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Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton.
There is in this country a large gap in educational attainment between children from richer homes and those from poorer homes as measured by eligibility for free school meals. As the Minister has said on a number of occasions, closing that gap is a moral imperative. I am proud of the Government’s commitment on that front, and of the fact that every time Ministers discuss raising standards in education the issue is always both increasing overall attainment and closing the gap between rich and poor. There have been many initiatives on that matter, and I am sure that there will be more, but probably the biggest change of all is how the pupil premium structurally funds schools. That has at least three effects. First, it ensures that schools in disadvantaged areas are better resourced; secondly, it funds specific programmes and interventions; and thirdly, it makes pupils who are eligible for free school meals more attractive—as it were—to schools.
The key problem is that opportunity in Britain is still not evenly spread. Much continues to depend on the type of family and income bracket that someone is born into. Of course, today we are discussing the fact that opportunity also has much to do with where someone is born. There are several aspects to that, and I am going to touch on three. First is the straightforward fact that there is variation in attainment for disadvantaged children both within and between regions, and that seems to happen differentially for primary and secondary phases. Secondly, there is the perhaps counterintuitive problem of being born poor into a relatively wealthy area. Thirdly, there is my main focus: outperformance at the top end and the increasing exceptionalism of London.
I will talk first about the overall variation within and between regions, although we must be careful when we talk about regions because, in a sense, they are not really anything—they are just administrative constructs; geographical niceties. Nevertheless, there does seem to be some sort of regional pattern. If we look at the proportion of children who get five or more GCSEs at grade C or above, including English and maths, we see that there is significant variation between regions. That variation is more marked, however, in children eligible for free school meals. On both counts—children overall and disadvantaged children—London tops the table. Versus the rest, it is ahead by 3% overall and by 16% for disadvantaged children specifically.
There are also variations between individual areas within regions. In a number of local authorities, more than 55% of children eligible for free school meals achieve five or more GCSEs at grade C or above: Newham, Redbridge, Lambeth, Tower Hamlets, Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea. At the other end of the scale, in 14 authorities, fewer than 25% of children achieve that benchmark. Those areas are liberally scattered throughout the country—north, south, east and west. The important point is that all the top performers are in London and the poorest performers are all over the place.
Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)
I apologise to my hon. Friend for missing the start of his speech. Our challenge in North Yorkshire is that the overall performance of schools is good, but only 33.9% of children eligible for free school meals achieve five GCSEs at grade C or above.
Damian Hinds
Indeed; there are issues of that nature—a wide variation—throughout the country. Sometimes it makes sense to look at this issue at the regional level—for my hon. Friend, that would be Yorkshire and the Humber—and in other cases it makes sense to look at individual local authorities. Sometimes we must actually drill down lower still.
In general and on average, if a child lives in a richer area they are more likely to go to a school judged good or outstanding by Ofsted than if they live in a poorer area. Ofsted’s report last year, “Unseen children”, highlights that point well. The report shows that the gap between the proportion of schools judged good or outstanding for leadership and management in the poorest parts relative to the wealthiest parts is biggest for primary schools in the south-east and east midlands, and biggest for secondary schools in Yorkshire and the Humber and the north-east. It is interesting that the report highlights how different areas have the biggest gap for primary and secondary schools. The area with the starkest difference is probably the north-east, which has the biggest gap of all between the proportion of secondary schools judged good or outstanding for leadership and management, whereas for primary schools it is the top performer in the entire country. The blended average of those two gaps ends up being quite good.
Another problem is the fact that within otherwise wealthy areas there is a danger that poorer children can be overlooked. I said at the start of my speech that it is counterintuitive in many ways, but it seems to be true—at least to an extent—at both school and area level, that a child from a disadvantaged background is best off being in a place where there are either hardly any other children in that category or loads of them. They are worse off if they are somewhere in the middle range.
Ofsted has just started publishing regional-level reports, and of the south-east it said that
“the poor performance of small numbers of pupils entitled to free school meals is lost in the midst of otherwise strong performance by 16-year-olds.”
Of course, there are exceptions, and I was delighted to note that one of the schools singled out in that report as doing particularly well in that regard was Bohunt school in my constituency, which the Secretary of State visited a couple of weeks ago. Nevertheless, there is a problem in the south-east overall with children eligible for free school meals. The report says that
“pupils eligible for free school meals in the South East attain at levels below the national figure for similar pupils in every single local authority in the region.”
David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. I realise that education is a devolved matter for Northern Ireland, but he is painting an image mirrored across all regions of the United Kingdom. North and west Belfast are the worst areas we have in Northern Ireland for numbers of children eligible for free school meals, perhaps because of the troubles. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with me that every child, whatever their background, deserves a proper education?
Damian Hinds
The hon. Gentleman is of course quite right. He will understand that I cannot comment in detail on the figures for Belfast, but I agree with his sentiment. In fact, one could argue that the worse off and more difficult a child’s background, the greater the moral imperative for politicians to ensure that a good school is made available.
A number of questions arise on within-school underperformance. How should the pupil premium be used? If a school has relatively small numbers of disadvantaged children, what is the best way to use pupil premium moneys to benefit them? We know that, in general, whole school improvement programmes tend to disproportionately benefit the better off—although they may be beneficial overall, they are less likely to be beneficial in closing the gap. When a school has smaller numbers of disadvantaged children, specific, targeted interventions become quite difficult. Interventions are presumably not targeted at pupils because they are entitled to free school meals—that would be both difficult and rather divisive, and not something we would want.
Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)
Therein lies the problem. Schools are entitled to a pupil premium for children receiving free school meals. Therefore, there is a problem in some poorer neighbourhoods. Because of housing tenure and type, lots of youngsters who are not entitled to the pupil premium or free school meals but who are still in relatively low-income and deprived households live cheek by jowl with kids who do generate the pupil premium, and they often have as many educational problems as the youngsters entitled to funding.
Damian Hinds
The hon. Gentleman raises a good point. There are a number of aspects to what he says. One is that free school meals entitlement is by definition a cliff-edge measure—children are either entitled or they are not—so, as he points out, crossing that line does not actually change whether a child is advantaged rather than disadvantaged. There can be a disconnect. Being on free school meals is not an indication per se that a pupil will not do well at school. The converse of what he says is that, as we know, lots of children entitled to free school meals do stunningly well at school.
Ian Mearns
On that point, I am a member of the Select Committee on Education. We visited the Netherlands last year, where the system considers the prior educational attainment of the parents in determining whether a child should attract additional funding in school. That is not perfect, any more than free school meals, but it seems to have some inherent sense behind it, because it is about the richness of the cultural experience of the child’s home life as well as the richness of the education that they get in school.
Damian Hinds
I will return to the educational attainment of parents when I discuss London specifically. The hon. Gentleman touches on something that I was about to mention. Entitlement to free schools and other measures of disadvantage are often correlated with certain clear indicators that children are less likely to do well at school, particularly those involving the home learning environment—whether there are books at home and so on.
Clearly, at system level, it makes sense to use the gap between free school meal recipients and others to chart our progress. Although entitlement to free school meals is not a perfect measure, it is the best we have in terms of accuracy. However, now that we have the new progress measure, which tracks the progress of each attainment group at entry and as they go through school, I wonder whether, particularly in secondary school, it would make more sense to use that as the primary measure in closing the gap, so that when students arrive at secondary school, whatever their prior attainment, we ensure that all schools are stretching all children to the best of their abilities.
I have numerous questions about between-school and between-area underperformance. The most obvious is how to get the best leaders and leadership support into the places where they are needed most, and how to incentivise great teachers into the areas that need them most. As I mentioned earlier, there is a vexing pattern. Certain areas are good either at primary or secondary, but not both simultaneously. Sorry; I should not say that they are not good, but hon. Members know what I mean. The proportion of schools judged good or outstanding is in primary or secondary, but not both.
I am pleased that this gives me an opportunity to say that within the south-east, Hampshire is an exception. I pay tribute to John Coughlan and his team. Hampshire is rated relatively well in both primary and secondary education. Overall, if all regions could reach their own internal benchmark—in other words, whether they are outstanding at the primary or secondary level, if they could get the other phase of education up to the same level—that would mean many thousands more pupils were attending a good or outstanding school.
Turning to London, I have already mentioned the gap at GCSE level between London and the rest of the country, and how London outperforms considerably when it comes to poorer children. In fact, it starts a lot earlier than GCSEs, and the effect persists a long time after age 16. It seems that in London, even before school begins, poorer children outperform children in the rest of the country at the early years foundation stage, to the extent that one can talk about a three-year-old outperforming. They pull away as they progress to infant and junior school, and by the time they reach age 15 and 16, they are almost 50% more likely than children outside London to get five or more good GCSEs, they are twice as likely as disadvantaged children elsewhere to go to university and, depending on which numbers one looks at, they are perhaps up to four times as likely to end up going to a Russell Group university, although the numbers are still small—one in 25 rather than one in 100.
Why is that? There was a thing called the London challenge. Whenever the outperformance of London comes up, the most obvious thing to say is, “London does well because of the London challenge.” Is that true? I have absolutely no doubt that the London challenge has been beneficial, and it is also true that there is a fuzzy boundary around it. In the period from about 2000 until now, many initiatives have either happened first in London before spreading elsewhere or been specific to London. They may or may not have been merchandised as part of the London challenge, but in a broader sense it could be said that they were.
But—it is an important “but”—there are a number of reasons to believe that the London challenge is not the sole or primary cause of London’s educational outperformance. The first and most important reason is that the year in which London’s GCSE performance caught up with the rest of the country was 2003, the year when the London challenge started. By definition, all the kids who did their GCSEs in 2003 had spent their entire life not in the London challenge. Politically, 2003 was a good year to start a programme focused on making London better, because from there everything was going up. The second reason is that after the initial London challenge, when it was extended to Greater Manchester and the black country, it did not translate as well. There were some improvements in performance, but not nearly on the same scale as in London.
Ian Mearns
The hon. Gentleman is right about the starting date for the London challenge, but the London challenge came on the back of other initiatives instigated by the previous Government, such as excellence in cities. Those programmes also occurred in other parts of the country, but they were not followed by the London challenge.
Damian Hinds
The hon. Gentleman is quite right. I acknowledged that there were a number of initiatives before 2003, and others that were not necessarily branded as the London challenge, but could more broadly be said to have been part of it. He is right that a number of things were done elsewhere, but the simple fact is that after all of that, and with the ability to copy from London anything that anyone would want to copy, we still have a 16 percentage point gap in GCSE performance among disadvantaged pupils between those who happen to have been born in London and those who happen to have been born in the rest of the country.
Mr David Ward (Bradford East) (LD)
I am in the awkward position of trying to avoid questions to prompt the Minister that he will no doubt be asked at tomorrow’s meeting as well. Can I plant something for the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) to consider as he goes through his analysis of the situation? Where does a national strategy as a remedy fit in with the general direction of travel towards greater autonomy within schools?
Damian Hinds
There is always a balance. I suppose it partly depends on one’s political tradition, where one comes from and what one tends to think works. We could say that the London challenge had a bit of both. On one hand, one area, Greater London, was doing its own thing, and within that, there was plenty of innovation in individual schools, which were encouraged to innovate, but on the other, it had system-wide leadership. There is always a tension and a balance.
The third reason to doubt that the London challenge was the sole or primary cause of the improvements is that the difference between children on free school meals and others was so marked, and the London challenge was not solely about children on free school meals or poorer children. The fourth reason is that it seems that London’s poorer pupils may already be ahead before school has even begun. There are so many other things that are different about London that we owe it to ourselves to at least examine them and consider what role they may have played.
Ian Mearns
The hon. Gentleman has not yet covered one factor that I am convinced has an impact. The Greater London area employment market is such that it is much easier to have achievable employment ambition and aspiration than it is in other parts of the country. In areas such as the north-east, where unemployment has continued to rise and youth unemployment is still growing, ambition and aspiration are difficult for many, because they do not see light at the end of the tunnel.
Damian Hinds
Can we hold that point? I will come back to it a wee bit later.
If the difference is not the London challenge alone—I totally acknowledge the beneficial effects of many of the programmes within it—is it simply more money? Of course, whenever we mention London’s outperformance, people say, “Oh, they get more money.” Yes, London schools get more money, but when we adjust that for deprivation, we discover that the difference is not quite as big as it at first appeared. In other words, when comparing the high number of free school meals in London with those in the rest of the country, the funding premium is not quite as large, although costs are higher in London, which is why there has historically been higher funding.
If we were to say it is just about having more money, we would have to say what more money has bought. Since I started working on this subject, people have told me that class sizes in London are smaller, but they are not. Bizarrely, they are slightly bigger than in the rest of the country, except at key stage 3. There is not a higher proportion of teaching assistants. Teachers are paid more, as are people in lots of occupations and professions in London, because of London weighting, but the difference in pay for the average London teacher versus the average teacher elsewhere is less than advertised. According to the ads, someone can earn up to 25% more as a newly qualified teacher in London, but the actual difference in take-home pay is on average smaller, because London teachers are younger and further down the pay scales.
What is different? I shall come to some of the things that the hon. Member for Gateshead mentioned. First, all sorts of things about the city are different compared with other parts of the country. The employment market is different, as he rightly says, which manifests itself in different ways. There are differential rates of unemployment, and youth unemployment in London remains concerning. In addition, there is the visibility of opportunities. If someone is travelling on buses and underground trains, they will be interacting with all the adverts, the people and all the rest of it. There is the cultural capital of the city—the museums and art galleries—and the pull factor of more university places. There are more university places per head of population in London than in other cities, and most people travel only a short distance from home to go to university. Everything is nearer. That helps with school choice—children go across local authority boundaries to go to school—and it helps schools wishing to co-operate with one another.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
I have read the report by the hon. Gentleman’s all-party group on social mobility. It is a fascinating, interesting and detailed piece of work, and I congratulate him on it. However, all the factors that he has mentioned have not changed in the past 15 years. London is no further away from anywhere else than it was 15 years ago. I presume he will go on to explain what he thinks has changed.
Damian Hinds
The shadow Minister is such a nice man. He has read “Capital Mobility”, the report by the all-party group. I did not realise he had also read the sheet of paper in front of me, which states that many of those things were also true when London was the problem child of British education, before it became the poster child. Although such factors are relevant, we cannot ascribe the difference in London performance specifically to them.
The population make-up of London is one massive change and a massive difference. London is diverse on a scale unknown in the rest of the United Kingdom—indeed, unknown in most of the rest of the world. London’s state secondary schools are now 32% white British by ethnic origin, and the statistic for kids just starting secondary school is extraordinary: 48% do not have English as their mother tongue. An even more surprising statistic is that children with English as an additional language come very close in performance by GCSEs to children who have English as their mother tongue, and in London they beat them—in GCSEs in London, children who do not speak English as their mother tongue very slightly outperform those who do. That raises difficult questions.
I do not want to pre-empt tomorrow’s Committee meeting, at which, sadly, I will not be able to join my Opposition compadres, but I know the Minister will be appearing before the Committee to talk about the performance of white working class pupils. It is true that all ethnic groups do better in London than they do outside—spectacularly so in the case of children of Pakistani origin. There is a 14% gap between the performance of pupils of Pakistani origin in London versus the rest of the country.
There are other relevant differences in London, some of which might be driven by differences and diversity in ethnicity and religion, such as larger families and older, better educated mothers. Surprisingly, it is estimated that parents in London are slightly more likely to be married than parents outside London. It is slightly odd that we can only estimate that, but that is another question altogether. There are more families with a parent at home. There is less use of formal child care, slightly lower participation in free school provision, and slightly more use of tutors. One would normally associate such things with lower educational attainment, particularly in terms of early years participation, which again raises important, difficult and challenging questions.
What is different and what might we be able to have an impact on, given that we cannot have much impact on the composition of the population? London teachers are more diverse, more likely to have been educated abroad, more likely to be full time, and, before somebody says it, a bit less likely to have qualified teacher status—given the sorts of numbers we are talking about, I do not think that that is particularly relevant.
Teachers are also a little less likely to be on upper pay scales or the advanced skill scale and more likely to be on the main pay scales. Within the London challenge, there were various recruitment initiatives, which included addressing housing problems. One of those initiatives was Teach First. Opinions vary and sometimes teachers get wound up if we bang on too much about Teach First, but Teach First teachers can have a positive, disruptive impact as they come into schools, observe existing teachers, bring ideas of their own, swap things around and so on. Some 48% of Teach First teachers are still in London, and I think there is an opportunity to spread that scheme more widely.
There was a big focus on leadership in the London challenge. It was about supporting leaders in schools and ensuring that they were paid properly. As an aside, primary schools in London are on average a lot bigger than primary schools outside, and I wonder whether that means it is possible to afford more by way of leadership. Alongside that support and remuneration was intense scrutiny and what people close to the London challenge operation would describe as verging on ruthlessness to ensure that schools were being run absolutely as well as they could be. That was all facilitated by an intense use of data and what are called families of schools, whereby someone could compare their school to others in similar circumstances, so they could see what was really possible.
London also over-indexed greatly on sponsored academies. Compared with the rest of the country, London is much more likely to have sponsored academies. That relatively small number of schools had a disproportionately larger impact on the overall performance of London as a whole, because the results tended to go from very low to very good.
Where does all that leave us? I should like to put a number of things to the Minister. I do not pretend for a moment to have all the answers, or even most of them, but some things are obvious challenges. First, on attracting the best teachers, we know that most people stay in their home region. That puts a premium on marketing intensely the teaching profession to high performers within the areas and regions where they are most needed, at school-leaver level and university graduate level.
Secondly, there has to be a big opportunity for Teach First outside London. That is happening, or starting to happen, already. There is now a focus on Bournemouth, which is welcome. We need to bear in mind why 48% of Teach First teachers were in London. One reason is that the programme started there. Another is that, of course, young people like to move to London; that cannot be changed very much. Another big factor is the network effect: knowing that other new graduates are doing the same programme in schools relatively nearby and so having social and support networks. Some co-ordinated, geographically-focused expansion of Teach First would be smart.
There are always questions in some schools about what the pupil premium can be used for. What is the Minister’s attitude to schools in heavily disadvantaged areas using it to pay teachers more, to attract the best? Alongside attracting the best teachers, there is also the matter of getting top leadership to the areas where it is needed most. In that regard, I look to the growth of initiatives such as Future Leaders. I wonder whether the incentives are enough. Can those be looked at, to ensure that they are sufficient and that they persuade people to go where they are most needed?
I turn to geographical patterns. There can sometimes be an over-supply of national education leaders in areas away from schools where their support would be most beneficial. I wonder whether it is possible to improve that situation by using technology, for example.
Julian Smith
On attracting talent, does my hon. Friend agree that, as well as the Government’s coming up with initiatives, we need to encourage schools and local authorities to cast the net wider? Again, coming back to North Yorkshire, it is a challenge to get local authority education department leaders or heads from outside the region. We need to get the schools and council to work harder to achieve that.
Damian Hinds
My hon. Friend is right. An intense marketing effort, leaving no stone unturned in the search for talent, is absolutely essential.
Having mentioned people, let me speak more broadly. We need to be impatient on behalf of the places where the academies revolution has not happened. In London, we have seen what it can do. There needs, through whatever means, to be a lot more push on that issue in parts of the country where the change has not happened.
There are some specifics from the London challenge. Are we using data enough outside London—particularly in identifying families of schools, so that each school can compare itself with others? Although the term “sub-regional strategies” always gives me a bit of a rash, I wonder about the role of system-wide leadership. When I am talking to teachers and head teachers about the London challenge, they always talk about the person who led it and his assistant and immediate team. I wonder about the balance that must be struck between individual school autonomy, which I am a great supporter of, and having a sense of shared ownership and system leadership.
I started by commending the Government’s twin approach to education, in respect of raising overall attainment and narrowing the gap. It is right that we do both; it is no good equalising performance around some sort of acceptable average. A lot has been done, but the gap is still wide. There is much more to do in our quest for the combination of social justice and economic efficiency which is social mobility or opportunity for all.
There is a lot going for us in that quest. We have unprecedented amounts of data at our fingertips as well as international benchmarking and case studies. Schools have been set free to innovate, and we have the Early Intervention Foundation and the Education Endowment Foundation. There is certainly the political will from the Minister and his colleagues. However, quite a lot of questions remain. As I said, I certainly do not have all the answers and I am concerned that some of the answers do not yet exist. However, we need to keep asking questions, including about how one area of the country can learn from another. That is the focus of this debate, which I hope will play a small but useful role in that quest.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Caton.
I congratulate the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this debate. I am delighted that he continues his interest in education, although I suspect he still laments his retirement from the Education Committee. We probably agree about more things than we disagree about, and there are probably more things that unite us than divide us.
We have already heard about the importance of education. It is undeniably important, whether as a route into work, if work exists, as a means of attaining personal potential, as a mode to better understanding of the world we live in or simply as a quench for a thirst for knowledge. It is—or at least should be—a powerful tool for young people of all ages, driving social mobility and providing the foundations on which our country’s future sits.
It is crucial that we do everything in our power to ensure that our young people have unrestricted access to education of the highest quality, to safeguard the notion of equality of opportunity. Sadly, that opportunity still depends on where people were born, to whom they were born, their ethnicity, their level of affluence, what the local offer is and, of course, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) said, what their parents’ prior attainment was.
In its recent report, the all-party group on social mobility recognised a series of seven key truths on social mobility, related to education and the associated opportunities and policy challenges. Although countless factors impact on social mobility, the report identifies quality of teaching as
“the most important controllable factor”.
We are aware that the education systems we would deem to be the most successful are those that promote success at all levels for all students. We also appreciate that levels of ability are not uniform across schools, let alone across entire regions. We recognise the challenges that that issue brings; the hon. Member for East Hampshire outlined it in considerable detail. Some degree of variation in outcomes is to be expected. However, the Ofsted report of 2012-13 identified the north-east and the Yorkshire and the Humber region as having an “unacceptably large variation” in performance. I will probably be a bit parochial or regional here.
Although the primary sector in the north-east is among the best in the country, Yorkshire and the Humber has one of the highest proportions nationally of primary schools rated as being less than good. In secondary education, more than 90% of pupils in York attend a secondary school that is good or outstanding, while in Barnsley, only 40 or so miles away, that falls to just 20%.
Julian Smith
In analysing such issues in Yorkshire, does the hon. Gentleman feel that councils of whatever political hue have been coasting for too many years and need to get real about what they have to do, to get the performance of their schools up, and markedly?
Alex Cunningham
I do agree that there are examples of local authorities across the country that have not been doing the job of driving up standards that we would have hoped for. That varies throughout the country. However, in local authority areas there are still excellent schools, whether they have converted to academy status or they remain as local authority schools. It is the ones that are not doing well that the local authorities and others need to turn their attentions to.
Across the country, there are nine local authority areas, predominantly in London, where every secondary school student attends a good or outstanding institution. Yet in 13 local authority areas a majority of secondary students attend a school that is not good or outstanding. Although there are areas of high performance across the regions, they are unfortunately far from the norm.
Ofsted’s report puts it bluntly, saying that secondary schools in the north-east and Yorkshire and the Humber are among the worst in the country. That is not an observation I relish, as a north-east Member of Parliament, but it is one that we cannot afford to hide from. Those results are symptomatic of an education system that is failing many of our young people, but it is not all about the system; there is something else.
As has already been said, the Education Committee is currently examining the underachievement of white working-class children, many of whom come from impoverished working and non-working families living in areas where jobs are hard to come by and, as is the case in north-east England, regions where unemployment continues to go up. We are looking for answers to that underachievement, and we want to understand the variation across the country. Perhaps the answer is back in early years, as Governments appear to have agreed over the years.
The previous Labour Government did much for early years provision. I witnessed that in the north-east region, where they did more than ever to give children a better chance at the start of their education. However, we are still not reaching the children we need to reach, and the loss of provision is a serious concern. It is not wholly surprising that young people in the north-east and Yorkshire and the Humber are less likely to attain results above the national level in the key indicator of five good GCSEs, including English and mathematics, than young people from almost anywhere else in the country.
As I said, we have successes in the north-east. The Secretary of State for Education, in his evidence to the Education Committee last month, talked about Sunderland, Gateshead and other pockets across the region where there have been improvements. In my own backyard, the North Shore academy in my constituency has improved considerably in the past few years. The school was developed under Labour and delivered under the current Government.
Poverty is a strong and powerful player. The north-east has the highest proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals outside London, and the gap in attainment between those eligible for free school meals and those who are not is wider than the national average in primary schools. Worse still, the gap widens by the time pupils leave secondary school.
Her Majesty’s chief inspector of education, children’s services and skills may be right to assert that children in England now have the best chance they have ever had of attending a good school, but that broad remark fails to acknowledge the dramatic regional variations that are turning education into that most horrible of clichés, a postcode lottery. Indeed, Her Majesty’s chief inspector accepted as much when he described our school system as
“a tale of two nations.”
He said that the system is
“divided into lucky and unlucky children.”
“Luck” is not a word I work with, but that is what he said. He talked of an
“educational lottery that consigns some children to substandard schools and favours others”.
Her Majesty’s chief inspector is clearly right to state that too many children in our country are unlucky, but too many children from similar backgrounds and with similar abilities end up with widely different prospects because the quality of their education is not consistently good—in other words, because they grew up in different regions and attended different schools with different opportunities.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead outlined, the north-south divide means that people in the south can aspire to tremendous things, but there is not so much aspiration in the north and other regions. That is not fair. We must develop a system that minimises regional and local variations and restores fairness to our education system, ensuring that it delivers the skills and knowledge that the young people of today will need to succeed tomorrow.
We must deliver not only to some young people but to all young people. A crucial element of attaining that goal is to ensure that our teachers—their teachers—are fully equipped to do the job. The path to educational attainment, a path that every parent wants their children to follow, is guided by teachers. Nobody, apart from family, is more important in children’s lives. It is clear to me that the key to securing improved attainment for all, irrespective of the geographical fortune of social circumstance, lies in ensuring that teachers are trained to the highest standards to allow the cycle of progress to continue.
Ian Mearns
Outlining the importance of teachers is crucial to this debate because, for too many youngsters, the school day is an oasis of calm in an otherwise chaotic life. It is all too sad that we are asking teachers to put right an awful lot that is wrong for our youngsters.
Alex Cunningham
We certainly do, and I have seen some tremendous examples in my constituency and across the Stockton borough of teachers picking up a lot of education. Young children are arriving in nursery school still not knowing how to use a knife and fork, how to interact properly with children or even how to have a proper conversation. We rely on teachers tremendously, which is all the more reason why outreach through children’s centres and other organisations is so vital to helping parents and the wider family to help children to develop.
We need good teachers at all levels and in every neighbourhood, each equipped to deliver a modern education based on an up-to-date understanding of developments in teaching practice, specific subject knowledge and the latest educational tools and technology. The previous Labour Government responded to the challenge of failing education with huge investment in early years and across the primary and secondary sectors. The London challenge delivered great results, but that achievement was not reflected everywhere despite unprecedented resources in our schools.
The current Government are seeing some positive results from the pupil premium, but again the success is far from universal. I have no doubt that the social factors that my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead describes, as well as the quality of education, have to be addressed to build the desire to learn and the desire of all parents to have high expectations of their children so that they do well in a society that offers equal opportunity for good-quality jobs and careers that can ensure they have a life to enjoy, rather than simply an existence.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing this debate, which has been excellent so far, and on his thoughtful and, as ever, intelligent contribution. I once again congratulate him on the report, which I have read and is worthy of reading. I have also read his blog, which is a little more partisan, but I will forgive him. One has to take such things into account. Heaven forfend that we should be partisan.
I visited Bohunt school in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency last year before the Secretary of State for Education’s visit, and it is an excellent school that has a healthy disregard for Government initiatives, including, I hasten to add, the current Government’s initiatives such as the EBacc. The school has a progressive approach to the curriculum, which I am glad the hon. Gentleman supports. Perhaps that is why it is such a good school.
I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) on his extremely thoughtful contribution. I look forward to following the proceedings of tomorrow’s Education Committee, before which the Minister will make one of his glittering appearances.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North said that Ofsted has talked about young people being lucky or unlucky, which triggered a thought, if the Chamber will indulge me, about my own background. I feel extremely lucky, because both my parents left school at 14, which was not unusual for the working class in my parents’ era. My father was an immigrant from the west of Ireland, although that part of Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom when he was born, and my mother was the daughter and sister of coal miners in the south Wales valleys. They both left school at 14, but I feel lucky because they both cared about education and thought that it was an extremely important opportunity. My father was taken out of school by his father to go on to the farm at a time when his teacher wanted him to stay on to get more education, so I feel lucky generationally.
Like many in this Chamber, I had some inspirational teachers, but I went to a school from which no one had ever been to Oxford or Cambridge. It was hoped that I might get into university, so when I did my summer job, which my father secured for me—patronage is everywhere—at Llanwern steelworks and phoned up to get my A-level results, it was much to my surprise that I had done so well. I went back to take the sandwiches from the canteen to the gang, and one of the men with whom I was working said, “You ought to go to Oxford.” That was the first time anyone had ever said that to me. I had completed my A-levels and my schooling and was working at Llanwern steelworks, and he was the first person who had ever suggested to me that going to Oxford might be possible.
I feel passionately about this subject, as do many colleagues. I welcome the commitment from Members from all parts of the House to trying to ensure that people can fulfil their potential, and that poverty of aspiration is overcome as much as the problems resulting from the economic consequences of poverty. Not that I was from a poor background, I hasten to add; my parents were fortunate enough to be in employment for pretty much all their working lives.
The subject is extremely important. In a sense, the debate is about regional disparities, rather than class or ethnicity, although those factors obviously play into it a great deal, as the hon. Member for East Hampshire said. Those disparities also play into the Select Committee’s report and its inquiry into the performance of white working-class boys. It is worth considering for a moment why white working-class boys are not doing as well as they should in our education system. Perhaps it is a misnomer to talk about white working-class boys in this context, because it is often as much about the parents’ background and their low educational attainment as it is about income. It is also about worklessness and such factors within families.
The hon. Gentleman talked about how the migrant factor plays into this issue, particularly in London. Perhaps many such families look at the school system with fresh eyes and high hopes compared with parents who had a bad experience of the school system. They might have gone through in a low set and absorbed a feeling that school was not valuable to them or that they were not valued by school. They might then have transmitted that on to their children, which would be a factor. I think we can all agree that parents’ behaviours and attitudes matter in this debate. One thing we should consider is how we best influence parents and the role that the Government can have in raising parents’ aspirations and encouraging good parenting on education. We have to consider policy on parents and not just policy within the four walls of the school.
The issue of geography, which is essentially what the debate is about, and the issue in relation to London have been raised, and I will come back to them later.
Mr Ward
I suspect that the hon. Gentleman will come on to this, but it is a bit like we are casting the fly into the river; we keep coming near to this thing that bites for the fly, but then it disappears again, and that thing is the quality of teaching. We have heard about aspirations, parental involvement and career advice and so on, but we know about those and we keep coming back to them. The hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) spoke about the quality of leadership and management and the Ofsted reports about certain schools in certain areas, and we keep coming back to this idea of how we get the very best teachers into the most difficult schools. How do we deal with that conundrum when someone is deciding where they want to teach or where they want to be a head teacher?
Kevin Brennan
I will come on to that. I was about to say that one of the key challenges is on how we motivate people to go into areas that are struggling with recruiting and retaining highly effective teachers. How do we spread out excellent teachers to ensure that they are available to schools across the country? I will come back to that later.
The previous Government had policies on this issue and made narrowing the gap a priority, as this Government have. There is evidence that the previous Government were successful in narrowing the gap. The Institute for Public Policy Research report “A Long Division” contains some helpful information that illustrates that the attainment gap between the richest and poorest students narrowed between 2003 and 2011. We have to monitor the gap closely to ensure that it does not widen once again. The report shows that schools play a part in that, as does excellent teaching. Having good and outstanding schools is an important and necessary method of ensuring that we close the gap, although it is not sufficient in itself. We need to think more broadly about policies.
Many hon. Members will be familiar with the Sutton Trust report, “The Reading Gap”, from July 2013. It showed that boys aged 15 from disadvantaged backgrounds are some two and a half years behind their counterparts from the most advantaged backgrounds. That shows the problem of the attainment gap. Similarly, a Sutton Trust report from September 2011 highlighted the point that the hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) just made, namely the importance of high quality teaching. The executive summary of that report said:
“The effects of high-quality teaching are especially significant for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds: over a school year, these pupils gain 1.5 years’ worth of learning with very effective teachers, compared with 0.5 years with poorly performing teachers. In other words, for poor pupils the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher is a whole year’s learning.”
That shows the significance of raising teaching standards and ensuring that they stay high.
Teacher morale matters. I said that in a recent debate in the House, although the Minister was unable to attend on that occasion. Digging down into the detail of the programme for international student assessment report and the OECD reports, they clearly show that in systems where teacher morale is high and teachers feel valued—it is not necessarily where they are the best paid—pupils perform better. The Sutton Trust has shown that it is particularly important for disadvantaged pupils that we have high performing teachers. Will the Minister commit to publishing the data collected during the 2013 teacher workload survey? I and others have asked the Secretary of State to publish that on many occasions. We need to know what happens, because teacher morale matters to pupil outcomes, particularly those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.
Mr Ward
In terms of the earlier discussion on the challenge in London, does the hon. Gentleman feel that there is a Hawthorne effect in London? Teaching in London is seen to be special and teachers are held in high esteem compared with many other parts of the country, where the teaching profession feels undervalued.
Kevin Brennan
That might well be a factor. There have been many initiatives in London and a real attempt to attract good quality graduates into the profession through a number of different routes, including Teach First, as the hon. Member for East Hampshire mentioned in his remarks. I have not seen data to show that the public regard teachers more highly in London than in other parts of the country, but that might be a factor.
Returning to the point I was making, on 13 January—I have asked this question subsequently, too—I asked the Minister
“when he intends to publish the findings of the most recent Teacher Workload Survey.”
Bear in mind that the survey was undertaken in March 2013, almost 12 months ago. The Minister’s answer was:
“Officials are currently analysing the data collected during the 2013 Teacher Workload Survey.”—[Official Report, 13 January 2014; Vol. 573, c. 360W.]
Now, when one asks a parliamentary question, one never expects an answer—certainly not from the Department for Education. The relevant word in my question was “when”, but there was no reference in the answer to when the Minister intends to publish the report—not even to “shortly”, “soon” or other civil service terms. Nor was there any reference to “in the autumn”—a term that usually extends to 31 December.
Julian Smith
The shadow Minister seems to be alluding to the suggestion that the report contains some sort of smoking gun that teachers are overworked or unhappy. Would it not be better to focus on what teachers need to do, which is to improve markedly, and on having a massive step change in our educational performance? Worrying about what happened last year or whether teachers are feeling a bit stressed is not the goal. We need to get our PISA rankings up, and that should be the priority.
Kevin Brennan
I do not know whether the report contains a smoking gun; I have no idea what it contains. It cannot contain a smoking gun, because the gun has not been fired, despite us waiting a year to hear what the survey says. If the hon. Gentleman would care to read in detail the OECD reports on the PISA rankings, he will see that they make the point that teacher morale matters, and that it is a key component of ensuring that our system produces good quality outcomes and, therefore, a component of raising our performance in the PISA tables.
Ian Mearns
As a member of the Select Committee on Education, I would find it useful if the Department published the findings of the teacher workload survey. It would be useful for everyone in the field to see what those findings are.
Also, instead of focusing on PISA rankings, it is much more important for us to focus on educational outcomes for children. That will have a knock-on effect on PISA rankings, but the matter is about educational outcomes for individual children.
Kevin Brennan
My hon. Friend is absolutely correct.
I appreciate that the civil service’s work load may be great. I understand that in the most recent survey of civil servants in the Department, many of them expressed concern about how they are being treated. However, a year is a reasonable period, after a survey has been completed, to publish it. In this day and age, the Department does not need to analyse the data; it should just publish them. Others, including the Education Committee, the hon. Member for East Hampshire, who is thorough in his research, as we have seen today, and many others in the blogosphere so loved by the Secretary of State for Education, will tell us what they conclude the survey to say. Will the Minister commit today to publish the survey, in the interest of letting us know what is happening with teachers; whether the Government are getting it right in doing what they said they wanted to do in their White Paper a few years ago, which is to give proper status to the importance of teaching; and whether the work force are well motivated by the Government’s policies? I hope that he will tell us in his conclusion when he will publish the report, with the emphasis on “when”.
The London factor was mentioned a lot in this debate. There is considerable evidence of the impact of the London challenge. I accept what the hon. Member for East Hampshire said in his remarks—that that is not the only factor we should consider regarding the performance of London’s schools, which have outperformed schools in other parts of the country and are the most improved schools in the country—but the London challenge is undoubtedly an important part of the London factor.
An Ofsted report published in 2010 found the London challenge to be a great success. The report attributed that to a number of factors:
“Clear, consistent leadership…Improvement programmes which matched strategies to the needs of individual schools…Strategic deployment of support from the London Leadership Strategy…Successful heads mentoring head teachers in target schools…Sensitive matching of partners under the leadership of LC advisers…Support, ‘without strings attached and without conflicts of interest’, from local authorities…external consultants or teaching schools aimed at raising the quality of teaching and learning…Collaboration between schools and grouping schools in families…Continuing development programmes for teachers…Teachers being committed to all London children not just those in their own school…The development of robust tracking systems to monitor children’s progress.”
Those kinds of factors are the ones we should be seeking to replicate across the country. I have a concern—I put it no more strongly than that, in this more academic forum this morning—that elements of the Government’s approach to education policy are militating against the ability to achieve the 10 key factors that were identified in the Ofsted report.
Damian Hinds
Just out of interest—this is not meant to be a political challenge—regarding all the things the hon. Gentleman mentioned that could be replicated, the Labour Government tried to do that in 2008 in the black country and in Manchester. I am interested in his analysis of why there was no read-across.
Kevin Brennan
I think there was some read-across, particularly in Manchester, where it worked better than elsewhere. I do not think the policy was given enough time. This Government were wrong to abandon that approach when they came in, in favour of a wholesale structural and cultural revolution, rather than looking at those key factors and attempting more effectively to replicate them. The system has been endangered by wholesale atomisation—the creation of this kind of Govian archipelago of schools across the country that are not well connected.
What the London challenge tells us—I sense sometimes that the Schools Minister may have some sympathy with this point—is that, while autonomy at school level is important, it should be provided within a collaborative system and a culture of collaboration, with highly qualified and well motivated professionals working together in the interests of all the children in that particular area. That was the lesson from the Ofsted report, which should be returned to and should become our mantra in trying to improve schools across the country. We should not simply rely on the idea that changing the sign at the front of the school and introducing academies and free schools will solve all our problems. It will not, and any intelligent analysis will show that.
We accept that we now have a variety of different types of schools, but let us re-introduce into the system the values of the London challenge that have been shown to be valuable in raising standards. That is not to say that everything from London is replicable across the country, due to many of the factors mentioned by the hon. Member for East Hampshire, but it is clear that they are key features of the London challenge that worked, and features of school systems in other parts of the world that show them to be a success.
I am conscious of time and I want to leave the Minister with time to respond, so I will briefly say a few more things. We have not heard much today about the importance of early years. I am not going to speak extensively about what the previous Government did on that; it has already been mentioned by other colleagues. We welcome and support—in fact, we proposed this—the extension of early years to two-year-olds. However, we need to do much more on that, and we need to have a much better offer for parents, particularly in relation to child care. We have already proposed a primary child care guarantee and extending free child care for three and four-year-olds from 15 hours to 24 hours per week. The Government ought to consider those proposals.
The pupil premium has been mentioned. Let us be clear: it was not really a premium, in the sense that it did not constitute any extra money in the system. When in opposition, the Schools Minister had said that there would be additional money—
Kevin Brennan
The Minister may challenge the figures if he likes. The premium constituted no real increase in the schools budget. I know that the Minister is an economist, so if he wants to challenge what I say, he can, but it is a fact. When is a premium not a premium? When it is a pupil premium. Nevertheless we welcome the focus on the most deprived children, and we need to talk more about how best to use what is in effect a ring-fenced part of the school budget to close the gap. There is no silver bullet for that, or for overcoming regional differences identified by the hon. Member for East Hampshire, but the factors I have mentioned are important, and teaching quality is essential. The Government are getting that wrong with their message about unqualified teachers, and we think all teachers should be willing to become qualified so that the profession can be valued, so that they are up to date with the best pedagogical methods, and so that they understand child development properly. Strengthening parents’ role is vital and we need to think about how best to do that.
We have not talked much about the social and emotional aspects of learning, but those are important for children, and especially those from deprived backgrounds. We need to give more careful consideration to approaches such as mindfulness for improving the attentiveness and emotional well-being of children in school. Those are important factors in a good education.
Ian Mearns
The Select Committee recently went to Peterborough and met a gaggle of primary school heads. They said that because of the state in which some youngsters were coming to school they were using pupil premium money to feed them.
Kevin Brennan
Children often come to school with more than just the books in their schoolbags—they come with their home issues; and sometimes, unfortunately, they come with little in their bellies. I am a former teacher and it is difficult to teach them if they are hungry, or if they are distressed or perturbed because of something that has happened at home. We need to focus on more rounded issues to do with the child in education, if we are to close the gap.
The shadow Education Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), has made a big contribution to the debate recently, which I welcome, with reference to the importance of character and resilience, and schools’ role in helping to develop those qualities in young people. Those are the bedrock of educational attainment, and will contribute to closing the gap.
The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Caton. I want to start in the traditional way by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing the debate and choosing such an important issue—not just for education policy, but for the challenges the country faces. I congratulate him, too, on setting out the case in such a thoughtful, measured way. He built it strongly on recent work on educational disadvantage by the all-party group on social mobility, which he chairs, and highlighted some of the challenges that any Government will face in the coming years in dealing with low attainment and the unacceptable gap in outturns between those from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds.[Official Report, 3 March 2014, Vol. 576, c. 12MC.]
I thank other hon. Members who spoke. There were good speeches from the hon. Members for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), and interventions from my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) and the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns). I should put the hon. Member for Cardiff West out of his misery before he intervenes on me to ask about the teacher workload survey, which he has become obsessed about. I have fantastic news for him, which will make his day: it will be published, not just shortly, but on 4 March. In the very near future he will be able to see all the information and get all the answers he wants.
Mr Laws
I certainly do not intend to get into trouble by falling into the hon. Gentleman’s trap and giving out information that has not yet been approved. It would be an affront to Parliament.
We have had a good debate and talked about the challenge of raising attainment and closing the gap. My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire talked in some detail about the pupil premium. Among the achievements of the coalition Government that is one of the policies I am proudest of. The pupil premium will rise next year to the full amount of funding that we said, at the beginning of the Parliament, we would allocate to it—£2.5 billion. That means an uplift, for each disadvantaged young person who receives it, of £1,300 in primary education and £935 in secondary education. That makes, and will in future make, a massive difference to the schools with the additional funding.
Contrary to what the hon. Member for Cardiff West suggested, that is on top of the existing cash protection per pupil. It is happening at a time of austerity in the public sector, which would have been necessary whichever party was in power, and when we have been deliberately controlling the cost of schools by keeping down their biggest cost—teachers’ salaries. That has not been popular with teachers, but it has enabled us to contain costs while putting in additional money. Hon. Members will be aware from visiting schools that the ones that receive a lot of pupil premium money, because they have many children who qualify for it, notice the difference even in the present tough times. In Redcar, for instance, where the local economy has never properly recovered from the recession of the 1980s, I have visited schools where 80% or 90% of the young people are entitled to the pupil premium, which enables teachers and head teachers to transform their opportunities.
Alex Cunningham
My hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) alluded earlier to children on the margins, particularly the children of the working poor, who are just below the threshold to qualify for the pupil premium. Are there plans to address that, particularly for areas such as the north-east, where the attainment gap is wider?
Mr Laws
That is an important point. Some of the ways in which we now allocate funding for disadvantage go beyond the pupil premium. They include area-based methods and prior attainment, a factor that many local authorities use. It is not only through the pupil premium that we channel money into schools. However, I am serious when I say that we are keeping under review the question of whether in future we should have a different way of targeting money at disadvantage. The hon. Member for Gateshead raised the question of free school meals targeting, and whether that is sufficient. It is worth keeping other options in mind for the future beyond the current Parliament. I was interested in his comments about the Netherlands experience of targeting money towards children whose parents do not have strong educational qualifications. We should not assume that we have the perfect method for allocating disadvantage funding at the moment, and should seek constantly to build on what we do and improve it.
The performance of disadvantaged pupils has improved across the country since the coalition Government came to power in 2010, and it improved before that. The proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals who achieve the expected standard in maths at the end of primary school has risen from 66% to 74% since 2010, and the gap between those children and their peers has narrowed by 4 percentage points. The picture is similar at key stage 4. The proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals achieving at least five A* to C grade GCSEs, including English and maths, has risen from 31% in 2010 to 38% in 2013. The gap between those youngsters on free school meals and the rest of the pupil population has narrowed. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire pointed out, however, the performance of disadvantaged pupils is different throughout the United Kingdom and throughout England.
Kevin Brennan
Does the Minister agree that one should not be complacent about such things? In England last year, the GCSE attainment gap widened in 72 out of 152 local authority areas. In 66 areas, it was larger than it was two years previously. In England as a whole, the gap was 26.7% last year, up from 26.4% in 2011-12, which means we should not be complacent.
Mr Laws
We certainly should not be complacent at all. We have a huge amount of progress to make in reducing the gap. In the previous year, 2012, there was a particularly large reduction in the gap at secondary level, so I am not surprised to see some push back against that in 2013. The trend is still clearly downwards, but there is a long way to go and I would like a much more rapid pace of progress than we have had in recent years.
A number of Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire, pointed out that progress in London has been more impressive over the past decade or so, as was said in the all-party group’s report, “Capital Mobility”, which was published at the end of last year. Disadvantaged young people in London are now more than 10 percentage points more likely to achieve five A* to C grades including English and maths than those in the next highest-performing region. The gap between disadvantaged young people and their peers is narrowest in London.
We need to ask, as my hon. Friend did, what the important factors in London are. He was able to put aside some factors that do not appear to be explanatory and to identify others that are significant, such as aspiration among young people in London being higher, for which there is some evidence. There is also a different ethnic mix in London, compared with much of the rest of the country, with a greater proportion of London pupils from high-performing ethnic groups such as Chinese, Indian and Korean. There is also important and impressive performance by many ethnically Pakistani and Bangladeshi children, who perform better than white children in London, but worse than white children outside London.
As is well known, London schools are better funded, but we need to be careful about drawing easy conclusions from that. Part of the headline difference simply relates to area cost. London also has above-average unemployment and deprivation, so it might be expected to attract higher levels of funding on average. As my hon. Friend pointed out, however, London has less experienced teachers and larger, rather than smaller, class sizes, although it has more sponsored academies, which have been making impressive progress under this Government and the previous Labour Government in raising attainment and narrowing the gaps.
My hon. Friend also mentioned Teach First. It is true that around half of Teach First graduates are in London. That is a hugely disproportionate share, but it reflects the fact that the programme started in London and that, to some extent, it is easier to find young people who after university want to be located in our biggest cities. I am delighted that Teach First not only has doubled in size since 2010 to become the country’s largest graduate recruiter, but will from next year be present in every single region of the country. I hope that will ensure that we get effective teachers teaching in schools throughout the country and not only in our largest cities.
It is worth pointing out, as a number of hon. Members have, that Teach First will only ever provide a minority of teachers in this country. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East invited us to think about what more could be done to develop the talents of the rest of the teaching work force. After all, we have around a third of a million teachers, and we need to ensure that we attend to all of them and focus not simply on the Teach First programme, important though that is.
We need to look at ways to get teachers to some of the most challenging schools and we need to allow schools to use the pupil premium in whatever ways are effective, including paying to attract better teachers to the more challenging schools. We know, however, that some people will not move around the country, for family and other reasons, and we have to be able to recruit good teachers throughout the country, in every single area and region. We cannot assume that teachers can be moved around.
In some local authorities, our schools are not doing well. For example, in England as a whole, just under 80% of schools are now good or outstanding, which is the highest figure since Ofsted began, but in 13 local authorities fewer than half of all secondary pupils are in such schools. None of those authorities is in London. They are clustered in Yorkshire and the Humber, in places such as Bradford, Doncaster, East Riding and Barnsley; and in the north-west, in places such as St Helens, Blackpool, Salford and Tameside.
In 14 local authorities, the attainment of free school meal pupils at key stage 4 is more than 10 percentage points below the national average for such pupils. In places such as Barnsley and Portsmouth, performance is appalling: only 22% and 23% respectively of children eligible for the pupil premium achieved five good GCSEs including English and maths, which is only just over half the national figure. Achievement for that group of pupils declined in 2013 in both places. In 12 local authorities, attainment at the end of key stage 4 for pupils eligible for free school meals was lower in 2013 than in 2010. That, too, is completely unacceptable.
Ofsted is addressing regional underperformance through its regional inspection arrangements, with focused inspections of local authorities and groups of schools. It is carrying out inspections not only of schools, but of school improvement functions. I welcome the chief inspector’s plans to ask challenging questions of local authorities and others about their contribution to school improvement. After each such inspection, the Department looks carefully at Ofsted’s conclusions. Where the chief inspector is unhappy with a response, we will take action as necessary.
In the case of the Isle of Wight, we issued a direction under the Education Act 1996, which required the local authority to enter into a strategic partnership with Hampshire to tackle its weakness in school improvement. We will not hesitate to intervene again where local authorities fail in their Ofsted inspections on school improvement and where they fail to improve swiftly or to rise to the challenge.
We are keen to see local authorities and sponsor groups on the front foot, taking the initiative, rather than waiting to be challenged by Ofsted or the Department. We are heartened to see initiatives breaking out in many parts of the country to lead improvement in schools, such as “By schools for schools” in Greater Manchester.
We are targeting schools and local authorities where the attainment of disadvantaged pupils is unacceptably low. I recently wrote to 214 schools—115 primary and 99 secondary—with the poorest value-added progress among disadvantaged pupils. I will shortly be writing to the schools, local authorities, dioceses and academy sponsors so that they may provide additional challenge.
A number of Members mentioned the importance in a system of autonomous schools of having more school-to-school support to ensure that we spread best practice. That is extremely important and something that the Department takes seriously. Teaching school alliances and peer support networks can be effective in raising standards. Currently, 345 teaching schools cover around 4,800 other schools. In September, the Secretary of State announced an expansion to reach a total of 600 alliances by 2016. I have seen for myself—in Redditch, for example—the importance of such arrangements and what the alliances can do for work on school improvement.
We also need more national leaders of education in those parts of the country in which they are in short supply, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire mentioned. We need a programme to support our best leaders and deputy leaders taking up posts in parts of the country in which there are large gaps and weaknesses in educational attainment. That will not necessarily suit everyone, because many people have family and other commitments to keep them in particular places. Many are willing to move, however—people with high aspirations, who might have already improved their schools and be willing to attempt it elsewhere in the country. From September 2015, the talented leaders programme announced by my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister will start by matching 100 head teachers with underperforming schools in areas that struggle to attract and develop outstanding school leaders. In these ways, we hope to spread the improvement that we have seen in areas such as London to the whole country.