Air Quality

Debate between Thérèse Coffey and Mark Field

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I am encouraged to hear that the Minister is making air quality her first priority. I hope that it will continue to be so until the problem is solved, because this is a deplorable state of affairs. I know that the Minister is part of a new ministerial team, but I agree with everything that was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish). My own constituents have had enough of the current appalling state of air quality. I know that I am in the middle of a big city, but the same applies to many other parts of the country. We need to ensure that the perverse incentives for diesel are stopped in their tracks, and I hope that the Minister will make representations to that effect at the highest level.

[Dr Coffey]

As my right hon. Friend suggests, the Government intend to continue to encourage people to opt for low-emission vehicles. As for what is being done in London, the Mayor said that he would plant 2 million trees in the run-up to the campaign—[Hon. Members: “Where are they?”]—and I hope that he keeps to his pledge over the next four years, because that will help to improve air quality. I know that the Transport Committee has asked him to appear before it. As I have said, it is important for central and local government to work together to help the people whom we all represent.

Education Performance

Debate between Thérèse Coffey and Mark Field

Thursday 12th May 2011 Westminster Hall

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship for what I think is the first time, Mr Rosindell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) on securing the debate. I was delighted to support her in securing it, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating the time.

I will start with a quote that might ruffle your feathers, Mr Rosindell: “Education, education, education.” Perhaps that is the one thing on which I agreed with the former Prime Minister, Mr Blair—how important education is in our country. It is very important that we give our youngsters the best chance in life, to allow them to cast their net further and wider, so that they can reap a rich catch in life and become big fish in a big pond, not minnows in shark-infested waters.

Education performance matters for our country at different levels. At macro level, it is about preparing people to be innovative, and making them ready for business and work—ready to be our future doctors, nurses and teachers. It is about creating people who are flexible and skilled—people who will do the everyday jobs, as well as the ones that involve scanning the world for new wealth to come to this country. At micro level, it is about having people who are cultured and enlightened, and having a social country in which we live at peace with one another in a culture of respect and tolerance. At individual level, there is no question but that education is the passport to a bigger choice in life and to social mobility, that magic phrase that we often hear now. For me, nothing else fits the bill as well as education.

Educational performance is about preparing not only for university, but for life. My hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk said that there is a risk of imbalance between vocational and academic choices. Trying to say that one degree is worth the same as, or a similar amount to, another perhaps suggests that not going to university means that one has failed in life. Far from it; we need people to develop all their talents in whatever way they can.

I genuinely believe that every child has talents that can be nurtured through school and later in life, but every child needs a good foundation in reading, writing and mathematics to allow them to succeed. There is no one more disadvantaged than the voter I met in the streets of my constituency the other day, who said that he could not read. He had struggled all his life to find work that did not involve him using his hands. I am not saying that he did not have a valuable skill, but how much more he could have achieved! For instance, he could have set up his own business or something similar. Frankly, even Wayne Rooney and David Beckham need a good educational foundation if they are not to be reliant solely on their lawyers and accountants and are to get the best out of them; they need to be conscious of that.

I will not rattle off a lot of statistics. My hon. Friend has already given us some good evidence, and I know that others are prepared to do so. Instead, I shall take the House on a bit of a personal journey. I do not pretend that my educational history is typical. I did my first O-levels when I was 13; I then did some A-levels and finished my schooling in the constituency of the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg). I went to university and then changed universities; I effectively stopped attending one and moved to another because I could not cope with the way of learning at the first. I then went on to do a PhD. I do not pretend that that is typical, but during that journey I found out that, in a way, standards have changed, and that is unfair on those who are slightly younger than me. That leads me on to the challenges that the country is struggling with 20 years later. I know of them as a result of my science education.

I am old enough to have taken O-levels; I took them a bit early in 1986. When I went on to do A-levels, I happened for whatever reason to do physics for a year. I was working with students from the lower and upper sixth forms, doing a combined kind of crash course. When I was with one group—I should keep up to date; we now call them year 12 students—I was often told, “Oh, Thérèse, you’ll have to do an extra half hour because year 12 does not need to learn that any more, but you can add that topic during your extra learning out of class.” That happened quite regularly throughout my physics A-level studies.

Some might argue that I took a harder A-level, but that is not strictly fair. I genuinely believe that the year-on-year debate about A-levels, O-levels or GCSEs not being as difficult as they used to be gives rise to a false argument about standards. I do not want to make this into a generational slanging match. I would not say that those studying physics 20 years ago were any brighter than the youngsters doing it today, but the opportunity to stretch the learning, to stretch the imagination, may now be constricted. The differentiation, with more children getting A and A* grades, is the result of youngsters today having to learn a lot less. Frankly, if children now have to learn their times tables only up to three, when before they had to learn them up to 12, it does not surprise me that more children now get their sums right.

[Mr Mark Field]

I am sorry to interrupt my hon. Friend’s journey. As she is a Liverpudlian, it must have been a magical mystery tour. Although I agree with much of what she says, I am not sure that she is correct about the exam system. There has been an utter debasing of the results system over the past 20 years in GCSE and O and A-level exams. The results are now largely discredited, and there needs to be an urgent rethink. As my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) said, someone who got a grade E in an A-level exam only a decade and a half ago could now receive a mark as high as grade B. That does not allow great confidence in the system. There has been a debasing of the system, and we need to consider it afresh.

[Dr Coffey]

I fully accept what my hon. Friend says, but I am trying not to turn this into an inter-generational slanging match. There is nothing worse than getting these wonderful results in August and then, all of a sudden and from whatever quarter—not from politicians but from others—people say, “Oh well, standards are getting lower.” I imagine that that is really hurtful to those receiving their results because, frankly, they are doing the best they can with the course and the exams that are set. It is not their fault, and I agree with my hon. Friend that we need to challenge the education establishment and the Government.

That brings me to another part of my speech. We should not be ashamed to challenge the education establishment, and even ask it to pause and reflect, in order to improve educational standards and performance. The Government are already doing that with elements of the English baccalaureate. We saw it also with the acceleration of academies under the previous Government. I note that academies have longer school days, and that they build other activities into their school day; school is no longer a half-past 8 to 3 o’clock existence, with pupils then being sent out. Academies allow a much wider existence; they are building an education for the entire person, not just slotting pupils into classes. I accept what my hon. Friend said, but I do not want to attack the young people or teachers of today, because they are already in the system. It is our role to challenge it and to get it changed.

Stepping back a little further, I am sure that many Members who went to university did three-year degree courses. I did my BSc in three years. Just as I was finishing my PhD, I saw that many universities were starting to move to four-year courses, and that is now almost the standard; the degree is now called MSci. Although not many universities will say so, the reason for the change is that when students had finished their A-levels, they did not have enough of the curriculum to grab the university course in year one. It is not that they were doing a remedial year, but they needed a foundation year at university. They could then continue. Some courses were perhaps not really four years; they were three and a half years with an extended research project to make up the time. As a consequence, students now spend four years at university, and with fees going up, that means more money being spent on university courses.

It would be honest to ask whether A-levels are at the right standard for entry to university, so that we ensure that we do not leave the universities with the challenge of making up the gap. The Russell group universities have done a great service to schools and teachers—and, most importantly, students and parents—with their brochure “Informed Choices”, in which they give a list of subjects. The facilitating subjects are maths, English, physics, biology, chemistry, geography, history and languages, classic and modern. The Russell group believes that those building blocks allow students to go on to do almost any subject. I accept that those who want to do a degree in art need to study art, and that it would probably help those who want to do music if they have studied a bit of music on the way, but for most degrees, it almost does not matter what subjects have been taken at A-level; students simply need the ability to think and to analyse, as suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk.