Kickstart Scheme
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Thérèse Coffey(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Dr Coffey
The Government already have close relationships on aspects of trying to help people get into work. It is worth pointing out that the Welsh Labour Government’s own report into Job Growth Wales, published in June this year, found that the programme suffered from a lack of clarity and momentum. It does not matter who provides the support to get people into work, whether it is the Welsh Government or the United Kingdom Government. I want to make sure that we focus on the young people for whom it is intended, rather than some of the bureaucracy that may come in other ways.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
I support the general principle of the Government intervening to help young people into work in this way and I was really disappointed in 2010 when the Government dropped the Future Jobs Fund. I am slightly disappointed that this scheme has been allowed to be designed in such a way that it is for the convenience of the Department, rather than small businesses. Having been a Government Minister I know how this works in the Department for Work and Pensions, but could the Minister, in all seriousness, go back and talk to officials and see if there is any way of making this more friendly to small businesses?
Dr Coffey
The hon. Gentleman talks about the Future Jobs Fund. It was a failure in getting the private sector involved. It was a failure in getting much smaller businesses involved. That is why we have stripped back the criteria to focus on what really matters for the young person, rather than a tick-box exercise on all sorts of different benefits that needed to be created. I am not trashing the Future Jobs Fund, because the intention was absolutely right, but we want to make sure that this has a wider ambition. There is already a youth hub in Cardiff. We have already had approaches about wanting to get involved. That is why the gateway for small businesses is much simpler than it has ever been in previous similar schemes. I am confident that we will make it a success.
Business of the House
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Thérèse Coffey(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
May we debate why the Government want 50 fewer elected Members of Parliament but keep on creating more unelected Tory peers? The hon. Lady’s party received 36.8% of the votes at the general election, but 43.7% of the House of Lords already consists of party political Tory peers. Will her party stop creating peers, and drop its plans to gerrymander the House of Commons?
Dr Coffey
The purpose of the Act that was passed during the last Parliament was to ensure that constituencies were of equal size, and I thought that very fair. I find it extraordinary that there are 40 MPs in Wales, representing considerably smaller constituencies than the average in England and Scotland. Someone who says that he believes in fairness should accept that that is what the electorate deserve.
School Funding
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Thérèse Coffey(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
I really welcome the announcement. It is a significant step towards a fairer funding formula, which children in our counties were denied by the previous Government. Labour continues politically to use the education budget for its own areas. I am keen to hear what the announcement will mean for children in Suffolk, if the Minister has that information available.
Privilege
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Thérèse Coffey(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
The taking of the oath is not irrelevant, because if someone gives evidence under oath that turns out to be untrue—these powers of a parliamentary Select Committee exist for a reason—they can subsequently be charged with a criminal offence under the Perjury Act 1911.
Dr Coffey
I am not a lawyer; I stand here as a parliamentarian who passes law. In response to the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) and the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), my understanding is that any information given as evidence during parliamentary sittings cannot necessarily be used in a court of law. That is part of the basis of parliamentary privilege.
Sunday Trading (London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games) Bill [Lords] (Allocation of Time)
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Thérèse Coffey
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
My hon. Friend the Minister knows that I have concerns about the Bill, and I wish that more time had been set aside so that amendments about geography could have been debated rather than being perceived as wrecking amendments.
Kevin Brennan
The hon. Lady says that she has concerns. Has she a free vote on the matter?
Dr Coffey
As the hon. Gentleman knows, every vote in the House is a free vote.
I stress to my hon. Friends on the Front Bench that the amendments that some of us thought about tabling would have tried to be helpful. As was mentioned earlier, we are considering a festival of sport—one of the greatest things that will ever happen in our country. The route from Stratford or Pudding Mill takes people through a shopping centre, and it would be odd if they could not buy something on their way home, but I am not sure what excuse there is for some of the shopping centres further afield to be open.
I understand that the matter is important for the Government and I did not table any amendments because I did not want to be perceived as trying to wreck the Bill, but I hope that any other debate on Sunday trading hours will be given time for hon. Members to discuss the subject properly.
Question put.
Education Performance
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Thérèse Coffey(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Dr Coffey
My hon. Friend is right. I hope that the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) has read the brochure; I shall be sure to send him a copy. I do not doubt that some of the softer subjects mentioned, such as media, photography and business studies, are popular. I see them when I visit sixth forms in my constituency, and I accept that they are valid A-levels. I do not decry them, but we need to get the message across to students that such subjects will not necessarily lead them to the wider choice of career and life to which they may aspire. It may take them down a narrow career path, and they should be fully aware of that.
Kevin Brennan
Given what the hon. Lady has said, does she think that I wasted 10 years of my life teaching A-level economics?
Dr Coffey
I would not say that the hon. Gentleman had wasted any of his life, although if he had had the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) as a pupil, we might be in a better place today. However, I studied a bit of economics at university, and I can assure hon. Members that I did not do A-level economics beforehand. As to whether someone teaching business studies at school will have ever run a business, I do not know, but that may well be a possibility with Teach First and Teach Next.
Kevin Brennan
In defence of economics, I should say that it is a rigorous academic subject, and mathematics is an extremely important skill to bring to the study of it. However, when a subject is left out of prescriptive lists such as the one the hon. Lady mentioned, we can understand why that can be insulting to some people—not to me, but to those who study it.
Dr Coffey
I understand that point. The hon. Gentleman will know the famous joke that there are different kinds of economists: ones who can count and ones who cannot. However, I think the Russell group is trying to help students and parents in choosing options. That can be early in someone’s life—we have talked about children aged 11, and some people have talked about even younger children. If people are not careful, they can narrow their choices later in life, which would be a shame. The Russell group is doing people a good service by making sure that they fully understand the choices they make. We are talking not about people making poor choices, but about people deciding not to do certain subjects in the full, conscious knowledge that that will restrict them later in life.
The hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) mentioned selection. I am not suggesting that we return to selection, but I do praise efforts to differentiate and to ensure that people reach their full potential. One school I attended was a grammar school; it was not a particularly flash grammar school, but it produced Lord Birt, Roger McGough and Brendan Barber, who have all gone on to do extremely well in their chosen fields.
The Government have an opportunity to put the United Kingdom—particularly England and Wales—back at the top of the class. We need an A* and we need “education, education, education” to be the Government’s mantra. I am confident that we can carry on this journey, but I hope that we will accelerate and that the three R’s will no longer be a dirty word, but the founding blocks of a successful education.
Kevin Brennan
Just the Minister and the hon. Member for East Hampshire. [Interruption.] I see there are a few other late developers. Since I asked that question, it is only fair to say that I did not pass the first time round, and I admit to the hon. Member for Wells that I had to do the dreaded resit. We should be careful about banning resits; the Secretary of State would not be able to drive had he not been able to resit his driving test on several occasions. The hon. Lady should be careful what she recommends.
Let us move to the substance of my remarks. The context for this debate was reflected in the e-mail sent out by the hon. Member for South West Norfolk, and concerns the way that the Secretary of State has used data from international surveys as the evidence base for his reforms. We have debated some of those reforms elsewhere—the Minister and I were recently on a Public Bill Committee and I know he is sick of the sight of me.
Part of the context for this interesting debate was provided by the Secretary of State in the White Paper and concerns international evidence. Quite frankly, I thought that all hon. Members present today made a better effort than the Secretary of State to put that evidence into some sort of context, which is why it has been a better debate. When the Secretary of State speaks about our educational performance in international comparisons, he quotes only from the PISA survey. He did not turn up for the Education Bill’s Third Reading, but on Second Reading he stated:
“We moved from fourth to 14th in the world rankings for science, seventh to 17th in literacy and eighth to 24th in mathematics by 2007.”—[Official Report, 8 February 2011; Vol. 523, c. 167.]
It is, however, misleading to quote out of context the UK’s raw rankings in figures from the PISA survey between 2000 and 2009 because, as other hon. Members have pointed out, the number of countries that take part in the PISA survey dramatically increased over that period. I am sure that if a survey took place in Norfolk, the hon. Member for South West Norfolk would be found to be the best MP in Norfolk—there is probably no question about that and since there are no Labour MPs in that area, I can say it with safety. If that survey were extended to the whole of the UK, and for the sake of argument, the hon. Lady finished in 11th place—this is purely hypothetical; I am sure she would still finish first—that would not mean that she had become a worse MP, but simply that there was more evidence and more MPs included in the survey. That is exactly what happened with the PISA survey—over time, there has been a huge expansion in the number of countries that participate. Furthermore, the OECD has stated that it is not statistically valid to make the comparisons over time on which the Secretary of State has relied, because there was no statistically valid sample from this country in the first place.
There is no consensus among statisticians and educationalists that the PISA survey can be relied on, let alone treated as a sort of religious text in the way it is by the Secretary of State—I must be careful because the hon. Member for South West Norfolk is an expert in this area. The Secretary of State likes to say that Andreas Schleicher, who compiles the PISA tables, is the most important man in our education system, but if he wants to base his policy on evidence he should consider all opinions, not just that of one person.
The PISA statistics will be examined in the months and years ahead, but I warn the Secretary of State not to rely too heavily on them. A Danish academic, Professor Svend Kreiner, is preparing a paper that will soon be published. He says that the PISA survey does not compare like with like across all countries, and is not therefore an objective performance benchmark. In this country, Professor Stephen Heppell has long contested the accuracy and usefulness of the PISA results, and his website cites research into PISA’s methodology. Professor Alan Smithers doubts its ability to compare like with like. S. J. Prais of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in London has previously used the example of England’s results to demonstrate serious flaws in the response rates and sampling of Pisa, which necessarily lead to biased results.
Gjert Langfeldt of Agder university questions the validity and reliability claims made by PISA, pointing to
“constructional constraints, methodological mishaps and the cultural bias embedded in the PISA design”.
Svein Sjøberg at the university of Oslo analysed PISA items and found that some involved confusing and erroneous material. For example, he observed that the title of an article about cloning, “A Copying Machine for Living Beings”, was translated literally word for word into Norwegian, rendering the title totally incomprehensible. The questions are supposed to be culturally neutral.
I could go on, but the point that I am making is that it is not accepted universally or even in a widespread way among academics and educationists that PISA can be relied on solely to provide the evidence required. I would forgive the Secretary of State on this if it was the only evidence available to him, but he did not mention in the Second Reading speech that I referred to, which he did turn up for, that other pieces of evidence were available. The hon. Member for South West Norfolk did, but the Secretary of State did not. We might have presumed from what he said that PISA was the only evidence available, but as has been mentioned in the course of this debate and as the hon. Lady mentioned in her remarks, because she is a very honourable lady, there is the trends in international mathematics and science study—TIMSS. She rather played TIMSS down. I will not at this point, having just tried to trash some of the PISA methodology, say that the TIMSS methodology is perfect. All I am saying is that it should be cited at the same time by the Secretary of State when he is making policy that is supposed to be based on evidence.
TIMSS showed that between 1995 and the last tests in 2007, England’s primary school maths performance improved by a greater margin than any of the other 15 nations that had pupils taking tests in those years, including Singapore, Japan, the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Norway. Our score went from below the international average in 1995 to comfortably above it in 2007. Our ranking improved from 12th out of 16 countries in 1995 to seventh out of 36 in 2007. It was an expanded table in which we had gone up. An example of that kind of performance would be the hon. Member for South West Norfolk going from 10th in Norfolk to 1st in East Anglia.
Kevin Brennan
“No chance” says the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal from a sedentary position. I did not notice her sneak back into the Chamber; I would not have said that if I had.
The most recent round of TIMSS brought even more good news relating to other tests. In secondary maths, England was the joint third most improved of 20 countries during the period 1995 to 2007, rising from 11th out of 20 to seventh out of 49 in the table. In science, the country was seventh most improved out of 16 at primary level, with its ranking moving from sixth out of 20 countries in 1995 to seventh out of 36 in 2007. It was the fifth most improved out of 19 at secondary level, its ranking improving from seventh to fifth between those two years, even though the number of countries taking part had increased from 19 to 49. I could go on—I am going on until 5.15 pm if the Minister wants to know. However, there is no mention of the alternative picture reflected by TIMSS in any of the things that the Secretary of State says.
We have had an extremely interesting and serious debate this afternoon about what we need to do to improve the education of our children, to improve our schools and to improve our economic performance. We should be doing that in the spirit of thinking about what the real evidence is, examining the statistics and accepting that we should all be striving for continual improvement.
Taking only one part of the picture, subjecting it to the extreme hyperbole of the Secretary of State, with his rather dramatic style, and making that the only basis for policy making is a serious mistake and undermines our shared wish to improve educational performance in our country, to improve opportunity for young people and to improve our economic performance. I therefore make a plea for a higher plane of debate than we have had from the Secretary of State—one that involves less flummery and exaggeration and that is more evidence-based. If that were the case, we could seriously have the kind of education debate that we need and that we want in order to improve our economic performance and to improve education in this country.