Schools Update

James Frith Excerpts

Monday 17th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[James Frith (Bury North) (Lab)]

I welcome more funding. Schools such as Derby High in my constituency cannot recruit teaching talent because they face the rising costs of national insurance, an ageing teaching population, the apprenticeship levy and increasing class sizes, and they need new school buildings. Will this new money be enough to address these complicated problems? Will it go far enough to provide the enrichment activities that have all but disappeared in schools, with a whole generation of children from 2010 missing out on such activities because of the imposition of austerity by her Government?

[Justine Greening]

I know that the hon. Gentleman shares my concern about improving educational standards in Derby, which has been a challenge for many—[Interruption.] I apologise to the hon. Gentleman for not recognising him—he is obviously the new Member for Bury North. I was going to talk about how important the opportunity area that we have set up in Derby is to me, but I can also assure him that standards in his schools are just as much a priority for me as standards in any other. Today we are trying to set out a way of ensuring that funding is fair for all schools, including the one he mentioned, but it will be complemented by additional funding, which I think he welcomes. That is part of our strategy for improving educational standards, but by no means is it all of it. It is not just about the amount of money we put into schools; it is about what we then do with it and the strategy behind it. As we have seen, education in Wales has been going backwards under Labour because it has no strategy, and as a result children are getting worse standards. We do have a strategy, which is why standards are going up.