Queen’s Speech

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, when we refer to staff shortages, a crisis in funding, creeping privatisation and a lack of morale among the staff are we talking about the NHS or our schools? Sadly, it is both. My noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Brinton will focus on health and social care. Since 2010, 140,000 fewer pupils are taking creative and technical GCSEs. That is a 21% fall in the very subjects that prepare our future engineers and creative minds, and we want to see the continued success of our creative industries. The arts and cultural industries in Britain are of huge and underrated importance. We are a global creative hub and need to remain so. My noble friends Lady Bonham-Carter and Lord Clement-Jones will be demonstrating later in the debate how best the terms of Brexit and our education and training policy can be designed to mitigate the impact and do the maximum to ensure the continuing development and growth of our creative economy in the future.

Most of your Lordships’ time will be taken up with Brexit, and there will probably be very little time to discuss other subjects, such as education. Talking about Brexit, one fact has already emerged. There has already been a 6% reduction in the number of EU nationals coming to UK universities. Imagine the millions of pounds lost to UK universities as a result.

Now that the general election dust has settled and the billion-pound deal has been sealed with the DUP, I suppose we can also breathe a collective sigh of relief that minority government realism has set in and some of the Government’s planned policies are no more. How pleasing it is to know that now the coalition policy of the pensions triple lock is safe, the coalition policy on free meals for key stage 1 primary school children is safe and the coalition policy of no more grammar schools is safe. Indeed, that news was slipped out by the Government on Tuesday.

The gracious Speech had little to say on education. There were just two lines:

“My Government will continue to work to ensure that every child has the opportunity to attend a good school and that all schools are fairly funded”.


Is there any noble Lord who does not want children to attend a good school or indeed to see all schools funded fairly?

Turning to education, which is my main area of interest, I shall begin by accentuating the positive. I congratulate the Government on the total lack of any reference to selection in schools. It is interesting to note that the word “grammar” did not appear in the Conservative manifesto. Even having bought the support of the DUP—which, by the way, also approves of selective education—there is no grammar school Bill. This underlines the fact that, even with such support, the Government are unwilling even to try to introduce their flagship education policy.

The Government’s education clothes in the manifesto were pretty threadbare, to say the least. After calling an election which secured a minority Government, there is, as I have said, just one fig-leaf paragraph on education in the Queen’s Speech, and it reveals neither imagination nor competence.

I shall focus on two issues which are significantly absent from the Queen’s Speech, but are two of the most critical facing our schools. The first issue, which will surprise no one, is funding. In spite of an attenuated consultation period, the fairer funding about which the Government have made such great claims has turned out to be unfairer funding, with schools having to reduce teaching staff, reduce non-teaching staff, cut subjects from the secondary curriculum and ask parents to pay for the free state education which we used to be proud of. The average primary school will lose £74,000 in real terms over the next four years, which is equivalent to two teachers, and the average secondary school will lose £291,000 in real terms, which is equivalent to six teachers.

To plug the funding shortage in our schools, an increasing number of heads are using the pupil premium—money that should have been spent on the most disadvantaged children. The Sutton Trust found that schools with the most disadvantaged intakes were more likely to make cuts to staff: almost half—47%—of heads in the most disadvantaged fifth of primary and secondary schools said they had cut teaching staff, compared with a third, 35%, in the least disadvantaged fifth of schools.

If we really want to give our children the best possible start in life, we cannot let the Government stretch our schools to breaking point. In the manifesto, the Government pledged to spend an additional £4 billion on schools to ensure that no school lost money as a result of the new formula. They intended to find this money by withdrawing free school meals for key stage 1 and giving every primary child toast for breakfast. Having achieved a minority Government, where will the Government find this £4 billion? Will they find it in the same place as the £1 billion sweetener they found for the DUP? Perhaps the Minister will enlighten us in his reply.

The Government repeatedly claim that school budgets have been protected and that they are spending more on schools than ever before. There are two flaws in this claim. The first is that while schools may have received more income, the increases do not match the additional costs they have to bear for teachers’ pensions, national insurance, oncosts and the apprenticeship levy. The second is that the school population is increasing and more pupils and students are having to be educated. You do not need a C in GCSE maths to work out that more pupils cost more to educate.

The second issue concerns the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers. As far as I can see, the word “teacher” does not appear in the Queen’s Speech at all. The crisis in teacher recruitment has now reached the stage where students are expected to take their GSCE in maths without ever being taught by a maths graduate. The national shortage of physics teachers is hardly likely to be solved by offering bursaries to graduates or trying to entice PhDs in physics into the classroom. There are few vacancies for design technology teachers—a subject vital to the creative industries and the economy and attractive to students—but the subject is disappearing from the curriculum as head teacher after head teacher shuts down his or her design and technology department. Even in subjects where, overall, there might be sufficient teachers, the lack of a national strategy in favour of “let the market decide” has created teacher recruitment cold spots. In September, some of our English coastal towns feel more like the tundra than the season of mellow fruitfulness.

The Government must take action to ensure that every child in every school is taught by well-trained and well-qualified teachers. Being well taught should not be a postcode lottery. This is one burning injustice on which the Government should act immediately.

I speak from personal experience when I say that our teachers are our education service’s greatest asset, as we said in our manifesto. However, we seem to find it easier to damn them with faint praise, if we praise them at all. It is time to establish a rapprochement between the Government and the teaching profession and a proper consensus about the way forward. The Government talk a lot about a world-class education system, but a Rolls-Royce cannot be made without top-class materials, state-of-the-art machine tools and high-quality technicians. Our schools need sufficient resources, state-of-the-art facilities and, above all, high-quality teachers.