Improving Education Standards

Luke Graham Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Neil O'Brien]

That was an important intervention from the hon. Lady. I do not agree that those subjects were chosen on ideological grounds. Funnily enough, when we look at the longitudinal earnings and outcomes data, those kind of hard sciences and subjects are the ones that are important gateways to the professions, which will lead to higher earnings. On her point about design and technology, if we were to look again at the subjects and include something else, that would be one of the first things that I would consider.

[Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a comprehensive speech. He seems to be focusing a lot on England though. Obviously, this is the United Kingdom Parliament and improving educational standards is especially important in Scotland, where our international standards, particularly in maths and science, are falling. We are falling in the international tables, whereas other parts of the UK are rising. It would be interesting to hear—perhaps he will come on to this shortly—why he thinks that is and why Scotland is being left behind, while the rest of the UK is taking a step forward.

[Neil O'Brien]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important intervention. I was going to come on to that, but I will deal with it now. Education, and the quality of Scotland’s education system, was Scotland’s pride and joy. This is one of the important things that everyone in the country feels very strongly about. I am from Huddersfield, and all of the rest of my family are from Glasgow, so it is something that we all care about. Not having some of new Labour’s reform agenda in Scotland is one reason why school standards in Scotland have gone off the boil. The other problem, of course, is that because of the decisions on higher education funding of the Scottish National party Government—unfortunately there is no one here from the SNP to represent them—pupils from more deprived areas are now twice as likely to go to university if they are in England than if they are in Scotland. That is a radical unfairness in our country caused by the policies of the SNP Government.

Let me just finish the point about rigour. I will say something which Labour Members may agree with. We can restore rigour—we have done that and it is an important move—without having to have terminal exams. I am quite a supporter of modular exams. Young people’s mental health is an increasingly important issue. Many young people I meet in schools feel strongly about it. There is not necessarily a connection between high standards in exams and terminal exams. I understand that there are pedagogical arguments for terminal exams, but there are also good arguments for modular ones as well.

One important reform—this is important in the context of improving teacher recruitment and teacher numbers; I am glad that there are 10,000 more teachers than there were in 2010—is to stop Ofsted being excessively overbearing. When I was the chair of governors at a London primary school, I was struck by the way in which everybody was being socialised into jumping every time Ofsted changed some tick box and we were all chasing around after Ofsted. There was a complaint from the Labour Front Bench earlier about some schools not being inspected particularly often by Ofsted. That is part of an approach that focuses on places where there are problems and does not hassle teachers unnecessarily with inspections that do not need to happen. I agree with the Government’s move towards assessing school improvement on progress, data and outcomes, rather than trying to reach into schools with occasional inspections every three years, as if that were the way to drive school improvement. The way towards school improvement is to have high-performing, multi-academy trusts; I will return to that point soon.

I disagree with Opposition Front Benchers about free schools. According to recent data, they are our highest-performing schools on the Progress 8 measure, phonics and key stage 1. One of the important things about free schools is that they allow innovation into our system, and those innovations can be quite different and from different pedagogies. For example, School 21—set up by new Labour adviser Peter Hyman—has a huge focus on oracy, which the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) mentioned earlier. That is an interesting innovation. It is a high-performing school from one angle. Michaela Community School, set up by Katharine Birbalsingh, is also a brilliantly high-performing free school that is bringing new ideas into the education agenda, with a strong emphasis on order and discipline. This shows that we can achieve high results in different ways. Free schools have let lots of new ideas into the system that can then percolate through to other schools.

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[Neil O'Brien]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman; he held the door open for me earlier this week, and has done so again verbally today.

Kevin Conway was a guy who turned around Greenhead College—the college I attended—in Huddersfield, which had been rather underperforming. He was a great and totally uncompromising individual who achieved amazing things in my sixth-form college and transformed the lives of generations of people who grew up in Huddersfield.

[Luke Graham]

My hon. Friend is making a fantastic point about great thinkers in education. Earlier this week, I went to a YouTube event where I was able to see the rapping teacher, who is now getting about 4 million hits a week on some of his online content, which is helping students across the United Kingdom and internationally to make progress and improve their grade results—something that I am sure my hon. Friend would welcome.

[Neil O'Brien]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for intervening in such a friendly way. The rapping teacher is clearly able to speak in whole finished paragraphs, while I am barely able to articulate a sentence.

I really just wanted to say that Kevin Conway was an inspiration to me and really did amazing things for the town of Huddersfield—the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) was briefly here a moment ago, but has had to go—through his uncompromising approach. He did not have an ideological approach; it was just an insistence on very high standards. Through that great work, he really did change the lives of a lot of people.

Let us move on from the debacle of my attempt to pay tribute to my old principal to a point of policy and boring stuff that I can talk about without welling up. When one visits technical colleges, one always sees the potential. I was in South Leicestershire College just the other day visiting the public services class—the wonderful young people who are going to go off and become firefighters and police officers.

The Government should look again at the whole issue of GCSE resits in FE colleges, because the move to FE and a more work-like environment—I particularly like apprenticeships, but FE is also an important part of the mix—is such an important part of the process for young people who perhaps did not get on with school. These people may have felt like it was not for them and that they were not achieving. The thought behind it was right—that everyone needs a basic grounding in English and maths—but I increasingly think that the GCSE is just not the right thing. Almost everybody who fails it a first time goes on to fail it a second time, and that is very discouraging for young people. It is not the right qualification to ask them to do. Instead, we should look at offering some kind of “maths and English for the citizen” type of qualification.

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[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien). I enjoyed so much of his speech, especially the passionate and kind tribute he paid to his principal. I think that everyone in the House found that extremely moving. He was clearly an inspirational man, so I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. Sadly, I do not know if we are going to continue to agree as I make the rest of my speech—but we started well.

Back in 2011, when I saw the school system that the coalition Government were creating, I remember standing at a rally and asking the question, “In this brave new world of the educational system that the Government are creating, what happens to the children no school wants?” The combination of a high-stakes accountability system and reduced school funding has created a perverse incentive for schools to off-roll and discourage certain children from attending mainstream schools. Parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities are in despair. I am quite sure that every hon. Member here has had parents in their constituency surgery giving them the same story. Some parents are forced into spending thousands of pounds trying to get the resources promised them in their education, health and care plans.

As evidenced by the recent Barnardo’s report, our excluded, or off-rolled, children are vulnerable to becoming involved in criminal activity, or to being exploited or groomed. This is the true educational legacy of the coalition Government. They wasted billions on ideologically driven pet academy projects, a school curriculum that does not meet the needs of all our children, an accountability system that has destroyed teaching careers and has no way of recognising or valuing inclusive schools, and a school system that fails too many of our most vulnerable children.

Although I am happy to stand here and talk about improving school standards, I will focus on the forgotten children and evaluate what standard of schooling they are getting. For Members who are not aware of this, let me quote the Ofsted definition of off-rolling:

“The practice of removing a pupil from the school roll without a formal, permanent exclusion or by encouraging a parent to remove their child from the school roll, when the removal is primarily in the interests of the school rather than in the best interests of the pupil.”

I have been reading reports about this. Some of the suggested reasons for the rise in off-rolling include unintended incentives through school performance measures such as Progress 8 to remove lower-performing pupils from a school’s score and financial pressures on schools incentivising the removal of some children from the school roll. As I know from having been a teacher, it requires more resource to teach and help to develop children who are not performing as well as others than it does to teach a child who is very quick and understands things very easily.

Our Education Committee report—a cross-party report—said in its recommendations:

“An unfortunate and unintended consequence of the Government’s strong focus on school standards has led to school environments and practices that have resulted in disadvantaged children being disproportionately excluded, which includes a curriculum with a lack of focus on developing pupils’ social and economic capital. There appears to be a lack of moral accountability on the part of many schools and no incentive to, or deterrent to not, retain pupils who could be classed as difficult or challenging.”

That is, let us be honest, a diplomatic way of saying that off-rolling has been caused by the coalition Government’s changes to education since 2010.

We are talking about improving school standards, so let us look at what standard of education these children get—the ones who are kicked out of schools and not wanted. What happens to them? Research by Education Datalab published in January 2017 stated that

“outcomes for all groups of pupils who leave the roll of a mainstream school are poor, with only around 1% of children who leave to state alternative provision or a special school, and 29% of those who leave to a university technical college (UTC) or studio school, achieving five good GCSEs…there exists a previously unidentified group of nearly 20,000 children who leave the rolls of mainstream secondary schools to a range of other destinations for whom outcomes are also very poor, with only 6% recorded as achieving five good GCSEs”.

Who are the children being off-rolled? Ofsted says—it is not Labour saying this:

“Children with special educational needs, children eligible for free school meals, children looked after, and some minority ethnic groups are all more likely to leave their school.”

These children—our neediest children—are being failed by the system that this Government introduced, but there are signs of a fight-back by the profession.

I pay credit to the Association of School and College Leaders, which has recently established the Ethical Leadership Commission as the beginning of a process to articulate the ethical values that should underpin the UK’s education leaders. I call on the Government to do everything they can to support this and to look again at how the accountability measures can be changed to reward inclusive schools and heads who are genuinely trying to do the right thing.

We have looked at off-rolled children, so now let us look at improving school standards for children with special educational needs and disabilities. What happens to them? The Education Committee, on which I serve, is currently doing an enquiry into SEND, and we have heard powerful evidence from our witnesses. This is what one parent told us:

“I quickly understood the bigger picture, which was that I was dealing with a dysfunctional system of rationing in which the central criterion was which parents could push the hardest. Because I am a reasonably well-educated and well-resourced person who can read nine pages of text and spew out an approximation of them in two minutes…I could just about play the system successfully.”

Good for him, and he got the resources that his son needs, but what about all the children with special educational needs and disabilities whose parents do not know how to fight the system? What happens to them? How much support do they get? They are failed, excluded or encouraged to leave—that is what happens to them.

We cannot have a debate about improving school standards without also talking about funding, because funding matters. Only this week, the Headteachers Roundtable came to give evidence to the Education Committee. One of them, Laura McInerney, said, “Schools cannot afford to be inclusive.” She argued that restricted funding means that schools cannot afford crucial pastoral support for their children, and this is one of the main drivers behind exclusions. I do not think that schools have suddenly become crueller or teachers have suddenly become more unkind, but I know as a teacher that if I have 30 children in my class, I have problem behaviour with one or two of them and I have no resource in the rest of the school to support me with them, of course I am not going to want those children in my classroom.

We should be saying to schools, “Here are the resources to provide the pastoral support. Here are the resources to help those children deal with anger through anger management to enable them to stay in a mainstream setting.” These are the people who have gone, because when the funding cuts bite, schools cannot take away the teacher in front of the children in the classroom, so what do they do? I know that this happens in every constituency around the country—although I accept, looking at the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Luke Graham), that I do not know as much about Scotland. Pastoral support and teaching assistants go—that is what happens.

On 6 September this year, the National Association of Head Teachers published the results of a survey on SEND funding. Only 2% of respondents said that the top-up funding they received was sufficient to meet individual education, health and care plans or statements for pupils with SEND—just 2% got enough money to support children with special needs in their schools—and 94% said they were finding it harder to resource the support required than they did two years ago.

Katie Moore, the principal of Fullbrook School in the Chancellor’s constituency, recently gave an interview, because the Chancellor had visited her school and she wanted to talk about the impact of the cuts. She said:

“He saw on his visit to Fullbrook that we are desperate for enough money to support the basics”—

let alone the children with SEND—

“of our students’ curriculum and the fundamentals of a good education, not just what he described as ‘little extras’. We need an increase to ongoing core funding that addresses the cost of teachers and support staff. We need to close the funding gap left by the 8% real-terms cuts over the last five years that schools in his constituency and around the country are unable to meet.”

It is impossible to discuss improving school standards without addressing the basic need for increased funding of our schools. I want to pay tribute to the brave headteachers who have taken part in the “Worth Less?” campaign for more funding for their pupils. I was involved in the demonstrations back in 2011 with other teachers against what was happening to my profession, so I know that it is unprecedented for headteachers to march on Downing Street. Two thousand of them came, and they did not come waving banners and placards or blowing whistles, although part of me wishes they did. They came to simply ask the Government, “Give us enough money for our schools.”

[Luke Graham]

The hon. Lady says that those protests were unprecedented, but they have also been happening in Glasgow, where the pay award for teachers and headteachers is seen as insufficient. This is not a particular problem in her part of the United Kingdom, but right across it.

[Emma Hardy]

I would always argue for more funding for schools right across the United Kingdom, and the hon. Gentleman would have my support in arguing for that.

Let us look at what some schools that do not have the staffing resources are doing. If there is a problematic pupil in a classroom and a school does not have the resources—the pastoral support, the anger management and all the people I have mentioned—to deal with them, what does the school do? I am sure colleagues across the House know about the increasing use of isolation rooms for extended periods. I believe that this is partly fuelled by the need for a cheap solution to problematic behaviour. Schools do not have the resources to address the causes of the behaviour, so they treat the symptoms.

Even if we think, “Those kids deserve it. Put them in isolation—it’s good for them,” or some other macho comment that comes out from the Government every now and again, we surely cannot believe that these children are getting any kind of quality educational experience. In fact, the evidence shows that they are being given generic online resources instead of equivalent work, so while these children are in isolation, they might as well not be in school at all. They are missing weeks of learning. How will that help them? How will that improve schools standards?

I want to conclude by saying that it does not have to be this way. With adequate funding and local authority resourcing, local experts could come into schools and provide the crucial services that local authorities used to offer. I hope the hon. Member for Harborough agrees with me. All the specialists who are needed—speech therapists, educational psychologists, education welfare officers, school social workers; I could go on—could be provided at local authority level, to come into schools and support every child.

We could also look at reducing the demand for education, health and care plans by providing school-level support. I know from our Education Committee inquiry that one of the reasons parents are so desperate to get EHC plans is that they see it as a passport to accessing the funding and resourcing they need, but if we gave schools the money to start with, parents would not need to drag themselves to a tribunal and spend thousands of pounds trying to fight the system. They would have what their child needs in the school right there and then.

Fundamentally, we need to reform our accountability measures. We need to look at how we as a society can say to schools that include all children in their area, “We reward and recognise that you’re doing that, and we think it’s a good thing” because the current system does not. We should also get rid of the £6,000 notional funding for SEND and enable schools to have the money from the very beginning, rather than make them spend that first £6,000.

When I am told that education standards are improving, as I was when I sat and listened to the Minister for half an hour at the beginning of the debate, my challenge is: include all the children—add them all in. Let us look at every single one of them. How good does our system look if we include all the children who have been excluded, all the children who have been off-rolled, all the children in alternative provision and all the children who have been electively home-educated? Let us put them all in the mix—now tell me the coalition Government have done a good job.

If we want to improve education standards for all pupils, we need to break with the coalition’s ideology of the past and create and reward inclusive schools that are well-funded, well-resourced to provide the necessary support for all pupils and with the curriculum flexibility to adapt to every child’s need. We have the answer to the question I asked in 2011. The children that no school wants are rejected, marginalised, failed and left vulnerable to criminal activity. We reap what we sow, and it is time to change.