A-Level Provision: Knowsley Metropolitan Borough

Debate between Maria Eagle and Marie Rimmer

Tuesday 27th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered A-Level provision in Knowsley Metropolitan Borough.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I am pleased to welcome all my fellow Knowsley metropolitan borough MPs to the debate, plus others from nearby who clearly have an interest in education. I also welcome the Minister, who has a long-standing interest in the matter. Indeed, I think we first had a meeting with him on this very issue sometime in June 2016. The matter is therefore not recent; it has concerned my colleagues and I—and, I hope and believe, the Department—for well over two years.

Knowsley is now the only sizeable English metropolitan authority that does not have A-level provision within its borders. It is a matter of some disgrace that young people living in such a large borough, with such a large urban population, cannot take A-levels within the boundaries of the authority. Those who wish to do so—and many do—have to leave the borough. That is not good, and it should not persist any longer than it has to. Indeed, only two other English authorities that have some responsibility for education have no A-level provision within their borders: the Isle of Wight, which has its own issues as an island, and the City of London, which does not have that many residents.

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

In Carmel College, 400 pupils—just under 25%—come from Knowsley. That is exactly the same position as two years ago.

[Maria Eagle]

My hon. Friend has dug out some interesting numbers from Carmel College, a sixth-form college in St Helens. It is some miles away from Knowsley. It is fair to say that it is not the easiest place to get to. It is on the edge of the green belt on the edge of St Helens. If I had to get there without my car, it would not be immediately obvious to me how to do that. For young people from Knowsley or Halewood—the part of Knowsley in my constituency—having to go to that college presents significant extra difficulties, costs and barriers to their ability to take up A-levels.

Halewood Academy sixth form was closed in the summer of 2017. The closure had been mooted from the previous spring. That was when my colleagues and I first sought meetings with Ministers in the Department. The Minister here today first met with us about the issue back in May or June 2016. The sixth form closed, notwithstanding the fact that it left the entire borough without A-level provision within its borders. Any young people who did well in their GCSEs at Halewood Academy were then required to leave the borough to take up A-levels and post-16 education. It is not acceptable for young people anywhere to have to do that, particularly not when those born in Knowsley begin life with greater disadvantages than most pupils who might go on to study A-levels and post-16 education.

Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council is second on the list of most deprived local authority areas on the indices of multiple deprivation, with 45% of its neighbourhoods in the highly deprived category. Despite many efforts by Governments of all persuasions, it has a long-standing history of educational under-attainment. The Government have had initiatives—not enough in my view—that have led to extra support going to Knowsley. Previous Labour Governments of which I was a member also had many initiatives, including building new schools and new educational establishments. None of those things has thus far resulted in educational attainment being sufficiently improved. It has gone up and it has gone down, but it has consistently been below average, and that is still the case.

Knowsley is precisely the kind of place where we need to ensure that educational opportunities are available and present in every community. They need to be easily accessible. We should encourage young people who have the potential—many do—to study post-16. In particular, we should encourage them to do academic A-levels, which provide such an excellent route into better chances in life educationally, such as going on to higher education and university in the traditional way. It also offers job opportunities and economic activity that can lead to prosperity later in life. Knowsley is just the kind of place where A-levels need to be accessed by as many people as possible. It is not the kind of place where that opportunity should be difficult to access.

There have been some improvements over the past year, for which I congratulate schools, but Knowsley’s performance is currently among the worst on some educational attainment measures at GCSE. It is still below average, although things have improved over the past year on the attainment 8 measure, which is the one that is often cited. Good education is a right for all in a civilised society, no matter the circumstances of birth of an individual. We should judge ourselves as a nation and as a society on whether we can ensure that people born in Knowsley—with all the disadvantages that that often carries with it and implies—have just as much chance of meeting their potential in education and life as anyone born with greater advantages living elsewhere.

In addition to that being the right thing to do—in their rhetoric, the Government say they wish to do it—it is the key to the future economic prosperity of the English regions, such as Merseyside and the wider north-west. Our success as a region absolutely depends on us having available a highly educated workforce and developing the full potential of all our children and young people academically and economically. If we do not manage to do so, it is very likely that our area and region will fall further behind some of the other regions in our nation that manage to fully develop the potential of their young people.

Doing A-levels and going through the academic route on to university is one tried and trusted method by which those born with disadvantages in life can meet their potential academically and economically. That improves social mobility in our communities, our region and our society more generally, helping to improve the economy of the nation as a whole. It is for that reason, among others, that I am particularly concerned about what has been happening with post-16 education in Knowsley. I fear that the Government are not doing as well on that measure as I wish they would and as I hope they wish they would. They are inadvertently letting down my constituents who live in Halewood.

The Government’s approach to these matters fails because it unfortunately has no analysis of the impact of deprivation on educational attainment and no analysis of the disadvantage that results. As a consequence, Government educational policy does not seek in practice—it often does so rhetorically—to counteract disadvantage. It simply assesses numbers and standards and applies money on the basis of numbers and judges on the basis of standards. While that is one way of doing things, it does not do the job in an area such as Knowsley, which has deep-seated and long-standing issues with disadvantage and educational attainment.

As the Minister well knows, my colleagues and I have been raising this issue since March 2016, when I wrote to the then Secretary of State for Education, the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan). In addition, I have had a number of meetings with Ministers in the past two years, usually attended by my colleagues. There has been a dizzying array of Ministers before us—it has been like a merry-go-round—although I am very pleased that the Minister with us today is still in his post. His memory reaches back to those early meetings, so he knows how seriously local representatives have taken this matter. I know how seriously he takes his responsibilities, and I am glad he is answering the debate today.

I do not think I am misrepresenting the Government if I say that they accepted from an early stage in the meetings that the current situation—having no A-level provision within the borders of an entire metropolitan borough—is unacceptable and unsustainable. At a meeting a year ago with Lord Nash, who was then one of the Minister’s colleagues, we were promised that a new and excellent provider would be brought into Knowsley to restore academic A-level provision and that capital money would be provided to facilitate that if necessary. Since that time, I think the Department has backtracked from that commitment. It has supported reintroducing A-level provision, possibly including some academic A-levels, through the merger of Knowsley Community College and St Helens College at the Stockbridge Lane site in Huyton. I understand that that will happen; such a merger was on the cards anyway.

We have also been told, following an assessment by the Education Funding Agency, that there is no need for any new provision on the basis of its usual criteria. My right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth), my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) and I could have told the Ministers responsible that anyway. Indeed, we did tell them in meetings that the situation does not fit into the Education Funding Agency’s usual criteria for providing extra support and provision, because the issue is not that there has been a sudden boost in population or increase in the number of people wanting to study A-levels in the borough. The issue is that the available provision has simply disappeared, been closed and been taken elsewhere, for various reasons none of which has to do with the situations of the students and potential students themselves.

The situation was therefore never likely to fit the usual criteria that the Education Funding Agency applies, and I do not believe that it was particularly useful to go through that process, although of course the local authority did so, along with officials in the Education Funding Agency. Surprise, surprise, it decided that there was no real need for new provision. That was not what we had been promised in the meeting with Lord Nash. We were promised the introduction of an excellent provider, so that A-level provision, including academic A-level provision, could be brought back within the borough boundaries and expanded.

Let me be clear: I welcome the new provision being introduced as a consequence of the merger of Knowsley Community College and St Helens College. It is an entirely good thing that that will be available, but I worry about the extent to which it will solve the problem, for a number of reasons. I understand from parliamentary answers from December, and from the college itself, that there have been 113 applications so far for the new provision mooted at the merged college, and that a set of 21 subjects, including some academic A-levels, might be available in the curriculum of the new merged college. No one can really enlighten me—perhaps the Minister might be able to in his reply, or subsequently—about whether all 21 subjects will be run, or whether that depends on how many people apply; it would be unusual for the subjects to be run regardless of how many people do so.

[Ms Rimmer]

The advice is that there has been an impressive number of applications so far, suggesting significant aspiration among school leavers in Knowsley to study A-levels, and an offer of 21 subjects, many of them A-levels. Is my hon. Friend concerned that people may be applying thinking that everything they want to do will definitely be on offer?

[Maria Eagle]

I think if one looks at a curriculum and is given 21 subjects to choose from, it would not be unusual to expect that, if one chooses a course, it will be run. However, it is not clear to me that they will be. When I asked the chief executive at the college about that, I was told that

“the number of subjects that will run will of course depend on demand.”

I was not told what the minimum number of pupils is that will guarantee that one of the A-levels on offer will be run. As far as I can see, there is no guarantee that any of the courses will be run from September of this year. We hope that they all will be, but I can see no guarantee of that in the answers that I have received, nor have I had any indication of what the minimum number of pupils required will be to ensure that a course is run.

When I was at school, which admittedly was a very long time ago now, I was told at my local comprehensive that I could choose any A-level subject and the school would put it on, which is indeed what happened. We are not in that game any more, unfortunately. I do not know how many or how few people have to apply for A-level English language, or A-level politics for that matter, for that course to be run. I also do not know whether that course, if and when it is run, will be run at the Knowsley site in Huyton, because St Helens College has links elsewhere. My hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston has already referred to the so-called partnership plan with Carmel College, which is a long way outside the Knowsley borough boundaries.

The provision is welcome, and I do not wish to sound churlish, but if it results in no opportunity for local young people over the age of 16 to study academic A-levels and other A-levels within the borough boundaries, we have not moved any further. My difficulty is that it is harder for young people born and brought up in Knowsley, owing to their educational disadvantage, family circumstances and deprivation, to do A-levels than it is for people with a more advantaged family background. Such people may have had a more advantaged upbringing, more of an understanding in their family of the value of academic study, and a more supportive environment at home. It is easier for young people in those circumstances to take on and do A-levels than it is for young people examining their options in Knowsley.

It is doubly difficult if doing A-levels and academic A-levels means an additional cost of getting to college, or the additional barrier of having to get to this or that campus, five to 20 miles away. That can make the difference between a young person taking on the A-level study or not. When there is disadvantage already, having that additional barrier makes it much less likely that a young person will take up the A-level provision available. I fear that the double disadvantage that faces young people in deprived areas puts more people off studying than would be the case if they could just go to the sixth form in their local school. Those who take that option end up having to leave the borough, and even that has the additional barriers I mentioned of extra cost and time. They may also have to travel in a way that is not easy, perhaps if the family does not have a car or if the bus routes are not very good and do not go frequently to the place where A-levels can be studied.

To the credit of St Helens and the merged college, and Knowsley Community College, they have put on a bus that will take young people from my constituency to the site in Huyton. The Minister knows that we have geographical challenges in Knowsley because of the shape of the borough and the fact that there are three very distinct centres of population, none of which is particularly well served by buses running between them, which presents practical difficulties.

A bus is to be put on, but a young person from Halewood would have to get on that bus at 7.25 in the morning in order to get to the site in Huyton more than an hour later, going around the houses and through most bits of Liverpool on the way—the congested bits, I noticed, looking at the route—and would not get back to the pick-up point in Halewood until 10 to six. As the Minister knows, A-level studies are not eight hours of lessons every day. If someone has to get on a bus at 7.25 and does not get home till 10 to six, with perhaps one or two hours of study on site, that is not a tremendously practical way to convince a young person to think that it is a good option. What else might the Department and the Minister do to deal with that additional barrier—that extra disadvantage of having to wait for a bus, which is free—that young people from my bit of Knowsley and Halewood have in getting to the site in Huyton, if the A-levels are all to be taught there?

How many young people in Huyton will simply decide that there is some option other than A-levels that they will do instead? How many will decide that A-levels are not for them? What is the consequence of that over time? It makes it look like young people and communities such as Halewood are not interested in higher education or in post-16 studies that lead to job and economic opportunities in later life that might help their social mobility. That is not a good thing and will not tackle the ingrained disadvantage I have been talking about.

The relative widening of the gap between the educational opportunities available to those who are better off in areas that are better off, and those who are not, is a great worry for the future of social mobility in our society, and for economic opportunity. Analysis by the Centre for Cities has shown a widening gap in educational opportunities between northern and southern cities. Places with the weakest economies have less access to quality higher education, which compounds existing economic divides and makes them grow.

The Government recognise that trend because they introduced opportunity areas to try to counteract precisely that effect by supporting better educational provision. Inexplicably, they have not awarded that status to Knowsley. Inexplicably, Knowsley metropolitan borough was so far down the list on the criteria that I do not see how it could have been awarded that status. I would suggest to the Minister that there might be something wrong with the criteria. If a borough such as Knowsley does not come out pretty high up on that kind of measure, I do not understand the criteria.

Nothing I am saying should be taken as critical of the local authority, which literally has almost no levers left to pull in respect of secondary schooling in Knowsley. There are no directly controlled local authority maintained secondary schools, only academies or church schools. All of them are part of multi-academy trusts based outside the borough. The only thing that the authority can do is try to persuade and cajole. They have no power or levers to pull. The Minister knows that financial imperatives apply to multi-academy trusts and academies that give them little leeway to do things in the interests of local communities—that might cost money that the academy wishes to use for something else.

I am also not criticising Halewood Academy. Once it was forced into academisation by a bad Ofsted, it had no option but to close its sixth form for financial reasons, no matter what the consequences for the almost 100 pupils who were studying for A-levels at the time. Since that unfortunate event, it has taken welcome strides towards improving its GCSE results, which I welcome very much. Pupils, teachers and governors have worked very hard at that school, and I congratulate them on their work and the progress they have made.

Knowsley borough council is implementing a local deal for improving access to A-levels, along with its partner organisations; trying to improve links between primary and secondary schools; celebrating and highlighting school achievements; and trying to boost mentoring programmes and other useful and worthy initiatives. But let us be honest: they are tinkering at the edges of a major problem in educational opportunities faced by our communities. The council no longer has the power to intervene as directly as it once did.

I have a few questions for the Minister, and would ask for a response, if not today, later, if he needs a bit more time to consider them. Will he guarantee that academic A-levels will be taught within the borough boundaries from September this year, as a consequence of the merger between Knowsley Community College and St Helens College? What is the minimum number of people accepted on a course for it to be run, rather than for it to be on the curriculum but not actually taught, and for us to be told that not enough people have applied? Will the Minister guarantee that candidates will not be expected to travel to additional sites to do their courses if they accept places at the Knowsley Community College site, because some of the sites they would have to travel to are a long way away, which would present another difficulty for those pupils?

Perhaps the Minister will enlighten us about what the partnership with Carmel College consists of and its implications. If people will have to travel to that site, that does not put us in a different position to the current one in terms of A-level provision within the borough boundaries.

Will the Minister tell us what extra money the Government are putting in to assist in solving the ongoing problems with A-level provision in Knowsley? I have set out some of the additional challenges and disadvantages. Given that Knowsley did not fit the criteria for opportunity areas, perhaps the Minister will tell us what additional support his Department can give.

What plans does he have to recognise deprivation and educational disadvantage in the how he funds post-16 provision? It worries me that the problem we have in Knowsley now might be something that we see in other areas, such as the south Liverpool part of my constituency. We are already seeing newly built schools closing because they had a bad Ofsted, and other newly built schools being forced into academisation—it is not clear who the sponsors will be and what will happen to their sixth forms. I fear that, because of how the Department funds post-16 education, where standards tie in with forced academisation, for example, and the financial imperatives on academies, we may, over time, see developing deserts of post-16 opportunity in places that are already blighted by disadvantage. A number of our sixth forms and newly built schools will be forced to close because of the interaction between standards and numbers at post-16, leading to the closure of provision, which can be even more detrimental for areas already disadvantaged in accessing opportunity.

I am not convinced that the Department and the Government’s policy goes far enough to understand, recognise and do something about entrenched disadvantage and the lack of educational attainment. Instead, it looks simply at standards and numbers. An area such as Knowsley will never be advantaged if one looks simply at standards and numbers, because of the existing long-standing disadvantage. That is quite enough from me, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.