Oral Answers to Questions

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend has made another welcome point. The truth is that any reductions in spending across government are a direct result of the mismanagement of the last Government and the economic mess that they bequeathed to us.

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

The IFS report shows that the Secretary of State is undertaking the largest cut in education spending since the 1950s, and that education capital will be cut by an eye-watering 57%. Can he tell us how that 57% cut compares to the average capital spending cut across all other Departments?

[Michael Gove]

I am reminded by my hon. Friend the Minister of State with responsibility for children and families that it should be “compares with”, not “compares to.” The truth is that under the last Government capital spending was poorly allocated and wastefully squandered, and we are now ensuring that money goes in particular to those primary schools in desperate need that were neglected when the hon. Gentleman, unfortunately, was not in government but so many of his colleagues were.

[Stephen Twigg]

The right hon. Gentleman’s English may be better than mine, but his maths certainly is not, because, as he knows, the cut is double the average cut—a truly terrible spending settlement for education capital. With youth unemployment now over 1 million, will he join me in pressing the Treasury to bring forward capital investment in schools, as set out in Labour’s plan for jobs? Does he agree that that would not only be good for education, but it would be good for jobs and economic growth?

Education Bill

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller]

Indeed. I will happily listen to the hon. Member for Cardiff West if he wishes to—[Interruption.] I can see that those on the Opposition Front Bench are not quite sure whether they are on or off, or on the fence.

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

That is not within the scope of this debate.

[Richard Fuller]

I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman says from a sedentary position, although I am sure that you would rule on whether it was within the scope of this debate, Mr Deputy Speaker.

Whatever the Opposition’s position, Government Members fully support the moves towards free schools. However, for the idea to bed in and become successful, schools’ admissions policies need to be clearly defined, otherwise they will potentially be an Achilles heel. Organisations opposed to free schools—some have honourable intent, although some are the dinosaurs of an old regime—have pointed to admissions policies, saying that they will somehow be unfair. Those criticisms, from those organisations, have often flown in the face of the facts. Those facts show that admissions policies have often been just cut and pasted from other local schools. These Lords amendments will give reassurance on those criticisms, so that the reformist voices on the Opposition Benches can be encouraged further to recognise that there is a path forward and that this can be part of the most reforming legislation for some of the most disadvantaged children in our country. Therefore, Lords amendments 20 and 21 are most welcome.

I would like to talk about some of the comments made about direct, individual budgets for children with special educational needs, a topic of great interest in Committee when it came to ensuring that the reforms moved forward the provision of education for some of the most vulnerable children and young adults in our communities. Although in principle I am a supporter of individual budgets, both in this area and in others, I am somewhat sceptical about full implementation. It is interesting to note two parts of what Lord Hill said in the debate on the amendments dealing with personal budgets in the other place, when he referred, first, to

“control over the support they receive and better access to and greater satisfaction with services.”

I want to return to better access later. Secondly, he said:

“In those individual budget pilots, nearly two-thirds of families opted to have a direct payment as part of their personal budget.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 1 November 2011; Vol. 731, c. 1195.]

People’s attention rightly focuses on those two thirds, who comprise the earlier adopters and those who can be encouraged relatively easily to follow on.

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[Mr Hayes]

As you say, Madam Deputy Speaker, we are debating the character of the apprenticeship offer. This Government take the view that we need further to refine the legal framework for apprenticeships. The debate on this subject in the other place was on the character of that duty. Lords amendment 36 places a new duty on the chief executive of the Skills Funding Agency to make reasonable efforts to secure employer involvement in apprenticeships. That is so important because we have changed assumptions of the nature of apprenticeships. We take the view that apprenticeships should intrinsically involve employment—making an offer separate from employment seemed nonsensical.

I make that point because until relatively recently, some apprenticeships—programme-led apprenticeships, for example—were not tied to employment in quite the same way. Lords amendment 36 was the outcome of a great deal of hard work and good will, as I have described. The overtures made to me by Lords Layard, Wakeham, Willis and Sutherland persuaded the Government and my noble Friends to devise an amendment that satisfies the wishes of those who want to place a clear duty in the Bill, but not one that the Government think is undeliverable.

Although I know some feel that I have summarised the Lords amendments all too briefly, those amendments put apprenticeships, the freedoms about which I have spoken, the changed inspection regime, the different role for the Government, the new emphasis on skills, and the mantra—I decidedly and deliberately put it that clearly—of freedom, flexibility, innovation and dynamism, at the very heart of this legislation. I think they improve the Bill significantly and I look forward to hearing whether the Opposition think so too.

[Stephen Twigg]

It is always a great pleasure to speak opposite the Minister in such important debates. This is my first opportunity to do so from the Opposition Front Bench. The Minister reminded us that my noble Friend Lord Layard has written about happiness, about which he is an international expert, alongside my constituent Ken Dodd, who has been writing and singing about such matters for a very long time.

The Opposition have serious wider concerns about the Bill, some of which, including on schools, were addressed in the debate on the previous group of amendments. Other concerns, including those on information, advice, guidance and the careers service, are outside the scope of today’s debate. I should like to focus on inspection, governance and apprenticeships. I echo many of the things the Minister said, and in particular his positive comments on the role of the Association of Colleges, and I look forward to attending its conference in Birmingham later this week.

I also echo what the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) said about the importance of partnerships between further education colleges and the wider education system, including schools. In the debate on the previous group, we discussed the importance of co-operation and collaboration alongside autonomy and competition. We often discuss school-to-school and college-to-college co-operation and collaboration, but there is great scope for further co-operation and collaboration between schools and the further education sector.

Let me address the inspection of further education institutions. All hon. Members are seeking to strike a balance between autonomy and inspection—this is a similar debate to the one on schools, as the Minister said. Lords amendments 28 and 29 have much the same effect as Lords amendments 26 and 27. The former relate to further education institutions and the latter to schools.

The Opposition have a number of concerns that echo those we raised about schools, although they are not exactly the same. I should like briefly to put some of them on the record; they have been raised in previous stages both in this House and in the other place. We are concerned that exempting certain further education colleges from inspection will undermine the campaign for high standards in those institutions, and in particular we fear that the Government’s approach is simply to rely on a market effect, which could let down, for example, students who are currently studying. Their institution could struggle and yet nothing will be done, and there is no trigger for them to make an inspection happen. It is possible—we debated this with respect to schools—for a further education institution that at one time was high performing to slip for some reason. The lack of an inspection regime in such a situation could be a major challenge.

The new Ofsted chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, was quoted in the previous debate by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan). The chief executive’s point was about schools, but it applies to further education colleges as well—the principle is much the same. The conditions that would render a further education institution exempt from inspection are not clear. If the Minister has the opportunity, with the leave of the House later, I should like him to clarify the Government’s thinking on when a further education college will be deemed exempt.

I understand that that thinking will be set out in regulations, but Lords amendments 28 and 29 mean that all regulations apart from the first set made under section (5) of the Education Act 2005 must be subject to the affirmative procedure. There is no requirement for an affirmative resolution the very first time the exemption criteria are outlined. I invite the Minister to explain his reasoning for that and to assure us that the measure is not simply being rushed through because of Ofsted’s budget situation. Given the seriousness of the step that is being taken, and the lack of public consultation on it, the Opposition believe that there should be an affirmative resolution the first time as well as on subsequent occasions, and have tabled an amendment to that effect.

The Minister referred to issues of governance. As Lord Hill acknowledged on Report in the Lords, Labour peers, led by my noble Friend from the Labour Front Bench, Baroness Jones, made important arguments on this issue. Labour Front Benchers in the other place tabled an amendment to reinstate the rights of students and staff to be represented on further education colleges’ governing bodies. As the Minister outlined, the Government brought forward an amendment on Third Reading in the other place to guarantee governing body places for staff and students. Lord Hill said:

“It may help if I inform noble Lords of discussions between the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and my honourable friend, the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning”—

the Minister—on her amendment to

“retain requirements for staff and student governors…The Government have brought forward these changes to support our case for the private sector classification for colleges, in accordance with the policy of successive Governments. It was not our intention to encourage colleges to remove staff or student governors from college governance arrangements. I know that colleges greatly value the contribution that those governors make.

Having listened to the arguments that were put to him by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones…my honourable friend”—

the Minister—

“and I have spoken further. We have decided that the Government will return at Third Reading with their own amendment, which will give effect to what the noble Baroness's amendment seeks to achieve.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 1 November 2011; Vol. 731, c. 1135.]

Let me thank the Minister for his generous tribute to my noble Friend and also echo her thanks and appreciation to him and his colleagues in the Department for this important change to the legislation. Participation in the governance of FE colleges is an important part of student citizenship, as well as contributing to good governance. I would like also to put on the record our appreciation to the National Union of Students for its excellent work on ensuring that the relevant amendments were agreed.

Nobody in this House could doubt the Minister’s personal commitment to apprenticeships. We welcome the amendments that impose a duty on the chief executive of the Skills Funding Agency to make reasonable efforts to secure employers’ participation in apprenticeship training for all young people in the specified groups covered by the redefined offer—that is, 16 to 18-year-olds and 19 to 24-year-olds with a disability or learning difficulty assessment, as well as young care leavers. Without those amendments, the Bill would have simply taken opportunities away from our young people. The Minister mentioned the assiduity of my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) in Committee, where he said that the clause in question represented a wholesale degrading in the value the Government place on apprenticeships; that it is a retrospective step, stopping the duty to create apprenticeships for suitably qualified people; and that instead of creating jobs, transferring skills to young people, and boosting the economy, this clause does the exact opposite.

Lords amendment 36 is a significant improvement, but we believe that there is scope to go further. As the Minister has set out, under the legislation introduced by the previous Labour Government, the chief executive of the Skills Funding Agency had a duty to secure an apprenticeship place for every suitably qualified person within certain specified categories. The previous Labour Government’s policy was that the agency was under a duty to find an apprenticeship for every qualified young person who wanted one. They had to be given two choices about the sector that they wished to enter. That was removed in the original draft of the Bill, but as the Minister has said, a cross-party group of peers, led my noble Friend Lord Layard, achieved an important Government concession that required the agency to make reasonable efforts to involve employers in apprenticeship training, which has led to Lords amendment 36, which we welcome.

The amendment was a cross-party amendment, tabled in the names of Lord Layard, Lord Wakeham, Lord Willis of Knaresborough and Lord Sutherland. Lord Layard said in the other place:

“If you look at the situation in our country, it is clear that academic young people are offered a clear route to a skill and a useful role in society. They can see where they are going. That is not the case for less academic young people. There is no clear route that they can see they are entitled to go down. The result is low levels of skills and a degree of alienation…If you look at this from a young person’s point of view, we are raising the education participation age. It is quite difficult to see how we are going to be able to do that in a way that is acceptable to young people unless these apprenticeship places are available to them. We need legislation that states the main aims of our education system. For that 16 to 19 year-old group, we have a lacuna. We cannot fill it by ministerial statements and assurances, as Ministers come and go. We expect the basic structure of our educational system to be reflected in the laws of the country.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 14 September 2011; Vol. 731, c. GC274.]

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[Steve Rotheram]

My hon. Friend has outlined the move in emphasis away from securing employment for every qualified person and towards involvement with employers. Will he join me in congratulating Liverpool city council, for instance, which has decided to use an innovative model to create 2,000 new apprentices?

[Stephen Twigg]

I am delighted to join my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour in congratulating Liverpool city council, which, despite one of the worst funding settlements from central Government, has been able to create a new programme. I thank him for that opportunity, although I am in grave danger of moving beyond the scope of this debate, so I shall return to my speech.

Our amendment would change the term “reasonable” in Lords amendment 36 to “best”. In contract law, making a “best effort” requires a higher level of commitment than making a “reasonable effort”. Our amendment would place a greater duty on the chief executive to secure employer participation in apprenticeships for the specified groups and would reintroduce, in part, the previous Government’s commitment, which placed a duty on the chief executive to find an apprenticeship for all who wanted one.

This is a major challenge for us all. In a recent speech, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition set out a new policy on apprenticeships, giving a commitment that in future all major Government contracts should

“go to firms who commit to training the next generation with decent apprenticeships,”

and that none should

“go to those who don’t.”

I invite the Minister today to consider making a similar commitment on behalf of the Government. I seek assurances from him about how the new clause proposed by Lords amendment 36 will be implemented in the context of the Government’s broader approach to apprenticeships. For example, concerns have been raised about Train to Gain places being replaced or rebadged as apprenticeships. Today we have seen early coverage in the media of a report—to which I understand the Minister has contributed—by the Institute for Public Policy Research, due to be published later this week, setting out concerns that younger people are not getting a fair share of the increase in apprenticeships. I appreciate that there is a balance to be struck, and we very much welcome older workers having the opportunity to take up apprenticeships, but with youth unemployment almost certainly set to hit 1 million this week, we need to maintain the important focus on young people and the opportunity that is provided by having an apprenticeship place.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is giving a thoughtful speech. In light of his amendment (a) to Lords amendment 36, which seeks to ensure that the chief executive should try to make reasonable efforts to secure employers’ participation, does he agree that we would not wish this or any other Government to get on the hook over the numbers? We must maximise the numbers, but also ensure that we have quality. If we have apprenticeships that do not lead to a major improvement in the earning potential of the young people in question, we will have betrayed them. If courses do not last long enough to give them the skills to raise their value in the market place, we will have betrayed them. It is important not only to provide opportunities, but to ensure that they are valuable opportunities that deliver lifelong benefits.

[Stephen Twigg]

I found myself in agreement with much of what the hon. Gentleman had to say in the earlier debate on schools, as I do with what he has just said. He makes a critical point, which enables me to bring my remarks to a close. Clearly, with 1 million young people unemployed, having high-quality apprenticeships is going to be a vital part of a strategy to address that problem, but it must not become simply a numbers game. I would like apprenticeships to become the gold standard of vocational education. I attended an Edge Foundation event a few weeks ago and made the point that it would be wonderful if the parents of a 17 or 18-year-old who gets an apprenticeship were as proud of their daughter or son getting that apprenticeship as they would have been of them getting into higher education. That should be what we aspire towards, and at the heart of that is quality, as the hon. Gentleman said.

[Mr Stuart]

In the light of the requirement to try to secure places, does the hon. Gentleman agree that apprenticeships need to be for a decent period and that an important part of making them work for employers—thus being provided and sustained in the long term—is that the rate of pay should not be too high? The aim should be to make the ticket at the end the valuable part; that is when the benefit comes. Keeping the rate of pay relatively low and ensuring that it lasts for a decent long time will mean that the apprenticeship will work for the company and that at the other end the young person will earn considerably more money.

[Stephen Twigg]

I might be told off by Madam Deputy Speaker, but let me say that the quality of the education and training elements of the apprenticeship are vital. What we must not do, however, is allow apprenticeships to become a form of exploitation. A balance has to be struck. Clearly, an apprenticeship should be first and foremost about quality education and training, but with a decent amount of pay, too, for those who are apprentices.

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate. These are very important issues. I do not believe that any Opposition Member doubts the personal commitment of the Minister, particularly on apprenticeships. We have concerns that we have expressed previously about the impact of other changes—the abolition of the education maintenance allowance and the trebling of tuition fees—and we would be very concerned if there was any weakening of the apprenticeship brand. Let us perhaps forge a cross-party national consensus to the effect that we want apprenticeships to increase in number, but more importantly we want to see them as a high-quality gold standard for those young people who follow a vocational route of education.

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) raised a number of points, which I shall try to address in my closing remarks. I would like to speak first to amendment (a) to Lords Amendment 29, under which the first as well as any subsequent regulations exempting certain providers from Ofsted inspection in particular circumstances would be subject to the affirmative procedure. The hon. Gentleman asked me particularly to address those matters.

My hon. Friend the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), has already spoken about a related amendment to the schools inspection exemption. The same intentions lay behind the exemption for further education providers and our plan, in essence, is to exempt outstanding colleges. I will listen, however, to the points raised. I do not have a dogmatic view on this matter, and as we move to a lighter-touch inspection regime, it is important to do so with appropriate caution.

I would like to deal with one particular concern. Where students feel that an outstanding institution is not maintaining high standards, Ofsted will take very seriously any comments students might make as part of the risk assessment, which could trigger an inspection. My hon. Friend the Minister spoke about the risk assessment process, and it is important that it is tied closely to the view of students about the quality of teaching and learning in an institution.

I spoke to the National Union of Students today about representation on college governing bodies, which we discussed when we dealt with the amendments to which the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby also referred. As I described earlier, we view such representation as a baseline. Representation on governing bodies does not provide the whole answer for learner or staff engagement. Learners and staff should be engaged at a policy level in plotting the strategic direction of a college. As we move to a more freed-up system, so learner choice and learner judgment will play an increasingly critical role in how colleges evolve. I hear what the hon. Gentleman says about the process. We are moving ahead boldly, but cautiously. At this juncture, it is probably best for me to leave that there.

Amendment (a) to Lords amendment 36 would require the chief executive of skills funding to make “best” efforts rather than “reasonable” efforts in respect of apprenticeships. Of course I understand the intention to strengthen the focus on the delivery of this important objective. It is crucial to maintain and, indeed, improve the quality of apprenticeships while we grow their number. When something grows rapidly, it obviously creates a pressure on quality. Inevitably, the momentum will lead to more employers and more providers becoming involved and more individuals becoming apprentices—including people who might not have done so if the system was smaller. I believe that places an extra responsibility on us to ensure that the integrity of the brand is retained by an appropriate emphasis on quality, and as I said on the Floor of the House a few days ago in a different debate on a different subject, we will do that. The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby is right to say that this amendment, and his argument about it, draws attention to the issue of quality. The debate in the other place and the discussions to which he referred—I pay tribute once again to Lord Layard and others—helped us to concentrate our thinking on maintaining and improving the quality of the apprenticeships offered.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman has made a useful comment. The way in which apprenticeships are perceived, and the experience of the apprentices themselves, are critical to whether apprentices are likely to make progress. Those who have had a good experience of the early stages of apprenticeship may well progress to a higher level, perhaps in the companies that have taken them on, which will be good for both the business and the individual.

Paragraphs 30 and 31 of Lord Leitch’s report, which was commissioned by the last Government, state:

“Improving the skills of young people, while essential, cannot be the sole solution to achieving world class skills. Improvements in attainment of young people can only deliver a small part of what is necessary because they comprise a small proportion of the overall workforce. Demographic change means that there will be smaller numbers of young people flowing into the workforce towards 2020.

More than 70 per cent of the 2020 working age population are already over the age of 16.”

Lord Leitch concluded that unless we upskill and reskill the existing work force, we will never catch up with our competitors.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby is right to say that we should not think in terms of two alternatives. This is not about providing a valued and valuable route to practical learning through apprenticeships for younger people but not doing so for people in their 20s or 30s who want to upskill or reskill, such as the level 3 apprentices whom I met recently at Jaguar Land Rover in Halewood, near Liverpool, not a million miles from the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. Both those things can be achieved through an apprenticeship offer of the right kind.

[Stephen Twigg]

I entirely agree that we are not talking about two alternatives, but does the Minister share my concern about the fact that, according to the IPPR report, there is a large growth in the number of apprenticeships for those over 25, a pretty large growth in the number for those aged 19 to 24, but a much smaller growth in the number for 16-to-18-year-olds?

[Mr Hayes]

I think that we need to calibrate the system to ensure that there is a good age spread. I probably should have emphasised to an even greater degree—you know what I am for understatement, Mr Deputy Speaker—the need to make growth sustainable. If it is to be sustainable, it will be necessary to address issues such as those that have been raised tonight. By “sustainable growth”, I mean growth that offers older learners the opportunities to upskill and progress that were mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness—opportunities to create a vocational pathway of the quality that we both seek, the “gold standard” for apprenticeships. I had used that term myself, and the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby may have read it, imbibed it subliminally and repeated it. I know that he would normally have attributed it; perhaps it was by accident that he did not.

We also need to be constantly vigilant about the quality of the offer. Let me set out some of the things we are doing in that respect. I have made it very clear to the National Apprenticeship Service that poor provision should be eliminated. We have to be very tough on any provision reported to us that we investigate and find not to be of sufficient quality.

Oral Answers to Questions

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

I congratulate both Royal Wootton Bassett and the school. It is a tremendous achievement for the town, and the academic results that my hon. Friend cites are a tribute to the teachers at that school.

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am pleased to join the Minister in welcoming the GCSE results of academies in 2011; their progress in English and maths is especially welcome. Some of them have focused successfully on improving vocational education —progress which is not reflected in the Government’s E-bac. Will the Secretary of State give serious consideration to creating a technical baccalaureate as has been proposed by many, including the Minister’s noble friend Lord Baker?

[Mr Gibb]

May I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his post? I know that he has a passion for education and I look forward to working with him in the months and years ahead.

The English baccalaureate is designed to increase the take-up in our schools of history, geography and modern foreign languages, which has declined significantly in recent years, particularly in modern languages since 2004. That is something we seek to reverse. However, the E-bac is sufficiently small to enable pupils to take a vocational subject in addition to the E-bac and to take music, art, economics—[Interruption.]—and religious education, indeed, and all the other subjects that pupils want to take.

[Stephen Twigg]

We will return to that in later questions.

The Government give the impression that they are interested only in the progress of academies and free schools. I welcome the great results that academies have achieved, but can the Minister tell me what proportion of the schools that he and the Secretary of State have visited are neither academies nor free schools?

[Mr Gibb]

Certainly the vast majority of schools that I have visited are maintained schools, and that may well be the case for the Secretary of State—we can send the hon. Gentleman the figures. It is important that we raise standards right across the board, and that is why the Secretary of State has raised the floor standards for all schools to 35% this year and to 40% from next year. By the end of the Parliament, we expect all schools to have at least half of their pupils achieving five good GCSEs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I first join the Secretary of State in welcoming the appointment of Sir Michael Wilshaw, who has a fine track record, and in thanking Miriam Rosen and Christine Gilbert for their service?

May I take the Secretary of State back to my earlier exchange with the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb)? I welcome the increase in the number of young people taking history, geography and modern foreign languages, but schools are getting very mixed messages about the E-bac. Will he answer the question that I put to his colleague? Will he look to create a technical baccalaureate, as proposed by many including his noble Friend Lord Baker? If he does not, the UTCs and others will simply be frozen out of the improvements to education that he says he wants to deliver.

[Michael Gove]

It is a curious type of freezing out that has seen the number of UTCs increase by 800% as a result of the changes that we have made. If we are going to talk about freezing out and frostiness, what about the cold shoulder that the hon. Gentleman is turning to the parents and teachers who want to set up free schools everywhere? If we are talking about a chilling effect, what about the chilling effect on all those who believe in education reform, who will have seen his brave efforts to drag the Labour party into the 21st century, only to see him dragged back within 72 hours? We detect the cold and pulsate hand of his leader dragging him back from a posture of reform to one of reaction.

New Schools

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove)]

Mr Deputy Speaker, with your permission, I would like to make a statement on the next steps in our school reform programme. Just a few weeks ago, we opened the first 24 free schools—new comprehensive schools free from central and local government bureaucracy, designed to tackle educational inequality, widen choice and raise standards. Those schools have provided great head teachers with a new opportunity to extend educational opportunity, and they have given parents who had been denied a choice the chance to secure educational excellence for their children.

In the most disadvantaged areas of Enfield and Bradford, outstanding state school teachers have opened new schools for children who have been denied the good school places that their parents wanted. In Norwich, the new free school is open from 8 am to 6 pm, 51 weeks a year. In Haringey, Birmingham and Leicester, inclusive schools with a religious ethos, whether Jewish, Sikh or Hindu, now provide parents with more choice. In Hammersmith and north Westminster, outstanding academy sponsors are extending to primary schools the superb education that they have already been providing for secondary school children.

Across the country, new schools, by increasing choice, are forcing existing schools to raise their game. By embodying the principle that every child should have access to a great education, free schools are helping to advance social mobility and make opportunity more equal. It is because we want to make sure that more children benefit that we are today accelerating the pace of reform. The 24 free schools set up in the past year were established in record time. It took the Governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major five years to establish 15 city technology colleges, and it took Tony Blair eight years from winning office before the first 17 academies were established. The speed with which the first 24 free schools have been set up is astounding, and credit is due to the teachers and parents behind them, and to the superb team of officials at the Department for Education who oversaw the reform.

The establishment of free schools is just one of a series of reforms that we have taken forward explicitly to raise standards in the state sector. We have also ensured that more than 1,000 schools have been able to convert to academy status, each enjoying new freedoms, and each using those freedoms to help other schools. When Tony Blair was Prime Minister, he argued that having 400 academies would be transformational; we now have three times that number.

We are using the academy programme to transform underperforming schools. This year, more underperforming schools than ever are becoming sponsored academies. Outstanding schools that enjoy academy status are increasingly sponsoring underperforming schools. By extending academy freedoms to more great schools, the capacity is created to turn round more disadvantaged schools. We have explicitly targeted those secondaries where fewer than 35% of children get five good GCSEs and those primaries where fewer than 60% of children get to the proper level in English and mathematics. We are targeting those local authorities with the worst concentrations of poor schools, and we will lift the floor standard below which no secondary school should fall, so that schools know that by the end of this Parliament at least half their students must get five good GCSEs. Under this Government, there will be no excuses for underperformance.

Sadly, one area where England has underperformed for years is vocational education, but under our reforms and the leadership of my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, that is being addressed. I was pleased that, this weekend, England came fifth in the WorldSkills championships, outstripping nations such as Germany and, indeed, France and proving that, when it comes to vocational skills, our young people are world beaters. [Interruption.] I am always happy to acknowledge that our United Kingdom is stronger for all its constituent parts.

We are building on that success, because there is a new model of academy whose development has the potential to be particularly transformational—the university technical college. Thanks to the leadership shown by Lords Adonis and Baker, and the vision of Sir Anthony Bamford of JCB, the first university technical college opened its doors in September last year. Educating young people from the age of 14 to 19, with a curriculum oriented towards practical and technical skills, with support from industry and sponsorship from a university, these schools have the potential to transform vocational education in this country immeasurably for the better. They combine a dedication to academic rigour—with the JCB UTC delivering GCSEs in English, maths, the sciences and modern languages—with the adult disciplines of the workplace. Longer school days and longer school terms contribute to a culture of hard work and high aspirations.

The JCB UTC was joined by another in Walsall this September, and three more are in the pipeline. If we are to ensure that the benefits of UTCs, academies and free schools reach many more children we have to up the pace of reform. That is why I am delighted to be able to announce today that my Department has given the go-ahead to 13 new UTCs in Bristol, Buckinghamshire, Burnley, Bedfordshire, Daventry, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, Plymouth, Sheffield, Southwark, Wigan and at Silverstone race track. This Baker’s dozen of UTCs will specialise in skills from engineering to life sciences, and I am convinced they have the potential to change the lives of thousands for the better.

In addition, I am delighted that today we can more than double the number of free schools approved to go through to the next stage of opening by confirming that 55 new applications have been accepted, including the first fully bilingual state-funded schools—Brighton bilingual primary school and Europa school in Oxfordshire. They include schools set up by existing strong educational providers such as the Dixons academy and Cuckoo Hall academy. They include the London Academy of Excellence—a school for sixth-formers set up by Brighton college with the aim of getting talented pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds into our leading universities. They also include a school led by Peter Hyman, a former Downing Street policy adviser turned deputy head who wants to create new opportunities for pupils in east London. They also include Atherton free school, which has been set up by a community group in the constituency of the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), and they join eight free schools already in the pipeline for opening in 2012.

Altogether, the number of wholly new schools, UTCs and free schools that have been approved to go ahead from 2012 is 79. Once they are open, more than 100 new schools will have been established by the coalition Government to help to raise standards for all. More than 70% of the free schools given the go-ahead today are in the 50% most deprived areas of the country. More than 80% of the schools are in areas where population growth means that we need more good school places. Every single one of those schools was born out of the passion, the idealism and the commitment to excellence of visionary men and women.

The proposer of one of the new schools we approve today, Mr Peter Hyman, explained in The Guardian why he was opening a free school—and his feelings are shared by every promoter of free schools and UTCs:

“There is no cause greater in our country today, no mission more important, than giving all children an education that inspires them to do great things.”

I could not agree more, which is why I commend this statement to the House.

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement today and thank him for providing a copy of it in advance.

At the Conservative party conference last week, the Secretary of State said:

“We’re fortunate in this country that we have so many good schools. We’re fortunate that we have so many great teachers.”

I agree with that. May I thank him on behalf of the Opposition for his fitting tribute to Labour’s education record?

Like the Secretary of State, I am pleased to echo the words of Peter Hyman in The Guardian, and I congratulate the university technical colleges and free schools that have secured approval today. UTCs are an exciting innovation modelled, as he said, on the highly successful JCB academy in Staffordshire established under the previous Government. However, there is a real risk that the success of the UTCs will be undermined at birth by the stringent requirements of the English baccalaureate. There is a basic contradiction at the heart of Government policy. The rhetoric is often about freedom and autonomy, but the reality is that the Government want to dictate the details of the school curriculum from the Department.

The Government’s emphasis on the central importance of English and maths is absolutely right and I support them in that, but are we really saying to successful schools and colleges such as the JCB academy that they will be punished because they offer engineering rather than the full range of E-bac subjects? In the summer of 2011 this academy, the first UTC and the model for what the Secretary of State is announcing today, scored 0% on the E-bac. How can that make sense? Surely if we are going to increase the status and quality of vocational education, we need a modern baccalaureate, a policy championed by my predecessor and by Lord Baker?

As we showed in government, Labour supports experimentation and innovation in how we set up new schools. Our academies programme proved that good schools can indeed be delivered. The question for the Government’s free schools policy is will the new schools established be good ones. Will they extend opportunities, particularly in deprived areas? Will they drive up school standards in their localities? Will they be based on a fair admissions policy? Most important of all, will they help to close the attainment gap between children from rich and poor backgrounds? That is the basis on which we will scrutinise and challenge the Government’s policy. The Secretary of State’s belief in the programme is ideological. Our scrutiny will be evidence-based.

However, the bigger challenge is the hundreds of schools that need new capital investment and that are not in today’s announcement, including in areas with a severe shortage of school places. Is not the central problem here that the Secretary of State got such a terrible spending review settlement for schools capital from the Treasury a year ago—a cut of 60% in schools capital, compared with a Government average cut of 29%? His failure to persuade the Treasury to give education the settlement given to other Departments means that thousands of children will continue to go to schools with out-of-date facilities, leaking roofs and asbestos.

Today we have an announcement that focuses on just 68 new schools. We wish those schools well, but there are 24,000 schools in England. The Opposition will support reform, investment and innovation that benefit all schools so that we can improve standards for children in all our communities.

[Michael Gove]

May I thank the hon. Gentleman for his generous words and welcome him back to the Front Bench? He was a superb Minister in the Department for Education. Like Lord Adonis and the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), he was a reformist in government and I am more than happy to underline my appreciation for the work that he did. He is the third shadow Education Secretary whom I have faced across the Dispatch Box. His two predecessors indulged in raucous opportunistic assaults on our reform programme and were promoted as a consequence. I realise that there is now a battle between ambition and principle in the hon. Gentleman’s breast. I know that he will choose principle, as he always has done throughout his political career.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the support that he has given to the university technical colleges. They are emphatically a cross-party achievement. Lord Adonis played a part. I think others, including the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), acted as fairy godfathers to the project. I am delighted that UTCs have their support.

It is important to recognise that the English baccalaureate is there to ensure that students pursue the sort of subjects that will get them into universities. The great advantage of university technical colleges is that they also have that link with higher education institutions that help to raise aspiration for all. There is no single tool that will raise aspiration in all our communities. We have to use whatever tools are to hand. I believe that the English baccalaureate, as so many head teachers are demonstrating, helps alongside high quality vocational education, to raise aspirations and increase the number of students going into higher education.

The hon. Gentleman said that when he was looking at free schools, he wanted to apply a series of tests. The tests that he asked me to apply are: will they extend opportunity, will they drive up standards, will they have a fair admissions policy and will they close the attainment gap? Those are four sensible tests, and I would add a fifth—can they ensure that we have a low-cost way of adding capacity to our school system so that exactly the solution to the problem that he alluded to, the need for good school places, was found at the lowest possible cost?

The hon. Gentleman asked me about capital and drew attention to the difficulties that we have with capital in the Department for Education. These difficulties, I am afraid, are a consequence of economic decisions that were taken while he was out of the House by his successors in the Labour Government, and they landed us with a poisoned economic legacy. We are doing our very best to deal with it, and one of the things that we can do is ensure that we get more schools more cheaply. That is why I am so delighted that as well as the additional sums that have been made available for school repair, and as well as the additional sums that we are making available for new schools, the free schools programme has seen schools being delivered at a unit cost lower than was the case under the Labour Government’s school building programme.

Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked me whether I regretted not getting the same settlement for the Department for Education as other Government Departments. No, I do not regret it. I am delighted that we secured the same level of funding in cash terms for education as the previous Government had secured. I am delighted that we had the best revenue deal of any domestic Department, apart from the Department of Health. I am overjoyed that, thanks to the support of our coalition partners, there is £2.5 billion of additional money going in the pupil premium to the very poorest schools. It is additional money being spent in a progressive cause, and it is deliverable only thanks to the leadership shown by two parties working together in the national interest.

Careers Service (Young People)

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

This is the first debate I have spoken in since the summer recess, so may I declare an interest that I should have declared when I spoke in a Westminster Hall debate on 6 July? Since March this year, I have had a part-time placement in my local office from a local not-for-profit social enterprise, the Neighbourhood Services Company. Due to an oversight on my part, I did not register that interest until 8 August. I am pleased to have this opportunity to put that on the record.

My right hon. Friend the shadow Education Secretary set the context for this important debate—rising youth unemployment, the loss of education maintenance allowance and the increase in tuition fees, with the danger that today’s generation of young people could be left in the lurch. He also made the important point that Labour Members are not arguing for preserving the status quo, and he made it clear that we want to work on a cross-party basis to deliver the terms of the motion. I welcome the comments by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who reminded us of the recommendations in his report. I gently encourage him and his colleagues to follow those words by joining us in the Aye Lobby.

The big policy challenge to which several Members have referred is how we can increase social mobility. We know from research, including last year’s “Going for Growth” report from the OECD, that this country has an appalling record. The strength of the link between a person’s income and their parents’ income is higher in this country than in any other OECD country. That is a truly shocking fact. I think that every speaker has mentioned Alan Milburn, so I feel the need to do so as well. In his 2009 report, Alan said:

“Birth, not worth, has become much more of a determinant of people’s life chances.”

We must ensure that we address that in this debate.

[Mrs Chapman]

On the subject of Alan Milburn, if my hon. Friend cared to read further on in his report, he would notice that Mr Milburn recommended that schools should be funded in order to commission such careers advice.

[Stephen Twigg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. I was going to make a similar point later, but she has made it very powerfully.

The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, who is not here this evening, has been cautious in his criticism of the previous Government’s programmes, and rightly so. Of course, as Members on both sides of the House have said, there were serious imperfections with Connexions and Next Step, but we must be careful not to write off the positive features and the important work of many talented and committed professionals who have worked, as some still do, in those programmes.

Today, in advance of tonight’s debate, I spoke to people in some of the secondary schools in my constituency. Those at St John Bosco school in Croxteth told me about the work they have been doing with the Aimhigher programme. They have drawn particularly on the importance of the role of face-to-face contact by employing a graduate mentor to assist the girls at the school with their university applications and career development. This is a school in a very deprived neighbourhood that has an excellent reputation and a high percentage of its girls going on to university.

Cardinal Heenan school for boys has pioneered a particularly innovative approach to careers advice. I want to commend Dave Forshaw, the head teacher, and his team for their industry day programme, which I have had the opportunity to visit on two occasions. The programme draws on alumni, partners and a range of local organisations to deliver rich and effective careers advice, starting in year 7. Its recent industry days have had contributions from a former pupil of the school, the actor Ian Hart, who appeared in the Harry Potter films, as well as local and national journalists, sports professionals, solicitors, accountants and others. West Derby school has adopted a similar approach and held its first careers convention last year.

I cite those examples because they demonstrate two important points. The first is the critical importance of giving information and advice at an early age. Too often, these things are left too late. The second is the importance of drawing on expertise, including among the alumni of the schools themselves, to inspire young people.

The head teachers of those schools said to me today that quality careers advice needs resources. They are very concerned about what they see as a potential shift in policy away from face-to-face interaction to online and telephone-based services. My right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State set out the research published by Unison that was done at the university of Derby, which shows the sheer scale of the cuts in careers services up and down the country. That is the backdrop for this important debate.

Some of this debate has focused on low-cost solutions and how effective they are in delivery. I would like to bring the House’s attention to the work of an organisation called Future First. It has done excellent research on careers services. Like the head teachers of the schools in my constituency that I have cited, it emphasises that careers advice cannot be reduced to online information and telephone services. A complementary model is surely the best way forward. Future First seeks to increase social mobility by building communities of alumni around state schools to inspire young people about their futures.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is giving a passionate speech. He has just said that careers advice should be complementary, and I agree. However, the Opposition motion does not say that the Government should seek to find additional funds to provide face-to-face careers advice; it says that all young people should be provided with face-to-face careers advice whether they need it or not. That does not sound complementary; it sounds like the cumbersome over-specified and overly expensive processes that we saw too much of under the previous Government.

[Stephen Twigg]

Not at all. What I mean by complementary, and what I understand Future First to mean by complementary, is that we need face-to-face advice, but that that is not enough. We also need the other projects to which I and other Members have referred.

[Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Lab)]

On the subject of complementary services, my hon. Friend will be aware that the Labour Government and my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) explored the possibility of using social media as a complementary way of introducing kids at school to people who have the same interests. Does he think that we might take that idea forward in the future?

[Stephen Twigg]

Absolutely; my hon. Friend makes an important point. Face-to-face advice is vital, and that is why the motion is about that, but it is not enough on its own. We need other initiatives, whether they use information technology or networks of alumni, as Future First does.

Future First started as a project in London state secondary schools. It was founded by a team of graduates from state schools, who were motivated by their own experience. It seeks to improve the support offered to young people at school as soon as they start considering their future. It is now supported by a wide range of organisations, including the Sutton Trust. It is looking to extend its excellent practice beyond London to other parts of the country. Recently, I had the opportunity to introduce Future First to Liverpool Vision, with a view to opening opportunities for it to take its programmes to Liverpool. It will be meeting shortly with head teachers and business leaders in the city of Liverpool.

Future First’s study, “Social Mobility, Careers Advice and Alumni Networks”, to which my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State referred, makes the point that was made earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) about the contrast between what happens in private schools and state schools. When asked how they rated their careers service, just 31% of young people in state schools said “good” or “very good”, yet in private schools the figure was almost double that at 57%. The figures from the independent sector and those from the state sector show a very significant contrast, which highlights the scale of the challenges that we face.

In-school services must get better. Schools need to improve them, but they cannot do that on their own; they need partners, and organisations such as Future First provide ideal partners for that excellent work. I therefore urge the Government, following tonight’s debate, not only to guarantee face-to-face careers advice as set out in the motion, but to go beyond that, and support and encourage excellent programmes such as the one at Cardinal Heenan school in my constituency and the ones that Future First has promoted in London. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Education Secretary said, Opposition Members will work with the Government if they genuinely seek to advance that vital instrument in the fight for a more socially mobile country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

In the ’80s and ’90s, I spent 10 years as a youth worker in a youth co-operative project for unemployed young people. At that time, more than a quarter of young people were unemployed. They were a generation who had no jobs, no hope and no future. Some of those young people never recovered from that period. Some committed suicide; others turned to drugs and alcohol, or ended up with long-term mental health problems. Even when the economy started to recover, those young people who had spent many years unemployed found it incredibly difficult to get a job. Let us be honest, most employers would probably prefer to employ a 16-year-old fresh out of school than a 26-year-old who has spent most of the past 10 years unemployed, with nothing to get up for and nothing to do.

The youth co-operative tried to stop the cycle of despair for young people. It helped them to gain skills and set up their own businesses. It gave them driving lessons and taught them how to use computers. It built up their confidence and gave them a reason to get out of bed, and it was open 365 days a year. It was about more than skills education; it provided a support network, and it challenged attitudes. It helped people to believe in themselves and gave them practical help. We helped young people who were sleeping in cars and on friends’ floors to get rehoused. We then helped them to decorate their new homes and find second-hand furniture. We helped young people whose schools and colleges said that they were not good enough for university to get there and to complete their degrees, and we supported young people into work. Then we were closed by Tory cuts in the youth service.

The Labour Government came along and introduced the Connexions service, which offered careers advice-plus, in the form of straightforward careers advice for all young people and a dedicated support service for young people not in employment education or training, or those at risk of becoming NEETs. The service did many of the things that the youth co-operative did in the ’80s and ’90s. Now we have another Tory Government, and youth unemployment is at its highest since 1992. We are seeing the destruction of Connexions and the youth service, and all support services are being slashed. It is back to the future again. Young people again feel that they have no jobs, no hope and no future.

We can argue about the effectiveness of the Connexions service. The Government like to use the result of an online survey of 510 respondents who said that they were unhappy with the service, rather than the survey of 5,000 young people carried out by the then Department for Education and Skills, which found that over 90% were satisfied with the service that they had received. Surely no one can argue that online advice is a substitute for face-to-face advice. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Mrs Chapman) and, I suspect, many other Members, I did not get good careers advice—[Laughter.]

[Stephen Twigg]

Like all of us; that’s why we are here.

School Funding Reform

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

We will absolutely seek to ensure that academies are fairly funded and that they are neither penalised nor overfunded. The hon. Gentleman is quite right to emphasise that in some cases we need to look again to ensure that there is absolute propriety. On the broader question, we will continually seek to bear down on inefficiencies, and money that we liberate will go to those most in need.

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

Five schools in my constituency lost out with the cancellation of BSF, including St John Bosco and Holly Lodge. Those schools will have their hopes raised by the Secretary of State’s announcement of the new private capital fund. Can he tell us how quickly decisions will be made on the allocation of that fund? Will deprivation be a criterion according to which it is decided which schools will get money, and will there be scope for match funding by local authorities?

[Michael Gove]

I hope to take decisions this autumn. I would not wish precipitately to raise hopes in any part of the country, but we will seek to work constructively. Deprivation obviously figures in revenue funding, but in capital funding the question I have to ask is: which schools are in the gravest danger? We need the information now to ensure that every child is in a safe school place, whichever part of the country they are in. Obviously, if a council such as Liverpool is prepared to work constructively, we will work constructively with it.

Employment (North-West)

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey). As she has reminded us, it is the 30th anniversary of the events in Toxteth. In many ways, Liverpool and the rest of Merseyside, in common with the rest of the north-west, have come a very long way in those three decades. However, communities in Liverpool, including in my constituency, are concerned and fearful that the large-scale cuts in public spending will result in a return to those days. I should also like to put on record my appreciation of the hon. Lady’s work in promoting career opportunities. She came to St John Bosco school in my constituency and spoke to the girls there about career opportunities, which was a positive experience for the young people concerned.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden) on securing this important debate, which addresses vital issues for constituencies throughout the region and, indeed, other parts of the country. He set out some of the key economic strengths of the north-west region. He spoke about the BBC’s move to Salford and about the impact of the work of both the National Apprenticeship Service in the north-west and the North West Universities Association. He rightly reminded us of the disproportionate and unfair impact that the Government’s decisions on cuts last year have had on constituencies such as his and mine. The combination of the reduction in the area-based grant and the disproportionate impact of the wider cuts has been felt in the voluntary and communities sector and in education, including, as my hon. Friend rightly said, further education.

My hon. Friend spoke about the impact of the cuts to the education maintenance allowance. Like other Members, I have in recent months visited sixth forms and colleges, including Liverpool community college, in my constituency, and young people are concerned that, without EMA, they might not be able to stay in education. I still encourage them—I am sure that all Members do this—to consider education, because of the broader benefits that it brings, but there is concern. My hon. Friend is right to say that the Opposition will closely monitor how the Government’s new and much cheaper scheme to replace EMA operates in practice.

My hon. Friend also spoke about the English baccalaureate and its implications for vocational education. It is a big challenge. Concerns have already been aired about the E-bac—the subjects that are and are not included, the way in which it was introduced, and the retrospective application of a standard that schools did not know about at the time. Those, however, are matters for another day. In today’s debate, I am keen for the Government to give an indication that they will develop a vocational version of the E-bac. It would tell those young people who will not follow a primarily academic path that there is something of equally high status and rigour with a strong vocational component that will recognise their achievement.

My hon. Friend also spoke about apprenticeships. I want to put on record my appreciation of those in Liverpool who provide apprenticeships. When Labour regained control of Liverpool city council just over a year ago, a commitment was made, despite the difficult funding environment, to create new apprenticeships. I am delighted that Joe Anderson’s administration has created 133 apprenticeships. It is striking that, when Liverpool city council advertised those new apprenticeships, there were 1,183 applications. That demonstrates my hon. Friend’s point about the demand for the kind of support that apprenticeships provide.

I want to refer to three different examples—two from Liverpool and one from London. If we are to enhance career opportunities for young people, that will not simply be delivered by the state, be that the Department for Education nationally or local authorities. The social and private sectors will also have an important role to play. In Croxteth in my constituency, the neighbourhood services company, Alt Valley Community Trust, is a model of a social enterprise that works with both the private and public sectors to deliver for local people. Its work has been widely praised and recognised. It runs a hugely successful future jobs fund initiative. I certainly do not concur with the hon. Lady, who described that fund as a pre-election stunt. I invite her to come to Croxteth to see the brilliant work that the communiversity is doing with funding from the future jobs fund. Some 800 beneficiaries have been provided with six-month contracts over almost the past two years. There have been more than 500 work placements as a result of that one social enterprise, which is a communiversity or neighbourhood services company based in Croxteth, one of the most deprived parts of my constituency.

From September, when the future jobs fund will come to an end, the neighbourhood services company in Croxteth will work with others, including local housing associations and the city council, to provide a further 60 apprenticeships. Yes, future careers for young people are about what happens in our schools and the policies of central Government and local authorities, but they are also, importantly, about engaging with social enterprises such as the communiversity in Croxteth.

Liverpool city council, in partnership with Liverpool community college and Liverpool John Moores university, is working on a proposed university technical college in Liverpool. It is an exciting opportunity for Liverpool to create a new college for 14 to 19-year-olds. Some 600 students will probably attend the university technical college, if it gets the go-ahead, which I very much hope it does. Its curriculum for 14 to 16-year-olds will be based on traditional GCSEs and A-levels, but with a much more significant technical element for about 40% of the curriculum. It will look at either the traditional or the new strengths in the Merseyside economy. I echo what the hon. Lady has said about the importance of the port. The university technical college will focus on the port and economic activity around it, as well as on environmental technology. That is a model of the way in which the education system can meet some of the new challenges we face, particularly in vocational education, which my hon. Friend has set out so eloquently.

Finally, there is the broader question of careers advice. Frankly, we have never got it right in this country, and we can all tell stories about the advice we got when we were at school or college as teenagers. When the Labour party was in government, we tried to deal with the issue, and I was briefly the Minister with responsibility for the Connexions service when it was first set up. We know from all the evidence that, for all the different initiatives we have had, we have never quite got things right. We have to look at new and innovative solutions.

Cardinal Heenan school in my constituency runs industry days. It invites local people who work in a variety of fields to come and meet its young people face to face to talk about the work they do. The school does that with the year 9s before they choose their GCSE options, and it does it again with the year 11s, who are at a crucial stage in their education. That is the sort of programme that we need to encourage and have more of.

[Bill Esterson]

My hon. Friend is giving some good examples of the importance of a good careers service and good practice. Does he agree that the change to providing careers advice remotely is worrying? The loss of face-to-face careers guidance, particularly where personal relationships already exist, is very worrying, and there is concern about the ability to maintain the benefits of such face-to-face guidance.

[Stephen Twigg]

. I share my hon. Friend’s concern. I echo what he has said and what my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South said in his opening remarks: a face-to-face element and direct interaction are crucial. In a sense, my argument is that we need more rather than less of that. Some of that advice will come through traditional careers advice in school, but some needs to be different and innovative, and I will give an example shortly.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

We all agree about the importance of good-quality careers advice. Is my hon. Friend as concerned as me about the resources for that advice in schools? As more schools set up independently as academies, the resources available to local authorities to support the schools that remain in their ambit will be reduced, so careers advice may suffer.

[Stephen Twigg]

Absolutely. It is vital that carers advice is seen as a priority by schools—whatever their status, they have to own this issue—and by central and local government.

I want to give an example of a social enterprise. Future First, which was set up by an inspirational young man called Jake Hayman, looks to change the way in which careers advice is provided. Its key aim is to bring former students back to their old schools to inspire, advise and guide the current pupils. It aims to build an alumni network in each school in the state sector and to work with schools to celebrate the diverse range of talents that have come from them. Future First uses these networks to engage with the current pupils over four years—this is not a one-off event. It leverages that network with a community of businesses. It is currently working in London with businesses such as Google and PricewaterhouseCoopers to provide work experience, internships and industry days.

I know one of the schools Future First works with in north London. William Ellis school in Camden has built a network of 40 former students, including football coaches, doctors, sound technicians, entrepreneurs and architects, providing a careers curriculum for more than 900 students. Through its alumni network, it has created a range of work experience placements, which includes more than 20 work-shadowing opportunities with leading barristers. That is absolutely the right way to go, because it is about promoting social mobility, narrowing gaps in opportunity between the poorest and the richest and giving young people in state schools opportunities that a lot of young people in private schools take for granted.

Future First has commissioned research into the issues it works on. Some 27% of children in state schools said the careers advice they had received was bad or very bad, whereas the figure in private schools was just 6%. Some 39% of young people attending state schools agreed with the statement:

“I don’t know anyone with a career that I'd like to do”,

and the figure rose to 45% among those receiving free school meals. The polling showed that the Future First style of advice was very popular among young people. Future First receives no Government funding and has been set up voluntarily. The schools pay for its services, but at a heavily subsidised rate. Corporate partners provide the bulk of the funding.

I have mentioned that example from London in this debate about the north-west because I am keen to see a similar programme in the north-west, perhaps starting in Liverpool—just to conjure a name off the top of my head. I have spoken today with Future First, which is keen to go to other parts of the country. That is not an alternative to the proper careers advice service my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South spoke about, but on its own the traditional service is not good enough. In particular, it is not addressing the skills gaps and lack of social mobility that Members have identified in the debate. I would be grateful if the Minister responded specifically on how the Government see the Future First programme.

Oral Answers to Questions

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davey]

My hon. Friend, who has campaigned so vigorously and successfully on this issue, will be delighted to know that we published the draft Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill just before the recent recess. We hope that it will be scrutinised by the Select Committee and will attract interest across the House, and we hope to introduce the formal Bill on the basis of that scrutiny.

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

T8. May I return the Minister to the issue of regional development agency asset sales, about which there is considerable concern in my constituency and throughout the north-west? Can he answer the question put to him earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey)? If assets can be gifted to Boris Johnson and London, why can they not be gifted to the rest of the country?

[Mr Prisk]

Let me clarify the position. The London Development Agency had already been merged into the Greater London Authority, so the process position was very different from that involving the RDAs. We have ensured that we are able to represent that. I understand the concern, but we are working with local enterprise partnerships, local authorities and local businesses to ensure that they are involved in the regenerations. I have discussed the issue with a number of the hon. Gentleman’s hon. Friends who have constituency interests in it, and I continue to listen to and work closely with them.

Oral Answers to Questions

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend has made his case consistently and well. I hope to make an announcement about our response to the James review before Parliament rises for the summer recess. That will give explicit details about how we can make available resources for schools whose condition and fabric deserve urgent attention.

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

In March this year, the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb) kindly visited St John Bosco arts college in my constituency. In the Government’s announcement before the summer on their response to the James review, will they state that schools in areas of high social and economic deprivation will still benefit from higher capital support from Government?

[Michael Gove]

I know that the Minister of State was impressed by the commitment shown by the teachers and parents at the school he visited. The hon. Gentleman has put his case throughout fairly and well. We will do everything that we can to ensure that the schools in the greatest need receive money. We have to prioritise schools where the fabric is most in need of support. As ever when thinking about revenue and capital allocations, deprivation is one of the central factors that we will consider.

Education Performance

Stephen Twigg Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

I apologise for being late for this important debate and I congratulate the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss)on initiating it. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), who I assume went to St Eddie’s in my constituency, and the hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe).

The starting point of my contribution is the importance of us all taking seriously the available evidence and data about education performance. It may be legitimate self-criticism for all of us, wherever we stand in terms of our parties or on the issues discussed today, to say that we all have instincts and prejudices. We all went to school, many of us have children at school and we all have schools in our constituencies. Understandably, those things, as well as our political philosophies, inform our outlook on school policy, but we need to supplement those instincts and prejudices by looking at the data and evidence.

[Mel Stride (Central Devon) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman rightly points to the importance of evidence when comparing countries, so is he a little concerned that we were not listed in the 2003 PISA results because schools did not provide the requisite amount of information? Does he welcome the fact that this Government will make it mandatory for schools to provide such information?

[Stephen Twigg]

The hon. Gentleman anticipates the next part of my speech. I absolutely share his concern. In fact, I was Schools Minister at the time—I do not know whether he intervened on me with that knowledge—and I remember the difficult conversations we had to have. The subsequent judgment was that the figures, for both 2000 and 2003 I think, were invalid because there were not sufficient schools. All we have to compare is 2006 with 2009.

The hon. Member for South West Norfolk spoke about PISA before I came into the Chamber. I apologise for missing what she said. The Secretary of State has spoken about the PISA outcomes on a number of occasions. Clearly, we must all share his concern about how low down the PISA league table we are for maths, science and reading. There are issues about its methodology and about the new entrants that were not in previous studies, but I will not dwell on them. I share the concern of the hon. Lady and others that we clearly still face a very big challenge.

The hon. Lady referred to Shanghai, which is a part of China that was not in the previous PISA table in 2009 and that went straight in to the current table at No. 1, which is what they used to say on the top 40. It is now top of the PISA league table for maths, science and reading. Clearly, there are lessons that we need to learn from that part of the world.

[Kevin Brennan]

Let me caution my hon. Friend on this matter and recommend that he read the article in The New Yorker, which asked whether help had been given to those taking the tests in Shanghai.

[Stephen Twigg]

I will read that article.

Whenever we discuss test scores, there is always this argument about whether people are being taught to the test. Of course there are other pieces of research that show rather different outcomes. I know that this has been referred to in previous debates, but the trends in international mathematics and science study, which does not cover English or reading, looked at scores in years 3 and 9 between 1995 and 2007. In terms of progress in both mathematics and science, the United Kingdom was towards the top of the most improved countries in the world.

[Elizabeth Truss]

I mentioned TIMSS earlier. Part of the concern about TIMSS is that it is based on the curriculum of a particular country. It is not a standardised test that people sit across countries in the way that PISA is. Moreover, France and Germany did not take part in that study. We were still trailing all the Asian tigers, such as Japan and Hong Kong.

[Mel Stride]

rose—

[Stephen Twigg]

Allow me to respond to the hon. Lady and then I will give way to the hon. Gentleman if he still wishes to intervene.

From the information that I have in front of me, I can see that the hon. Lady is correct in what she said about Germany and France. As for Japan, we performed better in science and mathematics in year 3-4 and year 8. I accept her point about the validity of different forms of comparative research. None the less, on TIMSS, we were ahead of Japan and the United States. I know what she will say to that. What I am measuring is the improvement on the absolute score. After the improvement, we are still slightly behind Japan, but in that period we improved faster than Japan, although from a lower base.

[Mel Stride]

Is it not the case that our apparent improvements in the TIMSS can to some degree be attributed to the fact that the cohort of countries that we are looking at in each year has changed and that a number of non-OECD African and Asian countries have entered in more recent times, thus slightly flattering our figures?

[Stephen Twigg]

I do not believe so. I am relying on the particular table in front of me. In each case, it examines a country that was in the 1995 cohort and the 2007 cohort. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman’s criticism is valid. The hon. Lady’s implied criticism is a fairer one because I was relying on the improvement. She is right to say that, if we look at the absolute score for Japan, it is, in every case, slightly better than ours, but we have made a greater improvement in that period. Interestingly, the United States is behind us on not just improvement but the absolute score in every case.

[Mr Mark Field]

In the midst of this battle over evidence—I accept that evidence is important and that getting the figures right does matter—surely the hon. Gentleman does not disagree with the assertion of my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk that there is a problem. We are going down the league table, although perhaps not by as many places as might have been predicted. More importantly though, there is a lack of rigour in the choice of subjects that the average student is taking for A-level. We are not looking at academic subjects in the way we were in the past, and that is in stark contrast to many of our most important economic rivals in the 21st century.

[Stephen Twigg]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. At the end of the hon. Lady’s speech, she said that there is no contradiction between a high-quality and a high-quantity education system, and that is something with which I passionately agree. I do not necessarily agree with everything that she said in constructing that argument, but I certainly believe that we should be aspiring to that.

Let me take up something that the hon. Lady said and that has also been said by other Government Members. We face a real challenge in changing the attitude of many state comprehensive schools to getting their brightest kids into Oxbridge. As someone who went from a comprehensive school to Oxford—okay, it was quite a long time ago, as the hon. Gentleman will know—I relied on a particular teacher who mentored and encouraged me. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and I was doing A-level economics. Without him, I am not sure whether I would have made that application. I do not think that that situation has changed as much in the subsequent 25 years as I would like. It is not just about Oxbridge, but if we are rightly to criticise Oxbridge for the comparatively low numbers of state school kids getting in, part of the challenge is for the schools as well as for Oxbridge.

[Kevin Brennan]

We are all in danger of confessing our educational backgrounds. I also went to a comprehensive school and ended up studying PPE at Oxford. That just shows how predictable MPs are.

[Stephen Twigg]

Did my hon. Friend study A-level economics?

[Kevin Brennan]

Yes, I studied A-level economics and got an A in case anybody asks. Cambridge Assessment sent me an article this week about the PISA studies in which Andreas Schleicher, who is often cited by the Secretary of State as his hero, seemed to suggest that there is no evidence of decline in English pupil performance.

[Stephen Twigg]

I think I will move on from this part of my speech, partly because a lot of Members want to participate in the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Elizabeth Truss]

From a whole series of studies, including TIMSS.

[Stephen Twigg]

I am not sure whether TIMSS shows that, but I want to move on. When the hon. Lady spoke about China, she mentioned the cultural attitude to education, and that is clearly a factor. We know that in our own country from the data for achievement by ethnicity. Chinese and Indian children consistently outperform all other sections of the population in tests and exams, even when they are from the poorest families, as measured by free school meals, so there clearly are cultural factors.

In my remaining time, I will say a little about progress over time and highlight some successes in Liverpool. I will say a little about the factors that shape success and then something about learning from elsewhere. I want to say a bit about Teach First and about the US and Swedish experience of chartered schools and free schools respectively and then finish by saying something about E-bac and the surrounding debate around measuring achievement.

Between 1997 and 2010, we saw a significant improvement in the scores in the key stage tests—the SATS—A-levels and GCSEs. The national improvement in the five A* to C measure was from 32% in 1997 to 55% in 2010. I wanted to use that fact to pay particular tribute to the schools in Liverpool, which improved by a more significant margin—from a miserable 24% in 1997 to 53% last year, which was just two points below the national average. Linked to that, because of the success that those children and young people have had in their GCSE results, more of them are staying on at school or college after the age of 16. Nationally, there has been an improvement from 64% in 1997, just below two-thirds, to 79% last year, just below four-fifths. Again, in Liverpool, there was much more significant improvement, from just over 50% in 1997 to 78% last year.

There is a very important debate to be had about why those rates are changing. I agree with the hon. Member for South West Norfolk that improving educational performance is not just about Governments waving a magic wand. We will always have a debate about resources. Resources are not the focus of today’s debate, but spending is clearly a factor. There is also a debate to be had about the appropriate accountability measures and I will return later to that issue. However, improving educational performance is actually about what happens at the school level and the local level. We know that, because we know that schools with very similar intakes that have very similar amounts of money spent on them perform very differently from each other. Improving educational performance cannot be only about the context or the amount of money that is spent, although clearly both those things matter.

I agree with the hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock that the head teacher in a school is critical. The quality of leadership around and below the position of head teacher is also important. Governors are important, too; the hon. Gentleman referred to his own role as a governor. All those positions are also vital.

Let us consider what we can learn from elsewhere, because it is important that we examine all the evidence available. I have praised the Government for the expansion of Teach First. One of the earliest decisions that I had to make when I became a Minister in 2002 was about whether we should support a programme that was initially called Teach for London, but eventually became the Teach First programme. We can learn a great deal from the Teach First programme.

The hon. Member for South West Norfolk—or perhaps it was one of her colleagues—spoke about the attractiveness of teaching in some of the toughest schools and how the best teachers often may not want to teach in them. As I say, Teach First began in London before expanding to other parts of the country and the whole basis of the programme was to place some of the brightest graduates from some of the top universities in some of the toughest inner-city schools in London as teachers.

Some of the examples of teachers who have gone through the Teach First programme are truly remarkable. Moreover, the number of teachers who went through the programme and stayed in the education world rather than following other careers that are probably much better paid has been another truly remarkable achievement. Research by Manchester university shows that schools in challenging circumstances where Teach First graduates are first placed have seen a statistically significant improvement in their GCSE results and that there is a positive correlation between the degree of improvement at GCSE level and the number of Teach First graduates in a school.

Teach First is a great programme and a great example of learning from another country, because it was modelled on a scheme in the US that enjoys strong cross-party support. Whatever else happens in the field of education policy, we should all continue to support and encourage the further expansion of the Teach First programme.

Having said that, I should add that there is a need to be cautious when we are studying school reform movements in other parts of the world. When the case is made for the Government’s policy on free schools and academies, great emphasis is placed on the experience of the US charter schools and the Swedish free schools. In preparation for today’s debate, I have looked at some of the evidence from the US and Sweden, and I think that it is fair to say that the evidence from both countries is mixed.

I think that the Secretary of State for Education and the Minister who is here today have both referred to a US programme called KIPP, which is the Knowledge is Power Project. I had an opportunity to visit KIPP schools in New York and Texas some time ago and I was hugely impressed by what was being achieved in those schools. KIPP schools are a great example of how some of these new, more autonomous schools in the US are delivering, particularly for children from some of the poorest backgrounds. There is no doubt that both the US charter schools and the Swedish free schools are hugely popular with the parents of the children who attend them.

However, the evidence about the impact on standards of those schools is mixed. There have been a number of studies in New York that suggest there has been real improvement in the charter schools compared with non-charter schools and that in particular some of the poorest children from ethnic minorities have done better than they might have done otherwise. On the other hand, the Centre for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford university published a report in 2009 that suggested that there is a much more mixed picture across the US, including significant state-by-state variation. That suggests that the extra autonomy granted to those schools may in itself bring benefits—but there are clearly other factors at play in addition to that extra autonomy, which help to determine whether those schools are successful or less successful.

In some ways, the picture in Sweden is quite similar. The Swedish free schools are popular with parents. One piece of research that I looked at showed higher grade point averages in free schools compared with those achieved in other Swedish schools. It has been suggested that in an area with a concentration of free schools, there was a wider positive impact. On the other hand, other significant studies that I looked at earlier today suggest that there has been a general worsening of performance in the Swedish school system in recent years, so that it is perhaps the case that the free schools have not delivered the national system-wide improvement in Sweden that their proponents originally anticipated.

Furthermore, there is real concern in Sweden—this is different from the experience in the US of the charter school system—that the gaps in terms of socio-economic achievement have widened in the country. Admittedly, those gaps in Sweden have always been much narrower than the gaps in the UK, so I still think that we have a lot to learn from Sweden and from some of the other Scandinavian countries. Nevertheless, we still need to tread with care on both sides of this debate, because I have heard both advocates of the Government’s proposals and critics of them somewhat overstating the case for or against by citing evidence from the US and Sweden. As I said, the evidence from those countries is decidedly mixed.

There is a very difficult debate to be had about how we measure how well schools are doing—and, indeed, how such measurement can itself have an impact on what happens in schools. That is really the debate about E-bac. That is a very difficult debate; I do not think that it is easy or straightforward at all. The hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock said something that I passionately agree with—that we should make the contextual value added the key indicator of schools. He then added a very important caveat by saying that we must also find a way to make CVA understood. I remember that when I was a Minister I said, “Why can’t people see that the value that this school is adding is actually far more significant than the raw score?” But people did not look at the value that was being added. They looked at the raw score.

The dilemma that all of us who care about education policy face is how we best measure schools and how we ensure that that measurement does not distort choices. I am concerned about E-bac, but that is not because I am not passionate about history, geography and modern foreign languages; I am passionate about all three of those subjects. However, I am not convinced that making them compulsory for all children, which could happen as a consequence of the E-bac, or emphasising them over other subjects, is necessarily the wisest way to encourage more children to have a passion for, and therefore to learn, foreign languages, history and geography.

The jury is out. We need to look at that issue further. As a Minister, I had some responsibility for the work that we did on modern foreign languages after they were made optional. I had mixed views. In the end, I think that it was probably right that they were made optional. What we sought to do was to encourage primary schools to take up modern foreign language teaching. We have seen a big expansion in such teaching in our primary schools in recent years. I hope that that will result in primary schoolchildren having a passion for foreign languages and that they maintain that passion as they go on to secondary school. That was the thinking behind encouraging language teaching in primary schools.

I can understand the desire of a new Government who are in a hurry to do something quick on E-bac, but I worry that it is effectively being introduced retrospectively. As I said in the Education Bill debate yesterday, there are schools in my constituency that are getting year 10 pupils who are midway through the year to change subjects so that they do E-bac subjects, because the school thinks that it will be measured by the performance in those subjects. I am not convinced that that will either prepare those children well for the world of work or give them a passion for those subjects that they have been told they must switch to.

I will finish by referring to the other thing that I agree with the hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock about—the importance of recognising that progress takes time. The political and educational cycles are not exactly the same. When the Minister responds to the debate, he will say that of course the Government want to see progress. We were the same when we were in government.

We all want that progress for good reasons; it is not only to gain political kudos, but because all of us are passionate about children and young people being able to do well at school, so that they are fully equipped and have the best possible chances later in life. However, we often expect change in schools to happen too quickly. We set hurdles that cannot be crossed. As the hon. Gentleman said, schools cannot necessarily improve every year, because they have a different set of children each year. That is not an excuse for failure; it is just a recognition of reality.

When we assess how well schools do, let us look at subjects beyond English and maths, but let us not lose that vital core of literacy and numeracy. Let us look at a school’s progress over the previous five years, and let us look at value added—at how well particular children do at age 16 compared with how they do at age 11.

I very much welcome the opportunity I have had to participate in this debate, and I apologise for taking a bit longer than other Members. However, as I am the only Member on the Opposition Back Benches today, I can assure everyone that everything I have said is on behalf of all Labour Back Benchers. It is vital that we regularly debate education because, in spite of our real policy differences, we all know that education is vital if we are to be a successful economy and a fairer society with greater social mobility.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) on securing this debate, which is indeed important, because while some things have unambiguously improved in education in the past 10 or 15 years—we should all be proud and celebrate that—overall there have clearly been insufficient returns on a very large amount of money spent. Universities struggle to differentiate between students and have to take remedial action, as my hon. Friend outlined. We again had employers in the Select Committee on Education this week complaining about the lack of generic skills in the people they see coming forward, and about a lack of work ethic, too. There is a yawning gap between the rich and the poor. Frankly, far too many young people are left behind, with a million young people not in school, not in training and not in a job.

That has all been happening at a time when we have been breaking records year after year in our presumed education performance. The fact is that many of the so-called comparisons are not comparable over time, and not comparable between schools, individual students or groups of students. Although PISA is not perfect, it gives us an anchor point. It gives us an external benchmark with which to compare. It is, of course, not just about our changed place in the league table, as it were. I fully accept that there are difficulties with the methodology and, of course, if the number of countries in the sample is changed, then that will change the rankings. What should concern us, however, is where we were in any year relative to others—both relative to our traditional competitors of Germany, the United States, Japan and so on, and relative to our new competitors, particularly China. A province of China was at the very top of the table, but as everybody knows, a single province comfortably dwarfs the size of our population.

That is doubly important, because the Chinese have already whupped us on low-cost volume manufacturing, and we will never again make t-shirts cheaper than China. It is already ahead of us in natural resources, and what it does not have, it makes up for by bringing it in from Africa and elsewhere. The arenas left for us really to compete and excel in are largely those in which academic achievement is very important, such as advanced manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, the knowledge and creative industries, and education itself. Many of the others in which we need to excel, such as tourism and the non-tradable service sector in general, call for a much higher level of soft skills, interpersonal skills, communication skills and so on than we typically see from 18-year-olds coming out of large parts of the British education system.

I will not talk about what the Government are doing. I was going to say a lot, but most of it has already been said, which is lucky, considering the lateness of the hour. I will talk just about measurement and accountability. The English baccalaureate has filled up our inboxes to a degree that I suppose most of us did not really expect. I have been astounded, actually—

[Stephen Twigg]

indicated dissent.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman has not. Perhaps it is just me. I have attracted comments on the subject like a magnet—I am a very popular fellow, obviously. They have mostly been from teachers, not parents. In fact, I have not had a single parent or child spontaneously mention the English baccalaureate in any way whatever. People are particularly worked up, as we know, about religious studies, music and other subjects. They are particularly exercised about what they call the retrospective nature of the way the proposal was applied. I can understand teachers’ frustration on that in some ways, but only to an extent. The English baccalaureate tells us one really important thing, and I am not sure that we would have found this out any other way: the yawning gap that I mentioned between the rich and the poor. Among kids on free school meals—free school meals are not the only measure of deprivation, but it is the best and most accurate one that we have—only 4% were achieving the English baccalaureate. Overall, it was 16%, so that is a quarter of the level for the cohort as a whole. Even more worrying than the fact that only 4% of those children passed that set of exams, what really scares me is that only 8% were entered for that set of exams. That is truly shocking.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) on securing this very important debate, which has seen excellent contributions and consensus on the need to improve our education performance. Her excellent opening speech reiterated many of the points made in her CentreForum report published earlier in the year entitled “Academic rigour and social mobility: how low income students are being kept out of top jobs”. Both her speech today and that policy paper are worthy of much wider circulation, and I hope that they will receive that, because she has made very important points.

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend’s analysis and, in particular, with her forensic dissection of the UK’s educational performance in recent years: her insightful thesis, if I may describe it thus, that equivalence of qualifications has failed the poorest children; her conclusion that comprehensive reform of our education system is urgently required; and her suggestion that there is much more that we can learn from the best performing nations and regions of the world.

There have been excellent speeches from other hon. Members. It is heartening that a debate on education has been so dominated by my hon. Friends, almost all of whom are, as they say, fresh from the people, having been elected in 2010. My hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) spoke of her own educational journey and emphasised the importance of the foundation subjects of English and maths and the service that the Russell group provided in publishing details of the facilitating subjects, which just happened to match, if I may say so, the subjects in the English baccalaureate. It is a real concern, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) said, that only 4% of students on free school meals achieved the E-bac last year compared with 15.6% nationally. That figure itself—one in six—is lamentably low.

I wonder what the former Schools Minister, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), would have thought when he looked at the five GCSEs or more figures and the increase over the years—it is up to more than 50% today. I wonder whether he thought that most of those achievements would not be in the English baccalaureate subjects. Did he envisage that only 15.6% would achieve a C or more in the English baccalaureate subjects, compared with the more than 50% achieving five or more GCSEs?

[Stephen Twigg]

The Minister raises a serious point. As I said in my speech, I am passionate about the particular subjects involved—history, geography and modern foreign languages—but I think that I would have recognised that some people would be achieving five A* to C grades at GCSE with one of the subjects being religious studies or perhaps music. My concern is that in a laudable attempt to celebrate the subjects that he has added, other subjects will be crowded out.

[Mr Gibb]

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, but of course there is plenty of room outside the English baccalaureate to study RE, music and art and, indeed, for some pupils to take a vocational subject. We have deliberately kept the English baccalaureate small to enable that to happen.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) spoke of consistent application of school rules and pointed to how dramatically a school can improve its academic performance once behaviour is sorted out. He is absolutely right. He called for more flexibility in the movement of heads going back to teaching. The Government certainly intend to allow more flexibility in terms and conditions for our schools. The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby was right to pay tribute to Teach First, and I welcome his support for its expansion.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) said that the paucity of aspiration was a key characteristic of poorly performing schools. He is absolutely right. We must grapple with that in all our schools, to ensure that we do not sell children short, particularly those from homes where there is not much aspiration; we need to replicate that aspiration in school. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his support for synthetic phonics. I hope that young Master Field is already reading at the age of three and a half.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) is right to be concerned about the growing gap between the independent and state sectors. The OECD has commented on the fact that the gap in the UK is one of the widest among OECD countries. I assure her that we are committed to raising the standard of alternative provision, and to including the voluntary sector and other providers that have a proven record of helping children with challenging behavioural problems.

My hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt) said during her contribution that more widely based GCSEs, such as the pilot GCSE in boxing that she cited, can be valued without necessarily having to claim that they are the equivalent of academic GCSEs. That is an important point.

My hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride) provided an important analysis of the PISA figures from 2000 to 2009. We are determined to address the long tail of underachievement, another factor that was found in many PISA surveys.

The hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) quoted Andreas Schleicher. However, as politicians tend to do, he failed to give the full quotation. It is true that he said that there has been

“very little change over the last 10 years.”

But he went on to say that we are an average performer and that

“improvement on the equality front from a social perspective somewhat declined; performance is average.”

He meant that in a pejorative sense, not as something to be happy with.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire was right to point to the weakness of the figure for five or more A to C grades, and the inevitable focus on the border between grades C and D. We are considering the matter, but measures that look at the performance of the lowest quintile will help to address the problem. A column in the performance tables will show what schools have achieved for pupils qualifying for the pupil premium. Schools will not then be able to say, “Well, this is our intake and this is why we are performing poorly” if we consider GCSE results only of those children who qualify for the pupil premium.

My hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) asked about school places. We are doing a significant amount to tackle the problem. There has been an increase in the birth rate since 2001, which is now feeding through into an increase in primary school numbers, and there is £800 million of basic need capital funding to cover shortages. Capital funding is a priority, albeit that it rather short in the current circumstances.

The hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) cited Australia. We are introducing a scholarship fund—an education endowment fund—of £125 million, to be administered by the Sutton Trust. Teachers will be able to bid for funds to allow them to undertake further study in their academic field, or to improve their teaching skills. That important initiative is on similar lines to the one that she mentioned.

I shall now address the debate more generally. The challenges that we face in the 21st century and the opportunities that we now enjoy are more global in scope than ever before, as many hon. Members have pointed out. The days are long gone when we could afford to educate a minority of our children well, while hoping that the rest would be okay. As we heard, China and India are already turning out more engineers, computer scientists and university graduates than the whole of Europe and America combined.

The success of other nations in educating more of their young people to a higher level is part of their resolute determination to secure their future prosperity. It is no longer good enough to say that we as a nation are doing better than we did in the past. What matters now is not so much how we are doing compared to the past, but how we are doing compared to the rest and, in particular, how we are doing compared to the best of the rest.

We need to ask ourselves how our 16-year-olds are doing when compared with those in the US, Singapore, China and Scandinavia. Sadly, the answer is that we are not doing anywhere near well enough. Across the globe, other nations are outpacing us, accelerating reforms, creating more innovation and pulling ahead in international comparisons.

As has been pointed out, in recent years the UK has slipped down the international league tables. Indeed, when the PISA tables were first published, to the disbelief of the German education establishment they demonstrated that its education system was nowhere near being the global leader it had always thought. In Germany, it became known as “PISA-shock”. Most important, it stimulated a furious debate about how Germany could catch up, and that is the approach that we should be taking. We should not be saying, “Now that the figures are low, this academic or that will not believe them.” That was not being said in the years after 2000 by Labour Ministers or civil servants when the figures showed us being fourth, seventh and eighth in science, literacy and maths.

Similarly, when the United States was confronted with evidence showing that that 15-year-olds in the far east were comfortably outperforming their pupils in maths and science, it was described as a “Sputnik moment”. Most important, it again prompted radical reform of science education in the US. The good news is that the coalition Government are determined to ensure that the latest PISA study leads to similar action here. We are doing so by using examples of what works in the best-performing education nations.

As well as the OECD’s findings, another invaluable contribution was made by Sir Michael Barber and McKinsey. The seminal 2007 report, “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top”, provided a blueprint for all nations serious about reforming their education systems of what they needed to do to catch up. The 2010 report, “How the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better”, provided further invaluable insights for all nations aspiring to improve their education system.