The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)
My Lords, I am very grateful for and touched by the good wishes that I have received today. I ask noble Lords not to be too kind. I can cope with being duffed up, but acts of kindness creep up on one a little harder. I felt rather sorry for the young men who attacked me last night when I realised that the main thing that they had made off with was my speaking notes for today’s debate. When they find what they have got, they might be a trifle disappointed, but I hope that noble Lords may be a little more forgiving.
As I picked myself up and felt various bumps and bruises, I reflected on the connections between what happened to me and today’s debate. It seems that the connection is this: if those boys had a better education and home life, a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, perhaps they would not have been hanging around on street corners waiting to jump on unsuspecting Peers from behind and hit them over the head. That is an important point to bear in mind in what we are debating today.
Like all noble Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Perry on securing this debate. I do not need to tell the House about her huge experience in education, but I take this opportunity to express my thanks to her for the generous advice that she has given to me since I came into the House and to say how much I have benefited from it.
Successive Governments have set themselves the goal of achieving excellence in education—I think that there is no difference between us on that. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, knows, since we have been debating with each other, I have, I hope, always been quick to say that there are many things that the previous Government did on which we are seeking to build.
I associate myself strongly with the notion of excellence, whether that is academic, as my noble friend Lord Blackwell argued, or vocational, as my noble friend Lord Baker and the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, pointed out. Excellence, whether vocational or academic, is something that we must strive for and, as my noble friend Lord Addington said, we must bring out the best in every child. Children are all different, but the key is aspiration. I have seen that aspiration in non-selective maintained schools, academies and selective schools.
However, I think that there is agreement—the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, was very honest about this—that, in spite of the best efforts of successive Governments, our education system is still failing too many and, most of all, it is failing the poorest in our society. We have many excellent schools, but we have too many schools that are struggling or coasting—I listened with care to what the noble Lord, Lord Bew, said about the Northern Irish example. Overall, as a nation—we probably know the figures—four in 10 pupils do not meet basic standards by the age of 11 and only half manage at least a C in both English and maths GCSE. What makes it worse is that poor performance is so powerfully concentrated in the areas of the greatest disadvantage, as the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, said. It is important to make sure that those children continue to receive help. The pupil premium will provide such help, particularly to children from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Only a third of children eligible for free school meals reach a good level of development by the age of five, compared to more than half who are not. That gap continues through primary and secondary school until, at 16, pupils entitled to free school meals are only half as likely to achieve five good GCSEs but more than twice as likely to be permanently excluded. Out of that cohort of 80,000 children on free school meals, only 45 make it to Oxbridge. As the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, one sees these problems at their most intense and concentrated in our prisons.
Other nations have been more successful recently in educating more and more children to a higher level. I shall not go through the figures, because we are short of time and we are, I think, familiar with them. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, that debate about education in this country has been conducted too much in terms of looking backwards and inwards. Some people in my party in particular have prefaced the argument by saying, “Can we not go back to?”. It is very much my view and, I think, that of the noble Lord that the real test for us is to look outwards and compare ourselves with the best internationally. We will have a much more productive debate about education if we frame it in those terms.
Therefore, one of the first things that I did on becoming a Minister was to look at OECD research into the best-performing and fastest-reforming education systems. Three essential characteristics seem to mark out all those different jurisdictions. First, those jurisdictions seem to be guided by the principle that more autonomy for individual schools drives up standards. Secondly, the highest-performing education nations invariably also have the best teachers—no surprise there. Thirdly, they all have rigorous systems of accountability, which has been mentioned today.
We can see examples of these lessons being pulled together in the United States, where President Obama is promoting greater autonomy by encouraging charter schools, while also giving extra support to programmes designed to attract more great people into teaching and leadership. This also seems to be working in Canada, Sweden and Singapore. We know from experience in our country that giving schools greater autonomy seems to work. We know from the academies programme, which was based originally on the CTC programme but then built on and rolled out by the previous Government, that overall results have improved faster in academies than in other maintained schools.
I welcome the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield about Trinity Academy and I am grateful more generally for the part that the Church of England has played in our school system, which was a point made by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London. Last year, overall, academies improved twice as quickly as other schools.
I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Baker and the remarks that he made about university technical colleges. I have had many conversations with my noble friend about those matters. I am conscious of the support that he said that he had received from the noble Lords, Lord Adonis and Lord Knight of Weymouth. It is my intention to build on support that has previously been given and do everything we can to get as many UTCs up and open, giving excellent vocational qualifications and training as soon as possible. To pick up on a point made by my noble friend Lady Perry of Southwark, I also hope to have more apprenticeships.
On academies, this House knows better than anywhere that we are now rolling forward our programme. Let me update the House. Since the beginning of the school year in September, 57 of the outstanding schools have converted to become academies. That number is now increasing month by month and more schools are coming forward, keen to convert. That is on top of an additional 64 new traditional academies. In all those schools, academy heads have the power to tackle disruptive children, protect and reward teachers better and give children the specialist teaching that they need. In the coming weeks, we will set out how more schools will be able to apply for these academy freedoms.
On free schools, we announced the first 16 projects that should be up and running by next September. Given that it typically took three or four years to set up a new school, the fact that we might have one so quickly is very encouraging. We have more projects in the pipeline that could open by next September.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about the difference between structures and teachers, a point that was raised more generally today. I am certainly not someone who believes that the answer to everything is structures. The point of our reforms is to give teachers more freedom within those structures to get on and do what they do best. I agree with my noble friend Lady Perry. The most important people in improving standards are clearly heads, teachers and teaching assistants.
As far as that is concerned, we will publish our first education White Paper before Christmas. I can tell the House that, in that White Paper, teachers and other education professionals will be at the front and centre because everything else that we want to achieve flows naturally from the quality of the workforce. I agree with the point made repeatedly this afternoon: we have the best generation of teachers in our schools. I will reflect on the point made by my noble friend Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville about the difficulty of attracting men into primary schools in particular. I was lucky recently to present awards at the Teaching Leaders’ annual event and see the enthusiasm of those young teachers who are progressing up the profession. That told me clearly that that was the kind of talent that we have to support, as we do Teach First, which has been referred to already. We have doubled the size of the programme that we inherited from the previous Government and have extended it to primary schools for the first time.
In the White Paper, we will unveil a whole range of further proposals to ensure that we attract the best possible people into education, to make it easier for talented people to change career and to enable teachers to acquire deeper knowledge and new qualifications, for which the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, eloquently argued.
We can also help with discipline and behaviour. Among undergraduates, the most commonly cited reason for pursuing a profession other than teaching is a fear of not being safe. We will build on the action that we have taken to remove the ban on same-day detentions and we will give heads and teachers stronger search powers, with further changes, including simplifying the use of force guidance and how we will protect teachers against false and malicious allegations from pupils and parents.
Once professionals have the power that they need to feel secure and are able to develop their skills and knowledge, we have to create more room for them to use them. In recent years, the national curriculum has been bent out of shape by the weight of material in it and some overprescriptive notions about how to teach and how to timetable. That is an area that we will look at. Later this year we will set out how we will carry out the review of the curriculum. I know that many noble Lords will want to be part of that process. The principle behind the curriculum that we want to construct is that it will be informed by teachers and experts, will have greater flexibility and will be based on the best global evidence of what knowledge and concepts can be introduced to children at different ages.
We also spoke in the debate about accountability, which is an important theme. Autonomous schools must have high-quality people, but they must be properly accountable to parents and local communities. We cannot return to the situation where parents and professionals were in ignorance about what was going on in schools, which was the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and with which I agree. I also agree with the point made by a number of noble Lords about school improvement. We need to think carefully about how we make sure that the excellent practice that exists in schools continues to be shared as widely as possible. Nobody wants to see a situation where we have schools operating as islands within the education system. We want to ensure that good practice is shared school to school as much as possible.
We need rigorous external assessment. Tests can be improved and refined—and they must be—but parents need independent external assessment. We want to publish more information to shine a spotlight that parents can understand and help to hold schools to account. We are also looking at ideas behind an English baccalaureate, which will help to drive excellence, built around a core group of academic subjects including a modern or ancient language and a humanity. We are looking at the role of Ofsted and I will reflect on the points made to me by my noble friend Lady Perry in that regard.
I will just say a couple of words about spending, since the issue has been raised. During this debate, we have spent £12.5 million paying the interest on the country’s debt. That is equivalent to the annual salaries of 371 classroom teachers, so we need to do something about cutting that debt. Within that, we have managed to prioritise education and, at a difficult time, to find £2.5 billion for the pupil premium, to fund an increase in places for 16 to 19 year-olds and to extend the entitlement for free education for three and four year-olds to disadvantaged two year-olds. I take the points about the importance of tackling education young and supporting the young and families and will reflect on those.
This has been an excellent debate. I will follow up any individual points that I have failed to respond to and hope that the House will forgive me for that because of the constrained time. I express my thanks to my noble friend Lady Perry. The whole House agrees with the stated ambition of providing excellence in education. It is our duty as a Government, but more generally as a society, to pursue that goal and this Government and I will do all that we can to ensure that all children have the best possible chance to succeed.