Improving Education Standards

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[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 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.

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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—

[Emma Hardy]

I think that the hon. Gentleman may have misinterpreted what my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) said. We can have zero exclusions through exploring other policies such as managed moves, or using equality or tenanted provision. Zero exclusions does not necessarily mean that the pupil has to stay in that school. It means that they are not excluded and pushed out of the school system altogether.

[Neil O'Brien]

I thank the hon. Lady for clarifying that point. My concern is that the goal will quickly lead to a number of policies, some of which she has just alluded to, which bog down schools’ ability to act quickly on disorder and which gum up the works. I sense that that is something about which we disagree but I take her point.

One positive development in recent years has been the growth of low-stakes testing—things such as year 1 phonics screening, which enables us to spot problems early and nip them in the bud. That is one other reason that this country’s performance on primary school reading in the international tables is going up. We are bringing in those kinds of tests. Likewise, the proportion of pupils in the new and improved SATS who are achieving the expected standard in reading, writing and maths has gone up from 54% in 2016 to 64% now. That is a really good example of our teachers and our pupils rising to the challenge when a lot of opponents said that that would be too hard for kids to do.

Another positive development has been ending grade inflation and restoring rigour to our exams. I do not mean to make a partisan point here, but the number of pupils getting three As at A-level doubled under Labour. I do not think that anybody could credibly claim that that was all down to real improvement. There was grade inflation and a drift away from the most hard academic subjects, with the proportion of pupils doing the EBacc at GCSE falling from half in 1997 to 22% in 2010. Therefore, we had a drift away from the most difficult academic subjects and a move towards things such as the computer driving licence, which, because of comparative tables, were scoring huge numbers of points in GCSE league tables, but in fact were not valuable qualifications. I do not think that the hon. Lady would agree with that approach.

[Emma Hardy]

I just wondered what the hon. Gentleman’s opinion is on the subjects that are used in the EBacc and whether he thought that it would be crucial for the Government to look again at including perhaps design and technology, considering the comments that the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) made earlier about artificial intelligence, the fourth industrial revolution and the changes to society. Does he not think that perhaps the subjects chosen for the EBacc were chosen on ideological grounds by the Minister, rather than, actually, on what subjects our children need to face an uncertain future?

[Neil O'Brien]

That was an important intervention from the hon. Lady. I do not agree that those subjects were chosen on ideological grounds. Funnily enough, when we look at the longitudinal earnings and outcomes data, those kind of hard sciences and subjects are the ones that are important gateways to the professions, which will lead to higher earnings. On her point about design and technology, if we were to look again at the subjects and include something else, that would be one of the first things that I would consider.

[Luke Graham (Ochil and South Perthshire) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a comprehensive speech. He seems to be focusing a lot on England though. Obviously, this is the United Kingdom Parliament and improving educational standards is especially important in Scotland, where our international standards, particularly in maths and science, are falling. We are falling in the international tables, whereas other parts of the UK are rising. It would be interesting to hear—perhaps he will come on to this shortly—why he thinks that is and why Scotland is being left behind, while the rest of the UK is taking a step forward.

[Neil O'Brien]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important intervention. I was going to come on to that, but I will deal with it now. Education, and the quality of Scotland’s education system, was Scotland’s pride and joy. This is one of the important things that everyone in the country feels very strongly about. I am from Huddersfield, and all of the rest of my family are from Glasgow, so it is something that we all care about. Not having some of new Labour’s reform agenda in Scotland is one reason why school standards in Scotland have gone off the boil. The other problem, of course, is that because of the decisions on higher education funding of the Scottish National party Government—unfortunately there is no one here from the SNP to represent them—pupils from more deprived areas are now twice as likely to go to university if they are in England than if they are in Scotland. That is a radical unfairness in our country caused by the policies of the SNP Government.

Let me just finish the point about rigour. I will say something which Labour Members may agree with. We can restore rigour—we have done that and it is an important move—without having to have terminal exams. I am quite a supporter of modular exams. Young people’s mental health is an increasingly important issue. Many young people I meet in schools feel strongly about it. There is not necessarily a connection between high standards in exams and terminal exams. I understand that there are pedagogical arguments for terminal exams, but there are also good arguments for modular ones as well.

One important reform—this is important in the context of improving teacher recruitment and teacher numbers; I am glad that there are 10,000 more teachers than there were in 2010—is to stop Ofsted being excessively overbearing. When I was the chair of governors at a London primary school, I was struck by the way in which everybody was being socialised into jumping every time Ofsted changed some tick box and we were all chasing around after Ofsted. There was a complaint from the Labour Front Bench earlier about some schools not being inspected particularly often by Ofsted. That is part of an approach that focuses on places where there are problems and does not hassle teachers unnecessarily with inspections that do not need to happen. I agree with the Government’s move towards assessing school improvement on progress, data and outcomes, rather than trying to reach into schools with occasional inspections every three years, as if that were the way to drive school improvement. The way towards school improvement is to have high-performing, multi-academy trusts; I will return to that point soon.

I disagree with Opposition Front Benchers about free schools. According to recent data, they are our highest-performing schools on the Progress 8 measure, phonics and key stage 1. One of the important things about free schools is that they allow innovation into our system, and those innovations can be quite different and from different pedagogies. For example, School 21—set up by new Labour adviser Peter Hyman—has a huge focus on oracy, which the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) mentioned earlier. That is an interesting innovation. It is a high-performing school from one angle. Michaela Community School, set up by Katharine Birbalsingh, is also a brilliantly high-performing free school that is bringing new ideas into the education agenda, with a strong emphasis on order and discipline. This shows that we can achieve high results in different ways. Free schools have let lots of new ideas into the system that can then percolate through to other schools.

[Emma Hardy]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there should have been greater checks and a more rigorous look at who was applying for free schools in different areas and the level of need? Although he mentioned School 21, of which I am aware, there are many other free schools—as my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane) mentioned—where the money has just been wasted because the schools were not needed or wanted in the first place. Although the hon. Gentleman can point to some successes, surely he agrees that we need a much more rigorous process of assessing free schools and whether they should be built in the first place if this policy is to continue.

[Neil O'Brien]

I always look for points of agreement, rather than points of disagreement.

[Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

You were caught out.

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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.

[Luke Graham]

My hon. Friend is making a fantastic point about great thinkers in education. Earlier this week, I went to a YouTube event where I was able to see the rapping teacher, who is now getting about 4 million hits a week on some of his online content, which is helping students across the United Kingdom and internationally to make progress and improve their grade results—something that I am sure my hon. Friend would welcome.

[Neil O'Brien]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for intervening in such a friendly way. The rapping teacher is clearly able to speak in whole finished paragraphs, while I am barely able to articulate a sentence.

I really just wanted to say that Kevin Conway was an inspiration to me and really did amazing things for the town of Huddersfield—the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) was briefly here a moment ago, but has had to go—through his uncompromising approach. He did not have an ideological approach; it was just an insistence on very high standards. Through that great work, he really did change the lives of a lot of people.

Let us move on from the debacle of my attempt to pay tribute to my old principal to a point of policy and boring stuff that I can talk about without welling up. When one visits technical colleges, one always sees the potential. I was in South Leicestershire College just the other day visiting the public services class—the wonderful young people who are going to go off and become firefighters and police officers.

The Government should look again at the whole issue of GCSE resits in FE colleges, because the move to FE and a more work-like environment—I particularly like apprenticeships, but FE is also an important part of the mix—is such an important part of the process for young people who perhaps did not get on with school. These people may have felt like it was not for them and that they were not achieving. The thought behind it was right—that everyone needs a basic grounding in English and maths—but I increasingly think that the GCSE is just not the right thing. Almost everybody who fails it a first time goes on to fail it a second time, and that is very discouraging for young people. It is not the right qualification to ask them to do. Instead, we should look at offering some kind of “maths and English for the citizen” type of qualification.

[Emma Hardy]

I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Gentleman’s point about GCSE resits. Does he agree with me about the need to look again at functional skills qualifications in FE colleges, which offer a similar level of understanding in maths and English but, as he said, are taught in a different, more vocational way that is suitable for the children attending FE?

[Neil O'Brien]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, as she has managed to put the point that I was trying to make more clearly than I was able to.

Opposition Members and my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford have already touched on the issue of funding for sixth-form colleges. Clearly, there is a very odd shape of funding—there is this drop-off at sixth form. On the productivity in our schools and the bad consequences of that, I think sixth-form colleges are actually our most efficient type of school. They achieve the highest results, even though they do not benefit from the £1 billion a year internal transfer within schools as school sixth forms do. It is sort of obvious why they are so effective: instead of having an A-level class with two people in it, there are classes with 30 kids in them, like the classes in the college that I attended. If we changed funding for sixth-form colleges and that stage of education more generally, it would help to level the playing field, and I think we would see a lot more sixth-form colleges.

I have probably detained the House too long already, but if it is acceptable to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will mention two last things. We have already touched on the issue of smartphones and social media. There is so much potential to improve education. I know that the new Minister at the Department is passionate and is pushing the exciting things that are going on in edu-tech. But it also has the potential to disrupt and cause problems in our classrooms. I am a strong supporter of the idea already mentioned and the work that is going on in the Science and Technology Committee on the effect of smartphones and social media on young people’s mental health. I am a strong supporter of having a national campaign to limit and control the use of smartphones in class. There is an excellent London School of Economics study based on a randomised control trial that shows that there is a substantive increase in GCSE performance in schools that introduced a ban on smartphones in class. I agree with the Government that we should not have a one-size-fits-all national policy —I do not think we should do exactly what France has done—but I would love to see a national campaign to help schools to put in lockers and to adopt other policies to get smartphones out of the classroom, because they can be distracting in class and they are also sometimes distracting at home. Children arrive at school tired because they have been on a Snapchat streaks feature until 1 o’clock in the morning. There is lots of bad practice by our social media companies which are aiming to addict and to take up young people’s attention.

I think that I have covered all the things I wanted to cover in my speech. I am incredibly grateful to the various hon. Members who helped me to get through it.