Department for Education

Jeremy Quin Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

Since I became the proud Member of Parliament for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough two years ago, teachers and parents have contacted me about the severe challenges facing our local schools. I have listened to their stories about impossible teacher workloads, increasing class sizes and lack of provision for the least privileged children. I am extremely grateful for the input of those teachers and parents. On being re-elected last year, I vowed to renew my efforts to hold the Government to account for their shambolic approach to our children’s education.

I have spoken out about how the Government have cut school budgets by £2.8 billion in real terms since 2015; about how local schools have had to forgo residential trips, breakfast clubs, after-school activities and extra learning opportunities for underperforming pupils; and about how schools in Sheffield and across the UK are so cut to the bone that they are now having to let teachers go, as well as teaching assistants and support staff—people needed to support our most struggling students.

Now, as the national funding formula’s “redistribution” leaves Sheffield with the worst schools funding of all the major cities in England, I am outraged. Under the current Government budget, schools in the city will receive £743 per pupil less than Manchester in the next academic year. But this is not a matter of taking from Peter to pay Paul; it is one of fair funding for all—from Sheffield to Slough, from Manchester to Maidenhead. Headteachers in Sheffield have openly said that they will struggle to keep schools operating to their current standards.

[Jeremy Quin (Horsham) (Con)]

I appreciate that there is a difference between Sheffield and Manchester, but does the hon. Lady accept the principle of being a national funding formula? If she does, she must accept that there will be differences between different cities in different parts of the country.

[Gill Furniss]

I said that there would be differences. The nub of the matter is the differences between northern areas where there is an educational divide: resources should be given to make up those differences. They should not be taken away from us, as we are now seeing.

Some of our headteachers are even warning of mass redundancies as a last resort to balance their budgets by 2020. This is not a war-torn country in 1945: this is Sheffield in 2018, and it is simply not fair. The Government’s national funding formula is not working. The Department for Education claimed it would redistribute funding from local authority control, focusing on historically deprived and isolated areas, but schools in pockets of some of the greatest deprivation, which have fought against the odds to improve their funding situation, are suffering the most. Now, after a continual uphill struggle to secure sufficient funding, Sheffield school budgets are being decimated once more.

Some schools in Brightside and Hillsborough are being pushed to the limit. One is predicted to lose a staggering £190,000 by 2020, meaning a reduction in teachers, teaching assistants and other crucial resources. At a time when the Sheffield school-age population has increased by 7% across the decade, which has also led to a greater demand for specialist services and special educational needs, the Government ought to be putting more much-needed resources into the system. They have consistently failed to do so. Instead, they are pumping money into grammar schools—so much for helping the “just about managing”. We need an alternative.

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[Jeremy Quin (Horsham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper). I shall return to her point about growing the economy. It is also a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), the Chairman of the Education Committee, who introduced the debate so elegantly.

We have already heard from Dickens via my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg). I sensed a slightly Micawberish tendency on the part of my right hon. Friend, and indeed the hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas), in regard to the NHS announcement: a feeling that that positive announcement might somehow crowd out expenditure on education and the work of other Departments. In fact, when we look at the history of the NHS, it is extraordinary to see how closely education spending has mirrored its real-terms increases, year in year out. Since the creation of the NHS, education spending has grown nearly tenfold, from less than £10 billion to £87 billion this year. These things are not contradictory.

Of course, the past is no guide to the future. Let me now pick up the point made by the hon. Member for Burnley. We need to grow our economy. We need to increase our GDP, and with it our tax base. That is why my right hon. Friend was so right to flag up the need for investment in this area. Any chart, or any analysis of our projected population growth over the next 30 years, makes the position very clear. We will see a significant rise in our population, but the working population will not grow. We are relying on a smaller number of people to produce the goods to fund both our education and our NHS—indeed, all our public services.

We make our sums add up through productivity, and at the heart of that is education. Its impacts are twofold. First, there is a clear correlation between educational outcomes and productivity, which is why I welcome the emphasis that our country places on education. We are spending more on it, as a proportion of GDP, than any other country in the G7—more than France, Italy, the United States or Japan. Secondly, the creation of a land of opportunity in which anyone can succeed is fostered by a good education system. That is why I welcome the pupil premium, about which we have already heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow, and why I particularly welcome—here I thought that he was a little ungenerous—the narrowing of the attainment gap between the most privileged and the least privileged pupils.

Let me now turn from the general to the specific and the national funding formula. I think that the principles behind it are sound. We all want a transparent funding system that distributes funds to maximise opportunity and reflects the pressures on schools from deprivation, low prior attainment and the number of pupils for whom English is a second language. It is positive that the NFF recognises it, and it does so against a demographic map of the UK that is superior to anything that has gone before it. For understandable reasons, Ministers did not move straight to the ultimate end-goal pointed to by the NFF, but tapered and softened the results. For fairness to be fully established as greater resources are devoted to the sector, the full implications of the NFF will, I hope, work their way through, so that areas such as Horsham, which always have been and remain less well funded on a per pupil basis than elsewhere in the country, see further increases in their funding.

Every one of my secondary schools benefited from the minimum funding guarantee. I campaigned for that and welcomed the guarantee, and this reflects to me the importance of either maintaining a guarantee into the future or ensuring the full implications of the NFF are worked through over time.

I totally agree with my right hon. Friend that we should not be unpicking consultations. They take time, and a lot of work and effort was put into those consultation processes, but there are three areas I would highlight for the future. First, the high-needs block has been discussed; it is less easy to make economies on this scale and to be efficient, and these are kids who really do need our support, whether in special schools or through funding their progress through mainstream education. Resources targeted at them not only help some of our most vulnerable children, but have an impact across schools as a whole.

Secondly, a discussion of the area costs adjustment of the NFF leads to the risk of getting technical, but while I appreciate that its purpose is to reflect local wages rather than the local cost of living, I think the latter would be more appropriate, and when one looks at the London fringe, one sees that that has in reality spread far faster than the Department recognises. Costs have risen significantly. This affects teacher recruitment and retention, and this is a technical area that could be productively re-examined.

Finally, on teachers’ pay, we need to continue to recruit and retain highly motivated subject experts. That is perhaps peculiarly hard on schools in areas such as Horsham on the fringes of London with, I am delighted to say, areas of high employment and high-value employment. For such areas, getting good teachers in to teach STEM subjects is difficult. The Treasury has for other Departments looked creatively at pay, and I hope that it will look at it creatively again here if the evidence shows, as I suspect it will, difficulties in retaining and recruiting.

I will conclude my remarks on a positive note. Nationally, we have more pupils in good and outstanding schools than ever before, and I welcome the fact—I particularly praise the Minister for School Standards for this—that our international results are so much better. Huge amounts of good work are being done in our schools. I praise the heads and teachers in my schools, who, whatever the funding situation, produce outstanding results for their pupils. Unlike the hon. Member for Harrow West, I think we can look with confidence to the Department and what it will be getting for our pupils in the longer term.

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[Nick Gibb]

I will not take any interventions for the moment, if my hon. Friend will forgive me.

In addition to the funding distributed through the NFF, eligible pupils will also attract the pupil premium, which has a specific focus on raising the attainment of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds—we are talking about £2.4 billion this year. As a result, the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers has closed by 10%, and standards are rising in our schools.

Our focus on phonics has transformed the way reading is taught in our primary schools. When we introduced the phonics screening check in 2012, just 58% of the six-year-olds taking the test reached the expected standard. Last year, that 58% had risen to 81%. However, we need to go further to ensure that every primary school is using the best approach to teaching reading. That is why we have funded phonics roadshows and why we are rolling out English hubs across the country to promote, and train schools in, the use of systematic synthetic phonics in the teaching of reading. We want every child in every primary school to be a fluent reader.

[Jeremy Quin]

Will the Minister give way?

[Nick Gibb]

I will not give way, if my hon. Friend will forgive me.

In 2014, we introduced a more demanding primary curriculum. In the first standard assessment tests, taken in 2016, which reflected that new curriculum, 70% of pupils reached the expected standard in the more demanding maths and arithmetic SATs. A year later, that had risen to 75%. But we want it to go higher still, which is why we are spending £75 million funding 35 maths hubs across the country, promoting the highly effective south-east Asian maths mastery approach to teaching maths. Our ambition is for half of all primary schools to be trained to use that approach by 2020, and for 11,000 primary and secondary schools to be in that position by 2023.

Next year, we are rolling out a computer-based multiplication tables check for all nine-year-olds, ensuring that every child knows their times tables by heart. What a contrast to the days when teachers were told they must not teach times tables. We are promoting the use of high-quality textbooks in primary schools, undoing the damage from the 1970s, when textbooks in primary schools were consigned to the store cupboard. High-quality, knowledge-rich, carefully sequenced textbooks promote understanding and reduce teacher workload.

In a global trading nation, we need to reverse the decline in the study of foreign languages that began under Labour in 2004. Since 2010, the proportion of 16-year-olds taking a GCSE in a foreign language has increased from 40% to 47%, but our ambition is for 75% to be studying for a GCSE in a foreign language by 2022 and for 90% to be doing so by 2025.

Let me respond to the typically thoughtful speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow, in which he paid tribute to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care for securing a five-year funding settlement. He is right that longer-term visibility is helpful in every sector, and we are committed to securing the right deal for education in the spending review. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for raising this important issue. Our track record gives us much to be proud of, but we will of course continue to listen carefully and take into account the issues raised today and the findings of the Education Committee inquiry. Investing in our young people’s future is one of the most important investments that we can make as a country. As a Government, we are committed to getting it right.