to tackling these issues, and I am determined to ensure that we make progress. Sadly, we need to recognise that despite Government reforms and the hard work of professionals, tragedies will still happen. There are individuals who will harm children. We cannot eliminate that risk, but we can all work to help to reduce and manage it—indeed, we all have a duty to do so. Society is right to expect professionals to take responsibility and make the best judgments that they can in the best interests of children. Those judgments will not always be the right ones, but they need to have been made for the right reasons and on the best possible evidence.

This Government believe that we need to move towards a child protection system with less central prescription and interference, and in which we place greater trust and responsibility in skilled professionals on the front line. Professor Munro has provided us with a thorough analysis of the issues. It is now for the Government, working with the sector, to help to bring about sustainable reform. That is why I have established an implementation working group, drawing in expertise from local authority children’s services, the social work profession, education, police and the health service, to work with the Government to develop a response to Professor Munro’s recommendations by the summer recess. We are today publishing on the Department for Education website the first account of the group’s deliberations, which started at the end of last month.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Tim Loughton]

Before I reach the final line of my speech, I will give way to my hon. Friend.

[Mr Stuart]

I am delighted to hear that those other agencies are represented on the implementation group. Will my hon. Friend say a little more about the group’s remit and how we can ensure that other Departments integrate with it, so that it is not just the social work profession that looks to respond to the Munro review?

[Tim Loughton]

The Chairman of the Select Committee on Education makes a good point. The people serving on the group, whose names are published on the website, have been chosen not because they are the great and the good—although I am sure many of them are great and some of them are good—but because they are experienced practitioners with expertise in their particular areas. For example, we have on the group the chief safeguarding expert from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and a safeguarding expert from the NHS Confederation. We also have the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Anne Milton), who is the Minister responsible for public health, a senior headmistress of a secondary school, a senior headmistress of a primary school, a senior police officer with a long record in child protection, a real social worker from the front line, along with a Labour councillor from an authority with a good track record in child protection, and so on.

This is absolutely about getting all the right parts of the jigsaw together and trying to produce a system that, by working together from the same song sheet and with the same priorities and the Government’s backing, produces an environment that ensures that we can keep more of our children safer. Today’s debate—even though I have taken up rather too much of it, and more than I had intended—will help to inform the implementation group’s response. I very much look forward to my hon. Friends’ contributions this afternoon.

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[Toby Perkins]

The hon. Lady makes a valuable point. The Munro review recognises the significant steps made in the direction of partnership working and some of the challenges, particularly in difficult financial circumstances. The report also deals with other innovations that might be needed to help achieve the hon. Lady’s suggestion in her valuable point.

The report’s recommendations on the education, training and continuous professional development of social workers are an important step forward. We entirely endorse the review’s commitment to the highest standards and consistency of education, the importance of the highest quality of practice placements and the new supported and assessed first year in practice, acting as the final stage of becoming a fully practising social worker. We recognise that more must be done to strengthen the quality of social work in this country, and a real commitment to improving education and recruitment will be very welcome.

We also believe that the recommendation for local authorities to appoint a principal children’s and family social worker could play an important role in ensuring that the voice of those who safeguard our most vulnerable children is heard loud and clear in every town hall in the land.

We particularly welcome the further support for early intervention to identify and work on problems as soon as they are presented. Professor Munro particularly identifies the importance of early intervention whenever it occurs in a child’s life, and we entirely agree with her on that. Although many families that require the help of social services might appear likely to head down the wrong path in life from an early stage, changing circumstances can mean that children and families hit problems and need support at any time in the childhood journey—and the earlier those problems are identified and the more broadly all parties work together, the better the chance that families can be kept together and problems averted before they become impossible to deal with.

The review also focuses at length on the importance of partnership working, extolling the virtues of the existing networks in early years practice and the importance of a constructive relationship with the police, mental health services, adult social services and health professionals. The review expresses the fear that widespread changes and the desperate financial position in which some public services find themselves could lead to a fracturing of the partnerships. Indeed, we are already seeing evidence of that.

We know from the Secretary of State’s letter to Professor Munro, the choice of Professor Munro to head the review team, and the press releases that have emanated from the Department for Education that the need to cut paperwork and bureaucracy in order to enable social workers to do what they should be doing is intended to be a prominent theme, but anyone who focused solely on that element of the report would greatly undermine its quality and depth. I hope that no one will again attempt such a paraphrase, because the quality of the research and the importance of the issue deserve better. I am thankful that the Minister went far beyond that in his speech today.

We welcome the recognition of the importance of administrative support for social workers so that they can spend more time in the field. It is sad, however, that that comes at a time when Unison is reporting that many of its members with administrative roles are among the first to be laid off in councils. Administration and record-keeping vital: they can save social workers’ time, and are invaluable to the quality of their intervention. No one in this House wants to prevent social workers from spending as much time as possible working with children and families, and we all know that social workers themselves do not go into the profession with the dream of sitting at a wooden desk typing away.

There is no doubt that the review team considered at length the amount of central prescription and the amount of time spent on administration—matters that have also concerned the profession and its representative bodies and unions. We support the pilot schemes that are taking place in four authorities with the aim of relaxing time scales. They are at an early stage, but we look forward to the outcome. We urge the Minister to ensure that the additional quality assurance measures referred to in appendix D and implemented in Hackney are tightly observed while those trials are being completed, and that before anything is done to make the changes widespread, the full implications of those changes are understood.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman touched on the subject of bureaucracy, but he did not make his views clear. Does he accept that there was too much prescription from the centre, does he accept that it was getting in the way of effective social work, and will he give an undertaking that a future Labour Government would not seek to reverse sensible, practical and common-sense attempts to reduce bureaucracy and ensure that the priority is given to the front line?

[Toby Perkins]

I shall deal with that point in some detail later. However, I can say that we support the trials that are taking place. If the professionals feel that some measures can safely be dispensed with, that is acceptable as long as safeguards are established, as they have been in Hackney, to prevent slippage of cases. We do not want social workers to lose sight of the importance of some cases along with the paperwork.

The report is evidence based, and Professor Munro identifies both excitement and anxiety in the profession about the steps to be taken. Throughout its time in government Labour took advice from experts seriously, as the present Government are doing.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

We gave an answer to that excellent report with the publication of our White Paper, “The Importance of Teaching”. From that title, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will draw the appropriate inference that there is nothing more important than teaching.

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

The James review found that school buildings that are beyond being merely fit for purpose make no real contribution to educational standards and that teaching and leadership are what make the difference to outcomes for children, not least in our weakest schools. Will the Secretary of State explain the difference in spending patterns that will be implemented by this Government as compared with those of the previous Government?

[Michael Gove]

That is a typically good question from the Education Committee Chairman. Unlike the previous Government, we will not be wasting money on a capital programme that is out of control and bureaucratic. Instead, we will be investing money in making sure that more of the very best graduates go into teaching and we will be expanding opportunities for inspirational figures such as Peter Hyman to open new free schools and target the disadvantaged, who need them most.

Vocational Education

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Commons Chamber

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

Professor Wolf might not have thought that the English baccalaureate on its own could distort and harm outcomes for the poorest in our schools, but I have to say that the Chairman of the Select Committee feels that it could. However, I welcome what the Secretary of State has said today about building a balanced score card. Can we work to create a consensus across the House that what we need is an assessment and accountability framework that gives equal weight to the progress of every child? We do not want too complicated a set of targets, but we need a system that works, allowing schools to get on with it and deliver for everyone.

[Michael Gove]

That is a very good point. It is rather a shame that the view of some Labour Members—which is not shared by my hon. Friend—is that working-class children cannot achieve academic excellence. [Interruption.] I am afraid that that is the view of Opposition Front Benchers. Labour Members therefore feel that this is somehow an unfair and elitist measure, but I think that it is an aspirational measure. My hon. Friend is absolutely right: we need to ensure that all the abilities of all children are recognised, whatever their background. Labour Members need to return to the aspirational educational model that we saw under Lord Adonis, the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) and the former right hon. Member for Sedgefield, which was sadly abandoned three years ago.

Education Bill

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Commons Chamber

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

I share the sentiments expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Mr Gyimah) about the need to put the interests of the children first, but, as he said that it was a probing new clause, it would not be right to weaken the protection of those who teach and work in some of our toughest and most challenging schools. We have to send out the message—I think my hon. Friend the Minister has just done so—that, although we will protect and support the rights of the people who work in the toughest schools, we will ensure that we have a performance management framework that challenges underperformance, and we will not be afraid to restructure when putting new measures in place.

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend is right, and the Government are committed to protecting those employment rights.

The underperformance of teachers is not necessarily the only reason why schools underperform; there is a whole host of reasons, one of which is that schools are burdened by bureaucracy. One key measure that we implemented in the opening months of the Administration was a reduction in the amount of bureaucracy and prescription that has been heaped on teachers over the past 10 years. With those few comments, I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey will not press his probing new clause any further.

I turn to the new clause tabled by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field). We welcome the many initiatives in the independent schools sector, assisted by the schools themselves through bursaries and scholarships and by many charities, to support children who would not otherwise be able to receive an independent school education. The right hon. Gentleman may have seen the article in The Times today by Lord Adonis and Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Wellington college, urging the independent sector to sponsor more academies, and we share the views of those two contributors. That should be happening, and we want to see more independent schools sponsoring academies, but the Government’s priority is to transform the state education system so that all children are able to access a good-quality education regardless of their background.

Our independent schools provide some of the best education in the world, according to the OECD and other commentators, and we are keen to encourage greater collaboration between the sectors so that best practice can be shared and schools can work more effectively together in the best interests of pupils and staff, but the right hon. Gentleman’s new clause is neither desirable nor necessary.

An academy is free to further its education objectives by using any funds it is able to raise through charitable donations or other similar sources, but academy funding agreements regulate the way in which such schools can use taxpayer funding. The general annual grant paid by the Secretary of State can be spent by an academy only on its normal running costs, and we have no intention of changing that. That does not mean academies cannot buy in additional support from independent schools or collaborate with them on joint provision, but the bulk of state funding should rightly be used to raise educational attainment and standards for the benefit of all pupils in the academy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Brady]

Absolutely. The right hon. Gentleman is entirely correct. No new selective schools would be created under the new clause. The country would have the same schools that it has at the moment, but those schools would be able to accept people regardless of parental means and the ability to pay. It would bring more excellent schools into the state sector, satisfying the objective of the Minister.

This is not a theoretical situation. I first became interested in this area because many years ago, two independent schools in my constituency did precisely this. They opted into the state sector, in those days as grant-maintained schools. St Ambrose college and Loreto grammar school, which are both Roman Catholic selective schools, were welcomed by a previous Conservative Government into the state sector, and were allowed to maintain their ethos and admissions rules. St Ambrose college is an excellent school, which educated three Members of this House, including my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds). This could be called the St Ambrose and Loreto new clause.

Not only would the new clause restore the ability for excellent independent schools to come into the state sector in the way that they could under the previous Conservative Government, it would end the unfortunate state of affairs that has pertained since. Again, that is not a theoretical point. Some years ago, William Hulme’s grammar school in Manchester became an academy, but under the previous Government it was forced to abandon its selective admissions policy and become a comprehensive school. It is still a good school, but regrettably, it was required to change its ethos in a way that it had no desire to do. More worryingly, that process is continuing today. As the Minister knows, Batley grammar school is in the process of becoming an academy. Shockingly, under the present Government, it, too, is being required to change its ethos and its admissions policy in a way that would not have been required had it been a state school transferring to academy status.

I am aware of other independent schools that would be interested in pursuing this route if the Minister and the Secretary of State were to open the door to them. That point is important. Typically, these are schools that value their independence and their selective ethos, but have no desire to charge fees that might deny access to some able boys and girls who would benefit from the education that they offer. Frequently, like Batley grammar school, they are not in the most prosperous parts of the country. This measure would clearly extend opportunity to a significant number of children in less affluent parts of the country.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Brady]

I happily give way to my hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Select Committee.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend paints a powerful picture. It is inspiring to imagine that schools that, because of their economic circumstances, moved away from their original foundation, which was to provide education for some of the poorest scholars in the land, will be able to return to doing that again. The pupil premium will give them the economic incentive to target children from the poorest families and provide them with high-quality education. That is a vision to fulfil the principle that the Minister talked about of ensuring that all areas of education work together to look after the needs of all children, with priority being given to the poorest families.

[Mr Brady]

I am grateful to the Chairman of the Select Committee for his support. As he said, the new clause would simply remove an obstacle that stands in the way of the noble ambition of some excellent schools that are deeply committed to educating children of whatever means. Many schools can do so because they have access to bursary funds that cover the fees for such pupils, but not all can. To give another example from my city, Manchester grammar school, which is a former direct grant grammar school, is a fantastic institution that had the ability to raise a large bursary fund, which allows it to operate its admissions in a needs-blind way. Not all good independent schools can replicate that because they do not all have as many successful and wealthy old boys.

To return to my central point, this is a modest measure that would correct an anomaly, but in doing so would sweep away an obstacle that can only be considered dogmatic. It is entirely in keeping with the existing policy of the coalition Government, who, in the Academies Act 2010, accepted the principle that selective schools can be academies. The Minister is a passionate advocate for the academies programme. He has always made it clear that opportunities should be opened and that good schools, of whatever kind, should be encouraged. I have always welcomed that in our many constructive conversations. This simple measure would open the door to more good schools accepting the principles that he has set out and accepting the hand of friendship to welcome them into the academies programme and the state sector. It would allow more children to enjoy a high-quality education without the threat of fees having to be paid. I hope that he will accept the new clause in that spirit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Burnham]

Yes, we do, but that is not the central point. In making that move, the Minister is weakening the overall powers of the Office of the Schools Adjudicator and taking away its teeth. We hear that he is also about to weaken the admissions code—I will come on to that in a moment.

My greatest fear is that in Gove’s world, less academic children, those with less parental support and those with special educational needs will be the biggest losers. The Secretary of State is creating by the back door what, as we have just heard, his own Back Benchers are today enticing him to create by the front door—an elitist, two-tier system that is good for some children and some families, not all children and all families. We need safeguards for all parents, and I implore the House to vote to keep them. Otherwise, we will leave uncorrected the real flaw that lies at the heart of the Government’s vision for the reform of public services.

In education and in health, if the Government plan more freedom and autonomy for providers, it is absolutely essential that the change is accompanied by a corresponding empowerment of the public and a greater ability for the users of services to hold providers to account. If the Government do not increase people’s voice, they will create a provider’s market, a free-for-all with an accountability deficit. If primary care trusts or local authorities are no longer there to ensure fairness for all, it is crucial that we keep and strengthen the mechanisms that protect the rights of patients and parents.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Going back to the right hon. Gentleman’s point about the English baccalaureate, does he agree that we need an assessment and accountability framework that gives equal weight to the progress of every child? If he does—I hope that we can get consensus between the Front Benchers on that—does he agree that the current levers and pressures on schools provided by the requirement of five good GCSEs do not deliver that vision, and that Members on both sides of the House need to work harder to create a system that gives equal weight to the progress of every child?

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

indicated assent.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend, who is nodding, has helped champion that issue very effectively in the Education Committee.

[Andy Burnham]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I agree with his emphasis on the needs of every child, and I further agree that the five A to C-grade GCSEs measure had its imperfections. He might, then, agree with what I am about to say.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Burnham]

That is not the full answer. If schools are being judged by the gold standard of specific GCSEs, does the hon. Gentleman not accept that he is creating a real disincentive for schools to focus on the kids who are not taking those subjects? I know that he cares about vocational education, and I look to him to give us some more convincing answers that show that the Government are committed to those young people.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andy Burnham]

I want to make some progress, but maybe I will give way to the Chairman of the Education Committee again later.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Bill weakens the schools adjudicator and could dilute the admissions code—although we cannot assert the latter as a fact, because we have only media reports to go on. It is a disgrace that the Minister has been unable to give that information to hon. Members, who are voting on life-and-death issues for their constituents: the question for parents is whether they can get the schools that they want. I put it to hon. Members that they will be doing a huge disservice to their constituents if they vote for a weakening of the admissions system without knowing what is in the code, and the full extent of the Government’s intentions.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I asked the right hon. Gentleman earlier whether he would support the principle of an assessment and accountability framework giving equal weight to the progress of every child in our schools. Does he support that? If we collectively introduce such a system, we would not need such massive bureaucratic machinery to try to stop artificial selection in schools, because there would no longer be an incentive to pursue such measures. Rather, the system would encourage schools to attract more children who come with the pupil premium, and we could have a more equitable education system, along with the outstanding outcomes that we all seek.

[Andy Burnham]

I sympathise with the Chairman of the Education Committee. I am reading into what he says the impression that he fears the effect of the English baccalaureate on the proposed free-for-all system, in which there is no power at local level to challenge what schools are doing, and in which the adjudicator does not have the teeth to rewrite admissions policies. I am sensing that the hon. Gentleman has real worries about that, and I ask him to urge those on the Government Front Bench to sort it out, before we drive real unfairness into our school system.

Yes, we should have a system that measures every child’s progress in the important things such as maths and English—that will be the bedrock of any system—but I fear that the English baccalaureate is a highly divisive tool that will set some children against others and give schools the wrong incentive.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andy Burnham]

We know that the measure was applied retrospectively to schools, so the Government were encouraging the media to see it as a performance-management measure. It is so unfair to schools being sent out into this highly competitive environment to have their reputations so damaged, and to have not one but two hands tied behind their backs. The Government have knocked the stuffing out of some schools that have worked so hard to improve in recent years, and it is totally unacceptable.

Experts’ warnings about the admissions clauses could not be clearer. Children’s life chances are at stake here. The Government have failed to convince the experts that we can gamble with those life chances by weakening the admissions system. I intend therefore to press amendment 13 to a vote this evening. In the face of this free-for-all in education, it is vital that the rights of parents and children are protected, and that the House does not sleepwalk today into a return to selection in our schools.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, and to see so many faces from the Public Bill Committee, as well as Select Committee members, including the stellar four or five Labour Back Benchers under the Gallery there.

I want to discuss my new clause 22 on home education. My hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady) has made most of the key points about his new clause 2. This is not about extending selection in our schools; it is about taking existing institutions—in many cases, institutions originally set up to serve some of the poorest in our communities—and allowing them to serve those communities again. I must confess to having been torn before deciding that supporting new clause 2 was appropriate, although there will be differences of opinion on both sides of the House—the shadow Secretary of State failed to note that supporters of the new clause include Labour Members as well as Government Members.

[Stephen Twigg]

The Select Committee Chair says that new clause 2 would not extend selection, but it would involve its extension within the state system. Does he not acknowledge that a number of independent schools, including Belvedere school in Liverpool, have entered the state system and been willing and happy as a condition to become local comprehensive schools? Is that not a better approach, if we are to widen opportunities for as many young people as possible?

[Mr Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. Where the institution feels that it best serves its mission to improve education by becoming a comprehensive, it would be free to do so. If I have read it correctly, which I hope that I have, the proposal does not insist that schools should retain their existing selection or non-selection criteria, so the tone of what the hon. Gentleman has said is perhaps unfair.

My new clause 22 would impose an obligation on the Secretary of State to issue guidance to local authorities on how they handle families who seek to home educate their children ahead of changes in the regulations. However, my new clause has been overtaken by events. The Government have let me know today that they have decided not to go ahead with those regulations, which would have changed the rules on what happens when a parent deregisters their child from a school in order to home educate.

The Badman review, which many hon. Members will remember, under the previous Government recommended a 20-day period in which a child’s name should remain on a school’s register, so that if the parents had been pushed into home education because of failures on the part of the school or local authority to meet the needs of their child, they would not automatically lose a place at school, but would have time to think through the implications of home education.

That recommendation by the Badman inquiry was accepted by the then Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families. I always thought that that was right, because it seemed to place no restrictions on the rights of parents and families, but seemed to restrict the rights of schools and local authorities, which, according to Badman, if I recollect correctly, were in some cases using home education to push away children whose needs they were failing to meet, finding it easier to push that responsibility on to parents who did not really wish to pursue it.

On the face of it, that recommendation seemed reasonable, which I am sure is why the Government came forward with proposals to implement it, having seen that both Badman and the Select Committee supported it. However, it was not recognised that the Government’s formal consultation on the Badman recommendations had shown that, far from being uncontroversial, the proposal had attracted opposition from 75% of those who responded, with only 13% agreeing. Why would that be the case? Why would families be concerned about having the power to return their children to school within 20 days, with no restriction whatever on their freedoms and no delay forced on the start of their home education? The answer lies in the behaviour of local authorities.

Many home educators expressed alarm and horror at the proposal when it came out recently—those home educators were not formally consulted by the Government, because the proposal was supposedly uncontroversial—because, they said, it would lead to bullying and intimidation of parents who had decided to home educate. Those home educators said that the proposal would serve as another excuse for local authorities to misinform parents and tell them that the local authority would decide on the quality of the education provided by parents and that it should sit in judgment on whether they were fit and proper people to educate their children. That would be an entire reversal of the long-standing legal settlement in this country, which says that it is the parents’ duty to educate their child. Most parents choose to delegate that to the state, through state schools, and some to private schools, with a small number choosing to carry it out themselves. It is a fundamental basis of education in this country that the parent remains the No. 1 decider of how their child is educated.

In case that response was just overly paranoid home educators who felt that properly caring local authorities would be asking them impertinent questions or who had misread or misunderstood what they were doing or saying, I can share with the House the fruits of my labour last night, which I spent on the internet looking at various local authority websites. A colleague texted me at 6 o’clock to say that we were going to be let go unusually early, and that a night of fun and frolics could lie ahead. I had to say, “No, my fun will involve looking at local authority websites.” Tameside metropolitan borough council’s elective home education guidelines say:

“It is up to parents to show the local education authority that they have a programme of work in place that is helping their child to develop according to his/her age, ability and aptitude and any special educational needs he/she may have.”

But it is not up to parents to justify that to the local authority; all too often, it is the local authority that has let down that family and those children through its failure to provide proper education. The local authority should be the servant of the family; the family should not have to answer to the needs of the local authority.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

I absolutely agree that it is important for parents to be involved and in control of decisions about their own children, but I am dismayed that I have heard very little from the hon. Gentleman about the children themselves. The reason that we have frameworks is not to create unnecessary bureaucracy but to make absolutely certain that we are protecting our children and ensuring the best outcome for them. I would like to hear his response to that point, because before coming to the House, I worked for many years with children, some of whom had suffered the most appalling neglect and abuse at home, and for whom the state was a real lifeline.

[Mr Stuart]

The hon. Lady makes some fair points. Certainly the right of the child is central, but I believe that the parent is the best protector of that child’s needs. Of course, the local authority has a role in intervening when there is problem. However, fewer than half the children in this country get five good GCSEs as a result of compulsory state schooling for 11 years, so the state is hardly in a position to lecture parents who make a massive sacrifice to find ways of educating their children themselves. Furthermore, according to all the evidence that I have seen, there is no suggestion that home-educating parents—although they might be rather radical and act in ways that would not fit with my idea of how to educate a child—do a worse job for their children educationally than the state; quite the opposite, in fact.

It is interesting that, although Badman selectively quoted evidence from New Zealand, he failed to mention that, just before he produced his report, New Zealand scrapped the registration guidelines that formed a central part of the report.

[Mr Sheerman]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Stuart]

Before I give way to the former Chair of the Select Committee, I must deal with the point on which I disagree most with the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy). She has done what Badman did, and what the former Secretary of State did under the previous Government, which is to conflate child abuse with home education. Education and welfare are two separate things. Contrary to what Graham Badman stated in his report, and failed to substantiate in the Select Committee, there is no evidence that home-educated children are more subject to abuse than children in general. When there is a risk, local authorities have all due powers to intervene, and so they should. When such evidence arises, the authorities can and should go in to ensure the protection of the child. However, we cannot have the suggestion that home-educating families are linked to a problem of abuse. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it is important to nail that fact. We must not do as the previous Home Secretary did, which was to smear the reputation of home-educating families by suggesting that there is a problem, because there is no evidence for that.

[Mr Sheerman]

I do not think that the hon. Gentleman means to do so, but he is being a little misleading about what happened in the Select Committee inquiry, in which he failed to persuade the majority of the Committee of his views on this subject. Many of us on the Committee took a rather different view and wrote the majority report along those lines. What he gets wrong is the balance. This is not about a balance between abusive parents doing dreadful things to children, on the one hand, and the local authority letting them down, on the other. Rather, we found a lot of evidence to show that what was supposed to be home education actually did not amount to very much at all.

[Mr Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is incorrect on the central point. Although the report did not take the same form as it would have done if I had written it alone, the central point about the need for registration and licensing of families that want to educate their own children was rejected by the Select Committee—it was Labour-dominated and chaired so ably by him. That point was rejected, and the report said no to the central recommendation of Badman. The previous Government still pursued that recommendation, but it was—eventually and rightly—thrown out by Parliament before the last election.

[Mr Sheerman]

Of course we rejected that element of policy, and quite rightly, but that is not the case that the hon. Gentleman is making. It is a serious concern if we do not know what kind of syllabus or stimulus children will get in the home education environment. Children’s education, and not just their welfare, is their right. The hon. Gentleman is trying to turn the issue into one of welfare against education, but that was not the line that we took.

[Mr Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is entitled to his views on how current regulation should be changed. That, after all, was what the Badman report and our Select Committee report were all about.

What I am discussing today—I do not want to take up much more time—is the current law, which is clear, although it is not properly represented by many local authorities. I will not go through all the legal aspects, but I will mention the 2007 guidelines on elective home education for local authorities, which were produced by the Department for Children, Schools and Families in 2007. It is still available on the departmental website, subject only to the need for an update to take into account changes in the rules governing children missing from education. The report stated:

“Local authorities have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring the quality of home education on a routine basis.”

If there is no evidence that education by home educators is inferior to that provided by the state, what is the role of the state? Apparently it is to stick its nose into families that have often been let down by the same instruments of the state and impertinently to try to impose exactly the same kind of regimented approach to education that failed for those children. That is why the parents made the massive sacrifice of taking their children out of school in the first place.

We must defend freedom and a principle that is perhaps even more important than that, which is that the law, as it stands, must be enforced. If the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) wishes to campaign to get it changed and is successful in convincing this place, what he wants will then become the law. Local authorities must honour and observe the law as it stands and not overstate it because they happen to agree with the hon. Gentleman. They cannot make the law up as they go along because they do not like the current settlement. The current settlement is clear: local authorities have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring the quality of home education.

I have already dealt with Tameside, so let me touch quickly on Barnsley. Its elective home education information leaflet says that

“the law allows parents to educate their children at home instead of sending them to school, if they fulfil certain conditions.”

That is subtly done. I am not sure whether it is strictly inaccurate, but it is suggestive enough to make it sound as though the council decides whether those conditions are fulfilled. It goes on to make it clear that that is precisely its conclusion:

“Barnsley MBC will need to be satisfied”—

in other words, the council will need to be satisfied—

“that a child is receiving suitable education at home, and the Assessor”—

these people are even called assessors; who do they think they are?—

“will ask to meet with the family in order to talk to the parents and to look at examples of work and learning.”

That is beyond the law. I want the Minister to confirm that he will make sure that local authorities no longer produce misinformation like that and use it in order to abuse their power over families.

Sheffield provides another example. Parents there are told:

“You must show that the opportunities being provided are helping your child to learn and that development is taking place appropriate to their age, ability and aptitude.”

It is fair enough for parents to have a duty to provide suitable education and meet those requirements, but local authorities have no right to interpose themselves and decide that that is not happening. If they have reason to believe that suitable education is not being provided, they have a duty to challenge, but only in that event. They do not have the right routinely to monitor and interfere.

Sheffield city council continues:

“The Children Service Authority (CSA) is responsible for ensuring that the arrangements provide a suitable education for your child.”

That is not true.

“When you have given the CSA a plan stating your ideas an appropriately qualified”—

unlike you—

“Senior Inclusion Officer (SIO) will arrange an initial home visit and make a preliminary assessment”—

in your home—

“of the education provision the child is receiving.”

It is disgraceful.

South Gloucestershire council is advertising for someone who will provide

“information, support and challenge to parents…The service is responsible for assessing the suitability of the education provided to children educated at home”.

The Lancashire local authority, in one of the most egregious examples, states:

“Lancashire Officers will take the lead on this because they have the responsibility to ensure the safety of all children as well as to monitor the quality of education received by children educated at home.”

That is a nice one, neatly conflating the issues of safety and home education. No one has yet arrived at my house during the summer holidays just to check up on the safety of my children, who are, after all, spending months at home with me. Who knows what my wife and I might get up to, or what the younger or older sister might do? Who knows what visiting relatives might do? What we need are visitors from the local authority, just to make sure. I do not want people such as the director of children’s services in my local authority to lose a moment’s sleep because they feel that they are not pursuing every possibility of intervention to cover their own backsides and telling me how I should run things in my own home. That is precisely what the local authority suggests should be done in the case of home-educating parents, who deserve its intervention no more than the rest of us. The document continues:

“Thus, when a practitioner or professional becomes aware that a child is being educated at home, they should use local information sharing arrangements to help the Lancashire Authority to fulfil both its duty to be confident”—

so it has a duty to be confident now—

“of the well-being of the child and its duty to assure the quality of the education provided.”

That, too, is not true.

As far as I can tell from one evening spent looking at their websites, council after council is entirely misrepresenting the legal position, and I hope that the Minister will put that right.

[Ian Mearns]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Stuart]

I am aware that I have been speaking for too long already, but I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Ian Mearns]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman. For a short time I thought that I was in the back of a bus in Helsinki.

There is a problem with what the hon. Gentleman is saying. If a child becomes unwell or is injured at the hands of parents or other relatives, the focus of attention is often not on the family but on the director of children’s services in the local borough. Will the hon. Gentleman reflect on that? Will he also reflect on the rights of the child who, despite the wishes of their own parents, may or may not receive a good level of education at the hands of those parents? I know that the hon. Gentleman inhabits a middle-class, or possibly upper-middle-class, ideal in which his own children will be extremely well catered for, but that is not always the case. As policy makers, we must provide for the rights of every child in the country, no matter what their circumstances.

[Mr Stuart]

I have a great deal of respect for the hon. Gentleman, who is a distinguished member of the Select Committee and who brings years of experience of education to it, so I hesitate to say what I am about to say. However, he is suggesting, as a Labour Member of Parliament, that working-class families involved in home education should be treated with more suspicion than those in better-off areas, that they are not to be trusted with the education of their children, and that inspectors and assessors and all those other people with acronyms should be wandering into their homes, because of—my God—what they might do to their children.

I have given a great deal of thought to these issues. There are many armchair theorists—I met many of them when we were debating the Badman review—who have not looked at the data and the research, who have not tried to meet home-educating families to discuss their problems and who have not met local authority officers, who deal with difficult cases such as home-educating households where children are abused and are not given an education. There are real difficulties and challenges, but we cannot deal with them from an armchair. If the hon. Gentleman follows that advice, I hope that he will come round to my point of view that the current law is appropriate but should be enforced, and that we cannot allow local authorities to continue to abuse their position and bully parents.

I congratulate the Minister on having listened. He listened carefully to families and to representations from Members both during the passage of the Children, Schools and Families Act 2010 and since then. He listened to representations on the 20-day rule, of which I myself was in favour until I listened to the arguments and was able to follow the evidence and look at the links to the consultation and the response, which I either did not know about or had forgotten.

There is a strong message here. We must listen to these families, and we must support and respect them. We must have challenge that is appropriate, but we must not allow those in power to abuse that power and overstep the mark.

[Mr Sheerman]

I do not quite know how to follow that speech. The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) was a very good member of the former Select Committee, which I chaired. He was always an excellent contributor, but he always got the issue under discussion out of proportion. There has been a full Select Committee report, and I hope that people will read that as well as pay attention to the hon. Gentleman’s speech today, at one stage of which I thought the men in white coats might be coming.

When the Committee was looking into this matter, I got the feeling that the hon. Gentleman was rather taken over by the home educators. Home educators are very good when they are good, but there is evidence, in the Badman inquiry and elsewhere, that there are all sorts of people who use home education because they do not want to send their children to school yet do not want to be prosecuted. Home education is a right, but if people take up that right they must also accept that they have a responsibility to offer the children in question a coherent and stimulating educational programme, and I believe that local authorities have the right to check on that, in the most sensitive way possible. I therefore hope people make a balanced judgment of his new clause 22.

The previous Select Committee spent a lot of time on these matters. One of the great victories for those of us who work on Committee reports is someone taking notice of what they say. That is wonderful, although normally there is about a two-year time lag before notice is taken. I think our report on admissions policy was one of our best, with recommendations such as giving teeth to the schools adjudicator post and making sure that the code of admissions is obligatory and schools do not merely have to take note of it.

When we conducted our inquiry, I was amazed to discover that really nice people—really nice heads and educators—would bend every rule to get the selection process that suited their school. That was the case even for head teachers who looked as though they came from central casting and seemed to conform to the stereotype of the good, confident head teacher. I remember asking one particular lady, “How many looked-after children do you have at your school?” “None”, she replied. I then asked, “How many children with special needs?” She said: “Very few.” My next question was: “How many children on free school meals?” We found that the school did not have any children in that category. I therefore asked whether or not the school had taken notice of the code, to which she said, “Yes, we took note of it.” That is all anyone had to do; that is why the code was not working. Our Committee recommended that if we were to have a code, people should have to take notice of it, and if they did not, the schools adjudicator could say, “Come on! There is a code and you should obey it.”

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[Dan Rogerson]

That is a personal remark—I resemble that remark.

As I said in an intervention on the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), there are matters across government that go beyond the coalition agreement, and decisions have to be taken about where the balance should be struck. From my point of view, the issue is whether we stay true to the principle that both parties have articulated about looking at what is constraining schools and trying to set them free to move forward, while also looking after particular groups of people who might be vulnerable if schools do not operate in the spirit of the code and what the Government seek to achieve.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Going back to an earlier point, this is all about the incentives that apply to schools. The head teachers at the Church schools that the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) mentioned are not bad, but people respond to the incentives they are given. Although I am not positive about all the moves the Government are making—I have doubts about the English baccalaureate—things are moving forward with the measurement of pupil premium and children on free school meals. If we can move to a system that better rewards and reflects in the accountability measures for schools the performance of every child, we will not need to have this suspicion about every head teacher. Heads have responded in the way they have because of the incentives that were created by the previous Government, which led to this large, unwieldy system. [Interruption.] I should be fair: I am talking about successive Governments. We need to come up with a measure collectively that will improve that: then we will not need a schools adjudicator, because schools will simply have a mission to educate their local children and will be supported and rewarded for doing a good job for all of them.

[Dan Rogerson]

I welcome that intervention from the Chair of the Select Committee on Education, which will be providing more evidence over the next few years as we continue this debate. He makes an important point about the incentives that have pushed head teachers into operating in a particular way that was not envisaged when targets and regimes were set up. As the hon. Member for North West Durham said, good people occasionally do things that are less good or bad. Why do they do that if they are essentially good people who want to look after the educational opportunities of all those in the community they serve? It is because incentives are acting on them and pressing them down a particular course of action. We need to tackle those issues.

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[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. Those are concerns to which we are giving careful consideration, but there are strong opinions on all sides of the debate. We want to ensure that we consider the issues carefully and take all those strong opinions into account.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

May I express my gratitude to my hon. Friend for listening to the representations from me and from home educators? That is precisely the way in which the Government should operate, and I know that there is great gratitude out there among home educators who are afraid that there will always be malign forces at work whenever the Government come anywhere near them. As for the local authorities that misrepresent their powers and are, according to home educators, overstepping the mark, can the Minister give any reassurances about what can be done to protect the rights of home educators? Where there is evidence that children are not receiving a suitable education, local authorities should act, as the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) said, but outwith that they should respect the right of home educators to direct their children’s education.

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, just as he made a good speech on those issues. Local authorities are public authorities. They should provide accurate information about their powers and duties, and they are open to challenge if they fail to do so. I hope that that reassures my hon. Friend.

[Mr Stuart]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again. If, with the help of home educators, I compiled a dossier of evidence about local authorities, would it be possible for me to meet the Minister and talk further with him about ways to ensure both that local authorities are aware of the law and that they observe it?

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

It is a pleasure to speak again in the debate, and to follow the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), who is a fellow member of the Education Committee. He made a powerful speech, but he rather overstated the case. References to the wholesale kicking away of all the ladders of opportunity do not befit the hon. Gentleman, who is knowledgeable and who also tends to speak in a reasonable and balanced fashion. Similarly, attacking postcode lotteries is always an easy way of resisting any form of localisation aimed at ensuring that need is met appropriately in a rural area.

As one who represents a rural constituency and rural further education colleges, I am aware of the need for a more appropriate use of limited funds. I will not go into the details—I am sure that Ministers will do that—but we know that the last Labour Government made it clear that, if they were re-elected, they would look again at the EMA and seek to make savings. If savings are to be made, what better way of making them than to put the funds into the hands of those on the front line who have the closest interest in, and the best understanding of, provision for young people? The hon. Gentleman should not overstate his case, let alone suggest that Government Members, particularly Ministers, have any motivation other than to try to improve ladders of opportunity. It is possible to believe that measures are not going in the right direction without suggesting that they are all calamitous or driven by the wrong motives.

Although I did not table amendment 27, its wording is exactly the same as an amendment that I tabled in Committee. It emphasises the need to ensure that the transition to the new all-age careers service is handled properly, and that in the intervening period we do not indeed see a postcode lottery with some areas not receiving appropriate care.

[Ian Mearns]

That is already happening.

[Mr Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman has a point, which is why it is important for us to be reassured about the interim period. It is worth saying—I wish that the hon. Member for Scunthorpe had been able to say it—that the Government’s vision of a higher quality of careers advice than we have seen in the past is a good one, but, like the hon. Gentleman, I want more reassurance about exactly what will be delivered.

It is all very well to paint a picture of a fantastic service that will be genuinely independent and give people a better overview of all their options—not just the academic options delivered by institutions in their own interests—but we need to see what incentives are provided for the actors in the system to ensure that they deliver that. We do not want someone to tick the box by simply shoving a young person in front of a website, with the result that that young person never receives the information that they need about local provision. I will not rehearse all the arguments, but I have heard evidence about further education colleges being barred from going into schools to advise young people.

There is a clash between institutional interests and what I want to see, which is a truly independent service with highly trained staff who have an extensive knowledge of all the local options—I know that that is also the vision of the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. It is difficult to imagine that anyone, however clever and hard-working, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of those options, but we need staff with as much knowledge as possible who can give advice as well as, perhaps, signposting young people in the direction of online resources. Such a combination could bring real change, ensuring that young people follow pathways that lead to satisfaction, personal development and economic success. I know that the Minister entirely agrees with that.

I am pleased to note from Government amendment 36 that Ministers listen. I said in Committee that the Secretary of State’s right to withdraw the apprenticeship offer was not appropriate given the new circumstances, and that if employers were prepared to take young people on, the last thing that we should do is introduce a provision allowing someone in the Government to prevent them from doing so. I am delighted that the Minister listened to that, as he said that he would, and has already returned with a Government amendment.

If the Government continue to be firm in purpose and clear in vision, but prepared to listen where the argument is sufficiently strong, we will further improve both the Bill and, most importantly, the education of young people in this country.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

I cannot let what the hon. Lady has just said pass. People from lower-income families can afford to go to university, as they pay nothing up front. People pay only when they earn £21,000; they pay 9% above that, when they are earning the money. Do not send the message to young people from lower-income families in your constituency or mine that they cannot afford to go to college—they can, and they should if they want to. Do not scaremonger.

[Lisa Nandy]

First, it is absolutely clear who is sending a message to young people in this country that we do not value them, will not support them and will not back them, and it is the hon. Gentleman’s party. It is an absolute disgrace that on the things that we are discussing today—Aimhigher, the EMA and tuition fees—all the progress that has been made is being unravelled, with very little humility or apology from the Government. On the hon. Gentleman’s accusations that my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe is overstating his case, I simply ask where on earth the hon. Gentleman has been for the past 12 months. The outcry has not just come from young people in Wigan and Scunthorpe, because there has been a national outcry at the removal of the EMA, which is one of the most successful things introduced by the previous Government. I simply ask him to spend a bit more time outside this place listening to young people who are experiencing serious hardship and a bit less time trying to support his Front-Bench team.

That brings me to the subject of enrichment funding, on which my hon. Friend and I have tabled a provision as we are seeking to protect it today. The withdrawal of enrichment funding will have an astonishing impact in my constituency—my local college, Winstanley college, is losing £200,000 of its funding next year, which represents a 10% cut—yet we have heard so little about this. Over the past year, I have heard Ministers talk a lot in the Select Committee about trying to improve the situation of the most disadvantaged young people, but the withdrawal of enrichment funding is doing a great deal to widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Winstanley college is being forced to say that only students whose parents can afford to send them on trips will be able to go on them as part of their course. That is just one of many examples that the college gave me and is distraught about. The withdrawal of this funding will have a real impact, and I urge Ministers to think again.

The withdrawal of enrichment funding will clearly hit hardest those schools that already have a disadvantaged intake. St John Rigby college, which is just down the road from me in my constituency, will take a funding hit next year, because of the withdrawal of £300,000. Half its students receive the EMA and only 2% of the students who come into that college average an A-grade at GCSE. Its very hard-working and talented principal has told me that enrichment funding is not an optional extra, but an essential part of giving its hard-working and talented students the chance to reach their full potential. It cannot replace that enrichment funding, so it must do other things. It is planning to halve the tutorial hours for all students, so that it can ensure that it protects those essential services. Like Winstanley college, which I mentioned earlier, class sizes will go up, which will disadvantage all students but will have a particular impact on the most disadvantaged.

I join my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe in supporting the new clause because unless the Government think again, sports, arts, drama, counselling and career opportunities will be denied to precisely those young people who need them most. Surely that is not the intended consequence of the Government’s policies. I urge the Minister to think again.

Higher Education Policy

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House condemns the failure of the Government to deliver the commitment made to Parliament that £9,000 a year student fees would be ‘exceptional’; further notes that the Office of Fair Access (OFFA) has said that it has no powers to set university fees or determine university admissions policies; notes with alarm the warning of the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills that average fees higher than £7,500 would mean reducing student numbers or further cutting university teaching funding; condemns the failure of Ministers to explain their policies by publishing a Higher Education White Paper; believes that Ministers are putting at risk the success of universities and the future of generations of students; further believes that current policies are unfair, unnecessary and unsustainable; and therefore calls on Ministers, as soon as practicable, to set out to Parliament how they will meet the promise that fees of £9,000 will only be in exceptional circumstances, to guarantee that there will be no fall in the number of university places or further cuts to university teaching budgets, and to outline what powers, if any, they propose for OFFA on determining fee levels and enforcing access arrangements.

I am glad to see the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in his place, although I understand that he is not following the usual courtesy of responding to my opening remarks. I am nevertheless grateful to him for attending the debate.

I make no apology for raising for the third time in an Opposition day debate the dismal record of this Secretary of State and the Minister for Universities and Science on university fees. Nothing is more important to this country’s future than the rising generation of young people, including all those who are working hard as we speak on their GCSEs and A-levels. We owe it to them to give them the best opportunities, to make the most of their talents, the most of their abilities, the most of their willingness to work hard and do the best for themselves. All of us depend on them to ensure that, through their innovation and creativity, this country can pay its way in the world and create jobs in the future. Despite fashionable sneers, we need more people, not fewer, educated at a higher level. That is what is happening in every country with which we compete. Young people will benefit from their higher education, but so will the rest of us. That is why our young people deserve a fair deal and good opportunities.

Under the last Labour Government, the number of students in English universities increased by almost 380,000, and 51% of young women now go to university. Now, however, the ladders of opportunity are being kicked away. The education maintenance allowance has been scrapped, and Aimhigher, which persuaded countless young people that they could go to university, has been scrapped. Sir Peter Lampl of the renowned Sutton Trust said:

“I think these fees are going to put a lot of children from lower and middle-income homes off universities.”

A poll today shows that more than half of final-year students at 14 Russell group universities in England would not have enrolled if annual fees had been £9,000.

For those who do aim high, fees are being trebled—to the highest average fees of any public university system in the world, and all because this Secretary of State decided to cut the higher education teaching grant by 80%, to make most students pay the whole cost of their higher education and to embark on a bizarre ideological experiment devised by the Minister for Universities and Science. It was always a bad idea, but these Ministers have implemented it with truly staggering incompetence: they have lost control and are making it up as they go along. Instead of being open and honest about finances and open and honest about their future policies, they are resorting to veiled and not-so-veiled threats, planning the biggest ever interference in the autonomy of universities.

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

If a Labour Government had been re-elected, would tuition fees have risen?

[Mr Denham]

We have made it quite clear in every debate since the Browne report was published that it would be unrealistic to say that higher education budgets would be untouched by the deficit reduction that we would have had to introduce. However, we have also pointed that if, for the sake of argument, the reduction in higher education spending had been in the order of 10% to 20%, as faced by most public services, we would certainly not have been talking about tuition fees above about £3,800—and certainly not the £9,000 that this Government are implementing.

Since Parliament voted to treble tuition fees in December, Ministers have ensured through their actions that record numbers of disappointed students will be turned away from university this year, with perhaps 150,000 applicants missing out on places. More of the students across England who are studying hard for their A-levels today will be rejected than ever before, because tens of thousands are rushing to avoid the trebling of fees, and because Ministers have already cut 20,000 places for 2012 from the number that Labour had planned for 2010—and that is before any more cuts that may be in the pipeline.

On 3 November, the Minister for Universities and Science told the House:

“We… are… proposing a basic threshold of £6,000 a year, and in exceptional circumstances there would be an absolute limit of £9,000.”—[Official Report, 3 November 2010; Vol. 517, c. 924.]

That was the solemn promise on the basis of which the House was asked to treble fees. The Minister did not say, “Most universities will charge £9,000 or as near as makes no difference”; he said that £9,000 would apply “in exceptional circumstances”, and that is not going to happen. Of the universities that have made declarations, 71% have declared fees of £9,000 and 85% have declared fees of £8,000 or more.

The Minister continues to live in a world of his own. In March he was saying of arts and humanities degrees:

“Most institutions should only need to charge £6,000—or perhaps a bit more once inflation has been accounted for.”

So where are those £6,000 arts and humanities degrees in the most sought-after universities? Where, for that matter, are the £6,000 arts and humanities degrees in less sought-after universities? The truth is that the Minister and the Secretary of State have lost control of the system through their own incompetence. They have created a system in which there is every incentive for universities to charge high fees and virtually no incentive for them to charge low fees, and it is young people who will pay the price. Some will be put off university altogether, while those who go to university will face 30 years of debt repayments, with middle-income graduates paying more money and a larger proportion of their incomes than the wealthiest. They will still be paying off their student debt when their own children have started university.

The Minister is now trying to say that what matters is the average once the reduced fees for some students have been taken into account. How disingenuous can you get? When the Minister promised fees of £9,000 “in exceptional circumstances”, I do not believe that a single Member of the House thought, “Oh—that means that most universities will charge most students £9,000, or as near as makes no difference.” That is not what Members thought; they thought that he meant “in exceptional circumstances”. I do not think they thought that middle-class, middle-income students would have no choice but to pay close to £9,000 a year no matter which university they chose to go to. The Minister’s failure to admit that he got it wrong does him no credit.

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[Mr Willetts]

I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart).

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my right hon. Friend nail the misinformation, peddled not least by Opposition Front Benchers, about the increase in fees putting people from lower-income backgrounds off going to university? The truth is that the payments per month will be lower under the new system, that those who earn lower amounts will pay less, that the new system is more progressive and that Opposition Front Benchers, who cry crocodile tears for caring about those from the lowest incomes having access to a university, are scaremongering and providing misinformation. Will he please put them right?

[Mr Willetts]

That was an excellent intervention. After this debate, I hope that Members on both sides will agree to commit ourselves to visit, between now and the summer, the secondary schools and colleges in our constituencies and explain to them that not a single young person is going to have to pay up front for their higher education. They will repay only if they are earning more than £21,000 a year and that means that their monthly repayments under our proposals will be lower than under the system we inherited from the previous Government.

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[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in today’s debate, as I am very worried about the Government’s plans for higher education and their impact on many of my constituents and the city I represent.

I was deeply concerned when the Government announced their intention to raise the cap on fees, and like every Opposition Member I voted against that rise. I did so not just because of my pledge during the general election campaign but because I felt that the Government were rushing through their plans without proper thought and consultation. Like many Members, I felt that fees of £6,000, £7,000 or £8,000 would deter many bright and able students from low and middle-income families from applying to university, or from applying to the university or course that would best suit them. As university after university has announced its intention to charge fees of £9,000, my concern has only deepened. Far from being the exception that the Prime Minister promised, £9,000 fees are becoming the norm. Why? It is because universities have to fill the huge hole left by the cut in the teaching grant.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the hon. Lady confirm for the benefit of her constituents that the monthly payment that each of them will have to make will be lower under the new system than it was under the previous system? The monthly payment will be lower at all times. The bad news is that people will have to pay for longer, but the payments will be more affordable and people will have to pay only when they are earning £21,000. Her constituents need to hear that so that they are not put off. I hope that she agrees.

[Lilian Greenwood]

The concern that many of my constituents express is that they will have to pay back at least three times more than they would if they were a student now or had been recently.

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[Lilian Greenwood]

No, not at the moment. Under the Minister’s scheme, those who earn the most will pay less, because they can pay their loans off quickly, before they have substantial amounts of interest to pay on top.

Sir Martin Harris, the director of the organisation charged with improving access to higher education, says that there is a “real risk” that teenagers from low-income homes will feel unable to attend university, which makes me even more convinced that this Government’s policies are not properly thought through.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lilian Greenwood]

No—I am not taking another intervention.

Unfortunately, my concerns were further confirmed when I recently met staff from Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Connexions services. Careers advisers were not only demoralised by cuts to their service when young people most need advice and guidance to help them to make difficult choices, but deeply concerned about the impact of Government policies on the teenagers whom they are committed to assist. They told me that fee increases are having a clear impact on many young people, and that many young people in Nottinghamshire feel that they can no longer afford to study for a degree.

The problem is heightened by the increase in youth unemployment. Young people are worried not only that they will rack up debts of £30,000 or £40,000, but that they may not even be able to secure a job at the end of it. It was particularly sad to hear a member of staff of the Aimhigher campaign, which supports young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who have the potential to go on to higher education, tell me that it has become increasingly difficult to convince such young people that university is for them.

Young people and their parents frequently bring this issue up on the doorstep. On Monday afternoon, a constituent asked me how he could afford to send his children to university.

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[Mr Wilson]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for making that point, because there are certainly questions still to be answered, which is something I will come to.

I am concerned that the restrictions on student numbers will mean that we fail to realise the full benefits of competition in the higher education sector, which would have encouraged universities to achieve greater efficiency and offer more value for money. As a recent report by Tim Leunig for the think-tank CentreForum put it,

“because government restricts the number of students that each university can take, this is not real competition”—

and indeed, it is not. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Minister will agree that the Government must devise a system in which universities and courses that are popular and economically important can expand, if necessary at the expense of unpopular courses and institutions. Does he therefore share my concern that capping student numbers will threaten one of the key benefits offered by the Government’s reforms? What further action does he propose to take to ensure that courses that students want to take, at a price that they want to pay, can expand at the expense of courses that they do not want to take, at prices that they do not want to pay? In these difficult times the Treasury is keen not to spend more on subsidies for students than it absolutely has to, which provides the Secretary of State and the Minister with a big challenge if they want real competition in the higher education sector. If the Minister cannot convince the Treasury that removing the cap on student numbers will reduce overall HE costs, there will be no genuine market in HE.

However, I hope that the Government are thinking creatively about seeking micro-solutions to the problem. In particular, I would recommend that they look at three areas that are perhaps worthy of further consideration. The first is how we encourage private sector institutions to enter the HE sector and offer degree courses. There is no reason why they should not be allowed to enter the sector and overcome any real or perceived barriers to entry, which can easily be removed. Secondly, the further education sector needs to be encouraged to offer more degree and higher education courses. The changes that we have made in the HE sector offer huge opportunities for FE colleges to offer high quality, affordable, specialist courses. Once again, we can look across the Atlantic at what is happening in the US community college system as an example of the model that we need to strive to follow in this country.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, the content of which I agree with. Does he agree that many FE colleges are now delivering the quality that should enable them to confer degrees, rather than being dependent on universities, which in times of financial uncertainty tend to reduce what they allow FE colleges to do? We need to give them freedom if they are to compete properly in the market.

[Mr Wilson]

Indeed I do agree with that. There are some fabulous FE colleges that could easily deliver high quality higher education degrees.

Thirdly, if we are to have a Treasury-imposed affordability limit on student numbers, we need to think more creatively about how we tease the best out of a more limited market system. As I have said, we need to encourage the best high-quality, sought-after courses that students actually want to take. We have to design a system that allows good universities with good courses to expand, and poorly performing universities with poor quality courses to decline, or at least take action to improve their offering.

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[Mr Bailey]

Yes, it certainly was and I was just coming to that. We should have had a White Paper, followed by a full debate, which would have enabled the Government to put forward their proposals and the Opposition and others to probe them. A range of educational institutions —there are an enormous number of them—would have been able to contribute their expertise. What we have had, however, is this seismic shift in Government funding, carried out without adequate research and debate.

I spent 10 years on the Government Benches listening to lectures from Conservative Members about the dangers of hasty legislation and the unintended consequences that almost inevitably arise from it. If ever there was a case in point, I honestly think this is it. Hasty legislation, or hasty regulation in this case, is usually bad legislation, or regulation.

The lack of research and work done highlights a number of issues. The first is the setting of the fee levels. The Minister’s hopelessly optimistic estimates, on which the financial model was predicated, have been demonstrated as completely incorrect. The repayment implications are considerable. A whole range of expert research has been done to demonstrate that the income stream on which the Government predicated their financial model will not be met. There will therefore be a long-term financial liability, possibly an expanding one, that the Government will have to meet.

Another issue that could and should have been explored far more comprehensively if we had had a White Paper is of course the role of the Office for Fair Access. When Ministers were pressed on the setting of the level of tuition fees, they seemed to ascribe to OFFA powers that were completely beyond it, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) said in his opening remarks. The fact remains that OFFA is an organisation of four people, to whom responsibility was attributed by the Deputy Prime Minister for setting the tuition fee levels of all universities. That is totally beyond their resources, and they could not do it anyway, because they do not have the legislative basis to do so. This could and would have been teased out in a full and open debate of a White Paper, but by virtue of the Government’s actions it has been precluded.

The outcome is that the figures in the financial model do not appear to stack up. I mentioned the potential long-term financial implications earlier. As the Minister has acknowledged, the options are to cut funding for universities further and to reduce student numbers. I believe that if tuition fees averaged £8,000 per annum, it would be necessary to reduce the number of students going to university by 17,000 in order to stay within the model. There is actually a third option: the Government could change graduates’ repayment conditions. I think that that would open another can of worms, and would provide the basis for further research to assess the possible outcome.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Bailey]

No, I will not give way again.

A reduction in student numbers is inevitable, either because the Government decide to ration them or because of the deterrent effect of the higher fees on student recruitment. I should like the Government to make it clear whether, if the figures indeed do not stack up and the average fees exceed £7,500, they will limit student numbers. I do not know the answer and I am not sure that the Government do, but I should welcome their opinion none the less.

I should also welcome some sort of statement on when we will see the White Paper so that we can debate the issues further. It was originally to be published in January, we were then assured that it would be published in June, and I understand that in subsequent speeches to the civil service the Minister has referred to the summer. It is a bit like Billy Bunter’s postal order. I pressed the Secretary of State on the matter in the Select Committee this morning, and even then he would not give a commitment that the White Paper would be published in June. What I should like him to do today is tell us when it will be published, and whether it will deal with questions raised not just by me but by a range of Members about the funding implications of the current proposals.

Other countries recognise the value of higher education and the number of graduates who make an economic contribution. Other countries, even those that have suffered from the same sort of financial problems that we have experienced during the recession and are subject to the same sort of financial constraints, are investing more in higher education. The long-term implication of not getting this right and reducing the number of graduates is very serious indeed. On the basis of the picture that is emerging at the moment, I think that we are in danger of having fewer graduates, of damaging our economic growth, and of adopting a financial model that will make our public sector deficit far worse in the long term.