Education Funding

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Tuesday 13th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

My hon. Friend is, of course, entirely correct. The quality of our education is all about the person standing at the front of the room. It is all about the 450,000 teachers, and I join my hon. Friend in her commendation of them.

Free schools are among some of the highest-performing state-funded schools, and 442 are now open across the country. That includes 41 alternative provision and 34 special free schools, and a further 69 are in the pipeline. Again, parents are being given more choice in selecting the right provision for their children.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Damian Hinds]

I think I should make some progress. I have given way a number of times.

As I have said before, spending on education is in a different category from the spending of other Departments. It is about investment in our skills base, about bringing on the next generation, about social mobility, and about fulfilling the potential of all children. So it is right that this Government have prioritised education spending, and that our schools are receiving record investment. The total core schools and high needs budget, which was almost £41 billion last year, will reach a record £43.5 billion by 2020. That is thanks to an additional £1.3 billion put into core schools funding in July 2017 over and above the plans set out at the previous spending review.

[Damian Hinds]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question, and I will come on to questions about the fairer national funding formula that we have put in place.

[Mary Creagh]

One of the free schools the Secretary of State mentioned is CAPA College—the Creative and Performing Arts College—which is being built in Wakefield after his Department’s disastrous attempts to move it to Leeds, purchasing a site which it later transpired was on the route of HS2. I am genuinely grateful, but that did overshadow last year’s general election to quite some degree. When I looked at the plans for the new free school, I was dismayed to learn that new schools are not being built to BREEAM—Building Research Establishment environmental assessment method—standards, which are the highest environmental standards. Will the right hon. Gentleman look at why that is, and make sure that all new schools and refurbishment projects meet environmental standards, since kids are going to be taught in them for the next 100 years?

[Damian Hinds]

The Education and Skills Funding Agency follows high standards, but I will be happy to follow up with the hon. Lady separately on some of the specific issues she mentions.

As we were discussing, spending on schools is high by historical standards. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, real-terms per-pupil funding for five to 16-year-olds in 2020 will be more than 50% higher than it was in 2000 and more than 70% higher than in 1990.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Anne Milton]

Yes, my right hon. Friend is absolutely right that further education colleges—seven out of 10 have been graded good or outstanding—are absolutely critical in drawing together businesses from the local area. Along with local authorities and local enterprise partnerships, they can have a significant impact on the education and training that young people get.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Wakefield College opened its advanced skills and innovation centre late last year. It is a brilliant new centre to help entrepreneurs start up their own businesses. The one cloud on the horizon is the excellent work done by the college through the national collaborative outreach programme, which is still up in the air following the fiasco of the Minister’s Department over the setting up of the Office for Students. When will she announce the funding for the years going forward and when will my excellent staff be able to continue that good work?

[Anne Milton]

The hon. Lady is right to praise the work of Wakefield College. Such colleges are real exemplars of what can be achieved. I appreciate the importance of outreach work, and that is particularly important when we consider social mobility. I am happy to discuss the matter further with the hon. Lady at any time.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

My hon. Friend should know that no academy trust can profit from its schools, and the Wakefield trust will not be able to retain any reserves that it has at the point of dissolution. We are working with all the academies and the preferred new trust to determine what is appropriate support and proper funding.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

I hope that the standard of the question is up to that of the jumper, Mr Speaker, but I fear that it may not be.

Notwithstanding what the Minister has said, the acting chief executive of Wakefield City Academies Trust managed to pay himself £1,000 a day in a company owned by his daughter and to pay £60,000 a year for clerking services. Despite those excessive sums, however, it appears that the audit committee did not meet for a full calendar year to sign off the probity of those payments. How many more academy trusts across the country are in special measures? Into how many more trusts has the Minister sent his special auditors so that they can have a look? He sent them into Wakefield, but he did not tell anyone else about what was going on, leaving the trust to fail in September during the first week of the new term.

[Nick Gibb]

All related-party transactions must be disclosed, and they are. We are working with the trust to transfer all 21 academies to new sponsors with a track record of improving schools and delivering high academic standards. Those transfers will take place in a way that secures the financial future of each school.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend’s question sets out how important it is to have a strong economy producing jobs and opportunity for young people. We are working with the Careers & Enterprise Company to build a national network, which will connect schools and colleges with employers. Over half of schools and colleges in England are already supported by an enterprise adviser, who helps them to build strong careers and strong enterprise plans for their young people. In opportunity areas, dozens of key employers, including Rolls-Royce, NatWest and KPMG, have committed to providing tailored careers support to young people.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Pupils at the 21 schools managed by Wakefield City Academies Trust are among the most disadvantaged in the country. The collapse of the trust on Friday came as a bolt from the blue to them, their parents and their teachers. A leaked report in November found: that the trust was predicted to be £16 million in deficit; that hundreds of thousands of pounds had been spent on an interim educational consultant; and that Wakefield City high school did not even know which pupils were in receipt of pupil premium. What steps is the Secretary of State taking to make sure disadvantaged children do not miss out as a result of financial mismanagement and her Department’s incompetence?

[Justine Greening]

I was agreeing with all the points the hon. Lady was making on how important it is to tackle low education standards in those schools and to make sure we take swift action to have the schools rebrokered so that standards can go up, but I fundamentally disagree with her that standards are falling. Standards are going up. In fact, the place in our United Kingdom where standards are the worst and falling is Wales, where Labour is in control. I really think that before pointing the finger at England the Labour party should be apologising to Welsh children, who are missing out because of a flawed and failing education policy.

Education and Local Services

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

I will make a bit of progress because many colleagues want to speak in this debate once I have sat down.

The Government are committed to having the best lifelong learning for adults in the developed world. We will achieve that by setting up a national retraining scheme.

All these reforms represent real support for people across the country, real opportunity and real ways to tackle inequality. We recognise that access to equality of opportunity—social mobility—is what will lift our country, not some kind of snake-oil populism from the Labour party, backed up by a fiscal black hole that will mean cuts in the very areas that are most important in improving opportunity.

Of course, throughout those reforms we will work hand in glove with British businesses, relying on their expertise, knowledge and leadership—businesses that the Labour party continually castigates as being part of the problem that our country faces, as Labour sees it. We see businesses as critical in driving opportunity and social mobility.

We know that good schools are the engines of social mobility, and they are not just about individual success. Schools are at the centre of every single community. Last week I visited the Kensington Aldridge Academy, in the shadow of Grenfell Tower. I am sure the House will join me in paying tribute to the teachers and staff of all the schools in the area, and indeed those in Manchester affected by what happened after the Ariana Grande concert. They were met with a terrible situation but helped the young people caught up in it with absolute professionalism. Leaders, headteachers and teachers in those areas have been the unsung heroes over recent weeks, along with our emergency services, and I want to put on record again my thanks to them for all the work they have done to make sure that our children are back in school but also getting the support that they need to deal with the experiences they have had. We are committed to ensuring that that support stays in place as those schools continue, when the cameras have gone, to help their students deal with what they have been through.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

With the news today that 95 tower blocks have failed the cladding test, it is clear that hundreds of children across the country, not just in Camden but in other local education authority areas, will experience the disruption of being moved out of their home. What will the Secretary of State’s Department do to help to support schools in areas where that disruption is occurring?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

May I say how glad I am to be back in this place after a very close and hard-won general election campaign? It is wonderful to hear so many brilliant maiden speeches from colleagues in all parties; they are certainly going to give us old-timers a run for our money. I am particularly thrilled to welcome my hon. Friends the Members for Colne Valley (Thelma Walker), for North West Durham (Laura Pidcock), for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Lesley Laird) and for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Hugh Gaffney), who will make brilliant additions to the House.

In the general election, people in Wakefield rejected the planned cuts to our public services—our schools, hospitals and police. I am delighted that the Government have dropped their mean-spirited plan to cut free school meals for infants. Parents in Wakefield told me how worried they were for the children in our city who rely on that as their only hot meal of the day. It is interesting that although the Secretary of State for Education declined to answer questions from Members on this side of the House, while we have been debating she has slipped out a written answer stating that there will be no new grammar schools during the term of this Parliament. Labour’s ban on those drivers of inequality remains in place.

Education has the power to change lives. Most of us here know that because we know that it changed our lives. I am proud to have spent seven years working as a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Cranfield School of Management, which is a brilliant institution. I want every child in this country to get a decent education, no matter where they were born, but the odds are stacked against far too many children in Wakefield. A quarter grow up in poverty and are eligible for free school meals. That is double the national average.

Wakefield Council and our local enterprise partnership have taken steps to tackle the low levels of tertiary education locally with a new £6.9 million advanced innovation and skills centre opening in Wakefield this summer, and Wakefield College has just received a silver award in the teaching excellence framework. Wakefield is on its way, but the planned cuts are making life hard. The area has lost 11 Sure Start centres since 2010, and every 16-year-old who was eligible no longer gets the education maintenance allowance to help them to stay on in college.

I pay tribute to Wakefield headteachers, who are doing so much for our young people despite the £21 million of funding cuts that they will see over the next two years. There will be fewer teachers, bigger class sizes, fewer choices for students taking GCSEs and A-levels, a reduction in vocational courses, less support for children with special educational needs or mental health problems, fewer extra-curricular activities and enrichment opportunities, and less money for textbooks and computers. That is what the headteachers in Wakefield wrote in a letter to parents, asking them to campaign against the Government’s cuts.

I pay tribute to our brilliant headteachers. I visited Clare Kelly at Dane Royd Junior and Infant School in March to present her with a British Council award for the amazing work she does with our local children on languages. They come out learning not just French and Spanish but Chinese, putting those of us who like to think of ourselves as old-school linguists to shame. Another example is Miriam Oakley at Horbury Academy. When I was making a film to go on Facebook about the cuts that her school faces—16 teachers and £550 per pupil—she came out and said, “I thought you were a truant.” That was one of the lighter moments of my campaign; no one has called me a truant for the past 30 years. I also pay tribute to Rob Marsh at CAPA College, which is waiting for a response from Education Ministers on what is going to happen to its award-winning performance arts provision.

I urge the Government to look again at these cuts; they are harming children in Wakefield.

School Funding

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Every child in this country, and every disabled child in this country, deserves a decent education. The principle that no child should be worse off as a result of these funding reforms should run through this consultation. Where a child was born should not dictate their life chances, yet that is the case for too many children in our country, and too many children in Wakefield, where 25% of them are growing up in poverty. I was proud to be a member of the last Labour Government, who lifted nearly a million children out of poverty, and I am so disappointed by what this Government have done, overseeing the closure of 800 Sure Start centres and changing the goalposts on measuring child poverty.

Wakefield schools have taken a very deep hit from these proposals.

[Lucy Frazer]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Mary Creagh]

No, I am not giving way.

Fair funding should mean a levelling up, not a levelling down. Every school in my constituency will see their funding cut under the Secretary of State’s proposals. The manifesto promise to protect education spending has been broken, as we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg). The Government have not provided for funding per pupil to increase in line with inflation; have not accounted for the increase in pupils attending schools; and have not considered the costs of higher national insurance and pension contributions, which now have to be absorbed by the school budgets. When the efficiency savings are factored into the funding formula, funding in Wakefield per pupil will fall from £4,725 this year to £4,211 in 2019-20—a real-terms cut of 11%.

[Michelle Donelan (Chippenham) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Mary Creagh]

I will not give way.

Nine maintained schools across Wakefield district are projected to be in deficit by 31 March, which means increased class sizes, subjects dropped from the curriculum, pupils with special educational needs and disabilities losing vital support, and teacher vacancies left unfilled.

There will also be a very worrying impact on special educational needs. At the moment, there is some flexibility to move money around and to move it into the high needs block. Under the new formula, there will be disruption and uncertainty around special needs funding for cities such as Wakefield. The funds are simply not enough for children in our city who need that extra support.

[Lucy Frazer]

The hon. Lady said at the outset that it was important for all children to get the same opportunities. She also mentioned that class sizes would go up. Does she think it is fair that, for the children in my constituency, class sizes in every single secondary school are over 30, and that those schools have been historically underfunded for years and years and years?

[Mary Creagh]

The hon. Lady reinforces my point, which is that the Government must take into account rising pupil numbers. This formula and the efficiency savings fail to do that, so she needs to have a word with her Secretary of State about them.

We cannot have a situation in which there is just not enough money to go around to educate all children well. In Wakefield, we will see 1,000 more pupils start school in September and yet no money has been allocated for that increase, which means that the schools and the pupils will miss out. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that schools in England face the steepest cuts to funding since the 1970s.

Despite those circumstances, headteachers such as Martin Fenton at Greenhill Primary, Rob Marsh at Cathedral Academy, and Georgina Haley at Netherton Junior and Infant School are doing excellent work in my constituency to improve the life chances of children in Wakefield. I urge the Secretary of State to drop her grammar school plans, revise the national funding formula for schools, and make sure that we do not go back to the bad old days. I was at school at the same time as she was. I had to pay £12 for my O-level physics textbook, and we did not have a teacher for two years in the good old days of the 1984 teaching budgets. We do not want to go back to those days.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

I do, and what we should not do is to allow ideology to get in the way of giving parents greater choice. The reality is that boys on free school meal provision who go to grammars have got three times more chance of getting into Russell Group universities than their other counterparts.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Nurseries and childcare providers in Wakefield are at breaking point, and over 50 have closed their doors since 2010. Will the Secretary of State set out how she will meet her manifesto commitment to provide 30 hours of free childcare a week for three and four-year-olds, given that the average increase for childcare providers next year will be just 21p an hour?

[Justine Greening]

I am sure that the hon. Lady welcomes the Government’s ambition to double the amount of childcare from 15 to 30 hours during this Parliament, which is why we are putting in more funding. We have consulted on that, and we will respond to the consultation shortly.

Further Education

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell]

Give me a chance!

The right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) will remember that when Labour left office, we were in the middle of a very difficult global recession, but for the vast majority of our time in office, our record on youth attainment and educational achievement was excellent.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

I am sure my hon. Friend will remember the landmark future jobs fund that was set up by Labour in government, in stark contrast to the Conservatives who when they came in in 2010 cut it off and cut off access to technician training, as they are doing for another generation of young people in 2015.

[Lucy Powell]

Absolutely.

I know we will hear from the Conservatives that these spending decisions are all necessary to deliver what they like to refer to—I hope this will get me some brownie points—as their long-term economic plan—[Hon. Members: “Hooray.”]—and a strong economy, but, as the Prime Minister agrees, investing in education and skills helps our economy to grow and reduces the deficit. Indeed, the reverse is also true: slashing and burning education, whether in schools, sixth-forms or further education, will lead to greater reliance on the state for unqualified young people and lower tax returns for those in lower paid jobs. Cutting education spending at the altar of deficit reduction is a false choice, and it is economic stupidity.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[George Freeman]

I would be delighted to give my hon. Friend a date. She makes an important point, and I welcome the ambition set out in the “Case for Cambridge” manifesto. Having sat myself on the board of the Greater Cambridge partnership, I well know that Cambridge is now a global technology cluster. Only last week, I went to visit AstraZeneca’s £500 million global research and development hub site. It is a city that needs global infrastructure, and we welcome the ambition set out in the manifesto.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

Regional growth in Yorkshire and the north-east is dependent on good transport links, so the cancellation of electrification between Leeds and Manchester and Leeds and Newcastle was a bitter blow to our economy. May I urge the Minister to urge the Chancellor to review the decision in the autumn statement and to look at the skills capacity in the transport sector, which is pushing up costs and prices in the electrification area?

[George Freeman]

First, the programme has not been cancelled; it is paused. It is a massive programme. [Laughter.] Opposition Members do not know much about running major projects. It is absolutely necessary that we get it right. The howls of derision opposite reveal their embarrassment at our success. You would think we would get more thanks for what we have done: a £7 billion regional growth fund; city deals across the country; 11,000 small and medium-sized businesses helped; and 130,000 jobs created, not least in the north.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady makes a point about the review of the role of the Children’s Commissioner and her office, which is quite separate from the Eileen Munro review. I share her concerns about the rights of children in care, and she will be aware that the children’s rights director has a direct role in that matter, which he has carried out with enormous respect over recent years, ensuring that the concerns and voices of children in care are heard loud and clear.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

6. Pursuant to the written ministerial statement of 5 July 2010, Official Report, columns 1-2WS, on public spending control, how much of the £1 billion of reductions in his Department’s expenditure in 2010-11 will take effect in (a) Wakefield constituency and (b) West Yorkshire.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove)]

The budgets that will be affected were published on the Department’s website on Monday 5 July. We will shortly write to all local authorities setting out the impact on their allocations.

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that reply, but the promises of rebuilding and repairing schools ring a little hollow in the light of the £1 billion cut to the schools capital programme that he is making in-year. Given that almost a third of the financial year has passed and he has not yet written to Wakefield or any other West Yorkshire authority with the details of how much will be cut from their reparation programmes, is his cut not in effect more like £1.3 billion or £1.5 billion, as the cuts will have to be made in-year?

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her question, but I refer her to a letter from the permanent secretary of my Department to the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls). He pointed out last week that, last year, the Treasury wrote to clarify its expectations of the use of end-year flexibility capital. The Treasury wanted to limit its use, but the Department refused to acknowledge it. The Treasury said clearly to the right hon. Gentleman that he was playing fast and loose with that capital stream. The issue had not been resolved by the time of the election, and instead of the dysfunctional relationship between the right hon. Gentleman and the Treasury, we now have a proper relationship involving a coalition Government who are clearing up the mess that we inherited from the hon. Lady’s Government.