Education and Adoption Bill

Debate between Kevin Brennan and Pat Glass

Wednesday 16th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Lady is just very enthusiastic and very keen. I appreciate the attention she is paying to what I am saying.

Our proposed new subsection (4) treats maintained schools and academy schools equally as far as intervention is concerned, which picks up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central. It is right that the same forms of intervention can be used for both types of school—for example, working with an outstanding school or working with a school improvement provider or replacing the governing body with an interim executive board.

Subsection (5) prevents the Secretary of State from making a forced academy order simply on the basis that a school has been notified that its pupils are not reaching their full potential. This should be about taking the right steps for a school, not arbitrary academy targets.

I said I would return to subsection (3)(a) of proposed new section 60B, which deals with teacher supply. My hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) is not here at present, but he said on Second Reading that

“the real crisis in education is in teacher recruitment and the quality of headteachers”

and that the Secretary of State’s proposals and speech

“have absolutely nothing to say about that.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2015; Vol. 597, c. 642.]

My hon. Friend was absolutely right. This is the real crisis and that is why we are addressing it. We cannot judge a school if it is not able to recruit the right teachers because of a failure of Government policy in relation to teacher supply.

Teacher recruitment has been falling since 2010. Some 10% of teacher training places remain unfilled this year, and one in 10 teachers left the profession last year, the highest rate in a decade. An extra 800,000 students will have entered England’s secondary programme by the next decade. It is predicted there will be a 7% shortfall in teacher training recruitment for next September, the third shortfall in a row. Also, Department for Education published statistics show that for the secondary programme 91% of the target, or 12,943 student teachers, were recruited; that is a shortfall of 2,278 teacher trainees against the target for this term.

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the figures are actually worse than that because they are being masked? School Direct is failing to meet anywhere near its targets in subjects such as mathematics and physics and is making up the numbers in non-shortage areas.

[Kevin Brennan]

My hon. Friend is right. We only have to speak to headteachers to know the difficulty of recruiting in those subject areas. Again, the Government have failed to face up to this crisis and schools cannot be judged if they cannot recruit the teachers because of a failure of Government policy. According to Professor John Howson, a shortage of more than 6,000 teachers has built up in the past three years. A report from London Councils says there is a need for 113,000 extra school places in the capital in the next five years.

I could go on and on, but I will not detain the House for too long with those statistics. It would, however, be interesting to hear from the Minister in his reply about what the Government are doing to meet this crisis in teacher training recruitment and retention, because that is the real issue out there and they are not addressing it adequately.

That is why we have made teacher supply one of the factors in judging how a school is performing under new clause 1. Ignoring teacher supply as a factor in influencing whether a school is doing well enough in helping its pupils to reach their potential is simply burying one’s head in the educational sand. That is exactly what the Secretary of State is doing in the Bill, and in her wider role. She remains obsessed by her pet projects of free schools and forced academisation, and is diverting ever more precious and scarce resources in the Department to them while failing to address the mounting crisis in teacher training, recruitment and retention. She cannot say that she has not been warned about this.

AS-levels and A-levels

Debate between Kevin Brennan and Pat Glass

Tuesday 16th April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Gentleman makes my point for me. Cambridge has been the university that has most used AS-levels to bring about widening access. It can show that it has widened access as a result of them in the past 10 years. If he wants to challenge the admissions tutors on the claim that they have successfully widened access through the use of AS-levels, he is free to do so. They are absolutely clear about it and say that if AS-levels disappear, university entry will become less fair. The Minister must answer that point. So far, Ministers have failed to answer it, or to explain why they are persisting with the policy.

In any case, the Government accept that Cambridge is right, and presumably that the Russell Group, the 1994 Group, Universities UK, the Association of Colleges, the Sixth Form Colleges Association, the National Union of Students, the teachers and head teachers associations and we, God forbid, are right about the usefulness of AS-levels. Nevertheless, the Government will proceed with the damaging and unnecessary divorce of AS-levels from A-levels. Like the EBacc certificates, no one supports the move. The Government quite rightly abandoned their proposals on the EBacc. The Minister might well have had an influence on that decision. Who knows? It happened to coincide with his appointment to the Department. As I said earlier, we will not proceed with the divorce of the AS-level from the A-level, and everyone should be aware of that.

[Pat Glass]

We have had people with huge expertise coming to us and saying that this is the wrong thing to do. The only other area where we have seen such an overwhelming objection has been to the proposed changes to GCSEs. I hope that the Minister will reflect on that, because the Government ultimately took the right decision in that area.

[Kevin Brennan]

My hon. Friend is right. The Secretary of State has had to issue a direction to Ofqual in relation to this proposal, because everyone thinks that it is nonsense, and it was confirmed in parliamentary answers to me that he had to issue a direction. On 31 January, I tabled a parliamentary question to ask what assessment Ministers had made of the recent Cambridge university admissions research working party study of AS-level as a predictor, and the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for South West Norfolk, said that she had “reflected on” the study. So, she had reflected on it and she agreed that AS-levels were

“a useful aid for university admissions”.—[Official Report, 31 January 2013; Vol. 557, c. 887W.]

So the Government agree with everybody that AS-levels are a “useful aid” for admissions. They know what the research is, and they have reflected on it.