Improving Education Standards

Mike Kane Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

In the past fortnight, we have seen the most unstable period of government since the Maastricht rebellion of the early 1990s. Unlike that debacle, however, this Government cannot rely on their own MPs, or even Unionist MPs, to make up the numbers. Indeed, many of the Minister’s colleagues have aired open mutiny directly to the Prime Minister in this Chamber; it is a piteous sight. So I was surprised to hear the Leader of the House announce last Thursday that there would be a general debate on improving education standards today. Thursday is normally reserved for Back-Bench business, but the Government do not want to hear any Back-Bench business at present.

This is an astonishing act of hubris: the Government have chosen to debate a subject for which they have shown nothing to show but failure over the past eight years. The right hon. Gentleman’s colleague the Secretary of State for Education must know that the Government have failed in their duty to improve educational standards, because in July the Secretary of State conceded that too many teachers were overwhelmed by excessive workload and then pledged to do more to support teachers and said he was trying to squeeze more funding out of No. 11. What did teachers get in last month’s Budget? The primary way of improving standards is to improve the quality of our teaching workforce and the relationship they have with their pupils, but there was no increase in school funding last month. Instead, budgets are set to fall again in the year ahead, and teachers did not see a proper pay rise. In fact, the majority of teachers will face another real-terms pay cut this year.

[Nick Gibb]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was paying attention to the Budget, but £400 million of extra capital was given to schools to spend this year, and another £508 million was given to schools to fund the pay award over two years.

[Mike Kane]

The majority of teachers will face a real-terms pay cut. I will come on to the £400 million in just a moment.

In the Chancellor’s words, all that the teachers got was a few “little extras”. The Secretary of State was said to have winced when asked about the Chancellor’s choice of words, which is not exactly the endorsement that one would expect from a Cabinet colleague. However, the Chancellor then doubled down by saying that the £400 million for “little extras” could buy

“a couple of whiteboards, or some laptop computers or something”.

It is no wonder that the Secretary of State cringed.

I am sure that the Minister will remember his colleague, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), now the Environment Secretary, saying that the measure of this Government’s success would be how the country would perform in the PISA rankings. That is what the Government predicated their agenda on. However, the PISA rankings that followed showed that the UK had failed to make any substantial improvements. In fact, we slipped back down the rankings. That shows the Government’s failure to improve standards on their own terms.

[Nick Gibb]

The children who were tested in those PISA rankings spent most of their education in schools under the last Labour Government.

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[Mike Kane]

They certainly did, and much of the improvement came from 2010 when we identified resources for coasting schools before we left government. The Minister, who has no formal pedagogic training, has based today’s debate on the back of a ConservativeHome article from a couple of weeks ago. He does not want experts to advise him. He has resisted the experts. He does not want to hear from our world-class universities and teaching institutions, which our competitors in the PISA rankings use to improve their education.

The Minister tells us that success and attainment in the primary school curriculum have gone up, but let us deconstruct that. All the international evidence produced over the past 30 years shows that interventions in the curriculum—and the Minister has had a few—and testing produce disruption to teaching and learning whereby results initially start low, rapidly improve as teachers and students learn what they need to do in order to do well in the tests, then tail off and plateau as this artificial improvement stops. This is known as teaching to the test. He can produce the statistics, but even Ofqual has recognised this problem as the “sawtooth effect”. That is what happens when we change the curriculum.

The Minister talked about the primary test. It is one of the numerous directed tests placed on schools, and it is adding administrative burdens. He is trying to run 22,000 schools from Great Smith Street. Why? Artificially inflated test results say nothing about the real quality of teaching, learning and standards achieved. We are narrowing the curriculum to cramming for tests in maths and English. In examining terms, we are measuring the construct of test-taking rather than the real knowledge of maths and English, let alone all the other worthwhile school subjects such as music and drama that have been pulled out of the curriculum because of the narrowing of the focus of the curriculum in this country. This is happening because somebody without any pedagogical knowledge feels fit to direct schools in what they teach. Primary schools already teach multiplication, and we do not need more money to be wasted on testing it. We need more money to be spent on teaching it.

Let us address the Government’s academies expansion and their free school programme. The Minister cited no evidence that any of their reforms have genuinely improved standards in schools or outcomes for pupils. In fact, more than 100 free schools that opened only in the last couple of years have now closed, wasting hundreds of millions of pounds in this failed programme.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

I am enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s speech very much. Why does he think that, according to the Progress 8 measure, free schools are now our top-performing type of school?

[Mike Kane]

The hon. Gentleman cannot have been listening to my answer about the disruption to the curriculum by new testing procedures. I have academic evidence from our major universities showing how the Minister came to that resolve and showing that he is wrong.

[Neil O’Brien]

I gently ask the hon. Gentleman at least to acknowledge that free schools are now, according to the Progress 8 measure, the highest-performing type of school in this country.

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[Mike Kane]

There is no evidence whatsoever for that. We know that 100 free schools have opened and shut in the past few years. We had one free school in Bermondsey that cost £1 million over two years and attracted 60 pupils. The local authority begged for it not to be opened, but it cost £60,000 per pupil while it lasted. We could have sent those pupils to Eton for half the price, although let me say to my hon. Friends that I am not advocating sending anybody there at the moment. We have 100 schools, unbrokered, containing 700,000 children. The Government cannot get anywhere near enough sponsors for the academies. They have only the Church of England in the rural areas and the Co-op, the Churches and the faith schools. The Education Policy Institute has stated that

“large structural reforms, through the expansion of the academies programme and the introduction of free schools, have so far resulted in…no impact on overall attainment.”

That is a damning measure, after eight years of this Government.

An economical attitude to evidence is apparent from the Government’s claim that 1.9 million children are in schools that are rated good or outstanding. Many of those schools have not been Ofsteded for more than 10 years, and the claim does not take into account the fact that we now have more pupils in the system. This is a discredited statistic. The UK Statistics Authority and the independent Education Policy Institute have raised serious concerns about it. The claim does not account for increases in the school population, or for the number of pupils who are in schools that have not been inspected since before 2010. In other words, it does not give the full picture. Today, the Minister has a chance to correct the record. Are his colleagues, the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister, right to say that their policies have led to 1.9 million more children being educated in schools rated good or outstanding, or is the UK Statistics Authority right to say that they need to put that figure into context? I would be happy to give way to the Minister on this point.

[Nick Gibb]

I said in my speech that, in 2010, 66% of pupils were attending schools that were then graded good or outstanding. Today, 84% of pupils are attending schools that are graded good or outstanding. If we multiply that out, we get the 1.9 million figure that the hon. Gentleman has cited.

[Mike Kane]

There we have it. That at least provides some context, but it is not what the UK Statistics Authority, the Institute for Fiscal Studies or the Education Policy Institute have said. These are made-up figures from a Government who have run out of ideas for education.

The true hindrance to improving standards is austerity. After all, every area of education—from early years, where we have seen 1,000 Sure Start programmes cut, to schools to further and higher education—has seen massive cuts since the Conservative party came to power. Our analysis of figures produced by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies shows that school budgets are £1.7 billion lower in real terms than they were five years ago.

[Neil O’Brien]

The hon. Gentleman continues to refer to early years cuts, which I find extraordinary, given that spending on early years will rise to a record £6 billion by 2020 and given that we have introduced new things such as the 30 hours’ free childcare offer, tax-free childcare and the offer of free childcare for disadvantaged two-year-olds.

[Mike Kane]

There is a huge threat to maintained nursery schools, which we hear enough about from Government Members. The Government cut 1,000 Sure Start centres. The sure-fire way to achieve social mobility in our country is to make the best provision available for the youngest people in our society. We do not have that anymore; those Sure Start centres were cut. I will come to the impact of that on social mobility in a second.

Our analysis of the IFS figures shows a £1.7 billion cut in real terms. Government Members know it in their schools, too, because they talk to headteachers just as we do in our constituencies. To unpack that, these cuts, along with the impact of the public sector pay freeze and then the cap, have created a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, which was not once referred to by the Minister today. The Government have subsequently missed the teacher recruitment and retention target for five successive years, and in the past two years, more teachers have left than have joined the profession.

[Nick Gibb]

rose—

[Mike Kane]

For the third or fourth time, and following his speech, which went on for about 26 minutes, I give way to Minister.

[Nick Gibb]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who has been extremely generous to me and my hon. Friends. I shall try to make this the last intervention. He might have missed the statistics that came out this morning, which showed that this year we recruited 8% more people, or over 2,000 more, into teacher training than we did in the previous year.

[Mike Kane]

Last year, we saw the number of teachers decline by 5,000. The Minister might come up with a statistic today, but teacher numbers are going down. Since 2011, a third of all teachers have left. I spoke to Teach First just the other day in a meeting. The current rate is one in, one out. Does the Minister bear no responsibility for the reforms, the pressures and the lack of pay rises that are the reason why so many great graduates and brilliant people are no longer training the future of our country but are leaving the profession? Does he bear no responsibility at all? Five thousand have left in one year.

Despite the noble effort of staff and teachers, schools are unable to deliver the high-quality education that children deserve because they simply do not have the funding to make ends meet, for either themselves or their schools. The Government’s own analysis has shown that teachers were around £4,000 worse off in 2016, compared with 2010, as a direct result of their policies on pay. Furthermore, the IFS has found that the promised pay rise will see the majority of teachers facing another real-terms pay cut.

Earlier this year, I was shocked to read a BBC article that reported that children were filling their pockets with food from school canteens because they were hungry. This is Tory Britain, 2018. These were children with greying skin. They were malnourished and afflicted with hunger. As a teacher, I know that schools cannot teach children properly if they are hungry in the classroom. That is happening in our country—one that now has 4.5 million children in poverty. That did not happen in a vacuum. Poverty is the grim and logical conclusion to austerity. Its effects are palpable, and its consequences can be irrevocable. If the Government truly want to see standards in education rise, they must do the logical thing and truly end austerity once and for all.

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[Neil O'Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

One thing we can do to improve standards in schools is to stamp out bullying. I wish to start by talking about an incident in Huddersfield involving a young Syrian refugee, Jamal, and the appalling bullying that he has suffered. Members from all parties will have been appalled by what they have seen. I was particularly appalled because it happened literally two minutes’ walk from where I grew up. I encourage the Minister, in her winding-up speech, to talk a little about that incident and about what the Government are doing to stamp out bullying. I shall come back to the point about order in schools, which is really important. When I saw the video, I was reminded of too much of the disorder that I saw in schools when I was growing up there. It is the same kids and the same problem, and it is important for the agenda of improving standards in education. The one positive thing that I can report is that since the news of this appalling incident went online, people have raised more than £100,000 for the family in a crowdfunding campaign. Some other goods things have happened, such as the Huddersfield Town goalkeeper inviting Jamal to a match. A lot of people are coming together to demonstrate that people in this country are not idiots and are actually kind to refugees and welcome them here.

Much of my speech will be about some of the things that we could change or do differently in education, and I shall start with some positive things. I wish to pay tribute to some important people in the Labour party who have driven the agenda in respect of improving school standards. I pay particular tribute to Andrew Adonis, whose magnificent book on reforming England’s education is an absolute must-read. I was reminded of that book the other day when I read a piece by an education academic slating an unnamed school in, I think, London. This school, it is rumoured online, is Mossbourne Academy, which was used by Andrew Adonis as an example par excellence of what Labour’s academies agenda had achieved. The school, Hackney Downs, had been a failure factory—a disaster area—for working-class kids for generations and it was turned into one of the highest performing schools in the country. This cowardly academic attack on the school, which is not named so the school cannot respond, is full of cod-Marxist jargon. It slates a school that has clearly turned around the lives of thousands and thousands of working-class kids and given them many more opportunities than they would otherwise have had. It was just an appalling piece for Cambridge University to have published.

Let me turn to some of the positives in the education reform agenda. The proportion of pupils in good or outstanding schools, which has already been mentioned, has increased from 66% to 86% since 2010. Good things such as the national fair funding formula have been introduced. In my Leicestershire constituency that is particularly welcome as, historically, it has been very underfunded. Total school funding is going up twice as fast as the national average over the next two years—the first two years of the formula—which is very welcome.

[Mike Kane]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Neil O'Brien]

Of course, I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, as he was so generous in giving way to me.

[Mike Kane]

I was really kind to the hon. Gentleman the other day when he had forgotten his pass and I let him through one of the doors, but I do not think that he was so kind to me in the debate just now. On that point, will he explain why Leicestershire County Council and schools across the board there are suffering £8.9 million of cuts—that is £104 per pupil since 2015?

[Neil O'Brien]

I will always be grateful to the hon. Gentleman for opening doors for me. He did ask who I worked for, and I was pleased to say, “The people of Harborough, Oadby and Wigston.” When MPs start to look younger, perhaps it is a sign that one is becoming more mature and statesmanlike. As I said, school funding is going up in Leicestershire, and going up twice as fast as the national average, which is hugely welcome.

The early years agenda has not been neglected. We will have spent a record £6 billion by 2020, covering: the 30 hours free offer, which will be very helpful to many people, the tax-free childcare and, particularly, that extra free childcare for disadvantaged two-year-olds.

In addition to those headline reforms, there have been many other less visible, but hugely important improvements in our schools. One of them has already been mentioned. I believe that it was an important and positive reform when the Government ended the right of appeal against exclusion because that helped to protect teachers and helps those pupils who want to get on and learn from disruption and violence. I have every sympathy with Labour Members who say that we must improve pupil referral units. I started my contribution by talking about bullying and order in our schools. However, I hope that the Government will not backslide and do anything to weaken schools’ ability to maintain order.

I had a lot of sympathy with some of the comments of the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) and of my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy). We must improve provision for those who could be in a pipeline towards prison. I have visited prisons and worked with the homeless. It is absolutely true that some of these people’s careers begin with school exclusion. However, this must not come at the expense of increasing disorder for those who want to learn. Young people do have agency and need to behave responsibly. I am afraid that I do not agree with the idea of a zero exclusions policy, or taking away schools’ freedom to exclude altogether.

Another important reform that is perhaps less visible—

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[Neil O'Brien]

I always look for points of agreement, but the hon. Gentleman is free to shout, “You were caught out”, from a sedentary position. Let me reach over the heads of the chuntering Opposition Front Benchers to say I agree with the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle that we must have a good look at all proposals for different types of schools, where they are to be located, where the need is greatest and so on. However, I caution the hon. Lady against the attentions of Her Majesty’s Treasury, where I used to work, because there is always the temptation to say, “We don’t need any new schools. Experimentation is expensive, so let’s just push more people into low-performing schools and keep schools going that are not working.” She will not be surprised to learn that I do not entirely agree with her point on this.

One of the most important changes in our school system is the growth of multi-academy trusts. Some people talk about them as chains, as if schools are supermarkets or part of the market economy, but I think of them as families of schools. I am grateful and glad that Robert Smyth Academy—a school in my constituency that had some problems because of the move from three tiers to two—is now part of a brilliantly high-performing multi-academy trust and has a new, amazing and incredibly dynamic headteacher. I am confident, because of the experience of replicating success, that that school will also be a success.

We have always had miracle schools, super-heads and flashes of inspiration in the school system, but one of the new and exciting things about multi-academy trusts is that those successes are now being replicated at scale. I hope that the Government will push a sort of industrial policy for schools. Let us get behind high-performing multi-academy trusts, think about their geographic distribution around the country and help the best chains to expand in areas of the north and midlands, which are lagging behind in school outcomes.

Of course, this debate goes beyond schools. FE and sixth-form colleges have already been mentioned. If it is acceptable to the House, while we have the education cognoscenti here, I would love to pay tribute to Dr Kevin Conway, who sadly died too young—[Interruption.] I am so sorry.

[Mike Kane]

The hon. Gentleman is making a strong and honourable point about a really good thinker in education. I hope this intervention will give him time to regroup and get back to his speech.

[Neil O'Brien]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman; he held the door open for me earlier this week, and has done so again verbally today.

Kevin Conway was a guy who turned around Greenhead College—the college I attended—in Huddersfield, which had been rather underperforming. He was a great and totally uncompromising individual who achieved amazing things in my sixth-form college and transformed the lives of generations of people who grew up in Huddersfield.