Education and Local Services

Maria Miller Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Education (Justine Greening)]

It is a pleasure to be able to open this Queen’s Speech debate this afternoon.

Since 2010, this Government have been focused on the pursuit of higher standards in education, higher standards in our schools, higher standards in our universities and higher standards in technical education—in fact, higher standards across the board—to unlock the talents of every single one of our young people.

We have made significant progress. Thanks to the energy of our great teachers and leaders, nine out of 10 schools are now good or outstanding, with 1.8 million more children in those places since 2010. Thanks to the energy of our thriving universities, more young people are going to university than ever before, including more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Thanks to the energy of businesses, we are well on our way to achieving our target of 3 million apprenticeships by 2020.

Perhaps more than most Departments, the legislation we need to drive up education standards and opportunity is already in place. In the last parliamentary Session alone, we passed the Technical and Further Education Act 2017, creating the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to oversee our bold new reforms; we passed the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, the most significant legislative reform of the past 25 years in higher education, to give students better value and more choice, information and opportunity; and we passed the Children and Social Work Act 2017 to better protect and safeguard the most vulnerable children in our society.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend mentioned the Children and Social Work Act, and an important provision the Government put into it was making relationship and sex education compulsory. What progress is being made on regulations to bring that into force?

[Justine Greening]

I am grateful for the cross-party support that enabled us to do that, and we are determined now to push on with the issue. We will shortly be setting out our plan for how we take the review forward and how we continue to get the overall support we need to make sure relationship and sex education in secondary schools, and relationship education in primary schools, are age appropriate and effective for children growing up in a very different Britain from the one many of us grew up in.

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[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

At the heart of giving every citizen the opportunity to succeed is the need to ensure that they have access to the best education, and I commend the Secretary of State for the clear vision she set out today, which the Government are following, to ensure that education remains at the heart of this Government’s social mobility policy. We should never forget that good schools are the engine of social mobility.

I slightly take issue with the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), because in my constituency we had to wait for a Conservative Government to get record levels of investment. We did not get it under Labour.

Critical to the role of good schools in social mobility is their delivery of academic excellence. Again, it is good to hear the Secretary of State talking about our education system, which is now on a par with the best in the world in what it is delivering academically. I urge her to stress that that should be at the top of the agenda for every headteacher in this country, regardless of their area.

The Minister for School Standards has done a tremendous job of ensuring that academic excellence is translated into reality through our curriculum and through the Government’s focus, from the start, on using phonics to ensure that we get away from the unacceptable situation in which one in three young people leaves primary school without the basic ability to read. We now have far higher standards. I recently went into Marnel Community Infants School to see the inspiration that young people are getting from their teachers because those young people are able to read fluently much earlier.

The other part of the Government’s focus on academic excellence has been the introduction of the EBacc. I was particularly pleased earlier this year to see the New Schools Network report, which laid to rest some of the myths about the introduction of the EBacc, particularly that it might be reducing young people’s ability to follow arts subjects. The excellent research showed that although young people focus on English, maths, science, a language, history and geography, they are able to include other arts subjects in their GCSE choices. It is important for us to continue that as a country, as our creative industries are world-renowned and we must ensure that that continues.

I will not go into detail on the importance of the other part of the curriculum that the Government will be addressing in this Session—relationship and sex education—although I look forward to hearing more about how that will be developed with the input of the very expert groups that advised me when I proposed amendments to the Children and Social Work Act 2017 on Report.

The Secretary of State touched on technical education and the importance of parity of esteem. I congratulate the Government on their work with the technical sector to provide supported internships for some of the most challenged young people in this country—those with special educational needs. I was privileged to go into my local Basingstoke College of Technology last week to celebrate the first anniversary of supported internships. BCOT is working with local employers to give young people with a learning disability the opportunity to get the sort of supported work experience that will make an enormous difference to the rest of their life.

This is probably the final point I will be able to raise in my short remarks. Hampshire has the third lowest education funding in the country, and we need to see the Secretary of State’s proposed changes, which will mean £14 million of extra funding for our county to try to put right some of the inequities that built up in the past. In Basingstoke 90% of our primary schools are good or outstanding. We have 1,300 new primary school places, with more than £30 million of extra investment, but we need fairer funding to ensure that the historical inequities are addressed.

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

I welcome all colleagues, including many new colleagues, to the House—many of those new colleagues will want to give their maiden speech today. I also welcome the Secretary of State, who was re-elected only by the skin of her teeth.

The Prime Minister called the election to offer the country strong and stable leadership, and what has been left is a complete and utter mess for the country. It is an indictment of a terrible general election campaign but also a reflection of the Conservative party’s time in government. School funding was undoubtedly a key issue in the election, as was, latterly, funding for the police and security services. Those issues highlighted a similar concern, which is that the public are fed up to the back teeth with cuts to vital public services—services that are precious to the public—with the same rhetoric coming from this Government.

The school gates campaign was a particularly successful and effective part of the general election campaign, and I pay tribute to the headteachers, the unions, the staff and others for their work in highlighting these issues over many months. It is pretty pathetic of Conservative MPs to blame headteachers for their loss of seats at this election.

[Mrs Miller]

Does the hon. Lady regret that parents were inadvertently left with the impression that funding for schools might be cut, particularly in my constituency, where we were going to see an overall increase in school funding? That was not necessarily always the message that her party gave.

[Lucy Powell]

I do not, because the exchanges we saw earlier today reflect the ones in the election, which showed that Conservative Members had their fingers in their ears about the facts of the matter. Let us just go through some of those facts: before we even get into the fair funding formula, every school in this country will lose between 8% and 9% of its budgets over the course of this Parliament—or this new Parliament and two years of the previous one—because costs have gone up. Although the Government say they are protecting budgets in cash terms, they are not protecting them in real terms, so even the winners from the fair funding formula will still lose 3% of their budgets, whereas the losers will lose more than 11%. Every school in the country is a loser, and Conservative Members still have their fingers in their ears, even after the general election disaster they have just overseen. Those are the facts, and I do not blame any headteacher for telling them to parents.

The Conservatives should blame themselves, because those cuts mean that headteachers are having to make some of the most unpalatable cuts to school budgets. They are having to cut back on teachers, teaching assistants, school trips and extra-curricular activities. Those are the unpalatable cuts that the Government have overseen, which is why at the general election parents around the country said, “Enough is enough.” Perhaps that is why the polling has shown that since the election nearly 750,000 people have said they changed the way they voted in that election because of cuts to school funding. Perhaps it is time now that the Government actually started to listen. Persisting with the failed lines they used during the general election campaign will not cut it, so it is about time that the Secretary of State used her reappointment to go to the Chancellor and the Prime Minister and say that she needs to find the money to meet that shortfall. This is a funding crisis and she needs to deal with it quickly.

Having dug themselves in on school funding, the Government found themselves in the same rhetorical malaise on police resources as they also took centre stage in this election. I wish to take this opportunity to pay tribute to Greater Manchester police and their response to the Manchester terror attacks; to Manchester City Council, whose response was exemplary; to the whole city; and, as the Secretary of State said, to the teachers, headteachers and the staff in our schools who supported the many, many children who, having been at that concert that evening, went and did their GCSE exams the very next day. They all did a great job.

However, the current plans for cuts in police numbers are just too much for Greater Manchester police to bear—they are unsustainable—which is why our chief constable has asked the Government urgently for extra resources for 800 police officers. I hope the Government can find the money from somewhere for that extra resource, because the new threats our country now faces mean that we need them. Again, the Tories’ arrogance and inflexibility during the campaign meant that police cuts were undoubtedly another vote loser for them. What an irony it is, then, that they have now managed to find £1 billion from their magic money tree for their grubby deal with the DUP. Had they found that money a few weeks ago for schools and the police, perhaps they would have had a majority here today—a bigger majority even. Perhaps they will finally learn some of the lessons of the election.

Finally, let me say that it is not all bad news, because one good thing to come out of this election—I know the Secretary of State will share my view on this—is the end to the bringing back of grammar schools. I know it was a policy she was not all that keen on. We are glad to see the back of it and I am sure she will welcome that. However, I urge her and her Government to learn the right lessons of this election and make sure that our public services and education system have the funding they need.