Education and Social Mobility

Robert Jenrick Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

In January, the ceremony to open the new £25 million Newark Academy was cancelled because the teachers were out on strike. On the same day, a window cleaner from South Leverton who came to my surgery said that he could not send his bright son to the local grammar school in Gainsborough, which is across the border in Lincolnshire, because he could not afford the £400 a year it would cost to get him there every day. This year, more than 50% of the children in my town are going to schools out of town, and they are the 50% who can afford to do so, not the 50% who might need that the most. It is no coincidence that Newark and Sherwood district is among the areas in the United Kingdom where social mobility is at its lowest.

The story of Newark secondary schools is a near-complete description of the failings of our state schools since the 1960s: the destruction of a successful grammar school, the Magnus, which had been established in 1531; the pre-emption of places at the good schools in neighbouring, better-off towns by articulate parents with the resources to work the system to their advantage and to afford the cost of travelling to them, given that such an option was not available in their own town; the flight of middle-class parents to Lincolnshire for grammar schools, for which demand was extremely high, but for which one needs £500 to £1,000 a year to bus one’s child to school; the tolerance of failure—or at least of consistent underperformance—and a great deal of complacency and hand wringing, with lines such as, “What do you expect? It’s only Newark”; and the gradual decline in aspiration and a pervasive culture of low expectations, including the kicking away of the ladder out of ignorance and poverty by neglect and complacency dressed up as egalitarian, progressive education policy.

[Suella Fernandes]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the culture of low expectations and the soft bigotry of a “prizes for all” culture is exactly what needs to be changed and what this Government are standing up against?

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Jenrick]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend.

In Newark, social inequality is not the problem, but the symptom of a real malaise. The condition of the town’s education has been allowed to reach an appalling level. Having diagnosed the problems—the lack of a choice of school, an unwillingness to intervene, and an unwillingness to embrace selection in any form, even when parents are crying out for it—there are many solutions. In my town, armed with a range of tools, we are starting to make progress under this Government, and I am convinced that we have finally turned the corner.

We intervened to remove the sponsor of the Newark Academy, which was not working, and brought in the No. 1 school in the county to run it, thanks to Conservative policy. In September 2017, we will open a new free school in Newark, of which I have the pleasure of being a governor. It will be committed to the highest standards of education, discipline and character formation, and to repatriating children from across the county whose parents have had to send them away. The diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, which runs the other school in the town—the Magnus—has now increased its commitment to driving up standards as a result of the competition and choice that we are now putting into the system. The apprenticeship levy is forcing a long-overdue conversation between the employers in the town and the schools.

The common thread that runs through all these policies is parental choice. Parents in my town want the choice to send their children to the school that suits them and their needs, rather than being told by others that only the privileged few who can afford the bus fare or the fees at a private school deserve it.