Education and Local Government

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Tuesday 14th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and many congratulations to you.

I strongly welcome this Queen’s Speech. I believe that skills, social justice, standards and support for the profession should be the four interlocking foundations of this Government’s education programme. There is enormous talent all over the country just waiting to be unleashed, but to do that we must help lower-skilled workers to train and boost their wages. About 6 million adults are not qualified to GCSE level. Many end up in low-paid jobs, their prospects dragged into the quicksand. A wave of lost opportunity is also about to come crashing down on the next generation, as a third of England’s 16 to 19-year olds lack basic skills. In addition, according to PwC, up to 28% of jobs taken by 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK could be at risk of automation by the early 2030s, so we must find answers quickly.

First, the Government should turbocharge adult learning. Overall adult learning is at its lowest level since 1996, and employer training has stagnated. Why not develop the national retraining scheme to focus on training for low-skilled workers into roles that align with our labour market? We need a world-class apprenticeships programme. The levy could be reformed so that it supports more apprenticeships in small and medium-sized enterprises and getting school leavers into areas of skills shortages. Access to levy funds should be limited for firms that are simply accrediting existing skills rather than adding new value, and more generous allowances should be made to employers who are upskilling low-skilled workers. There needs to be a much clearer progression route from lower to higher apprenticeships.

It is time for a healthier balance between technical and academic learning. One way to solve some of the problems in higher education that my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) pointed out in his speech is by rocket-boosting degree apprenticeships. They should be the crown jewel in a revamped technical offering: students earn while they learn, there is no debt and they are almost guaranteed to get a good skilled job at the end of it, and we meet our skills and productivity needs. Apprenticeships and degree apprenticeships should be hard-wired into careers advice.

Social justice must be the beating heart of our education policy: a bold, assertive agenda that has compassion and aspiration right at its core. Despite the good work of the Government, too many cohorts are being left behind. Disadvantaged pupils are 19 months behind by the time they do their GCSEs, and some groups are particularly vulnerable; whereas the average national attainment 8 score is 46.5, the rate for pupils with a special educational needs statement or education, health and care plan is 13.5, with the figure for looked after children being 18.8, and for white working-class pupils it is 28.5.

Everyone across the country should have access to a good school, but a child living in one of England’s poorest areas is 10 times more likely to go to a substandard school than one living in its wealthier areas. According to Ofsted, between 2006 and 2019, 415 secondary schools had at least four inspections that were not good or outstanding, despite various interventions aimed at improving them. Schools in many deprived areas also struggle to attract experienced teachers, who are so instrumental in driving up quality. In the most disadvantaged quintile of areas, 67% of secondary schools are rated good or outstanding for the quality of teaching, whereas the figure is 93% in the wealthiest quintile. These obstacles to learning should be dismantled. We should support the development of local teachers and incentivise highly commended initial teacher training providers, such as the Redcar and Cleveland Teacher Training Partnership, which was rated outstanding by Ofsted. By offering teaching bursaries, retention payments, salary bonuses and mentoring to good teachers in challenging areas, we can avoid the flight of local talent.

Educational standards are improving. The proportion of six-year-olds passing the phonics check increased from 58% in 2012 to 82% in 2018. More rigorous apprenticeship standards are replacing older frameworks. In the past 10 years, 1.8 million more pupils studied in good or outstanding schools. We have to build on that and export rigour to every part of our education system, including technical education. I welcome the extra funding for further education and, in particular, the £2 billion commitment to improving capital expenditure, but FE financial resources have lagged behind other education sectors in the past few years. We should carefully calculate and meet the required levels of investment beyond that, including in respect of the resources that FE providers need to support English and maths retakes—after all, pupils should not be leaving school without those basic skills in place.

The Government should also offer top-quality childcare. Almost half of disadvantaged children are already behind when they start primary school, and good-quality childcare can help to plug this gap. Children who attend high-quality settings for two to three years are almost eight months ahead of children who attend none. However, some of our early years workforce is underqualified. There is considerable scope to scale up apprenticeships, and we should use higher-level apprenticeships to address skills shortages in early years and improve quality.

The Government can help to support the profession by offering more flexibility to teachers to hone their trade and by helping schools to cover off-timetable time. There should be more emphasis on peer support. Although 30% of novice teachers in England are assigned mentors, the figure is higher in some OECD countries; for instance, in New Zealand it is 56%.

Finally, skills, social justice, standards and support for the profession must be the four pillars of our education programme. We have to extend the ladder of opportunity and invite those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds to climb to the top so that they can get jobs, prosperity and security, and meet the skills needs of our nation. We need to nurture that raw talent and focus relentlessly on addressing social injustice in education. In that way, we can build the brightest future for everyone.

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[Robert Jenrick]

Absolutely. Unusually, in this Government it is the Secretary of State himself who has chosen to take on that responsibility as a sign that apprenticeships matter to this Government, as they have since 2010.

We heard throughout the debate that we have a special responsibility to support those with special educational needs. That is why we are funding local government to provide those services with a 12% year-on-year increase.

I shall now answer the points that relate to my Department. Last year we built more homes than we have built for 30 years—241,000 new homes and 1.5 million since 2010. We built more affordable homes per year on average than the previous Labour Government and more council houses were built last year than in 13 years of the previous Labour Government put together. However, there is no room for complacency and we know there is a great deal more to do. That, I hope, is set out in the ambitious legislative programme of the Queen’s Speech.

We will take this forward in a number of ways—first, with further planning reforms. We have announced a White Paper on planning reform, which I will introduce in the coming months. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) said, we need a fair planning system that allows new homes to be built, encourages densification and gentle building upwards, and ensures that homes are built in the right places with a planning inspectorate that listens to local communities and is brownfield-first.

[Robert Halfon]

I am grateful for the towns fund, from which Harlow can access up to £25 million. My right hon. Friend talks about changing planning law. Will he also look at changing permitted development rights, so that we ensure that we have quality homes—not ghetto homes—and that London councils do not use it to send their most vulnerable families to my constituency?

[Robert Jenrick]

Absolutely. My right hon. Friend showed me some of those properties when we visited Harlow last year, and we will take forward reforms to permitted development rights in future.

We will also invest more in infrastructure. We did that in the last Parliament with our housing infrastructure fund, and we have been very clear that more investment in infrastructure is required, as we heard in numerous speeches, so that we build communities with the forethought of planned towns and cities such as Milton Keynes, which we heard about in the maiden speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt).