Toby Perkins
Main Page: Toby Perkins (Labour - Chesterfield)Department Debates - View all Toby Perkins's debates with the Department for Education
(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
We are aware that there are costs that schools have to face in the coming years, but we have protected school funding. If we look across Whitehall, we see the reduction in spending that we have had to secure to tackle the record public sector deficit that we inherited in 2010—£156 billion, or 11% of GDP. It is now down to less than 4% of GDP, thanks to those savings. We have issued significant guidance to schools about how they can manage their budgets and procure savings and efficiencies in the way they run their schools to meet these challenges.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) on ensuring that the Government are held to account on the failure in education policy, which is very important. The Minister should know, as he articulated, how real the demoralisation is of teachers in our schools. Have the Government made any assessment of the impact on our children’s education of how demoralised teachers are? Why do the Government not take serious steps to try to lift the morale of teachers rather than constantly denigrating them in this Chamber?
Mr Gibb
No one on the Government Benches is denigrating teachers. Teachers in this country are a much respected profession who are providing a very high, and improving, quality of education to young people. We have reformed the primary curriculum and the secondary curriculum, and we have reformed GCSEs, putting them on a par with the best qualifications in the world. The teaching profession has responded magnificently to those new challenges. Today we have published the key stage 2 results on a pupil basis, and we see that two thirds of pupils are now meeting the new expected standards in reading and 70% of pupils are meeting the new expected standards in mathematics. That is a tremendous achievement given the very significant rise in the expectations and rigour of the new primary curriculum.