Secondary Education (GCSEs)

Tristram Hunt Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I would never accuse the hon. Lady of falling into the fatalist camp, but some do. The fatalist position—that we cannot improve—was touched on by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), the Chair of the Education Committee, but I believe Andrew Adonis, who said: “The fatalists who say”—[Interruption.] As Front Benchers say, “If the cap on aspiration fits, wear it.”

Andrew Adonis has said:

“The fatalists who say that countries with strong academic school traditions cannot create, in a short timescale, quality vocational education institutions and pathways with real prestige should take note. It is being done abroad and must be done here.”

It is being done here through the introduction of university technical colleges, and through the development of studio schools, which were introduced by the Government of Andrew Adonis and expanded massively by this one. It is also being done with a review of vocational qualifications, which will mean that apprenticeships are at last possessed of the rigour that all hon. Members might expect, but which did not happen under the previous Government. Thanks to the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, we have extended a requirement so that all apprenticeships will be for 12 rather than just six months. We have also extended the important work-related learning in apprenticeships. I acknowledge that there are improvements to be made, but the Holt and Richard reviews will ensure that we make them.

If those improvements are to be enduring and if we are to succeed, if the university technical colleges and studio schools are to succeed and take root, and if the changes we are making in the academies programme are to succeed, such as the welcome addition of the Liverpool college—an independent fee-paying school—to the state sector, which was welcomed graciously by the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby, we need, as Andrew Adonis pointed out today, a consensus in the House.

In calling this debate, the hon. Gentleman has asked Parliament to approve certain propositions. Let us try to approve certain propositions on where Labour stands on critical issues.

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

It’s not about Labour; it’s about you.

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[Michael Gove]

The hon. Gentleman says yes, but his position on modern foreign languages has changed over time. As I pointed out, he said in July 2004:

“In the knowledge society of the 21st century language competence”

is “essential.” Then, in September 2004, he said, “We don’t want to go back to the old days when we tried to force feed languages to students.” Then, when he was asked in May 2011 what his real position had been on languages in 2004, he said: “I had mixed views.” Given this lack of consistency, can we be certain that his position now, in backing modern foreign languages, is a consistent one? And will he assent to our other proposals? Does he believe that we should get rid of modules at GCSE and end the re-sit culture? Yes or no? A simple nod will suffice. [Interruption.] No, he is not going to get into it. No consistency! He is uncertain. Is he for it, or against it? What about the English baccalaureate? All he needs to do is nod. Will he support the English baccalaureate? We know that the hon. Members for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) and for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) do.

[Tristram Hunt]

rose—

[Michael Gove]

Does the hon. Gentleman support the EBacc? Yes or no?

[Tristram Hunt]

I support the English baccalaureate. But my question is this: does the Secretary of State think the Daily Mail reported his intended reforms accurately and fully?

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for supporting the English baccalaureate. The frock-coated communist has become the grey-suited radical. One of the things that matters to me is whether the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby supports the English baccalaureate. Yes or no? [Hon. Members: “Answer the question.”] After my appearance at Leveson, it probably ill behoves me to pass commentary on the press in this country, other than to say that I support the right of a free and rigorous press to report and comment on things with their usually pungency.

Does the hon. Gentleman support our position on equivalents? Does he support stripping them out of the school system?

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[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

In contrast to the Chair of the Select Committee, because I have a more cynical frame of mind, I will work on the assumption that the Daily Mail report of 21 June was correct and that the briefing came from someone close to the Secretary of State’s office, from a special adviser or perhaps the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) at last earning his crust. I will also work on the assumption that today’s debate is part of testing the response to that. If at any point the Secretary of State wishes to stand up and say to the House, “No, Mr. Tim Shipman of the Daily Mail as ever got it totally wrong and we have no plans in this direction,” I will happily yield the floor. But I also warn the Secretary of State that he is going down a dangerous road, because if, as we have heard this afternoon, he has no plans in this direction, there is little more dangerous than the Daily Mail spurned. But for the moment I will work on the assumption that it is correct.

[Kevin Brennan]

If my hon. Friend is incorrect and the Secretary of State has performed some kind of humiliating climbdown today, does he think that the Secretary of State will have to apologise to all those who came on the media to back him, including Toby Young and all his other friends in the right-wing press?

[Tristram Hunt]

It was amazing how they were all ready, almost whipped in, but perhaps the Secretary of State will have another visit to the High Court and his friend Judge Leveson to explain all this.

The Secretary of State will know that I have no problem with some of his policies. I am happy to support the English baccalaureate, much greater rigour in standards, and the ending of endless repeat examinations and an end to semi-vocational, grade-inflating GCSE-equivalent exams. However, I share with my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State serious reservations about the downgrading of the engineering diploma, at a time when we are interested in rebalancing the British economy. I am in favour of schools being allowed to conduct internal streaming, of academy schools in the right circumstances, of apprenticeships when done properly. As an historian, I am also in favour of pupils learning dates and poems, because that provides the structure and the architecture that allows for greater learning and understanding. I am in favour of the Wolf report and what it means for skills training.

A large part of the agenda I can concur with, but this bizarre decision to think about abolishing GCSEs and reintroduce O-levels and CSEs strikes me as deeply misguided. How would this help children in my constituency of Stoke-on-Trent? I want students in my city to take GCSEs in relevant subjects, to be taught well and to aspire. I do not think that at the age of 14 they should be hived off into CSEs; for their aspirations to be put into a straitjacket. As the Chair of the Select Committee said, we know the problems about standards, but no Government Member has been able to stand up and say, “Yes, the solution to this problem is, as reported in the Daily Mail, the O-level/CSE divide.” Until we hear that, this is, as the Chair also said, a slightly bizarre debate. But I will continue working on the dangerous assumption of Daily Mail correctitude.

Looking at the Financial Times research, 25% of children in my constituency would be put into the straitjacket of CSEs. That is not the soft bigotry of low expectations, but the hard bigotry of low expectations in action. It demonstrates a total poverty of ambition.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

An interesting outcome of this debate was texting my office to ask how many people—I realise that as Chair of the Select Committee I should know this—take these foundation GCSEs. The answer I got back is that that information is not collected by the Department for Education or by the exam boards. Go figure.

[Tristram Hunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. That is why I found the discussion about employers knowing the difference between a C at GCSE at different levels attained wholly fallacious. If the big problem of educational attainment is the long tail of under-achievement, the measures to combat that need to be there for all. There is no evidence to suggest that dividing at 14 will help that. We had an interesting contribution today on some of the neurological evidence of the potential for growth from 14 to 16. What we do have evidence for is how overwhelming it will be for the poor and those from socio-economically challenged backgrounds who will be condemned to the new CSEs. That is why the 1980s Conservative Government abandoned this policy. In 1985, Sir Keith Joseph, who became Lord Joseph, unveiled evidence that there is a

“strong association between low achievement and the poverty-related factors of poor housing, single-parent families and a low proportion of children in higher socio-economic groups”.

This policy of division was too divisive even for Sir Keith.

We also hear that with the new O-levels there will be no national curriculum—although a back-door one because of a single qualification authority. This strikes me as a rather strange route to developing the kind of curriculum we want, drawing on a wide knowledge base. It also flies in the face of the Secretary of State’s ambitions to create a national narrative of British history, to teach in all our schools a single notion of British history that imbues notions of citizenship which develops a—rather Whiggish in my view—conception of the British past that all will share. They will not all share that if there is no national curriculum. The greater the division between schools, the greater the division in the teaching of history. Any ambition to teach a cohesive notion of citizenship through the teaching of history is totally undone by the elimination of a cohesive national curriculum.

Internal reforms of the GCSE would be welcome. Clampdown on grade inflation and the proposals vis-à-vis the examinations board are to be welcomed. An end to generalised humanities GCSEs—the merging of history and geography—are to be welcomed. We can learn from the international GCSE, the I-bac. But all that can be achieved within the current system. That is the tragedy of what the Secretary of State is up to.

[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman mentions the baccalaureate and international GCSEs. If those are acceptable, and it seems that they are, and they are the examinations for able pupils, which they are, what would happen to the other GCSEs that would be occupied by the less able?

[Tristram Hunt]

The point about the GCSE is that it is a general certificate of secondary education. The point about the CSE is that it had stigma attached to it. At GCSE one can have an A and an A*. There is still the GCSE and a structure. The briefing to the Daily Mail is that there is an ambition to return to a more divisive system. The tragedy is that there is so much work to be done: the quality of teacher training; ending the scandal of an ever-expanding key stage 4, which means pupils are finishing history or geography in year 8; ending the relentless examination culture that sees AS exams in the January of the lower sixth—we need to get rid of that; embedding a new strategy for the teaching of foreign languages; driving up numeracy and literacy. These are the real challenges confronting schooling. In the face of these challenges, this political strategy seems a massive misallocation of the Secretary of State’s time and resources and those of civil servants in his Department. The Government are already reviewing the primary and secondary school curricula, so why also begin this tub-thumping policy that is not based on empirical evidence?

This is no way to make policy: revealing these kinds of ideas in the Daily Mail, a newspaper usually opposed to deep thinking, learning and cohesive policy development, and at a time when young people are taking their exams. All we can hope is that it is a rather cack-handed example of kite-flying by a Secretary of State who is slightly puffed up at the moment and that the kite will soon be shot down and normal service resumed.

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[Gavin Barwell]

I will not take interventions, for reasons of time.

I do not want to go back to a CSE system, but we need the radical reform of our GCSEs in order to bring back a degree of academic rigour. The Education Committee Chairman made a very important point to the Secretary of the State about how raising the threshold will raise the number of people who succeed. I believe passionately, as a parent and from my experience of visiting schools, that paradoxically if we raise the threshold we will find that young people respond to it. That is the experience of schools that have switched to the IGCSE exam.

In the briefing pack for this debate, I saw some research from King’s college, London, showing the decline in maths over the past 30 years, with many 14-year-olds not understanding concepts such as algebra and ratios. I am not satisfied that my nine-year-old is stretched at his primary school, so I work with him on his maths at home, and he has already grasped those topics. I do not think that he is especially bright or clever, but I passionately believe that our young people are full of talent, and if they are pushed and stretched they will respond.

We also need to acknowledge that at 16 years old the right outcome for all our young people is not necessarily to sit a full suite of academic qualifications. For years and years this country has lacked a proper, respected vocational alternative, but if we secure such an alternative, we should not deride it as part of a two-tier system in which people doing vocational qualifications are somehow failures or second best.

[Tristram Hunt]

Like with CSEs.

[Gavin Barwell]

I am not talking about going back to CSEs, which were second-rate academic qualifications; I am talking about a system in which most children should be capable of getting robust academic qualifications and, through that, pushed to achieve their maximum. But we should recognise that it is not the right outcome for all young people, so there should be a proper vocational alternative, and we should not regard the young people who go down that route as failures or as second best in any way. I believe that absolutely passionately.

I shall end my speech—I know others want to speak—with one final point. Changing our exam system is not in and of itself a solution to the problems that the Education Committee Chairman has identified, but it is part of the mix, alongside the other things that the Government are doing: getting the basics right in primary school so that everybody learns to read and can access the curriculum that follows; emphasising discipline so that young people can actually learn in the classroom; giving teachers the freedom to innovate within their schools; giving parents a proper and effective choice through the free school model; and, finally, setting a floor and saying to schools that do not live up to the minimum standards that we have a right to expect, “That’s not good enough. We’re going to bring in an academy to replace you.”

That package of measures, together with a robust exam system, is what we need to give this country what it needs—the best equipped young people in the world. That is the only way to get the companies that will give us the jobs we want to locate themselves here, so we need to have the courage to bite the bullet and say openly, as both Front Benchers have for the first time today, that we have dumbed down our system over a number of years—not just under the previous Labour Government; it has been going on for a long time—and that that process needs to be reversed. We need to bring back rigour, to provide a proper vocational alternative and to stop the sterile argument about a two-tier system.

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

This has been a good debate, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie) pointed out, we need a reality check. The overarching objective of the Government’s education policy is to close the attainment gap between those from wealthier and those from poorer backgrounds, which is wider in this country than in many of our competitor nations. The gap means that 49% of pupils eligible for free school meals achieved a grade C or better in GCSE maths last year compared with 74% of all non-free school meal pupils; that 67% of pupils eligible for free school meals achieved the expected level in reading when they left primary school last year compared with 82% of non-free school meal pupils; and that just 8% of pupils eligible for free school meals were entered for the English baccalaureate combination of core academic GCSEs compared with 22% overall.

That attainment gap is morally unacceptable and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley) said, economically damaging to this country. It has all the hallmarks of the two-tier education system that hon. Members say they wish to eliminate.

[Tristram Hunt]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Gibb]

I will not give way because of the time.

Under the previous Government and that two-tier system, a sizeable proportion of young people were persuaded to take qualifications that scored highly in performance tables, but that turned out to have less credibility with employers than the young people had been led to believe, as so aptly pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West. That is why, on the recommendation of Alison Wolf, we have looked again at all vocational qualifications taught in schools to ensure that only those highly valued by employers count in performance tables. That will raise both the value and the esteem of the vocational qualifications taught in our schools, which is supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell).

Last year, the OECD produced its seminal report, “How do some students overcome their socio-economic background?” It states that, in Britain, only a quarter of deprived children were able to overcome their background in terms of academic achievement, compared with more than 70% in Shanghai and Hong Kong, which places Britain 39th out of 65 OECD countries.

Addressing those inequalities lies at the heart of every radical education reform implemented, announced or mooted by the Government since May 2010, which includes: the academies and free school programmes, which bring professional autonomy and diversity to our school system and raise standards in some of the most deprived parts of the country; the focus on phonics in reading and the phonic check—we last week checked the basic reading skills of every 6-year-old in the country—which mean that no child slips through the net with their reading problems unidentified; ending the re-sit culture and modularisation in GCSEs; restoring marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar; the pupil premium, which provides significant extra school funding for pupils who are eligible for free school meals; allowing good schools to expand; raising the floor standard of underperforming primary and secondary schools; giving more power to teachers to tackle unruly behaviour; reviewing the national curriculum; publishing draft primary school programmes of study in English, maths and science; and putting greater emphasis on reading, scientific knowledge, languages, arithmetic and the essentials of grammar, spelling and punctuation.

Those are the important reforms, but as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, the evidence shows that we must go further. A few weeks ago, a CBI survey showed that nearly half of all employers were unhappy with the basic literacy skills of school and college leavers—35% expressed concern over maths. This week, King’s College London reported that teenagers’ maths skills have declined over the past 30 years.

The Government are clear that we need fundamental reform. We want a broad, inclusive conversation to consider how we address the concerns of employers, parents, pupils and schools. We must learn our lessons not from the past, but from the best—from countries such as Singapore, where students are required to have a proper knowledge of syntax and grammar, an understanding of the scientific laws that govern our world, and an understanding of maths, which allow them to progress down both technical and academic routes. None of that is beyond the children of this country, but we too often lack the most basic aspiration on their behalf.

In Singapore, the exams designed for 16-year-olds are rigorous, academic, stretching and comprehensive. They are taken by the vast majority of the population. Those exams—O-levels drawn up by examiners in this country— set a level of aspiration for every child that helps to ensure that Singapore remains a world leader in education. We want to ensure that children in this country have exactly the same opportunities as their peers in Singapore and other high-performing nations; that our pupils are as comprehensively equipped to compete in a world of international commerce; that every single child has the opportunity to succeed to their full potential.

The Government’s reforms are designed to achieve a fundamental change in expectation and academic achievement. We should expect all schools to have the academic attainment of Mossbourne academy. We want our qualifications to be world class, with the expectation that all will study for them, and that the great majority will achieve them, if not by aged 16, then by 17, 18 or 19.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) made a revealing speech. I am not aware of any Education Minister from the previous Labour Government who would accept the existence of grade inflation in GCSEs. His acceptance of that and his change of view are welcome—they help to bring honesty and candour to the debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), in seeking to defend himself from accusations of fatalism, spoke of establishing a route map from point A to point B—good luck with that—and sought more detail on the Government’s proposals before the publication of our consultation document, while refusing to give the Government a glimpse of the Education Committee’s forthcoming report on qualifications, which is due out next week.

I welcome the support of the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) for the single exam board proposal and wholeheartedly congratulate New College school on its transformation, and on the “yes you can, yes you will” ethos.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) raised concerns about grade inflation, early entry for GCSE, re-sits and modularisation, and rightly pointed out that today we have a clear, two-tier GCSE system, which he called a rebranded CSE and GCE system. He revised the phrase made famous by Melanie Phillips—“All must have prizes”—by saying that all must merit prizes.

I welcome the support of my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) for rigour. He is right to be reassured about genuine consultation. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) falsely accused my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) of earning his crust, but I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s support for the English baccalaureate and for children acquiring knowledge in history and learning poems by heart. I take on board the caution of my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) against change for change’s sake.

The Government are accused of wanting to create a two-tier education system, but this country already has one, which we believe is letting down too many children and young people. Professor Wolf said in her important review of vocational education that English and maths are fundamental to young people’s employment and education prospects, yet less than half of all students have good GCSEs in English and maths at the end of key stage 4. There are two tiers: those with English and maths, and those without. There are two tiers in the current structure of GCSEs—a foundation tier and a higher tier—including in English, maths and science. The highest achievable grade in ordinary circumstances in the lower tier is C. We have two tiers in the grading system, with 19% of pupils achieving grades E, F and G in GCSE Maths, and 11% of pupils achieving those grades in English.

We need to ensure that our exams are on a par with those in the highest performing countries in the world, and that our schools are delivering the kind of education that equips and prepares all pupils to take and excel in those exams. That is what the Government mean by closing the attainment gap. I urge the House to reject the cynical motion tabled by the Opposition and to support the radical education reform agenda being delivered by this Government to ensure rigour and high expectations for all young people in this country.

Question put (Standing Order No. 31(2)),

That the original words stand part of the Question.