Education: Design Subjects
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Nash
I pay tribute to my noble friend’s support for technical education. In fact, there is no evidence that the EBacc has had a direct effect on the number of pupils taking arts subjects. In fact, the number of pupils taking at least one arts subject has increased since the introduction of the EBacc. As I have already mentioned, it is quite clear that modern pupils, in addition to being interested in design, are also interested in things such as coding.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister admit that it is shameful that the Government are wasting money on creating new free schools where school places are not needed and cutting the funding for pupils in adjacent schools where the money is needed? The Minister is presiding over a system that is depriving pupils in general because of his and his colleagues’ pet theory about independence.
Lord Nash
I am delighted that the noble Baroness has given me the opportunity to answer that question. Since I have been a Minister for the last four and a half years, 93% of free schools have been created in areas where there is a recognised need for new places. We are spending our money far more efficiently than the previous Labour Government. Despite inflation, we are building schools at least a third more cheaply than Labour’s profligate Building Schools for the Future programme. I constantly face bills from schools built quite recently under that programme, where I have to spend millions rectifying their very poor design.
Young Carers
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Nash
The noble Lord makes a very good point. We welcome the Children’s Commissioner’s report. We have just concluded our analysis of its findings and are considering what more we can do. We know that many local authorities are making great progress in their data analysis and capabilities but, as the noble Lord says, there is more for us to do. We are considering that in the light of the Children’s Commissioner’s report.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister undertake to ensure that psychiatric nurses treating patients are very careful? Often they have responsibility for doing what is best for the parent in a case of severe and distressing mental illness, but sometimes no one looks to the needs of the child, who may be in a home with a parent in an extremely distressing state. Surely there should be somebody there to protect the child from what can be a rather frightening and very paranoid parent.
Lord Nash
As I am sure the noble Baroness knows, we are working with the Department of Health to commission a major countrywide thematic review of children and adolescent mental health. We will bring forward a new Green Paper on children and young people’s mental health, and I shall certainly feed the noble Baroness’s comments into that thinking.
Education: Nursery and Early Years
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Nash
Yes. Our recently published workforce strategy sets out how we will support staff to offer good-quality provision for children with SEND. We are funding a range of training and development opportunities in this regard, working with organisations that specialise in SEND. We have a new targeted £12.5 million disability access fund and a requirement for local authorities to set up a local inclusion fund to support providers for better outcomes for children with SEND.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister undertake to look at research into high-quality preschool experience combined with adult education for children who fail later in life? Will he look at the Midwinter experiment in Liverpool, which did so much many years ago to demonstrate that the most important investment is high-quality nursery education combined with help for parents who sometimes have difficulty themselves in helping their children unless there is high-quality adult education for them?
Lord Nash
The noble Baroness is quite right in her remarks. We all appreciate that helping children at an early age, particularly those who have a difficult home life, is absolutely essential. The payback on that for both those children and our society is massive. I certainly would be delighted to look at the research to which she refers, and I would be happy to discuss it with her because I know that she has experience in relation to this.
Schools: Funding Formula
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Nash
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments about the efficiency of multi-academy trusts. One study shows that multi-academy trusts can achieve a saving of £146 per pupil. As I said, we are still recovering from the financial hole that we inherited in 2010 and we all have to adjust our resources. Schools have had a huge increase in money in recent years. We are trying very hard and have a lot of resources available on our government website to help them become more efficient.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister apologise for the fact that the Government are taking money out for their own pet schemes for grammar schools and depriving children in other schools in other parts of the country? Will he agree to go away and look at whether the Government’s pet schemes should have additional money that is not stolen from children in other schools?
Social Mobility
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts(8 years, 11 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Earl Howe) (Con)
My Lords, it is the turn of the Cross Benches and then, if we have time, we can hear from the Labour Benches.
Lord Nash
I agree entirely with the noble Lord on that. Increasingly we are seeing schools develop what is sometimes called a “raising ambitions” programme to raise their pupils’ horizons and ambitions. All too often in the past schools have not been ambitious enough for their pupils. I recently attended a very inspiring event run by Ormiston Academies Trust, which is developing a raising aspirations programme, and we are seeing many more of these kinds of programmes being developed.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws
My Lords, perhaps I may raise the issue of the new universities and the large numbers of young people from working-class backgrounds who choose to do law and invest in their futures by going on to qualify as solicitors but do not get training contracts. There is an absolute dearth of these contracts for students from modern universities—the former polytechnics and all these new universities that the Government are so keen to create. Ordinary working-class families encourage their children to go into areas where they assume there will be jobs, but there are no training contracts because they all go to the privileged.
National Funding Formulae for Schools and High Needs
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, has the Minister had a few moments to reconsider his answer to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on the whole issue of differentials, because he did not answer it? There will be many schools, as the Minister admitted, which will lose funding and will face difficulties. Given the Question that we considered earlier, where it was suggested that the Government might put extra money into independent schools and money for grammar school expansion, will it be possible for all the schools affected—a large number, as the Minister admitted—to submit to the consultation that they would prefer to have the money shared out?
Lord Nash
The noble Baroness is quite right about that. I can reassure her that there will be no cuts to the funding for high needs—no per-pupil cuts at all. Indeed, we have increased funding for high needs every year since the high-needs funding system was changed in 2013. This year, local authorities are getting more than £90 million in high-needs allocations.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, can the Minister be a little more specific about special and higher needs? Many years ago, Baroness Warnock identified that 20% of children have special needs, of whom only about 2% have needs severe enough for statementing. I go back to the question from my noble friend about the funding formula for young children. The Government are to be commended for extending childcare, but no one will support moving children with special needs not at statementing level, who are currently educated properly in infant and nursery schools by qualified teachers. We need an assurance that finance for this group of children will be protected. These children form a large percentage of those who fail to achieve later in their school careers because their special needs have not been identified and met.
Lord Nash
The noble Baroness is absolutely right and I am sure that she will be delighted to hear that, at the moment, additional-needs funding accounts for 13% for the overall schools budget and that it will be increasing, under these proposals, by an additional £1.7 billion, so it will be 18%. So in fact substantially more money will be made available for that group.
Independent Schools: Free Places
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Nash
My noble friend is right to say that we may well have to work with a number of groups to amend their proposals before we have a final set of proposals. As I say, we have a wide-ranging group of ideas and we are determined to devise something that will actually work.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
Will the Minister give an undertaking to ensure that, whatever happens, he will not take money from other schools’ budgets in order to fund a particular project that is being put forward by a group of people? As the Statement that the Minister is due to repeat later today shows, there is great concern that across the voluntary controlled and voluntary aided sector and local authority schools, money for school budgets is being cut. Projects like this ought not to be robbing children of funding for their schools just because the Government fancy a whim.
Lord Nash
This proposal is about encouraging independent schools to help the state sector, and the money will therefore be flowing towards the state sector, not away from it. As the noble Baroness knows, we have protected the core schools budget, but we will be talking about the national funding formula shortly.
Grammar Schools
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Andrews for this fascinating debate, which gave the opportunity for the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, to make her very interesting maiden speech.
I will follow on from my noble friend Lady Taylor. What issues face the education of children in our country? One major issue is underattainment by children, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, and disadvantage, as my noble friend said, can come in many forms. It can be poverty, or poverty of aspiration, or people not believing that the system is for them. The underattainment and failure, particularly of children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, is matched by disadvantage for children who have grown up in households where education is seen as “not for us”.
I will talk about increasing the attainment of children who come from backgrounds where we are concerned that they do not do well in the education system. My noble friend referred to nurseries; there is also Sure Start, which involves parents. I recall the Midwinter experiment in Liverpool many years ago, where parents—particularly, but not solely, mothers—were asked to go into the primary school, which was a very gentle, friendly and non-threatening environment. I met a young woman, a single parent with young children, who told me that she had come into the school on Valium—she could not cope with life. The school encouraged her to listen to children learning to read even though she herself was barely literate, so she took adult education classes. She then took a welfare rights course. She said to me, “As a result of that, I now want to go on a course to find out how to get some blankety blank rights”. This is about families like that. Sure Start should be expanded everywhere to help children who this policy will do little or nothing for.
Lancashire County Council was proud to be the first authority in the country to provide means-tested education maintenance allowances for all over the age of 15 who qualified, and we allowed adults who left school to come back. We are not tackling the huge pool of talent that is out there, which would benefit both children and the community. I am not the sort of person who believes that the sole function of education is employment. I know that employment is important, but everyone is entitled to a good education. People say that in many places 25% got in, but my own grammar school education taught me that it was far fewer than that. Interestingly, for what was then about 15% of the population, a third of the girls were told that they could go to university, a third were told, “My dear, you can become a domestic science teacher”, and a third were told to consider secretarial work. That was the ethos. The world is not like that any more.
We ought to offer everybody the chance to improve their education. If we want to help the most disadvantaged children, we will provide the services for them, but more importantly, for their parents and their families, who were rejected and told that they were failures the first time round.
Grammar Schools
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
Would the Minister accept that all serious education research—from Midwinter in Liverpool, to Head Start in America, to Sure Start—shows that detailed intervention with very young children is the best way of helping disadvantaged children? I accept the Government are doing more about childcare, but that does not solve the problem of disadvantaged children. When will the Minister accept that these children need detailed help from a very early age?
Lord Nash
I entirely agree with the noble Baroness that early years is so important. That is why we have seen so many people who started life in the secondary sector moving into the primary sector, and many of them are now moving into the nursery sector. I am delighted that since we started allowing, as of this round, free school applications to include applications for nurseries, a third of applications have included them.
Schools
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister accept that in the Statement there are many descriptions of the problem but few of the answers? In terms of 11-plus selection, during the passage of the legislation, will he cite exactly how any relevant study justifies selection? In fact, it is not selection at the age of 11; it is rejection for the overwhelming majority of children. Attainment is being judged. The noble Lord referred to special educational needs. Yes, regard will be given to children with statemented special educational needs, but not to others. What about summer-born children who may have had a full year less than their age group by the time they reach the age of 11? Early years education was a foundation on which to build, particularly for children from deprived, working-class communities. Are the Government going to back that in future and extend it? The Minister is falling for a cheap trick by the Prime Minister. He professes to be concerned that all children should be able to reach EBacc. Now the evidence we see is based on 20%—or is it 25% or 30%?—getting through and the others being rejected.
Lord Nash
As I have said, we believe it should be possible to design plans that would benefit the wider system. We are working with the Grammar School Heads Association on a test at 11 that will be much more difficult to coach and prepare for. The noble Baroness made an extremely good point on summer-born children. This is something we are looking at very closely. I have just taken over responsibility for admissions, and I am looking at this extremely closely. On early years, over the past few years, we have invested significant sums in widening access to childcare for parents, particularly the less advantaged. On the EBacc, our ambition is not that all children should take the EBacc; we fully understand that there will be some for whom it is not appropriate, but we see no reason why a target of 90% taking it, if not necessarily passing it, is not achievable. We are seeing that many schools that formerly had single figures for pupils taking EBacc are now achieving 70% or 80% of pupils studying these subjects quite happily.