Qualified Teachers

Lord Austin of Dudley Excerpts

Wednesday 30th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

As is so often the case, my right hon. Friend strikes a balanced and sensible note. He has made the point that under the coalition Government education has improved, and that teachers once damned as “unqualified” by the trade unions and others are driving improvement in our schools. If only we could hear more of him on education and rather less from some in the Labour party.

It is not just the quality of teaching that has improved; attainment has improved for our very poorest. One of the starkest problems in the education system that we inherited was the gulf between the achievement of the wealthy and that of the poorest in our schools. That gap has narrowed thanks to the teachers in our schools, to whom I, once again, wish to pay tribute today. At key stage 4 we inherited a gap of 27.6 points in exam performance, but that has been reduced to 26.3. At primary we inherited a gap of 21.3 points between the poorest and the rest, and that has closed to 16.8. I hope that everyone in the House would applaud that movement towards helping the poorest children do better.

[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

To truly tackle the social mobility crisis that exists in our country we need much more radical action than the schemes, no doubt well intentioned, that the Secretary of State is talking about. Will he examine the open access scheme championed by Peter Lampl of the Sutton Trust and consider introducing it for the 100 leading independent schools in our country?

[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman—I hesitate to call him that because he is increasingly becoming my hon. Friend; he knows what he is talking about and is the son of a head teacher—is absolutely right to say that we need more help from independent schools in improving the state sector. I think that Peter Lampl is a hero, but one of the things that the hon. Gentleman and I both believe in—independent schools helping state schools—would be more difficult as a direct result of official Labour party policy, as it would ban teachers in independent schools who do not have qualified teacher status from helping out in the way we would both want. His aim is noble and his heart is in the right place but he is on the wrong side of the House. I hope he will come over to our side, where logic will inevitably lead him.

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[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

The central point I want to make is that we as a country have to make education our No. 1 priority. We need to drive up results, enhance the status of the teaching profession, recruit the brightest graduates, train them better and insist on higher standards.

The fact is that not enough young people are succeeding in science, maths or technology, or going on to apprenticeships, particularly in high-tech industries. We are not sending enough young people to university and not enough young people from state schools are going to the best universities. We have to be honest with ourselves, however challenging it may be, that standards and results in too many state schools are just not good enough.

Britain is falling far behind other countries on basic numeracy and literacy. The OECD has just reported that, on basic skills, the UK is behind not just countries such as Finland, South Korea and Germany, but others such as Estonia, Poland and Slovakia.

Some areas in Britain are lagging even further behind. Just two schools out of seven in north Dudley reached last year’s national average with regard to five good GCSEs including English and maths. Six out of 10 across the borough as a whole failed to meet the national average. I do not think that any school in the country should be seeing fewer than 70% or 80% of its pupils achieving that level.

This year, I am pleased to say that results improved at four of those schools, but what shocks me is the extraordinarily wide variation in achievement between schools with similar intakes. Children starting at two schools in Dudley had achieved exactly the same key stage 2 results, yet five years later twice as many pupils in one school achieved better GCSE results than the other.

Just a few years ago, only a third of pupils at Ellowes Hall school managed to get successful grades; now, more than eight out of 10 do so. It is without doubt the best state school in the black country. If we take into account the value it offers its students, it probably has a good claim to be one of the very best schools in the country. It still has the same kids from the same families and largely the same teachers, but the thing that has changed is that it has a brilliant new head teacher, Andy Griffiths, and there is a relentless focus on standards and discipline. He has motivated the teachers and made the pupils believe in themselves.

Results are finally improving at Castle High, my old school in the middle of Dudley, under a new head teacher, Michelle King, and Dormston school, which suffered a catastrophic collapse in standards, now has a brilliant new head teacher, Ben Stitchman, who is turning things around.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that one of the best ways of driving up standards in our state schools is to get quality leadership in place. Is that not one of the key aims in driving forward the improvements he has mentioned?

[Ian Austin]

My hon. Friend is right. What unites all of those schools and others where results are improving is high-quality leadership. Being a great head teacher comes from being a great teacher. They know all about managing behaviour and discipline. They know how to get the best out of pupils, and they set high aspirations and demand high standards. I am concerned that, by not insisting on the very highest standards for teaching, the Government could be weakening the national stock of educational leaders for the future. That is so important, because the quality of teaching transforms opportunities for the rest of pupils’ lives. According to the Sutton Trust:

“Bringing the lowest-performing 10% of teachers in the UK up to the average would in five years bring the UK’s rank amongst OECD countries from 21st in Reading to as high as 7th, and from 22nd in Maths to as high as 12th. Over 10 years the UK would improve its position to as high as 3rd in Reading and 5th in Maths.”

My central point is that standards in too many schools are not high enough, and I do not think it is possible to tackle that by insisting that teachers in state schools should not have to have the very best qualifications.

[Mr Rob Wilson (Reading East) (Con)]

I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman, but what is his evidence base for suggesting that QTS teacher outcomes are better than non-QTS teacher outcomes? I have not heard any evidence.

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[Ian Austin]

My point is that standards are not high enough. We need to get the best graduates into teaching and insist that they are trained as effectively as possible. We must insist on the very highest standards in the classroom.

We should dramatically expand the work of Teach First. We should agree as a country—every party, the Government, schools, universities, teachers and business—to set an ambition for Britain to produce the best-educated young people in the world. We need a targeted approach based on the London challenge—which transformed education in the capital—with tough targets, the best heads and the brightest teachers for areas such as the black country that are lagging stubbornly behind.

We should be much less obsessed with a pupil’s age and focus more on their ability. We should ask whether pupils should be moving up each year, regardless of their attainment. We should massively expand Lord Baker’s brilliant work and have a university technical college in every town. We should specialise more at 14 years of age in relation not just to technical and engineering subjects such as those studied in UTCs, but to straightforward, academic subjects, too.

We have to be honest with ourselves and admit that the current system is not promoting social mobility. The vast majority of senior jobs in professions such as the law, the media, those in the City, the civil service and even politics go to a tiny minority of people from the best private schools and Oxbridge. Sutton Trust research shows that just five public schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than 2,000 state schools—two thirds of the entire state sector.

Ministers should look at the brilliant work on open access by Peter Lampl, who proposes opening up access to leading independent day schools so that kids from ordinary backgrounds can get into those brilliant schools. Sharing costs with parents would mean that the cost is less than the current cost of an average state school place. Those who say that we cannot afford to do such a thing should consider that failure to tackle this social mobility crisis will cost the UK economy up to £140 billion a year by 2050, or 4% of GDP.

We need an education revolution in our country. We need tough targets to drive up standards in our schools and we need to transform the status of teaching. We need to promote a new generation of brilliant head teachers and we need more UTCs and greater specialisation. We need radical new measures to open up to many more youngsters opportunities that are currently only available to a few, not just because we should open up access and opportunity as a matter of fairness or because that is the only way to create the new industries and new jobs on which our future prosperity will depend, but because people in places such as the black country are as good as anyone and we should open up for them the opportunities that people elsewhere have taken for granted for decades.