Secondary Education

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Thursday 21st June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Education to make a statement on reports that he plans to scrap GCSEs, end the secondary national curriculum and replace examination boards with single-subject bodies.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove)]

The coalition Government’s education reforms are designed to raise standards in all our schools and give every child the opportunity to acquire the rigorous qualifications that will enable them to succeed in further and higher education and the world of work. We have already taken steps to make the curriculum in primary schools more rigorous, with a new emphasis on getting every child to read fluently and widely for pleasure, higher standards in essential arithmetic and new, more demanding expectations of the level of scientific knowledge each child will master. Draft programmes of study for our primary curriculum are out for consultation and we look forward to engaging with parents and teachers on how to help every child achieve more. We inherited a situation in which far too many children left primary school unable to read, write or add up properly. That was a crime against social justice and we are determined to put it right.

We are also taking steps to inject greater rigour into secondary education. The introduction of the English baccalaureate measure has resulted in the numbers studying physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography and foreign languages all rising. At the same time, we have already made GCSEs more rigorous by tackling the re-sit culture, ending modules and restoring marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar, but the evidence we have heard from parents, pupils, our best schools and our top universities shows that we need to consider going further.

Children are working harder than ever, but we have been told that the exam system is not working for them. Before Christmas The Daily Telegraph reported on the competition between exam boards to dumb down qualifications—[Laughter.] I do not regard falling standards in our schools as a laughing matter. Heads have told us that the current league table system incentivises weak schools to push students towards soft subjects and easier exams. Parents and students have told us that there are weaknesses with current GCSEs, which privilege bite-size learning over deep understanding and gobbets of knowledge over real learning. Academics have reported that headline improvements in exam results have not been matched by profound improvements in understanding, with researchers from King’s college London reporting today that teenagers’ maths skills have declined over the last 30 years.

We have been considering how to address these concerns and plan to issue a consultation paper shortly. We would like to see every student in this country able to take world-class qualifications, such as the rigorous and respected exams taken by Singapore’s students, for example. We want to tackle the culture of competitive dumbing down by ensuring that exam boards cannot compete with each other on the basis of how easy their exams are. We want a curriculum that prepares all students for success, at 16 and beyond, by broadening what is taught in our schools and then improving how it is assessed.

These are inevitably challenging ambitions that will require careful implementation. That is why we want the conversation on how we raise standards to be broad and inclusive. It is in all our interests that all our children do better than ever before. Although we want a broad conversation, we are also determined to reach a clear conclusion: a state school system in which every child is challenged to do much better, in which there are no excuses for failure and in which every child is introduced to the best that has been thought and written and given every opportunity to achieve their utmost.

[Kevin Brennan]

My hon. Friend the shadow Education Secretary has asked me to put on the record the reason for his absence today: he is attending a meeting in Edinburgh with two of his constituents and the Spanish consul-general about the murder of their son in Spain. He sends his apologies.

GCSEs may well need improving, but a two-tier exam system that divides children into winners and losers at 14 is not the answer. The Opposition believe in a modern education system that promotes high standards, rigorous exams and a broad curriculum that prepares young people for the world of work and to succeed in life, but it seems that Ministers are in favour of going back to the future. They have cut education spending by the largest amount since the 1950s. They believe that Victorian-style rote learning is the way to teach our children. They want to bring back a two-tier exam system, designed in the 1950s, that will separate children and close off opportunity.

We on the Opposition Benches believe in rigour and high standards for all, but we also believe in a broad curriculum that prepares young people for work, so we will set a series of tests to ensure that the changes meet both. First, Labour wants higher literacy and numeracy standards. The key is to raise teaching quality across the board. Is there any reason to expect these proposals to deliver that? At best, they are a distraction from the central challenges. Standards rose under Labour because we focused on literacy and numeracy. It was we who inherited a weak system for maths and English from the Tories. Only three in 10 pupils—that is 60%, because I know that the Secretary of State is not very good at maths—got a good GCSE in 1997, more than half—[Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Sir Tony, you are now officially a statesman, and a statesman should not yell across the Chamber. Calm yourself.

[Mr Speaker]

No point of order is required at this stage. I shall hear the hon. Gentleman on another occasion, with great anticipation.

[Kevin Brennan]

I was just testing their numeracy; the figure is, of course, 30%. We improved literacy and numeracy standards. More than half achieved five good grades at GCSE, including English and maths, in 2010. Secondly, the Government appear to be writing off a quarter of all young people at 14 with the return to the CSE. There is strong evidence that children’s performance—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I feel sure that the hon. Gentleman is moving towards a conclusion—he certainly should be—and it might be useful if there was a question mark somewhere.

[Kevin Brennan]

Of course, Mr Speaker.

How will these measures improve and promote social mobility? How will a return to 1950s qualifications help to prepare young people for a 21st century world of work? Is not this nothing more than a softening-up exercise to disguise a fall in attainment as Tory cuts, disruption and teachers leaving have an effect on pupils’ ability to learn? Parents, pupils and employers will be asking today what evidence there is to suggest that a return, back to the future, to the CSE and O-levels will actually work.

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his questions and associate myself with his remarks about the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), who I know is unavoidably detained on constituency business. I hope that the whole House will note that he is doing his first and most important job: representing those who elected him.

The hon. Gentleman asked a series of questions—[Interruption.] He asked a series of rhetorical questions. He invited us to consider that what the Government are reported to be putting forward would lead to a two-tier system. The sad truth is that we already have a two-tier system in education in this country. Some of our most impressive schools have already left the GCSE behind and opted for the IGCSE or other more rigorous examinations. It is also the case, sadly, that 40% of children do not achieve five good GCSEs, including English and maths, in our system. He said that, under the proposals that are being reported, 25% of children would be left behind. The sad truth is that at least 40% of children have been left behind under the current system. There is no excuse not to act. [Interruption.] I note what the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) says from a sedentary position, but given the questions the hon. Member for Cardiff West asked, I think that trading percentages across the Dispatch Box is not an area in which Labour Members can consider themselves strong.

The hon. Gentleman also alleged that the proposals were an attempt to move backwards. Far from it. They are an attempt to ensure that our education system stands comparison with the world’s most rigorous, because although there have undoubtedly been improvements in our schools and by our teachers over the past 20 years, they have not been sufficient to ensure that we keep pace with other jurisdictions. As Singapore, Hong Kong, Alberta and New Zealand, have improved their education systems, we have fallen behind them in relative terms, and we need to ensure that our young people have qualifications that are every bit as rigorous and a curriculum that is every bit as stretching.

The sad truth is that, if we look at the objective measure of how we have done over the past 15 years, we find that on international league tables our schools fell in reading from 523 to 494 points, in maths from 529 to 492 and in science from 528 to 514. Every objective academic study of what has happened in our education system has drawn attention to the weakness of our qualifications. We aim to address that in order to ensure that the next generation get what they deserve—a world-class education and world-class qualifications.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes a similarly acute point. One of the initiatives that we announced last Thursday was making sure that those with good degrees in mathematics and science subjects who choose to go into teaching receive an additional bursary in order to entice them into the profession. It is also the case that we will prepare new routes for specialist maths teachers in primary schools, and we will also incentivise the recruitment of high-performing graduates to go into schools in the toughest areas, to make sure that the children who need help most receive it.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

May I, on behalf of my colleagues, offer our best wishes to all the young people—including my daughter, Siobhàn—who are sitting their A-levels today? Investing in teacher training is a very welcome measure, but recent reports suggest a drop of 15% in the number of people applying for teacher training, and teachers are reporting a sharp fall in staff room morale. Why is the Secretary of State having such a “chilling effect” on teacher morale?

[Michael Gove]

As Robert Burns, that great poet, once said,

“facts are chiels that winna ding”—

[Hon. Members: “Translate.”] The collapse of understanding of modern foreign languages under the Labour Government is something to behold, as is the Opposition’s disdain for an important part of the United Kingdom. But those of us who are Unionists, as well as lovers of poetry, know that recent statistics from the Teaching Agency showed that, among graduates who are contemplating entering the teaching profession, the estimation of the prestige and status of teaching has risen. Those are facts—statistics—that do not lie, unlike some of the press releases that have suggested that teacher morale has fallen.

Safeguarding Children

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

The Secretary of State is hugely engaged in the issue. I have been around the block a little longer than he has. Having been shadow Minister with responsibility for children, having dealt with safeguarding since 2003 and having been appointed to this position, I perhaps have a little more experience of the subject. When the current Secretary of State took up his position as shadow Secretary of State, his interest and his knowledge of serious case reviews on some safeguarding issues was extraordinary. He has driven the programme and enabled me and others to carry forward the proposals from Munro and others in the way we have. I remind the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) that the very first review that was established in the Department for Education under the new Secretary of State was the Munro review on child safeguarding. It was nothing to do with schools or education; it was on child safeguarding. That speaks volumes.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

That is good to hear, but when both the Minister and his hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) said that this debate was much more important than the previous one, is it not fair to point out that the Secretary of State chose to attend the beginning of the previous debate, but not to attend this debate?

[Tim Loughton]

I am sorry that we seem to be descending into the village frippery of the last debate. This debate was announced yesterday. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State had to shift various engagements to attend the House earlier and is not able to attend this debate. He trusts me and my ministerial colleagues to speak about this issue from the Dispatch Box. He follows these issues very closely. The fact that he has put the resources of the Department into ensuring that we have safeguarding improvements that are working is the test of the commitment of this Government, this Secretary of State and this ministerial team to the subject in hand.

Let us get back to the important business of saying what we have done and responding to the points that have been made. I welcome this opportunity to debate safeguarding children. It is appropriate that we should have this debate now because, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby mentioned, only yesterday we launched a consultation on revised statutory guidance, as part of our wider proposals to reform radically the child protection system in England. It is radical reform, and it is also about changing mindsets.

Before I remind hon. Members of the action that the Government have taken to keep vulnerable children safe, I want to pay tribute, as I am sure we all do, to the many thousands of professionals, social workers and others around the country who work hard to do just that, for which they receive little recognition and praise in the media or among our constituents. I often refer to social workers as the fourth emergency service. That is not an overestimation. Our reforms are designed to help those professionals to get on with their jobs better and to keep vulnerable children safer.

Although it is essential to tackle poor practice, I believe that we can and should do a great deal more to celebrate successes and to support those on the front line when they use their professional judgment to take tough decisions. I have met many hundreds of social workers over the past few years and spent a whole week in Stockport as a social worker a little while ago. They have to exercise the judgment of Solomon, often on a daily basis. It is not an exact science. They have to make difficult judgment calls, and we expect them to do so as part of their daily job.

As many hon. Members will know, the widely welcomed review completed by Eileen Munro last year laid the groundwork for a new approach to child protection. As I have said, it was the first review that we established. We are rapidly turning its recommendations into practice. Professor Munro found that the system had become overwhelmed by prescriptive bureaucracy and box-ticking, and that social workers were spending too much time on form-filling and not enough with families and vulnerable children. Endless procedures had been imposed on professionals to minimise risk, even though it is fanciful to believe that we can wish danger and insecurity away simply by ticking the right boxes. As a result, the professionalism and judgment of frontline staff had been undermined. The most important thing—the central focus on the needs of children—had been largely lost.

The answer that Professor Munro proposed was simple: we need to get back to basics of best practice. We need to allow social workers to spend more time with children and families, getting to know and understand them and responding to their particular circumstances and needs. As she put it, we need to focus

“not only on whether we are doing things right but whether we are doing the right thing.”

We accepted Eileen Munro’s findings and have been acting on them. We are beginning to see the fruits of the change of emphasis. We are seeing greater flexibility, with eight local authorities, including Knowsley and Islington, testing new approaches to the assessment of children’s needs over the past year. We have given them the freedom, through a special dispensation, to set their own local frameworks and to replace rigid time scales with professional judgments based on the needs of each child.

The feedback from the trials has been encouraging. Social workers are telling us that greater flexibility leads to more quality time with children and families, and better assessments, particularly for families with the most complex needs. Many also feel an enhanced sense of ownership over their work. We are, I hope, restoring confidence to the social work profession, which had taken such a knock.

Local authorities are telling us that with greater freedom comes greater responsibility. They have been reporting back to us about the need to monitor cases robustly to prevent drift. We are seeing a greater practical emphasis on multi-agency working and a drive towards transparency, which is essential in improving services and strengthening public confidence in the work that they do. We are seeing a stronger focus on supervision, with social workers having more time with their managers to discuss complex cases.

I am also encouraged to see an emerging greater emphasis on learning, another key point that was mentioned by the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby. Increasingly, the sector is taking the lead in sharing lessons from good practice and from when things go wrong. We can learn from mistakes only if we understand how and why they happened, hence our policy on publishing serious case reviews, which I am delighted to hear the Opposition have now come around to. We are also considering how we can improve serious case reviews to make them more effective tools for learning lessons that are widely shared and that lead to action and sustainable improvements. That could not happen while only very limited executive summaries were in the public domain.

Yesterday, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, we announced a further important step in our overhaul of the child protection system in England. It is a measure at the heart of the Munro recommendations: the revised “working together” strategy. That new statutory guidance for safeguarding children will help create a new culture of trust among health professionals, teachers, early years professionals, youth workers, police and social workers.

We have published three draft documents for consultation—and it will indeed be a consultation. Some of the points made by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, as well as others that the hon. Gentleman raised, absolutely need to be fed into that consultation. That was why we did not just plough ahead, much though Eileen Munro was urging us to do so. We want to get things right, just as she got her recommendations right. We want to ensure that we put them into practice in the right way so that they work properly.

Our three draft documents will replace more 700 pages of detailed instructions with 68 pages of short, precise guidance and checklists. They will be punchy but clear and give professionals space in which to exercise their professional judgment. The revised guidance proposes giving local areas more freedom to organise their services in a way that suits local needs. It will allow more face-to-face time with children and families, which is crucial, and provide a clear framework within which professionals must operate.

The first document, “Working Together to Safeguard Children”, clearly states the law so that all organisations know what they and others must do to protect children. It does not tell GPs and other health professionals, teachers, police and social workers exactly how to do their job, but it provides a checklist setting out their duties and what is expected of them. It also sets out how the role and impact of local safeguarding children boards can be strengthened. As the hon. Gentleman said, they are crucial to the reforms, and they play an absolutely vital role in holding local agencies to account and getting all the key players around the same table and talking the same language.

The second document is new guidance on undertaking assessments of children in need. Informed by evidence from the eight trial local authorities, it proposes replacing nationally prescribed timetables with a more flexible approach. That approach will be focused, as it should be, on the needs of each child. It will absolutely do what the motion asks for—it will put the child’s needs, rather than compliance with inflexible time scales and recording processes, at the centre of assessment.

The third document is new guidance on learning and improvement, to help all services learn the lessons from serious case reviews. It comes from our strong belief that serious case reviews need to be much more strongly focused on learning, rather than process, and that the reports must be published so that lessons can be shared nationally and locally. In those reviews, we need to get to the heart of what went wrong and what action at what point by which individual led to a decision being made that might have contributed to a tragedy.

The approach behind those three new documents has rightly been welcomed. Professor Munro has said:

“We are finally moving away from the defensive rule-bound culture that has been so problematic. I believe an urgent culture change in our child protection system is now underway.”

Anne Marie Carrie, the chief executive of Barnardo’s, has said:

“We support changing the emphasis within the system to enable professionals to take responsibility for safeguarding the welfare of the most vulnerable children.”

Oral Answers to Questions

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

I would encourage schools that want to have smaller class sizes and more control over how they are run to adopt academy status.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

When the Secretary of State told the Select Committee on Education recently that teachers have to work only 32.5 hours per week, even if they work full time, did he really believe it or was he just trying to cause offence?

[Mr Gibb]

I am aware that many teachers do enormous amounts of unpaid overtime. That is a tribute to the professionalism of the teachers in our schools today. It is important that that overtime is not spent filling in voluminous forms or reading huge lever arch files of guidance.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I would advise parents in my hon. Friend’s constituency to listen to their very shrewd and effective elected Member, who has consistently pointed out that academy status means not only more resources for students but greater flexibility for teachers and heads and higher standards all round. It is an increasingly welcome aspect of the political consensus that is emerging around academies that so many Labour Members are flocking to their banner.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Can the Secretary of State give the House an absolute assurance that neither he nor his special advisers have deliberately destroyed or deleted e-mails relating to Government business that he has sent or received through private e-mail accounts?

[Michael Gove]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that question. As he will be aware, we changed the information and communications technology curriculum just last week, and many of us were brought up when the old ICT curriculum was in place and may not always have been as handy with the cursor as we should have been. However, every single aspect of communications policy in the Department for Education has been in accordance with the highest standards of propriety, as laid down by the Cabinet Office.

History Teaching

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Chris Skidmore]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I will come on to that topic later. First, as a good historian, I want to set out a narrative of what has gone on in the country so far and then to debate what we should do about it. I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman that local history should feature more prominently in the curriculum, but more on that anon.

In 77 local authorities, fewer than one in five pupils are passing history GCSE. In one local authority, Knowsley, the figure has gone down to 8%, with just four pupils out of 2,000 passing history A-level.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Let me understand what the hon. Gentleman is proposing. Does he think that the teaching of history post-14 should be compulsory in academies?

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Skidmore]

I want history to be compulsory in some form to 16. I will come on to the important issue of the qualification later. Just as maths, English and science are compulsory in all schools, so too should history. Education is about not simply providing skills, knowledge and requirements for jobs, professions and universities—or whatever route or career a pupil may decide to take—but creating a canon of knowledge. I want every pupil to leave school not only with the basics but with an understanding of the basic principles of our constitution and history. They should have a rounded education and history plays a vital role in that.

[Kevin Brennan]

By what mechanism would the hon. Gentleman like to make history compulsory in academies, given that academies are exempt from the national curriculum?

[Chris Skidmore]

I am startled by the hon. Gentleman’s response. He was a Minister once.

[Kevin Brennan]

And a teacher.

[Chris Skidmore]

The hon. Gentleman knows very well that although academies are exempt from other subjects in the national curriculum, pupils still have to study maths, English and science. Those subjects are compulsory, and academies are bound by law in academy frameworks and agreements to provide them. Under my proposals, history would be included in the same way.

[Kevin Brennan]

In the agreement?

[Chris Skidmore]

Yes. Let me take a few more interventions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I add my congratulations to those given to my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) for securing the debate. It is certainly a very interesting subject, and it has given rise to different opinions around the Chamber.

We have heard about people’s experiences with their history teachers, and how teaching particular subjects can create the opposite effect to that intended. Perhaps I should prefix my speech by saying that I was taught not only history but politics by my local Labour party leader. Consequently, I am a Conservative Member of Parliament who knows very little about history. It is perhaps surprising that although we are in the most historic place in the United Kingdom, we are having to remind ourselves about the importance and relevance of history in education. It is something of a cliché, but I strongly feel that it is only by learning from the past that we can understand the present and plan for the future.

Much has been said about the approaches of different countries. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood talked about the teaching of history in Albania and other countries. It is right for history to be taught in different ways in different countries, because that enables each country to see history from its own perspective. It is therefore right that we should learn history from a British perspective. Unfortunately, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) is no longer in this Chamber, but I take issue with his concerns about the patriotism that Conservative MPs often display when talking about history. It is not just Conservative MPs who take a sense of pride in their British heritage; it cuts right across the political spectrum. Britain has the richest history in the world. If any country needs to prioritise history teaching, it is ours, because an understanding of history helps us to formulate national identity, pride and confidence in who we are.

[Kevin Brennan]

I am as patriotic as the next man, but does the hon. Gentleman not see that the statement that Britain has the richest history in the world is ludicrous and would not be made by anyone who knew anything about history?

[Gareth Johnson]

No, I do not agree it is ludicrous at all. More than any other country, Britain has had influence across the entire globe; the fact that English is spoken in more countries than any other language demonstrates the influence that this country has had throughout history. Some of that history is good, and we are very proud of it, and some of it we perhaps do not talk about as much as we should. However, nevertheless, we should be proud of our heritage because it is very distinct. It is certainly the richest of any country I have ever studied and it has influenced more countries than that of any other nation.

Yet it is right to say that the teaching of history in this country is patchy. In some areas, more than three quarters of students do not learn history after they are 14 years of age. We heard about the difference between classes that some people claim exists in relation to the teaching of history. Certainly there are differences between, for example, grammar schools and some comprehensive schools; the teaching levels are not comparable. The teaching of history varies around the countries, too. Although more people are passing GCSE history, fewer students are taking up the subject, which is a great shame.

The treatment of the subject is less patchy around Europe; it is compulsory in most European countries. As I said, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood mentioned Albania. That keeps cropping up, because it appears to be the only country in Europe that takes a similar approach to England with regard to history teaching. I do not know whether it is a fair comparison, but it certainly seems that there is less mandatory teaching of history in England than anywhere else in Europe. The rest of the UK fares little better.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

What an interesting seminar we have had this morning on teaching history in schools. There has been a very high standard, as one might expect with so many eminent historians and hon. Members present here to debate the subject. As was revealed earlier, it is true that I taught history, alongside economics, in a comprehensive school for 10 years. In fact, I tweeted that I was going to participate in this debate and one of my former pupils, Cerys Furlong, who is now a Labour councillor in Cardiff—she was indoctrinated well when I was teaching history—tweeted back that she remembered the days when I was an actual history teacher.

I took O-level—as it was in those days—history back in 1976, and I took A-level history in 1978. I always remember one teacher saying to me that I would prefer A-level to O-level because it is about not only regurgitating facts, but understanding, interpretation and so on. I still have, in a cupboard at home, several green exercise books containing the notes from my history A-level lessons, which consisted mainly of our teacher—I will not name him unfairly—standing up for the first half of the lesson and giving an A.J.P. Taylor-type lecture. The second half of the lesson consisted of our writing down the notes that he dictated into those green exercise books. I sometimes wonder whether that is what the Minister with responsibility for schools has in mind when he talks about the sorts of changes he would like to see in our schools and whether, in his mind’s eye, he sees rows of pupils sitting down at their individual desks in their short trousers writing down whatever it is that the teacher has asked them to copy down off the board—perhaps in the manner which the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) deprecated in his speech of copying down facts about the kings and queens of England from the board. I accept that that is a parody, but the reason why I love history, and I think the reason why a lot of people love history, is not because of rote learning, but because of the interest in finding out that people in the past were just like us.

The idea that a diet of key facts and an officially sanctioned version of state history will inspire people or serve their interests is fanciful. We need to ensure that we do not go back to the approach taken when I was learning history at A-level in the 1970s. It was not the regurgitation of facts that caught my imagination about history, but the fascination of how people in the past, who were exactly the same as us biologically, acted in the face of the beliefs, culture, values and political power structures of the time, and what that told us about ourselves now. For me, that was the reason to study history.

As has been said, by the time I came to do a PGCE in history in 1984, the subject had changed a lot, which has been reflected in today’s debate. The Oxford history project and various other initiatives that were taken at the time involved talking about the skills needed to be a historian, assessing the reliability of evidence and, even for young pupils, thinking about what being a historian involves—being a kind of detective of the past. All those initiatives had come into the teaching of history, which was for the good. I looked recently at a careers guidance page for the university of Kent. One interview question for potential history teachers asked how they felt about a skills-based approach versus a factual approach to teaching history. That question, which seems to dominate a lot of the debate about the teaching of history in our schools at the moment, is fairly ludicrous, because teaching history cannot be skills versus facts. It has to be about having the skills to be able to learn, understand and interpret the facts. There is a legitimate concern about a loss of the sense of the narrative of history, which has been picked up in several of the contributions today. However, it would be a big mistake to turn history teaching into the dissemination of a patriotic narrative. It is interesting that there was not unanimity between colleagues from all parties on that.

We should not look at history as a way to mould our citizens into compliant people. We need to go beyond a simple glorification of the past, which I felt the hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) might have suggested. We need students to be able critically to engage with the past and understand how it affects them now, as individuals, and their community and country. In respect of studying history, the emphasis should not be placed on a particular narrative based merely on a political agenda. We should study history to have a sense of identity beyond race and religion and understand something of a common culture, so that we learn about the past and ourselves as individuals and members of British society.

[Sir Bob Russell]

I was hoping that the hon. Gentleman would touch on local history, because clearly national exams will only deal with national history. Where does he think that local history fits into the teaching of history in schools, bearing in mind that we are a diverse country and within a county there will be different local history characteristics?

[Kevin Brennan]

I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman said, and with what my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), who is no longer here, said: local history is a way of engaging the interest of pupils and students and enables them to spread out beyond that into a much wider historical context. Like the hon. Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell), I come from a town—in south Wales—where there are powerful remnants of the Roman empire, including an amphitheatre and a barracks of the second Augustan legion based at the Roman town of Isca, which is now Caerleon. Some 5,000 Roman troops were stationed there in a town that probably does not have a population as large today. It was fascinating for me, as a young person, to think about what it must have been like 2,000 years earlier in the area in which I grew up.

Although the title of the debate is not, “Should we make history compulsory to 16”, I think that is what the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) wanted to focus on in his speech. I congratulate him on securing the debate and on raising that important subject.

One problem with, and paradox of, the Government’s approach to this matter is revealed, in a sense, by what the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Dartford said. The Government say that they are seeking to decentralise education and to have schools that are effectively autonomous and exempted, with choice about what they teach, and if the Government get their way, by the end of this Parliament most schools will be exempt from a national curriculum. Yet they are undertaking a review of the national curriculum and will, presumably, at some point, advance detailed proposals about the national curriculum. Some interim information on that has been provided by the Government. However, by the end of this Parliament, if the Government proceed in the way that they are going at the moment, most schools will not be compelled to teach the national curriculum. If the hon. Gentleman is advocating, on top of that, that more subjects should be made compulsory up to 16—in this case, history—I do not understand the transmission mechanism by which his ambition might be achieved. Exultation is fine, as are nudge-theory approaches, such as the English baccalaureate, but ultimately the hon. Gentleman will not achieve his aim of making history compulsory if it is not possible to implement a transmission mechanism to compel schools to teach that subject.

[Chris Skidmore]

On transmission—I agree in part with the hon. Gentleman on the curriculum—the point of the curriculum is secondary to assessment, which is increasingly becoming the driver of standards in schools. Parents and their children will look at schools offering high-quality examinations and at the standard that is achieved in those examinations. This relates to my point about creating a narrative of British history GCSE, because I believe that that would be the lever by which parents would be able to look at all schools offering history GCSE—just as they can in respect of GCSE maths, English and science, which all schools have to offer. If history joined that cadre and we were able to ensure that all pupils studied the equivalent of a western canon, instead of a GSCE that focuses only on the Third Reich or Stalin’s Russia, we would have one that allowed pupils to study the narrative of British history.

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Gentleman is right. Many parents will do what he described, but not all of them will. That is why education itself is compulsory: it will not happen just through exhortation or because the Government say that they would like it to happen, or even by the Government employing little nudge mechanisms, such as the English baccalaureate.

I am reserving judgment on whether history should be taught compulsorily up to 16, because I, too, have a fairly open mind about that. History has never been compulsory. When I was 14 years of age, we had to do either history or geography, and we could not opt for both because of the tightness of the options in the school that I attended.

[Sir Bob Russell]

indicated assent.

[Kevin Brennan]

That was common, as I can see from the reaction of the hon. Member for Colchester.

[Gareth Johnson]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Kevin Brennan]

I took a long intervention and do not want to eat into the Minister’s time. I apologise to the hon. Gentleman for not being able to give way one more time.

The Third Reich came up quite a bit during our debate. I confess that teaching that subject started during the time when I was teaching history. I taught up to about the end of 1994 and even back then the Third Reich was a major component of O-level history, which then became GCSE during the time I was teaching. It seems to have generated itself into a kind of educational industry over that period. My daughter, who is doing A-level history, is studying the Third Reich, having studied it at GCSE as well. I share the frustration of other hon. Members about that. Really, schools should not be doing that. I understand why they do it—teachers gain expertise and resources, and so on, and want to give their pupils the best opportunity to pass exams, which is only natural—but it should not be studied over and over, as hon. Members have described.

I shall conclude, because I want to give the Minister an opportunity to respond. We have had an interesting debate with some excellent contributions. First, I am interested to hear the Minister set out his plans and say whether he has any intention of making teaching history compulsory up to 16. If that is not his intention, perhaps he will make it clear. Secondly, what is the transmission mechanism by which he is going to get the national curriculum taught if most schools are exempt from it?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gibb]

Those are precisely the issues for consideration by the national curriculum review.

I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood would like history to be compulsory to 16, which is one of the things that the national curriculum review will consider. As I said at the outset, it is clear that some subjects, such as history, which all pupils should have a good grasp of, have been less popular choices at GCSE. The Government therefore want to encourage more children to take up history beyond the age of 14, particularly among disadvantaged pupils and certain ethnic groups. That is why we introduced the English baccalaureate, which will recognise the work of pupils who achieve an A* to C in maths, English, two sciences, a language and either history or geography, to encourage more widespread take-up of those core subjects, which provide a sound basis for academic progress.

The English baccalaureate has already had a significant impact on the take-up of history: according to a NatCen survey of nearly 700 schools, 39% of pupils sitting GCSEs in 2013 in the schools responding will be taking history GCSE, up eight percentage points and back to the 1995 level of history uptake. There are clear benefits to pupils in taking the subjects combined in the E-bac. Pupils who have achieved that combination of subjects have proved more likely to progress to A-level than those with similar attainment in different subjects in the past. They have also attempted a greater number of A-levels and achieved better results. We are also committed to restoring confidence in GCSEs as rigorous and valued qualifications. We will reform GCSEs to ensure that they are more keenly focused on essential knowledge in those key subjects, and with exams at the end of the course to support good teaching and in-depth study.

To refer to the questions of the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), what we want to achieve from the national curriculum review is a curriculum that is so good that the academies will want to adopt it, albeit not being compulsory. The national curriculum also does feed in to statutory testing, in maths and English at the end of key stage 2 and the GCSE specifications.

[Kevin Brennan]

Is the Minister considering writing into funding agreements the requirement that academy schools should teach the national curriculum?

[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.

Financial Education

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Justin Tomlinson]

Absolutely. It was important to include that as part of the evidence, but as we are about to set out in our recommendations, it was not the conclusion that we came to.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman on his work and on the report that he has produced. Does he not accept that if his Front-Bench colleagues had not taken that position, compulsory financial education would have been delivered through PSHE in secondary schools since last September?

[Justin Tomlinson]

I thank the shadow Minister for his intervention. We are trying to reach consensus on the very best way to deliver that education. We considered that approach as part of our report and concluded that it was not the right way to go. I am about to set out what we feel should be done. I am aware that a number of other Members will also go into detail to explain why we came to that conclusion.

I am going to whizz over the key recommendations. My hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole will explain the mechanics behind them because he chaired the inquiry. We believe that the Government should promote the provision of high-quality financial education in schools in England. They should do that by acting on, or supporting, the following recommendations. I hope that the Minister’s pen is poised.

With regard to national provision, personal financial education should be a compulsory part of every school’s curriculum. Resources produced by outside organisations and visits of providers to schools should be available and accessible if considered helpful by teachers and quality-marked by a trusted body. There are many and varied examples of volunteers and financial institutions that already go into schools to do a good job. There is also evidence that some people felt that that was sometimes a marketing exercise.

It was also clear that provision was very patchy. We saw lots of evidence that if a school governor happened to have a connection to a particular financial institution, their school was more likely to have that opportunity than others. That said, those institutions can play an important role as long as the teachers lead. For example, a PE teacher providing a wide variety of sports may be particularly competent in football and rugby, but if his students want to take part in, say, trampolining, he may invite the local trampolining club to come in and give a lesson. That should be under the control of the teacher and be quality-marked so that we can be sure that it is not a marketing exercise.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justin Tomlinson]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention and echo those comments. We have seen that response as we have made our visits.

Personal, social and health education should be clearly defined as four separate strands, one of which should be personal finance. By reworking the PSHE syllabus, more focused training and assessment can be developed, and individuals would have an opportunity to learn about the implications of their decisions.

Earlier, I pointed out that we are all individuals, with our own individual challenges, priorities and things that we consider important, so there is not necessarily a right answer in this area of education. I shall use yet another example from Martin Lewis to illustrate that point. An individual has been unable for 12 months to find a job; they have been offered a job in a neighbouring town but with only a three-month guaranteed contract; and the only way in which they can get to the town is if they take out an expensive car loan. Does that individual take out the loan? There is not necessarily a right or wrong answer. Are they confident that they will be so good in their job that they will last beyond three months? That is probably the determining factor, but such examples offer young people the opportunity to talk through the day-to-day, real-life challenges that they may face when they enter the big, bad world.

[Kevin Brennan]

The first key recommendation of the hon. Gentleman’s committee is that personal finance education should be part of every school’s curriculum. Is he including academies and free schools?

[Justin Tomlinson]

That is exactly the sort of question that, in setting out the mechanics of the recommendations, my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole will cover—if the shadow Minister could just be ever so slightly patient.

We also call for a school co-ordinator or champion to be appointed to each school, preferably from the senior leadership team. They should be given responsibility for ensuring that outcomes are achieved in maths and PSHE; for ensuring that there is a clear link between the elements of personal finance taught in mathematics and PSHE; and for sourcing resources. We make it clear that such education should be cross-curriculum, so there should be a point of contact who can champion it.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

May I start by apologising for having been a couple of minutes late to the debate?

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Darlington (Mrs Chapman). She is right that an investment in knowledge pays the best interest—certainly better than the interest that some of my retired constituents are receiving on their bank balances at the moment. She made an important point, and I hope that the national curriculum review will ensure that our new national curriculum increases the amount of knowledge that children receive.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) not only on his balanced and passionate speech but on his leadership, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), of the all-party group on financial education for young people. I thank the all-party group for its report on financial education in the curriculum. Both have been powerful advocates of the cause, and together with Martin Lewis have managed a powerful and effective campaign. I look forward to hearing from my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole later if he catches your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Martin Lewis is an energetic and highly effective campaigner for financial education in schools, the result of which has been an e-petition with more than 100,000 signatures. From meeting Martin Lewis recently, it is clear to me how passionately he believes in the importance of financial education for young people to help them deal with the complexities and dangers of money and debt management. I know that the all-party group has also been well supported by the Personal Finance Education Group, which has worked for a number of years to promote and develop finance education in schools.

The Government are currently conducting two reviews—that of the national curriculum, which of course includes the core subject of mathematics, which is a cause about which my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) is passionate, and that of personal, social, health and economic education, which includes financial capability. The all-party group’s report provides important insights and recommendations to both reviews, and the Government are grateful to it for its thorough and high-quality report. We will examine it very carefully indeed.

I know that we all agree about the importance of good-quality personal finance education and the critical role played by a sound grasp of basic mathematical skills. Support from the finance industry and a range of good resources play their part in supporting schools to teach pupils how to manage their money well.

It is true that young people are growing up in a materialistic world for which they are often not fully prepared. As my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) said, the “Got to have it now” culture means that young people have high aspirations for branded or designer goods, often without the means to pay for them. They have unrealistic expectations about the lifestyle that they can afford, which are fuelled by the glittering trappings of celebrity.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon made the important point that our generation—I like to associate myself with his generation—was cushioned from its financial mistakes by rising house prices, which provided equity to pay off consumer debts. That is not available to the current generation.

We all have a job to do in moving young people’s aspirations away from that empty and often destructive perception of what success means. Our determination to raise academic standards in all schools and for all young people, regardless of their background, is about high achievement and stretching aspirations. Developing children’s intellectual capabilities and interests is a direct antidote to materialism. Alongside that, young people must acquire a sense of responsibility. They need to contribute to society as responsible citizens and not take wild risks. They need to learn to live within their means.

[Kevin Brennan]

I understand why the Minister will not today give us the conclusions of the curriculum review that is under way, but does the first key recommendation of the report—that personal financial education should be a compulsory part of every school’s curriculum, which I take to mean all taxpayer-funded schools, including free schools and academies—fall within the terms or the remit of the curriculum review and the review of PSHE?

[Mr Gibb]

We made it very clear when we announced the review of PSHE education in schools that it is not possible for PSHE to become a statutory element of the national curriculum. However, it is in the remit of the review to recommend that elements of PSHE should be compulsory if it believes that strongly.

[Kevin Brennan]

Just to be clear, does that include making those elements compulsory in free schools and academies?

[Mr Gibb]

The national curriculum applies only to maintained schools. The rules that apply to academies go through their funding agreements. The review will consider that issue. The extent to which those elements will apply to academies depends on the funding agreements, which maintains the approach to academies taken by the previous Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. Those are the kind of issues that the PSHE review will consider. We want to ensure that the quality of PSHE teaching in our schools improves. That is the key driver of the review.

The hon. Member for Darlington quoted Benjamin Franklin, but I shall quote Mr Micawber from Dickens’s “David Copperfield”:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

Those aphorisms are as true today as they were in the nineteenth century. Borrowing more than one can afford to repay is one of the most serious social problems facing the UK today. British consumers are considerably more indebted than those in continental Europe. Between 1999 and 2007, household debt increased by 125% while household income increased by only 40%. The Office for National Statistics estimates that around 10% of all households have problem arrears and are unable to make minimum payments in one or more of their financial commitments. The Government are serious about taking action to help people to manage their debts.

We want to ensure that individuals facing financial difficulty can get advice early rather than waiting until their problems become more difficult to resolve. The new Money Advice Service has a statutory function to enhance people’s understanding and knowledge of financial matters and their ability to manage their own financial affairs. It provides free and impartial information and advice. Those consumers who find themselves in high levels of debt will continue to need specialist debt advice, and the Money Advice Service, with its consumer financial education remit and national reach, is well placed to take a role in the co-ordination of debt advice services as part of its existing services.

I have another quote; this time it is from Shakespeare. As Polonius advised his son—

[Kevin Brennan]

Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Gentleman has said it for me.

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

Can he carry on?

“For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

It is good advice from Polonius, but we must remember that he is widely regarded as an old hypocrite. Perhaps he is not the best person to quote. He was a silly old fool.

[Mr Gibb]

It was good advice to his son.

[Kevin Brennan]

Perhaps Iago might be more appropriate.

“Who steals my purse steals trash; ‘tis something, nothing;

‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him,

And makes me poor indeed.”

[Mr Gibb]

Very good indeed. The green-eyed monster is there as well. The hon. Gentleman also makes the case for rote learning of English literature. That is missing from our schools. The more poems we can recite in our early years, the better. The hon. Gentleman must have learned that passage many years ago.

To be successful and to achieve aspirations, young people need to be able to stand on their own two feet. They must organise themselves, prioritise, manage money and work independently. That needs to start from an early age. Primary schools must lay the foundations by raising standards of arithmetic and securing a confident progression on to secondary schools. I am also mindful of the many reports of young people leaving school without the most basic knowledge of mathematics. We are committed to improving attainment levels in maths and to ensuring that all children leave primary school fluent and confident in arithmetic. We are studying evidence on the most effective ways of teaching arithmetic in primary schools and we have read the reports and listened to the speeches of my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk.

In the current secondary mathematics curriculum, pupils must achieve fluency and confidence in a range of mathematical techniques and processes that can be applied in a wide range of circumstances, including managing money. The kinds of calculations that people should be able to do are set out in the report “Financial Education and the Curriculum” by the all-party parliamentary group. There is a suggested example of a GCSE question. It asks what Sophie should do with £4,300 that was left to her by her grandfather. She has a choice of two accounts. The first pays 3.1% on a monthly basis and the second pays 3.25% annually. The formula on page 41 is “AER=100[(1 + r/100n)ⁿ - 1]”. If one can master that, one knows all one needs to know about how to calculate compound interest.

Young people need to be confident and competent consumers. They need to be able to work out when a supermarket deal is not what it seems. For example, when supermarkets offer a deal on buying two small packs of something, they need to work out whether it is really cheaper per litre or per kilogram than buying one larger pack. In fact, I have found in some supermarkets that it is more expensive to buy one larger pack than to buy two smaller ones.

The Government are currently reviewing the national curriculum, including the curriculum for maths. The all-party report on financial education and the curriculum will feed into the review, and the review will ultimately ensure that the GCSE reflects its conclusions. We will consult widely on the number of maths GCSEs in the light of the review, and will consider evidence from the pilot of the pair of maths GCSEs referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk. Application of mathematics and methods in mathematics will also inform decisions. We will look carefully at the evaluation of the pilot.

[Kevin Brennan]

What have not been mentioned so far, but have been endorsed by the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), are the qualifications in personal finance offered by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Has the Minister had a chance to examine them and form a view on how suitable they are for pupils?

[Mr Gibb]

We will examine them as part of the curriculum review, but our first priority is to establish what knowledge children need. That will then feed into the qualifications. We have also benefited from Alison Wolf’s review of qualifications in schools. A process is under way to ensure that every qualification offered by schools is of sufficient size and quality, and commands respect in the real world among employers and further and higher education institutions. Those are the factors that will determine whether a qualification continues to be recognised in performance tables.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

May I first apologise to House as I may need to leave before the debate’s conclusion, depending on how long we run on for?

I congratulate the all-party group on financial education for young people on producing its report, and I pay tribute to the hon. Members for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) and for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) and my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Mrs Chapman) for the work that they put into it. [Interruption.] Did I miss somebody out? I beg the pardon of the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier). Does anyone else want a mention while I am on my feet? I pay tribute to everyone who has been involved in the report. It is very thorough and much work went into taking the evidence. It is of the standard of a Select Committee report—perhaps even better than some Select Committee reports.

I also congratulate Members on getting Martin Lewis to help with the report, although it sounded as though that was not too difficult for the hon. Member for North Swindon, and on getting 100,000 people to petition for today’s debate. More broadly, I pay tribute to the role that Martin Lewis has played in improving public awareness of finance issues through his website and other media. When I was a Minister with responsibility for consumer issues, he was very supportive of a reform that I introduced and from which I hope some Members here might have benefited. I refer to the measure on 0% credit card offers under which repayments by consumers henceforth went on the most expensive debt first—exactly the opposite of what used to happen, when credit card companies would pay off the 0% debt first and leave people with a very high rate of interest on any remaining balances. That is the kind of understanding that consumers need to have when taking up so-called 0% credit card offers, including on arrangement fees.

Knowing how to manage money and be a savvy consumer are vital life skills in an increasingly complex world, but why do more young people not start learning this at school? That is the question at the heart of today’s report. As a former head of economics in a Cardiff comprehensive school, I am well aware that this issue has been on the agenda for many decades. I can remember some of the earlier initiatives on improving financial education in schools, including the early days of school banks, when young people were encouraged to make deposits in the school bank, often supported by the local branch of their bank or building society.

Education is about giving young people the skills and knowledge that they need to get on in life, which is why every child should learn not only the three R’s at school but about pensions, saving, borrowing and mortgages. As the report shows, despite many of these initiatives down the years, the provision of financial education across the country is still extremely patchy, as the Minister acknowledged when he referred to the Ofsted report. That is why we would have had compulsory financial education in every school last September, through personal, social and health education, under plans that the previous Government set in train in the then Department for Children, Schools and Families before the last general election, again with the help and support of Martin Lewis from MoneySavingExpert.com.

We said that financial education should be a compulsory part of the curriculum, as part of PSHE, with improved training and tools to give teachers the confidence to teach it. The law to make that happen was going through Parliament when the general election was called last year. However, as we heard earlier, those on the Conservative Front Bench, including the current Schools Minister, refused to support it—probably for other reasons, to do with their objection to the sex education provision in PHSE—and so the plans were scrapped.

There have been 18 months in which no progress has been made, which is why the report is so welcome. It gives us an opportunity to try to find a way forward, and perhaps a cross-party consensus, on a vital issue for the long-term good of our country. I am therefore pleased that the e-petition calling for financial education to become a compulsory part of the curriculum has been a success and that it has sparked today’s debate. The report is also timely, as there is a review of the curriculum under way, as the Minister said, which gives the Government a perfect opportunity to listen to the thousands of people who are backing the campaign. As I said, every child should learn how to manage their money. It will set them up for the rest of their lives, and financial education lessons might also enable them to teach their parents a thing or two.

Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue)—who is on the Front Bench, in the Whips’ corner—sent me an e-mail yesterday after we talked about this issue. Hon. Members will be aware that the Prime Minister praised her yesterday for her work with citizens advice bureaux. She said:

“One of the side effects of the project I managed delivering to schools/colleges was a rise in demand for debt advice from the parents…They talked to their children and realised there was a problem.”

She continued:

“There has to be sufficient quality free debt advice available to cope with this demand in the local area—and the signposting needs to be sensitive and appropriate too. Teachers need to think about how they would deal with the issue—perhaps a session from the local CAB?”

To which she adds:

“if it’s still around that is!"

This is therefore a timely moment for a debate on financial education, with the review of the curriculum under way. We in the Opposition will be looking carefully at what the Government come up with when they conclude their review.

However, I think there is a paradox and perhaps some confusion at the centre of the Government about the curriculum. As I understand it, the Schools Minister and the Secretary of State are driven in their review of the curriculum in part by a desire to give more freedom to teachers, head teachers and schools to teach as they think appropriate for their local communities, with more autonomy for schools and head teachers. However, at the same time, Ministers—driven perhaps by the desire to generate the right kind of headlines—continually demand a specific approach to teaching all sorts of subjects, including history, as favoured by the Schools Minister and the Secretary of State. At the same time, there is a big push, backed by money, for more and more schools to convert to academy status or become free schools, thereby no longer being required to teach the national curriculum. On the one hand, therefore, the Government’s policy seems to be to exempt most schools over time—if their current plans continue—from teaching the national curriculum, while on the other hand they are revising the national curriculum to ensure that schools teach more closely what they want them to teach. At some point, some genius in the Department for Education will have to square that circle and explain how those two things will be delivered.

It is paradoxical, and perhaps even absurd, that if the Government get their way, we will have a national curriculum that the vast majority of schools will not have to teach. It will not matter what anyone recommends in a report should be made compulsory: it will not be deliverable unless there is some stick in the system. The Government cannot decentralise and at the same time dictate from the top, because ultimately the whole project will collapse in on itself.

[Elizabeth Truss]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

I can see that the hon. Lady is itching to intervene.

[Elizabeth Truss]

Is it not about leadership, as the reality is that many academies and, indeed, private schools follow or tack along with the national curriculum? It is the role of the Education Secretary and the Department to indicate what kind of things students should know when they leave school.

[Kevin Brennan]

I am sure the hon. Lady is right; she thinks deeply about these subjects and makes intelligent contributions. The report, however, states:

“Personal finance education should be a compulsory part of every school’s curriculum.”

If that is going to be delivered, there must be some transmission mechanism. I am afraid that history teaches us, and future events will teach us, that exhortations from Secretaries of State—no matter how talented or eloquent they be—are not sufficient to make things a reality on the ground. As I say, there has to be a mechanism to make it happen.

In thinking about this issue, the Minister will need to clarify what the role of the national curriculum will be in a schools landscape where most institutions will not be required to follow it. How will that fit in with the original vision of a national curriculum to be taught by all schools across the country, as introduced by Kenneth Baker, now Lord Baker, who was the Secretary of State when I was a teacher back in the 1980s? How can the Minister ensure adequate teaching of financial education if most schools will ultimately be free to follow their own path?

[Damian Hinds]

The shadow Minister says that a transmission mechanism is required. Does he agree with me that if practical maths were made part of the GCSE syllabus for each of the main awarding bodies, such a transmission mechanism would exist?

[Kevin Brennan]

That is for 14 to 16-year-olds. If GCSE maths is taken between the ages of 14 and 16, young people would indeed receive some of this provision. The hon. Gentleman is correct about that, but the report goes much further in its recommendations for making financial education compulsory across all ages in the curriculum.

[Damian Hinds]

rose—

[Kevin Brennan]

I will give way again in a moment if the hon. Gentleman is dead keen. All right; I will carry on.

The Government are correct in their desire for people to take responsibility for their finances in order to reduce unaffordable debt, but they have to get the ball rolling, which means that they need to find some way of getting this going in our schools.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that although we might want to teach many subjects as part of the curriculum, unless we specify them there is always the risk that they will not be taught? Practical maths has been mentioned, but different parts of the subject might be taught. Some subjects— I would include emergency life support skills among them—are so important that we must specify that they have to be taught.

[Kevin Brennan]

I have sympathy with the Minister over the difficulty created by having more and more subjects shoved and squashed into the curriculum. Education Ministers of all parties will know that it is a difficult task as they come under pressure to include all sorts of subjects in the curriculum. My point is that we need to be absolutely clear what we are talking about. If the Government accept the report, they will have to go a lot further than simply including some practical questions in GCSE maths papers. What my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) said is absolutely correct.

There are examples of good practice out there. I shall not go into them in too much detail, but some schools around the country could link up with local credit unions. This has not been mentioned much in the debate, but it is a great way to encourage responsible saving in community-based organisations and to teach young people about the responsible use of money and about saving.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend touches on the matter of teaching. Does he agree that, as statistics from the Graduate Teaching Training Registry obtained by The Times Educational Supplement show, from November 2011 overall applications for training courses for secondary maths teaching fell by more than a quarter? Bearing in mind that the teaching of personal financial education is going to require an element of teaching maths, does he agree that the Government should encourage more teachers to apply to teach the subject?

[Kevin Brennan]

We have heard about those worrying statistics in the course of our deliberations, but my hon. Friend is absolutely correct to emphasise their importance and the need for urgent action by the Government.

We need to get to a point at which all children realise that by saving now they can be prepared for the future, but that is only possible if they get the right sort of financial education. In particular, we should not let children from neighbourhoods of lower socio-economic class suffer because their schools do not offer good financial education. The hon. Member for North Swindon quite correctly said that with the huge increases in tuition fees that young people going to university are facing, there is even more need to give serious thought to what will happen when our children go to university and have to deal with the debts they will incur as a result. In fact, Martin Lewis himself said that

“in the 20 years since student loans came in, we’ve educated our youth into debt when they go to university, but never about debt.”

It is extremely important that we do that.

[Tessa Munt]

Was it not also the case that Martin Lewis had a very robust session on the “Politics Show” about a month ago when he explained quite clearly that young people should not be afraid of going to university because under the current regime it is cheaper? If they understood the fact that the threshold was £21,000, not the £15,000 it was under the previous Government, the 9% calculation would allow them to be a lot wealthier under the new system than they would have been under the old.

[Kevin Brennan]

I am not sure they are going to be a lot wealthier, quite frankly, but it is absolutely right that the reality of the Government’s proposals should be explained and that there should not be scaremongering. I think we would absolutely agree about that. I agree that it is important that young people should consider applying to university because, ultimately, it is quite clear that that benefits them in the long term. We should be absolutely clear about it. Yes, the changes have reduced the payments but ultimately the fees being paid are much higher. The hon. Lady must accept that the reality is that the overall debt that they are incurring has increased greatly as a result of her party’s collaboration in the changes to student finance since the general election.

I want to make a couple more points before I conclude. The Consumer Financial Education Body previously funded the Personal Finance Education Group’s budget, but that has fallen by 80% since the spring and the staff has been cut since the CFEB became the Money Advice Service. So far, as I understand it, the MAS has declined to state how much of its £44 million budget was spent on school budgets. I think we would all welcome some clarity on that.

The survey from the all-party group found that in England the provision of personal finance education is ad hoc, with only 45% of teachers reporting that they have ever taught the subject. New research by HSBC has shown that 5.1 million savers under 25 do not know the interest rates on their savings account. If they had received good financial education while growing up, they would be more aware of interest rates. Furthermore, the survey found that a high percentage of people across all age groups had no saving goals.

We need greater financial education and this is a very good and thorough report from the all-party group, but we need the Government to show that they are genuinely committed to ensuring that every child is entitled to a good finance education. I think that is the ambition of the hon. Members who compiled the report we are considering today.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate and I am pleased to see that so many Members have attended, particularly on the Government side of the Chamber, and especially on a day on which there is a one-line Whip and, apparently, a by-election. It is good to have so many people here to debate this important issue. I am also pleased to follow both the Minister and the shadow Minister. I thank the Minister, in particular, for his warm words about our report and for the assurances he has given us about the role it will play in the curriculum review. I also thank the shadow Minister for his warm words, although I think he was trying to push at the edges of political point-scoring—

[Kevin Brennan]

It is my job.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Percy]

I am certainly not, as my hon. Friend interjects, the bard from Brigg. It is not going to happen, alas.

To return to the report, I thank the Minister for meeting me and my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) shortly before its publication. The Minister will recall that I said that if the Government did not take it seriously, I might well end up dousing myself in petrol and setting myself on fire, but I will not have to make that protest any more, not least because I cannot afford the petrol at the current prices and because we have had a positive response.

I thank all my friends on both sides of the House who sat on our inquiry. They included my hon. Friends the Members for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) and for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw) and the hon. Member for Darlington (Mrs Chapman), as well as myself and my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon. It was a thoroughly valuable experience and I think we all enjoyed taking part in a cross-party inquiry on such an important issue. Because we conducted it in the way we did, on Select Committee terms and by hearing evidence, I think we all felt that the hours we spent doing that were probably some of our most valuable since getting elected. One can wonder whether a lot that goes on in here is having any impact or making any difference, particularly in some people’s cases, but on this issue we all felt that the experience was valuable and that we were engaged in something important.

Some hon. Members will have read our report, which is very comprehensive. I am not allowed to use props so I shall not hold it up. As can be seen from the executive summary, we have recommended that this subject should form part of the national curriculum. We want it to be compulsory across schools, and I shall say something about the mechanics of that in a moment. It is important to get some statistics into the debate about why this is so important. As people who have read our executive summary will have seen, it states that, according to a learndirect study:

“Two-thirds of people in the UK feel too confused to make the right choices about their money and more than a third say they don’t have the right skills to properly manage their cash.”

Sadly, we have seen higher and higher levels of insolvency in recent years, and we know that personal debt levels have exploded in the past 10 or 15 years.

I am not part of the generation about whom my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon spoke. I am part of the generation after, having got on the housing market only last year but with considerable debts, which I have spoken about before. I am not one of those who will see the big increases in house prices that will take care of all those nasty credit card debts.

Let me explain why I got involved in all this. It has been a good partnership with my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon because he is extremely financially competent, as anyone who knows him will know. Having shared a flat with him, along with another of our hon. Friends, I can certainly attest to his competency in all things financial—and perhaps to his being frugal as well. I am the antithesis of that, having made some incredibly bad financial decisions when I left school and went to university, including getting on the conveyor belt of credit card debt while at university and getting student loans even though that was the year before tuition fees came in. So I left university with an awful lot of debt and then did two years of postgraduate study, which I funded myself, which meant getting into even more debt. I am still paying off those debts today, and I do not mind the education side of them—it is all those other lifestyle debts that one builds up on credit cards that I am still lumbered with to this day.

It has been good to have a partnership of two people with different experiences of managing their debt looking at this issue. I was proud to be in the top set of my comprehensive school in Hull. I was quite bright and managed to get a GCSE in maths at grade C although I have always struggled with maths. I got good A-levels, a degree and postgraduate qualifications but I am still completely and utterly incapable of working out interest payments, APR and all the rest of it. I could not tell you what I pay in mortgage interest, Mr Deputy Speaker—I just pay up every month. I suppose I am an example of the people we have talked about and at whom the report is aimed. This is not moralising about debt. We have been very clear: this is not about saying that people should not get into debt or about educating people never to get into debt; it is about providing people with appropriate skills.

[Kevin Brennan]

Is the hon. Gentleman at all worried that he has put his name to a report that includes a recommendation that would bar him from teaching in a primary school?

[Andrew Percy]

I understand that that would not be applied retrospectively—and a very sound recommendation it is on those terms. I shall come on to that in a moment, because I taught in a primary school the year before I was elected, and I had to teach maths. That experience has led me to the conclusion that we should absolutely ensure that primary school teachers have better maths qualifications. Although I did not do them a disservice, the children I taught would have benefited from being taught by somebody who had not struggled with maths as I did. I managed to scrape a GCSE C grade. That is why we have supported the minimum grade of B for primary school teachers.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon outlined most of our recommendations and stole quite a lot of my speech in the process. He also talked about the inquiry process and stole my three bullet points on that too. I have been left with something to say, however. It is important to remind ourselves why this subject is so important. A lot of the research that we looked at in preparing the report was quite frightening. The situation out there is even worse than I expected. Research by EdComs in June 2009 found that by the time children reach the age of 17, more than half of them are or have already been in debt. A YouGov survey in 2008 found that 70% of 18 to 24-year-olds were already in debt. As we have heard, with tuition fees and the way life is today, that figure will not go down any time soon.

A survey by M&S Money found that some 14 to 18-year-olds are given no help with basic money matters by their parents. Indeed, 19% of parents have never discussed with teenagers how to spend money, and 32% have yet to discuss how to budget or even describe what a budget is. Most telling of all is the report compiled in March this year by Credit Action which found that a lack of financial education has cost Brits nearly £250 million in bank charges and penalties alone. I know that we are all grateful to Martin Lewis for helping us to get our money back in those matters.

The lack of financial education is a growing problem. We seem to be sending young people out into the world, which is increasingly financially complex, without providing them with the skills they need. I support the Government’s drive to reduce burdens on schools, to slim down the curriculum and to mandate less to schools, but in that process we must never allow ourselves to scale down to the extent that we remove the basic capabilities that we expect our young people to have when they leave school. Our view is that the financial education component should be a key measure.

I listened to the shadow Minister’s comments about PSHE. We gave some consideration to that. One of the big fights in our inquiry, not only between panel members but between those who gave evidence to us, was about whether financial education should just sit in PSHE. As a former practitioner who was expected to deliver PSHE, I felt strongly that it was not suitable, not least because it is not examined. As the hon. Gentleman, as a former teacher, will know, and indeed as head teachers told us during the inquiry, if a subject is not examined, schools do not necessarily accord it the importance they should.

For three years, I taught in a very difficult school in Hull, in one of the most deprived catchments in the country. I had to deliver PSHE, but we had so many other pressures on us to raise standards, such as working with grade C-D borderline kids so that in the next year’s league tables we would do a little better and would not be picked out by the local media as the worst-performing school. In better-performing—dare I say it?—more middle-class schools, teachers may be able to indulge themselves a little more in developing the PSHE curriculum because they do not have quite the same pressures on them. However, I am afraid that in a lot of schools, despite the professionalism of teachers, the subject often takes a back seat. When the Arun Youth Council and My Money Young Advisers came to give evidence, I asked one young person, “What do you think of PSHE?” His response was, “Well, it’s a bit of a doss.” Sadly, that is the situation in a lot of schools. Some fantastic work is being done across the country in PSHE, and we were provided with evidence of that and told about it by other young people. Although PSHE is important and must be part of the solution, we concluded that financial education had to be examined so that schools place the necessary emphasis on it.

We made it clear that there should be a financial education element within maths that can be clearly defined and packaged to young people. It is not simply a case of putting in a few questions that look like they are about financial education, as the shadow Minister said. It is about packaging a lot of the education and skills that are already there and saying clearly to young people, “This is financial education, and this is why we are doing it.” We can also help to improve the importance placed on PSHE, which is already taught in schools, because it will be used to support the drive for standards in mathematics. I think that that provides a real opportunity to raise the profile and importance of PSHE across the country.

I will give a couple of examples from our report to demonstrate this. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon said, we did not want to come up with a wishy-washy report that said it would be easy to have financial education, knock on the Minister’s door and have him say, “Thank you very much. It looks lovely, but I am afraid that it’s not going to happen.” Therefore, we have tried to work in the direction of Government policy and to provide practical solutions.

Members who have looked at the report will have seen that on page 38 we demonstrate clearly where in the maths curriculum the financial education elements can fit nicely—we are grateful for the help we had from mathematicians. Those have been split into three headings: money and transactions; risk and reward; and financial landscape. The money and transactions elements includes being able to do compound interest calculations with a calculator or spreadsheet, to set up a spreadsheet to do calculations involving percentages and to use foreign exchange rate information to make calculations. For financial landscape, the competencies include the ability to do reverse percentage calculations and to work out an inflation rate for a given time period, which is very important and something we hear a lot about. That involves real maths skills, not wishy-washy stuff at all.

That can be supported over in the PSHE curriculum by talking to young people about the products that they might have to make choices about. For example, we can talk to them about managing money, budgeting, the subjective issues of risk and reward and what is right for them in particular situations. That is not something we felt could fit easily into one or other area, which is why the solution we have come up with is deliverable within the current curriculum without putting extra pressures on schools.

One of the recommendations that has been referred to is that of having a co-ordinator on this in schools, and that should be someone from the senior leadership team within the school. That is important, because one of the big drivers when I first started teaching in the early 2000s was the drive towards more cross-curricular working, and it happened for a bit and then we lost focus on it. Having someone at a sufficiently senior level within the school to drive that cross-curricular agenda and link the two subjects is important, and the educational professionals who came to speak to us were very supportive of that approach.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames), who is doing a lot of work on the further education part of the all-party group’s inquiry. I have had the pleasure of being in a couple of his inquiry sessions. I extend my appreciation also to my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), who has done a fantastic job of chairing the evidence sessions that have resulted in the group’s report, and to my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), who has done a really outstanding job in putting the group together. As we have heard, it has had record membership right from the start. It would be wrong of me to start my speech without also expressing my appreciation of Martin Lewis, whom I met when he first came before the Treasury Committee. He was not only an extraordinarily fine witness but quite an inspirational one.

I come to the subject from the point of view of being a member of the Treasury Committee. The House has heard a lot from teachers and from Members with constituency experience, but I consider the matter with regard to how we run the economy of our country and deal with the crisis that faces us.

When we as a society send children to school, we do our very best to equip them to face life and give them the best opportunity possible to have a successful life and career. We teach them basic subjects such as maths, reading and writing, computer skills, sex and relationships education and how to be good citizens. That is all extremely good and important, but we signally fail to equip people to be financially literate. The evidence of that is all around us. We are one of the most personally indebted nations on the planet, with a staggering £1.5 trillion of personal debt. That is about £25,000 for every man, woman and child. To put that into the context of more meaningful numbers, this country has about 10% or 11% of the population of the EU, yet we have 50% of the personal debt. That is quite a frightening statistic.

As constituency MPs, we see on an all too frequent basis people coming to us with financial problems and, as we have heard, Citizens Advice is seeing a ballooning of debt problems. We are in the midst of a financial crisis, and the banks are accused on a daily basis of causing it. They are quite rightly accused of making irresponsible loans to customers in the housing market, yet we all too frequently gloss over the elephant in the room. For a bank to make an irresponsible loan, it needs an irresponsible consumer to take on that debt. Our response to that situation is to increase the regulation of the financial system, and in so doing increase the cost of financial services to consumers.

It is absolutely right that we examine the regulatory system carefully and do our very best to ensure that we neither have a repeat of the financial crisis nor walk into the next, as yet unidentified, financial crisis. However, part of the solution to the current problems has to be greater financial literacy. We would not have irresponsible borrowers taking out irresponsible loans if they knew what they were doing.

Another topic that we have heard about this afternoon is payday loans. We know that as many as 3 million people will take advantage of that service in the next year, and in some cases they will pay annual percentage rates in the thousands. Yet someone could easily pay a higher rate of interest on a small, unauthorised overdraft, by the time the cost of the levy from the bank, the interest and the penalty charge has been taken into account. However, our response is to consider harder regulation of payday loans. Surely the answer is greater financial literacy, so that an individual is less likely to need any sort of loan.

[Kevin Brennan]

Would not another possible answer be regulating unauthorised bank overdrafts with more rigour?

[Mark Garnier]

I want to get away from the need to regulate everything. We need to ensure that people are in a stronger position to manage their own money and accounts properly, so that they do not get into that problem in the first place. If they did get in trouble, they would be in a far better position to evaluate the best solution.

[Kevin Brennan]

I accept the hon. Gentleman’s point of view on deregulation, but does he not see the paradox in supporting the all-party group’s report, whose first key recommendation is that personal financial education should be a compulsory part of every school’s curriculum, while also supporting the deregulation of the schools system, which would ensure that schools did not have to teach anything of that kind compulsorily?

[Mark Garnier]

That is a neatly and well made point, but the hon. Gentleman will remember my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) making the point that, by having financial education in the curriculum, we would not just provide for directly funded schools but provide a lead for other schools to follow. That is an incredibly important point.

The Money Advice Service is part of the solution. It announced earlier this week the start of a new strategic oversight function for financial education. I shall quote from its press release, because it is always very good to hear such excellent civil service-speak. It says that the review is

“to inform and improve the provision of financial education for young people in the UK. Firstly, mapping the range of education initiatives funded by the financial services industry, to create a single view of the landscape; secondly, commissioning new research into education and behaviour change - to both identify global best-practice in the field of financial education; and examine whether successful types of intervention in other fields, for example health or drug education, can be applied to the area of money.”

That sounds fantastic, but there is a simple solution, which we keep repeating: we should put financial education on the curriculum in schools. We should get the Money Advice Service to concentrate on those adults who have not had the chance to get a financial education so far, and who are in desperate need of it to help them to deal with the problems that they face as a result of being financially illiterate.

As part of the all-party group inquiry team, I heard a great deal of interesting comment. I think I went to almost every single meeting, although I might have missed a couple. As we have heard, help is out there. Financial institutions go into schools to assist with financial education, but many teachers feel intimidated by the subject, presumably because they in turn did not receive a financial education. We have also heard that provision is sporadic: sometimes financial education is very good, but sometimes there is none at all. One member of the Arun youth council said that his school spent more time teaching him how to put on condoms than they spent teaching him about money. It was a thin day for bananas that day at his school.

The question is: how do we get financial education into the curriculum and where do we put it? Of course, there is a maths element—frankly, financial education is the type of thing that could enhance maths teaching. Teaching a child about compound rates of interest is not an exciting subject, but teaching a child that buying a pair of football boots for £125 on a credit card with an APR of 26% and paying that over six months will cost him a lot more than if he paid cash gives that child both a good example of how maths works and a lesson in financial facts.

If I were Martin Lewis, I would be able to work out in my head what that compound rate of interest would mean, but I was an investment banker and I am afraid I am completely unqualified to do so, as I would be if I were a footballer. However, to limit financial education to maths would be a huge mistake. Although maths can handle the quantitative side of things, it can do nothing about the qualitative side. We need people to make solid, judgment-based decisions. Maths will give people the skill to answer the question of whether they can afford something, but the question of whether they should buy something is just as relevant.

If I live in the centre of a city, the question of whether I should buy a car is a relatively simple one—there is plenty of public transport so I might not use it, parking might be a problem and so on. However, for an unemployed person living in the country with just a few hundred pounds to their name, the question of whether they should spend their last savings on a car so that they can find a job and make themselves more employable or keep the money to live on is much more difficult to answer. Many people are simply not equipped to make such a subjective evaluation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I apologise to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to the Minister if it turns out to be necessary for me to leave the Chamber before the end of the debate.

It is almost a year to the day since I spoke in this Chamber about the need for better financial education in schools. I talked about the patchy or non-existent current provision in so many schools and about the sad results of the lack of financial capability, which I witnessed over many years in my community law firm. It was apparent not only in the levels of debt but in the breakdown of relationships and health. There is a huge cost to society of providing debt advice—essential though it is. Currently, citizens advice bureaux receive around £27 million, much of which is for debt advice.

The main thrust of my argument then was that better financial education is necessary because prevention is better than cure. Shortly after I spoke, the all-party parliamentary group on financial education for young people was founded. I am sure that I speak for all my colleagues who have served on the parliamentary inquiry into the need for better financial education for young people in schools when I say that it has been a real privilege to serve on that inquiry. It has been one of the most fulfilling roles that I have undertaken in my short time in this House. I pay tribute to the chairman of the group, my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), and to the chairman of the inquiry, my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), for their vigour in leading this work and for the fact that this week, a substantial report on financial education and the curriculum has been published. I have to say also that they have stolen all of my good lines.

During the course of the inquiry, we took evidence from dozens of witnesses. I pay particular tribute to two witnesses from my constituency. David Black, who has recently retired, was head teacher of Alsager high school. He has spent years co-ordinating volunteer educators who advise young people in schools in Cheshire and train teachers to deliver financial education under the banner of “debt cred”. Will Spendilow of New Life church, Congleton, was one of those volunteer educators. Last year in Cheshire, 7,000 pupils benefited from this “debt cred” advice. Those pupils are fortunate, but what of the many across the country who receive no such advice? Even more worrying is the fact that many teachers do not feel up to the task of teaching financial education.

Our inquiry found that the whole area of financial capability urgently needs addressing. Some 70% of 18 to 25-year-olds are in debt. People in their 20s are the least capable age group in making ends meet, choosing financial products and balancing a budget. This lack of financial capability has cost Britain nearly £250 million in bank charges and penalties alone, and 71% of people say that a lack of basic financial understanding is to blame for debt.

While young people are faced with a financial world of baffling complexity, they are vigorously targeted at an early age by retailers and lenders and assaulted by a consumer culture that raises for them unrealistic lifestyle expectations. Our report found that two thirds of people in the UK feel too confused to make the right choices about their money and more than a third say that they do not have the right skills to manage cash.

In the 12 months to the third quarter of 2011, approximately one in 361 people became insolvent, which is significantly higher than the annual average of one in 1,655 people over the past 25 years. It was clear to us that without fundamental changes to the way in which individuals manage their money, the problem would continue to grow. Financial education is a long-term investment and a solution to what is now a widespread national problem. Teaching people about budgeting in their personal lives is also an essential basic component to equip the work force with the necessary skills to succeed in business and drive forward economic growth.

Where will young people improve their financial literacy, the costs of which are clearly set out in our report, if not in school? It is not from their parents; our inquiry found that a third of teenagers’ parents had never talked to their children about budgeting. They will not learn it from the banks; the era of the trusted family bank manager who knew people and took a personal interest in their financial welfare has long gone, although many banks do provide support for financial education in schools, which is valuable. It would be wrong to rely on voluntary organisations to give advice, although many do provide excellent advice; Christians against Poverty, which was originally founded to help those in debt, has now moved into the proactive area of providing courses on personal financial management, and I commend it for that. However, such organisations should not be relied on to provide financial education, particularly in schools. That void makes it essential for financial education to be taught in schools to all young people before they enter the world of work and are faced with some of the financial challenges to which I have referred.

Let me now comment on the recommendations. The first is that personal financial education should be a compulsory part of every school’s curriculum, and that it should be assessed. David Black, whom I mentioned earlier, has said:

“Unless you test, it will not happen.”

I recall an amusing exchange at one of the inquiry’s evidence sessions. I said, “As a mother of two teenagers, I know that nothing focuses a pupil’s mind like an exam.” One witness responded, “And nothing focuses a teacher’s mind like an exam.” We also found that in 20 countries across the globe financial education is already compulsory, and has been for many years. It would be interesting to see whether they share our nation’s debt problems.

[Kevin Brennan]

The report says, and the hon. Lady has just said as well, that personal financial education should be a compulsory part of every school’s curriculum. Does the hon. Lady mean that the Government should make it a compulsory part of every school’s curriculum, or was that merely an exhortation that she thinks should be out there in the ether?

[Fiona Bruce]

I believe that it is such an important issue that space should be made for it in both the PSHE and the maths curriculums. Another of the recommendations makes that very suggestion: that financial education should be cross-curricular, overlapping with maths and PSHE. Pupils made it clear to us that they enjoyed financial education. One said:

“I thought it was really interesting because, personally, I learnt a lot and a lot of my peers said they learnt lots too.”

We all know that we learn more when we enjoy a subject, and it seems that including financial education in the maths curriculum could well aid maths learning overall, which would be an important added-value benefit.

Again and again, teachers told the inquiry of their sense of inadequacy when it came to teaching financial education. It was almost a refrain. They talked of significant barriers to teaching it well, particularly their own lack of confidence in their knowledge of the subject, as well as a lack of awareness of suitable resources. One of the most important recommendations in the report is to establish a quality kite mark from a trusted body, which would assure teachers that if the subject took up valuable curriculum time, that time—if Members will pardon the pun—would be well spent.

The last recommendation that I would like to mention—by no means the least important—is that there should be a financial education champion in every school. Another head teacher giving evidence to the inquiry said:

“if you asked me for the number one thing, and that is to have a senior member of staff responsible for it as the champion, who has enough resources or enough clout to draw people to work at it. Then you will find it will come together.”

It is vital to ensure that members of the next generation are better equipped than those of the present generation to make informed financial decisions, for the sake of their well-being and that of our whole society. That applies to a host of areas: mental and physical health, relationships and family life, career prospects and entrepreneurialism. I believe that, over time, investment in financial education will reap exponential benefits for our society, and I urge the Minister to give constructive support to the recommendations in the report that was published this week. Let us work towards prevention rather than cure.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

We know, as W B Yeats knew, that education lights a fire that burns brightly. It certainly burns brightly in the hearts of Ministers. We have much to do in respect of adult community learning, which was derided by the last Government as mainly holiday Spanish. That was how the former Secretary of State described it. We will work with local communities. The first meeting to discuss models and timings will take place one week from today, and we intend to publish a prospectus in spring 2012. We are delivering.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

The Minister and I have jousted about Yeats before, and I should tell him that he did not share the Minister’s politics, which might disappoint him. There is a danger of his policy becoming a fig leaf around adult and community learning. Will he undertake to work from the centre with other ministerial colleagues, particularly for older people in care homes because of the incredible impact that adult and community learning can have on health outcomes for those older people?

[Mr Hayes]

One reason why I, along with the Secretary of State, have defended adult and community learning is due to its effect on things such as physical well-being, community health, mental health and so forth. It is certainly true that we will need to take those things into full account in respect of the offer. I give that answer mindful that the hon. Gentleman, who was my predecessor, was himself a champion of adult and community learning.

Girls (Educational Development)

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Esther McVey]

I will indeed. I will talk about work experience and employing other styles of developing confidence later on. My hon. Friend has certainly touched on an important subject.

The aspects that I have talked about make up confidence. They are important throughout life, and girls lack them. Quantitative studies over many years have shown that levels of self-confidence in girls and young women are much lower than those in boys—Hisrich and Bowen in 1986, Hollenstead and Wilt in 2000 and Kickul, Wilson, Marlino and Barbosa in 2008. Such issues need to be addressed, because they have lifelong implications.

Today’s debate centres on the key ingredients that assist in life fulfilment and in achieving personal potential, which need to be nurtured especially in girls far more than boys. Broadbridge noted that a lack of confidence resulted in girls being far more critical of themselves and their abilities. That can become self-doubt later in life, preventing them from applying for promotion and bringing attention to their own achievements, as Singh, Vinnicombe, James said in 2006.

That stands the test from a recruitment point of view. Having conducted informal quantitative studies, recruiters will say that they can probably check a woman’s CV in 20 minutes, because a woman usually underestimates her ability, whereas they might need up to two hours to check a bloke’s CV, because he is convinced that he can do something, even if he has not necessarily done it yet.

In Carol Gilligan’s book, “In A Different Voice”, she explained how male and female traits develop differently from birth through parental guidance. Boys strive to be independent by, for example, playing competitive games, whereas girls stay close to their mother and their games are dominated by “sharing” and “playing together”. That means that men can put “winning” ahead of relationships and that women value co-operation and do not like the quest for victory, if it threatens the harmony of a group. The academic Albert Bandura noted that

“confidence in our ability to perform”

is developed in four key ways—social persuasions, mastery of experience, modelling and judgment of our own psychological state. Social persuasions and stereotyping, as identified by Bandura, are a huge concern when considering girls in school.

Girlguiding UK’s 2009 girls’ attitudes survey showed that girls aspire, stereotypically, to female careers. Hairdressing was the No.1 choice for under-16s; teaching was the No.1 choice for 16 to 21-year-olds; and only 1% of those surveyed said that they wanted to work in science or engineering. In the same survey in 2011, when the girls were asked why so many of them aspired to be hairdressers and so few to be engineers, more than half those surveyed—57%—said that hairdressing is what girls are interested in, while they veer away from engineering because of a lack of interest, as expressed by 51%, and a significant lack of female role models, as expressed by 60%. It was also perceived that girls “don’t do that sort of job”, as expressed by 47%, and that they did not know enough about it anyway, as expressed by 43%.

As demonstrated by those figures, there is a confidence issue when we explore areas of work that are outside the stereotypical areas of female work, which often limits the job prospects, wages and promotion of women. In turn, that often leaves women in much more vulnerable jobs later in life, such as “the five Cs”—cleaning, catering, caring, cashiering and clerical work. The widening of girls’ horizons from a young age is vital, especially as there is a constant battle with the daily barrage of media sexualisation and stereotyping of girls. Studies over the past 30 years—from McArthur and Resko, to Manstead and McCulloch, to Hyde—have constantly found that, overall, men and women in the media and advertisements differed in terms of credibility, with men being portrayed as authorities and women as users, and women in terms of relationships and men as independent. Given the daily amount of television alone that we consume—on average, four hours a day—and how highly we regard TV as our major source of entertainment and our most important news medium, we can realise how important that constant barrage of TV images is when it comes to fixing our views and adding to existing stereotypes.

Many girls tend to be seen, and see themselves, as the nurturers, which is reflected in their choice of occupation. The recent Ofsted report, “Girls’ Aspirations”, showed that the sort of fixed views exhibited by girls in the Girlguiding UK report are being maintained, because girls are sticking to strict, old-fashioned stereotyping. The Ofsted report also found a lack of knowledge among girls about what careers are available and about progression and promotion in careers in general, which highlights concerns about the careers system and careers advice.

What are the Government doing? They have taken some important steps. I welcome the introduction of the E-bac, or English baccalaureate, which is one of the Government’s most recent initiatives. It is a new performance measure for schools and is designed to give children a more rounded education, encouraging more students to take traditional academic subjects, including English, maths, history, geography, the sciences and a language. It was reported in August that the E-bac is steering twice as many pupils in England’s secondary schools towards core academic subjects. A Government-commissioned survey showed that 33% of pupils will take E-bac subjects in 2012 and 47% in 2013 compared with only 22% in 2010.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

Further to the point made in an earlier intervention, will the hon. Lady tell us what the impact of the introduction of the E-bac has been on the study of music?

--- Later in debate ---

[Tracey Crouch]

It is interesting how in the past certain comedians have mocked women’s education, to try to belittle women. Some dictatorships have banned women from being educated, which makes the point.

In my short remarks I want to mention the importance of sport and physical activity in building girls’ confidence. I am interested and active in sport, and am pleased to say I have just been appointed parliamentary ambassador to Us Girls, a lottery-funded project within 50 areas of high disadvantage, spread throughout England. It is tied in with the hugely successful StreetGames. I am also the manager of a girls football team in Chatham. I have been with the girls since they were nine and 10 years old, and now they are 13 and 14—the key age group we have been talking about this afternoon. They have gone from timid little girls to strong, confident and often cheeky teenagers. It has been very interesting to see them grow up, and I am proud to have played a small part in their lives thus far.

I am pleased to be involved in youth sport, not least because a quick search on the internet shows that there has been much scientific research into how sport can help to build confidence in girls. In addition, it has been proved that girls who do sports do better in school, because exercise improves learning, memory and concentration. It can also help to reduce stress and make people feel a lot happier, not just about their physical self but about their mental ability. What is fantastic about some of the recent initiatives to get youngsters—boys and girls—active in sport is the fact that there has been much more innovative thinking about the type of sport or physical activity that is offered. In my day—without meaning to sound as if I am 100 years old—the only opportunities for sport we had were netball and hockey in the winter and athletics and tennis in the summer. We were very lucky to have the playing fields so we could do those activities, but not everyone wanted to do competitive team or field sports. Now there is much more to do, ranging from dance and trampolining to Zumba, which is apparently the latest craze.

[Kevin Brennan]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Chris Ruane]

On Zumba? Kevin, please!

[Kevin Brennan]

I am not an expert on Zumba, I am afraid, so it was not on that matter.

The hon. Lady is making an interesting point about choice and diversity for girls in PE and games in school, and physical activities. In her role as an ambassador will she emphasise that to Ministers, too? An emphasis on competitive sports between schools is right, but for some girls the physical activities that will get them to participate, and increase their confidence, are not necessarily the traditional games she mentioned.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey) on securing the debate. It has been excellent, ranging far and wide on the issue of confidence and in particular on the confidence of girls in education.

As someone with two older sisters and a teenage daughter, I am aware of the importance of the subject and, particularly as the father of a teenage daughter, of many of the issues that hon. Members have discussed in relation to the way in which girls grow up and develop, what happens to their confidence over that time and the impact of culture, the media, school, education and friends on confidence, self-image and self-awareness. In fact, I had a conversation with my daughter about this debate when I found out about it.

[Chris Ruane]

She wrote my hon. Friend’s speech!

[Kevin Brennan]

She would be quite capable of doing so, having recently got through to the next stage of a debating competition with her school. Members may be interested to know, however, that she is not particularly interested in following me into politics—I think that she has higher ambitions than that.

The contribution of the hon. Member for Wirral West highlighted the work that she has done on the subject. I commend her for her work with girls to try to build their confidence and make sure that they have opportunities. She spoke about the National Youth Theatre project in which she is involved with her book and her work with Girlguiding UK, an excellent organisation with which I had many dealings as a Minister in the old Department for Children, Schools and Families. Girlguiding UK is a superb organisation that does great work with young women and girls, and it is also extremely progressive and forward looking. I commend some of its publications to hon. Members, if they have not had the chance to look at them and see the work that it is doing with young women. It is a modern organisation doing a great deal of good work, and the hon. Lady gave an extremely thoughtful and thoroughly researched speech on the subject.

The hon. Lady then talked about the English baccalaureate and the role that it might play in building confidence, but that is one point on which my opinion might differ from hers. The reason why I intervened on her on the matter of music—another hon. Member said that it is a subject that can give confidence to young people and to girls in particular—is that, when I asked the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), who has responsibility for schools, a question recently, I was unable to ascertain an answer from him about the survey to which the hon. Lady has referred as to what has happened to those subjects not included in the E-bac.

[Esther McVey]

The hon. Gentleman is making a good point—we have all said that music, drama and sport are vital in developing confidence—but my point was about the ability of a person to have confidence and choice in their career later in life, so that they have the skeleton of a very good, sound education that does not limit them later. That is what we found to be the case for so many girls who limited their choices and future avenues early on.

[Kevin Brennan]

That is a valid point. I completely accept that it is important that, when it comes to those crucial points in school when choices are made, young people and young girls in particular are aware of the choices that they are making and given good advice and mentoring about their consequences. My personal view is that the English baccalaureate does not serve that purpose particularly well and that it demonstrates that more young people are choosing the subjects that the Government want them to choose at a particular level. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that that will happen when schools are told that that is how they will be measured. Inevitably, they will then change their timetables and resources in order for that to happen. My point is that that does not necessarily deal with the issue of having the confidence to take those subjects in the first place. I am concerned that we still do not know, because the Government did not ask the question thoroughly in the survey, what impact that has had on the other subjects that are outwith the English baccalaureate, such as religious education and music and drama, both of which have been referred to as confidence-building subjects.

The hon. Lady was followed by the hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), who made some important points about confidence in relation to teenage pregnancy and the rates of teenage pregnancy in this country. She is absolutely right. Teenage pregnancy fell by about 13% during the period in which the previous Government were in office, but the figure is still far too high in this country. All hon. Members want to figure out the best way to tackle that, because it is far too high. There are sometimes differences of opinion on the best way to approach the matter in relation to sex and relationship education and other such issues, but I have no doubt that the hon. Lady is absolutely right that building girls’ confidence and self-esteem is key to lowering that all-too-high statistic.

The hon. Lady also mentioned the issue of self-image, weight and obesity. I commend to hon. Members, if they have an opportunity to read it, the Foresight report, which was produced during the previous Government’s time in office, although it is not a political report. It centres on obesity and was published about four years ago. It is a key document to understanding the subject and its importance, particularly in relation to some of the issues under discussion.

The contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) was also very thoughtful and well researched. He made the point, which I think all of us strongly recognise, about the confidence that young girls have at about the age of 10. I have always thought that if someone wants to find common sense on legs, they should talk to a 10-year-old girl and they will get the common-sense answer to any question on any subject. Something happens, however, during the course of secondary education, puberty and the teenage years, and, often, girls who were tremendously confident, articulate and able to speak up for themselves, and who had ambitious ideas about what they wanted to do for their future, become withdrawn all of a sudden.

I was a secondary school teacher for 10 years from the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s, teaching children between the ages of 11 and 18, and I saw that for myself when I observed their progress during that period. I was lucky enough to be a form tutor for one form group for seven years, so I saw the boys and girls who stayed for each of those years grow up during that time. It can be depressing to see what can happen to young girls in particular at the crucial age mentioned by my hon. Friend, although I did everything that I could as their teacher and form tutor to try to instil in them the kind of confidence that they should have had. My hon. Friend also mentioned the importance of networks and the frightening statistic that the only group in which smoking is increasing in the country is 15-year-old, white, working-class girls.

My hon. Friend was followed by the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage), who spoke with a great deal of passion and commitment about the importance of science and engineering, and about encouraging girls to take up those subjects and to have the confidence to do so. I listened recently, while driving, to Jocelyn Bell on Radio 4. She was, of course, denied the Nobel prize for science. Many people think that that would not have happened to a man if he had discovered the pulsar, but because she was a relatively junior scientist at the time she never got the recognition, through the Nobel prize, for her achievement. She still went on to be an extremely distinguished scientist, but her description of the sexism that she faced as a young scientist working in the scientific community was disturbing. That was back in the 1960s, which is quite a long time ago, but there remains a certain attitude towards girls and science that we need to make sure is overcome.

The hon. Lady was followed by the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), who spoke about the importance of sport and physical activities in instilling confidence in girls. When I was a Minister with responsibility for school sport, I was fortunate enough to work with Dame Kelly Holmes and Baroness Sue Campbell on this subject. The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I had the wonderful experience of witnessing my daughter’s one and only brief experience on the hockey field at the age of 11, but then, somehow or other, she disengaged from sport and physical activity, so I think that the hon. Lady is absolutely right that we need to do more to encourage a wider range of activities for girls.

I want to mention one sporting heroine of mine, Nicole Cooke from south Wales, who won the gold medal for Great Britain in the cycling road race at Beijing. She won the world championship in the same year, which is something no other cyclist has ever achieved. If she were a man, I am sure that the recognition would have been absolutely enormous. It is a shame that there is not a female sports person on the sports personality of the year shortlist this year, as the hon. Lady has rightly said.

As I have said, I was a school teacher for 10 years until 1995 and became an MP in 2001. There is rightly a focus on standards and on the need for high achievement in the curriculum. However, I am absolutely convinced that we should not lose sight of some of the things that I fear might be regarded in some quarters of Government as the softer, wishy-washy liberal aspects of our discussion today. For example, one of the things that I was responsible for when I was a Minister was the social and emotional aspects of the learning programme in school. That dealt head-on with the problem that some children, particularly girls, were sometimes coming to school with a lot of baggage—emotional baggage rather than the bag in which they carried their school books—because of the nature of modern society, which some hon. Members have described today.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd has said, girls can come under pressure in the home, from the media or from the pace of modern life. As was mentioned earlier, the social and emotional aspects of learning programmes and subjects such as dance, drama and sport, or extra-curricular subjects such as debating, group work or the Duke of Edinburgh award can build self-esteem, confidence, resilience and the ability to take risks.

As the hon. Member for Wirral West has rightly said, those things are extremely important. I sometimes fear—it is entirely possible that when we were in government, we gave this message as well—that, in our desire rightly to say, “We want to raise standards. We want academic standards to improve. We want this to be the country that is the best place to go to school in the world and that has the highest academic achievements,” we lose sight of the importance of some of the social and emotional aspects of learning. Such subjects actually promote better academic achievement. Anyone who has worked in education will know that children who are well-balanced, well-rounded and emotionally stable will do better in the classroom.

[Chris Ruane]

rose—

[Kevin Brennan]

I will give way briefly before I finish.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sure that the Minister would like to have a few minutes to respond to this important debate.

[Chris Ruane]

I do not give credit to the Prime Minister for many things, but he is introducing the index of well-being, which is being dealt with by the Office for National Statistics. Will my hon. Friend pay tribute to the work that is being done by the Government to measure well-being as well as academic standards?

[Kevin Brennan]

It is important to measure well-being, because welfare in the economic sense is not entirely related to the level of gross domestic product. There is nothing particularly new in that concept, but it is important to have a measure of well-being. It is also important for there to be such a measure in schools. That is the point I am making. If we are going to have such a measure for society as a whole, let us make sure we have it for schools, too.

Many books have been mentioned today. Hon. Members may have read the interesting book, “Grit: the skills for success and how they are grown”, by Yvonne Roberts, which talks about how to build social intelligence, emotional resilience, enterprise and discipline skills in girls and the importance of social and emotional intelligence. It also mentions how crucial reinforcement, mentoring and building resilience are. Some of the work done on that in schools by organisations such as the Young Foundation is extremely valuable and important.

Today’s debate has been extremely informative and of a very high standard. The subject is probably not highly politically controversial, but it has provided a useful opportunity to explore what the Government are doing to try to instil greater confidence among young women and girls in our schools and colleges.

[The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning (Mr John Hayes)]

As the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), has said, this has been an interesting and important debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey) on securing it.

I do not have daughters; I have two young sons. However, women have been very important to me throughout my life. My mother was a woman and, curiously, my wife is, too. Therefore, what I learned literally from the cradle is that women—mothers—shape our character and form our ambitions. We gain the confidence that has been described by so many of the speakers in this debate—it was highlighted by my hon. Friends the Members for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch), for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) and, indeed, by the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane)—very early in our lives. Governments, schools and others can do much—I will talk a bit about what we are trying to do—but, in the end, the familiar influences, particularly maternal influences, are critical to subsequent progress.

I learned from my mother and my father, who were both wonderfully archetypically male and female. I think of my mother and I think of her softness and the smell of talcum powder; I think of my father and I think of how bristly he was and how he smelled of tobacco and work. They were certainly both archetypically male and female and were both wonderfully demonstrative and loving. They gave me the feeling that I was the most special little boy in the world—a feeling that has never left me, by the way. I feel that now, at this very moment, so my ambitions were reinforced by not only their direct support but the sentiments that they instilled in me.

I entirely appreciate the points that have been repeatedly made in this debate. As the shadow Minister has said, they have been made on the basis of good information and a shared determination across the Chamber. I entirely recognise that the challenges people face as they turn their own ambitions into reality are affected by many influences. In the short time left, I will try to deal with some of those influences, some of which are benevolent and some of which are malevolent, as the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd said.

The hon. Gentleman made a wonderful contribution that underpinned the fact that this debate is as much about values and attitudes as it is about education. I reassure the shadow Minister that we understand—at least, I understand—that education is more than utilitarian. It is about values and attitudes, and ethos and sentiments. Although the work done by parents in instilling both ambition and the capacity to realise ambition in children is critical, the work done by our schools matters so much, too. Indeed, it matters more for those children who are not as fortunate as I was in having a stable, loving and supportive family.

In respect of girls and women, we need to go the extra mile. We need to take further steps to ensure that they are able to fulfil their potential. In the brief time available, I will talk about some of the steps that the Government are taking, but before I do so I will just say a word about Plato because I know that hon. Members would be disappointed if I did not. Some 2,500 years ago, Plato said:

“Nothing could be more absurd than the practice that prevails in our country of men and women not following the same pursuits with all their strengths and with one mind, for thus, the state instead of being whole is reduced to half.”

How interesting that the classical world understood what so often in the modern world we forget.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West, who initiated the debate, has not forgotten because she has dedicated a great deal of her considerable skill and energy to the promotion of the interests of young women. I pay tribute to the work she has done. I was pleased to be able to support it in a room close to here, when she was able to launch her magazine, Chloe Can, which is aimed at young women. She was able to articulate some of the points that she has made today at greater length then. The work we do to establish role models in these terms is important, and my hon. Friend is indeed a role model for young women whose interests she has championed with such vehemence and to such effect.

We have learned much—I defer to the two former teachers who have spoken—about what characterises good schools in this respect. Schools with little or no gender gap in achievement tend to be characterised by a positive learning ethos—we have heard about that today, have we not?—high expectations of all pupils, high quality teaching and learning, good management and close tracking of individual pupil’s achievement. Teachers know all their pupils well and plan their resources and teaching accordingly, rather than conforming to preconceived views about what those pupils might achieve, whether that relates to gender or any other particular characteristic.

We can do three things in particular to support teachers in their efforts to fuel social mobility and achievement. The first concerns advice and guidance. It is very important that young people get the right quality advice and guidance. In truth, one of the principal inhibitors to social mobility is this: I suspect that our children will become socially mobile because of us. Our children will benefit from the fact that we, in the Chamber, are reasonably well informed about the opportunities that might exist, be they boys or girls, and will impart an understanding of how to turn those ambitions into opportunity. That is not true for all young people, however. The advice and guidance that we can provide through the new national careers service will, to some extent, ameliorate the disadvantages of many young people who do not have either advice from a family or social networks.

[Kevin Brennan]

Is the Minister concerned, in the light of the debate, that the lack of face-to-face guidance in the careers service will be a hindrance to girls gaining confidence and being able to make the right choices?

[Mr Hayes]

It is important to appreciate the value of face-to-face guidance. The hon. Gentleman will know that the Education Bill establishes the new statutory duty on schools to secure independent, impartial advice and guidance. When it was debated in the House, we agreed, in the statutory guidance accompanying the Bill, to ensure that face-to-face guidance was available in particular to people with the greatest disadvantage, those special needs and learning difficulties. We also said that schools should make the most appropriate provision for their pupils. I emphasise that it is vital that that should include a range of provision, and that that provision should be linked to the quality standards that are being developed by the profession itself.

As well as changing the law, we have worked with the careers profession to establish a new set of qualifications, with appropriate training and accreditation. That means that we will re-professionalise the careers service after the disappointing years—I put that as mildly as I can—of Connexions. We are on the cusp of a new dawn for careers advice and guidance, with a professionalised service, a new set of standards, a new statutory duty and the launch of the national service co-located in Jobcentre Plus, colleges, community organisations, charities and voluntary organisations. I do not say that the task will be straightforward, but it is a worthwhile journey. The destination to which we are heading will be altogether better than the place we have been for the past several years. That advice and guidance will assist young women, in particular, to fulfil their potential in the way I have described and, as a result of this debate, will re-emphasise the significance of opportunities for girls and young women in the establishment of the national careers service this spring.

The second issue I wanted to speak about was apprenticeships. I made a point—the hon. Member for Cardiff West knows this subject well too—when I became the Minister of challenging the National Apprenticeship Service on the under-representation of particular groups. The obvious example in relation to this debate is women in some of what might be called the traditional apprenticeship frameworks: engineering, construction and so on.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Teather]

It varies according to area. We know that there is some tail-off at secondary school level, which is one of the reasons why our funding consultation touched on whether or not to introduce measures, including “ever” free school meals. That was about picking up children for the pupil premium who had previously been on free school meals, because there is some drop-off as they move from one area to the next. As I said, we are beginning some work to encourage parents to sign up. Not all parents want to sign up for the lunch, but they may well be keen to sign up if they know that their school will get extra money.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

The facts are that the Institute for Fiscal Studies report says that in this financial year nearly three quarters of primary schools and more than 90% of secondary schools will see a real-terms cut in their budgets, even after including this so-called “additional pupil premium”. Is the Minister embarrassed about the way she has been conned by her coalition partners or was she only too willing to sell our schools short?

[Sarah Teather]

Perhaps I can quote the IFS report back at the hon. Gentleman, because it says that the most deprived schools are likely to see real-terms increases in funding per pupil in 2011-2012. It is perhaps sometimes worth reading the detail of a report and not merely quoting back headlines.