Education Bill

Steve Rotheram Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

On the Minister’s first point, my mum reliably informs me that in 1950s Liverpool the mass was said in Latin, but I can tell him that it is not today. On his second point, he needs to tell the shadow schools Minister in Committee why he is removing the apprenticeships guarantee. What is the reason? If we are convinced that this can be done without restricting opportunities to young people who are not planning to go to university, perhaps we will be satisfied, but he does not fill me with encouragement.

[Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that Governments do not create apprenticeships, they fund apprenticeships? Employers create apprenticeships and under the previous Labour Government the number of apprenticeships trebled. Does he agree that it is simply laughable that the Secretary of State is trying to position himself as the champion of the working classes, and that we should invite him to Goodison Park to meet some ordinary working people, so that he can learn from them about what these policies will do to ordinary working-class families?

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend is right that the Government have nothing to say to young people who want to plan to get a good skill so that they can get on in life. He rightly said that employers create apprenticeships, but the Government are a huge employer. When I was Health Secretary we increased the number of apprenticeships from 1,000 to 5,000, but that was not enough in the country’s biggest employer and the third biggest employer in the world. It was the existence of that guarantee that meant that public services had to work hard to increase the number of apprenticeship places they were making available. My worry is that by dropping this commitment the Government are going to throw that progress into reverse. The Government have figures for funding apprenticeships, but I am not certain that they are going to turn into a real increase in the number of apprenticeships, and the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning will need to have some good answers on that point in Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am from Liverpool, so I suppose I am getting used to cuts. I will try to amend my speech to fit the six minutes allocated.

As we have already heard, the Bill covers a wide range of concerns—from school discipline and behaviour to schools admissions and exclusions, setting up new academies and even changes to apprenticeships and the reform of student fees and loans. It is a mishmash of proposals designed not to give everyone the best chance of a good education but to create a three-tier system of the haves, the have-nots and the have-not-got-a-chances. In the future, unless parents have money or good connections, their children will be sent to schools facing massive cuts in their budgets, while money is siphoned off to academies and free schools.

Narrowing the curriculum to five subjects will mean abandoning all the young people who have thrived on vocational courses. Removing the promise of an apprenticeship will leave a legacy of young people who do not fit into this 1950s vision of what an education should be—young people consigned to the scrap heap by a Secretary of State who cares more about Latin and the classics than he does about Liverpool and the educational attainment of children from ordinary working families.

Above all, the Secretary of State is asking this House to strip local authorities of their role in managing the provision of education, and to transfer to him 50 new powers to interfere in and control almost every aspect of our schools system in England, including what subjects our children learn and what kind of schools they go to. Indeed, so much will be affected that, in view of the time, I shall confine my remarks to an aspect of education that gets little attention in the Bill, something that I believe highlights this Government’s misguided priorities.

We on the Labour Benches judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable, not by how the strong prosper. In that sense, many Members have been right to express deep concern today about what the proposals will mean for the treatment of children with special educational needs. As Ofsted highlights, just over one in five pupils—1.7 million school-age children in England—are identified as having special educational needs. Critically, as a whole, pupils currently identified as having special educational needs are disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds, are much more likely to be absent or even excluded from school, and achieve less well than their peers, in terms of both attainment at any given age and progress over time.

Getting education right for those young people transforms their chances and our ability as a society to benefit from what they could be, rather than dealing with the consequences of what they never get help to overcome. First and foremost, what many parents of children with SEN in Liverpool will ask about this Bill is: how can we judge what these proposals will mean for those children if we have not even been given notice of when the special educational needs Green Paper that this Government said they would publish will be published? In the absence of such information, the proposals offer little comfort to parents, who fight hard to ensure that their children receive the education they need, whatever their ability.

Many in the Chamber would recognise the challenges that Ofsted identified in its work reviewing SEN schooling and in the special educational needs and disability review. However, that is why it is all the more worrying that the proposals in the Bill have been brought forward without any details outlining what they will mean for children with SEN. Under the present system, a parent of a child with SEN often fights long and hard to get their child statemented, to ensure that they can access the services necessary to address their specific requirements. Under the proposals in the Bill, I fear for those children who need the co-operation of different services to participate in education—for example, children with a disability—or to access speech and language therapy, or mental health support.

It is not just in ensuring that children with special needs are supported that the cross-agency approach is important. Many of the current provisions were introduced as a result of the Laming report, as we heard earlier, following the death of Victoria Climbié, in order to protect the health, safety and well-being of children and young people. I therefore hope that Ministers will offer more than kind words for the parents of children with special educational needs who are listening today, and explain clearly how the Government’s proposals and the removal of the role of local authorities will not lead to a loss in joined-up services for our most vulnerable students. We know that children with SEN or a disability are more likely to face discrimination in admissions. The outcomes of the case often depend on the evidence presented, and if—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order.