Fair Taxation of Schools and Education Standards Committee

Jonathan Gullis Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

We will be considering all of our options for how to force this issue, but this is a choice for Conservative Members. There is a clear and straightforward way that we could look carefully at this issue, and the motion sets that out. The question for Conservative Members is whether they are prepared to defend inexcusable tax breaks for private schools, or whether they want to invest that money in ensuring that all our children in our state schools get a great start in life.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

May I ask the shadow Secretary of State whether any Labour Members on the current Education Committee have put such ideas forward to its Chair for investigation by the existing Select Committee?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I cannot speak on behalf of other hon. Members, but I will happily address the point about the substance of the Select Committee in a moment.

Our children are at the heart of Labour’s ambition for Britain. Children alive today can expect to live into the next century, with the pace of change increasing and technological advancements growing. We must equip them for that world, and that must shape how we think about our schools today and tomorrow, about what it means to grow up in this country and about what the country they inherit will become. Children do not lack vision. Time and again, when meeting, talking to and listening to children, I am struck by their optimism and ambition, and not just for themselves and their families, but for our country and our world.

I am determined that, in government, Labour will match that ambition. The education we provide for our children today will shape all our futures, and by delivering an excellent education for every child, we will build a better future for all levels. A child at school now cannot pause and wait for change; they get only one childhood and they get only one chance. Our job is to make sure that their childhood is the best it possibly can be.

This House should not wait either. The Government have told us that they are not prepared to act. The hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), the Chair of the Education Committee, has set out his priorities—I am glad to see that someone in his party is talking about childcare for once, and I welcome his Committee’s interest in this area. However, we urgently need action there too, driving up school standards and the opportunity to end private schools’ tax breaks. A new direction and new ambition are needed to drive forward that change.

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[Gillian Keegan]

There is the huge education benefit, but I think the hon. Member may have his maths a little wrong—I do not think the average is £37,000.

We are improving state-funded education, not undermining the aspirations or choices that parents have for their children. That is important. We are delivering a world-class curriculum for all schools, not attacking world-class institutions that secure international investment and drive innovation. We are driving school improvement, not driving small schools serving dedicated religious and philosophical communities out of business. We are providing the funding to schools that they need.

I am delighted that Labour decided to include school standards as part of this debate, as our record speaks for itself. In 2010, just 68% of schools were rated by Ofsted as good or outstanding, but we have taken that to 88%—hopefully the Members opposite are still following the maths—which is a vast improvement driven by the Minister of State, Department for Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb).

Moreover, the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) should join me in praising the work of this Government. Since we took office, schools in her local authority of Sunderland have gone from 67% rated good or outstanding to 91%. Meanwhile, 97% of schools in the Leader of the Opposition’s local authority now enjoy a rating of good or outstanding—I am sure he has thanked my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton for his role in making that happen. The shadow Schools Minister, the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), should also be grateful; when Labour was last in power, fewer than half of his local schools met that standard, but I am happy to share with the House that we have taken that dismal record and made it good—literally. Today, Portsmouth now boasts 92% of schools rated as good or outstanding. I want to take this opportunity to thank teachers, headteachers and support staff up and down the country for their incredible work over these years, as they have been the key drivers of this success. I can guarantee that we will not stop there.

Underpinning that record are improvements in phonics, where a further 24% of pupils met our expected standard in the year 1 screening. In just eight years from 2010, we brought the UK up the PISA rankings—the programme for international student assessment—from 25th to 14th in reading and from 28th to 18th in maths.

We will continue that trajectory as we build on the ambitions of the schools White Paper, which will help every child fulfil their potential by ensuring they receive the right support in the right place at the right time. This will be achieved by delivering excellent teaching for every child, high standards of curriculum, good attendance and better behaviour. [Interruption.] Somebody opposite mumbles “13 years”—I am sure that schools are delighted with the improvement I have just outlined over the past 13 years. We will also deliver targeted support for every child who needs it, making it a stronger and fairer school system.

Let us focus on the independent school sector. We are very fortunate in this country to be blessed with a variety of different schools. We have faith schools, comprehensive schools and grammar schools, to name but a few, all of which help to support an education that is right for children. The independent school sector itself is incredibly diverse. It includes large, prestigious, household names—in this House, we will all have heard of famous alumni from Eton—but there are 2,350 independent schools, and not many of them are like Eton. Reigate Grammar School, a fee-paying independent school that now charges £20,000 a year, once educated the Leader of the Opposition; like many in this category, it started as a local grammar and became independent. In fact, 14% of Labour MPs elected in 2019 attended private schools—double the UK average. I will be interested to see which of those hon. Members votes to destabilise the sector that provided the opportunities afforded to them.

As someone who did not benefit from such a prestigious educational background, I stand here focused not on the fewer than 7% of children who attend independent schools, but much more on the 93% who attend state-funded schools, as I did. As the Opposition wish to use parliamentary time on this issue, I would point out that the sector provides many benefits to the state and individuals alike. Independent schools attract a huge amount of international investment, with more than 25,000 pupils whose parents live overseas attending independent schools in the UK. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) pointed out, many could be working in our armed forces.

[Jonathan Gullis]

One of the greatest things I saw while working in the classroom, unlike those on the shadow Front Bench, was a scheme introduced under the Conservative Government by the former Minister for Children and Families, my right hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), which provided looked-after children with scholarships and bursaries to some of the leading boarding and private schools across our country. Are schemes like that—giving those most deprived kids the very best opportunities—not under threat because of the Opposition’s dangerous ideological plans?

[Gillian Keegan]

Absolutely. We will always focus on the people we can help. The more people we can help through a diverse school system, the better.

The independent school sector also has an international presence, exporting services through campuses in other countries. The independent sector includes many settings that serve small, dedicated faith communities, some with lower per-pupil funding than state-funded schools.

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[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

Let me start by saying—although she may not like it—what a tremendous fan I am of the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy). Unfortunately, however, in this instance I think she has missed the mark. While I absolutely respect the fact that she, like me, was on the frontline of teaching in state schools across our country, dealing with some of the most disadvantaged pupils in our communities, I need to make sure that she understands people like me.

I went to an independent school because my mother got off the council estate in London through grammar school after her father, a postman who died when she was 17 years old, and her mother, a local teaching assistant, put all the money they could into giving her the very best start in life with a tutor. My father, who had failed his O-levels, went back to school to be a cleaner during the day, then took night school classes and worked his way up, through the Open University, to be the first member of my family to hold a degree. If it had not been for my lifelong-supporting stepfather, who decided to invest in me, his non-biological son, I would not have had the privileged education that I was able to receive. So to try and make out that my family, who did not have holidays, new cars, house upgrades or extensions, but who decided that they wanted to invest in my brother and me to make sure we had the very best education, were simply some super-rich family—well, that is for the birds.

Yes, we were middle-income earners, and yes, my brother and I did not face the hardships that my mother and father had had to face, but to portray in that way any parent who aspires to enable their child to go to that type of school and has the money to do so is simply wrong. I walk around Stoke-on-Trent, North, Kidsgrove and Talke meeting parents who work on the shop floors of our local ceramics manufacturers, who are cleaners in local domestic households, who are workers in microbusinesses hiring maybe two or three local people, and who choose to spend their money in schools such as Edenhurst or Newcastle-under-Lyme, because that is their right, that is their choice and that is their money—while also paying their taxes on top, which funds the state education sector. It is completely wrong to portray such people in that way.

I find it astonishing that the vast majority of Opposition Back-Bench speakers have not actually addressed the motion, which proposes the establishment of an Education Committee 2.0, with a Chair who I am sure they believe would agree with their views, and with members who would obviously have a predetermined conception of what they wanted the outcome to be and would obviously come up with the result that they wanted. When I was a teacher, we certainly did not teach children to answer questions like that in exams, because it would have been the wrong thing to do; the idea was to have the ability to look at all sides of the argument and understand it.

I find it astonishing that we are having this debate, and that Opposition Members, despite praising the current Chair of the Education Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), as the shadow Secretary of State did, are saying to him, “You are doing a good job on childcare and we like what you are doing on careers, but because we are worried that you might not just agree with our policy we are going to try and set up a side-Committee—but, by the way, none of our Education Committee members agree with us, because they have voted with their feet and not turned up for the debate.” They have not even asked the Chair of the Education Committee to put forward his views in either a public or, I assume, a private session. If minutes can be provided to prove me wrong, I will be more than happy to be shown them.

This demonstrates yet again that we are here for purely ideological reasons. The maths simply does not add up—that is why the Prime Minister is absolutely right to want more pupils to study maths up to the age of 18, and I suspect that the Labour party should be the subject of a pilot study for this scheme to make sure that we show how it works and their sums add up.

As has been explained so beautifully by other Members, the scheme will come at a cost to the taxpayer. Some private schools, though not all, will close, and therefore some pupils will need other places. In Stoke-on-Trent we have no secondary school places available to fill, so there will be a cost to the Stoke-on-Trent taxpayer, as kids will be bussed out of the local area to neighbouring schools, although it may not be clear whether they themselves will have spaces. That will put more pressure on teachers at a time when they are still recovering from the covid pandemic.

Labour seems to think that new teachers will magically appear, although they have to go through a year of training and recruitment. That is challenging not because of Conservative rule, but because the likes of Opposition Members are telling me and others, time and again, how terrible teaching is—how terrible the conditions are, how terrible the classrooms are, how terrible the children are to work with. Is it any wonder that people do not turn up and ask to be teachers, when an advert over here is telling them that teaching is the worst profession in the world to work in?

I speak as someone whose partner is a former Labour party member who fully supports what the Conservative party has been doing to raise educational standards with a knowledge-rich curriculum and strong behavioural expectations. I have seen the same in schools with Labour-supporting headteachers, such as Kensington Aldridge Academy, right at the foot of Grenfell Tower, who have done excellent work to ensure that a rigorous curriculum gives children the chance to go to university. I think that, last year alone, six to 12 students went to Oxbridge from that school in that deprived part of Kensington because of the tremendous work of—yes, those friends: obviously, I declare my interest. That shows what this Government have done, time and again, to deliver for those people.

[Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech. According to the PISA—programme for international student assessment—tables, literacy and maths skills plummeted under Labour. We went from seventh to 25th in reading and from eighth to 28th in maths, and it has taken successive Education Secretaries and hard work from Ministers to recover from that position. Does he agree that before applying their big-state, freedom-stripping, economically illiterate ideologies to education, the Opposition should first get the basics right?

[Jonathan Gullis]

I fully concur with my hon. Friend. The simple truth is this. Even the Chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), told students at one of his local private schools, Redmaids’ High School, that he did not agree with this policy. Behind closed doors, the Labour Chair of a Select Committee says one thing while Labour Front Benchers say another.

This is not just about money; it is also about jobs. It is about the caterers, cleaners and groundskeepers who will lose their jobs if these schools close, and it will not necessarily be easy for them to find jobs to replace them. It is this Conservative Government who have introduced the successful multi-academy trusts and phonics; literacy and numeracy are up; and the disadvantage gap had narrowed before the pandemic. There is £7.7 billion from the spending review, and an extra £4.4 billion from the autumn statement. The Conservatives are on the side of teachers, on the side of parents and on the side of pupils. It is a shame that the Labour party is not.

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[Tom Hunt]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. This motion is deeply puzzling, and there are all sorts of questions like the one she has raised that have gone unanswered. We have not been helped by some of the contributions from the Opposition Benches that have increasingly strayed off the topic under discussion. Quite why the Education Committee, which is a sitting Select Committee, cannot look at this, I do not know. Why do we need to have a stand-alone Select Committee? Why would it take a year to look at this? I do not know. None of it makes any sense to me.

In terms of the impact, some of the changes proposed in the motion would lead to a number of independent schools closing, and it would not be the biggest, more established independent schools; it would be the smaller schools. There would be a consequence to this proposal. There is a legitimate debate to be had about class sizes, for example. We aspire to their being smaller, but the net result of pushing a set of policies that could lead to the closure of some independent schools would be potentially to increase class sizes, as the children who were in those schools would be in state schools. There would be a financial consequence to that.

What I take issue with is the populism and short-term politics behind this motion, which ignores the heavy lifting that is required to deal with the deeply complex issues that are rightly and understandably causing our education system to be unable to achieve its full potential.

[Jonathan Gullis]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Tom Hunt]

I will not give way right now.

Seeking to breed this kind of antagonism between the independent sector and the state sector is really not the right thing to do. In my Ipswich constituency, the relationship between our two principal independent schools and the state schools is close and productive. There is a huge amount of mutual learning between those two independent schools and the state schools. Trying to push the notion that, somehow, evil independent schools are behind all the ills in our state sector is regressive and unhelpful. A more constructive approach would be much more forthcoming.

I attended an independent school because I had two learning disabilities: dyspraxia and dyslexia. When I was 12, I had the reading and writing age of an eight-year-old, which most people now know because I have said it repeatedly. I could not tie my shoelaces until I was 14. I continue not to be the most organised person in the world, and I am still sometimes a bit prickly about all these sorts of things.

One reason why my father fought to put me in an independent school is that he thought I would benefit from that environment. The school helped with my learning development, not because of resources but because it had the freedom and flexibility to take an approach that works for neurodiverse individuals and unconventional learners. The reality is that a lot of young people with learning disabilities end up in the independent sector. Had I stayed in the state sector, I would have cost a lot of taxpayers’ money because of my needs, because of how far behind I was and because of some of my behavioural issues. I ended up going into the independent sector, so I was not a cost to the taxpayer. Taking policy decisions that could lead to the closure of many independent schools would create significant new pressures, because a lot of young people with learning disabilities would go into the state sector.

Many children have my learning disabilities, and few go to the kind of school I attended, without which I would not have ended up where I am today. I am conscious of that, and I live with it every day. I campaign as hard as I can to try to make sure that every young person with the kind of disabilities I have has a fair crack of the whip to achieve their full potential. If I genuinely felt that closing down schools like the one I attended would achieve that, I would agree with this motion.

This motion does not achieve that. It is driven by politics and populism, not by what actually helps young people with learning disabilities. The Opposition are trying to make the point that, somehow, this motion would be a game changer for those with learning disabilities. Let us have a constructive debate, because we know from our casework and from our conversations with constituents that huge numbers of young people with learning disabilities are not getting the support they need, and a lot of that is because of funding. We need every teacher to have greater understanding of neurodiversity, and we need to make sure Ofsted rewards schools that are great at SEND and punishes schools that do not emphasise SEND and potentially even play the system by off-rolling students. We have to do all those things. We should have been having that debate.

I have previously spoken to my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester, the Chair of the Education Committee, about my annoyance with the funding formula and the fact that areas such as Suffolk do not get a fair deal when it comes to funding pupils per head of population. It is all in the data. The way in which money is allocated is opaque and makes no sense. Why should a young person with special educational needs in Suffolk or Ipswich get any less than a young child anywhere else? They should have exactly the same money as anyone else. All sorts of things can be done.

I am very free speaking when it comes to education policy, and I am all up for occasional constructive disagreements with the Government if what they are doing is not right for young people in Suffolk. The Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), is here, and she recently came to a special school in Ipswich.

So much of our education system is not working as it should, and many young people, including children with SEND, are being let down. I encourage a constructive debate. The Education Committee has a great platform to do that. I regretfully feel that this motion has been driven by short-term politics and not by what actually works, including for some of the most vulnerable young people in our society.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Just under a week ago, I visited Ash Trees Academy, a primary special school in Billingham, to discuss the challenges it faces in delivering quality education to children with some of the most difficult of lives—children with both physical and learning special needs. Some of them cannot speak, and others are educated while lying down.

It was great to meet the children, but their access to the full package they need is compromised by a lack of on-site facilities and appropriate staff numbers. One example is the lack of a hydrotherapy pool. Due to a lack of funding, the pool they had was in need of considerable improvement and the decision was taken to fill it in and to repurpose the space. Some children are now transported to another site for vital therapy and to enjoy the water, but there is not enough money in the school for them to have their own special vehicle. I visited the Dogs Trust a few weeks ago, and it has fantastic facilities, including hydrotherapy pools—for dogs!—yet this school for special-needs children does not have such facilities.

Ash Trees also has no medical person. The duties once undertaken by a school nurse, such as feeding youngsters by tube, now fall to classroom assistants. I am in awe of them for undertaking the training to do such a difficult task, but why should school assistants have to undertake that medical duty when schools in other areas have full-time medical staff on site? We owe it to the children to do so much better, and when the schools Minister visits my constituency, hopefully soon—he is nodding his head, because he has agreed to come—I hope he will be able to drop in at Ash Trees to see those challenges at first hand.

Parliament Week is always one of my favourite weeks of the year, when I can indulge myself by doing what I enjoy most, which is visiting schools. I am pleased to say that the majority of children I meet are happy in school. For some, it is the happiest place of their young lives, as they often come from a background of poverty and chaotic lifestyles.

I thought I was imagining that children in some schools are taller and have rosier cheeks and a level of confidence way beyond children in other schools, but I know it to be true. If not for breakfast clubs, free school meals and even snacks provided by teachers, many children would not be equipped to listen and learn in the classroom. It is to this Tory Government’s shame that around 40% of children in the north-east live in poverty, and their life chances are limited as a result.

Schools were in a dreadful state when Labour came to power in 1997, in terms of standards, buildings and resources. Do not get me wrong: I am pleased that recent Governments have built on the legacy left by the last Labour Administration, and I know that, in some places, many children are doing extremely well in good and outstanding schools, but we were never going to get from where we were in 1997 to where we are today in just 10 years. It had to be a long-term policy, so I am pleased that some progress has continued to be made.

Despite the best efforts of our teachers and other staff, not all children get what they need. Headteachers tell me that restricted budgets mean they cannot fill vacancies, or mean they are planning to make people redundant, and that they are worried about the children. Again, despite great strategies from our teachers, many children in key stage 1 in particular are further behind in their education due to the pandemic. Government interventions have had limited success.

As I worry about that, we are told that Eton College plans to open a sixth-form college in neighbouring Middlesbrough, backed by a right-wing Mayor who believes that troublemakers on Teesside should be removed to Rwanda. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) might agree, but some of those troublemakers are the product of 12 years of Tory cuts. I doubt that an elitist sixth form in our area will help to address similar young people in our community. Had schools and children’s services been supported as they ought to have been since 2010, we might not have seen a situation where Middlesbrough’s Mayor says there are so many troublemakers that they should be robbed of their right to remain in the UK.

Is there anything like equality in education? Do we have a system that is geared to the most vulnerable and to children from difficult backgrounds? Those children do attract extra funding, but I remind Conservative Members that their successive Governments, including the coalition Government with the Liberal Democrats, have shifted more and more resources towards more affluent areas and away from areas of deprivation.

[Jonathan Gullis]

That’s not true.

[Alex Cunningham]

It is true.

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[Stephen Morgan]

I would expect better of the hon. Member, but I am delighted that he is already looking at the Labour party website. I can send him the membership links so that he can join the party, too.

[Jonathan Gullis]

rose—

[Stephen Morgan]

I will make some progress.

Education is about opportunity—opportunities to learn and grow, to achieve and flourish, and to have happy and healthy childhoods. Governing is about priorities, and VAT giveaways to private schools show exactly where the Conservatives’ priorities lie. They lie not in helping every child to get a great state education, but in helping the wealthiest in society. A Labour Government would make fairer choices. They would do so by asking those with the broadest shoulders to pay their fair share.

[Jonathan Gullis]

I am incredibly grateful to the shadow Minister, who is a good man. He pointed out that some of the money raised would go into teacher recruitment. What specifically will Labour use that money on to drive up teacher recruitment? Will it be by carrying on the bursary scheme and adding more money to it—I signed off on the £28,000—or is there another system that I am not aware of that Labour thinks will work? What specifically will Labour do on recruiting teachers with this extra money?