Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Field of Birkenhead and Nick Gibb(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Nick Gibb
Of course I will write to my hon. Friend as he asks, but I have to say that we are spending record amounts of money on schools, some £42.4 billion this year. There has never been a sum as high spent on schools in our history, and it will rise again next year to £43.5 billion, and we announced an increase in school funding last July to the tune of £1.3 billion. That was the result of successful negotiations with the Treasury.
Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
Nick Gibb
The right hon. Gentleman makes some interesting points and I will take advice on his suggestions, but I must say that we have guaranteed the pupil premium to the end of this Parliament: it is over £1,300 for every pupil eligible for free school meals attending a primary school, and nearly £1,000 for every disadvantaged child attending a secondary school.
Education Funding: Wirral
Debate between Lord Field of Birkenhead and Nick Gibb(6 years, 6 months ago)
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The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) on securing the debate and on her excellent speech.
I am delighted to be able to address this issue at a time when the Government have recently announced the outcome of our consultation on the national funding formula—an historic and necessary reform that will, for the first time, distribute funding on the individual needs and characteristics of every school in the country. This Government believe that all children should have an education that unlocks their potential and allows them to go as far as their talents and hard work will take them.
We are making significant progress. More schools than ever before are rated good or outstanding by Ofsted, and 1.8 million more children are in good or outstanding schools today compared with 2010, including 90% of schools in the Wirral. The attainment gap between poorer children and their wealthier peers is closing; it has not closed totally. We have launched 12 opportunity areas to drive improvements in parts of the country that we know need to and can do better.
Those improvements have been made against a backdrop of an unfair and arbitrary funding system. Similar schools across the country get markedly different levels of funding for no good reason and resources are not reaching the schools that need it most. The funding system has acted as a barrier to improvement, when we need it to be a support. That is why we are delivering on our promise to reform the unfair, opaque and outdated school and high needs funding system, and introducing a national funding formula.
Frank Field
A prime way in which the Government have tried to direct resources to the poorest pupils, sometimes to schools in the poorest areas, has been through the pupil premium. As I said in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), the data from housing benefit will be lost as universal credit is being rolled out. I ask the Minister to take away the idea, and talk with the Department for Work and Pensions, so that the data that is in universal credit will be made available on housing circumstances to councils, so that they can automatically offer registration for the school premium and free school dinners.
Frank Field
Will the Minister take the issue away and, when he has consulted his colleagues in the other Department, write to me please?
Nick Gibb
I am happy to write to the right hon. Gentleman, but these issues are being considered as we speak.
Given the significance of this reform, it was vital that we took into account as many views as possible, and the consultation process generated over 26,000 individual responses and responses from representative organisations, and we considered all of those views. The existing system is out of date. It is based on data and decisions from over a decade ago. Funding for each area has been determined by simply rolling forward the previous years’ allocation, adjusting only for changes in the total number of pupils in each area and ignoring all the other changes.
Free School Meals (Colleges)
Debate between Lord Field of Birkenhead and Nick Gibb(11 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)
I begin by congratulating the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) on securing this important debate. He is a former and distinguished Education Secretary.
As right hon. and hon. Members will know, the origins of a school meals service can be traced back to the mid-19th century. Later in the 19th century and in the early 20th century, a number of provisions for both free and reduced-cost meals were introduced to tackle malnutrition in schoolchildren. During the war years, the school meals service was transformed in policy and scope to become a general service of mid-day dinners that was intended to benefit all children.
The Education Act 1944 placed local education authorities under a statutory duty to provide meals and milk to pupils at schools and county colleges that the authorities maintained. The details were set out in the Provision of Milk and Meals Regulations 1945, but only in relation to maintained schools. Those regulations also made provision for meals to be provided free of charge to pupils at maintained schools who met certain conditions.
The Education Act 1980 gave local authorities the power to provide meals free of charge to pupils at any school maintained by them whose parents were in receipt of supplementary benefit or family income supplement. The 1980 Act was repealed by the Education Act 1996, since when the list of qualifying benefits for free school meals has increased, to ensure that those children who most need free school meals are entitled to them. The current criteria for eligibility are where a child’s parents are on income support; income-based jobseeker’s allowance; an income-related employment and support allowance; support under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999; the guarantee element of state pension credit; or child tax credit, but not working tax credit. The child’s parents must also have an annual income not exceeding £16,190. That has resulted in 19.2% of primary and nursery schoolchildren and 15.9% of secondary schoolchildren qualifying for free school meals.
The introduction of universal credit will simplify the benefits system and mean that we have to change the way that we determine eligibility for free school meals. We have yet to decide what the new criteria will be, but we want to make sure that they are simple and make free school meals available to those families on the lowest incomes.
It might be to desirable to extend free school meals further—for example, to all children. I understand the argument for doing so; I have seen that practice working well in Sweden, where all children receive a free school meal as part of what they receive at school, like the stationery, the heating and the building. The hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) mentioned Finland. However, extending free school meals, for example, to all pupils whose parents receive the new universal credit, in line with the proposal from the Children’s Society, would cost around £1.6 billion a year. To extend free school meals to all pupils of school age would cost around £2.9 billion a year.
Mr Field
The Minister is reading from his script what I feared he would read out. Will he give this gathering in Westminster Hall today an undertaking that when he goes back to his next ministerial meeting he will ask his colleagues if they are happy that he, as their colleague in the Government, should have to stand up and defend a situation where some pupils, because they happen to go to a college rather than a sixth form, may be hungry?
Mr Gibb
If the right hon. Gentleman will be patient, he will see that although I am reading from a prepared script, I have manuscript changes to that script that I made during the debate. I was listening very carefully to all the arguments that were made.
I will continue. The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 moved colleges from local authority control into a more independent further education sector. Current legislation—the Education Act 1996—continues to provide free school meals only to pupils at schools maintained by a local authority. As was mentioned, academies and free schools are required to comply with free school meal legislation via their funding agreement. This provision also extends to students attending school sixth forms, because they are covered by the definitions of “secondary education” and “school”. However, it does not extend to pupils at independent schools, or to pupils aged between 14 and 16 who study at a college instead of a school. Pupils who are registered at a school but who also attend college are still covered and their school must provide free school meals if they meet the eligibility criteria.
As the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough has pointed out, free meals do not apply to students at sixth-form or FE colleges. The different legal status and independence of sixth-form and FE colleges bring with them other benefits, which the institutions themselves do not want to lose. That does not mean that we believe that students studying at sixth-form and FE colleges are any different from those attending school sixth forms. I understand and have sympathy with the argument made by Members including the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge that vocational courses are more likely to be found in FE colleges than in school sixth forms. As the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) pointed out, we recognise the anomaly. It is an anomaly, whether or not we put the word in inverted commas, but it is not a new anomaly. Indeed, it is one that previous Governments have not address did—I have to say that it was not addressed by the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough when he was Education Secretary between 1997 and 2001.
Education Bill
Debate between Lord Field of Birkenhead and Nick Gibb(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
My hon. Friend is right, and the Government are committed to protecting those employment rights.
The underperformance of teachers is not necessarily the only reason why schools underperform; there is a whole host of reasons, one of which is that schools are burdened by bureaucracy. One key measure that we implemented in the opening months of the Administration was a reduction in the amount of bureaucracy and prescription that has been heaped on teachers over the past 10 years. With those few comments, I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey will not press his probing new clause any further.
I turn to the new clause tabled by the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field). We welcome the many initiatives in the independent schools sector, assisted by the schools themselves through bursaries and scholarships and by many charities, to support children who would not otherwise be able to receive an independent school education. The right hon. Gentleman may have seen the article in The Times today by Lord Adonis and Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Wellington college, urging the independent sector to sponsor more academies, and we share the views of those two contributors. That should be happening, and we want to see more independent schools sponsoring academies, but the Government’s priority is to transform the state education system so that all children are able to access a good-quality education regardless of their background.
Our independent schools provide some of the best education in the world, according to the OECD and other commentators, and we are keen to encourage greater collaboration between the sectors so that best practice can be shared and schools can work more effectively together in the best interests of pupils and staff, but the right hon. Gentleman’s new clause is neither desirable nor necessary.
An academy is free to further its education objectives by using any funds it is able to raise through charitable donations or other similar sources, but academy funding agreements regulate the way in which such schools can use taxpayer funding. The general annual grant paid by the Secretary of State can be spent by an academy only on its normal running costs, and we have no intention of changing that. That does not mean academies cannot buy in additional support from independent schools or collaborate with them on joint provision, but the bulk of state funding should rightly be used to raise educational attainment and standards for the benefit of all pupils in the academy.
Mr Gibb
I have no idea what the view of the House would be. I am not sure that the right hon. Gentleman would have huge support from Opposition Members, or that all elements of the coalition would necessarily support his proposal. I am not sure what the outcome of such a vote would be, but I am not convinced that his proposal is the right thing on which to use scarce taxpayers’ money.
Mr Frank Field
I make one last plea to the Minister. My constituents are not interested in a sectarian Government saying that they wish to raise standards in the state sector. My constituents wish to see standards raised, and they are not concerned about which sector is used to achieve that objective.
Mr Gibb
I share that view. There is too much sectarianism in education. There should be more working between the independent sector and the state sector. I should like us to look at the methods that are used in the independent sector to see what can be learned from it. Indeed, many of those in the independent sector tell me that they want to learn from what is happening in some of the best schools in the state sector. There should be greater movement between the two sectors, and we are committed to that. We share the views of Lord Adonis and Anthony Seldon in the article that they jointly wrote for today’s edition of The Times.
Mr Gibb
My hon. Friend is right. We need to ensure that our comprehensive schools are genuinely catering for children of all abilities, and that those able children are as well catered for in comprehensive schools as they are in schools that specialise in children of that ability, whether in the independent sector or the state sector. The point I was making to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead and to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) is that the state sector has many examples of where such children are extremely well catered for, and that is why some schools in the state sector have very high levels of entrance to Oxbridge and to Russell group universities. It is our view that if it can be done in those schools, it can be done throughout the state sector. We are determined to have a state education system that can deliver a high-quality education for children of all abilities, including the children that my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) mentioned.
The hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) asked about unnecessary referrals to alternative provision academies or to pupil referral units generally. There are three routes by which pupils can be referred to a PRU: first, through section 19 of the Education Act 1996 on placements by local authorities; secondly, through section 100 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, which was introduced by the Government of whom he was a member, under a duty on schools and academies to provide education for pupils on fixed-term exclusions of more than five days; and thirdly, through section 29A of the Education Act 2002, under which a maintained school can direct a pupil to be educated off-site for the purpose of improving behaviour. Each of those routes carries its own safeguards, which will remain in place. That will ensure that alternative provision academies will provide for pupils who can most benefit from that provision.
My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham talked about the need to ensure that there are sufficient places in primary schools, particularly in rural areas. We recognise that the large increase in the number of children of primary school age means that more schools are needed. We have made the funding available to meet that increase, and the academy free schools programme will add to that provision. We are very well aware of these issues. The birth rate has been increasing since 2001, and we are absolutely determined to ensure that there are sufficient places.
With those few comments, I commend new clause 20 to the House.
Question put and agreed to.
New clause 20 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.
New Clause 21
Charges at boarding Academies
‘After section 10 of AA 2010 insert—
“10A Charges at boarding Academies
(1) This section applies where—
(a) a registered pupil at an Academy is provided with board and lodging at the Academy, and
(b) the local authority for the pupil’s area is satisfied that either condition A or condition B is met.
(2) Condition A is that education suitable to the pupil’s age, ability and aptitude, and to any special educational needs the pupil may have, cannot otherwise be provided for the pupil.
(3) Condition B is that payment of the full amount of the charges in respect of the board and lodging would involve financial hardship to the pupil’s parent.
(4) If the authority is satisfied that condition A is met, the authority must pay the full amount of the charges in respect of the board and lodging to the proprietor of the Academy.
(5) If the authority is satisfied that condition B is met, the authority must pay to the proprietor of the Academy so much of the charges in respect of the board and lodging as, in the opinion of the authority, is needed to avoid financial hardship to the pupil’s parent.
(6) The proprietor of the Academy must remit the charges that would otherwise be payable by the pupil’s parent, to the extent that it receives a payment from the local authority in respect of those charges under subsection (4) or (5).”’.—(Mr Gibb.)
Brought up, read the First and Second time, and added to the Bill.
Mr Frank Field
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am not pressing my new clause, even though the Minister could have had his speech written for him by old Labour, which I think will be noted. I wish for the proceedings to go forward as expeditiously as possible.