Secondary Schools (Accountability)

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for his kind words for the shadow Secretary of State and the former shadow Secretary of State, which he gave in his usual courteous way at the beginning of his statement. I also thank him for advance sight of the statement. Labour will study closely the details of the changes he proposes, and if it transpires that they will incentivise rich, broad and balanced curricula in our schools, we will welcome them. There are, however, some important tests that the changes must pass.

Anyone watching last week’s “Educating Yorkshire” will have seen the extraordinary efforts that teachers go to—sometimes including risking their health—to help pupils pass their GCSEs. It is sad that these days that is sometimes known in Government as “gaming the system”. How will the Minister ensure that the new arrangements will allow teachers to help pupils of all abilities to achieve their best, and can he be sure that they will not throw up their own new perverse incentives?

The Labour party, backed by the CBI, is committed to ensuring that all young people continue to study maths and English to 18, although so far the Government have failed to support Labour’s plan. Will the Minister think again about that? As the participation age rises to 18, and with challenges for us all in the OECD report, does he not want all young people to continue studying maths and English to 18? We also need more detail about how the changes will impact on technical and vocational education which, once again, seems to be a bit of an afterthought. He referred to progression post-16, but why are the Government watering down the important requirement on schools to ensure that young people are ready for the world of work, through the provision of work experience and independent careers advice and guidance?

The central problem with the announcement is that parents, pupils and teachers no longer trust the Government not to tinker. When it comes to accountability measures, the Government behave a little like the badgers, moving the goalposts halfway through the school year. Will the Minister guarantee that the proposal will not be subject to the mood swings of the Secretary of State and his infamous friend Dominic Cummings? Parents, pupils, teachers and head teachers are livid about the latest knee-jerk announcement via the press, when pupils are already preparing for exams and only days away from the deadline for exam entry, that only first entry into GCSE can be counted in the school accountability measure. If the badgers are moving the goalposts, Ministers are changing the rules in the middle of the match. Will the Minister promise to meet with heads to discuss their concerns about this change being implemented in such a way?

Will this change to the accountability system make any real difference to children if their schools are vulnerable to—I quote the Secretary of State’s special adviser— “disastrous teaching” and “fraudulent activity”? That is the view of Dominic Cummings, who says that it is inevitable, because of the lack of grip the Secretary of State has on his free schools policy, that some will fail for those reasons. That is what he said.

We are already seeing the fruit of that failure in the scandal at Al-Madinah school in Derby, which left 400 children without schooling for an entire week and whose approach to women staff and female students has caused such controversy. What will the right hon. Gentleman do to ensure that school accountability extends beyond today’s measure and includes ensuring that all taxpayer-funded schools have qualified teaching staff, are monitored for financial fraud, have proper child protection measures in place and are adhering to basic British values of tolerance and respect for all, regardless of gender, sexuality or religious belief?

[Mr Laws]

I think I welcome the shadow Minister’s response to our statement. By the end of it, it was difficult to know whether he was supporting the statement or not. We will come to that in a moment. I think I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s relatively cautious approach because, from him, I take that as a sign of support, whereas from other people it might qualify as anything other than that.

I hope the hon. Gentleman will accept that we have taken time to get this right. Nobody can accuse us of rushing into the proposals. After all, we announced a consultation in this area in February. We have taken a great deal of time to get our proposals right. We have listened very carefully, including to the Chairman of the Select Committee, to a lot of the mathematics, to organisations that made representations, and to hon. Members on both sides of the House. As a consequence, the Secretary of State and I have changed the proposals that we first made. We have moved away from a threshold measure to a greater extent than was originally planned, precisely because of the perverse incentive effects that the hon. Gentleman talked about, and we think we have now got the balance right between having a proper accountability system and ensuring that that system embeds the right incentives. By having a number of key measures, we will ensure that it is not possible to game one of those and ignore all the other things that matter.

The hon. Gentleman is right that we need to encourage young people who have not mastered maths and English at 16 to go on studying those subjects, and we have announced a new core maths qualification beyond the age of 16 to ensure that young people have the opportunity to do that. We have also, through our 16-to-19 accountability consultation, paid a great deal of attention to the incentives that educational institutions will have to keep young people on course after the age of 16 and to create the right incentives. The destination measure that I have talked about today will give all educational institutions an interest in the qualifications that young people secure not only at age 16, but beyond that.

On the issue of early entries for GCSEs, I do understand that this has been controversial, but the hon. Gentleman will understand that we must pay attention to the serious warnings that we have received from Ofsted and others about the scale of increase of early entry. This summer almost a quarter of maths entries—170,000 entries —were from young people who were not at the end of key stage 4 study. Ofsted said that it found no evidence that such approaches on their own served the best interests of students in the long term. Indeed, Sir Michael Wilshaw has said that he thinks early entry hurts the chances of some children, who are not able to go on to get the best grades that they are capable of.

On future uncertainty about these frameworks, we hope very much indeed that we will be able to secure support from across the House for the proposals that we have made today, and I take the hon. Gentleman’s comments as a modest step in that direction. However, in terms of getting certainty about the degree of cross-party co-operation, it would be helpful if he could clarify some of divisions that there are now on his own side about some of the key issues. For example, one of the measures that we have said we would publish is the EBacc, and we believe we should continue to do so. The former education spokesman for the Labour party opposed the EBacc and said that it was at best an irrelevance and in some cases distorted young people’s choices. The new spokesman for the Labour party said that he supports the English baccalaureate. We want to hear from the Opposition some clarity about Labour’s position on these issues; otherwise, that will be a source of confusion.