Education Performance

Mark Field Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

I am delighted to have secured this debate under the auspices of the Backbench Business Committee. Underlying many of the key questions facing us, such as where our future growth will come from and issues about youth employment, is our country’s education performance, and how it compares with that of our international competitors. There has been much soul-searching around the world about education performance, so when Germany did badly in the programme for international student assessment tables in 2000, it upped the academic standards in many of its technical schools to address the issue. Other countries have delayed specialisation, and the US has introduced new policies in teaching. In Britain, there is not enough soul-searching, either in politics or in the wider education community and establishment, about our performance.

I want to talk about how our results compare internationally, the impact of that, and the main causes. I have identified two. The first is the false choice that is often presented between quality and quantity in our education system, which has led to a decline in standards, and the second is our process-orientated system, which does not rely on the student driving it. I also want to talk about how we can start to move towards the high-quality mass education system that should be our goal in Britain.

There has been much coverage of the hourglass economy. The number of high-skilled jobs has grown by 30% in the past 10 years, and the number of medium-skilled jobs has declined by 10%. There is an increasing return to education throughout the global economy, and if the 20th century was a human capital century, surely we will see an acceleration of that in the 21st century.

The US was very successful in the 20th century, having universal high school education and increased college access, but it has acknowledged that the quality was not there, although the quantity was. There has been a catching-up with that in the UK, where participation has increased at high school and university level, but unfortunately quality has fallen. We see the evidence for that in the PISA league tables. Although flawed, as all international comparisons are, they at least represent students sitting the same test in each country. They show that Britain has dropped to 28th in maths, 16th in science and 25th in reading. Some people will cite TIMSS—the trends in the international mathematics and science study—which shows that the UK came seventh, but we were still behind the Asian elite countries, such as Japan and Hong Kong, and France and Germany were not included in the comparison. However we look at the issue and however it is sliced and diced, we are performing worse than we should as the sixth largest economy in the world.

As well as our current standards not being good enough, our historical standards have also been poor. The problem is deep and historical. According to a CBI survey, 40% of people in the UK do not have basic skills, compared with 34% in the US, 28% in France and 22% in Germany, yet the political debate in this country has been dominated by the idea that our standards are rising year on year, despite the fact that we are clearly not producing enough rigorously educated students to fill available jobs. Schools are producing strings of A* students, when there would previously have been a smattering of As. According to Durham university, a maths A-level grade E in 1988 would now be a C or even higher.

There is still a persistent failure in basic qualifications, with 45% of students not achieving a GCSE in England and maths at grade C or above. The economic impact of all that is clear, and I see it in South West Norfolk, where companies struggle to recruit skilled engineers and graduate business managers, and we have a shortage of teachers in critical subjects such as maths. Between 1997 and 2007—the boom years for our economy—the number of jobs increased, but the majority were taken by people from overseas, many of whom filled our skill gaps. Employers consistently say that they are not satisfied with the quality of people leaving school and university—71% are unhappy with language skills, and half of all universities have remedial courses in English and maths to bring students up to standard. I have spoken to academics at Cambridge university, Greenwich university and throughout our university sector who say that our education system is not delivering people who are ready to learn and able to think for themselves. That is a crucial problem.

Some people say that it is inevitable that if we have more people in our school system, send more people to university, and have higher participation, standards will decline. They claim that there is a trade-off between mass education and standards. I have heard it said during the past year that some students are not suited to such education and are not up to it because they are not academic. I think that belief is holding our country back, compared with other countries, and has driven an unwelcome change in our school system.

Encouraged by the crazy equivalence in league tables and UCAS points, media studies has been given the same value as mathematics in our league tables. I studied both subjects, and I know that they are not equivalent. That has hastened the flight from academic subjects, particularly in comprehensive schools in this country. Employers and universities are absolutely clear about what they want: they want maths, languages, science, and people who can think and analyse. Nevertheless, fewer and fewer people are studying those subjects, and there has been a fall in the number studying GCSE languages from 79% to 44%. There was a fall in the number studying core academic subjects at A-level from 60% to 50% between 1996 and 2010.

That is a uniquely British phenomenon. It is not happening elsewhere. In fact, academic standards elsewhere are being tightened, so at the end of high school in a top US state such as Massachusetts, students will be studying maths, science, humanities and languages. In France, all students studying for the French baccalaureate study maths, French and foreign languages. In Japan, 95% of 18-year-old students are studying maths, sciences, languages and humanities. We are an outlier. Indeed, the Nuffield Foundation produced a report that showed that we are unusual in not requiring maths from 16 to 18, and that is feeding through into our school system. Unfortunately, we now have primary school teachers—I have seen this in classrooms—who do not understand maths concepts, and are unable to communicate those concepts to the next generation.

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

My hon. Friend makes interesting international comparisons. Does she have any data for China and India, the two great economic superpowers of the 21st century that she rightly heralds? The great changes being made in schools in those countries, and their passion for what my hon. Friend would regard as hard subjects, is equally important, and augurs badly for the state of our education system.

[Elizabeth Truss]

My hon. Friend is right, and I believe that the Shanghai region of China is included in the study that I mentioned. The appetite for education in some of those countries—as shown by the thousands of applications for the Indian Institute of Technology—shows a cultural attitude towards education that will help drive those countries in the future.

In Britain, we hear the idea that introducing new subjects is somehow modern, or that it is inclusive to different types of people and that is what is wanted by employers in the broader world. That is simply not the case, and the accusation that it is somehow retrograde or old-fashioned to want those core subjects is wrong. We can see the subjects studied by our international competitors. The reason why those subjects are taken is that an in-depth study of an academic discipline provides a level of rigour and the ability to analyse and think, which prepares a person for any kind of job. Technology is changing rapidly, and we do not know what skills and abilities we will need in 20 or 30 years’ time. Studying an academic discipline to a high level gives a person that vital ability to think and learn. Such study is not an elitist or minority pursuit. If it were, how come 95% of students in Japan already study in that way? Why do many emerging countries aspire to study those subjects?

The system in Britain actively encourages students to study subjects that provide little return. I was pleased to hear the announcement earlier by the Secretary of State for Education that some of those qualifications will be removed from the league table, but I think we should go further and also remove low-quality GCSEs and A-levels that are not equivalent to the more rigorous core subjects. Our system hampers young people’s chances of going to university, particularly our country’s top universities. Computer programming can be studied at Oxford, but it requires maths, not an A-level in information and communication technology. A student is 20 times more likely to study A-level law if they attend a sixth-form college as opposed to a private school. If they take that subject, however, it will not help them to study law at a Russell group university, because that is specifically prohibited. Students are being misled about the kinds of subjects that will help them get ahead in life.

This debate is not only about the sort of subjects that people study, but about the way some subjects are studied. A combination of modular examinations and bureaucratic intervention has damaged the intellectual integrity of many subjects at A-level. I frequently hear academics in universities complaining that students do not have a holistic view of the subject, and that they have been taught a pick-and-mix of various elements and therefore do not have the deep understanding and practice that they need to move to a higher level.

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[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship for what I think is the first time, Mr Rosindell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) on securing the debate. I was delighted to support her in securing it, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating the time.

I will start with a quote that might ruffle your feathers, Mr Rosindell: “Education, education, education.” Perhaps that is the one thing on which I agreed with the former Prime Minister, Mr Blair—how important education is in our country. It is very important that we give our youngsters the best chance in life, to allow them to cast their net further and wider, so that they can reap a rich catch in life and become big fish in a big pond, not minnows in shark-infested waters.

Education performance matters for our country at different levels. At macro level, it is about preparing people to be innovative, and making them ready for business and work—ready to be our future doctors, nurses and teachers. It is about creating people who are flexible and skilled—people who will do the everyday jobs, as well as the ones that involve scanning the world for new wealth to come to this country. At micro level, it is about having people who are cultured and enlightened, and having a social country in which we live at peace with one another in a culture of respect and tolerance. At individual level, there is no question but that education is the passport to a bigger choice in life and to social mobility, that magic phrase that we often hear now. For me, nothing else fits the bill as well as education.

Educational performance is about preparing not only for university, but for life. My hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk said that there is a risk of imbalance between vocational and academic choices. Trying to say that one degree is worth the same as, or a similar amount to, another perhaps suggests that not going to university means that one has failed in life. Far from it; we need people to develop all their talents in whatever way they can.

I genuinely believe that every child has talents that can be nurtured through school and later in life, but every child needs a good foundation in reading, writing and mathematics to allow them to succeed. There is no one more disadvantaged than the voter I met in the streets of my constituency the other day, who said that he could not read. He had struggled all his life to find work that did not involve him using his hands. I am not saying that he did not have a valuable skill, but how much more he could have achieved! For instance, he could have set up his own business or something similar. Frankly, even Wayne Rooney and David Beckham need a good educational foundation if they are not to be reliant solely on their lawyers and accountants and are to get the best out of them; they need to be conscious of that.

I will not rattle off a lot of statistics. My hon. Friend has already given us some good evidence, and I know that others are prepared to do so. Instead, I shall take the House on a bit of a personal journey. I do not pretend that my educational history is typical. I did my first O-levels when I was 13; I then did some A-levels and finished my schooling in the constituency of the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg). I went to university and then changed universities; I effectively stopped attending one and moved to another because I could not cope with the way of learning at the first. I then went on to do a PhD. I do not pretend that that is typical, but during that journey I found out that, in a way, standards have changed, and that is unfair on those who are slightly younger than me. That leads me on to the challenges that the country is struggling with 20 years later. I know of them as a result of my science education.

I am old enough to have taken O-levels; I took them a bit early in 1986. When I went on to do A-levels, I happened for whatever reason to do physics for a year. I was working with students from the lower and upper sixth forms, doing a combined kind of crash course. When I was with one group—I should keep up to date; we now call them year 12 students—I was often told, “Oh, Thérèse, you’ll have to do an extra half hour because year 12 does not need to learn that any more, but you can add that topic during your extra learning out of class.” That happened quite regularly throughout my physics A-level studies.

Some might argue that I took a harder A-level, but that is not strictly fair. I genuinely believe that the year-on-year debate about A-levels, O-levels or GCSEs not being as difficult as they used to be gives rise to a false argument about standards. I do not want to make this into a generational slanging match. I would not say that those studying physics 20 years ago were any brighter than the youngsters doing it today, but the opportunity to stretch the learning, to stretch the imagination, may now be constricted. The differentiation, with more children getting A and A* grades, is the result of youngsters today having to learn a lot less. Frankly, if children now have to learn their times tables only up to three, when before they had to learn them up to 12, it does not surprise me that more children now get their sums right.

[Mr Mark Field]

I am sorry to interrupt my hon. Friend’s journey. As she is a Liverpudlian, it must have been a magical mystery tour. Although I agree with much of what she says, I am not sure that she is correct about the exam system. There has been an utter debasing of the results system over the past 20 years in GCSE and O and A-level exams. The results are now largely discredited, and there needs to be an urgent rethink. As my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) said, someone who got a grade E in an A-level exam only a decade and a half ago could now receive a mark as high as grade B. That does not allow great confidence in the system. There has been a debasing of the system, and we need to consider it afresh.

[Dr Coffey]

I fully accept what my hon. Friend says, but I am trying not to turn this into an inter-generational slanging match. There is nothing worse than getting these wonderful results in August and then, all of a sudden and from whatever quarter—not from politicians but from others—people say, “Oh well, standards are getting lower.” I imagine that that is really hurtful to those receiving their results because, frankly, they are doing the best they can with the course and the exams that are set. It is not their fault, and I agree with my hon. Friend that we need to challenge the education establishment and the Government.

That brings me to another part of my speech. We should not be ashamed to challenge the education establishment, and even ask it to pause and reflect, in order to improve educational standards and performance. The Government are already doing that with elements of the English baccalaureate. We saw it also with the acceleration of academies under the previous Government. I note that academies have longer school days, and that they build other activities into their school day; school is no longer a half-past 8 to 3 o’clock existence, with pupils then being sent out. Academies allow a much wider existence; they are building an education for the entire person, not just slotting pupils into classes. I accept what my hon. Friend said, but I do not want to attack the young people or teachers of today, because they are already in the system. It is our role to challenge it and to get it changed.

Stepping back a little further, I am sure that many Members who went to university did three-year degree courses. I did my BSc in three years. Just as I was finishing my PhD, I saw that many universities were starting to move to four-year courses, and that is now almost the standard; the degree is now called MSci. Although not many universities will say so, the reason for the change is that when students had finished their A-levels, they did not have enough of the curriculum to grab the university course in year one. It is not that they were doing a remedial year, but they needed a foundation year at university. They could then continue. Some courses were perhaps not really four years; they were three and a half years with an extended research project to make up the time. As a consequence, students now spend four years at university, and with fees going up, that means more money being spent on university courses.

It would be honest to ask whether A-levels are at the right standard for entry to university, so that we ensure that we do not leave the universities with the challenge of making up the gap. The Russell group universities have done a great service to schools and teachers—and, most importantly, students and parents—with their brochure “Informed Choices”, in which they give a list of subjects. The facilitating subjects are maths, English, physics, biology, chemistry, geography, history and languages, classic and modern. The Russell group believes that those building blocks allow students to go on to do almost any subject. I accept that those who want to do a degree in art need to study art, and that it would probably help those who want to do music if they have studied a bit of music on the way, but for most degrees, it almost does not matter what subjects have been taken at A-level; students simply need the ability to think and to analyse, as suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk.

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[Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Rosindell, for calling me to speak in this vital debate. It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship.

I want to focus on the improving performance of schools in our education system. I speak as a parent, an employer and a former governor of a large secondary school. As a parent, I know that it is vital to us all that our children make the most of the opportunities they have and meet their full potential. As an employer, I need—indeed, we collectively need—a good supply of well-educated, well-motivated and engaged employees at every level. They need not only the ability to learn, but the basic core skills to make their way in the world. As a former governor of a secondary school, I care deeply about the school system and the service that it provides to society. I want to ensure that we always recognise and applaud schools’ efforts.

The Government have made great headway in the short time they have been in post. I particularly welcome today’s statement from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education on Professor Wolf’s report. However, there are other good things to celebrate, including the £2.5 billion for the pupil premium, the emphasis on vigorous and rigorous academic attainment, the encouragement given to schools to go for academy status and the fact that we are attracting more good graduates into the teaching profession. We also recognise the value of high-quality vocational education.

I want to focus on three issues. The first is the role of the head teacher in improving education performance. It is universally recognised that good schools have good head teachers. An energetic, dynamic head teacher really sets a school’s ethos. Their energy can drive forward improvements, and they set the framework in which the school functions.

One key aspect of that framework is discipline across the whole school, which is as much about the staff as it is about the students. If a head sets out clear and high expectations of the staff, that can quickly filter down into the student body. The consistent application of school rules means that everyone knows precisely where they stand. If that ethos is instilled in staff and students from day one, it can avert the problems that students may otherwise have had later in their school careers.

Teachers, too, have to set down clear guidance for behaviour and stick to it. Whether that guidance relates to uniform policy, behavioural standards or classroom etiquette, it must be consistent. A flaky approach to discipline undermines students so that they do not know where they stand from one day to the next. If schools get their approach right, that can dramatically improve their performance. We must recognise and accept that the head teacher plays a vital role in that.

[Mr Mark Field]

I entirely agree. In our time as Members of Parliament, all of us will have visited schools, and the single most important difference between well-performing schools, which have positive results and a positive attitude among parents, and less well-performing schools is the leadership of the head teacher, as my hon. Friend rightly said. Does he not agree, however, that clamping down on paucity of aspiration, which was mentioned earlier, and having zero tolerance for it, is an important part of that leadership?

[Stephen Metcalfe]

Absolutely—I agree 100%. I picked on discipline as one aspect of the framework that a head teacher can put in place in a school, but aspiration, energy, drive and ensuring that all staff want to get the maximum out of every pupil they come into contact with are also vital. There are other things, but I wanted to focus particularly on discipline.

Unfortunately, a good teacher does not always make a good head teacher, because the two roles require very different skills. I therefore want to ask the Government to examine a system that would allow for greater movement across the senior management team. I am aware of senior managers—members of a school’s top team—who may have had excellent pastoral skills and data manipulation skills, but who have been promoted to the role of head only to find that they did not have the entire skill set to do the job.

Unfortunately, the school and the individual are then left with few options. There is always the nuclear option of going down the competency route, but that is a painful experience for the individual and the school, and it normally results in someone who was a highly skilled professional leaving the service, which means that we have lost a good teacher, their skills and their commitment. Just because someone cannot be a good leader and a head in a school, that does not make them a bad teacher. I would therefore very much like to find a flexible system that would allow someone to recognise that they are perhaps in the wrong role.

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[Stephen Twigg]

I do not believe so. I am relying on the particular table in front of me. In each case, it examines a country that was in the 1995 cohort and the 2007 cohort. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman’s criticism is valid. The hon. Lady’s implied criticism is a fairer one because I was relying on the improvement. She is right to say that, if we look at the absolute score for Japan, it is, in every case, slightly better than ours, but we have made a greater improvement in that period. Interestingly, the United States is behind us on not just improvement but the absolute score in every case.

[Mr Mark Field]

In the midst of this battle over evidence—I accept that evidence is important and that getting the figures right does matter—surely the hon. Gentleman does not disagree with the assertion of my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk that there is a problem. We are going down the league table, although perhaps not by as many places as might have been predicted. More importantly though, there is a lack of rigour in the choice of subjects that the average student is taking for A-level. We are not looking at academic subjects in the way we were in the past, and that is in stark contrast to many of our most important economic rivals in the 21st century.

[Stephen Twigg]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. At the end of the hon. Lady’s speech, she said that there is no contradiction between a high-quality and a high-quantity education system, and that is something with which I passionately agree. I do not necessarily agree with everything that she said in constructing that argument, but I certainly believe that we should be aspiring to that.

Let me take up something that the hon. Lady said and that has also been said by other Government Members. We face a real challenge in changing the attitude of many state comprehensive schools to getting their brightest kids into Oxbridge. As someone who went from a comprehensive school to Oxford—okay, it was quite a long time ago, as the hon. Gentleman will know—I relied on a particular teacher who mentored and encouraged me. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and I was doing A-level economics. Without him, I am not sure whether I would have made that application. I do not think that that situation has changed as much in the subsequent 25 years as I would like. It is not just about Oxbridge, but if we are rightly to criticise Oxbridge for the comparatively low numbers of state school kids getting in, part of the challenge is for the schools as well as for Oxbridge.

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[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.