Educational Attainment: Boys

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, for initiating this debate and I particularly thank the House of Lords Library, the Sutton Trust and Teach First for sending briefings.

It is clear from all the research carried out that there is a real and continuing problem with the educational attainment of boys at state schools, particularly boys from disadvantaged backgrounds. My noble friend Lord Addington rightly said that there is no one silver bullet that will deal with the problem, but consideration of and action on a series of interventions, policies and practices may help.

Sometimes, we learn from our own experiences. I was head teacher of two primary schools, both in deprived communities. My last school was in Halewood, which was a white working-class community. It was a large primary school of 600 pupils. In a sense, we threw everything at those pupils to get them up to a good level of literacy and numeracy. Thanks to our success, our results in literacy and numeracy were above the national average, and we celebrated that fact, as did the five Ofsted inspections we had while I was there. But it used to always concern me that when my pupils left to go to a whole plethora of secondary schools, their results declined dramatically, and I never understood why.

I was interested in researching for this debate to come across Sutton Trust information which said among the various facts and figures that every year there are high-achieving boys at primary school—pupils scoring in the top 10% nationally in their key stage 2 tests—who five years later receive a set of GCSE results that place them outside the top 25% of pupils. How is that, with all the work carried out at primary level?

I can also tell noble Lords that a third of my staff were male teachers, and two were from ethnic backgrounds.

All that work is carried out at primary school. Two weeks ago I visited a primary school near Preston—I will not name the school—which is in a very deprived community. It is an oasis. It has a children’s centre linked to it and early years provision, all through a school purposely built by the local authority. I was really impressed. Ofsted rated it outstanding. It is an outstanding school in a desperately deprived community. I said to the head, “What happens to the pupils?”, and he reiterated what I just said: “Actually, sadly, they do not do as well in secondary education”.

So what is going on? I do not know the answer. I hear the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talk about poverty; I hear people talk about the importance of the home—of course, the home and poverty are important; of course, having role models is important. But we cannot sit around and wait for those things to happen; we have to do something now. There is no time to wait around for role models to become available if families are to get immediately out of the poverty trap. We need a plan of action to make sure that we succeed.

Early years provision is of course vital. It should not be about a national childminding service; there need to be trained staff who create stimulating, challenging learning environments and know the importance of learning through play. It is important that we develop those policies and strategies. Here is my starter for 10—I am suddenly conscious that I was rambling at the beginning and lost time. We need to use high-quality information about pupils’ current capabilities to select the best steps for their education and teaching. We need to use high-quality structured interventions to help pupils who are struggling with literacy. We need more highly qualified teachers—I do not think this has been mentioned—to teach in deprived schools. I am again indebted to the Sutton Trust research, which has shown that teachers in advantaged schools are more experienced than those in deprived schools. We should perhaps have our most experienced teachers in deprived schools. The research found that financial incentives and more time for lesson preparation would attract those experienced teachers to teach in deprived schools.

Let us implement targeted attainment improvement programmes. Let us continue to look at using the pupil premium. We must make better use of teaching assistants, who are a valuable resource to primary and secondary schools, and adopt evidence-based interventions to support teaching assistants in their small-group and one-to-one sessions. We need peer tutoring, one-to-one tuition, collaborative learning and effective setting of homework. I am sure that if we have a plan of action, we can turn things round.