Sixth-form Education: International Comparisons

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Monday 9th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Nic Dakin]

The hon. Lady is right to highlight the fact that certain elements of the curriculum are under threat when there is such pressure on funding. Enrichment activities, including those that address mental health issues, are one of the many activities that have been under threat over the past six years. The dramatic collapse in funding does have an inevitable impact on the education that 16 to 18-year-olds receive. As someone who has managed resources in a sixth-form college, I know that there are only a small number of variables to play with when facing significant funding cuts, as the sector has since 2010. Alongside the usual good management things relating to the back office, procurement, charges, efficiencies and so on, there are a limited number of options: shrink the curriculum offer; increase the teaching staff contact time; reduce student contact time; and increase class sizes. In reality, all those things have to be done to make things hang together.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an incredibly powerful case. On the issue of underfunding, does he agree that sixth-form colleges are uniquely cruelly treated, because unlike schools and academies they cannot cross-subsidise from the more generous funding available for younger students in schools and they do not receive a VAT reimbursement? So not only are they the most efficient, with the best track record on delivery, but they are the most underfunded section of the higher education area.

[Nic Dakin]

The hon. Lady is right to point out the performance of sixth-form colleges and the pressure on their funding. Of course the funding situation for 16 to 18 education is not just affecting sixth-form colleges—it is affecting school sixth forms and academy sixth forms, too. It is affecting all 16 to 18 experience.

Since 2010, the programmes of study followed by students have altered in those typical ways I outlined. Back then, most level 3 students followed a curriculum of four advanced courses in year 1, plus general studies, enrichment and tutorial. They progressed on to three or four courses in year 2, plus enrichment and tutorial. In most cases, as the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) pointed out, the enrichment has gone, the tutorial has shrunk significantly, general studies has largely disappeared and the number of advanced level courses taken is now normally three in both years. That leads to significantly lower student contact time. I know from experience that there is a direct correlation between contact time and achievement, particularly for students who have struggled to achieve at 16.

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[The Minister for School Standards (Mr Nick Gibb)]

May I start by adding to House’s adulation of the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and congratulate him on securing the debate? Ensuring high-quality post-16 education is a priority for the Government and for the country. We recognise the contribution of the dedicated staff working in all types of post-16 education and the hard work of students. In fact, a record proportion of young people are now participating in education, training or apprenticeships. I can give my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) and the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) the assurance that the Government support sixth-form colleges, including the sixth-form college mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney) and Franklin College in Grimsby.

Education and training in England is widely respected around the world, but we are determined to make further improvements to ensure that 16 to 19-year-olds are ready for the demands of the workplace by moving directly into skilled employment or by continuing to higher education. We are therefore reforming academic and technical education for over-16s and we are learning from the best international systems.

All countries that we look to learn from have a stage of education that no longer exclusively takes place in school. At this stage, there are options for students to gain relevant experience to prepare them for work either through apprenticeships or technical education, as we heard in the previous debate, or to prepare for further academic study at university. The way that works and the age at which it starts varies considerably around the world. For example, in countries such as Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, there is a high level of investment by employers in vocational training in the secondary phase and an early emphasis on workplace training. That leads to lower rates of young people who are not in education, employment or training than in England, but the difference in academic standards between pupils from different socioeconomic backgrounds in those countries is larger than in England.

By contrast, only about one fifth of 15 to 19-year-olds in countries such as Japan and Korea are enrolled in vocational upper-secondary programmes. The remaining 80% of those cohorts continue a rigorous academic programme. It is useful to benchmark ourselves—if “to benchmark” is a new verb—against such countries to understand the strengths and weaknesses of our education system and to raise our expectations of what students here can achieve. That is why I am determined that we should improve our maths teaching by learning from the high-performing Asian systems such as those in Shanghai, Singapore and Japan by adopting maths mastery through the maths hubs programme, but it is not simply a case of choosing one country to learn from. Our priority should be making our whole system world class.

There is much to be proud of in comparing our education system to other countries. For example, England’s 15-year-olds continue to perform significantly above the OECD average in science and, in 2015, England’s 15-year-olds performed above average in reading for the first time. However, our performance in maths remains at the OECD average and a survey of adult skills identified our 16 to 18-year-olds as having the weakest literacy and numeracy skills out of 18 countries in 2012. We need to take action to deal with areas of poor performance. In the case of literacy and numeracy, we have now made the continued study of English and maths in post-16 education and training compulsory for students who did not achieve a good GCSE pass at age 16. More broadly, we are reforming both academic and technical education.

International examples of programme hours are widely used, but those comparisons need to be carefully interpreted. It is important that we understand what the estimates include, how programmes of longer duration or higher intensity are funded and how they sit beside other routes for young people to take from school to work. It is not always clear in the various studies where work experience is included in the figures. Certainly in the planned hours used to benchmark our own programmes for funding, we do not include self-directed study or homework, which is a key part of this phase of education. It is important that we develop a system that serves our pupils and our economy.

In England, we have an established academic route for sixth-form students through well-respected A-level qualifications. It is true that our system requires pupils to make choices and therefore, to a certain extent, to specialise in a smaller number of subjects for the sixth-form stage, but some degree of specialisation is a feature of systems in other countries as well. Through the A-level route, our academic system at post-16 is effective in preparing pupils for successful futures through in-depth study of the subjects they choose. We have some of the best universities in the world, and the proportion of English students studying in higher education is now larger than it has ever been. That includes the highest ever entry rate for the most disadvantaged 18-year-olds.

Of course, we are not standing still, and we are strengthening the design of A-levels to make sure that pupils continue to be fully equipped for the future. We have given higher education providers a leading role in redesigning a number of key A-levels, to ensure that pupils who take these qualifications are prepared for undergraduate-level study. We have also redesigned the assessment model, increasing the time available for high-quality teaching rather than taking exams.

Where we have not matched our neighbours is in technical education, where we have a major programme of reform under way. The landmark review of vocational education for 14 to 19-year-olds conducted by Professor Alison Wolf in 2011 found that at least 350,000 16 to 19-year-olds were working towards vocational qualifications that offered no clear progression routes. The review led to the introduction of new study programmes and of per-student funding instead of per-qualification funding to ensure fair funding for FE colleges in line with other 16-to-19 institutions. As a direct result of the recommendations in the Wolf report, we now include only approved qualifications in performance tables. This means that young people can have confidence that their qualifications will enable them to progress to further study or into employment.

However, we recognise that the system is still not doing enough to support students who wish to pursue technical education. We recognise that we are still not matching the most effective systems of technical education in other European economies. That is why, following publication of the Sainsbury review, we are embarking on a radical reform of England’s post-16 technical education system. Learning from the best technical education systems overseas, we are working to introduce new technical routes that will enable young people to gain the knowledge and skills required for work, according to standards designed in partnership with employers. Bringing training for young people and adults in line with the needs of business and industry will support increases in productivity, which has lagged behind, even as economic growth and employment levels have improved. It will also help to ensure that young people and adults can move into sustained and skilled careers that lead to prosperity and security.

Alongside that, we are continuing the reform of apprenticeships, as we have heard. We are increasing the quality of apprenticeships through more rigorous assessment and grading at the end of the apprenticeship. We are also giving employers control of the funding so they become more demanding customers. We are committed to reaching 3 million apprenticeship starts in England by 2020.

[Caroline Lucas]

I genuinely very much welcome the Minister’s support for the sixth-form sector and sixth-form colleges, but he has been speaking for nearly 10 minutes and has said nothing about the arbitrary funding that has been the focus of so much of the concern expressed on both sides of the House. Will he commit to look at this funding issue? Will the Government look at how much funding is required for the rounded curriculum that sixth-form colleges want to deliver? Colleges in my constituency, such as Varndean College and Brighton, Hove & Sussex Sixth Form College, are desperate to deliver it but are being undermined by the lack of funding, which the Minister still has not really addressed.

[Mr Gibb]

If only the hon. Lady had waited just two more seconds, we would have come to that pivotal part of my response to the debate.

Clearly, the right level of funding needs to be in place to match our ambitious academic and technical reforms. In 2013, investment in education in the UK as a whole—combining public and private sources—was above the OECD average across all phases, including post-16. We have made the system more coherent so that school sixth forms and colleges are all funded and have their performance reported in the same way. Funding is on a per-student basis, giving schools and colleges the freedom to design the best programmes for their students, rather than rewarding institutions for providing large numbers of small qualifications that have little value.