Schools White Paper

Richard Graham Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

Opposition Members need to refresh their maths, because that calculation is completely wrong.

Our White Paper outlines exactly how we are going to ensure excellence everywhere. It makes it clear that while we have the most qualified teaching workforce in our country’s history, we can do more to ensure that every teacher has the support to do the job as well as they can.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend think it is extraordinary that, despite the volume of noise from the Opposition Benches, not one Labour Member has had the courage to stand up and say there is something fundamentally and totally inaccurate in the Opposition motion? It claims that the Secretary of State and our Government are trying to ban the role of parents on school governing bodies. Every single secondary school in my constituency is an academy and they all have parents on governing bodies.

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), who I think must have been reading a different White Paper from the one that I have read.

I start by tackling a comment from the shadow Secretary of State. In moving the motion, she made some totally unexceptional remarks, many of which I agreed with, but said that the White Paper was not about school improvement or autonomy but about a forced ideology that was not necessary. Let me tell her and others about my ideology on this issue. She and other Opposition Front Benchers occasionally use the word “ideological” in a negative and derogatory way. I will quote from the Google result:

“An ideology is a body of ideas, and those who agree with the main idea of something take an ideological stand to support it.”

My ideology on education is very simple: everyone should have access to good education. One aspect of our job as MPs is to help to find ways that give the strongest likelihood of our schools’ providing that. I am happy to take a stand to support that. I suspect that the shadow Education Secretary is, and I hope that every Member across the House is. That is what the White Paper aims at.

My right hon. Friend the Education Secretary has spelled it out very clearly that, through the White Paper, she is trying to achieve a discussion on how to resolve the problem that, as she says, there are

“too many pockets of educational underperformance—areas where too many young people miss out on the chance to benefit from the best possible education. This is deeply unfair.”

That starting point should be shared by all of us. This is a White Paper, not legislation—a point that many of our constituents do not seem to have grasped in their emails about the issue. We should be looking at what ideas are proposed in the White Paper.

Several points of interest have not yet been mentioned, including an independent college of training, which must be a good idea. We would all like to know more details about changes to qualified teacher status, but it is an interesting idea. The White Paper mentions a fairer national funding formula—surely we are all in favour of that, although it has not yet been mentioned by any Opposition Member so far today.

The debate has focused on two aspects: changes to a skill-based requirement on the selection of governors; and the conversion of schools into academies. Let me discuss that briefly—I will have to be very brief because you reduced the time limit by two minutes, Mr Speaker, just before I got up to speak. I have time to say only that anyone who listens to this debate must understand that parents can, should and will have a key role on the governing boards of academies, and the business of whether all schools should be converted to academies can wait for a fuller debate.