Tier 5 Religious Worker Visas

Debate between John Howell and Carol Monaghan

Thursday 4th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. It was also a pleasure to hear the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) introduce the debate. I wish to discuss some points that this debate generates.

The hon. Gentleman set out the background issues very clearly. As he pointed out and as the letter from the Catholic Church clearly points out, the debate is held in the context of the supply of priests, particularly in the summer, and allowing the laity to continue to attend mass. So there are two issues at stake: the laity attending mass and the priests being allowed a holiday. I am all for priests being allowed a holiday, just as I am all for MPs being allowed a holiday. As an aside, when I first came into this House, a very senior Member said to me, “The person you should acquaint yourself with to get the right sort of status is the suffragan bishop.” Members can interpret that as they wish. Whether the popularity of MPs and suffragan bishops has taken the same turn is something I will leave for others to decide.

We have heard about a change whereby visiting priests are required to apply under tier 2 rather than under tier 5, and that is producing problems, as the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Ged Killen) illustrated, as well as costs for various communities. There are also English language burdens they have to suffer and a little more red tape than under the current scheme. However, I do not think the problem is widely shared among all religious communities. The hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) nods. I will illustrate how it is not the case in some communities.

I accept that it is a case for the Catholic Church and for many others, but we live in a world where it is very difficult for anyone to recruit priests. Although this is perhaps the subject of an additional debate on another occasion, I point out that Anglicans are in a much better position because they have admitted women as priests. They therefore have an enormous supply of priests who are available and ministering. Whether the Catholic Church wants to take up my suggestion is a matter for it to decide and I will not interfere.

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

I am sitting here as a Catholic utterly stunned by what the hon. Gentleman suggests. He is here in Westminster Hall suggesting that the Catholic Church should change its policies because of what he perceives to be an issue and because of the actions of the Government. Honestly?

[Mike Gapes (in the Chair)]

Order. I know it is tempting to have a wider debate, but will Members, including Mr Howell, focus on the motion before us?

[John Howell]

Thank you, Mr Gapes. To respond briefly, I was not suggesting that; I was leaving it to the Catholic Church to decide. As I said, we can debate that issue on a separate occasion, but I think my point is a valid one.

I made inquiries in the Anglican Church about whether it has this problem. The answer was no, it does not have this problem, for a number of reasons. First, there is a supply of Anglican women priests, so the supply issue is taken care of. Secondly, Anglican ministries are organised increasingly in teams, so someone is always around; because all the members of the team do not take their holiday at the same time, someone in the team is always available to cover for others in the ministry. It is important to bear that in mind.

[Carol Monaghan]

The Catholic Church organises in teams as well, but the smaller groups within the archdiocese have priests who are already stretched to the absolute limit. When one takes a well-earned break, the others are simply asked to do even more. For them just to pick up the slack, as suggested, is unsustainable.

[John Howell]

The hon. Lady makes an interesting point, but I return to mine: we live in a time when it is very difficult to get enough people to come forward for the priesthood of whichever denomination.

GCSE English Literature Exams

Debate between John Howell and Carol Monaghan

Monday 26th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma, but it is a surprise to be called quite so early. As the debate is about GCSE English literature and I am a Member of Parliament from Scotland, I do not plan to speak at great length, but I will give some thoughts. I thank the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) for her eloquent and detailed introduction. She covered the vast majority of the issues to be considered, of which there are many, such as rote learning, mental health, the difficulty of examining and the examination system.

I will begin with the mental health issues and the pressures on young people. There is no doubt that young people who undergo state exams suffer from mental health difficulties. Many schools have mental health support systems in place, where young people can go to take time out and discuss their issues. During the many years in which I was a teacher in Scotland, the curriculum underwent a transformation. We went from a situation where everything depended on the final exam to having an element of continual assessment, and finally to both playing a part with a chunk of continual assessment that counted towards the final exam.

[John Howell]

I want to pursue the mental health issue, because I am a bit confused by the debate so far. We accept that students have mental health issues, which include a lot of mental health stress, but that is not entirely related to examinations. Is the hon. Lady aware of any work that has subdivided out mental health stress and tried to assess where it comes from? Otherwise, it is impossible to say, “This bit relates to exams and this bit does not.”

[Carol Monaghan]

Of course, unless the stress is examined in great detail, it is difficult to see where it is. When we examine the number of instances of mental health problems that young people experience at different stages of their school career, we see that young people in early secondary school have fewer issues than those who are at the point of taking national exams. There are definite links between the examination regime and young people’s mental health. There are a vast number of other contributing factors, including poverty, family background and social standing—many different things—but there is increased incidence of poor mental health among young people sitting state exams.

What I saw—this is anecdotal, and comes without a background of evidence—was that when young people had an element of continual assessment and a final exam, they understood the parameters under which they were operating. We saw more difficulties when there were constant submissions, deadlines to be met throughout the year and different deadlines in different subjects that meant that young people faced continual pressure that culminated in a final exam. Continual assessment can increase mental health difficulties.

The hon. Member for Warrington North questioned whether it was necessary for young people to retain a huge amount of information in their head when they can readily google it and click on the relevant page. In Scotland, in 2004 or 2005, it was decided to provide young people with a relationship sheet, which was basically a bunch of formulae, because it was realised that many had difficulty memorising them. In physics, we are not trying to examine young people’s memory but how they apply formulae, whether they can problem solve and whether they can think outside the box. It was considered that the sheet would be helpful, although there was a huge amount of scepticism among physics teachers, who thought that it was dumbing down.

In fact, giving young people the formula sheet allowed them to be more creative and to think about different examples. It also allowed us to introduce open-ended questions in exams, which were not just about young people showing that they had remembered a formula, sticking the numbers in and getting an answer. It allowed us to examine them more deeply on their physics knowledge, and the exam was improved greatly as a result. We saw great increases in critical thinking—their ability to evaluate and to discuss different experimental set-ups. It was a huge success.

Data sheets or formula sheets are still used in physics exams in Scotland. They are always given out at the start of the exam in the form of a booklet. Importantly, they come from the exam board—the Scottish Qualifications Authority—which administers them at the start of every exam diet. When they are given out with the exam paper, they are pristine and untouched—there is no way to tamper with them. After that, they can be taken away and used in departments. New ones must be used every year to ensure that they cannot be interfered with.

To relate that to English, I have a great deal of sympathy for the petition and I understand the points behind it, but I worry about the volume of information that would have to be taken into the exam. There are 15 poems and a number of texts, so how many pieces of information would young people take in?

We have heard that the exact words matter when we are talking about English literature—and they do. Simply shoehorning in a quote to try to make a point does not always work if there is not a degree of understanding behind that quote. There has to be a deep understanding of the text, but that can be shown without quoting directly, or with possible differences or slight mistakes in the quote. Having said that, Burns, who is part of the Scottish curriculum, famously said:

“We’re bought and sold for English gold—

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!”

Would that have meant the same if he had said, or if a pupil quoted in an exam, “a bunch of sell-outs”? I am not sure that it would.

On the issue of practicality, how can we set an open-book exam where young people do not have to memorise all those texts and where the invigilator knows that the information is clean and untampered with? How big a desk and how big a space would be required? All those things are important. If we did as in the physics exam in Scotland and had a short booklet with lists of quotes, that would stifle creativity far more, because we would be telling the young people which quotes were important. I question whether that is what is required, or indeed desired.

In addition, open-book exams take longer. If young people are given a dictionary in a modern language exam, it takes them longer to look through it than to just get on with it. How much additional stress will we cause young people by extending exams to hours and hours, rather than there being a finite time in which they have to produce quotes? There is some merit in having quotes to which young people are able to refer, but I question whether having an open-book exam for something such as English literature practically can become a reality.

PACE Trial: People with ME

Debate between John Howell and Carol Monaghan

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Carol Monaghan]

Absolutely. In fact, I will be calling for the patient voice to be heard in any treatments.

Calls to publish the raw data—basic protocol in good research—were ignored. Queen Mary University spent an estimated £200,000 on keeping the data hidden. Finally, after a long battle, patients won a court order to force the PACE authors to release the data. It was discovered that the authors had altered the way in which they measured improvement and recovery, to increase the apparent benefit of the therapies. Re-analysis showed that the improvement rate fell from 60% to 21% and the recovery rate fell from 22% to just 7%.

The method of patient reporting has also been questioned. As one participant says:

“After repeatedly being asked how severe...my symptoms were—in the context of…it’s just me not trying hard enough...I started to feel like I had to put a...positive spin on my...answers. I could not be honest about just how bad it was, as that would...tell the doctors I wasn’t trying and I wasn’t being positive enough. When I was completing questionnaires...I remember second guessing myself and thinking for every answer: ‘Is it really that bad? Am I just not looking at things positively enough?’”

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Lady for securing this debate. The PACE trials have been roundly condemned by many scientists as being totally inappropriate. Does she have a feel for what an appropriate trial might have found?

[Carol Monaghan]

Yes. I will come on to how an appropriate trial could be done. First, I will mention the self-reporting that was a part of the trial. Questionnaires provided the data and measures of success. There were no physiological or scientific measurements. For patients the damage was done. I am a science teacher by profession and I always told my pupils that there are a number of stages to any scientific investigation: “Start with a hypothesis. Decide how you will test this theory, what measurements you will make, how you will record your results and how you will use these results to draw your conclusions. Those conclusions, which might be different from the original hypothesis, must be based on the evidence you have gathered.”

That did not happen in the PACE trial, which relied on patient self-reporting, rather than measurable physiological parameters. Furthermore, when the results were not as expected, rather than revise the original hypothesis, the investigators simply changed the success criteria. Thus patients participating in GET who had deteriorated during the study were considered recovered.

There are, of course, ways of measuring the physiological impact of exercise. The two-day cardiopulmonary exercise test can objectively measure post-exertional malaise. We know that a person with ME can perform adequately—sometimes even well—on the first day, but can have greatly reduced cardiopulmonary function on the second. The test requires the participant to exercise on a static bicycle, and allows data on oxygen consumption, workload and gas exchange to be measured. Two identical tests, separated by 24 hours, must be carried out to properly measure the impact of exercise. Results from a single test could be interpreted as a lack of fitness. Two tests change that to something quite different. A healthy person will perform better the second time; an ME sufferer will most likely be worse.

Of course, the failure of the PACE trial to do that could simply be put down to bad science, but unfortunately I believe that there is far more to it. One wonders why the DWP would fund such a trial, unless it was seen as a way of removing people from long-term benefits and reducing the welfare bill.