Education Performance

Margot James Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) on securing this extremely important debate. I shall try to make my comments even briefer than you have asked us to, Mr Rosindell. The debate has been very interesting and we have touched on a lot of issues to do with aspiration, but I just want to say a little about education for excellent pupils, a matter about which the Minister and I had a brief exchange on the Floor of the House only yesterday.

It is, I think, in a bid to dampen some of the political furore over tuition fees that fresh debate has recently emerged over access to our best universities. As everyone has been admitting which university they went to, I should say that I, too, was at Oxford but, as I had the misfortune—at least in the eyes of the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan)—of coming from a grammar school, I did not do a Mickey Mouse subject such as PPE, but read law—[Interruption.] Yes, I know, it has been downhill all the way from there.

It has been suggested that the Government would grant permission to charge more than £6,000 a year in fees only to universities willing to widen their intake, and suggestions of measures to avoid penalties have included lowering grade offers and taking background into account when handing out places. We all know that, in practice, that could mean preferring a less-qualified pupil from an inner-city comprehensive over a student with top grades from an independent school. It is not clear how that might objectively be regarded as fair or evidence-based, but I suspect that it was hoped that the airing of such plans might take the sting out of any accusations that the new fees system was making our higher education system too elitist.

I have long contended, and will continue to, that our education system cannot be elitist enough. For far too long, the British attitude has been one of slight embarrassment and discomfort at the notion of high performance, excellence and the pursuit of academic rigour. I am not sure that the rest of the world feels the same, at a time when the likes of India and China are relentlessly pushing forward in global league tables. The two economic superpowers of this century have the pursuit of excellence and academic rigour at the heart of their thinking.

The domestic access-regulation plans have also betrayed an expectation that politicians seem to have had in recent years that our higher education system should somehow miraculously make up for the lack of genuine attainment by children in their primary and secondary-school years, particularly in the state sector. If universities fail to take in students who are not up to the mark, we blame not a child’s upbringing or education but the university itself for being too exclusive.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) and I were almost contemporaries at Oxford, and he will remember the outreach efforts that our colleges made almost three decades ago, which have continued—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman went up in 1985 and I went up in 1984, so it was almost three decades ago. Even at that time, tremendous efforts were made by the student union and, more importantly, by colleges via their tutors, to open up access. It is worth putting that on the record.

I do not believe that universities have an innate bias towards students from independent schools, but our top institutions are international leaders with worldwide reputations for excellence, which they aspire to maintain. In their admissions policies, they most pride themselves on recruiting the brightest and best globally. If the brightest and best have a tendency to come from a particular sort of school, we might be wise first to examine the deep shortcomings of the state sector.

That the private education sector has so flourished in recent years is a mark of how many parents have lost faith in the state’s ability to deliver their child a rigorous, thorough and excellent education. When articulate, active parents turn away, local state schools lose the key stakeholders that have traditionally helped to drive improvement. As a result, the poorest and most vulnerable children suffer, and they will not be helped by the state’s facilitating places for them at the best universities if they do not have the tools to make use of such places.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

I cannot make a lengthy intervention, but my mind has been shifted somewhat, on the topic that my hon. Friend is addressing, by a visit to King’s College London, one of the universities in his constituency. I urge him to visit the medical department there and see for himself the fantastic work being done with state school students with lower grades who are enrolled on the extended medical degree. They struggle not with the science but with some lifestyle factors which, with additional support, they are able to overcome.

[Mr Field]

I very much accept that. I have visited King’s College on a number of occasions and get on very well with the authorities there. Funnily enough, a lot of the evidence suggests that medicine is one of the very few subjects in which a lot of the comparators about school performance and expected academic performance at degree level break down to a certain extent. I suspect that King’s had that very much in mind when it set up its very innovative and important programme.

It seems to me, however, that the relentless focus of the Minister, who I know has a passion for driving up standards, should be on giving state sector students the tools they need to compete on a level playing field with their peers in the independent sector, and I admire a lot of the work that he is doing in that regard. He instinctively understands the damage that has been done in recent years by the levelling down of standards and opportunities to the lowest common denominator that has so entrenched underachievement. I particularly praise him for his emphasis on phonics, which is an essential learning tool. Given my experience of day-to-day life with a three-and-a-half-year-old son, I can entirely vouch for what the Minister has said on that matter. In some respects, however, the Government could be more radical in promoting choice and competition in the state sector.

Yesterday, I spoke briefly in the House about the importance of looking after the special educational needs of the most gifted children in the state sector, in the same way as we strive to help children who are less gifted, because all too often their needs are ignored. My words provoked an e-mail later that afternoon from a teacher in Norfolk:

“What a breath of fresh air it was for me, as a retired educator, to hear your intervention. My wife and I are both graduate teachers who have experienced at first hand the consequences of an absence of special provision for the brightest of our pupils, to the serious detriment of their educational development and realisation of their full potential, not to mention that of wider society. The needs of the talented must be formally brought under the SEN purview and schools and Ofsted should be expressly required to give as much attention to these needs as to those of lower achievers.”

I ask the Minister to give greater consideration to that issue. We want to retain the most gifted students in our state schools, bring them to their full potential and use them as exemplars for other students, so that a golden thread of aspiration is sewn through each and every school, as has been suggested by a number of other Members.

I am the product of a grammar school, and I remember various episodes when I was there that allowed me to aspire to the university place to which my parents could never aspire, and also to running my own business, becoming professionally qualified and eventually becoming a Member of this House. We must push pupils upwards and not hold back their talents.

I finish this brief contribution by returning to a theme that runs through so many of my speeches, but which nevertheless is important to drive home once again. Our wont in recent years has been to tinker with our educational system to engineer particular social outcomes, but the attitudes of our competing nations could not be more different; my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk covered that matter skilfully and in great detail. It is that sense of being in a highly competitive globalised world that will, and should, remain an important element of all our thinking. One need look only at the high number of highly skilled school leavers and graduates, not just in India and China but in Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, to understand that the world is not waiting for Britain to churn out the brightest and best any more.

In my 10 years as a local MP, I have regularly visited primary and secondary schools and higher education establishments to talk to students. Contrary to the negative image of young people sometimes portrayed in the media, I am always impressed by students’ sharp and inquisitive minds. Our country is brimming with talent, including here in our inner cities. That talent exists to be developed and can compete with the likes of India and China in the decades ahead, but that will happen only if we pursue excellence relentlessly and equip our young people with the tools to take on their peers. We do everyone a disservice by suggesting that there are shortcuts in this world.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) and her colleagues on securing this debate.

I will not comment further on standards and international comparisons, because those points have been well made. The decline in standards in certain subjects and the decline in the study of foreign languages at GCSE level, to less than 50%, are worrying. The problem has many causes.

The first thing that strikes me from my experience as a school and university governor is that our expectations of students at independent and academically selective state schools are very different from our expectations of students educated in the state comprehensive sector. As politicians, we regularly congratulate our schools on increasing the percentage of pupils who pass five GCSEs with a C grade or above, including in English and maths, yet for those of us who aspire to send our own children to independent schools or pray that they get into state academically selective schools, that is an uncomfortable, almost hypocritical situation to find ourselves in.

We celebrate that standard, yet if it were applied to our own children, we would be aghast. For students in independent or academically selective schools, the standard is nine or 11 A grades, and we ask how many are A*. There will be a smattering of Bs, but not many. That division is intolerable. One would not expect the same standards in non-academically selective schools as in the independent and selective sector, but it is reasonable to expect them to be far closer than they are.

In my view, the league tables have contributed to the problem in a couple of ways. I recognise that there must be some externally validated way for parents to compare local schools, and I am mindful of the words of the former Minister, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), about how difficult such problems are to solve. However, the obsession with C grades has led to far too much teaching emphasis on children who are borderline D-C achievers.

In addition, it is a statutory requirement for all children with special needs—not only statemented, but on school action—to have individual learning plans and a huge amount of support. I argue, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field), that too many schools put far more effort into children of lower ability than into stretching more academic children, who are on course for at least a B, so that they get A grades in the right subjects.

The second problem to which the league tables contribute is that too many children are encouraged to start studying vocational subjects at a young age, for no other reason than to boost their schools’ league table rankings. An ambitious boy aged 14 from one of the secondary schools in my constituency told me, while doing work experience for me, that he liked history. When I asked him what GCSEs he was doing, I was surprised to hear that history did not feature among them because he had been encouraged to take leisure and tourism instead. He was a bright boy. That is an example of how average schools, obsessed with league table rankings, have piled into BTEC qualifications.

That is the start of a slippery slope, as has been said. At age 14, many children, especially from families that have never benefited from higher education, make GCSE subject selections that narrow the choices available to them at A-level and finally divert them into a further education college or new university. I am not dismissing BTEC and other such qualifications, but we must be honest with students and their families—by taking such subjects, students set themselves on a vocational route in life.

In Stourbridge, just 25% of students now take history at GCSE level, and fewer than 20% take geography. I do not believe that only 25% of children in my constituency are academically gifted enough to be challenged intellectually and be candidates for top universities.

The prevailing culture militates against improving educational performance. Too many of us have talked in euphemisms about education. We have doled out excessive praise for mediocre performance, and we have eroded competitive sport by declaring no winners and prizes for all. Instead, we should stress that gain without pain is rare. Hard work, study, the pursuit of excellence and the productive use of time, including leisure time, should be imbued in all our children, as they are imbued in the children at our independent and academically selective schools.

The last of the myriad roots of the problem that I shall address is the restrictions on schools involved in contracts between schools and teachers, which I trust the academies and free schools will help overcome. Under the present system, it is virtually impossible for poorly performing teachers to be removed; at best, they are recycled to another school. As has been said, we all know that the important thing is quality of teaching and leadership by the head. I am pleased that the Education Bill will address that problem.

Other hon. Members have mentioned the length of the school day. When I was first selected in Stourbridge, I wondered what was happening when I saw children in school uniform milling around the streets at 3 o’clock, halfway through the afternoon. Then I realised that their day had ended. That was compounded when I toured schools and found that in the middle of the school day, children were playing football, netball and other such worthy pursuits and studying drama.

In independent schools, such things are studied between 4 and 6 o’clock and on Saturday mornings. Of course children taught in independent schools do better: they get hours more educational teaching work a week. It is no surprise that they come out with better grades and have time to pursue more academic subjects, as well as access to all the other pursuits that make up a good, rounded education. They are there for longer. It is almost as simple as that.

I am mindful of the time; I want to speak for only 10 minutes. I end with a plea for pupil referral units. I am a great believer in opportunities for late developers and children who go off the rails early in life, because I am one such. I think that I am the first speaker in this debate who did not go to Oxford. I am sure that there are some good PRUs, but provision in my area is patchy, they are not given enough priority and they can be seen as dumping grounds.

I know of one PRU in the black country where there is absolutely no discipline and no boundaries, which are precisely what children who end up in PRUs require. I suggest that that is an area where we need to encourage passionate voluntary sector providers to participate. We must not forget about those children. The same could be said for looked-after children, who also face many hurdles. We must ensure that voluntary providers are encouraged to come in. There are so many other things that we could discuss in this debate, but I end by congratulating those hon. Friends who helped secure it. I hope to hear so much more from other Members and hon. Friends.