Education, Skills and Training

Margaret Greenwood Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)]

The Queen’s Speech set out the Government’s intention to publish a life chances strategy, which I understand will be separate from, but run alongside, their new indicators for child poverty, which are being introduced as part of the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. What could be more fundamental to improving life chances than improving access to education, skills and training?

On Friday, I hosted an all-party group event on adult education and its future at the Carr Bridge community centre in Woodchurch in my constituency. The event was part of a piece of research being carried out by the Workers Educational Association and the University of Warwick, and it brought together experts in the field from right across Merseyside, including Wirral Metropolitan College, Wirral Council, Unite the union and staff from Ganneys Meadow nursery school who voluntarily provide GCSE maths classes for parents, because they know the value of the trusted community setting.

The conversation that afternoon was rich and valuable, and I wish to focus on two areas that were discussed with real passion. The first was the provision of literacy and numeracy classes to people with no qualifications or with low levels of qualification, and the second was the provision of a broad curriculum for all adults with a desire to learn and the need for us to rediscover a vision for lifelong learning in our country.

We know that there is a real problem with basic literacy and numeracy skills among adults in this country. The latest survey published by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2011 found that nearly 15% of 16 to 65-year-olds—around 5 million people—are functionally illiterate. That is a really damning indictment of one of the richest countries on earth. A total of 23.7% of participants in the survey—around 8 million people—lacked basic numeracy skills.

In 2013, an OECD study of 24 developed countries ranked England 11th in literacy and 17th in numeracy for people aged 16 to 65. Those aged between 16 and 24 fared even worse, being ranked 22nd and 21st respectively.

Last week, when I was walking down a road I saw a couple of children out playing. They were probably aged between three and four years old. All of a sudden, their mother appeared, tearing down the street and swearing at them to get back indoors. As I looked at them, it was clear to me that there was no future for those children. Their mother needs help.

I know from my own experience as a former adult basic skills tutor the powerful impact that the provision of free, friendly and accessible classes in the community setting can have on the lives of people who struggle to find the confidence to read and to write. I know, too, the powerful self-esteem that can flow when an adult is given the opportunity to learn—after all, we have all experienced that ourselves.

Seeing the mother and her children reminded me of the scene in “A Christmas Carol” where the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge two children emerging from under his robe. He describes them as

“wretched, abject, frightful, hideous and miserable.”

Scrooge asks Spirit, “Are they yours?” The Spirit replies:

“They are man’s…This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy…beware ignorance the most.”

That message is as true today as it was in Dickens’s time. We all know the adage, “Teach the mother and father and you will teach the child.” If we are to break cycles of deprivation, we must provide opportunities to learn in accessible community settings free of charge. To pass through this world unable to read and write with confidence is to experience a deprivation that few of us in this House can truly imagine. As one of the richest countries on earth, it is unacceptable that we allow this need to go unmet, yet the figures are telling. The total cut in the adult skills budget between 2010 and 2011 and 2015 and 2016 is around 37% in real terms, which has decimated local services, hence the need for voluntary provision, which I find unacceptable.

Then there is the matter of how we value those who teach basic literacy and numeracy. I know myself that tutors are very often on insecure and temporary contracts, and yet the work that they do is often as important as that of psychologists, nurses and language therapists. We need to provide a clear career structure and training for these basic skills tutors that properly rewards them and the work that they do.

Let me now turn to the matter of wider adult education provision, including those classes for which there is no requirement to take an exam or acquire a qualification. Back in the 1970s, we could walk past any number of schools in the evening and see the lights ablaze with classes full of people studying art, maths, Spanish, history, woodwork and yoga—the list was endless. We all recognise the value of having access to a swimming pool to maintain our physical health. Why do we not pay similar attention to public provision to foster creativity and maintain mental health? Why do we not value education for education’s sake and understand that some people want to learn without working to an exam? This is particularly important in an ageing society in which social isolation is a growing and significant public health issue. Education has an important role to play in tackling that. I believe we should foster a positive culture of lifelong learning so that we can all continue to learn, grow and share with others in our communities. To ignore our creativity and our ability to learn is to deny our society its full potential and deny all of us our humanity.

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[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

This is the climbdown Queen’s Speech or the “as much as we can muster together” Queen’s Speech. It is a Queen’s Speech so fearful of its own destiny—or should I say demise?—that it seeks hardly any powers at all. Nowhere is that more stark than in its flimsy offerings on education and skills.

The Prime Minister said only a few weeks ago that

“academies for all…will be in the Queen’s Speech.”—[Official Report, 27 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 1422.]

Yet the word “academy” did not even appear in Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech.

The Government had one big idea for education: to force all schools, against their wishes, to become academies. That has been dropped as quickly as it was unveiled to shore up the Chancellor’s lacklustre Budget. There remains a schools Bill, but it is hardly worth the paper it is written on and raises more questions than it answers. If that is the sum total of the new thinking of the first Conservative majority Government in more than 20 years, their education policy is in a very dire state indeed. In the process, their flip-flopping has wasted the valuable time and energy not just of the Department, which is failing to get the basics right, but of school leaders, parents and teachers around the country, who are in open revolt at the Government’s approach.

What a crying shame that after so many years of real progress in education by successive Governments, particularly the last Labour one, this Government are now presiding over a school system in crisis. It is mired by chaos and confusion created by incessant ministerial meddling, and the basics of sufficiency in quality teachers, school places and budgets are woefully lacking. For the first time in a long time, education is right back up there as an issue of public concern.

As we have heard in the excellent speeches by my hon. Friends the Members for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) and for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), and by many Conservative Members, there is relief at the Government’s decision to U-turn on forced academisation. However, the Government seem to have missed the point of the wide alliance that their plans have forged. It is not simply about the politically inept idea of compelling already good and outstanding schools to become academies against their wishes; it is about wider concerns about the desire for a fully academised system—without the underpinning evidence, capacity or robust oversight and accountability—leading to many more Perry Beeches or E-ACTs. Many of those concerns remain, but the Government have failed to address any of them or to produce any clear evidence. Vague assertions and loose statistics that have no correlation to cause and effect simply will not do.

The evidence remains patchy. Analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that only three of the biggest academy chains got a positive value-added rating and that just one of the 26 biggest primary sponsors achieved results above the national average. In areas where there is still underachievement at GCSE, most or all secondary schools are already academies. The highest-performing part of our school system is in primary, where more than 80% of schools are maintained and rated good or outstanding, and where most of the Education Secretary’s 1.4 million good new places have been created. There is simply no evidence that academisation in itself leads to school improvement. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) made many of those points, and my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Julie Cooper) made some excellent points about the fragmented and poor planning that the school system creates. That is why we now have a shell of a schools Bill and a Government with absolutely nothing else to say. I ask the Secretary of State again to get the independent analysis, take stock, ensure that best practice—not worst practice—is being spread and develop high-quality chains to take on more schools before seeking more powers to accelerate academisation.

I support the Secretary of State’s plans to require maths to be taught until the age of 18. Indeed, I think that that should be extended to English, too. But her ambition will fail completely if she does not take urgent action to tackle the chronic shortage of teachers, particularly in maths.

[Margaret Greenwood]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s failure to get to grips with the retention of schoolteachers is hurtling us towards crisis?

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[Lucy Powell]

The right hon. Lady shakes her head, but that is the reality on the ground. I could give her a number of examples of that happening in every part of the country.

The Government could have ensured a robust and consistent testing and assessment framework. Instead, we have seen chaos and confusion—calamity after calamity on SATs with baseline testing being abandoned, and new and radically different GCSEs still not ready just weeks before they are due to begin. Today’s kids are guinea pigs for the Government’s chaotic experiments. In every other public sphere, Ministers are championing devolution, yet in education they are going in the opposite direction.

[Margaret Greenwood]

My hon. Friend is being very generous with her time. Does she agree with a point put to me on Friday by a senior police officer on Merseyside that the Government are failing to provide an education that develops our children, particularly those who are not going to gain high academic qualifications, and that that is spilling over in the creation of lots of problems for our police and social services?

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point about the narrowing of the curriculum that we have seen under this Government.

This week’s IPPR North report warns of the growing regional divide. As my hon. Friends the Members for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) and for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods) highlighted, Ministers cannot build a northern powerhouse or a midlands engine of growth if they take away the levers that communities are using to tackle the deep-rooted causes of low attainment. However, the real headline of the report is just how well London has done. Why is that? It is—to name but a few reasons—because of the London challenge, significant resources and the development of a pool of world-class teachers. The Government seem to be ignoring all those lessons. Indeed, they are putting such achievements at risk by taking away further resources.

This is a programme from a Government who are unable to persuade even their own Members of the merits of their proposals, who are out of ideas for schools and education and who talk of improved life chances but whose actions make life much harder for those with the least. The Government’s education record has been one of structural change at the expense of standards, chronic teacher shortages, a schools places crisis, falling budgets and assessment in complete and utter meltdown. Their own record is now coming home to roost, and on it they will be judged.