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Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
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The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) on securing the debate and on making his case so powerfully. I agree with his points about national education policy and the importance of good leadership and governance. I am delighted that he picked today to hold this debate because this morning the Government announced a series of further measures to strengthen school leadership. He had extraordinary foresight in securing this opportunity, which allows me to put on the record some of the announcements we made today.
I am pleased to hear about the progress made by a number of the schools in my hon. Friend’s constituency, and I join him in congratulating the schools whose success he celebrated. He mentioned Gable Hall school, which secured a good set of GCSE results this year. A signal of its success is the fact that it does not see that as an end destination, but as something to build on; it is fantastic that it still wants to aim higher. Woodlands school, which came from a different starting point, has moved out of the “inadequate” category into “requires improvement” in a short period of time. Like my hon. Friend, I wish it well in moving further up to “good” and beyond in the future. It can be a difficult and time-consuming process to take over and turn around schools in the bottom category, so it is good that that happened so quickly.
I was also pleased to hear from other hon. Friends about the progress of schools in their areas—both in Redditch and in some of the teaching schools in the country. I agree with the right hon. Member for Oxford East (Mr Smith) about the need to ensure that schools in some of our more disadvantaged communities have the resources and flexibility to pay more to attract outstanding leaders and teachers.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock struck the right balance when he praised the schools that are doing well. If we are to be listened to in Westminster when we talk to schools that are not doing so well and challenge them to do better, we must show that we have balance and are willing to praise success as well as pick up the schools that are not doing so well. My hon. Friend was right not to be complacent in that regard. He has many outstanding schools in his constituency, including Great Berry primary school, Lee Chapel primary school and the children’s support centre at Langdon Hills, which are all rated “outstanding” by Ofsted. However, 16, or 44%, of the schools in his constituency are in the “requires improvement” category, which used to be “satisfactory”.
My hon. Friend is right that Ofsted is sending out a clear signal, for the reasons that he gave. We no longer accept that satisfactory is good enough. Most young people get only one chance at education, so it has to be high-quality. Therefore, where schools could be doing better and require improvement, we should be challenging and supporting them to do so in exactly the way that he described, and that is also why we have introduced some changes today, which I will outline shortly.
I commend not only the schools in my hon. Friend’s constituency but the excellent work of schools and school leaders right across the country. Those leaders have been turning around schools with their commitment, dedication and unrelenting focus on pupil outcomes. Leading a school is a very challenging role to take on, but it is also absolutely critical. It is very rare to find an outstanding school that does not have outstanding leadership.
Great school leaders can transform schools, but they cannot do so alone. They need their staff to engage in the pursuit of educational excellence, and of course part of a school leader’s job is to motivate and inspire staff and to recruit high-quality staff. That is why great school leaders are at the heart of this Government’s education reform programme.
Our schools White Paper, “The Importance of Teaching”, put schools and school leaders in the driving seat of our reforms and gave them more powers and more support. It set out our vision for a self-improving school system whereby our best schools and leaders drive improvement from within, working together to spread best practice, knowledge and experience, to the benefit of all schools.
We have made good progress on that agenda and we should celebrate the incredible achievements of schools, teachers and pupils, not only in my hon. Friend’s constituency but across the country. Schools in England are now performing better than ever before. Ofsted figures show that 83% of schools in England have achieved good or outstanding ratings for leadership and management, with 80% of schools in England now judged to be good or outstanding overall.
The sophistication and diversity of school leadership across England has also grown and matured over many years, with new approaches emerging in multi-academy trusts and elsewhere. For example, sponsored academy chains are pioneering new kinds of leadership development. Schools everywhere can learn a good deal from the approach taken by chains of three or more sponsored academies, whereby they can grow their own leadership. In this type of school, middle and senior leaders enjoy more opportunities for both internal and external coaching and mentoring. These chains also tend to have a chief executive who is actively engaged with developing leaders, establishing a culture of ambition and success for staff.
At a national level, the Government have invested in professional qualifications for middle leadership, senior leadership and aspiring heads. Since some of these programmes were launched in March 2013, more than 5,200 participants have commenced the middle leader programme, and more than 5,400 participants have commenced the senior leader programme. In addition, more than 2,300 aspirant head teachers have commenced the headship programme since its relaunch in autumn 2012, with a further 640 commencing the programme this autumn. Feedback from participants shows that these programmes help to prepare our school leaders of the future and enable them to develop the skills, knowledge and confidence that they need to thrive in their schools.
I understand my hon. Friend’s concern about ensuring that we have head teachers in place who are fully equipped to carry out the role successfully and to support all pupils in their care. That is why excellent school governance, which he also spoke about, is paramount. It is essential that school governors have the right skills and knowledge to support and challenge the performance of head teachers, which is why we are also investing in more effective school governance. Our national leaders of governance programme identifies highly effective chairs of governors, who use their skills and experience to support chairs of governors in other schools and academies, to increase leadership capacity and improve school performance.
Of course, we need many thousands of governors right across the country, which is a huge recruitment challenge, not least, as the right hon. Member for Oxford East indicated, in more disadvantaged communities, where we have to ensure that the quality of governance is very high. He was quite right to say that we need to call on businesses, other professional groups and other groups with people who have high aspirations who are willing to become governors and chairs of governors in these areas.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock may have seen that we have also convened a review group made up of highly respected professionals to review head teacher standards, to ensure that those standards set out the behaviour, qualities and knowledge expected of modern head teachers.
The Government also recognise that some schools face particularly challenging circumstances. This is why we are funding the Teaching Leaders charity and the Future Leaders Trust, so that they can work closely with staff in schools serving disadvantaged communities. Teaching Leaders identifies and develops middle leaders, such as heads of department or year, to improve teaching in the most challenging schools and for the pupils who will benefit most from such improvement. Owing to the impact that the programme has demonstrated, we recently expanded its provision in secondary schools so that more children can benefit from it. From this month, a new Teaching Leaders programme for the primary sector starts, which will benefit some 160,000 children by developing the skills of their middle leaders.
By funding the Future Leaders Trust, we are also developing the skills of aspiring head teachers who want to work in some of the most challenging schools in the country. So far, 85 participants in the Future Leaders programme have gone on to become head teachers in these challenging schools, many of which are outside London and in areas where other school improvement initiatives in the past have been less prevalent.
We are going even further than that, which is why I am particularly delighted that we have this debate today. Only this morning, we launched the new Talented Leaders programme, which is designed to transform the life chances of pupils in the areas of greatest need across the country, where we do not have enough outstanding schools or enough outstanding head teachers.
This new programme will recruit 100 outstanding deputy heads and heads to lead schools in some of the most challenging communities, where there is a shortage of good leadership. We are starting recruitment today, and the first placements will start in September 2015 and September 2016. Those placements are designed to be voluntary—we will engage the parts of the country that most need them—and to be long-term initiatives, not short-term initiatives, to grow the leaders in the schools that we put them into.
I urge hon. Friends and hon. Members who think that their constituencies are in parts of the country that have a shortage of outstanding leadership to consider applying for their areas to be part of this programme, so that we can get some of these outstanding leaders to the parts of the country where they are most needed.
Another reason why we have this close focus on school leadership is the impact that such leadership has on driving better outcomes for our most vulnerable children and young people. Great school leaders achieve great outcomes for all their pupils, whatever their background. To do that, they close the gap in achievement between pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers. This issue is close to my heart and the heart of the Government, which is why we are very proud to have helped to introduce the pupil premium. It was introduced in 2011 and has now risen to £2.5 billion per year, providing a massive amount of resources in schools with disadvantage, to ensure that all those schools have the money they need to try to close that gap.
The recent Ofsted report on the use of the pupil premium highlighted increasingly good practice in the schools that are using this money very effectively, to close the gap between them and other schools. We are committed to giving schools freedom in how they use the pupil premium; but through the Ofsted process, we will hold them to account, to ensure that the gap is closed. Our best school leaders are now driving improvements, which can be seen not only in the expansion of academies and free schools but in the increase in the number of schools across the country that are supporting other schools.
Teaching schools were raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart). They are outstanding schools that have a strong track record of working with other schools to bring about improvement. They are the principal network through which support and development for middle and senior leadership is now being offered. Last week, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education announced the 600th teaching school in England, which is a fantastic milestone in a programme that is less than four years old.
As part of this morning’s announcement, which I referred to earlier, we recognised the achievements of both the national leaders of education programme and the national support schools programme. The fantastic success of those programmes comes down to the excellent school leaders who have come forward to take on roles in them, collaborating with and supporting staff in other schools that require improvement or that are in special measures, to try to help them to improve.
Today, I announced our intention to increase the number of NLEs from the present figure of 1,000 to 1,400 by March 2016, to ensure that more schools and more parts of the country can benefit from NLEs, because at the moment—sadly—there are too few of them in large parts of the country, and consequently schools and local authorities in those areas that need more support find it difficult to identify those individuals.
We also announced today a new school-to-school support fund, which will be worth £13 million over the next two years and which will help to fund those NLE deployments, so that the schools that have NLEs will receive money to help them to support other schools.
I note that Susan Jackson and her staff at the Lee Chapel primary school, which is in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock, work in their roles as an NLE national support school and teaching school, collaborating with other schools to drive pupil outcomes. I am very grateful to teaching schools across the country, including in my hon. Friend’s constituency, which are doing this excellent work.
In conclusion, I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate, which is not only very important for his constituents but very timely, given the actions that the Government are taking. I hope that in the future we can build on this strategy across the country, including in his constituency, so that even more schools can achieve good and outstanding ratings.