Educational Attainment (Disadvantaged Pupils)

Julian Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 25th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton.

There is in this country a large gap in educational attainment between children from richer homes and those from poorer homes as measured by eligibility for free school meals. As the Minister has said on a number of occasions, closing that gap is a moral imperative. I am proud of the Government’s commitment on that front, and of the fact that every time Ministers discuss raising standards in education the issue is always both increasing overall attainment and closing the gap between rich and poor. There have been many initiatives on that matter, and I am sure that there will be more, but probably the biggest change of all is how the pupil premium structurally funds schools. That has at least three effects. First, it ensures that schools in disadvantaged areas are better resourced; secondly, it funds specific programmes and interventions; and thirdly, it makes pupils who are eligible for free school meals more attractive—as it were—to schools.

The key problem is that opportunity in Britain is still not evenly spread. Much continues to depend on the type of family and income bracket that someone is born into. Of course, today we are discussing the fact that opportunity also has much to do with where someone is born. There are several aspects to that, and I am going to touch on three. First is the straightforward fact that there is variation in attainment for disadvantaged children both within and between regions, and that seems to happen differentially for primary and secondary phases. Secondly, there is the perhaps counterintuitive problem of being born poor into a relatively wealthy area. Thirdly, there is my main focus: outperformance at the top end and the increasing exceptionalism of London.

I will talk first about the overall variation within and between regions, although we must be careful when we talk about regions because, in a sense, they are not really anything—they are just administrative constructs; geographical niceties. Nevertheless, there does seem to be some sort of regional pattern. If we look at the proportion of children who get five or more GCSEs at grade C or above, including English and maths, we see that there is significant variation between regions. That variation is more marked, however, in children eligible for free school meals. On both counts—children overall and disadvantaged children—London tops the table. Versus the rest, it is ahead by 3% overall and by 16% for disadvantaged children specifically.

There are also variations between individual areas within regions. In a number of local authorities, more than 55% of children eligible for free school meals achieve five or more GCSEs at grade C or above: Newham, Redbridge, Lambeth, Tower Hamlets, Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea. At the other end of the scale, in 14 authorities, fewer than 25% of children achieve that benchmark. Those areas are liberally scattered throughout the country—north, south, east and west. The important point is that all the top performers are in London and the poorest performers are all over the place.

[Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

I apologise to my hon. Friend for missing the start of his speech. Our challenge in North Yorkshire is that the overall performance of schools is good, but only 33.9% of children eligible for free school meals achieve five GCSEs at grade C or above.

[Damian Hinds]

Indeed; there are issues of that nature—a wide variation—throughout the country. Sometimes it makes sense to look at this issue at the regional level—for my hon. Friend, that would be Yorkshire and the Humber—and in other cases it makes sense to look at individual local authorities. Sometimes we must actually drill down lower still.

In general and on average, if a child lives in a richer area they are more likely to go to a school judged good or outstanding by Ofsted than if they live in a poorer area. Ofsted’s report last year, “Unseen children”, highlights that point well. The report shows that the gap between the proportion of schools judged good or outstanding for leadership and management in the poorest parts relative to the wealthiest parts is biggest for primary schools in the south-east and east midlands, and biggest for secondary schools in Yorkshire and the Humber and the north-east. It is interesting that the report highlights how different areas have the biggest gap for primary and secondary schools. The area with the starkest difference is probably the north-east, which has the biggest gap of all between the proportion of secondary schools judged good or outstanding for leadership and management, whereas for primary schools it is the top performer in the entire country. The blended average of those two gaps ends up being quite good.

Another problem is the fact that within otherwise wealthy areas there is a danger that poorer children can be overlooked. I said at the start of my speech that it is counterintuitive in many ways, but it seems to be true—at least to an extent—at both school and area level, that a child from a disadvantaged background is best off being in a place where there are either hardly any other children in that category or loads of them. They are worse off if they are somewhere in the middle range.

Ofsted has just started publishing regional-level reports, and of the south-east it said that

“the poor performance of small numbers of pupils entitled to free school meals is lost in the midst of otherwise strong performance by 16-year-olds.”

Of course, there are exceptions, and I was delighted to note that one of the schools singled out in that report as doing particularly well in that regard was Bohunt school in my constituency, which the Secretary of State visited a couple of weeks ago. Nevertheless, there is a problem in the south-east overall with children eligible for free school meals. The report says that

“pupils eligible for free school meals in the South East attain at levels below the national figure for similar pupils in every single local authority in the region.”

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[Damian Hinds]

The shadow Minister is such a nice man. He has read “Capital Mobility”, the report by the all-party group. I did not realise he had also read the sheet of paper in front of me, which states that many of those things were also true when London was the problem child of British education, before it became the poster child. Although such factors are relevant, we cannot ascribe the difference in London performance specifically to them.

The population make-up of London is one massive change and a massive difference. London is diverse on a scale unknown in the rest of the United Kingdom—indeed, unknown in most of the rest of the world. London’s state secondary schools are now 32% white British by ethnic origin, and the statistic for kids just starting secondary school is extraordinary: 48% do not have English as their mother tongue. An even more surprising statistic is that children with English as an additional language come very close in performance by GCSEs to children who have English as their mother tongue, and in London they beat them—in GCSEs in London, children who do not speak English as their mother tongue very slightly outperform those who do. That raises difficult questions.

I do not want to pre-empt tomorrow’s Committee meeting, at which, sadly, I will not be able to join my Opposition compadres, but I know the Minister will be appearing before the Committee to talk about the performance of white working class pupils. It is true that all ethnic groups do better in London than they do outside—spectacularly so in the case of children of Pakistani origin. There is a 14% gap between the performance of pupils of Pakistani origin in London versus the rest of the country.

There are other relevant differences in London, some of which might be driven by differences and diversity in ethnicity and religion, such as larger families and older, better educated mothers. Surprisingly, it is estimated that parents in London are slightly more likely to be married than parents outside London. It is slightly odd that we can only estimate that, but that is another question altogether. There are more families with a parent at home. There is less use of formal child care, slightly lower participation in free school provision, and slightly more use of tutors. One would normally associate such things with lower educational attainment, particularly in terms of early years participation, which again raises important, difficult and challenging questions.

What is different and what might we be able to have an impact on, given that we cannot have much impact on the composition of the population? London teachers are more diverse, more likely to have been educated abroad, more likely to be full time, and, before somebody says it, a bit less likely to have qualified teacher status—given the sorts of numbers we are talking about, I do not think that that is particularly relevant.

Teachers are also a little less likely to be on upper pay scales or the advanced skill scale and more likely to be on the main pay scales. Within the London challenge, there were various recruitment initiatives, which included addressing housing problems. One of those initiatives was Teach First. Opinions vary and sometimes teachers get wound up if we bang on too much about Teach First, but Teach First teachers can have a positive, disruptive impact as they come into schools, observe existing teachers, bring ideas of their own, swap things around and so on. Some 48% of Teach First teachers are still in London, and I think there is an opportunity to spread that scheme more widely.

There was a big focus on leadership in the London challenge. It was about supporting leaders in schools and ensuring that they were paid properly. As an aside, primary schools in London are on average a lot bigger than primary schools outside, and I wonder whether that means it is possible to afford more by way of leadership. Alongside that support and remuneration was intense scrutiny and what people close to the London challenge operation would describe as verging on ruthlessness to ensure that schools were being run absolutely as well as they could be. That was all facilitated by an intense use of data and what are called families of schools, whereby someone could compare their school to others in similar circumstances, so they could see what was really possible.

London also over-indexed greatly on sponsored academies. Compared with the rest of the country, London is much more likely to have sponsored academies. That relatively small number of schools had a disproportionately larger impact on the overall performance of London as a whole, because the results tended to go from very low to very good.

Where does all that leave us? I should like to put a number of things to the Minister. I do not pretend for a moment to have all the answers, or even most of them, but some things are obvious challenges. First, on attracting the best teachers, we know that most people stay in their home region. That puts a premium on marketing intensely the teaching profession to high performers within the areas and regions where they are most needed, at school-leaver level and university graduate level.

Secondly, there has to be a big opportunity for Teach First outside London. That is happening, or starting to happen, already. There is now a focus on Bournemouth, which is welcome. We need to bear in mind why 48% of Teach First teachers were in London. One reason is that the programme started there. Another is that, of course, young people like to move to London; that cannot be changed very much. Another big factor is the network effect: knowing that other new graduates are doing the same programme in schools relatively nearby and so having social and support networks. Some co-ordinated, geographically-focused expansion of Teach First would be smart.

There are always questions in some schools about what the pupil premium can be used for. What is the Minister’s attitude to schools in heavily disadvantaged areas using it to pay teachers more, to attract the best? Alongside attracting the best teachers, there is also the matter of getting top leadership to the areas where it is needed most. In that regard, I look to the growth of initiatives such as Future Leaders. I wonder whether the incentives are enough. Can those be looked at, to ensure that they are sufficient and that they persuade people to go where they are most needed?

I turn to geographical patterns. There can sometimes be an over-supply of national education leaders in areas away from schools where their support would be most beneficial. I wonder whether it is possible to improve that situation by using technology, for example.

[Julian Smith]

On attracting talent, does my hon. Friend agree that, as well as the Government’s coming up with initiatives, we need to encourage schools and local authorities to cast the net wider? Again, coming back to North Yorkshire, it is a challenge to get local authority education department leaders or heads from outside the region. We need to get the schools and council to work harder to achieve that.

[Damian Hinds]

My hon. Friend is right. An intense marketing effort, leaving no stone unturned in the search for talent, is absolutely essential.

Having mentioned people, let me speak more broadly. We need to be impatient on behalf of the places where the academies revolution has not happened. In London, we have seen what it can do. There needs, through whatever means, to be a lot more push on that issue in parts of the country where the change has not happened.

There are some specifics from the London challenge. Are we using data enough outside London—particularly in identifying families of schools, so that each school can compare itself with others? Although the term “sub-regional strategies” always gives me a bit of a rash, I wonder about the role of system-wide leadership. When I am talking to teachers and head teachers about the London challenge, they always talk about the person who led it and his assistant and immediate team. I wonder about the balance that must be struck between individual school autonomy, which I am a great supporter of, and having a sense of shared ownership and system leadership.

I started by commending the Government’s twin approach to education, in respect of raising overall attainment and narrowing the gap. It is right that we do both; it is no good equalising performance around some sort of acceptable average. A lot has been done, but the gap is still wide. There is much more to do in our quest for the combination of social justice and economic efficiency which is social mobility or opportunity for all.

There is a lot going for us in that quest. We have unprecedented amounts of data at our fingertips as well as international benchmarking and case studies. Schools have been set free to innovate, and we have the Early Intervention Foundation and the Education Endowment Foundation. There is certainly the political will from the Minister and his colleagues. However, quite a lot of questions remain. As I said, I certainly do not have all the answers and I am concerned that some of the answers do not yet exist. However, we need to keep asking questions, including about how one area of the country can learn from another. That is the focus of this debate, which I hope will play a small but useful role in that quest.

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[Julian Smith]

In analysing such issues in Yorkshire, does the hon. Gentleman feel that councils of whatever political hue have been coasting for too many years and need to get real about what they have to do, to get the performance of their schools up, and markedly?

[Alex Cunningham]

I do agree that there are examples of local authorities across the country that have not been doing the job of driving up standards that we would have hoped for. That varies throughout the country. However, in local authority areas there are still excellent schools, whether they have converted to academy status or they remain as local authority schools. It is the ones that are not doing well that the local authorities and others need to turn their attentions to.

Across the country, there are nine local authority areas, predominantly in London, where every secondary school student attends a good or outstanding institution. Yet in 13 local authority areas a majority of secondary students attend a school that is not good or outstanding. Although there are areas of high performance across the regions, they are unfortunately far from the norm.

Ofsted’s report puts it bluntly, saying that secondary schools in the north-east and Yorkshire and the Humber are among the worst in the country. That is not an observation I relish, as a north-east Member of Parliament, but it is one that we cannot afford to hide from. Those results are symptomatic of an education system that is failing many of our young people, but it is not all about the system; there is something else.

As has already been said, the Education Committee is currently examining the underachievement of white working-class children, many of whom come from impoverished working and non-working families living in areas where jobs are hard to come by and, as is the case in north-east England, regions where unemployment continues to go up. We are looking for answers to that underachievement, and we want to understand the variation across the country. Perhaps the answer is back in early years, as Governments appear to have agreed over the years.

The previous Labour Government did much for early years provision. I witnessed that in the north-east region, where they did more than ever to give children a better chance at the start of their education. However, we are still not reaching the children we need to reach, and the loss of provision is a serious concern. It is not wholly surprising that young people in the north-east and Yorkshire and the Humber are less likely to attain results above the national level in the key indicator of five good GCSEs, including English and mathematics, than young people from almost anywhere else in the country.

As I said, we have successes in the north-east. The Secretary of State for Education, in his evidence to the Education Committee last month, talked about Sunderland, Gateshead and other pockets across the region where there have been improvements. In my own backyard, the North Shore academy in my constituency has improved considerably in the past few years. The school was developed under Labour and delivered under the current Government.

Poverty is a strong and powerful player. The north-east has the highest proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals outside London, and the gap in attainment between those eligible for free school meals and those who are not is wider than the national average in primary schools. Worse still, the gap widens by the time pupils leave secondary school.

Her Majesty’s chief inspector of education, children’s services and skills may be right to assert that children in England now have the best chance they have ever had of attending a good school, but that broad remark fails to acknowledge the dramatic regional variations that are turning education into that most horrible of clichés, a postcode lottery. Indeed, Her Majesty’s chief inspector accepted as much when he described our school system as

“a tale of two nations.”

He said that the system is

“divided into lucky and unlucky children.”

“Luck” is not a word I work with, but that is what he said. He talked of an

“educational lottery that consigns some children to substandard schools and favours others”.

Her Majesty’s chief inspector is clearly right to state that too many children in our country are unlucky, but too many children from similar backgrounds and with similar abilities end up with widely different prospects because the quality of their education is not consistently good—in other words, because they grew up in different regions and attended different schools with different opportunities.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead outlined, the north-south divide means that people in the south can aspire to tremendous things, but there is not so much aspiration in the north and other regions. That is not fair. We must develop a system that minimises regional and local variations and restores fairness to our education system, ensuring that it delivers the skills and knowledge that the young people of today will need to succeed tomorrow.

We must deliver not only to some young people but to all young people. A crucial element of attaining that goal is to ensure that our teachers—their teachers—are fully equipped to do the job. The path to educational attainment, a path that every parent wants their children to follow, is guided by teachers. Nobody, apart from family, is more important in children’s lives. It is clear to me that the key to securing improved attainment for all, irrespective of the geographical fortune of social circumstance, lies in ensuring that teachers are trained to the highest standards to allow the cycle of progress to continue.

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[Kevin Brennan]

That might well be a factor. There have been many initiatives in London and a real attempt to attract good quality graduates into the profession through a number of different routes, including Teach First, as the hon. Member for East Hampshire mentioned in his remarks. I have not seen data to show that the public regard teachers more highly in London than in other parts of the country, but that might be a factor.

Returning to the point I was making, on 13 January—I have asked this question subsequently, too—I asked the Minister

“when he intends to publish the findings of the most recent Teacher Workload Survey.”

Bear in mind that the survey was undertaken in March 2013, almost 12 months ago. The Minister’s answer was:

“Officials are currently analysing the data collected during the 2013 Teacher Workload Survey.”—[Official Report, 13 January 2014; Vol. 573, c. 360W.]

Now, when one asks a parliamentary question, one never expects an answer—certainly not from the Department for Education. The relevant word in my question was “when”, but there was no reference in the answer to when the Minister intends to publish the report—not even to “shortly”, “soon” or other civil service terms. Nor was there any reference to “in the autumn”—a term that usually extends to 31 December.

[Julian Smith]

The shadow Minister seems to be alluding to the suggestion that the report contains some sort of smoking gun that teachers are overworked or unhappy. Would it not be better to focus on what teachers need to do, which is to improve markedly, and on having a massive step change in our educational performance? Worrying about what happened last year or whether teachers are feeling a bit stressed is not the goal. We need to get our PISA rankings up, and that should be the priority.

[Kevin Brennan]

I do not know whether the report contains a smoking gun; I have no idea what it contains. It cannot contain a smoking gun, because the gun has not been fired, despite us waiting a year to hear what the survey says. If the hon. Gentleman would care to read in detail the OECD reports on the PISA rankings, he will see that they make the point that teacher morale matters, and that it is a key component of ensuring that our system produces good quality outcomes and, therefore, a component of raising our performance in the PISA tables.