Education and Adoption Bill

Lucy Frazer Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend has made a valuable point. All that we have here is yet more relentless focus on structural reform rather than on the real issues that are affecting our education system. To be fair, however, the Government do mention parents in the Bill: they mention removal of the parental voice.

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

Did the hon. Gentleman not hear the Secretary of State say that the definition of coasting would be based on pupil performance data?

[Tristram Hunt]

Does the hon. Lady mean the progress 8 data, the EBacc data, or the data relating to free school meals? Again, it is very unclear what the Conservatives are going for.

The tragedy is that we would like to support action to engage with coasting schools. My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) made a valuable point about how we should define a coasting school. A coasting school could be good or outstanding if one would expect greater achievements from its pupils. We want early intervention to deal with coasting schools. Intervention was part of the reason for the success of the London challenge programme which my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) did so much to deliver, and which did so much to increase attainment in the capital before the Government scrapped it.

It is not the job of Oppositions to give a blank cheque to Governments. We are seeing something similar to the Government’s collapsing Childcare Bill, in which they could not define the funding terms, could not say what constitutes full-time work, and could not explain child ratio rates. They should have done some work before introducing that Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I have listened with admiration to many of the maiden speeches made by hon. Members on both sides of this House and to the speeches of many new Members. Clearly, we have a breadth of experience in the education sector in this new Parliament, and that is so important.

There can be nothing controversial about a desire to give our children the best start in life, whatever their background and wherever they live, and this Bill seeks to do that. Although more than l million more children are in good or outstanding schools than was the case in 2010, 1.5 million pupils are still taught in schools that do not meet those necessary standards.

I would like to discuss three critical elements of the Bill. First, it rightly recognises that a mediocre education is not good enough. As parents, we all want the best for our children and our Government should strive to deliver it. This Bill acknowledges aspiration, ensuring that schools will regularly assess their own performance and standards, and that they must never be complacent.

The second point is about control. This Bill is not about taking powers away from schools, but about giving them autonomy—and quicker. If schools become academies, they will have greater control over what they teach, when they teach it and who teaches it. We must recognise that the best people to run schools are teachers, and the excellent work of those teachers must be recognised.

Finally, the third point is about the people who lead our schools and help others that are failing. We recognise that, in building good schools, we need good and inspirational teachers, and I hope the profession will welcome the use of expert teachers to help drive coasting schools forward. The 1,000 national leaders of education are a vital component of those plans. They are the outstanding headteachers who work with schools in challenging circumstances to support school improvement. We must support and enable less good schools to learn from the best. In that respect, I wish to mention a school in my own constituency. Bottisham Village College, an outstanding school, is helping a local school, Netherhall School, which is in need of improvement. That is the sort of collaborative action that nurtures development. To improve our schools, we need partnerships: between local and national Government; between outstanding schools and those that are failing and coasting; and between trusts and management. It is not by standing still and doing nothing that we will improve our standards—it is by taking action and working together.

When we talk about what we want from our own children and from our students, we talk about aspiration, about the importance of learning from others and about aiming high, not settling for mediocrity. Those principles apply to schools, too, and they are the principles at the heart of this Bill.