Pupil Premium

Nick Gibb Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for the early comments she made. I should point out that what we are talking about is on entry to school, not at a ridiculous age. [Interruption.] Frankly, many schools—to which I would be happy to take the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman), who is shouting from a sedentary position—are already doing that type of assessment. They are doing it to inform their education and also to measure progress. We have descriptors at the moment that classify some young people as the lowest performers. That information is available at the moment; it is just very difficult for anyone to understand. Why should we impede parents in understanding more what their pupils are doing in schools?

I am particularly grateful to the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby, who leads for the Labour party on these issues, for being pragmatic. Although I quite understand the concerns about assessing youngsters at an early age, the logic of measuring progress, which is not in dispute in this House or among head teachers, teachers or parents, means that it is rational to measure progress right across the educational experience. It is not rational simply to pick an arbitrary date at the end of key stage 1 and to measure progress only from there. That is why we think it is sensible to have this debate.

[Mr Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his statement today, and particularly on the abolition of the meaningless and distorting levels in key stage assessment. Does he agree that the substantial rise in the pupil premium will mean that every school should now be able to ensure that all children, regardless of their background, will be fluent readers and fluent in arithmetic—including long division, long multiplication and fractions—by the time they leave primary school? Does he also agree that there will no longer be any excuse for an attainment gap between those from poorer and wealthier backgrounds?

[Mr Laws]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is reassuring to be able to visit schools with very large numbers of disadvantaged youngsters, such as the one I mentioned earlier, and to see that the attainment gaps have now been extinguished. This shows schools across the country that it is possible to close that gap, and that that is not just the perspective of some DFE Minister but the experience of schools across the land that are achieving that. The huge amounts of money that we are now putting into the pupil premium and other disadvantage funding for schools with disadvantaged youngsters will remove what were legitimate excuses 10 or 20 years ago about the absence of the resources necessary to achieve these big changes. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who did so much in his time in the Department to champion higher standards and to pave the way for much of what is in today’s statement.