Department for Education

Debate between Siobhain McDonagh and Robert Halfon

Wednesday 6th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon]

The hon. Member makes a powerful point. We want to ensure that everyone has the same opportunities to go to “good” and “outstanding” schools. The cost of living pressures that he mentions are powerful, and I am sure that the new Secretary of State is listening.

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

Further to my hon. Friend’s intervention, the other side of the coin for local authorities is finding temporary accommodation anywhere for families with children. I am sure that many families from London end up being placed in temporary accommodation in the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency. In my constituency, we are seeing more families farmed out to Kent or Essex, so staying on at a primary school is extraordinarily difficult, with over 124,000 children in temporary accommodation. Does he think that those issues should be taken in the round because of their impact on education?

[Robert Halfon]

As I said, I am sure that the Secretary of State is listening. Everywhere we look, there are all kinds of pressures on our education system. It is not just the things that the hon. Members mentioned; schools are paying huge amounts in energy bills, for example, and are not able to afford that. Instead of spending money on frontline teaching, they are having to pay energy bills. Those are big issues that the Government will have to deal with. I very much hope that, given that the previous Secretary of State had such a passion for education and that he is now the Chancellor, the education budget will see a significant increase in the autumn. That could resolve some of the things the hon. Lady talked about.

The Education Committee’s inquiry on the Government’s catch-up programme heard that, by summer 2021, primary pupils had lost about 0.9 months in reading and 2.2 months in mathematics. David Laws from the Education Policy Institute told our Committee of his concerns that vulnerable groups could be up to eight months behind in their learning.

The Government have invested almost £5 billion in catch-up and, following the recommendations in the Committee’s catch-up report, they have ended the contract with national tutoring programme provider Randstad and given schools more autonomy to organise catch-up programmes, at least from later in the year. They should reform the clunky pupil premium so that it much better targets those most in need of support. Data is available about education related to ethnicity, geography and socioeconomic background, but it is rarely cross-referenced to provide a richer analysis. By creating multivariant datasets, the DFE could facilitate a sophisticated view of which areas, schools and pupils need the most help. It could then reform the pupil premium using those datasets to introduce weighting or ringfencing to ensure that funding is spent on the most disadvantaged cohorts.

A further key measure that I ask my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to consider is provision of school breakfasts. The Government have rightly spent more than £200 million on the holiday activities programme, which is also funded and supported by Essex council in my constituency—I have seen that programme work, benefiting many children, and I support it—but more must be done on breakfasts. According to the Magic Breakfast charity, 73% of teachers think that breakfast provision has had a positive impact. Attendance increased in schools offering breakfast provision, with 26 fewer half-days of absence per year. I saw that for myself with Magic Breakfast on a visit to Cooks Spinney school in my constituency last Friday, where attendance has rocketed because the school ensures that the most disadvantaged children have a good breakfast when they start their school day.

The study also found that children in schools supported by breakfast provision made two months’ additional progress over the course of an academic year. An evaluation of the national school breakfast programme by EEF found a 28% reduction in late marks in a term and a 24% reduction in behavioural incidents. School breakfast provision should be a key intervention that the Secretary of State should look at more closely. Currently, the breakfast provision service reaches just 30% of schools in areas with high levels of disadvantage and invests just £12 million a year. By comparison, last year, taxpayers spent £380 million on free school meal vouchers.

Magic Breakfast proposes to invest £75 million more per year in school breakfasts, raised from the soft drinks industry levy—it is not even asking for more money—which would both provide value for money and increase educational attainment. It could reach an estimated 900,000 pupils with a nutritious breakfast throughout the year. That could complement other ideas, such as the deeper strategy for supporting family hubs, and go a long way to providing those children with the first step on the first rung of the ladder of opportunity.

Finally, I turn to skills, which I know the new Secretary of State is passionate about. As my Committee has heard in both our current inquiry into post-16 qualifications and our previous work on adult skills, the UK faces a worrying skills deficit. About 9 million working-age adults in England have low literacy or numeracy skills—or both—and 6 million are not qualified to level 2, which is the equivalent of a GCSE grade 4 or above. Although participation in adult learning seems to have grown since it was at a record low in 2019—44% of adults have taken part in some learning over the past three years—stark inequalities remain. Those in lower socioeconomic groups are twice as likely not to have participated in learning since leaving full-time education than those in higher socioeconomic groups. Our current inquiry into adult skills has heard that employer-led training has declined by a half since the end of the 1990s.

The Government have taken some welcome steps including the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022, the £2.5 billion national skills fund, the £2 billion kickstart scheme, £3 billion of additional investment in skills and the lifetime skills guarantee. It is reassuring to see increased resource and capital funding for further education in the estimates, together with growth in the adult skills budget—although, in terms of further education, much of that is catch-up. We need to go further. Levelling the skills playing field is about how we teach as well as the financial resources that we put in.

During my Committee’s inquiry into the future of post-16 qualifications, we have heard about the need for a curriculum that not just imparts facts but embeds cross-cutting skills that will better prepare all young people for our fast-moving industrial future. On a recent visit to King Ethelbert School in Kent, I heard great things about the career-related programme of the international baccalaureate, but there are concerns about future approval for its funding. That seems to be at odds with the Government’s skills agenda. The Times education commission, in which I took part as a voluntary member, recently recommended a British baccalaureate-style qualification.

I am sure that my right hon. Friend knows my views on the baccalaureate-style system. Used by 150 other countries around the world, it combines academic and vocational learning, creating true parity of esteem between the two disciplines and adequately preparing young people for the future world of work. The Department has recently undertaken a consultation and review of the qualifications horizon, particularly to reform the BTEC system. The FFT Education Datalab found that young people who took BTECs were more likely to be in employment at the age 22 of and were earning about £800 more per year than their peers taking A-levels. I understand the need to review the system and prevent overlaps, but, just to be clear, I urge my colleagues on the Front Bench not to remove BTEC funding until T-levels have been fully rolled out and are successful.

I strongly welcome the grip that the previous Education Secretary had on the Department, and I welcome the fact that he had some success in the spending review in securing an additional £14 billion over the next years. However, we are still playing catch-up when it comes to education recovery and further education. The brutal fact is that the total budget for health spending will have increased from 2010 to 2025 by 40%, whereas education spending will have increased by only 3% in real terms for the same period. Ultimately, as for health and defence, what we need for education is a long-term plan and a secure funding settlement.

Every lever and every engine of Government should be geared towards returning absent pupils to school. I ask the Secretary of State to set out in her response the practical steps the Department is taking to address the issues faced by disadvantaged pupils who are not able to climb the ladder of opportunity. We are denying those children the right to an education. In my view, it must be the most important priority for the Department to get them back into school. It is unforgivable that there are 1.7 million persistently absent children and that 100,000 ghost children have been lost to school rolls. That number is growing. Previously, roughly 800 schools in disadvantaged areas had the equivalent of a whole classroom missing, but figures from the Department for Education show that now 1,000 schools do. That situation is wrong. It must be taken seriously, and efforts should be made to tackle it. As the Children’s Commissioner said to the Education Committee yesterday, by September every one of those children should be back in school.

The previous Education Secretary said he could not “hug the world” but I know his priorities truly were “skills, schools and families”. I am sure they are the priorities of the new Secretary of State. Our children, the workers of the future, will need technical skills but also the ability to think creatively, work across subject silos and, most of all, adapt. As our country and economy move towards the fourth industrial revolution, we must ensure our education system can adapt to meet those challenges.