Education Funding

Laura Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Laura Smith (Crewe and Nantwich) (Lab)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran). Every child matters—that fundamental idea should unite everybody in this place whenever we discuss education. I start with that point because the belief that every child matters inspired me to go into teaching. My sense of purpose came from supporting each and every child to reach their full potential. I came into politics because I want to help to build a better world than the one we live in today, and I know millions of others share that dream. But the people who will lead that future are in our classrooms today, and if we fail to invest in them, that vision for the future will be little more than a dream. If we want to make it a reality, we have to be prepared to take a long, hard, critical look at the way the Government have directed and, some might say, designed our education system.

I say that because the IFS figures do not tell the full story. Working in classrooms, I have seen at first hand how Government policy strips resources from schools in other ways, too, with one such resource being teachers’ time. As a teacher, I always recognised the value of balancing knowledge with understanding. The real value of teaching is in equipping children with the ability to problem-solve—to make use of what you have taught them and to apply it to new situations—but it is much cheaper to simply test a child’s ability to retain information. The crude use of league tables, combined with the growth of the commercialised testing regime, has helped to make the curriculum far more content-based and less concerned with problem solving, a tendency helped along by snapshot inspections by Ofsted. When we also consider that this shift has happened at a time when schools have seen their budgets shrink in real terms, it is no surprise that the curriculum available to our children has also diminished, both in scope and quality. The result is that we end up with stressed out, overworked, underpaid teachers under more and more pressure to teach for the test.

As a teacher, I also recognised the value of co-operation between schools to improve provision across a local area. That could come in the form of sharing best practice or solutions for particular local problems, but it might also come in the form of pooling resources to achieve the same aim. The academisation of our education system has made that particularly difficult, as the schools in our constituencies now act, in many ways, as businesses in direct competition with each other. In addition, the direct payment of SEND funding to academies and free schools has resulted in the loss of the economies of scale provided by a central fund in a local authority area. I could talk for much longer about the consequences of academisation, but the point I wish to make in this debate is that it has contributed to the financial pressures in our schools, and we should not ignore that fact. So when we talk about school budgets being £1.7 billion lower in real terms than they were five years ago, the truth is actually much worse.

I truly loved my time as a teacher. Many of the children I taught will never know how much of an impact they made on me, but I hope that in the relatively brief time that I spent with them, I had a lasting impact on their development. As time went on and one colleague after another left the profession, I saw the schools that I worked in change—not just physically, but in every sense of the word. As workloads and class sizes grew and grew, morale plummeted. We lost some fantastic people—the kind of people we really want in our children’s schools, and not just teachers but teaching assistants and support staff too. The trend has only got worse since I left the profession. For the second year running, there are more teachers leaving the profession than joining it. Our children deserve to be taught by qualified, happy teachers who are paid properly. Teachers, teaching assistants and support staff are all thousands of pounds worse off in real terms compared with 2010 wages.

By the time I left the classroom, I had seen teaching change. Book scrutinies, lesson observations, data input, results, progress, benchmarking, always being Ofsted-ready—all of that took over every single teaching day. I felt that in the middle of this cycle were a load of kids whose confidence was shaken. The need to achieve and succeed outweighed their development as a whole person. If I was seen to spend five minutes talking to one child, even if it meant that that one child finally grasped fractions, I would fail a lesson observation. Little children were telling me that they were “stressed” and that they were “not good enough”. Parents were saying that their children would cry about homework for hours at the weekend. There is something seriously wrong when seven-year-old children feel like that. Primary school is supposed to be the most carefree time of a person’s life.

My own son was born on 29 August—he is the youngest in his class—and he recently told me that he was the worst in his class at writing and that he will never be smart. As a parent, it makes me feel so angry and so sad that my beautiful little boy, who improves every day, has to put up with a school report that just says he is working towards where he should be. He is working his socks off every day. What does that teach him?