Skills and Growth

Nick Gibb Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend is furiously ambitious for his constituency and the children in it. He is exactly right. The key to that is great teaching and strong leadership, making sure that young people are focusing on their academic subjects in order to get the basics right and then pursuing other academic or vocational routes.

One of the reasons we are disappointed with the Education Secretary’s approach in her new Bill is that it seems too indicative of an exhaustive, target-driven, bureaucratic, central-command approach. It is a 20th-century answer to a 21st-century problem. In the words of Steve Hilton, a great guru for the Conservative party, this marks a backwards and “Soviet” approach to education.

Higher ambitions require more substantial reform, and I am convinced that in England that requires us to explore the merits of a 14-to-19 baccalaureate system of upper secondary education, particularly now we are raising the participation age. There is an emerging consensus on that idea, and it demands closer inspection.

[The Minister for Schools (Mr Nick Gibb)]

indicated dissent.

[Tristram Hunt]

The Schools Minister says there is not, but he should listen to the CBI and leading headteachers, including those on the Headteachers’ Roundtable, and to one of the great Tory Education Secretaries, Lord Baker. There is a far broader consensus on the need to rethink the purposes of upper secondary education in the light of the continued inability of the current high-stakes, teach-to-the-test, exam-factory model in order to tackle our long tale of underperformance.

I do not expect the Government to commit to that today as a point of public policy. I accept, as we did during the election, that the short-term priority is to provide heads and teachers with a degree of curriculum stability, given the rather, shall we say, frenzied pace of recent reform. Now is the time to launch—as the CBI, the voice of business, has requested, alongside the Labour party—a broader cross-party review.

Disappointingly, prior to the election the Education Secretary walked out on the cross-party talks that the Royal Society had convened to introduce some stability to the curriculum process. Now that she is back in office, I hope she will take a slightly more mature approach and support a CBI-endorsed cross-party review to look into a more ambitious settlement for secondary education that can stretch the more able students, challenge the damaging snobbery towards creative, technical and vocational pathways, and tackle our seemingly intractable low skills problem, which so cripples our productivity.

In the light of the radical skills shift required by the industrial revolution we see all around us, with the move towards a digital society, we need to answer the deeper question of what skills, knowledge and attributes our young people now need to thrive and succeed in the 21st century. Until we have a clearer answer to that question, I fear we will not find a long-term solution to the productivity woes.

I hope the Government will give serious consideration to backing this bipartisan motion, and I commend it to the House.