Education Bill

Christopher Pincher Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to my dwindling number of fans in the Chamber for that unsolicited testimonial. I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak on Second Reading of this wide-ranging Bill. In the interests of time—the fickle finger of fate is working against us—I shall focus my remarks on one aspect of education that is essential to its success: the need to drive greater aspiration.

In Tamworth, we face a real challenge to encourage aspiration among our young people, because historically we have not had the sort of GCSE and A-level results that we could and should have had. However, parents, pupils and teachers are prepared to meet that challenge if they are given the tools with which to do the job.

There are three essential tools to driving up aspiration among our young people, the first of which is restoring discipline in our classrooms. I do not want to go on too much about that—my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson) has already spoken very eloquently about it—but we know that without good discipline, there cannot be good education. We heard the statistics. There are some 18,000 assaults on teachers each year, resulting in pupils being suspended or excluded, and that does not begin to describe the pain and fear that members of the teaching profession feel when those assaults happen.

Such indiscipline drives teachers out of the classroom, but it also distracts good children from their studies and means that the kids who really need help—the disadvantaged ones—do not even get into the classroom in the first place to be taught. I therefore welcome my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State’s announcement that the 24-hour notice period for detention will be abolished. That will give detention real teeth. I am pleased that we will encourage ex-members of the armed forces into the teaching profession, because they have dedication and enthusiasm and they know a little bit about discipline. I am also pleased that we will free-up pupil referral units, particularly in respect of my own excellent PRU at Two Rivers in Tamworth, to give them the opportunity to use their expertise to stem the tide of disruptive pupils who end up on the NEETs scrap heap.

We also need to use teachers. The Secretary of State paid tribute to them, as I do. We have some fantastic teachers in Tamworth, including a great set of maths A-level teachers at Belgrave high school. When I go to see my primary school heads at their quarterly meetings, I see the enthusiasm that they have for their subjects.

However, those professional people are burdened by bureaucracy. It is our responsibility to remove that burden of responsibility from our head teachers and other teachers, so that they can get on and do what they really want to do, which is to teach. That is what the Secretary of State will do. I also think that freeing-up schools via the academies programme encourages good teachers to stay in the profession and the recruitment of good teachers. We have one academy school in Tamworth, but by the end of next year all our secondary schools should be academies. Teachers in Tamworth are embracing freedom and the choice that freedom gives them.

It is important to stress vertical integration between primary and secondary schools. In Tamworth, we still have kids going into secondary school aged 11 who have a reading age of eight. Some even have reading ages of seven. I suppose that after 13 years in government, Labour might call that progressive. However, I do not think it is good enough, because it means that kids in that situation, entering Belgrave school, Wilnecote school, Queen Elizabeth’s Mercian school, Rawlett school or wherever, start at a disadvantage, and many of them will never catch up but will be put on the NEETs scrap heap.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will take note of this point, because we have discussed it before. We need to encourage greater linkage between primary and secondary schools, even joining them up, so that secondary and primary school teachers can work together to identify the children who need help and raise them up so that they are ready to go to secondary school and have the same chances as the other kids. Going to secondary school should be like going up a gentle incline; it should not be like facing a sheer cliff face. I hope that he will take that point onboard.

I should like to say one more thing about secondary school education and the need for greater aspiration. It is something that is not actually in the Bill, so I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister, in his winding-up speech, will make some remarks about it. Since the Butler Act—the Education Act 1944—we have clung to the antiquated notion that A-level students should apply to university six months before they sit the examinations that will determine whether they go. It is strange that the hopes and aspirations of young people should be determined by the educated guesses of their teachers, rather than their own merits. The fact is that they are just educated guesses: 55% of predicted grades, on which universities make their conditional offers, turn out to be wrong, and it is the most disadvantaged children who suffer, because of the kids doing A-levels in the lowest socio-economic group, 61% have mis-predicted grades and a very large proportion have under-predicted grades, the result being that many of them do not go to the university they want to and many do not go to university at all. That is a travesty.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will use all his eloquence and artistry to prevail upon the Minister for Universities and Science jointly to come up with a proposal for post-qualification applications to universities. It is a challenge, but it will mean less bureaucracy for universities and UCAS; it will end that horrible spectacle—I remember it back in 1988 when I left school—of kids going through the clearing process over the summer; and it will even up the advantage for those disadvantaged young people who currently go to university on the basis of crystal-ball gazing by their teachers, not on their merits.

Apart from that one, small caveat, I think that this is a good Bill. It offers freedom to schools, and we should support it. I shall be voting for it tonight.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—