Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Monday 29th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

I appreciate what the hon. Lady says, but I am afraid she needs to keep up: we have done the things that restrict the cost pressures on uniforms. We regularly survey how much uniforms are costing, and some of those results are encouraging. We also survey regularly the number of schools that have a second-hand uniform facility available, and I am pleased to report that that has improved. We are also very clear that, when a school trip is part of the national curriculum—an essential thing to do—there should be no charge. In addition to that, way many schools make sure that they are providing inclusivity for all pupils, and of course the pupil premium that we introduced shortly after 2010 is one of the things that facilitates that.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

10. When she expects the proposed Hanwood Park Free School in Kettering constituency to open.

[The Minister for Schools (Damian Hinds)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. I thank him for his ongoing support for this new school, including his personal work to make sure that there is provision for boys and girls. We are working with his council and sponsoring trust to agree a provisional opening date for Hanwood Park Free School as soon as possible.

[Mr Hollobone]

The new Hanwood Park Free School is a key part of the future educational infrastructure in Kettering and will be located at the heart of the Hanwood Park development, which, with 5,500 houses, is one of the largest housing developments in the whole country. Will my right hon. Friend please facilitate a meeting in Kettering with the Department’s regional director for the east midlands, me, the local educational authority, the Orbis academy trust and the Hanwood Park developers so that together we can ensure that the school build is co-ordinated as best as possible?

[Damian Hinds]

Again, I commend my hon. Friend for his work. I also appreciate the importance of the provision of local services—none is more important than education—where there is housing development. I would be very pleased to convene such a meeting as he requests.

Music Education

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 19th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Schools (Damian Hinds)]

I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis) on securing a debate on this important subject, and on what is an unusually well-attended Adjournment debate. I thank all his colleagues—all our colleagues—from Northamptonshire for being here. My right hon. and learned Friend is a former arts Minister, and I commend him on the great work he did in that role, including his very important work on public libraries as well as on music. I know that music is a subject very close to his heart, as it is to the hearts of so many of us in this place, including my own.

My right hon. and learned Friend mentioned my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb). As our right hon. Friend has often said, studying and engaging with music is not a privilege, but a vital part of a broad and ambitious curriculum. All pupils should have access to an excellent music education and all the knowledge and joy it brings. This is why music is part of the national curriculum for all maintained schools from the age of five to 14, and why the Government expect that academies should teach music as part of their statutory requirement to promote pupils’ cultural development.

Music, like every subject, is generally funded by schools through their core budget. In the November 2022 autumn statement, we announced an additional £2 billion in each of 2023-24 and 2024-25, over and above the totals that had been announced at the 2021 spending review. In July 2023, we announced an additional £525 million this year to support schools with the teachers’ pay award, and £900 million in 2024-25. The Government have continued to provide additional funding, over and above school budgets, to enable children and young people to access high-quality music and arts education. From 2016 to 2022 we invested £714 million, and we are investing £115 million per year up to 2025. Altogether, since 2016, this sums to close to £1 billion for a diverse portfolio of organisations over those years.

That sum includes £79 million a year for music hubs, as was mentioned by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North and by the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), who is no longer in her place. Hubs provide specialist music education services to around 87% of state-funded schools, and over £30 million a year goes to the music and dance scheme, which provides means-tested bursaries to over 2,000 young people showing the greatest potential in those art forms. It also includes a growing cohort of national youth music organisations, with new additions such as the National Open Youth Orchestra, which works with young disabled people, and UD, which runs programmes including Flames Collective, its flagship pre-vocational creative development programme. It was great to see Flames Collective perform with Raye at this year’s Brits. As part of the refreshed plan, the Government continue to invest £79 million a year in music hubs, as well as providing an additional £25 million of funding for musical instruments.

On the teachers’ pension scheme—the TPS, as it is commonly known—the Department for Education has secured £1.25 billion to support eligible settings with the increased employer contribution rate in financial year 2024-25. That will mean additional funding of £9.3 million for local authorities for centrally employed teachers, including those employed in local authority-based music hubs. The Department has published the details of the additional funding for mainstream schools, high needs and local authorities with centrally employed teachers. I can also confirm that the Department is committed to providing funding to cover the increase in employer contribution rates for existing non-local authority hubs for the current academic year—that is, until August 2024—and officials are working to agree the precise amount. Further details, including funding rates and allocations, will be provided soon.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North will know there is a music hubs competition in progress. Following its conclusion, which is due to be announced next month, the Department will work with Arts Council England to set final grant allocations for the newly competed hub lead organisations that will take over from September. As part of that work, due consideration will be given to additional pension pressures due to the increase in employer contributions through the TPS.

We know that, while potential is equally spread throughout the country, opportunity is not. As part of levelling up, our plan is to provide an additional £2 million of funding to support the delivery of a music progression programme. This programme will support up to 1,000 disadvantaged pupils to learn how to play an instrument or sing to a high standard over a sustained period. Further details about the programme will be announced in the coming weeks, once a national delivery partner has been appointed.

We know that many schools across the country deliver first-rate music lessons to pupils and offer high-quality extracurricular activities as well. However, we are also aware that there are some areas where music provision may be more limited, and to address this a refreshed national plan for music education was published in June 2022. That plan clearly sets out the ambition of the Government up to 2030 that every child, regardless of circumstance, needs or geography, should have access to a high-quality music education—to learn to sing, play an instrument and create music together and have the opportunity to progress their musical interests and talents.

[Mr Hollobone]

I thank the Minister for his response so far. Encouragingly, he is moving in the right direction. Does he recognise that Northamptonshire Music and Performing Arts Trust has warmly embraced the publication of the Government national plan for music education, the title of which is “The power of music to change lives”? Is the Minister impressed by the reach of NMPAT to over 53,000 children across Northamptonshire and Rutland? Not many music hubs have that scale of reach.

[Damian Hinds]

I echo my hon. Friend’s words about the power of music, and I join him in paying tribute to the great work of NMPAT. I do not have the statistics at my fingertips to assess where in the table, as it were, those thousands place it relative to others, but it certainly is a very impressive reach.

The expectations set out in the plan, starting from early years, are unashamedly ambitious, and informed by the excellent practice demonstrated by so many schools, music hubs and music charities around the country. As highlighted in the Ofsted “music subject” report published late last year, we know some schools do not allocate sufficient curriculum time to music. Starting this school year, schools are now expected to teach music lessons for at least one hour each week of the school year for key stages 1 to 3 alongside providing extracurricular opportunities to learn an instrument and sing, and opportunities to play and sing together in ensembles and choirs. We are monitoring lesson times to ensure that that improves.

Another weakness in some schools that was highlighted in the Ofsted report was the quality of the curriculum, in which there was insufficient focus on musical understanding and sequencing and progression. To support schools to develop a high-quality curriculum we published a model music curriculum in 2021, and, based on a survey of schools from last March, we understand that around 59% of primary schools and 43% of secondary schools are now implementing that non-statutory guidance. We want to go further in supporting schools with the music curriculum, which is why we published a series of case studies alongside the plan to highlight a variety of approaches to delivering music education as part of the curriculum. We are also working with Oak National Academy, which published its key stage 3 and 4 music curriculum sequence and exemplar lesson materials late last year, with the full suite of resources to follow in the summer.

While the refreshed plan rightly focuses on the place of music education in schools, it also recognises that music hubs have a vital role in supporting schools and ensuring that young people can access opportunities that schools on their own might not be able to offer. I join colleagues in paying tribute to the work of our music hubs across the country, including the organisations who lead them and their partners, who for the past 12 years have worked tirelessly to support music education.

One such organisation is of course the Northamptonshire Music and Performing Arts Trust, which I was pleased to hear my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North speak of in such glowing terms. I join him in thanking its chief executive, Peter Smalley, who I gather might be with us today. Just last week I had the privilege of seeing the work of another music hub in Surrey. I was very impressed by all that its partnership is doing to support schools to provide high-quality music and offer amazing opportunities to young people also beyond the classroom.

This year, hubs have continued their excellent work against the backdrop of a re-competition of the lead organisations led by Arts Council England. I recognise that that will not have been easy. As no announcement of which organisations will be leading the new hubs has yet been made, Members will understand that I cannot comment on the individual circumstances of any organisation currently in receipt of hub funding.

From September a new network of 43 hubs made up of hundreds of organisations working in close partnership will continue to build on the outstanding legacy of the hubs to date, and I offer my wholehearted thanks to everyone who has played a part in the music hub story so far. It will be exciting to see how the new hub partnerships develop and flourish with the support of the announced centres of excellence, once they are in place.

One area where hubs provide support to schools is in helping them to develop strong music development plans. This year we have invited every school to have a plan that considers how they and their hub will work together to improve the quality of music education. Our sample survey of school leaders last March showed that slightly under half of schools already had a music development plan in place. Of those, the vast majority—nine in 10—of school leaders intended to review it for this school year. Of those without a plan, nearly half reported intending to put one in place this school year. I hope it will not be long before every school has a strong music development plan that sets out how the vision of the national plan is being realised for their pupils.

The quality of teaching remains the single most important factor in improving outcomes for children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. We plan to update our teacher recruitment and retention strategy and build on our reforms to ensure that every child has an excellent teacher, and that includes those teaching music. Our strategy update will reflect on our progress on delivering our reforms, as well as setting out priorities for the years ahead. For those starting initial teacher training in music in academic year 2024-25, we are offering tax-free bursaries of £10,000. That should help attract more music teachers into the profession and support schools in delivering at least one hour of music lessons a week. The Government will also be placing a stronger emphasis on teacher development as part of the music hub programme in the future, including peer-to-peer support through new lead schools in every hub.

There is fantastic music education taking place across the country. Indeed, the opening remarks of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North did a better job at bringing that to life than I ever could. For my part, I offer and add my thanks to every music teacher in every setting for all that they do, but there is still a lot to do to make our vision for music education become a reality for every child in every school. I am confident, however, that our reforms are having an impact and will lead to concrete action that every school and trust can take to improve their music education provision. Through partnership and collaboration with hub partners, we will ensure that all young people and children can have access to a high-quality music education.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 10th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

That is similar to the point of the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford). Of course, all the services are linked, but as with the Prison Service—it is a fact across many different occupations in the public and private sector—there is a very tight labour market with high rates of employment and low rates of unemployment by historical standards. Recruitment is a challenge, but we are putting a huge emphasis on recruitment into the Prison Service and probation, which fundamentally drives workload. The other side of that is, as always, making sure that we retain staff.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I do not blame my right hon. Friend for triggering Operation Safeguard—in the circumstances, it was sensible—but he would not have needed to if the 12% of the prison population who are foreign national offenders had been imprisoned in their countries of origin. The top three groups are made up of 1,300 Albanians, 800 Polish nationals and 750 Romanians. Can we have more compulsory prisoner transfer agreements so that those people are sent to jail in their own countries?

[Damian Hinds]

My hon. Friend is correct that there are a large number of foreign national offenders in our prisons, and facilitating the movement back to their home country is important. We have had the prisoner transfer agreement with Albania since May 2022, and we are looking at more.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Monday 24th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

I totally acknowledge and celebrate the fact that school children are among those showing leadership on this issue. We cover climate change in the national curriculum, and rightly so.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Will the Secretary of State confirm that, as a proportion of our economy, our spending on primary and secondary education is higher than that of any of the other world-leading G7 nations?

[Damian Hinds]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. According to the most recent OECD “Education at a Glance” report, published in 2015, the UK’s spending as a proportion of national income was the highest in the G7.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Monday 29th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. He is right that permanent exclusion should be a last resort, and in my experience of headteachers, it is: it is a decision that they come to after a great deal of soul searching. He is also right that as well as the effect on the individual child, we have to think about the effect on the other 27 children in the class and, indeed, the staff in the school. There has been an upward trend in the number of exclusions in the past few years, but it has not reached the highs we saw under previous Labour Governments.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Does the Secretary of State agree with me that when permanent exclusions do happen, it should not be the end of something, but the start of something new and positive to get that child’s education back on track? Will he look at whether powers are needed by the regional schools commissioners to enable them to work with local education authorities to ensure excluded children are not just left wandering the streets?

[Damian Hinds]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend that exclusion must be the start of something new and positive, as well as the end of something, and that is why the quality of alternative provision is so important. I pay tribute to the brilliant staff and leaders who work in our alternative provision settings, 84% of which are rated good or outstanding. However, we know there is always more that can be done, and that is why we have our innovation fund and other initiatives.

Relationships and Sex Education

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Monday 25th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

I can only agree with the hon. Gentleman. I do not know if that is unparliamentary language or not, Mr Speaker, but I think we will let it go on this occasion.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I have had parents contact me over the weekend, ahead of the debate that is going on in Westminster Hall and the Secretary of State’s statement, saying that they would like to have the right to make sure that their children do not attend the relationships part of the proposals that he is suggesting. What is the Government’s response to my constituents on that?

[Damian Hinds]

I thank my hon. Friend for his question. Our response is that there is a long-standing right to withdraw from sex education. We took the view that that right should not be extended to relationships education, as Parliament also decided during the passage of the Children and Social Work Act 2017. It is important that every child has the opportunity to learn about and to discuss the different types of relationship there are in the world. That does not start with intimate relationships. It starts with sharing, taking turns and being kind to people, with an understanding about permission that then moves into discussing consent before getting on to some of these matters about intimate relationships. Obviously, schools do much of that anyway, but grounding the content for later years in school with regard to some of these basic building blocks is really important.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Monday 17th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

We do believe that in most cases it is right for the child to be with their parents and that they should be taken into care only as a last resort. We are putting resources into local authorities to help with that, but money is tight—I totally recognise that—and that is why we are seeking always to improve processes, including by some of our partners in practical innovation programmes.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for appointing a children’s commissioner to Northamptonshire. Why did he feel it necessary to effect such an appointment, and how quickly does he expect results to be realised?

[Damian Hinds]

Of course, the safety of children must always be paramount, and we consider it to be the right approach, in the circumstances in Northamptonshire, to do that. These things do not all change overnight in terms of systems and processes, but we do expect to see good progress.

Post-18 Education

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 20th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

We are constantly improving things. The level 4 and 5 review that is going on will feed into the review that we are discussing. As I have said to several Members, we want to ensure that the two sides are joined up.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Yesterday, when I looked, there did not seem to be a readily accessible link on the website to the review team. If members of the public want to share the benefit of their views with Mr Augar, will the Secretary of State ensure that there is an accessible, emailable link?

[Damian Hinds]

I will indeed ensure that it is possible to do that. There will of course be a call for evidence as part of the process.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 7th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds]

The businesses that I speak to say overwhelmingly that they feel they would get a better deal with the increased economic clout—five times the economic weight—that comes from being a member of the EU as opposed to Britain being on its own. All these trade deals take a long time, but when all the current EU negotiations are completed, the EU will have more trade deals with the rest of the world—so we will, too—than the United States and Canada combined.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

The living wage is a very attractive economic policy, especially in eastern Europe. Given the extensive financial modelling that my hon. Friend has conducted, can he tell the House his official estimate of the number of unskilled migrants coming to this country from eastern Europe in the first five years after a vote to remain?

[Damian Hinds]

The national living wage makes sure that British workers who are low paid cannot be undercut by people coming from other countries. It will be of great benefit to our economy. It is also the case that as our legal minimum pay increases, we will still be within the middle range internationally.

Fly-Grazing of Horses

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Tuesday 26th November 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Order. The second Division was not anticipated, so I can restart the debate earlier than advertised. The debate will continue until 4.26 pm.

[Damian Hinds]

Members will be pleased to know that I intend to accelerate my speech somewhat, because I know that several people want to speak.

As I was saying before the interruption, the problem is large and growing. Ten years ago, the RSPCA had 100 horses in its care; that figure now stands at 850, and the charity has to spend £3.5 million a year on food, board and care. The number of horses taken in has increased hugely since the peak year that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) referred to earlier. Prosecutions under the Animal Welfare Act 2006 have also risen. The debate is so important now, however, because of the risk that the problem will become much greater in England in 2014 following the enactment of the Control of Horses (Wales) Bill that is going through the Welsh Assembly.

Social Mobility

Debate between Philip Hollobone and Damian Hinds

Thursday 28th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

I am sure the world would be a very interesting place if you were the Prime Minister, Mr Crabb. To start our interesting debate this afternoon, I call Damian Hinds.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Hollobone, to see you in the Chair. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for this debate on a subject that matters a great deal to many hon. Members—and, indeed, brought many hon. Members into politics, directly or indirectly.

There are many aspects to social mobility, and I am sure that hon. Members will pursue different angles. I want to focus on some of the material in the report of the all-party group on social mobility, “Seven Key Truths about Social Mobility”. We formed the group a year ago, and I thank the many hon. Members and outside organisations that have come to our sessions and contributed to the debate.

I also thank the group’s officers, particularly the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw), who is detained in the Finance Bill Committee, and the noble Lady, Baroness Tyler. She is not taking part in this debate, for obvious reasons, but I am pleased to see that she is here. I also thank the Prince’s Trust, which provides great support to our group.

We did not seek to carry out primary research, or to espouse a load of opinions, but to synthesise the material, data, statistics and intelligence on social mobility. We always knew that, coming as we do from different political traditions, it was exceedingly unlikely that we would end up agreeing on policy prescriptions, but we thought we could agree on what we disagree on, to focus the debate.

Politicians sometimes know what needs to be done, but large challenges remain for implementation. However, sometimes they do not know what needs to be done, and no one does. I want to present some of those challenges. Unlike in other debates, I will not shout out a list of demands for the Government, or ask to know about this and that. In many cases that is more of an acknowledgement of the gaps that exist and where, as a society and a political system, we need to build up the approach.

Social mobility clearly matters, and from an economist’s perspective, it matters in terms of both equity and efficiency. To put that into better terminology, it matters for social justice and for economic growth. It is self-evident that every person should be able to achieve their potential and to become fulfilled, but from the economic growth perspective, national income maximisation requires the best deployment of resources. As a nation, we cannot afford to have talent going to waste and not providing all it can.

Studies suggest that reaching international benchmarks on social mobility could be worth around £150 billion per annum on national income, or the equivalent of a one-off increase in gross domestic product of 4%. Today, we are far away from those benchmarks. There are various studies comparing social mobility in Britain with other countries with liberal democracies and advanced economies. In those studies, we are near or very near the bottom of the list. What is worse and more depressing is that that has not improved. Today’s 40-somethings, such as me, have shown less mobility on average than today’s 50-somethings. In an advanced country such as ours, we would expect social mobility to be improving every year, even if it was difficult to catch up.

Social mobility is not one subject, but three, and we tried to bring that out in our report. If two people discuss social mobility, they may leave thinking that they had agreed, and that the other person was talking about the same thing, but it often turns out that they were talking about two completely different aspects. The three subjects are three degrees of intensity, or three types of challenge.

At one end is the “breaking out” category of people who are trapped in poverty or difficult circumstances for one reason or another, and need help to access mainstream society and opportunities. At the other end of the spectrum is the category, “stars to shine”, with outstanding talent that we must ensure fulfils its potential. In the middle is everyone else, and they are the ones who are often forgotten. They are the 60%, 70% or 80% of the population who are neither severely disadvantaged nor outstandingly talented, and they are the greatest number of people.

To bring those categories to life a little, I will explain how they interact with different policy issues. With early years and the moving on up category, which includes the vast majority of children, early-years settings and their quality, and general parenting programmes, are relevant. But to address the problems in the breaking out group requires a lot more action, starting with high-intensity parenting support programmes, and, in the most extreme cases, child protection.

During the school years of the breaking out group, children must be exposed to opportunities so that they have aspiration to fulfil their potential. Children in care have a particularly difficult time in the school system, and relatively poor levels of educational attainment. Talking about grammar schools to that group is supremely irrelevant, but for a relatively small group, grammar schools, selective education, assisted places and so on are relevant. Those children are in the stars to shine category.

That is the horizontal axis and those are the different degrees of challenge. On the vertical axis, we have seven key truths. Those are not my seven key truths, or those of the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles. They emerged from the expert witnesses we heard from. One may write one’s own list with a different emphasis, but we have run our list past quite a lot of people, and no one has said it is wrong, so we have some confidence that they really are seven key truths about social mobility.

First, the point of greatest leverage is what happens between the ages of 0 and 3, right at the start of life. That means primarily at home. Secondly, the cycle may be broken through education. Thirdly, the single most important controllable factor in education is the quality of teachers and teaching. Fourthly, what happens not just at school, but after the school bell rings—in the evenings and at weekends and in the holidays—is relevant.

Fifthly, university is the most important swing factor of achievements later in life. Pre-18 attainment dictates whether someone gets there, so pre-18 attainment is key. Sixthly, people should not give up, because it is possible to get back on the ladder and to go up it. Later pathways to mobility are possible as long as the will and the support are there. Seventhly, personal resilience and emotional well-being are the missing link in the chain, and permeate those different levels and life stages.

I believe that the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles will talk about what happens after the school bell rings, and about opportunities later in life. I will talk briefly about the early years and what happens at school. I am a member of the Select Committee on Education, and it is remarkable that whenever one talks to people in education, they always blame the stage before—employers blame the colleges, universities blame the secondary schools, secondary schools blame the primary schools, and the primary schools blame the nursery schools. It is sometimes comic, because it can sometimes be predicted when that sentence will come into the conversation. However, there is an element of truth in it, which is why we said that the 0-3 life stage is the point of greatest leverage.

We have all seen the famous Leon Feinstein graph. It shows, if children’s cognitive ability is measured in the early years of life, that bright children from poor backgrounds are overtaken by less bright children from wealthy backgrounds and it is quite depressing. More recently, there has been an acceptance that that analysis has perhaps been a little over-egged and overused, but it is not totally invalidated. The central message remains: we must nurture and support families with children when they are at a very young age in order for them to reach their potential at primary school. I am talking about children being able to access the curriculum, to read and so on.

In that regard, we should welcome a number of things that the previous Government did and that the current Government have done or are doing. I am thinking of the Sure Start programme, the 12.5 hours of free care from the previous Government and, under the current Government, the keeping of the extension to 15 hours and, critically, the extension to disadvantaged two-year-olds.

However, there is something slightly depressing about all this. If we look at what I call “the Sure Start generation”, the millennium cohort—children born in 2000—we see that there has not been the narrowing of the gap between the rich and poor that, other things being equal, we would expect to see. That was one of the purposes of Sure Start in this country, as it was for the Head Start programme—a remarkably similar name—in the United States.

The standard explanation is that we are just not reaching the right families; we are not going to the places where the need is greatest. I praise certain Sure Start centres, which do outstanding outreach work, including, by the way, in my own constituency. I also welcome the current Government’s refocusing of efforts within Sure Start on the neediest families. However, it seems a little too neat to say that the gap has not narrowed only because we have not reached the places where the need is greatest. We must also consider what happens in early-years settings. The review of the early-years foundation stage is welcome, but we should not regard the job as done. We need to have a constant feedback loop of learning from what works best at all stages of education and care.

However, there is a bigger challenge yet, and that is the work force. Cathy Nutbrown’s recent report states:

“It must be a cause for concern that early years courses are often the easiest to enrol on and the courses that the students with the poorest academic records are sometimes steered towards.”

I will not argue that nursery care should be yet another “graduatised” profession, as some probably would, but we do have a work force challenge and one that it is too easy to duck or ignore. We are talking about the care of our children. We know that the countries least marred by social immobility tend to be those that have invested quite heavily in work force development at early-years level.

However, all that is comfort zone stuff compared with the really big challenge. Unless we are to accept that the age at which children go into a state care setting should get younger and younger and that the number of children doing that should get bigger and bigger, eventually we have to conclude that the point of greatest leverage—zero to three—happens mostly at home. That, of course, is painfully difficult territory for the state.

We know the things that make the difference: a healthy pregnancy, early attachment, a good diet, warm relationships, having books at home, being read to, spending time with the telly off and so on. We need to start by considering how to maximise the leverage from existing successful programmes. That involves health visitors, whose numbers are currently being expanded, but also programmes such as Bookstart and voluntary organisations such as Home Start and the great work that it does.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) may take part in the debate later and, if so, will probably talk about parent-infant partnership programmes, such as OXPIP, the Oxford Parent Infant Project, and NorPIP, the Northamptonshire Parent Infant Partnership, and some of the great work that they do on early attachment.

I welcome the support from the Government for expansion of the family-nurse partnership programme. That is a great evidence-based programme, although I think that there some concerns in the field that the family-nurse partnership is based on the American—and confusingly named—nurse-family partnership. The family-nurse partnership is almost the same as the nurse-family partnership, but not quite. We must ensure that when we have these evidence-based programmes, they are truly following the pure model. Again, as with early-years settings, we need a constant feedback loop of learning—a repository for the knowledge of what works with these programmes. That is why it is important to aspire to something along the lines of the early intervention foundation recommended by the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen).

However, just finding successful programmes is not enough. Quite often, the most successful programmes are, sadly, also the most costly, and quite often we have local programmes that work well on a small scale but may not be scalable to cope with much greater case loads. Often, too, it is the third and fourth quintiles—the families who do not have advantages but do not have severe disadvantages either—that get insufficient attention. We need affordable mass programmes that can address and help very large numbers of families. The five a day for child development programme recently recommended by CentreForum is very interesting in that regard.

Although zero to three may be the point of greatest leverage, thankfully it is not the end of the story. At school, great differences can be made to social mobility, because although statistically we see a link between parents’ income and social class and children’s income and social class, it is not actually a direct link. The links are, first, between parents’ income and social class and children’s educational attainment, and secondly, between children’s educational attainment and their own eventual income and social class. If we can break that loop and get kids from poorer backgrounds and more difficult backgrounds achieving well at school, it is perfectly possible to have outstanding social mobility.

The pupil premium, a great innovation from the Government, is a very important step, but of course it does not give the answer, only space and opportunity for the answer. It is critical to know how schools, and the education system more widely, should spend money for maximum impact. Therefore, I welcome very much the work of the Education Endowment Foundation and the Government’s support for it, and the fact that Ofsted will in future be measuring how schools are using the funds. I also welcome the Sutton Trust toolkit of strategies for effective learning, which goes through in some detail individual programmes and initiatives that work in schools to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

Policy makers have to be brave and willing to take on and explode myths that for politicians are difficult to talk about—in particular, for example, on class size. There really is not any evidence that over the relevant range, reducing class sizes helps either average attainment or in terms of narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Obviously, it does at a certain point—when we are talking about 12 kids in a class—but not over the relevant range.

The single most important factor is not how many people the person at the front of the class has in their class, but who that person is; the issue is about teachers and teaching. We recently had a Select Committee inquiry. It was going to be called “What Makes a Great Teacher?” but obviously when the Committee got hold of it, we made the title much duller; it was something like “attracting, retaining, developing”—and something else—“teachers”.

What came up time and again was the importance of great teachers and great teaching. We know it when we see it. The problem is that it is very difficult to see it and know it before the teacher is already in the school and teaching. That is why one of our recommendations was to make auditioning for teaching much more prevalent before people take on teacher training.

We also said that it is too high stakes a profession in many ways. Once someone has made the commitment to do a postgraduate certification in education or a three or four-year BEd, they have basically committed themselves to following that career for life. That puts off some people, who would be outstanding teachers, from coming into the profession, but it probably also traps some people in the profession, once they have committed that time and money. In most other careers these days, people’s expectation is that they might do it for two years, five years or 10 years, but not necessarily for 30 years.

It is often said that no one forgets a great teacher, and that is true. Sadly, it is also true that most of us can also remember one or two pretty rubbish ones. As well as attracting the best teachers into teaching, we must take on the task of raising the average quality of the teachers who are already there. I repeat that most are outstanding, but we must look afresh at continuing professional development and at helping teachers with later-in-life career choices if teaching is ultimately not for them.

The individual child needs to be inspired to aspire, which is where careers advice becomes so important. It is worth saying that I did not hear many good things said about Connexions until there was talk of change, when suddenly it became the best thing ever invented. There has never been a golden age of careers advice in schools. Most people, whether they are 30, 40, 50 or 70, will relate the time when they were advised to become a florist, a caterer for the RAF or something very unlike what they ended up doing.

I do not know about other Members, but when I was 13 or 14, I did not know what I wanted to do—well, I thought I knew, but I was wrong about what I would end up doing; I have not totally given up on being a rock star though, so we will see how it goes. Often, the best advice is to keep your options open, so subject choice is an important consideration.

The English baccalaureate has its fans and critics, but it has clearly demonstrated that it can steer young people towards qualifications and subjects that keep their options most open. I remain concerned about A-levels in that regard. We have the list of the facilitating A-level subjects from the Russell group—the ones that it, to paraphrase, takes seriously in university admissions.

When I meet very bright young people in my constituency and elsewhere, I get depressed when I ask, “What subjects are you doing?” and they reply, “Physics, chemistry and law” or “Physics, chemistry and music technology” and so on. Too many young people are effectively self-selecting out of Russell group-type institutions, even though they clearly have the intelligence to be admitted. What, along E-bac lines, could be done about that at A-level?

University is the single biggest determinant in career progression in later life, and of course attainment is key to that. Much is made of the fact that although only 7% of kids attend private schools, they make up 17% of students at Russell group universities and 34% at Oxbridge. The figures are a tiny bit misleading, however, because that 7% refers to an average across all ages. If we take only the young people between the ages of 16 and 18 studying A-levels, the figure almost doubles to 13%. Of those who have passed three A-levels at grade C or above, it goes up further to 19%. For a subject combination such as maths, physics and chemistry, it is 27%.

If we ask what percentage of kids who get three As or A*s are at private school, I am afraid that the answer is 32%, which is knocking on the door of that 34% Oxbridge figure and well above the Russell group figure. There is clearly a big challenge. As part of that, and as only a part of it, we cannot dodge—as much as we, as politicians, might like to—the stars to shine question in secondary education on how we nurture outstanding talent.

The grammar schools debate is divisive. Many right hon. and hon. Members are former grammar school children, which is perhaps unsurprising given the numbers and the age profile in the House. What is more surprising is the number of people who say, “I was at a grammar school and I do not think that I would be here today had I not been”. The abolition of grammar schools was certainly well intentioned and something for which there has been consensus, implicit or explicit, across the House.

Grammar schools were better funded and in better buildings and so on than secondary moderns. There is concern that in doing away with that inequality, another inequality widened between the families who could afford to send their children to private schools and those who could not. In reality, it is not a binary question; academic tailoring is a continuum on which selection at 11 is one extreme and generic mixed-ability teaching is the other, but along the way is setting, streaming, enrichment programmes, specialisation at 14 and different types of GCSEs and so on.

When people say, “I’d like my children to go to a grammar school”, they really mean, and if you prompt them they will say, “I want my children to go to a grammar school, where the head teacher knows all the children’s names, where the teachers wear suits, and where if I walk along the corridor with a teacher and they see a piece of litter, they stoop to pick it up.”

Such things are replicable, but the tragedy is that in far too many schools we are not delivering. I would not want selection to come back to the town I live, for example; there are two outstanding secondary schools, and it would be divisive were one to be a secondary modern and the other a grammar. More widely, and particularly in a world where we have great and increasing diversity in educational provision, there could be a place, across a wider area and in every major conurbation, for an academically selective school alongside a school that specialised in sport or music and so on.

I am taking too long, so I shall accelerate and finish. We also wanted to talk in our report about the things that we do not know, and I will end on that point. We were pleased to mark down all the things that we could say, but it became abundantly clear that critical information is missing from the debate on social mobility, starting with information on innate ability.

With social mobility, we are clearly talking about equalising chances for young people and trying to hold everything else constant. It would be intellectually crazy to suggest that there was no innate ability—in other words, inherited intelligence. There is clearly some, but if we ask academics how much of a child’s ability is nature and how much is nurture—innate versus developed—they tend to say that it is somewhere between 25% and 75%. That is a huge range with which to deal, and although we will never have certainty, a little more direction on how much there is to go after would be useful.

We know that what happens out of school matters at least as much as what happens in school. When we push people to say what they would do in terms of out-of-school activities to equalise opportunities for poorer kids versus richer kids, however, they do not seem to know. They know that there are successful activities, but not quite what they are or, most importantly, how to make people do them. We frequently find that opportunities are made available in the most challenging areas, but the take-up is very small.

We are told repeatedly that non-academic skills, such as leadership, teamwork and customer empathy, are at least as important as academic achievement—the so-called non-cognitive skills. If we push people to name a non-cognitive skill and tell us how to develop it and what would be on the course, everybody dries up a little. It is a generic concept, so more clarity on what those skills are, and which ones we should develop and how, would be welcome indeed.

This vital issue has a great deal of focus and attention in the public sphere. I welcome the appointment of Alan Milburn to the new commission with Neil O’Brien as his deputy. It will give great focus and direction. I also welcome the close attention of the Government and Ministers and the involvement of the Deputy Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and, in particular, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Universities and Science. He is probably the one person who could possibly answer across the range of subject material.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for the time for this debate. At that point, I will stop.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—