Education: PISA Results

Lord Nash Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd December 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, with your permission, I would like to repeat a Statement made by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education in another place earlier today about the PISA league tables of educational performance published earlier today by the OECD.

“Before I go into the detail of what the league tables show about the common features of high-performing systems, may I take a moment—as I try to in every public statement I make—to thank our teachers for their hard work, dedication and idealism. Whatever conclusions we draw about what needs to change, I hope we in this House can agree that we are fortunate to have the best generation of young teachers ever in our schools.

The data show that the new recruits now entering the classroom are better equipped than ever before. I would like in particular to thank those head teachers who are, through the new school direct programme of teacher training, recruiting more superb new graduates to teach in our state schools. But while the quality of our teachers is improving, today’s league tables sadly show that that is not enough. When people ask why, if teachers are better than ever, we need to press ahead with further reform to the system, today’s results make the case more eloquently than any number of speeches.

Since the 1990s, our performance in these league tables has been at best stagnant, at worst declining. In the latest results, we are 21st in the world for science, 23rd for reading and 26th for mathematics. For all the well intentioned efforts of past Governments, we are still falling further behind the best-performing school systems in the world. In Shanghai and Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong, indeed even in Taiwan and Vietnam, children are learning more and performing better with every year that passes, leaving our children behind in the global race.

That matters because business is more mobile than ever, and employers are more determined than ever to seek out the best-qualified workers. Global economic pressures, far from leading to a race to the bottom, are driving all nations to pursue educational excellence more energetically than ever before, and today’s league tables show that nations that have had the courage radically to reform their education systems, such as Germany and Poland, have significantly improved their performance and their children's opportunities.

There is no single intervention or single nation which has all the answers to our education challenges, but if we look at all the high-performing and fast-improving education systems, certain common features recur. There is an emphasis on social justice and helping every child to succeed. There is a commitment to an aspirational academic core curriculum for all students. There is a high level of autonomy from bureaucracy for head teachers. There is a rigorous system of accountability for performance, and head teachers have the critical power to hire who they want, remove underperformers and reward the best with the recognition that they deserve.

Those principles have driven this coalition’s education reforms since 2010. The first reform imperative is securing greater social justice. It is notable that many of the high-performing jurisdictions set demanding standards for every child, whatever their background, and Germany in particular has improved its standing in these league tables by doing more to promote greater equity to ensure more children from poorer backgrounds catch up with their peers.

The good news from the PISA research is that in England we have one of the most progressive and socially just systems of education funding in the world. But we in the coalition Government believe that we must go further to help the most disadvantaged. That is why we have made funding even more progressive with the pupil premium, extended free pre-school education to the most disadvantaged two year-olds and changed how we hold schools accountable so that they have to give even greater attention to the performance of poor children. I hope that today the Opposition will acknowledge these steps forward and give their support to our reforms.

The second reform imperative is a more aspirational curriculum. In successful Asian nations all students are introduced to more stretching mathematical content at an earlier age than has been the case here; and in the fastest-improving European nation, Poland, every child now follows a core academic curriculum to the age of 16. Our new national curriculum is explicitly more demanding, especially in mathematics. It is modelled on the approach of high-performing Asian nations such as Singapore. The mathematical content is matched by a new level of ambition in technology, with the introduction of programming and coding in the national curriculum for the first time.

In our drive to eliminate illiteracy, we have introduced a screening check at age six to make sure that every child is reading fluently. Our introduction of the English baccalaureate, which is awarded to students who secure GCSEs in English, maths, the sciences, languages and history or geography, matches Poland by embedding an expectation of academic excellence for every 16 year- old. I hope that today the Labour Front Bench will confirm its support for our new curriculum, the phonics screening check and the English baccalaureate. Our children deserve to have these higher standards adopted universally.

The third reform imperative is greater autonomy for head teachers. There is a direct correlation in these league tables between freedom for heads and improved results. That is why we have dramatically increased the number of academies and free schools and given heads more control over teacher training, continuous professional development and the improvement of underperforming schools. By giving heads control of teacher recruitment, the School Direct programme has improved the quality of new teachers. The creation of more than 300 teaching schools has put our most outstanding heads in charge of helping existing teachers to do even better. The academies programme has allowed great heads, such as those in the Harris and Ark chains, to take over underperforming schools, such as Downhills Primary in Tottenham. I hope that today the Front Bench will signal its support for these reforms and show that, like us, it trusts our outstanding heads to drive improvement.

The fourth pillar of reform is accountability. Those systems which have autonomy without accountability often underperform, but accountability has to be intelligent. That is why we have sharpened Ofsted inspections, recruited more outstanding serving teachers to inspect schools and demanded that underperforming schools improve far faster. The old league table system relied too much on a narrow measurement of C passes at GCSE, which generated the wrong incentives and wrote too many children off. We have changed league tables to ensure that every child’s progress is rewarded and ensured that children are not entered early, or multiple times, for GCSEs simply to influence league tables. I hope that today the Opposition Front Bench will endorse those changes and join us in demanding greater rigour and higher standards from all schools.

The fifth pillar of reform is freedom for heads to recruit and reward the best. Shanghai, the world’s best-performing education system, has a rigorous system of performance-related pay. We have given head teachers the same freedoms here. I hope that today we can have a clear commitment from all sides of the House to support those brave and principled heads who want to pay the best teachers more.

The programme of reform we have set out draws on what happens in the best school systems, because we want nothing but the best for our children. Unless we can provide them with a school system that is one of the best in the world, we will not give them the opportunities they need to flourish and succeed. That is why it is so important that we have a unified national commitment to excellence in all our schools for all our pupils”.

I commend the Statement to the House.

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[Lord Nash]

I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s considered analysis. With her experience, she probably knows better than to suggest that we can be expected to have turned round the education system after only three and a half years, as Andreas Schleicher acknowledged only yesterday. It is far too early to form a verdict on the coalition’s reforms. However, we have stopped the decline. Between 2000 and 2009 we fell from fourth to 16th in science, eighth to 28th in maths, and seventh to 25th in literacy. We have now stabilised at 23rd in literacy and 26th in maths, although we have done worse in science.

I agree that the Labour Government spent 87% more in real terms on the education system, but it is all about what results you get rather than how much money you spend. We must have a concept of value for money. It does not look as though we got very good value for money. We are now building schools at half the cost per pupil of Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme; we are building many more purpose-designed schools, and more quickly.

I acknowledge that Teach First was a splendid idea. We have expanded that dramatically. I acknowledge that the academy programme was a splendid idea—indeed, I would not be here if it was not for the academy programme. The London Challenge was an excellent example of co-operation between schools. That is why we have taken these ideas and expanded them dramatically; for example, from 200 to 3,500 academies, working together in close geographic local clusters, with schools supporting each other locally, which we believe is the only model. We agree entirely with the collaborative approach.

The unqualified teacher story seems to run and run. It is a bit of a red herring. We have brought the numbers down to 14,800 from 17,800 under Labour. It is still a tiny proportion. It is interesting that the area that the noble Baroness refers to—London, which had some of the best results—has the highest incidence of unqualified teachers. It is also true that we have a high incidence of unqualified teachers in our academies and free schools because we have nationalised quite a few independent schools. However, we are interested in the best teachers with the best qualifications and now 75%—up from 61%—of our teachers enter the profession with a 2.1 or better.

However, it would be so much better if, rather than throwing stones at each other, we all acknowledged that these PISA statistics are a wake-up call for our school system and that we should work together in a unified way to improve it. I am delighted that the noble Baroness supports some of our reforms. I know that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education would love to know which reforms, and I look forward to discussing that with her further.

The PISA report contains an extremely intelligent analysis, which I recommend to everyone in this House. In particular, it states that the schools that succeed are those with high levels of autonomy and accountability—both of which the Government are focusing on—and a core academic curriculum.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for repeating the Statement. I agree with him 100% that the time for throwing stones at each other, as he puts it, should be past. That is something that schools get absolutely fed up with.

The Statement highlights the importance of head teachers. We all know that strong leadership in a school produces the results and the progress that we all want. Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore have been mentioned. What they have in common are focused and clear ways in which to become a head teacher, to train a head teacher and to put somebody into that role. Does my noble friend agree that we need to look carefully at how we prepare people for school leadership, that we cannot just have any unqualified person leading a school and that there needs to be proper training? On reflection, was it perhaps the wrong decision to do away with the leadership college and the leadership qualification for aspiring head teachers?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with my noble friend that we need to grow a new generation of head teachers. We are going to be short of head teachers because many of them are retiring. We will have to promote younger people, which is why it is so encouraging that so many more highly qualified people are motivated to become head teachers. Many of the academy chains have very sophisticated training programmes for their heads to ensure that we grow the next generation of head teachers.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, the Statement made no reference to one issue which must have caused a certain amount of buzzing in the DfE yesterday. His ministerial colleague, Liz Truss, addressed the Publishers Association and very largely deplored the disappearance —which may surprise many of us—of the textbook from the classrooms of both primary and secondary schools. I was astonished to learn from a Telegraph report today that, as compared with 10% use of textbooks in primary schools here, Germany and Poland have around 80% or 90%. Only 8% of pupils in English secondary schools have textbooks in their hands, whereas the figure for Finland is 80%. I compare the UK largely with other European countries because of the huge cultural differences which make comparison with Taiwan and Hong Kong a bit difficult. In view of what Liz Truss said yesterday, why does the Minister think that there is such a gap between our countries and other European countries in the simple use of textbooks in classes? Does he think that this gap between the two lots of teachers and the two lots of procedures may account for our disappointing performance and the much more hopeful performance that he has drawn attention to in Poland and Germany?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with the noble Lord. I think that the answer to his questions in brief, although I will elaborate, is that this situation has been caused by a lack of rigour in the curriculum and in teaching methodology. I agree entirely that this lack of rigour and methodology, which is expressed in one way in textbooks, is one of the reasons why we have declined. One also needs to look at workbooks. In far too many state-maintained schools, there is a complete absence of workbooks. We are finding that some of the much more successful schools—not just academies but maintained schools—insist that all their pupils have a workbook. A workbook is something pupils can be proud of and it can be marked. Pupils do more homework and they get more feedback. In all senses, we need to instil more rigour in our school system.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government’s reforms borrow more from Sweden than from any other jurisdiction, but the position of Sweden in these tables is going backwards. As we have heard, the reforms also built on what the previous Government did on academies. Therefore, regardless of politics—and I regret the highly political tone of the Statement—should we not learn from the top three, from Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore? There, parents are much more involved in their child’s learning, and those jurisdictions are designing-in collaborative problem-solving to meet the needs of employers. Given that those skills will be tested by PISA in 2015, how does the Minister think our children will fare then, given the Government’s new emphasis on rote learning and individual testing?

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[Lord Nash]

I know that the noble Lord is very experienced in these matters. I was recently visited by a delegation from Sweden consisting of MPs and others involved in education. They were here to study our accountability system because they acknowledge that they have half of the equation right—autonomy—but not the other half. They have been impressed with what they have seen here in Ofsted and our move to a more rigorous accountability system in examination analysis. That is why they acknowledged that they have failed; I do not think that it has anything to do with autonomy.

We are learning from Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, particularly in maths. We sent 50 of our head teachers, with their heads of department in maths and science, to Shanghai earlier this year. I agree entirely that parents need to get more involved. When I first got involved in the academy programme, we had one ghastly meeting in Pimlico with all the antis. They were clearly not representative of parents, so to reach out to the parents, we organised eight one-hour meetings in Camberwell and Brixton, where the parents lived, to tell them what we were doing. There were 1,300 pupils so you would think that there would be 2,500 parents. I would like to ask noble Lords to guess how many parents turned up but I will tell you—one parent came to all eight meetings. We now have more than 90% attendance at parents’ meetings, because all state schools must now send out a message to their parents that if their children go to that school, they must turn up. That is what happens in independent schools and we must try to replicate that in the state system. I entirely agree with the noble Lord.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I follow on from the wise, perceptive question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, and my noble friend’s response to it. Is not one secret a proper, disciplined framework in every school? In 10 years as a schoolmaster and 40 years visiting schools in my constituency, it was always the case that where there was proper discipline—allied to parental enthusiasm, I would add with reference to the noble Lord, Lord Knight—and children could learn in a disciplined framework, they made real progress. Should not our primary aim when we are talking of rigour be to ensure that there is real, rigorous discipline in every school?

[Lord Nash]

I agree entirely with my noble friend. Across the academy system a great many sponsors have taken over schools where, frankly, the previous behaviour was very poor indeed, and put in place a very effective behaviour management system. I saw a behaviour management system in America which I thought was particularly effective. You start the pupils on the left-hand side of the page, where they basically behave because they will get into trouble if they do not, and you slowly move them across to the right-hand side of the page, where they behave because that is the society they want. They want a calm society in their school because that is the only way they can learn. More sophisticated behaviour management systems are coming into place. We have strengthened teachers’ ability to confiscate mobile phones, particularly in the appalling incidents of sexting, and given more power for detention, and so on, but I agree entirely with my noble friend.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

Can the Minister confirm that although this is December 2013, the tests on those half a million children actually took place in 2012? I have to say that it is ludicrous beyond belief, and silly, for my friends in the Opposition to complain that it is the fault of the coalition. Two years is a nanosecond for change and it is ludicrous to make such connections. I would argue that although the Secretary of State went a bit far in his Statement in throwing stones, it is also a case of “What’s sauce for the goose”.

I do not go on many school visits these days but I was in a secondary school about a month ago. It has been dramatically turned around in the last six months, since a new head arrived. He described his office to me as being set out like a war room, with all the key five factors. I asked him, “What about the staff turnover in this period?”. There were very few changes; I had walked around the school and talked to the staff as well. In other words, the dramatic changes in the school had been brought about by leadership—not by going in to clear out teachers but by leading them. Even this head will therefore require help in future. I take the point about the leadership of schools being absolutely crucial. You cannot just put the best teacher in the role of head teacher. They have to be trained to lead but it can be done. Finally, if this is a wake-up call to the schools, it is equally a wake-up call to the governing bodies. More work needs to be done there because if governing bodies take the issues seriously, it is more likely that parents will take them seriously.

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments. He made his opening point extremely eloquently and I think we all realise that you do not turn around an ocean liner in a couple of years. He is absolutely right and we should all just avoid having that conversation in the future.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford]

If the Minister will give way, I have to clarify the points I made in my opening speech. It was not that I expected the Government to have turned around a tanker. What I said was that substantial progress had been made during the years of the Labour Government, and necessarily so because of the state of the education system in 1997. In their three and a half years, the Government could have built on that progress rather than starting again with some very destructive reforms.

[Lord Nash]

We will have to beg to disagree on this because I do not see our going from seventh to 25th in literacy, from eighth to 28th in science or from fourth to 16th in maths as progress.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, referred to a war room. I look forward to him perhaps taking me to visit that school at some stage. I entirely agree on the question of leadership. I was particularly impressed when I visited the Perry Beeches schools in Birmingham, which are run by an inspirational head, Liam Nolan, and by how he has managed to turn around a number of failing schools. He has not only kept in place people who were clearly not performing well under the previous regime but promoted them to very senior positions.

I entirely agree, too, about governing bodies. Whether the school is a local authority maintained school, a church school or an academy chain, real decisions can often be made in the governing bodies and we are focusing much more on them. We have recently made it absolutely clear that governing bodies should focus on a few key things: the vision and strategy of the school, holding the head to account for the attainment and progression of pupils, the performance management of his or her staff, and the finance. We need smaller governing bodies, in many cases, but with many more of the appropriate skills.

[Baroness Humphreys (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his Statement. For many years I worked as a teacher in Wales, so it was with a great deal of sadness and disappointment that I read the PISA results for Wales today. Wales performed worse than the OECD average in all measures: maths, science and reading. Since 2009, Welsh pupils have slipped from 40th to 43rd in maths, from 30th to 38th in science, and from 38th to 41st in reading—a disastrous performance which shows Wales to be the poorest performing nation in the UK.

All this makes the ambition of Wales’s Labour First Minister to be in the top 20 by 2015 almost laughable, if it were not so serious. This is the culmination of nearly 15 years of Labour control of the struggling Welsh education system. I recognise that education is a devolved matter, but will the Minister be having discussions with Ministers from the devolved nations to ensure that standards improve throughout the United Kingdom?

[Lord Nash]

I know that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education is deeply concerned about the situation in Wales, which—quite deliberately, it seems—lacks many of the systems of accountability and rigour that we are putting in place here. My noble friend puts it extremely well: if anyone wants a case study of how not to do it, Wales seems to be it. We would be happy to have conversations with them if they were prepared to engage in conversations.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

When he read out the Statement, the Minister began by paying tribute to the work and dedication of teachers, which is the right thing to do. I hope that it was meant sincerely, not by him but by the Secretary of State who wrote it. However, I have to say to him, although I am sure that he will know this if he visits schools, as I know he does, that that respect and affection is not reciprocated by teachers up and down the country. He will know that dedicated and committed teachers see the Secretary of State as being arrogant and failing to value the commitment and quality of teachers, their advice and their experience, which in my judgment is a very bad position for any Secretary of State to take. They do not feel valued and understood by him, and they do not feel, when they express strongly held opinions, based on experience, about how and what to teach and how to manage schools, that they are respected by this Government.

I will not say that I modestly suggest this because it is not a modest suggestion, but I simply suggest as a matter of common sense that if the Secretary of State wants to make changes in our education system, then a fundamental principle of management on his part should be to get on his side the people who have to implement those changes and improvements.

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[Lord Nash]

I think that the Secretary of State wants to improve the lot particularly of underprivileged children in this country far more than he wants to be liked. He greatly values the advice of teachers and constantly has teachers and head teachers in and out of his office. It is a fact that where you have an organisation—I have seen this in business many times—that needs to go through change because it has slipped so dramatically down the international tables, we have to make a lot of changes. That is why we are making a lot of changes quickly, because we have slipped so fast. People are always reluctant to embrace change, and I understand that teachers feel under pressure from so much change. However, we have to do it if we are to do the right thing for our teachers. Both my right honourable friend and I constantly have conversations with head teachers around the country that go along the lines of, “I know you’re unpopular and I know that teachers don’t like it, but you’re doing the right thing. Keep going”.

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, can my noble friend give us a little more insight into the view that he takes of the comparison between examination systems—their design, their management and use—in competitor countries? How do they differ from ours, and is that in itself one element that needs to be improved?

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful to my noble friend for that question. We have looked at examination systems across the world in improving the examination systems in this country. We have reduced, or rather will be reducing—again, going to the point about turning the ship around quickly, a lot of these reforms have not even come into effect yet—the number of modules and the amount of coursework and continuous assessment in exams, and we will be reducing the scandal of equivalence that went on in recent years. You could take a higher diploma in construction, a subject that even someone as hamfisted as myself would probably pass because there were no exams at all and it was entirely continuous assessment, and it counted for four GCSE equivalents. I could give noble Lords many other examples of exams that were massively overrated, doing their pupils no favours at all and not valued by employers. We have taken into account a lot of what we have seen in international systems in our reform of the exam system.