Asbestos in Schools

Debate between Jim Sheridan and Nick Gibb

Tuesday 7th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jim Sheridan (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (Lab)]

Very briefly, what proportion of schools fell below the standards?

[Mr Gibb]

I do not know the proportion that fell below the acceptable standards, but I will write to the hon. Gentleman shortly with the precise figure from the HSE.

Everyone in the education sector has a role to play in raising and maintaining awareness. Where duty holders fall below acceptable standards, HSE inspectors will continue to take action, and they have robust procedures in place to enforce regulations. The Department and the HSE have put in place clear guidance for schools and local authorities to help them identify and manage the risks posed by asbestos. We are currently producing an asbestos awareness training website, containing online training packages for head teachers and governors, and teaching and support staff, as well as premises and caretaking staff. In addition to training, the website will allow schools and local authorities to share good practice and documentation on asbestos management. The head teacher’s course is undergoing trials and will be released later this year. We do not propose to make the training mandatory, as we do not want to impose one particular model where good practice may already be in place.

Another recommendation in the report, to which the hon. Member for Wansbeck referred, was that data about the extent, type and condition of asbestos should be collected by central Government. There is a need to maintain a register of asbestos surveys at local authority level, but we do not see the need for a national register of asbestos surveys of public buildings in England and Wales. It would result in the unnecessary duplication of the records that local authorities and other employers are required by law to keep, and the need to maintain two sets of identical data would increase bureaucracy.

Another recommendation in the report was that a system should be introduced so that parents and school staff could be regularly informed about the presence of asbestos and how it was being managed. A similar system is in place in the United States. We encourage a policy of openness, but it is for duty holders to determine which information to share with parents.

On the issue of proactively removing all asbestos, the HSE’s advice is clear. Removing all asbestos when a risk assessment has determined that that is not necessary is considered more dangerous to those removing it and to the building’s occupants than leaving it undisturbed. If the control of asbestos regulations are followed and asbestos surveys and management plans are put into effect, with periodic checks on the condition of any asbestos, the expert advice is that this will result in no significant exposure to asbestos.

The Government take very seriously the issue of managing the problem of asbestos in our schools. As the all-party group’s report makes clear, the majority of schools contain asbestos-containing materials, as do many other buildings, both domestic and non-domestic. The asbestos in schools steering group, established by my noble Friend Lord Hill, has asked the committee on carcinogenicity of chemicals in food, consumer products and the environment to look into the relative vulnerability of children to even low-level exposure to asbestos fibres. I have taken on board the hon. Gentleman’s point about the exposure of children to asbestos. This will be the first such assessment, as previous assessments have been for adults exposed to high exposure levels. We will review our policy on asbestos management and our advice to schools when we receive the committee’s report later this year.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising this issue. I hope that he will be reassured that the Government are taking it very seriously. As previous Governments have done, we are following the expert advice of the Health and Safety Executive in formulating policy and managing safely the asbestos in school buildings.

Question put and agreed to.

History Teaching

Debate between Jim Sheridan and Nick Gibb

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gibb]

No, that would obviate some of the freedoms and the whole essence of academy schools. The funding agreements require the teaching of maths, science and English to 16, thus making them compulsory, but the application of the national curriculum is not compulsory for academies, although it feeds into the specification that determines what is tested and assessed through the GCSE system. In that sense, there is an imperative for schools to teach those subjects.

The essence of the national curriculum review is to produce a curriculum that is on a par with the best in the world, based on evidence of what is taught in those jurisdictions that have the best education systems and against whom graduates from this country’s schools will be competing for jobs in the future. The national curriculum, which will be published and available to parents, will be of such a quality that it will become the norm and the benchmark against which parents will judge the quality of their schools.

Finally, I want to touch on the part that teachers play in our school systems as far as history is concerned.

[Jim Sheridan (in the Chair)]

Order. We now come to the next debate.

Grammar Schools

Debate between Jim Sheridan and Nick Gibb

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gibb]

However, Andreas Schleicher also says that there has been no increase in performance in this country, whereas other countries around the world are increasing performance. That is the problem facing our young people if we do not improve standards in our state schools, because those young people are now competing for jobs in a global market. It is no longer good enough just to look at the past, because we now have to compare our system with the best systems in the world.

Our education system has become one of the most stratified and unfair in the developed world. Since coming into office, we have been setting out our vision for reform on four broad themes: improving the quality of teaching and the respect for our work force in schools; greater autonomy for schools to plan and decide how and when improvements should take place; more intelligent and localised accountability; and reducing and simplifying the bureaucracy that frustrates and demoralises teachers. Those themes formed the basis of the White Paper that we published a year ago this month, “The Importance of Teaching”, and I believe that grammar schools can actively support improvement in each of those four areas.

First, we want to get the best graduates into teaching by funding the doubling of the Teach First programme during the course of this Parliament, and by expanding the Future Leaders and Teaching Leaders programmes, which provide superb professional development for the future leaders of some of our toughest and most challenging schools. We want grammar schools actively to share their experience of staff development with other schools, in both the initial training of staff and the provision of professional development. We have had more than 1,000 expressions of interest in establishing teaching schools and 300 applications have already been received, with grammar schools among the keenest to sponsor or support local schools to improve standards in their communities.

Secondly, our drive for greater autonomy has seen 111 of the 164 grammar schools that made those applications become academies, and many of them support other local schools. The vast majority of grammar schools participate in some form of partnership with other maintained schools or academies, be that an exchange of staff, working with students or supporting school leadership. Between them, the newly converted academies have agreed to support more than 700 other schools and to support fellow head teachers through the doubling of the national and local leaders of education programmes.

Thirdly, it is vital to ensure that improvement is driven not by the Government but by schools themselves, through effective accountability that focuses on raising standards. We are overhauling the inspections framework to focus on schools’ “core four” responsibilities—teaching, leadership, pupil attainment and pupil behaviour. The E-bac sets a high benchmark against which parents can hold schools to account, and it helps to narrow the gap between those from the poorest backgrounds and those from the wealthiest backgrounds.

The Russell group of universities has been unequivocal about the core GCSEs and A-levels that best equip students for the most competitive courses and the most competitive universities—English, maths, sciences, geography, history and modern or traditional languages. However, nine out of 10 pupils in state schools who are eligible for free school meals are not even entered for those E-bac subjects, and just 4% of those pupils achieve the E-bac. In 719 mainstream state schools, no pupils who are eligible for free school meals were entered for any single-award science GCSE; in 169 mainstream state schools, none of them were entered for French; in 137 mainstream state schools, none of them were entered for geography; and in 70 mainstream state schools, none of them were entered for history. Academic subjects should not be the preserve of the few, but we need to free schools to achieve that aim.

Fourthly, therefore, we are dramatically reducing the bureaucracy that constricts achievement. In opposition, we counted the number of pages of guidance sent to schools in one 12-month period. They came to an incredible 6,000 pages—or six volumes of “War and Peace”, if people are inclined to consider it that way— yet they contained little of substance that schools do not already know or share.

The most recent example of our efforts is the recently completed consultation on the school admissions and appeal codes. There were some 130 pages of densely worded text, with more than 650 mandatory requirements that were often repeated. The revised versions, which we published last Wednesday, total just over 60 pages and are minimal in their requirements, while preserving the important safeguards as well as introducing new requirements, such as priority in admissions for children adopted from care. As my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms) said in his contribution, it is one of the most far-reaching changes that we can make if we give all schools, including grammar schools, a greater say over their own published admission number.

Currently, that intake number is tightly managed by the local authority to ensure that any increases do not affect the school down the road. That kind of rationing of places only limits choice for parents and pushes cohort after cohort of children to less accomplished schools, rather than giving good schools the freedom to expand and share their excellence.

Our approach is simply to let schools decide how many students they can offer a high quality of education within their own capital budget, while ensuring that they maintain standards or improve any underperformance. Why is that important? Quite simply, it is important because we want the number of places in all good schools to increase, to increase genuine choice for parents. Even marginal increases in some areas will lead to a positive cycle of increased standards. Critics who argue that that will create sink schools overlook the current admissions codes—

[Jim Sheridan (in the Chair)]

Order. We must now move on to the next debate. Before doing so, I ask colleagues who are leaving Westminster Hall to do so quickly and quietly.