Post-16 Education Funding
Graham Stuart Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Michael Gove
I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for those questions. I am grateful for his reference to people being out of their depth—I will of course acknowledge his expertise in this area. I am also grateful to him on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills for once more recycling the Mr Bean joke—the copyright on that joke will ensure that the right hon. Gentleman enjoys a successful and happy retirement in years ahead.
The first question that the right hon. Gentleman asked was: where is the money coming from? The answer is that the money for all public spending comes from the taxpayer. It was on his watch that the taxpayer got a spectacularly bad deal from a Government who spent every penny and left this coalition Government with a difficult economic inheritance. He asked whether the money would be allocated by discretionary means. I pointed out in my statement that it absolutely will. He argued that college principals would face an invidious decision, but he must know that it was the Association of Colleges that argued that the new fund should be put in place on discretionary principles. Perhaps he should consult college principals before claiming to speak on their behalf.
The right hon. Gentleman accused the coalition at one point of engaging in no consultation, and of having too much at another. There was no consistency at all in the questions that he asked. There has been a certain consistency in his position in one area, however, and that is his consistent refusal to state what his alternative would be. The truth is that Labour does not have a policy on this issue or any other education issue. We know what the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle thought: he said that we should divert money from the EMA to the poorest. We know what the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) thought: that we should divert money from child benefit to pay for EMA. However, we do not know what the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) thinks, beyond believing that students should have money to go out for drinks with friends.
We do not know how the right hon. Gentleman would pay for his alternative to our proposal, because he has opposed every saving that we have made. We do not know what he thinks people should be studying when they are not going out, because he has opposed every reform to raise standards. He has no policies on education other than blanket opposition. No wonder he did not join the march for an alternative on Saturday—he does not have one.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
I welcome the statement and the funding—which is greater than was originally expected—going into the new bursary scheme. I also welcome the focus on the poorest, to whom it is appropriate to ensure that that funding goes. Can the Secretary of State tell the House on what basis the money will be allocated? Will it be based on free school meals? Indeed, is that part of the consultation? Can he also confirm again that colleges will have total freedom in how they spend the money, so that they can provide directly for transport, for instance?
Michael Gove
The Chairman of the Select Committee on Education asks two intimately related and very good questions. On the first, I can confirm that we intend as closely as possible to mirror funding for the replacement scheme and existing funding, which was given to colleges on the basis of EMA entitlement. However, as he rightly points out, in the consultation, which will relate to the implementation of the scheme, we will take on board the points made by college principals and others, in order to ensure the fairest possible distribution of funding. Unlike with the EMA, college principals will have explicit flexibility under our scheme to be able to provide for transport, among other needs.
Oral Answers to Questions
Graham Stuart Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Michael Gove
Thank you. The two manoeuvres for which the shadow Secretary of State is preparing are: a U-turn on his academy position, which he has already executed, and now another U-turn, which I can sense him undertaking on the English baccalaureate. I celebrate the fact that he is manoeuvring out of the way of the criticism of those of us on this side of the House who believe in higher standards.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
Can the Secretary of State confirm that the English baccalaureate is not compulsory, that schools retain the right—indeed, the duty—to offer an appropriate curriculum to their pupils, and that schools such as university technical colleges will not be obliged to ensure that at least 80% of pupils’ time up to the age of 16 is spent on academic subjects?
Michael Gove
The Chairman of the Select Committee on Education has not only asked an excellent question but given a superb summary of the beneficial effects of the English baccalaureate and the flexibility inherent in the coalition’s education proposals.
Sure Start Children’s Centres
Graham Stuart Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to take part in a debate which will, I hope, rise above semantics. I do not know whether “initiation” is a partial word or not; I suppose it depends very much on what ceremonies one has undergone earlier in life.
This debate takes place in the context of a crisis of confidence in our education system and, more broadly—if I may pick a few headings at random—in our society’s ability to raise children so that they achieve, enjoy life, are safe and healthy, make a contribution, and go on to prosper. The PISA—programme for international student assessment—tables to which the Government frequently refer indicate that, on a comparative basis, this country’s performance has declined.
The first 10 years of the last Government, between 1997 and 2007, preceded the credit crunch. I should it put on record, in my party’s interests, that the period of solid economic growth between those years had begun in 1992. During that period, the number of young people aged 16 to 24—pick your age range—who were not in employment, education or training remained about level, but once the credit crunch arrived it spiralled up, and now as many as 1 million young people may not be in apprenticeships, at college, at school or in a job. That is a pretty tragic situation.
I have always believed that those who seek a crude proxy to measure the effectiveness of an education system should consider not so much the outcomes of those who go to Oxbridge—important though that is—or those who go to universities in general as the number of young people who end up as NEETs. We engage in an annual argument about whether exams are becoming easier, and how we are placed in comparative terms. I used to point out to Labour Ministers in the Select Committee that existed under the last Government that the system of which education forms a part was intended to deliver Every Child Matters outcomes, and to ensure that young people were able to go on to prosper in life. They cannot do that—and, indeed, they are signally failing to do it—if they end up as NEETs.
As I have said, those who seek the best proxy to measure the effectiveness of society’s systems for bringing up children—which, I suppose, include families—should consider the number of NEETs. That number is at a record high, and we need to tackle it. However, we are also concerned about social mobility, and the fact that our record on teenage pregnancy, fatherless households, drug use and other issues connected with social breakdown and social failure is not good in comparison with the records of other European countries.
The intellectual running under the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government seems, ironically enough, to be being made largely by current and former Labour Members of Parliament. I am pleased to see that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) is present. Whether we cite the Field report, the Allen report on early intervention or Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility, it is clear that a huge amount of work is being done, which indicates a general consensus in the House that we should try to become more effective.
The Select Committee produced its report as the Labour Government moved towards their target for full service delivery, which was at least 3,500 centres. I believe that there are now more than 3,600. Having initially established children’s centres in the most deprived parts of the country, the Government wanted to ensure that they existed in every part of the country. While it is fair to say that they wanted to provide a universal service, their rationale for taking Sure Start everywhere was the need to reach the poorest and most disadvantaged children in areas that were not themselves generally disadvantaged. They recognised that if they focused only on the most disadvantaged areas, many children elsewhere would be missed out.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Sheerman
May I ask the hon. Gentleman to think again about what he has said? According to evidence given to the Select Committee, most children from deprived backgrounds lived outside the 500 most challenging wards in the country. That was the point: more young people with deprived backgrounds lived outside than inside the targeted areas.
Mr Stuart
The hon. Gentleman is, of course, right, and if I suggested otherwise I did not mean to. I meant to say that the main driver was not the need to provide a universal service, but the need to reach poor children wherever they were. In rural constituencies such as mine, which may in general contain high levels of wealth, there are still many people from poorer families. The aim was to provide a universal service that would reach those people, but the Committee concluded that the policy had not been as effective as we should have liked it to be.
I hope that we shall learn from Ministers today about their vision of the future of children’s centres. We know that the Government agree on the importance of early intervention, and we know that they see an important role for children’s centres within that. We also know that they have rolled funding for children’s centres into the early intervention grant. They say that they are providing enough funds to keep all the existing children’s centres open, but they have not insisted that local authorities do so. Moreover, the larger fund in which they have included the funds for children’s centres has itself been reduced this year from about £2.7 billion to £2.4 billion, and from 1 April it will be 10.9% lower than the 2010-11 notional figure.
Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend congratulate authorities such as Medway, which has 19 Sure Start centres—seven of which are in my constituency—and has agreed to keep all of them open? That clearly demonstrates that it is not inevitable that Sure Start centres will close. I should declare an interest: I am a sitting Medway councillor.
Mr Stuart
I am happy to congratulate my hon. Friend’s council on adopting what it considers to be the most effective way of delivering the improvements that we so desperately want for young people. However, the number of NEETs has been rising, and research suggests that the outcomes from children’s centres so far are not what we would wish them to be.
We have heard about the bundling of funds and the relaxation of ring-fencing. Ministers are still saying that every Sure Start or other children’s centre should be able to stay open, but “should be able to stay open” and “will stay open” are two separate concepts. I should like to know from Ministers, and indeed from Opposition spokesmen, whether they are fixated on the importance of maintaining buildings from which services of varying quality emanate. Is that the be-all and end-all, or are we prepared to give local authorities the power to decide how best to provide early intervention, which may well be through a rationalisation of children’s centres? I do not know whether the Front-Bench teams think that the buildings are the be-all and end-all and that any reduction from 3,600 will be a disaster for our young people, or that local authorities should be allowed to think for themselves and tailor local solutions to local needs. I would like a clearer steer from both Front-Bench teams so that we have a better idea of where we are going.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
In the last Parliament, the hon. Gentleman and I served together on the Select Committee and I respect his opinion. He has touched on the key question. The Government are cutting the funding to my local authority by about 13% and they say that leaves enough money to keep the network open, but the local authority is cutting by 45%, which clearly will not leave enough, so the majority of centres will close. In such a situation should the Government intervene or should there be localism at its purest, and if the local authority wants to close down most of the centres should it be allowed to do so?
Mr Stuart
The hon. Gentleman is right to pose this question about the right response, and we need a clearer steer. While making claims about localism, will the Government in fact quietly put pressure on councils and say, “You must keep these centres open”? I recognise why the hon. Gentleman says the last Government put all these things in place and the new Government are threatening to dismantle them while denying doing so, as that is an understandable line to take in opposition, but rationalising these centres could be the right thing to do. It could be that, after sober analysis and assessment of the needs of its local community, a local authority decides that its children’s centre buildings are not working well enough and it cannot get the teams to deliver in the right way but thinks it will be able to find a better way of providing these services. I would like to know how fixated we are going to be on children’s centres per se, rather than on delivering the outcomes for young people.
Mrs Hodgson
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I too served on the Select Committee with him in the last Parliament, and I think he is doing a sterling job as Chair of the new Select Committee. I am also pleased that we are having this debate today.
I can assure the hon. Gentleman that the Opposition are not fixated on the buildings. Our priority is that the provision should still exist. We still believe it should be a universal provision targeted on those most in need. It is not about the buildings; it is about ensuring that there is a service within them. When the Sure Start children’s centres were first introduced the aim was that everybody would be within a pushchair push of one of them. If a local authority decides to have just one or two such centres, people are not going to be within a pushchair push of their nearest one, and they will therefore not be used by those who need them most.
Mr Stuart
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. She makes a fair point, but service delivery is the key and there is enormous variation in that between children’s centres across the country. In the last Parliament, the National Audit Office investigated the cost-effectiveness of centres at our behest, and it concluded that
“it remains very difficult to examine and compare centres’ cost effectiveness.”
It also said:
“Where we have been able to calculate unit costs we found wide variations. Together with other evidence this suggests that there is still scope for improving cost effectiveness.”
That suggests that there could be savings. The Government reasonably say that reductions in budget should not necessarily lead to closures. Children’s centres could, perhaps, be improved and operate on a lower budget.
The NAO also said:
“There is qualitative evidence of improvement; for example, some local authorities and centres are developing and implementing means of managing children’s centres to make more effective use of skills and resources. And most centres and local authorities have made substantial improvements in their monitoring of performance since our 2006 report.”
There is progress, therefore.
I ask the Minister to set out the Government’s vision, and explain to what extent they wish the existing infrastructure to be maintained, or whether, in the spirit of localism and the tailoring of services to meet local needs, they want local authorities to make up their own minds, which might lead to great discrepancies. It could certainly lead to the loss of a national entitlement to children’s centres, but that might be an improvement. A true localist looking at the analysis of the results so far may conclude that a more localised and differentiated approach would be better.
I went on a Select Committee trip to Finland two weeks ago. Learning lessons from Finland is hard, and I know my predecessor as Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), hated any mention of Finland. I do not think he ever explained why, but I guess it was because of the difficulty of applying its experiences and contexts to our experiences and contexts. There was one thing I did learn from Finland, however. Someone in its central department of education said, “We’ve been trying to achieve a particular outcome, but although we’ve been working at it for 10 years, we haven’t really made as much progress as we want, so we’re going to work harder and carry on trying to make it happen.” That is very different from the way things are done in our country, where, typically, 18 months into a new initiative new Ministers arrive and throw it overboard because they decide it does not work, and they stop doing the long, hard, grinding work that leads to the improvement of existing services.
I would hate the groundwork that has been done by children’s centres across the country to be dismantled, not because they are universally successful but because it takes a long, hard slog to improve performance and management, to bring on more leaders, and to learn what certificates they should sit for so that we have higher quality staff who can identify the areas that are brilliant and share that practice, and identify the areas that are poor and need to be challenged. I would rather we did that than what this country seems to do, which is just throw everything up in the air again when a new set of Ministers come into office.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful case. One of the Select Committee conclusions is:
“Children’s centres are a substantial investment with a sound rationale, and it is vital that this investment is allowed to bear fruit over the long term.”
The hon. Gentleman is reminding us of the necessity to consider the long term. The long term is even longer than 10 years, as he rightly points out, so now is not the time to fiddle with this provision.
Mr Stuart
It is certainly a time to fiddle with it. There is ample room for improvement, but it would be a shame if these centres were inadvertently dismantled before what they could deliver had been properly thought through. I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman about that.
I also want the Minister to say whether there are any incentives in place for local authorities to ensure that they focus on changing the life chances of young children, because all too often people will pay lip service and say, “Of course we’re on board with this.” I am reminded of another Select Committee trip, this time to the Netherlands in the last Parliament. The Dutch changed the way local authorities were financed in respect of young people’s services. I think they froze the money from central Government so that if there was a spike in youth unemployment and so forth, local authorities would be at serious financial risk, but if they addressed such matters, they would be much better off. As a result, local authorities stopped just processing young people and putting the financial claim for that into the centre. Instead they became locally responsible for the financial consequences of young people remaining as NEETs. I believe—the previous Select Committee Chairman will put me right if I am wrong—that they more than halved the number of NEETs over the years.
If there are incentives for local authorities that are real and that bite and that mean they take this issue incredibly seriously and focus on it, that would give me more confidence than even the maintenance of the centres. If I felt that local authorities were driven by a desire to grasp this agenda and make a difference to their young people’s lives and one of them told me it was closing some of its children’s centres, I would find that more encouraging than watching, in this time of fiscal retrenchment, centres close apparently because they were especially local and apparently because things would then get better.
Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman is making a very powerful case, as always. On local authorities and incentives, I wonder whether he shares my concern that some authorities may do what it looks as though my local authority is doing. Westminster city council is trying to keep the children’s centres open so it can avoid the controversy attached to closing a building, but it is slashing outreach and drop-in services and other services that actually work and that are provided from within the bricks and mortar of those buildings. That is likely to have an even worse impact on children’s outcomes.
Mr Speaker
Order. Just before the Chairman of the Select Committee responds to that intervention, I want to make the point that, although there is no time limit on Back-Bench speeches and the House is listening attentively and with respect to the Chairman of the Select Committee, I know that he will want to take account of the substantial interest in making contributions to the debate, and I am keen that everyone who wishes to speak should have the chance to do so. I know that the hon. Gentleman will tactfully take account of my gentle ministration.
Mr Stuart
I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for that gentle and quite proper intervention—and those who wish to speak will be even more grateful.
The hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) is right. We need to ensure that the resources are used for the best purposes, not political purposes—not in order to make it look as though something has been protected, or to avoid embarrassment, but to help to look after the most vulnerable children for the long term. That is what we must all hope for.
Mr Sheerman
I intervene only because the hon. Gentleman, who is a good friend of mine, mentioned Finland and has now moved on to Holland. It is true that, although I like the Finns, I do not think that many lessons can be learned from their experience. However, he did not give the full picture of the core of the Dutch answer to NEETS, which is very successful: in Holland people cannot draw benefit until they are 27 unless they are training and learning the Dutch language.
Mr Stuart
I believe that that measure was originally introduced by the mayor of Rotterdam, who picked the 27 threshold. It was about creating incentives at a local level in order to tackle the root of the problem. The hon. Gentleman, as befits a previous Select Committee Chairman, tries again to correct me by pointing out that I did not necessarily give the full story.
Will Ministers explain the rationale for the things included in the early intervention grant? I should like to understand how they hold together. Will they take us through the finances of the grant in some detail, and tell the House whether the Government have acted on the Select Committee report recommendation that they pull together all the funding that goes into Sure Start children’s centres? How much will come through health visitors? Also, can Ministers tell us more about health visitors? One of the most important things that children’s centres can do is be more effective in outreach. The National Audit Office and the Durham university study found that, in fact, children’s centres were not as effective in that respect as they could be. The growth in health visitors could play a major part in creating a more effective outreach service that identifies such children earlier and gets them the services and support they need, so that they are school-ready.
Mindful, as ever, of your ministrations, Mr Speaker, I shall sit down.
Neil Carmichael
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I would say that that is the experience of Sure Start in one situation, but we need to be sure that all Sure Starts deliver high standards for all the children who attend.
I want to make two general points about Sure Start. First, there is the issue of localism, which has cropped up several times. The real need is to ensure that we shape our services for the needs that we find on the ground where we see the problems. It is therefore right that local authorities have more influence in allocating and shaping provision. This is the converse of the previous Government’s approach, which was always top down, telling everybody what it was important to do and ensuring they did it, but not taking into account people’s needs, especially local circumstances. That obsession with top-down control often means that people end up worrying too much about the structure and too little about those within it and the children needing to benefit from it.
Secondly, we are no longer ring-fencing funding. That is right, because it is important to have local accountability for the provision of services and to enable local authorities to make the decisions that they want to make. The way in which the Government are now funding Sure Start is the better way to ensure that these facilities can be more flexible and adaptable. I make the case for localism on those terms.
Mr Graham Stuart
I would like to pull together the point that my hon. Friend has just made and the point about evaluation. Does he agree that if we are to have a more localist approach, national Government need to ensure that evaluation takes place so that we have the data to see whether local authorities are making a difference to the school-readiness of children when they turn up? If we spend all this money and it does not make any difference, as the Durham studies have shown in too many cases involving poorer children, then we are spending money to no positive result.
Neil Carmichael
My hon. Friend is right. We need to be sure that we deliver the outcomes that we want. If we are obsessed with process, structures and all the rest, and not with outcomes and delivery, we are letting down the very children we aspire to help.
The Education Committee went on a trip to Finland, where there were some interesting points to note, one of which was schools’ involvement in more than just teaching the children. Schools always had social care provision and, in effect, district nurse provision, and there was proper, regular consultation between those providers and the teachers if there was a problem. That is well worth thinking about. It is important to consider other ways of doing things than simply the prescribed way from central Government. As I have often said, it is sensible to look at other systems, not necessarily to copy them completely, because that cannot be done effectively—there are too many obstructions such as different cultures and priorities—but to pick up ideas that can be transferred. I urge people to keep an open mind about that kind of arrangement.
Before we got to Finland, we were in Germany. There, too, I learned something, which was that the Germans have a different approach to NEETs, and they did not seem to have nearly as great a problem as we have had. They were taking relatively proactive measures to encourage young people to become involved in society at an early stage and to give them signposted ways into further education and employment. That is something that we could pick up on. There is a lot more detail that we could discuss about those trips that would be useful to the debate, but I mention those two examples.
The right hon. Member for Birkenhead was entirely right, and very moving, when he spoke about family structures where parents were sometimes unable to provide decent parenting for their children, and wondered whether he could have survived in certain circumstances. We must recognise that this is a very serious issue. We cannot, as a society, be happy when such comments can be made and readily accepted without question. We must concentrate on improving parenting—not in the case of all parents, obviously, but those with the biggest challenges and problems.
I met a lady in my constituency who is in charge of the Nationwide Community Learning Partnership, which focuses on providing strong and effective programmes for improving parenting. I urge the Minister to think very carefully about such programmes, which offer a way forward. That organisation is of a very high standard. It is based in the county of Gloucestershire but has functions across the country. I think that, allied to Sure Start activities, helping people in need of parenting skills is a way forward. I invite the Minister to meet the Nationwide Community Learning Partnership, because I think that it would bring something of value to the discussion.
We need to be more flexible and open-minded on this issue. We need to recognise that Sure Start has a strong role to play. It is sensible to have a localist and flexible approach to providing such support.
In this debate, it is worth remembering the role that the pupil premium will have in helping children. I do not think that it has yet been amplified, but I believe that it is an important way of getting financial support to the right place at the right time. The schools I have visited in my constituency that will receive a large amount of pupil premium recognise its value.
The Government’s decision to provide funding for two and three-year-olds is a big step in the right direction. As hon. Members have said, one can tell when children who need that support have received it and when they have not. To solve the problems of children in this category, it is logical that we must help them when it really matters, and it really matters at that young age.
This is an important debate. We have to be sure of the quality of the services that we provide. We need better evaluation and a wiser way of interpreting the data. We must capture the needs of local people and children in a much more intelligent way. To a large extent, that means trusting local authorities to do just that. It is right to have this debate at this time. There are a lot of challenges and we should not rest until the headline figures that I referred to at the beginning of my remarks come down much faster than they have done thus far.
Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)
I am delighted to have the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I give my apologies in advance in case the debate continues beyond 4 o’clock, because I am hoping to speak in Westminster Hall.
I agree with the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) about the importance of evaluation. There have been constructive speeches from Members from across the House. As my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) said, we have to start by looking at the evidence of what is working in our country and, as several hon. Members have said, what has and has not been successful in other parts of the world. Several hon. Members talked about the balance between having universal expectations of services in all parts of the country and local flexibility. I am a fan of local flexibility. The hon. Member for Stroud said that the situation must depend on the needs on the ground. I say to him gently that although that is true, meeting those needs on the ground depends on the resources being there. In the latter part of my speech, I will talk about the impact of the Government’s cuts to these grants on children’s centres and nursery provision in Liverpool.
I absolutely concur with the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) on the need to focus on those who are not in education, employment or training. Ultimately, the success or failure of Sure Start and other investment in early years will be assessed by whether we succeed in cracking the nut that all speakers have referred to: that so many people’s life chances are set before they go to primary school or even, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) said, before they enter a Sure Start children’s centre.
Before 1997, I had the privilege of working with my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), who is now Chair of the Public Accounts Committee. She was asked by the then Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair, to develop a policy for early years. That ultimately became the Sure Start policy that was taken up in Government by my right hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) and for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell). Our approach then was very much the one that my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield set out. We looked at the evidence and at the examples of excellence from our own country. They did exist, but they were individual cases rather than occurring nationwide. Perhaps more importantly, we looked at the head start programme in the United States, which seemed to be having such a big impact on the life chances of children and young people from poorer communities, and at similar programmes in European countries.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead has had to leave the Chamber, but his speech was an important contribution to the debate. In the latter part of my remarks I will focus, as I am sure will other Labour Members, on the impact of Government cuts, and in doing so we are saying that not everything in the garden is rosy. Of course some children’s centres are doing better and are more effective than others, but we need a proper quantitative and qualitative analysis of what is working so that lessons can be shared across the country.
Mr Graham Stuart
I believe it was the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) who had the courage to say that if one believes in early intervention, in the current financial situation one must reduce funding further up by taking money away from primary schools, secondary schools and colleges, and give it to early years. Does the hon. Gentleman therefore support the fact that two-year-olds will now have nursery education at a cost of more than £300 million, which perhaps reflects a redistribution from later school years by this Government?
Stephen Twigg
I welcome that element of what the Government have done. On its own, it would represent something of a redistribution. The trouble is that it exists alongside other changes that work in the opposite direction—principally the removal of the ring fence. The hon. Gentleman referred to the debate on ring-fencing. It has always struck me in debates about education and other public services that people tend to be against ring-fencing in general, but in favour of it in particular. We all want our favourite thing to be ring-fenced, but we do not like the general idea. The principle of moving away from central Government saying, “You must spend this funding on this, regardless of local circumstances,” is good. However, it is concerning in this instance, not least because it is happening in the context of cuts in many areas. With the best will in the world, it is very difficult for local authorities to maintain expenditure on early years with the ring fence removed, when they are having to make such big cuts in other areas of their budgets. I will come back to that point, but I urge the Government to think again about the proposal to remove the ring fence for this area of spending.
I think that the case for investment in this area is now accepted across the House. It can make such a difference to the life chances of all children, and in particular those from the poorest and most deprived areas with the greatest need. The formulation set out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead is right: we want a universal service, but within that, we must focus without relenting, and without any apology, on the needs of those from the very poorest communities.
That brings me to the financial predicament that is being faced by local authorities of all parties up and down the country. There is no quarrel about the need for cuts, or about the fact that some of the cuts will affect children’s services, but our concern is that the scale, speed and distribution of those cuts, combined with the removal of the ring fence, will cause enormous damage.
Matthew Hancock
I am puzzled; I hope I will not be shocked. I know that Liverpool council’s total spending power is falling by 15% over two years in real terms. The hon. Lady has just claimed that spending on children’s services is falling by 35%. Is it true that Liverpool council—
Matthew Hancock
Is it run by the Labour party? Is it true that that council is cutting children’s services by so much more than the total overall cut?
Luciana Berger
I look forward to the Secretary of State’s forthcoming visit to Liverpool.
From many pieces of correspondence with families in my constituency, I have learned that they cannot understand why, when they play by the rules—many are in work and paying their taxes—their most prized and precious asset is the among the first to come under the axe. Councillor Jane Corbett, whom I mentioned—she is Liverpool council’s education and children’s services cabinet member—spoke for so many in our community when she said:
“The Government is showing complete contempt for the youngest children in Liverpool by putting forward these politically motivated cuts. I cannot believe the lack of concern for children and families in Liverpool.”
Liverpool people have a strong sense of fairness. They know that the Government are not treating them fairly, and they will not forget it. If the Government want a big society, they need not look much further than the Sure Start centres at Childwall and Woolton, and at Church and Mossley Hill.
Mr Graham Stuart
The hon. Lady was just asked how she would like the deficit impacts to be dealt with on a local authority basis, and said that she would welcome a meeting. However, if there were a Labour Government, how would the money have been divided up? Undoubtedly, under a Labour Government, there would have been pain in children’s services, as in other areas, just as under a coalition.
Luciana Berger
I will come to what needs to happen in the final part of my speech.
To go back to my previous point, the Government seek a big society, but we already have that—in the two Sure Starts that are under threat of closure. We have committed staff, engaged parents and fantastic children. However, if we are looking for a big betrayal of children’s hopes and futures, we need look not much further than those on the Government Benches.
My hon. Friends have spoken previously about pledges that were made before the election, and I want to repeat those in this debate, because those important points have not been made today. The day before the election, the Prime Minister said:
“Yes, we back Sure Start. It’s a disgrace that Gordon Brown has been trying to frighten people about this. He’s the Prime Minister of this country but he’s been scaring people about something that really matters. Not only do we back Sure Start, but we will improve it.”
Also on the day before the election, the Deputy Prime Minister said:
“Sure Start is one of the best things the last government has done and I want all these centres to stay open.”
On behalf of all parents and children in the communities in my constituency who today depend on Sure Start in these challenging times, and those who will depend on it in future, I urge the Government, the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister to honour the pledges that they made the day before the election. As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said earlier to the Prime Minister, it is not too late to ring-fence the money to save our Sure Starts.
Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
I am delighted to follow my hon. Friends the Members for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) and for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) in speaking in this important debate. The fact that three Labour MPs representing Liverpool constituencies have contributed shows the depth of feeling in our city about the issue under discussion.
In a move designed to detoxify the Tory brand and cultivate cuddly, compassionate Conservatism—allegedly big on children and the family—the current Prime Minister told Tory acolytes back in 2009:
“Sure Start will stay, and we’ll improve it.”
Actions speak louder than words, however. Eighteen months and one election later, 250 children’s centres are due to close nationwide and some 2,000 will be forced to reduce their services. Sure Start as we know it looks set neither to “stay” nor “improve”. This is another example of Cleggism, if one was needed: saying one thing, but doing another.
Steve Rotheram
No, not just yet.
It is glaringly obvious that the Government do not understand the holistic nature of the Sure Start children’s centres—their qualitative as well as their quantitative value. Yes, they are about providing a co-ordinated range of practical facilities and services, but, equally importantly, they are also about offering social and emotional encouragement and support, often to parents living in some of the most disaffected, marginalised and hard-to-reach communities in the land.
Sure Start children’s centres do not cater only for the most disadvantaged—whom our Cabinet of multi-millionaires clearly finds so tiresome. They also support hard-working low and middle-income families. Ministers would do well to remember that. Isolation, chaos and dysfunction are both causes and symptoms of family deprivation and marginalisation, and are not the preserve of the least well-off.
I fully acknowledge that the children’s centre programme, which is still in its infancy, is far from perfect. The quality of provision is sometimes patchy, there is room for standardisation and improvement, and although all the indications are good, it is much too early to evaluate the benefits fully.
Steve Rotheram
As we have heard, the Government and certain Members just do not get any of this, but actually, Liverpool city council does get it. It is much maligned of late by the Con-Dems, of course, but, no thanks to the coalition, and despite an 18% cut to its early intervention grant, from which Sure Start funding must now be drawn, it has managed to secure the future of 22 of its centres and will work hard through its consultation process to find ways of avoiding the closure of the four that are threatened, which my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby referred to earlier.
However, this is no vindication of the Government’s approach, as unfortunately, service reductions are inevitable. City-wide, under-fives and their families will suffer as a consequence and, needless to say, Liverpool city council has been forced by the Government into the iniquitous position of having to take from Peter to give to Paul. Shuffling reduced resources has inevitably meant that protecting children’s centres has come at the price of other vital services.
I am particularly concerned about the broader, vaguer proposal tucked away in the coalition agreement to introduce payment by results into the Sure Start equation. Market forces bring with them risks, competition and inconsistency. People such as the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock) may disagree, but in my book there is no place for any of those in the delivery of services to children and young families.
All this would of course be all well and good if the Government could present a reasoned, evidence-based case for change, but as usual they cannot. In fact, in their arrogance they appear to have gone out of their way stubbornly to ignore popular opinion and expert advice, proffered well in advance of their budget deliberations.
Mr Graham Stuart
The evidence that we need to change the system of accountability is available, both from the National Audit Office and from Durham university, whose team analysed primary schools and the young people attending them over seven or eight years. It found that the readiness for school of young people from the poorest families was not improving, despite all the expenditure by the previous Government. Therefore, moving to payment by results, so that local authorities and children’s centre staff are absolutely focused on transforming the life chances of children, is precisely what we need to be doing, and I think the hon. Gentleman should think again.
Steve Rotheram
What a bizarre argument. Saying that an area such as Liverpool, which is among the most deprived, is having its money reduced and that that will somehow result in improved services to the groups that the hon. Gentleman is talking about is bizarre. As we have heard, almost a year ago the Children, Schools and Families Committee, as the Select Committee was known then, published a progress report on Sure Start children’s centres, having conducted a lengthy inquiry involving dozens of expert witnesses and practitioners—apparently, Jamie Oliver was the only one to turn down this fantastic opportunity. The Committee’s analysis was rigorous and measured, and it was firmly rooted in common sense and fairness. Three of its recommendations are worth highlighting again today.
First, the Committee warned that any reduction of funding
“would undermine the programme to an unacceptable degree and jeopardise the long-term gains from early intervention… we would not wish authorities to be bequeathed an underfunded statutory duty.”
Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)
I thank the Chair of the Education Committee for securing this timely debate. We served together on the Children, Schools and Families Committee in the previous Parliament and he is already making a name for himself. Although I am very grateful to him for securing the debate, I doubt that the Minister will be quite so grateful given the opportunity it has created for colleagues to air their experiences of the impact on the front line of the decisions that she and the Secretary of State have taken about funding and the removal of ring-fencing.
The debate is timely for several reasons, but primarily because many local authorities are taking decisions that they do not particularly want to take on the future of children’s centres. That is especially true of Liverpool. Contrary to some of the disgraceful comments that have been made in the past week and even in this debate, those decisions are not politically motivated. Liverpool is having to take them because of the terrible settlement it has received, which is one of the worst in the country even though it is the most deprived local authority in the country.
The debate is also timely because it fortuitously follows a seminar on Sure Start that was hosted in Parliament this morning by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), as well as the 4Children conference at which the Minister of State and my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), who is not in his place, also spoke. I understand that she thanked them this morning for their constructive criticism, so I hope that she will take my remarks in the same spirit.
If the Minister had been able to come to the seminar, I am sure she would have found it very useful. We heard from a number of parents and others involved in children’s centres about what services mean to them and their communities and about the impact that budget cuts could have and are having. We heard from everyone, including some of the Minister’s colleagues, whom we were pleased came along. We heard, as we have heard in this debate, about the difference that good children’s centres can make to the lives of children and parents. We heard from Willie Wilson, whose children attend the Pen Green centre in Corby. He told us how being involved in its Sunday dads group had helped him to overcome his mental health issues and how much his children enjoyed using the centre. He said:
“Everything good in my life in the last five years has been down to Pen Green Children’s Centre”.
Those sentiments were echoed by a young mum who told us how her local centre had helped her and others to get over post-natal depression. Pen Green is facing big cuts to its funding and might have to cut services. I understand that the Minister’s colleague, the hon. Member for Corby (Ms Bagshawe), has said that that will happen over her dead body. I do not know whether the Minister just caught that but I think the Secretary of State did and I hope that they will talk to the hon. Lady about that, as such comments are not necessary.
The panel at the seminar agreed with something that the Minister will have heard at her engagement this morning: the ring fence to Sure Start funding is key to the stability of the service on the front line. It also agreed that it is no good keeping centres open if they are not providing a good quality service.
We learn, as we have today from Hammersmith and Fulham, the Prime Minister’s favourite council, that centres that are apparently being kept open will have to survive on a budget of £19,000 a year. No doubt the Minister will agree that that will not go far. It is hardly enough to pay for a caretaker, let alone the running costs and a work force. If we want good results from centres, they need the funding and the stability of funding to employ qualified staff and provide quality services. Cuts and the removal of ring-fencing will not help.
The Minister has been conspicuous by her absence from the past two meetings of the all-party Sure Start group, although we were pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) was present. The hon. Lady recently got round to replying to a letter sent from the group in December, to which I referred earlier. Given the Minister’s absence from the meeting as she was ill, I was surprised to receive, during the meeting, a Google alert informing me that she had published a local media release that very afternoon criticising her local Labour council in Brent for closing or downgrading
“10 out of 20 children’s centres”.
Apart from that not being strictly true—I have checked—I thought it was a bit rich that the hon. Lady should be criticising her local council, which is having to deal with a real-terms cut to its budget for early intervention of almost £10 million over three years, or 18%, according to figures that I have from the Library. That is a cut that she handed to the council, and a decision that she made. She even had the sense of humour in that press release to portray that as a rather good deal. I doubt whether many of her constituents will see it that way, even if Brent council manages to protect the majority of front-line services.
We keep hearing the refrain that there is enough money in the early intervention grant to maintain the children’s centre network. We heard it from the Prime Minister earlier, and a couple of weeks ago he even said that funding for that grant is going up. Both those statements are misleading to the public. The early intervention grant might be increasing by a small amount between 2011-12 and 2012-13, but from the baseline—the budget that councils originally had for services that will now be provided by that fund—there is a significant cut. The EIG covers more than 20 other funding streams, as well as children’s centres, and according to the Department’s publications it is being cut by a total of almost £1.4 billion over three years in cash terms. In real terms, Commons Library research shows that that will be more like 18%, with the worst-hit areas seeing cumulative cuts of more than 22%.
Funding for children’s centres is not ring-fenced within the early intervention grant, which itself is not ring-fenced from the rest of the local authority’s budget, so there is nothing to stop that money being used to fund things entirely separate from what it is supposed to be for. There is therefore no way in which the Minister can realistically tell us today that she is protecting Sure Start. She will call it localism, no doubt, but I call it naiveté in the extreme. Why be a Minister if all she can do is cross her fingers and hope for the best?
I am sure that very few local authorities want to cut budgets for children’s centres or other early intervention schemes, but given the scale of the cuts to their budgets across the board, many of them will have no choice. If not children’s centres, do they cut breaks for disabled children, programmes to combat teen pregnancy, family intervention or targeted mental health in schools, all of which save money in the long term, which is the purpose of early intervention projects? We all know the old adage about a stitch in time saving nine. In short, cutting early intervention funding is ill thought out and will create long-term problems for the sake of short-term savings.
Mr Graham Stuart
I am grateful to the hon. Lady, all the more so after her kind words. It is early days and, as I said in my remarks, I hope we do not see the dismantling of a service that is still embryonic. It is not about buildings or budgets, but about outcomes. How does she think we can best ensure that it delivers the outcomes we want? Would she support a movement to payment by results, for instance?
Mrs Hodgson
I would support a return to the ring fence, if not for the whole early intervention grant, then specifically for the Sure Start element within it. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman wanted my opinion and I have given it. The proposals are also contrary to the considered views of the Select Committee, which he now chairs, of my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead and of my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen).
The Minister of State seems to be continually distracted and keeps missing important points I am making. She has already had to ask the Secretary of State about my comment on the hon. Member for Corby, and I would not like her to miss anything else I say.
As I said, my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead and my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North, whose opinions the Minister actively sought, have both championed the prioritisation of early intervention schemes such as children’s centres.
Sarah Teather
I am afraid that I cannot answer the hon. Lady’s question at the moment.
Children’s centres are a priority for us, so we have ensured that there is enough money in the system to maintain the network of Sure Start children’s centres through the early intervention grant, or EIG. The spending review announced that funding for Sure Start children’s centres would be maintained in cash terms, including new investment from the Department of Health for 4,200 health visitors to work alongside outreach and family support workers. I understand that many in the sector are concerned about the removal of ring-fencing. However, this is not about a lack of priority for the sector; on the contrary, it is a recognition of its growing strength and maturity.
The removal of the ring fence is not taking place in a vacuum. Across the piece, this Government are removing ring fences in many areas because we believe that the right way to make decisions is to trust people on the ground to decide how best to prioritise funding. In that way, we get much better decision making.
Sarah Teather
I give way first to the Chair of the Select Committee and then to the hon. Gentleman.
Sarah Teather
I do not want to spell out exactly which bits of the EIG go to what, because I want local authorities to make decisions on the ground about the best ways to do that. As the hon. Gentleman says, the money for health visitors comes from the Department of Health. I will write to him to provide some information about that, because I do not have it here with me. However, I do not want to—
Education Bill
Graham Stuart Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Michael Gove
As so often, the hon. Lady is absolutely right. One problem in the education system is that we need to make it easier for good heads to tackle underperformance by encouraging staff to do the professional development that they need to improve. If they do not improve, they should move on. No one benefits when poor teachers are in the classroom. It not only places an additional burden on hard-working and talented staff, but denies children the chance that they need.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
Will the Secretary of State give way?
Mr Stuart
The Secretary of State plans to keep a register of teachers who are barred from teaching. Will he confirm that schools will be able to refer someone who is sacked for gross misconduct to the Secretary of State to be put on the register, but not someone who is fired for incompetence? If that is the case, will he explain the reasoning behind it?
Michael Gove
I am delighted to confirm that. We want to ensure that people who are barred for gross misconduct are kept on a central list, which is updated continually. As my hon. Friend and I know, the General Teaching Council, which was responsible for dismissing and barring incompetent teachers, succeeded in barring only 14 teachers over the 10 years that it was in existence. We need to ensure that at school level, head teachers have the power to dismiss those whom they consider to be inappropriate. We must ensure that head teachers who are doing a fantastic job and are generating improved results have freedom and flexibility over the staff that are required to carry on doing that great work.
Mr Stuart
I agree with the Secretary of State that the previous system was not working effectively. However, that is no reason to believe that we should not have a system that ensures that an incompetent teacher who is removed and sacked—we know how difficult that is, as the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) just said—does not reappear in another school. That will happen if the Secretary of State does not put that person’s name on a register. I ask him to reconsider this issue.
Michael Gove
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, and we will have an opportunity to consider it in Committee. The phenomenon that he refers to is known in the United States as “the dance of the lemons”, whereby teachers who are not up to the job are removed from it and reappear in another educational setting. We have explored with a variety of professional bodies the best way of ensuring that that cannot happen. There is no consensus that a central list of the kind he mentions is the answer. I am happy to discuss with him, in Committee and elsewhere, how we can ensure that teachers who are not effective do not continue in the classroom.
I mentioned that there are six principal areas in the Bill. The first is investment in the early years. It is critical that Opposition Members appreciate that if they vote against the Bill tonight, they will be voting against additional funding to guarantee 15 hours of learning for all disadvantaged two-year-olds. Under Labour, 20,000 of the poorest two-year-olds would have received 15 hours of free learning. Now, under the coalition Government’s proposals, 120,000 two-year-olds will be able to have the best possible free learning. Because of that investment, we will be able to ensure that those children are school-ready when they arrive at primary school. We can ensure that when we have in place the literacy check at the end of year 1 that we intend to impose, those children will have a grasp of the basic skills required to make the most of their time at primary school.
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
It is only weeks since the Government asked the House to pass an education Act using procedures normally reserved for counter-terrorism legislation. Today the Secretary of State is back with an even more audacious request. He is asking Members of the House of Commons to give him more than 50 new powers, and near-total control over almost every aspect of our school system in England. He wants the power to seize land, to close schools, to overrule councils on budgets, to ban teachers from working, to define early-years provision, and to rewrite the curriculum without reference to parents or the public.
The Secretary of State has been known to claim—and he did so again today—that he is continuing Labour’s reforms. Labour Members empowered parents with guarantees, but the Bill does precisely the opposite. It constitutes an unprecedented power grab from pupils, parents, professionals and the public, leaving them without essential safeguards in a free-for-all. As we have heard, the Secretary of State wants to tell children what subjects and facts they must learn, and what kind of schools they must go to. Student and parent choice is being restricted.
During the passage of the Bill, the House will have to reflect very carefully on whether it can ever be healthy for so much power over something as precious as our children’s education to be vested in one person. Given the Secretary of State’s record in office to date, would it not be downright reckless to give him a free hand in such crucial issues? Local authorities will be stripped of their long-standing role of looking after all children in their areas, balancing the wishes of one group against those of another and thereby ensuring that service is shaped by need and not by the loudest voices.
Where does this leave Government promises of localism? I look to the Liberal Democrat Benches. Where does it leave those promises? Absolutely nowhere. By preaching freedom and autonomy—as he so frequently does—only to come up with a highly prescriptive reform of the curriculum, the Secretary of State places himself in serious danger of collapsing under the weight of his own contradictions.
As with the Government’s national health service reforms, the fabric of public services is being ripped up. Power is being taken from people and handed back to the system. The result is a huge void in public accountability at local level. Liberal Democrat councillors can see that; why cannot Members of Parliament see it as well? The Bill reveals an unhealthy obsession with structures, and the mistaken view that structural reform automatically leads to higher standards. It does not. The Bill has little to say about what really matters to parents: high standards in the basics, a rich and balanced curriculum, and quality teaching in every classroom.
There are elements of the Bill that we support, such as the proposals relating to early-years provision and discipline, and I shall say something about those later. However, what we are witnessing from this Secretary of State—and, indeed, from the Secretary of State for Health—is an unseemly rush to reform in which the normal processes of government are simply ditched. There will be no pilots, no evidence and no consultation. No time will be taken to listen to parents and children, consult teachers, and build the broad consensus in the country that should properly underpin any education reform. We will oppose the Bill tonight because it represents too big a gamble with the life chances of our children, and because—as I shall now set out in terms—it takes power from pupils, parents, professionals and the public, leaving them with fewer protections in a less publicly accountable education system.
Let me explain first how the Bill takes power from pupils. It restricts student choice and takes away guarantees at a time when youth unemployment is at a record high. It strips yet more support from young people, adding to the growing risk of a lost generation. This is national apprenticeships week. Debating the abolition of a guarantee of an apprenticeship for all suitably qualified 16 to 19-year-olds seems to me an odd way in which to mark it. It cements the impression that this Secretary of State gives very little thought indeed to the hopes and life chances of the 50% of young people who are unlikely to go to university. That is further strengthened by clause 29, which lifts the requirement on local authorities to ensure young people have access to studying for the diploma. Both the Association of Colleges and the Association of School and College Leaders have expressed concerns that that sends the
“wrong message about the future of vocational education.”
[Interruption.] The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning shakes his head, but that is what they say. Does it not also send the wrong message about student choice in this day and age that young people might not be able to choose the courses that will give them the skills they need?
Mr Graham Stuart
May I gently request that the right hon. Gentleman does not take this line on apprenticeships? I served on the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill Committee. One criticism was that the Bill gave a statutory right to an apprenticeship when one needs a job to get one. The right hon. Gentleman can correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that the current Bill simply recognises that reality, but does not alter the right of a young person who secures a job that needs apprenticeship funding to get that funding from Government. I therefore do not think the right hon. Gentleman is taking the right line on this very important issue.
Andy Burnham
I hear what the Chair of the Select Committee on Education says, but this guarantee was important because it was about bringing forward offers of apprenticeships, particularly from the public sector, so that there are sufficient opportunities for young people who decide that university is not for them. I put it to the hon. Gentleman that we in Parliament have neglected debating the opportunities for those 50% of young people who do not plan to go to university. We owe it to them to do more by debating the quality of the opportunities that we are going to give them so that they can have a foothold in the future and hope of a better life. We endlessly debate higher education, and that is very important, but is it not about time that we gave more thought to young people who want to get a good skill so that they can get on in life? The hon. Gentleman’s Secretary of State has absolutely nothing to say to them.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
It is a pleasure to take part in this debate. Last year, the Academies Act 2010 flew through Parliament. Today, we are debating the Government’s second education Bill, which follows on from the White Paper entitled “The Importance of Teaching”. Disraeli told the House 136 years ago:
“Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.”—[Official Report, 15 June 1874; Vol. 219, c. 1618.]
That view was true then; today, it is even more obvious and is shared across the House.
There is a lot to support in the Bill—a lot that even the most opportunistic of Oppositions would struggle to oppose. I welcome the priority given to behaviour and discipline, the subject of the Education Committee’s first report, which was published last week. Anonymity for teachers prior to criminal charge and clarity about teachers’ powers will materially help, as will the more focused brief for Ofsted. The Committee urges the Government to collect appropriate data to monitor the actual, as opposed to the perceived, state of discipline in our schools. I hope that Ministers will think on that.
The emphasis on international comparison is also right. What was the point of the previous Government claiming higher standards at home if, compared with others, our relative position was collapsing? The changes to Ofqual are therefore also correct. The duty on schools to bring in specialist careers advice from outside is hugely welcome. The provision of advice is often woeful and exacerbates pre-existing disadvantage for those who do not have strong family networks. The change is a great move and needs to be extended to academies and free schools. If that cannot happen in the Bill, I should like to hear from Ministers that it will be included in the funding agreement.
Those are all good things, yet I cannot help feeling a little disappointed with the Bill. When I saw “The Importance of Teaching”, I thought, “Maybe the Government have got it. Maybe they’ll be obsessed with teacher quality above all else”, as the research suggests we should be. Attracting, retaining and motivating the brightest and best in teaching is a matter of existential importance to this country’s future, and removing the incompetent is likewise essential, so what does the Bill offer on that front? Less than I would like.
We know that Teach First, the highly selective programme to get the brightest graduates into teaching, is being doubled in size, which is extremely welcome. The entry level for teacher training is being raised to a 2:2 degree, and training will be reformed, with a big expansion of school-led initial teacher training, which the Education Committee has welcomed.
However, it seems to me that the biggest challenges are to increase the accountability of teachers and to manage variability both within and between schools. The Government have inherited a performance management system for teachers that is toothless. The so-called social partnership was a surrender to the teaching unions and the producer interest, strangling every effort to put the interests of the child brought up in poverty ahead of those of the well-paid, qualified adult who teaches them. Our professional standards, by which the performance of teachers is judged, were written as much by union leaders as by leaders in education. When will the Secretary of State rewrite the professional standards? That cannot be started too soon.
If the Government’s promise of autonomy and accountability is to be delivered, we need more than a refocused Ofsted. We need action when children stop progressing in a teacher’s class. We need a considered resetting of the rights of the child and the rights of the work force. Where are the provisions in the Bill to ensure that the teachers who do not help pupils to learn cease to teach?
The Government have stressed the importance of autonomy in their proposals for free schools and academies, which I broadly welcome. The best education systems in the world all give their schools and heads a lot of autonomy. However, we need to be wary of concluding that greater autonomy by itself brings higher standards. High-performing leaders tend to demand and be granted more autonomy in any organisation—it is a by-product of top performance rather than an initial driver. In business, a top manager is granted more freedom because of his success. He then uses that freedom further to improve his practice. A management consultant looking at businesses with branches would find that the best-performing branches in a variety of businesses tended to have leaders with greater autonomy from the centre. Observing that, the consultant might conclude that if only all managers had those greater freedoms, standards would necessarily rise elsewhere. I believe that that would be an erroneous judgment. Can Ministers assure me that we are not making that mistake in education?
McKinsey’s excellent report, “How the world’s most improved schools systems keep getting better”, shows that different interventions are required at different stages of school system improvement. Ministers should reflect on its analysis and recognise that in a system as large as England’s, one size does not fit all. Will they also expand on the respective roles of competition and co-operation? How will the Government ensure that competition, which is so critical to improvements in the business sector, will not stifle the exchange of best practices that is often so important in the education sector?
I entirely understand why Ministers have proposed what they have proposed on the English baccalaureate—they want to ensure that young people are not put on Mickey Mouse courses that should be removed for their lack of rigour. However, that rightful intervention does not necessarily mean that one should assume that all courses that are not academic courses are Mickey Mouse courses that lack rigour. Surely we should ensure that we remove inappropriate courses rather than condemn them all. I am concerned that we could end up getting the mix between vocational and academic courses wrong.
Chris Goodwin is the head teacher of Beverley grammar school in my constituency, which must be one of the highest-performing state schools in the country. Despite its name, it is the oldest state school—and indeed the oldest school—on one site in the country. It is a comprehensive school for boys and it has been found to be outstanding in its last three Ofsted inspections. Chris Goodwin and his team have extreme concerns about the potential impact of the baccalaureate. He said:
“I thought the whole drive of the government is to give power to the Headteachers to enable them to make the right choices for their students. By publishing tables and rating schools in this way, you are placing me, the staff and students in a strait-jacket. We will have no choice but to comply, to the detriment of all concerned…This is ironic, as my entire Senior Team are in favour of a better constructed English Baccalaureate—just not this one.”
I hope the Government remain open minded on that. I absolutely understand their desire for rigour and to make the basic right to a decent academic education an opportunity for everyone in our society, but we must ensure that vocational and other courses that schools often use are not squeezed out by the baccalaureate, thus undermining so much of the good work in many of our schools.
Mr Rob Wilson (Reading East) (Con)
I rise to support the broad thrust of the Bill. It is unlikely to be remembered as one of the great education reform Bills—such as, arguably, the Bills of 1988 and 1944—but the sum of this Bill is probably much greater than its parts; and, if we add the changes that have already been pushed through in the Academies Act 2010, it is likely that this Government will have a claim to be remembered as a really radical reformer of education. For all the arguments that we have heard—and will hear again—against this Bill, few would disagree with the broad principles that lie behind it. Those principles are about devolving power down to schools; ensuring that exams reach the highest possible standards internationally; improving social mobility; and reducing the bureaucratic burden on schools, allowing the quality of teaching and leadership to flower, which, as Baroness Morgan, the new chair of Ofsted, has said, is the bedrock of any successful school.
Crucially for me, what this Bill has at its core is support for teachers. I particularly welcome the measures aimed at strengthening the power of teachers to maintain school discipline. We all know how one badly behaved child can threaten the prospects of all the pupils in a class if they are not dealt with firmly and quickly. The national statistics are quite shocking. Every day, nearly 1,000 children are excluded from school for abuse or assault against staff or fellow pupils. Major assaults on staff have reached a five-year high. Good teachers are leaving the profession because of bad behaviour, while talented graduates are discouraged from coming into teaching owing to fears for their safety. Across Reading in 2008-09, we had 390 suspensions for assaults and abuse, which is equivalent to two exclusions for every school day in the last recorded year. Why should we expect teachers to put up with that? We would not expect any other profession to put up with such violence.
Put simply, the substantial improvement in pupil attainment that all Members across this House wish to see will not be possible unless we give schools all the help that we can to set and maintain school discipline. Rules imposed by the previous, Labour Government deliberately made it more difficult for schools to expel pupils, undermining the authority of head teachers. By contrast, the measures in this Bill will ensure that we get adult authority back into schools. The fact that exclusion review panels will no longer be able to enforce the reinstatement of disruptive pupils will help to set boundaries for acceptable behaviour and ensure that teachers are not second-guessed all the time. The new powers on detentions and searching for items banned under school rules will help to give the necessary legal backing to enforce school rules whenever that is needed.
Pupils go to school to learn. That must be our message to parents, pupils and teachers. I am confident that the long-overdue measures in the Bill will considerably reinforce teachers’ authority in schools. But action on discipline on its own will not be enough to drive the vast improvement that we need to see in England’s schools. The latest OECD report, the “Programme for International Student Assessment”, made it clear that, under Labour, schools in England plummeted down the international league tables. As we have heard from the Secretary of State, we went from seventh to 25th in reading, from eighth to 28th in maths and from fourth to 16th in science.
This trend is deeply worrying for our economic future. Reading was recently named in Centre for Cities’ “Cities Outlook 2011” as one of the five cities best placed for a private sector-led recovery. Among the major local employers are international companies that require a highly skilled work force. In information technology, for example, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco and Symantec all have important headquarters in Reading. To ensure that those employers continue to feel that Britain is the best place in which to run major parts of their operations and to enable them to draw on the skilled work force that they need, we must take every possible step to ensure that we reverse the decline, relative to other countries, and strive to get to the top once again. To do anything else would be to sell future generations short.
I welcome the provisions in the Bill that will require Ofqual to compare standards in England with others internationally. I also welcome the proposals to give the Government the power to require schools to make themselves accountable to international surveys.
Mr Graham Stuart
My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Does he agree that big international companies such as Microsoft need not only excellent PhDs but first-class technicians to support the work that they do?
Mr Wilson
I thank the Select Committee Chairman for his question. Of course technical skills will be important, and I hope that university technical colleges will play an important role in that regard. I shall return to that point in a minute.
Rigour is absolutely essential, but we must not lose sight of the fact that not every pupil is right for university and the academic route. There has been a danger in recent weeks that all the emphasis might be placed on academic subjects and academic achievement. I have no doubt that that emphasis might be necessary temporarily while we are changing the prevailing philosophy that has surrounded education over the past decade, and, yes, we need academic rigour, but we also need alternative, equally valid and equally celebrated pathways in education. However, this should not come down to pushing some young people towards easier subjects, which is what the previous Government did. We have to find different ways of teaching and learning. I am looking forward to the findings of the review on vocational qualifications that is being led by the excellent Professor Alison Wolf. Unfortunately, they were not available in time for this debate, which was disappointing.
I welcome the Government’s support for initiatives such as university technical colleges under the academies and free schools programme. UTCs, as championed by the endlessly energetic Lord Baker and the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, offer 14 to 19-year-olds the opportunity to take a highly regarded, technically oriented course of study at a specialist college that is equipped to the highest standards. Those colleges specialise in subjects that require particular, modern equipment, and local employers, large and small, are asked to help to shape the specialist curriculum. The colleges offer a promising way of engaging young people through a different type of teaching, which is, as the name suggests, more technical in its orientation. They do not neglect the academic subjects, however, and they also help to ensure that local employers continue to have the skilled work force they need.
I welcome the priority given to academies in the establishment of new schools. This builds on the previous Government’s most successful reform programme, which in turn built on the success of city technology colleges. Academies are a proven success story, with their academic performance improving at almost twice the rate of other state schools. In 2009-10, the proportion of pupils in academies achieving the expected level at GCSE of five A* to C grades, including in English and maths, increased by 7.4 points on the previous year, compared with an increase of 4.1 points across all maintained schools. The OECD has concluded that
“in countries where schools have greater autonomy over what is taught and how students are assessed, students tend to perform better”.
Labour Members might not like the reforms, but teachers and parents in my constituency do. Three schools in Reading have already become academies, and all the secondary schools there will probably have converted by the end of next year. The number of proposals for new free schools is rising at what the Secretary of State might regard as an alarming rate. There is clearly an appetite among parents and professionals for our policies. With the extra priority being given to academies in the Bill, Reading might finally be relieved of the absurd situation in which Reading children cross into neighbouring local authority areas in search of good schools while pupils from other local authorities cross into Reading to attend what are successful but almost regional grammar schools. The quality of schools should not depend on the local authority in which they are situated. The measures in the Bill will give head teachers more freedom to determine what goes on in their schools and greater powers to drive improvement, wherever they might be. As such, I welcome these measures as a step in the right direction.
Oral Answers to Questions
Graham Stuart Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Gibb
The right hon. Gentleman is right to support this development. We intend to have 12 UTCs up and running by the end of the spending review period. He is also right to emphasise the importance of science, technology, engineering and maths, which the Government are committed to.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
I share my hon. Friend’s enthusiasm for UTCs, but is he confident that the English baccalaureate will not have a cramping impact on the power of innovation in institutions such as UTCs, so that we can ensure the most appropriate education for all their pupils?
Mr Gibb
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question. The English baccalaureate is designed to leave ample time in the curriculum for other subjects, including vocational subjects. In the countries around the world that have the best technical education systems, core academic subjects are taught alongside, not instead of, technical or vocational subjects until their students reach the age of 15 or 16. Subjects such as modern languages are critical for the technical and vocational success of young people.
Disadvantaged Children
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Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this extremely important and valuable debate. I believe that there is all-party agreement that early intervention in children’s lives is crucial to tackling not just the symptoms but the causes of deprivation, in order to prevent disadvantaged children from becoming disadvantaged adults and prevent cycles of deprivation from being repeated.
We all accept that it is essential to make the right interventions. Both my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) and my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) have made that point in their excellent reports. However, the key question is: how do we most effectively achieve such intervention and produce good outcomes?
In an earlier debate, I discussed some of the interventions that I believe can make a difference, such as outreach work with families. The pilot scheme in my constituency to provide early-years education to disadvantaged two-year-olds was extremely successful, and we also had a successful pilot scheme for family nurse partnerships. Both share a similar model: contact with parents; building relationships with those parents; giving them information; and getting them to use other support services to improve the quality of their parenting, which is a key factor in delivering better outcomes for children.
I want to focus today on whether the introduction of the new early intervention grant will help us to safeguard such achievements and move us further towards obtaining the outcomes for disadvantaged children that we all want. The main problems with the EIG are that it is not a specific grant—it is not ring-fenced—and that it represents an 11% cut on its predecessor grants. They, themselves, were cut last year, so the real cut is more like 17% in Government funding to Stockport. The new EIG is not confined to early interventions in children’s lives; it is for early interventions in a number of areas. The EIG will replace funding to a wide variety of 22 other schemes, including everything from the Youth Taskforce to teenage pregnancy programmes, the youth crime plan and young people’s substance misuse services. Those schemes give support to young people in need, but they will now have to compete against each other for resources.
The Government have said that although local authorities will be able to spend money where they want, they will be expected to continue to support Sure Start children’s centres and the free early education places for disadvantaged two-year-olds. Ministers have also reiterated that short breaks for disabled children, support for vulnerable young people, mental health work in schools and support for families with multiple problems should also be priorities. However, it is not mandatory that those services are prioritised, and I fear that there will be a lot of casualties in the local financial tussles for funding up and down the country.
As the Minister will be aware, there is much concern in the early-years sector about the removal of ring-fencing, despite ministerial reassurances that the Government expect to see early-years services protected. People know that, ultimately, without a sanction, the councils can choose to ignore the exhortations of Ministers. The Daycare Trust, the national child care charity, says that many local authorities are already considering diverting funding allocated for early-years provision, leading to the possible closure of Sure Start centres.
I do believe that Ministers have genuinely accepted the arguments about early intervention, and I welcome that. Such a view is supported by the fact that the Government set up the report by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead and this week’s report by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North. Both reports call for much more emphasis to be placed on the early years. It would be a shame if, having accepted the principle, Ministers failed to tackle the problem in a way that will make a real difference to the lives of some of the most disadvantaged and deprived families in the country.
As my right hon. Friend said in his recent report on poverty and life chances, which was endorsed by the Prime Minister:
“Later interventions to help poorly performing children can be effective but, in general, the most effective and cost-effective way to help and support young families is in the earliest years of a child’s life.”
It is vital that we continue the valuable work with young children that has been done so far, be it through children’s centres and early-years education, or through outreach work with hard-to-reach families, and that projects and services around the country are not damaged by the change in the funding process from having individual ring-fenced budgets to having one smaller communal pot of money, which has to be fought over locally.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
The hon. Lady is making a powerful and thoughtful speech. I wonder where she feels savings could be made elsewhere within the educational budget in order to prioritise early-years provision. I hope that Sure Start’s increased focus on the most vulnerable children, albeit with a reduced budget overall, can still deliver more of the benefit that we were originally seeking. Perhaps she, like the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), would accept larger class sizes as the price for getting more money into early intervention. These are the choices that we need to make. I wonder whether she has any thoughts on that.
Ann Coffey
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but the point that I am making is about the difficulty when ring-fencing is removed from grants from central Government to local government. I would be grateful if the Minister could clarify what processes are in place to ensure that we monitor how much money continues to be spent on early-years intervention as the mixed picture of how local councils choose to spend the early intervention grant emerges.
I would also be grateful for clarification about what monitoring procedures will be put in place to evaluate the effectiveness of the money spent in terms of outcomes for disadvantaged children. I can foresee two years from now a parliamentary question asking for information about early-years intervention receiving the reply, “The information is not kept centrally.” Without central monitoring, it is difficult for hon. Members to hold the Government to account for their stated policies.
Targets and some external assessments of local authorities are being abolished, so how will the Government monitor whether their emphasis on the importance of early-years intervention is shared by cash-strapped councils in the face of priorities set by a local electorate that might not be the same as those of the Government? The pressure on local councillors might be to maintain parks and street lighting and to keep roads and pavements in good repair. They have to be responsive to the needs of their electorate and early-years intervention might not be a priority for local people.
The Government have emphasised the importance they give to early years, but the chosen commissioners are councils so how, without statutory guidance and without ring-fencing, will the Government ensure that councils deliver on the coalition’s commitment to early interventions in children’s lives?
While I have the opportunity, I want to draw attention briefly to another disadvantaged group—children in care homes. They are the children who would have benefited from early intervention in their lives. As the chair of the all-party group on runaway and missing children and adults, I am particularly concerned about the number of children who run away from care homes. I was shocked when I discovered that more than half the children reported missing in Greater Manchester are from children’s homes in Stockport. This is concerning, as research shows that children who run away are at serious risk, exposed to violence, criminality, substance abuse, sexual exploitation and trafficking.
Over the years, I have expressed much concern about the need to improve Ofsted’s inspection reports so that they reflect the numbers of children who go missing from care homes. We are awaiting the new national minimum standards for children’s homes, which I hope will tackle the issue. I am disappointed that the timetable for the publication of the new standards keeps slipping. In a parliamentary written answer in July last year, I was told the revised standards would be ready in November 2010. When they did not appear, I tabled another question and was told they would be ready “early in 2011”. I hope that the new standards will be published as soon as possible and will include in the inspections of children’s homes consideration of how those homes manage children who go missing to ensure that the highest quality of care and control is provided.
In conclusion, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North said in his report about the importance of early intervention policies and programmes:
“The rationale is simple: many of the costly and damaging social problems in society are created because we are not giving children the right type of support in their earliest years, when they should achieve their most rapid development. If we do not provide that help early enough, then it is often too late”.
His words must not go unheeded.
Fiona Bruce
I do so agree. In fact, that was the subject of my very first question in the House, some months ago, and I look forward eagerly to hearing the Government’s response to the idea of such a scheme being put into action. I thank my hon. Friend for raising it again; that is a timely reminder.
As the mother of two teenage boys with the benefit of a supportive wider family, I want to promote and encourage the role of parents and grandparents in helping children to grow up to be all that they can be. In the report by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), I welcome his statement:
“We imperil the country’s future if we forget that it is the aspirations and actions of parents which are critical to how well their children prosper.”
He is absolutely right. Children flourish with support and encouragement from the care giver or care givers with whom they have, ideally, a long-term, stable and loving relationship. So do parents.
If parents never had continuing close care and nurture as they grew up, or the example and experience in their lives of caring parents, how difficult it must be for them to be good parents themselves. We have to address that key issue. How can we break the inter-generational cycle of poverty in families where parents themselves have not had a good parenting model?
Mr Graham Stuart
My hon. Friend talks about absences in young people’s lives. I am particularly concerned about young boys, who are often brought up in families with no male role models. They turn up at primary school, where more than eight out of 10 teachers are now women rather than men, and they lack the male role models in life to ensure that, as they grow up, they can learn how to behave as a man, as a father and as a supporter of their own family.
Kate Green
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that suggestion, which covers a number of important points. The first is the importance of fathers in raising children and improving child outcomes, and of the support that we can give families, whatever their structure, to ensure that both parents remain engaged in their children’s lives.
Secondly, the hon. Gentleman hints at the important point that universal provision for all people who become parents—not just the poorest—provides us with a crucial opportunity to improve the way in which they are equipped and given the confidence to raise happy, successful kids. He is right also to say that parenting and the ability to parent well go much further than simply providing materially for children and providing them with good physical health and circumstances. They are also about emotional, educational and social support, all of which should sit within programmes of support for new parents. I very much welcome the hon. Gentleman’s comments.
As I said, we should do everything we can to enable parents to bring up their children successfully in the context of family life. It is therefore particularly important that we give extra attention to services such as Family Action’s Building Bridges service, which works with parents in the home to enable them to keep their kids with them and ensures that they are properly supported to do what they want to do—raise successful children. I am wary of an over-emphasis on care settings and taking children out of the family home, which we should avoid wherever possible. The worst outcomes are for our looked-after children, and we should do everything we can to minimise the number of children who end up in state care.
Mr Graham Stuart
We all take on board the hon. Lady’s comments, given her long record in this area. I am delighted to hear her say that she sees an equal role for fathers and mothers in bringing up children. Does she agree with a presumption of equality of access between fathers and mothers in the event of separation, rather than the current presumption, which too often means fathers dropping out of children’s lives altogether?
Kate Green
The presumption at the moment is that the child’s best interests must be paramount, which I continue to support. Of course, in the majority of cases, we would want to secure contact with both parents after separation. However, the starting point should not be the interests and wishes of the parent; the best interests of the child must remain paramount. I hope that there will be no deviating from that valuable and valid principle in the Children Act 1989.
Let me conclude by addressing one or two of the suggestions made in the report of my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North. I am disappointed that he is not here this afternoon to hear the many compliments that his work certainly deserves. I was pleased that he wrote of the need to intervene early and to sustain that intervention and support. His suggestions for private funding to support our children and the families who raise them are interesting and imaginative, but I hope they will not be used to let the Government off the hook. At this time, when so many of the voluntary agencies that have done so much to support our most vulnerable families are struggling to maintain their finances and when they are concerned about their financial future—they face uncertainty perhaps as soon as the beginning as the next financial year—it is important that we underwrite with financial support what is needed to raise happy, successful and healthy children. That is the responsibility of all of us: the country, the state and the Government cannot abdicate it.
Education Maintenance Allowance
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Andy Burnham
The hon. Lady has just shown how hopelessly out of touch Government Members are. Is she telling me that nine out of 10 young people in her constituency who get EMA are saying they do not need it? If so, she has been speaking to some very different young people—although I am glad that she has at least been speaking to them, unlike those on her Front Bench. She needs to answer this question. The Government are proposing a scheme that is a tenth—
Andy Burnham
I am about to do that. The Government are proposing a scheme that is a tenth of the size of the previous one, so a fair assumption is that it will help one in 10 of the people who are getting help today. How is that compatible with the full participation in education of all 16 to 18-year-olds, to which the Government amendment refers?
I have never set my face against changes or savings to the EMA scheme. I proposed a change last year—that of giving young people between 16 and 18 the choice of unlimited free travel or EMA. Today I say this to the Secretary of State: I am prepared to discuss changes while keeping the principle of a national weekly payment scheme to support young people in education, but I am not prepared to see a successful scheme, which brings a huge range of social benefits, dismantled and replaced with a residual scheme a fraction of the size. He will have to work very hard to convince us that a scheme a tenth of the size will, in the words of his amendment, improve
“access to, enthusiasm for and participation in further and higher education.”
How can it possibly do that?
Andy Burnham
As I said, 80% of people get the £30 higher level. I also said that I am not opposed to talking to the Secretary of State about changes. However, if he is to fulfil his goal of keeping young people in education, he will have to talk about a scheme on a much bigger scale than he is proposing, and he will have to do that today.
Let me set out, first, the educational case for EMA. EMA has had a positive impact on participation in post-16 education: that is accepted by all. The Government’s figures suggest that EMA makes all the difference for 78,000 young people. However, as we enter 2011, the financial outlook for many families is changing for the worse. Calculations about the affordability of staying on will have to be redone when the loss of EMA is set alongside changes to other benefits and wages. New research released yesterday by the University and College Lecturers Union suggested that seven in 10 EMA recipients will drop out of education if EMA is taken away.
Mr Graham Stuart
I regret the removal of EMA and the necessity to remove it, which was caused by an orgy of overspending by the Administration of whom the right hon. Gentleman was a part. A diet of cold, hard decisions now has to be taken by Ministers, and I have some sympathy with them. Choices have to be made, such as between providing nursery education for two-year-olds in the poorest areas or retaining EMA. The right hon. Gentleman accepts that there can be changes to EMA. Is there any reason why a slimmed-down version, such as that proposed by the Government, with constructive input from all sides, cannot deliver for the most needy and minimise the negative impacts?
Andy Burnham
The hon. Gentleman is having it both ways. He started by saying that he regrets the removal of EMA, before going on to make his attack. I will make two points to him. First, he said that EMA was essentially unaffordable. Why then does the Institute for Fiscal Studies say that the costs of EMA are “completely offset” by the wider benefits that it brings? He might want to reflect on that point.
Secondly, why did the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State promise young people that they would keep EMA? More than that, why did the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), stand at the Dispatch Box after the general election and say that EMA would be retained? Why did they do that if it is now such a bad idea? Will he answer that?
Mr Stuart
On that particular point, following our joint interview yesterday, I looked up the Prime Minister’s interview on Cameron Direct. He expressed some concerns and talked about the mixed messages that he had received from students on EMA. He said that the Conservative party had no plans to remove EMA. That is not a matter of pure semantics. There was no promise, and the right hon. Gentleman should not put out an untruth about the Prime Minister on this subject.
Andy Burnham
We will leave those kinds of points to Back Benchers; we do not expect them from the Chair of the Select Committee.
The fundamental point that the Government are missing is that participation is only part—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) does not have to put his hand up—he can just stand up. Participation is only part of the story; EMA helps students to succeed once they arrive at college. It stands to reason that young people do better if they can afford the books or equipment that support the course. As many young people have told me, EMA means that they do not have to take a part-time job, so they can focus all their energy and attention on their studies. College after college reports that EMA improves attendance, helps people to stay the course, reduces the drop-out rate and, in the end, brings a higher rate of achievement.
Andy Burnham
I will do so, but I cannot answer for the Secretary of State. I have been to sixth-form colleges in London, and that brings me to my case about social mobility. If he visits a sixth-form college while he is in the job, may I suggest that he could do worse than visit the one that my hon. Friend mentions, or indeed Newham sixth-form college, which I visited yesterday? If he does, he might meet the young man who told me about the practical effect of losing EMA. He feels that he will have to lower his ambitions in the universities to which he applies, because he thinks his exam grades will undoubtedly suffer.
Andy Burnham
The Chairman of the Education Committee cements the impression that the Conservatives have not really thought about what it is like to be a young person in the circumstances that I have described. It is hard to put a value on the self-confidence and peace of mind that financial security gives a young person. It creates the conditions for their academic potential to be realised.
The Secretary of State talks frequently about social mobility under the Labour Government, citing the number of young people on free school meals gaining a place at Oxford or Cambridge. Time and again, he has used that figure selectively to paint a misleading picture of Labour’s record, and I wish to set the matter straight.
First, I politely point out to the Secretary of State that Oxbridge is not the be-all and end-all. If he examines the university system as a whole, which my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) has taken the trouble to do, he will see that between 2005 and 2007 the number of young people on free school meals gaining a place at university increased by 18%, double the rate of increase for all young people. Does the Secretary of State recognise those figures and, if so, does he accept that EMA has played an important role in securing that social progress? Does he further accept that the proportion of children on free school meals who stayed on in full-time education at 16 increased from 60% in 2005 to 70% in 2009? That is why more are applying to, and getting into, universities.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
It is a pleasure to take part in the debate about scrapping the education maintenance allowance. I share the frustration of many Opposition Members about the potential impact of abolishing it. However, although they may deny the relevance of the deficit, my anger is directed at the Labour party and the state in which the previous Government left the public finances.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
You should remember you’re the Chair of the Committee.
Mr Stuart
I am entirely happy to chair a Committee and to bear witness to the reality of education funding. I am involved in education and serve on the Committee because I care passionately about improving the quality of education and opportunity in this country. We may hear from others later, but the shadow Secretary of State did at least have the goodness to recognise that there was room for reducing the deficit. However, he would not tell us where, what, when or how. When I consider the attempt to make more effective interventions in the early years and I look at the nursery education opportunities for two-year-olds, I ask myself whether I would prefer to cut that or keep the EMA.
A Labour Member suggested that there might be differences between Members. In my constituency, some students travel for an hour and 40 minutes each way to attend Bishop Burton further education college. That is a real issue for a rural area such as mine. However, I know that half of all 17 and 18-year-old full-time students are eligible for EMA, and I am aware of the chronic crisis and pressure on education budgets—the desperate desire to deliver the outcomes that we have struggled to provide from our system. I have said it before, and I will risk repeating it: I know that the Labour Government were utterly committed to trying to close the gap. They had will and they had resource—a resource which has sadly gone—yet too often the gap widened rather than narrowed. I do not blame the Opposition for using this issue today, but I hope that we will collectively, not in a party political way, take the limited funds that are available—the deficit is not an irrelevant fact but the fundamental elephant in the room—and look to do what is best. We had a lot of spending previously, and we have a diet of hard decisions now. They must be faced.
The shadow Secretary of State suggested that the best approach was to cut everything by the same amount. Is that really the strategically sensible way to ensure that we improve outcomes for people in our society, not least those with least? I do not think that it is. So I am interested to know how the discretionary learner fund—the replacement for EMA—will work, because of the realities faced by my constituents, who travel over three hours a day to get to an FE college, and who then achieve at the end of that. If those people manage to do that in the face of great difficulty and personal inconvenience, I want to be sure that colleges such as Bishop Burton, which run private enterprises to make profits so that they can have a fleet of vehicles, are not disadvantaged. Despite those vehicles, the college is worried that the students, who often live in small hamlets, need to travel from their home to the pick-up point for the college bus. We need to ensure that we have a system—whether financed by local authorities or the replacement for EMA—that covers that.
It is hard to believe that EMA as it stands is the most sensible use of scarce resource. I am not trying to make a party political point, and I am mindful of my position as Chair of the Select Committee, but I want us to devise the system that works most effectively and yet does not deny the reality.
When I was first elected as a councillor—in Cambridge—many years ago, I went to a budget survey meeting with the public in a local shopping centre, which the then Labour council had arranged. I was handed a form which gave a list of spending areas for the budget debate. It said, “Please tick all those areas where you would like to see more spending.” I am a small-state Conservative in some ways, and I found many items on which I wanted to spend more. I was terribly aware of what went on in my ward—the lack of provision for young people, the need to do more in many areas—and I wanted to tick many boxes. However, the Labour council had sensibly included a proviso, which said, “All we ask is that for every box you tick to give more money, you identify another item on which you want to spend less.”
That is the challenge that faces the Select Committee, which will look under the bonnet of the new fund. It will examine engagement and participation by 16 to 19-year-olds. We want to ensure that the dire warnings by the shadow Secretary of State are not fulfilled and that young people are not put off education, but we must realise that we are in a highly constrained position because of this Government’s financial inheritance. Like that wise Labour council many years ago, every time we say, “Let’s save EMA”—Opposition Members have not made it clear so far whether they want to save all or half of EMA—we should ask, “What will we cut?” Just as, in that shopping centre, members of the public, like me, were told, “It’s not enough to say you want better youth services; you’ve got to tell us where to save the money too,” if hon. Members are to do justice to the young people, whom we all want to see given decent and proper opportunity, we must ensure that we do so in a financially responsible manner.
Further Education Lecturers
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Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
It is a pleasure to have secured this debate, which follows another education-related one. As I speak, hon. Members in the main Chamber are debating the education maintenance allowance, so Ministers, like the rest of us, are trying to be in two places at once.
This debate is about Government policy on the employment of further education lecturers as school teachers in schools. I am delighted to see present my predecessor as Chair of the Education Committee in its previous guise as the Children, Schools and Families Committee, the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman). I hope that he will participate. The subject is important because the importance of vocational and practical education within our education system is too often underplayed. There is also an artificial chasm between those who teach in further education and those who teach in schools at a time when we are trying to create a system such as that in health, which tries to build pathways in relation to the patient so that, instead of providing health services on the basis of institutional convenience, everything is built in relation to the patient. In exactly the same way, institutions that serve young people in education should bend and shape themselves to suit the young people’s needs, rather than the other way around.
Further education lecturers are required to work through a four-tier qualification system, culminating in qualified teacher learning and skills status. FE lecturers with QTLS accreditation may then work in schools not as teachers, but as instructors, and only as a last resort. Even though they perform essentially the same functions, instructors have a lower professional status and, usually, a lower salary than schoolteachers. The equality of esteem and the need to ensure good vocational learning are undermined by that artificial divide.
Primary and secondary teachers, on the other hand, have a qualification known as qualified teacher status. Teachers with a QTS are currently eligible to teach in the FE sector. If the potential of the Government’s schools policy is to be realised, we need the best possible teachers in the classroom providing education at any one time. The Government’s schools White Paper rightly identifies teacher quality as the most important ingredient in improving the quality of education in this country, thus encouraging social mobility and other issues of social justice that hon. Members on both sides of the House devoutly desire. The White Paper states:
“All the evidence from different education systems around the world shows that the most important factor in determining how well children do is the quality of teachers and teaching.”
Many FE lecturers are dual professionals with expertise both in their vocational subject area and in pedagogy. That expertise needs to be used in schools on an equal and fair basis in the same way as that of teachers. I hope that the Government will look to overcome the obstacles and create a single teaching qualification, effectively moving the barriers that constrain the best use of FE lecturers.
The Government’s skills strategy shows that they are committed to the promotion of technical as well as academic qualifications—I believe that that issue has just been debated in the main Chamber—to promote a variety of routes to improved employment opportunities to students. My hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning has just left the Chamber and, given his passionate espousal of the importance of craft and vocational learning, we must ensure that we make best use of our teaching work force. The skills strategy states:
“Skills are vital to our future and improving skills is essential to building sustainable growth and stronger communities. A skilled workforce is necessary to stimulate the private-sector growth that will bring new jobs and new prosperity for people all over this country.
And a strong further education and skills system is fundamental to social mobility, re-opening routes for people from wherever they begin to succeed in work, become confident through becoming accomplished and play a full part in civil society.”
The reality, however, is that there has been a lack of expansion of vocational expertise in the school work force, which fails to match the expansion of vocational curricula in schools. Schools too often do not have the appropriately experienced teachers to inspire students to excel in vocational courses.
The Children, Schools and Families Committee carried out an inquiry into teacher training in the 2009-10 Session and its report, “The Training of Teachers”, was published in January 2010. The Committee called for
“greater fluidity—and shared development opportunities—across the school and further education sectors.”
The report’s recommendations include:
“At the very least, teachers with Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills status should immediately be able to work as a qualified teacher in schools if they are teaching post-16, even post-14, pupils.”
That recommendation represents the nub of my case today, for which I hope we will have a sympathetic and constructive response from Ministers.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Like the hon. Gentleman, I rushed from the main Chamber where we have both been speaking. We are a regular double act. The recommendations of the inquiry under discussion were made by a former Select Committee—the Children, Schools and Families Committee. It was one of our later inquiries and it was very much an eye-opener for all members of the Committee. We made recommendations on improvements to teacher education and asked why we had an artificial divide whereby a schoolteacher could not teach in FE and many people teaching in FE could not teach in schools. It seems a crazy divide.
Mr Sheerman
Sorry, Mr Hood. It was a very long intervention. I hope that you will call me to speak again later.
Mr Stuart
I now know—if I did not already—that my predecessor would like to speak in this debate, so his intervention served that purpose. The report’s recommendations, under the hon. Gentleman’s august chairmanship, also stated:
“In the context of the 14–19 reforms, the Department should put in place a mechanism for assessing vocational or professional qualifications as equivalent to degree status.”
It added:
“Over the longer term we recommend that the training of early years teachers, school teachers and further education teachers become harmonised through generic standards.”
That is the request that I am making today—“harmonised through generic standards.”
Those recommendations seem to have been overlooked, with FE lecturers remaining on the sidelines. Despite their obvious expertise in the vocational pathway, we are clearly ignoring the opportunity to utilise their talents in our secondary schools. My Committee is currently conducting an inquiry into behaviour and discipline in schools, and wants to ensure that we have the best possible teachers to engage with young people who perhaps find their academic studies less inspiring. Having the best possible vocational teachers is a great way of getting people re-engaged in learning to the benefit of both academic and vocational skills.
The Skills Commission published a report, “Teaching Training in Vocational Education”, in February 2010, which states:
“If we are to successfully establish and maintain a vocational pathway through 14-19 education and on to higher education, we need professionals with recent and relevant vocational knowledge and skills”
to transfer their expertise to learners. Those are common-sense words, but there is a barrier standing in their way. The report notes that
“the system as it now stands is biased towards academic education and its teachers, and fails to recognise the crucial role that vocational education and its teachers play in 14-19 education… For vocational instructors employed in schools their conditions of service are inferior to those employed as school teachers.”
It adds:
“We cannot continue to perceive vocational education to be second class and inferior to academic education. In turn, we cannot continue to label teachers of vocational education as a ‘semi-profession’… The Commission believes that, in the short-term, greater transferability between the two professional statuses must be achieved in order to realise high quality academic and vocational provision throughout 14-19 education—getting the right skills in the right place of our education system must be a priority for policymakers.”
That is why I am delighted to be participating in this debate. The report continues:
“To realise this, the Commission believes that convergence courses should be developed to facilitate transferability between QTS and QTLS. The principle of this convergence would be central to the Skills Commission’s vision for 14-19 education, and to establishing a high quality route through the 14-19 phase... The two regimes should be replaced by a unified training system and a ‘universal teaching status’.”
So why have neither the recommendations of the former Children, Schools and Families Committee nor those of the Skills Commission been implemented by the Government? It seems that there are a number of possible objections to a unified teacher status. First, teaching young adults is considered a different playing field to teaching 11 to 16-year-olds. Therefore, an individual who is teaching in further education might not have the skills and pedagogical background necessary to teach younger children. That was one of the fears before the increased flexibility pilots were started seven years ago—I am sure that the Minister is familiar with them—when the national curriculum was made more flexible, so that it included a wider variety of settings in which students could study. In practice, FE staff found that teaching groups of 14 and 15-year-olds was not so very different from teaching 16 and 17-year-olds. The skills are fundamentally the same—good lesson planning, varying the pace, involving students and so on.
A second argument is that schoolteachers might have a better grounding in the theory of teaching and pedagogy than FE teachers. Teaching degrees and the PGCE provide a grounding in the theory of teaching and pedagogy, but so does the four-stage approach to the QTLS. FE lecturers are required to gain QTLS status by successfully going through professional formation, which is, according to the Institute for Learning,
“the post-qualification process by which a teacher demonstrates through professional practice the ability to use effectively the skills and knowledge acquired whilst training to be a teacher; and the capacity to meet the occupational standards required of a teacher.”
By contrast, there are strong arguments in favour of a universal teacher status. Academic and vocational education are both important and require equally rigorous teaching. It is simply unreasonable, not to mention unfair, that FE teachers cannot go into the school environment. As I have said, it is crucial that highly skilled and experienced professionals can use that skill wherever it is most needed. The current system of teacher qualification is over-complicated and should be simplified to allow high-quality professionals to teach in both sectors.
My predecessor as Chair of the Select Committee wishes to speak, so I will bring my remarks to an early close. I have made the key points that I wanted to make, and I hope that the Minister will be able to respond positively. We need to ensure that we have a rich curriculum that regards vocational and practical learning as equally important, equally valid and equally useful as academic learning. There should be a system through which we increase academic rigour, while ensuring that the whole work force and every type of learning are treated according to their merits and that every child can access the best possible teaching whatever course they are doing at whatever time.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hood. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) not only on securing the debate but on being part of the dynamic duo that is now performing in this Chamber, having dual-tasked and performed just a few minutes ago in the main Chamber.
This is an important issue. I recognise the particular interest in the subject that the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) has and his background in the work that his Committee did before the election. It is therefore appropriate that he was able to contribute. My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness made some positive and constructive points, and I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment of his comments. He asked me to be sympathetic, constructive and positive in my response; as he well knows, I always endeavour to do so. Whether I can give him the detail of that sympathy, constructiveness and positivity remains to be seen, given that the Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb) would normally be responding to the debate. Of course, he is involved in the debate in the main Chamber.
Mr Graham Stuart
I am grateful to the Minister for responding to the debate, given the pressures on the Department. I understand why he finds himself in that position. As he is helping out the Minister with responsibility for schools, perhaps he will ask whether my predecessor as Chair of the Select Committee, Baroness Sharp—if she wishes to join us—and I can meet the Minister with responsibility for schools to discuss the matter further after having heard the Minister’s remarks.
Tim Loughton
I will be delighted to pass on that invitation for a meeting. I am sure that the Minister with responsibility for schools will be sympathetic, positive and constructive in his response to it. Notwithstanding what is going on this afternoon, the timing of the debate is also appropriate given the review of vocational education that the Secretary of State has asked Professor Alison Wolf to carry out—her name was mentioned in the main Chamber a little while ago.
The Government attach great importance to improving vocational teaching in schools. In response to my hon. Friend’s point, it is certainly not a question of being second class to academic education or treating vocational sector teachers as second class; it is a question of appropriateness and horses for courses, in the same way as perhaps primary school teachers do not readily transfer to become secondary school teachers and vice versa. I want to make it clear that all aspects of teaching those different areas are absolutely valued, but that they will be more appropriate for certain people in certain areas than in others.
My hon. Friend made a point at the beginning with which I wholeheartedly concur: we need to shape institutions around children and young people to ensure that they are getting the most appropriate support, education and training of whatever type, rather than trying to pigeonhole people into particular structures. The coalition agreement for the new Government included a commitment to better vocational education in England, and the Secretary of State’s speech to the Edge Foundation last year on 9 September set out the need for radical reform to address long-term weaknesses in practical learning. That is why we have asked Professor Wolf to carry out what is proving to be a major review and to make recommendations about how vocational education can be improved.
Professor Wolf’s review is considering how we can ensure that vocational education for 14 to 19-year-olds supports valuable participation and progression into the labour market and into higher level education. The final report will include practical recommendations on how vocational education will be improved in line with the public commitment that we have made. I know that Professor Wolf has made very good progress with the report. She has met teachers, heads and college principals to inform her review, and she has been considering submissions made as part of the call for evidence. We look forward to receiving her full report later in the spring, as the hon. Member for Huddersfield has mentioned.
Mr Graham Stuart
If I recall, the original timetable was that an interim report would be presented by Professor Wolf before Christmas. Has such a report been presented to Ministers? If so, can it be published?
Tim Loughton
I am not aware that a full-blown interim report has been presented to Ministers. I am aware that there have been preliminary discussions between Professor Wolf and Ministers about her initial findings. I do not think that an exact date has been set for publication so far, but when my hon. Friend has the meeting with the Minister with responsibility for schools I am sure he will be able to elaborate further on the exact details.
Tim Loughton
I cannot answer for any discussions my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and other Ministers have had with Professor Wolf on her appointment. I am not in a position to answer that. Again, that is a question that the hon. Gentleman can address to the Minister with responsibility for schools. I am sure that the Minister will grant an audience to him, his dynamic duo partner and the noble Baroness Sharp at a later date.
An expert, experienced work force with the right training is, of course, essential to a successful future for vocational education. The Government have therefore asked Professor Wolf, as part of her review, to look at work force issues in particular. I know that Professor Wolf has identified many of the issues raised by hon. Members today, and that her report will consider further education teachers’ eligibility to teach in schools, and in particular the question of why FE-trained teachers, who have already achieved Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills status, also need to gain Qualified Teacher Status to be able to teach as qualified teachers in schools, which is the essence of my hon. Friend’s argument.
Pending Professor Wolf’s independent report, it would not be right for the Government to reach a definite conclusion on some of the issues that we have debated here today, and I am sure that hon. Members understand that. However, I can set out the simple ambitions that should guide us in reviewing this policy: getting the best people into schools and colleges, relevant to the demands of the particular curriculum or subject, whether academic or vocational; and fairness in dealing with the teachers who dedicate so much to providing excellent education, both academic and vocational. I include in “teachers” the experts from industry and professions who want to pass on their expertise to the next generation by supporting vocational education.
We do not think the current policy goes far enough in meeting those ambitions, which is why Professor Wolf is looking at this area so carefully. It is vital that schools have the flexibility to employ the staff they need to offer excellent vocational education to their particular set of students. It is also vital that the contribution that teachers with a further education background can make to schools is fully recognised by schools.
I want to address the specific proposal that the solution to the problems identified here today is simply to bring the professional statuses for further education and schools together into one status. I am aware of the conclusion of the Skills Commission inquiry into teacher training in vocational education, which was published last year and to which both hon. Members have alluded. It concluded by stating the need to achieve convergence of the two separate teacher training regimes that currently exist for teachers of academic subjects in schools, and those of vocational subjects in FE and the post-compulsory sector. The former Children, Schools and Families Committee reached a similar conclusion when it looked into teacher training and reported early in 2010, under the chairmanship of the hon. Member for Huddersfield, that there should be harmonisation of training programmes.
The Government accept the issues highlighted in those reports. There are clearly problems that we need to look at carefully and address, but in addressing those issues, and those raised in debate today, we must also be careful to take a balanced approach. That means that we must not remove the safeguards that guarantee to pupils and parents the standard of teachers that they expect in the schools that their children attend. We should remind ourselves of what we have at the moment: a wholly graduate teaching profession with expertise in teaching the national curriculum; teachers trained to deal with the particular challenges of providing a stimulating education to children; and a profession where individual teachers have the flexibility to teach across all school age ranges from five to 18. That is a foundation that the Government will build on to create an outstanding teaching profession, as set out in the schools White Paper, “The Importance of Teaching”.
I recognise the logic of convergence. There are, of course, many similarities between the jobs done by teachers in schools and in FE colleges. However, we must also be clear that QTLS status has been designed for the distinct requirements of the further education sector, with a focus on vocational learning and teaching over-16s. That does not prepare teachers to carry out the full range of work that is required of a qualified teacher in a school, as set down in the standards for qualified teacher status. Those include a degree, usually in the subject being taught, knowledge of the national curriculum, which it is the basic duty of schools to offer, and experience of teaching in two age ranges and capabilities around safeguarding and behaviour management that are different for younger children. Simply allowing anyone with QTLS to teach in schools would mean that we were not able to guarantee the rigorous academic expertise of teachers to pupils and parents. Whatever the recommendations, results and the way ahead, a good deal of work will need to be done to offer appropriate teaching to children and young people in those different educational environments. It cannot just happen simply because the rules have changed.
There are ways that the Government can address the need for reform in this area without undermining our plans to build a graduate teaching work force to create an outstanding, high status profession. For example, we have already consulted publicly on an assessment-only route to obtaining QTS for those who have substantial experience of working in schools or further education, and who have a degree. That will offer a more flexible route to QTS accreditation with minimal teacher training.
In the wake of Professor Wolf’s recommendations, I expect that we will be able to bring forward further proposals. For example, one such proposal might be to support teachers without degrees who wish to teach the vocational subjects in schools that they are already able to teach in colleges.
I hope, without being able to go into go into an enormous detail, pending the report and given the limitations on my own presence here and my particular brief in the Department for Education, that I have at least signalled to the satisfaction of my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Huddersfield that this is a matter to which the Government are giving considerable and urgent attention in order to improve the current policy.
Mr Graham Stuart
I appreciate the tone and quality of the Minister’s remarks. The Government are backing university technical colleges, which will provide education for young people from the age of 14. Those young people will sometimes come in, dressed in a boiler suit at the age of 14, and have a spanner in their hand at 8.30 am or 8.45 am. If the Government are going to consider, following the Wolf review, greater flexibilities, the age at which young people start must be 14. That would fit with the university technical colleges and the wider Government programme. I just wanted to make that point on the record to the Minister today.
Tim Loughton
I hear what my hon. Friend has said. Those comments might have been as appropriate in the previous debate in this Chamber, which involved the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, who is a Minister in both my Department and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, but I have heard what he has said and will pass those comments on along with all the comments from hon. Members this afternoon.
I am confident that the decisions that we will take in the light of Professor Wolf’s review will result in a more logical position than we have at present—we all readily acknowledge that—which will continue to improve the quality of the school teaching work force, allow schools to make the best use of teachers with experience and expertise from outside the classroom and is fair to all those who play a role in the education of young people.
May I reiterate my gratitude to my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee for the balanced, measured and informed way in which he put his comments? I undertake to pass on the points that both hon. Members have made and to urge my hon. Friend the Minister with responsibility for schools, in his greatly uncluttered diary, to find time to have a more detailed meeting with them.
School Sports Funding
Graham Stuart Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, which opened with a funny and high-quality speech from the shadow Secretary of State, which reflected his passion for, and expertise in, sport. I am sure that will soon be conveyed into the area of education. The Secretary of State’s response was also of high quality. Last week he produced an extremely promising White Paper that rightly focused on teacher quality. He has also successfully protected schools’ funding and introduced a pupil premium to help the poorest.
The Opposition do not like hearing it, but we all know how terrible, and indeed terrifying, is the scale of the overspending that the last Government left. Apart from the wilfully blind, all of us recognise the necessity of bringing it down before it does the same to us. It is therefore understandable that the Government should seek to make every possible saving, and that the £162 million budget for the physical education and sport strategy is put under scrutiny.
The Government are determined to stop micro-managing how schools and others spend their money, and to end most ring-fencing of budgets. Their proposals on school sport partnerships are consistent with that approach. Exaggerated claims that ending them will destroy all competitive sport in maintained schools are foolish and wrong. It is true that school sport partnerships have not been the cure-all for our children’s obesity and exercise challenges, and that as we heard, there have been a mixture of outcomes and variations. Nevertheless, I welcome the tone of the Secretary of State’s speech, which set out the fact that the Government are prepared to listen to the representations that have been made up and down the country.
Whatever the variations, sport partnerships have had a role to play in improving and increasing participation in sport. It is incumbent on the Government, even in these parlous times, to listen to the representations that are made and consider ideas of how to ensure that we do not needlessly lose what we have of value. There may be a period of transition, and as the Secretary of State rightly said, we will need to provide time to allow alternative funding to be brought forward, but there is huge popular sentiment behind sport for our young people and children.
As the hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr Godsiff) said, there is a vast amount of wealth in football, but also in other professional sports. We must take at face value the enthusiasm of the many sports people who are speaking up on behalf of sport partnerships, and see how we can work with them and others. I am not sure I agree completely with a levy on the premier league, but it is an idea to put in the pot.
We need to consider ways of maintaining what is most valuable. From what the Secretary of State said today, I picked up on the fact that the Government are open to listening to representations on that. He said that there was scope for more efficient use of the existing infrastructure, which implies to me, in however nuanced a way, that the Government are coming to recognise that that infrastructure may have value and is not just needless bureaucracy. I hope that we will see further action on that.
Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that head teachers and staff have the capability and organisational skills to retain competitive sport in schools, just like at my school, Dingwall academy, a state community comprehensive, in the 1980s? The teachers worked tirelessly to ensure that there was competitive sport, with all sports included.
Mr Stuart
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, and like the Secretary of State, I believe in trusting front-line professionals. May I take her with me on a virtual journey to my constituency, and to some of the small rural primary schools there? Without some form of infrastructure such as the sport partnerships, it would not have had specialist coaches coming in to work alongside the teachers in the school. That co-ordination and involvement can play an important part. Rural areas and the primary sector in particular can benefit from some form of central infrastructure.
The Government showed that they listen during the passage of the Academies Act 2010, when representations were made in both Houses about special educational needs, with Members saying that not all the responsibility should be passed down to schools after careful consideration of the impact that it would have. The Government came forward with changed proposals to ensure that certain aspects of SEN provision would rest with local authorities. Having heard the Secretary of State’s words today, I am hopeful that he is in listening mode again, while also rightly seeking to ensure that we do not have needless bureaucracy.
The engagement among the Front Benchers in recognising that there is room for improvement and for common ground should give hope to all those who want to ensure that we move forward from a position that was improved in recent years under the last Government, but which can and should be so much better than it is. If we can move forward on that basis, I believe that we can do the right thing by our young people in schools up and down the country.
Schools White Paper
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Michael Gove
I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s typically statesmanlike words. I agree that there is significant consensus across the parties on the way forward. When he was chairman of the Select Committee he did a great job of pioneering ideas. It is right to look at Mike Tomlinson’s arguments and to ensure that all children have a properly broad education. Our English baccalaureate will ensure that all children, whatever their background, have access to the best that has been thought and written academically, but we will also ensure that vocational qualifications that blend with the academic are of the highest quality. That is why we commissioned Alison Wolf, and why the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning has done so much with the launch of his skills strategy last week to raise the prestige and esteem of vocational learning.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
I believe that there can be consensus in the House, but it must be based on an acceptance that the present position is not good enough, that we must have higher aspirations for this country, that we must recognise that we have fallen behind our international competitors, and that we have seen the gap between rich and poor widen unacceptably.
On international comparison, will my right hon. Friend explain how the Select Committee will be able to map and track that? Will there be a role for Ofsted—on which we are doing an inquiry—in providing information and checking the Government’s progress?