Anne Main
Main Page: Anne Main (Conservative - St Albans)Department Debates - View all Anne Main's debates with the Department for Education
(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
I want to put it on the record that the Backbench Business Committee asked on 5 February for a six-hour debate on this issue, and that request has been granted. That request was supported by 43 Members, many of whom are here today. It is about time that the Government found time for this very valuable debate, because it is roundly supported.
Liz Twist
I thank the hon. Lady very much for that intervention. What is clear from all Members here today is that we need a long debate on this issue, and I hope that we will have one soon.
Last November, I visited St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School in Blaydon, along with our local parliamentary outreach worker, Gillian. It is the school of Mr Ramanandi, the lead petitioner—and a fine school it is, too. I met some of the younger pupils there: they were polite and well-behaved, but also fizzing to make inquiries and ask questions. They were not afraid to ask some of the questions that many adult constituents would be too polite to ask.
Our discussions ranged far and wide, really covering some important local, national and environmental issues. These children had clearly been taught to have inquiring minds and to express themselves—in fact, I had to leave the school without answering all of their questions as I was late for my next meeting. In December, I had the chance to see the school Christmas play in a church just down the road from my office, and what talented and well-behaved ambassadors for their school the children were! I congratulate Mr Ramanandi and the staff on that.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
As I said in an intervention on the hon. Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist), it is about time we had the six-hour debate that this House has been promised. Indeed, 43 Members supported that and I know a lot more who could not sign but wanted that debate, as can be seen in the number of people wanting to speak today. We have only a few minutes, which is nowhere near enough.
We accept that more money has gone in, but if more people are invited to the party, rations have to be spread ever thinner. Many schools are spreading those rations beyond belief. I particularly want to raise a concern that a headteacher told me, which has not been raised yet. She felt guilty about almost heaving a sigh of relief when a very senior member of staff left, because that meant she could take on a more inexperienced junior member of staff and therefore have a bit more give in her budget. I was teacher a long time ago, but I can remember being a probationary teacher, as they were called in those days. We need experienced teachers to lead from the front, to drive schools forward. We cannot expect our schools to constantly rely on a churn of young inexperienced teachers who need to learn on the job, but also make sure they have plenty of time for lesson preparation.
Teachers cannot pay their bills with long holidays, as I used to say to people.
Laura Smith
I find myself agreeing with the hon. Lady, probably because we have both been teachers. She is exactly right with regard to—the point has gone from my brain. Sorry!
Mrs Main
I was right, and that is all that matters. Every Member will be told the same by other schools. In high-value areas such as mine, we cannot pay bills with holidays. Teachers have to pay bills with their salaries. They are struggling to get on the housing ladder in areas as expensive as St Albans, where the average house price is £600,000. Recruiting members of staff is difficult; retaining members of staff is very difficult, as they find their pounds go a lot further elsewhere.
Thelma Walker
On recruitment and retention, for the first time in history, as far as I know, more people are leaving the profession than entering it. One of the issues that headteachers bring to my attention is that many young people who do not have those years of experience are promoted too swiftly when they enter the profession. They are given responsibility, but there is burnout just a few years later.
Mrs Main
No, if she does not mind, because Members on the hon. Lady’s side are waiting to speak. We need those experienced teachers and we must ensure that teachers are not overwhelmed so quickly that they fancy quitting the profession.
I am also worried that we will end up cutting the curriculum to the bone. Gone are the times when there would be the luxury of a peripatetic music teacher coming to schools. There simply is no latitude in schools to pay for anything other than the bare necessities. The statutory obligations on a school have to be paid for first. It also worries me that sometimes there is a reluctance to statement pupils; if a pupil is statemented, that pupil is rightly required to have additional assistance. However, a school might drag its feet in that scenario because it does not wish to be obliged to provide the extra funding.
I went to a public meeting in my constituency. It is not easy to have rocks thrown at us, but sometimes we need a rock to wake us up. It is hard to admit that schools are struggling. Schools have always been struggling; anyone who has worked in a school will say that the roof has always leaked and the windows are always awful. But there comes a point when things have to be tackled—they cannot be put off any longer. As many Members have said, robbing Peter to pay Paul is not the answer. Taking away from one set of schools to give to another set of schools that are very deserving is not the answer.
An hon. Member earlier talked earlier about the results meaning that we must be doing something right. My schools have excellent results, but that does not mean they do not need the resources. At some point, those results will start to crumble. The curriculum has shrunk down to the core topics, so perhaps those results are already sliding. When I was at school, I was passionate about art. Many young people are not academic but value those topics as much as anything; they inspire young people to go into school, and those teachers may inspire them and know how to deal with the complex needs of some youngsters who have been turned off by education.
We cannot just look at results. Value adding to a pupil means that pupil may have benefited far more from being taught in a good school than another pupil who is academically high achieving. I simply cannot accept that by looking at a set of results we can judge how well our schools are doing. We must ensure that every pupil is making the best of whatever they have to offer.
I accept that more money has gone into the system. We can all talk about how much extra there is, but Sian Kilpatrick of Bernards Heath Primary School told me that she had to write to parents to explain why she had to ask them for money: because a lot of things that used to be paid for are no longer paid for. This is the banquet I am referring to: outdoor visit risk assessments, legal and human resources advice, general maintenance costs and staff insurance. When parents send their children to school to get educated they do not expect that a teacher will have to divert money from teaching their pupils to pruning back overgrown trees in the playground that a risk assessment has identified as a problem to the pupils.
It is high time we had the six-hour debate. I do not think that views in here will change, but looking at what has been expected to be done with the money that schools have had is the only way to see whether there is enough money. If there is not, we may have to find some more.
The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate the hon. Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) on her opening speech, which was very good indeed.
There have been several very good speakers, including my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), who pointed to rising standards in our schools. He is of course absolutely right: thanks in part to our reforms, the proportion of pupils in good or outstanding schools has increased from 66% in 2010 to 84% today. Our more rigorous primary school curriculum—on a par with the highest performing in the world—has been taught since September 2014. Since it was first tested in 2016, the proportion of primary school pupils reaching the expected standard in maths has risen from 70% to 76% in 2018, and in reading from 66% to 75%.
Our primary school children have achieved their highest ever scores on international reading tests. When we introduced a phonic check in 2012, just 58% of six-year-olds taking it reached the expected standard. That figure is now 82%. More children are now on track to read more effectively than when we came into office in 2010. The attainment gap in the primary phase between the most disadvantaged pupils and their peers, as measured by the attainment gap index, has narrowed by 13.2% since 2011. In secondary schools, our more rigorous academic curriculum and qualifications support social mobility by giving disadvantaged children the knowledge they need to have the same career and life opportunities as their peers. I thank the 452,000 teachers—10,000 more than in 2010—who have delivered these higher standards in our schools. I also thank the 263,000 teaching assistants, of which there are 49,000 more than in 2011, and the 263,000 support staff, of which there are 129,000 more than in 2011.
To support these improvements, the Government have prioritised school spending while having to take difficult decisions in other areas of public spending. We have been enabled to do that by our balanced approach to the public finances and to our stewardship of the economy, reducing the unsustainable annual deficit of £150 billion, which was 10% of GDP in 2010, but 2% in 2018. The economic stability that that provided has resulted in employment rising to a record 32.6 million and unemployment being at its lowest level since the 1970s, giving young people leaving school more opportunities to have jobs and start their careers.[Official Report, 21 March 2019, Vol. 656, c. 10MC.]
That balanced approach allows us to invest in public services across Government. Core funding for schools and high needs will rise from almost £41 billion in 2017-18 to £43.5 billion in 2019-20. That includes an extra £1.3 billion for schools and high needs, announced in 2017, that we invested across 2018-19 and 2019-20, over and above plans set out in the spending review.
Since 2010, 825,000 new school places have been created in our schools. One of the first decisions we took on coming to office in 2010 was to double basic-need capital spending, reversing the cuts of 100,000 school places that we saw under the last Labour Government.
Nick Gibb
Not right now, if my hon. Friend will forgive me. I want to make sure that I respond to the points from as many hon. Members as I can.
Figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that real-terms per-pupil funding for five to 16-year-olds in 2020 will be more than 50% higher than in 2000. We compare favourably with other countries. The UK spends as much per pupil on primary and secondary state education as any country in the G7 apart from America—a point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert).
While more money is going into our schools than ever before, we recognise the budgeting challenges that schools face as we ask them to achieve more for children and to absorb cost increases, such as employer’s national insurance and higher pension contributions to teachers’ pension funds, that have arisen as a result of our determination to bear down on the unsustainable deficit. That means that it is essential to do all we can to help schools make the most of every pound.
In addition to providing additional funding for schools, we changed the way funding is distributed, to make the system fairer. Last April, we started to distribute funding through the national funding formula, with each area’s allocation taking into account the individual needs and characteristics of its schools. That replaced the unfair and outdated previous system, under which schools with similar characteristics received very different levels of funding, with little or no justification. These disparities existed for far too long, as my right hon. and hon. Friends from West Sussex pointed out, leaving some schools trying to achieve with fewer resources the same as other, better-funded schools in similar situations. That is why we committed to reform the system, and I am proud to say that our introduction of the national funding formula delivers that commitment.
Schools are already benefiting from the gains delivered by the national funding formula. Since 2017, we have given every local authority more money for every pupil in every school, while allocating the biggest increases to the schools that have been most underfunded. By 2019-20, all schools will attract an increase of at least 1% per pupil, compared with their 2017-18 baselines. The most underfunded schools will attract up to 6% more per pupil by 2019-20, compared with 2017-18.
The hon. Member for Blaydon will be aware that funding for schools in her constituency has risen from £52.6 million in 2017-18 to £54.9 million in 2019-20—a 4.5% increase in cash terms. In Blaydon, per-pupil funding has risen from £4,468 per pupil in 2017-18 to £4,635 in 2019-20, which is a 3.7% increase over that period.
The hon. Lady cited a figure from the School Cuts website, which incidentally has been criticised by the UK Statistics Authority. It said:
“We believe the headline statement”,
which the hon. Lady cited in this debate,
“that ‘91% of schools face funding cuts’ risks giving a misleading impression of future changes in school budgets. The method of calculation may also give a misleading impression of the scale of change for some particular schools.”
My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) made important points about the over-politicisation of this issue. I understand the points that he made about the historical inequities in school funding in West Sussex.