Education Bill

Stephen McPartland Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Phillips]

I am grateful for the opportunity to address, albeit briefly, new clause 1 to which my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) has just spoken. I was not intending to do so and I therefore hesitated to rise. The charge that he levels at the Secretary of State is essentially that my right hon. Friend is not being sufficiently radical. May I respectfully say that, if that charge is right, the new clause that my hon. Friend moves is itself not sufficiently radical?

The new clause identifies only one set of circumstances—the circumstances of underachievement—in which the Secretary of State should have the ability to disapply the provisions of the Bill in order to ensure that an academy comes into being. I have little doubt that there are many other circumstances in which it might equally be advocated that the Secretary of State should intervene to disapply provisions of the Bill in order to ensure that an academy comes into being. I have in mind an issue that has recently arisen in my constituency which affects many other rural constituencies where there are village primary schools with insufficient places to meet the demand of local parents in the village, with the effect that children from villages sometimes have to travel a great distance for their primary education, often at the cost of being separated from their peers with whom they spend the remainder of their time. One might seek to argue that the Secretary of State should equally have the right to disapply the provisions of the Bill should it be passed and receive Royal Assent. The problem to which I refer is particularly acute in a village called Witham St Hughs in my constituency.

I wonder, therefore, whether the charge which my hon. Friend perhaps rightly levels at the Front Bench could be levelled at his own new clause. He might like to consider whether it should go much wider, in giving the Secretary of State the power not just to disapply the provisions where there is underachievement, but to disapply the provisions that stand in the way of the creation of an academy in other circumstances as well. He may wish to consider amending his new clause in due course. That rather depends, I suspect, on whether he presses it to a Division today.

I should like to hear from the Minister that there is to be some action from the Government on the problem that I have outlined, which affects rural communities and villages in rural constituencies such as mine, as it does in Witham St Hughs. The lack of sufficient primary places is a problem that the Government will need to address, not necessarily because their immediate predecessor did not address it, but because successive Governments across a number of decades have failed to recognise the needs of village communities in constituencies such as mine.

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)]

I, too, had not intended to speak, but I would like to do so in defence of new clause 1, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller). He is very radical when it comes to education and desperately keen to ensure, as am I and many Members across the House, that children from deprived backgrounds get the education that they deserve and that would allow them to be educated out of poverty. He is concerned that that is not happening because we are not being radical enough in providing the Secretary of State with powers to help those schools that are trying to move forward and improve the benefits they offer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen McPartland]

I will be very brief, Mr Speaker—two minutes or less, I promise. I was a member of the Public Bill Committee, which was my first such Committee, and I was pleased by how robust its scrutiny of the Bill was, and by the good humour shown by Opposition and Government Front Benchers throughout its mammoth 22 sessions. There was certainly cross-party consensus that we wanted our children to have access to the best education system in the world. That is why I believe the Bill is important—because it promises to raise educational attainment for the poorest children in my constituency. The gap in educational attainment between poorer pupils and their peers simply is not acceptable. We know that by the age of seven the highest early achievers from deprived backgrounds are overtaken by lower-achieving children from advantaged backgrounds, and that that gap gets wider as they get older. That traps children in a cycle of poverty. We cannot measure poverty solely in monetary terms; there is real poverty of education in many parts of the country, which leads to a lack of opportunity and aspiration.

The Government’s commitment to expanding early years learning for disadvantaged children is a welcome step in reducing that poverty of education, and that commitment is firmly reinforced by the pupil premium, which means an investment of more than £815,000 this year in the most disadvantaged children in my constituency. That money can be used by schools to provide additional support such as one-to-one tuition, which I know from my wife’s experience as a primary school teacher makes a dramatic difference to young children. I support the Bill because I believe it will deliver a massive boost to the education of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable children in my constituency.