Education and Local Services

Mike Wood Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner (Ashton-under-Lyne) (Lab)]

Let me first welcome you back to the Chair, Mr Speaker, and also the many new Members to the Chamber for today’s debate. I am sure we are all looking forward to hearing some excellent maiden speeches.

I also welcome the Secretary of State back to her place and her new Ministers to theirs. I suspect she may have found herself debating education issues quite a lot during the campaign, not least in her own constituency, but a lot has changed in these few short weeks, so today’s debate might be rather different. In fact, the Secretary of State concentrated more on the Labour party today than on her own Government and the Queen’s Speech. There are more than 2,500 words about education in the manifesto on which the Prime Minister stood those few weeks ago, but barely 50 in the speech we heard last week. Maybe that is why the Secretary of State concentrated so much on the Labour party manifesto. What we have heard is not so much a programme but a Post-it note. Although I listened carefully to the right hon. Lady’s opening remarks, I do not think we know much more about her policy now than we did before she stood up.

Let us start with the obvious points. The centrepiece of the new Prime Minister’s education policy was meant to be new grammar schools. I will not rehearse the arguments, but I will just put this observation on the record:

“When people talk about the grammar school issue, I never get people asking the question, ‘Why don’t you bring back the secondary modern?’ And in fact…most children would go to a secondary modern school…if we brought back selection”.

Of course, that is not an original observation. In this case, it is the argument made by the Minister for School Standards, the right hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb), when explaining why he opposed new grammar schools, when that was the Conservative policy under the last Prime Minister. I do not think it was said in this election campaign, so let me be the first to say it: #IagreewithNick. Perhaps the Secretary of State can explain what a hashtag means to her Home Secretary. I also agreed with the Minister for School Standards when he said:

“Now our job is to improve the standards in the three thousand comprehensive schools in this country and I believe it’s not getting rid of the grammar schools that was the issue.”

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

Perhaps the shadow Secretary of State could shed a little light on her own policy by responding to a question that has been asked in most of these debates but never properly answered. Would a Labour Government abolish existing grammar schools?

[Angela Rayner]

I think I have been quite clear that we would concentrate on standards and not structures, unlike this Government, who are ideologically obsessing and wasting billions of pounds—not my words, but those of the National Audit Office about the Government’s fixations.

The question is, will the Government now get on with the job and does the Prime Minister now also agree with Nick? Will the Secretary of State make it clear that there will be no attempts to lift the ban on new selective schools? Will she finally concentrate on solving the real problems—those that we hear about time and time again and that we heard about throughout the general election: the crisis in funding and in the teacher workforce—instead of creating more problems for herself?