Education and Opportunity
Debate between Stephen Gethins and Damian Hinds(4 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Damian Hinds
As ever, the hon. Gentleman makes an important point incisively and speaks up powerfully for rural communities—he was here the other night talking about rural health services and the challenges that they face—but this is already going to be a wide-ranging debate and I think I might try your patience, Madam Deputy Speaker, if we moved into a debate about the Scottish education system and the SNP Administration, much as he and I would relish that opportunity. However, he is quite right to say that Scottish education has had massive historical strengths but has been let down by the SNP Administration.
When politicians on the left talk about a progressive agenda in education, I understand how that can sound beguiling and benign, but we must not forget that the legacy of the last Labour Government was for England to be the only country in the developed world where the generation approaching retirement was more literate and numerate than the youngest adults just entering the workforce and those who had just gone through their education under new Labour. But that is the past, and this team and this Government will be assessed and judged on the present and the future.
Damian Hinds
At the risk of widening the debate, I will very briefly give way to the hon. Gentleman.
Stephen Gethins
I hope the right hon. Gentleman will welcome the Scottish success in having more children and students going on to positive destinations after school. Does he also acknowledge the damage that has been done by years and years of Tory austerity and by removing the rights and opportunities we had through freedom of movement following our withdrawal from the EU, which, according to Labour figures, has cost £140 billion? He should have some reflection on his own record.
Damian Hinds
I admire the hon. Gentleman’s ability to turn everything into a discussion about Europe, but I have to tell him there are other things at play. If I were an SNP politician, I would not come to the Floor of this House boasting about the record of the SNP Government given their woeful performance on behalf of underprivileged children in Scotland. Nor, by the way, would I be complaining about the finances, when the Scottish Government are well financed for the things that they should and must do. Until recently it was us sitting on the Government Benches making these points, but now it will be Labour Members.
This is a debate about opportunity, and the point of greatest leverage in spreading opportunity is what happens in the very earliest years, as the Secretary of State said. Since 2010, we have had five major extensions in early years and childcare entitlements, and a sixth is now on its way. I think I heard the Secretary of State say that she was committing fully to our plan in each of its phases. Unless she corrects me now, that is certainly how I will interpret it. She then went on to say there were some difficulties and so on—[Interruption.] I can assure the Secretary of State, who speaks from a sedentary position, that there was indeed such a plan, and we look now to the Government to see that plan through. I would also like to hear from her colleague the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), when she sums up, about the 3,000 nurseries to be established in primary schools. It is important for us to know what proportion of those she expects to be full-time, year-round nurseries as opposed to term-time only.
We know that however much time young children spend in nursery or in childcare, they will spend more time at home, and the social mobility literature is clear that what happens at home makes a big difference to opportunity later in life. This is a difficult area for Governments and requires great care, but I hope that this new Government will look to build on the home learning environment programme—Hungry Little Minds—that we put in place and then reprised during covid, and do so in a supportive and non-invasive way.
I also hope that the Government will continue with the family hubs, recognising that while they are vital for the 0 to 2 age group, many issues go on right through childhood and adolescence. The supporting families programme is actually a cross-party story because it was brought in during the Cameron Government from 2012 following a pilot under the previous Labour Government. With its key worker approach it has so much potential, and it now covers 300,000 families, not the original 120,000. Bringing it into the Department for Education presents a great opportunity for the Secretary of State, and I hope she will make the most of it.
In schools, the success story we have been discussing, which can be seen in the results in the programme for international student assessment, the progress in international reading literacy study and other studies, has been based on three legs of a stool. The first is school autonomy, with transparency and accountability. The second is a knowledge-rich curriculum and proven learning methods such as phonics and maths mastery, with the Education Endowment Foundation evaluating and accrediting programmes. The third is the spreading of good practice through academy trusts and through schools learning laterally from other schools, with teachers learning from teachers rather than things being imposed top down, through a nationwide network of hubs in key subjects and in key areas such as behaviour. It is not yet clear exactly what the new Government’s plans are in each of those three areas, but if they seek to undo what has worked and what does work, we will argue the counter case robustly.
The Government have, as the Secretary of State said, announced a review of the curriculum, as of course they can, and as we did in the past. But again, I would urge them to reflect on what has worked and what does work, and in particular not to see a conflict between skills and knowledge. Clearly, when children are growing up, developing and being educated, they need both, but it is through having a depth of knowledge that they best develop skills. As to what knowledge, I hope the review will also acknowledge that a strength of our national curriculum is that, unlike what a lot of people think, it is not in fact a detailed specification of everything a pupil will learn in history or literature. Rather, it is a framework. That guards against political interference, and that is a principle that absolutely must be maintained. I hope that Labour did learn the lesson of the literacy hour and the numeracy hour—that seeking to set out to schools in 10 or 15-minute segments exactly what should be taught to children is a Bad Idea, with a capital B and a capital I.
On behaviour, a calm and ordered environment is a basic requirement for learning, and that is what children tell us they want. Of course, no one wants pupils to be suspended, still less expelled, but that option needs to be available as a last resort. Yes, we must think of the child’s wellbeing, but we also need to think of the wellbeing and life chances of the other 27 children in the class.
Having school leaders in the driving seat is essential, but that also brings a need for transparency so we can see whether children in some areas are not getting as strong an education as children in others. Progress 8, which we brought in, measures the progress of all children equally and is far better than the blunt and much-gamed approach of measuring how many children got over the five-plus C-plus at GCSE hurdle. It is also materially better than the old contextual value added measure, which effectively lowered expectations for entire groups of children.
We also need a threshold to trigger intervention, so that underperforming schools can be moved into a strong trust that can better support them. That is standing up for parents and children, who will get only one shot at schooling.
There are challenges to address and, as I said to the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), high on that list post covid is attendance. It is much better than it was, but there is further to go. I hope the Government will keep and build on the measures that we put in place, together with schools and the wider education family.
We always need to strive to do more to support children with special educational needs and disabilities and enable them to maximise opportunity. I was encouraged by what the Secretary of State said. I call on her and the Government to keep and grow our capital programme for more special school places, as well as, as she rightly said, to strive to support inclusion in mainstream education, where that is possible and beneficial.
Today there is a greater prevalence of mental ill health in young people. Crucially, this issue is not specific to this country. We see it in most comparable countries, or at least those where there is data we can look at; we see a similar trend there. The Labour manifesto spoke about having mental health professionals in schools. When we were in government, with the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS, we were already rolling out mental health support teams to clusters of schools and I urge the Government to look at that.
Of course, we and other countries must also ask why there is this increased prevalence of mental ill health in young people. Because it is international in nature, some of the ready answers that might otherwise be thrown about cannot be correct. We will work constructively with the Government as they work to build on the landmark Online Safety Act 2023, for example, and ensure its most effective implementation.
Schools are all about teachers and we welcome the Government’s plan to recruit 6,500 more. Of course, 6,500 is a large number, but it is not quite so large in the context of the total number of teachers, which is 468,000, and it should be noted that the increase in the number of teachers over the last Parliament was considerably more than 6,500—in fact, it was more like 15,000. However, it is true that it has been tough to recruit for some subjects, such as computer science, physics and modern foreign languages, and I welcome the Secretary of State’s focus on that area.