School Governors

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael]

That is a really important point, Mrs Main. I am suitably chastened.

If a governing body is recruiting from a relatively small pool, it will, by definition, be harder to recruit. That is my first point. My second point is whether we need to have 20 people sitting around the table. Should we not be looking at smaller governing bodies?

Governing bodies should recruit people from outside the education field as well, because it is imperative that schools have a better relationship with businesses, thereby improving career opportunities for their pupils. Part of a governing body’s role is to provide an interface between the school and future employment and further and higher education.

Let me now focus on the role of the chairman and the need for them to be properly trained and, possibly, remunerated. If we want someone who is going to spend quality time with the head teacher and who is able and willing to challenge them and to support them when they are implementing necessary changes, we need someone who has the commitment, the appropriate professional skills and, if necessary, the reward. I want to put on the table now the idea that we should be remunerating people. This is not a new idea, and it has been advanced by others, not least the chief inspector at Ofsted, and we need to consider it very carefully.

Another element of the role of the chair is whether or not they have been formally assessed. We need to introduce a system in which assessment is rigorous. We do not want a few old friends gathering around for a cup of coffee, slapping one another on the back and saying, “Hey, you have done a really good job.”

The other key person in a governing body is the clerk, and they must be someone who is capable of taking notes, ensuring that meetings run properly and advising the governing body on its statutory responsibilities and any other legal implications of its actions. I have seen too many governing bodies struggle without such advice and make inappropriate and sometimes quite useless decisions.

An issue that I have already raised in relation to one of the reports is whether, when parents have lost confidence in the school governors, they should be able to dismiss the governors en masse. That would be a final accountability mechanism that was not necessarily used often, but which was an ultimate threat. Such a mechanism would ensure that governing bodies were mindful of the need to interface properly with the parent body.

Those issues are important with respect to the chair and other aspects. On the structure of governance, I want to focus on three areas. First, it would be sensible to think in terms of more federal structures for governing bodies. The evidence is—this certainly shows up in the academies programme—that where we have governing bodies looking after more than one school, the likelihood of outstanding schools being developed is much higher. That is a statistical fact and one that we need to note. However, it is also important that we bear it in mind that good schools can spread best practice to the schools that need to improve, and through a federal or a partnership model of governance, that might happen more often and more readily. It seems to me that that is a direction of travel that has already started with the academies programme, but it should be promoted.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend think that with small rural schools, including primary schools, that sometimes have particular challenges in attracting sufficient governors, the model he described—a single governing body for multiple schools—could be especially important?

[Neil Carmichael]

I thank my hon. Friend for that very astute question, and the answer is an emphatic yes. I believe that smaller schools in rural areas would benefit from one good governing body running two or three schools, and we should also look at vertical models, by which I mean secondary schools with feeder schools and not just primary schools. To some extent, it is horses for courses, but we must put this idea on the agenda as a direction of travel to ensure that we get better governance for schools, including those that he mentioned.

Oral Answers to Questions

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

1. What assessment he has made of the level of satisfaction of participants and businesses with the apprenticeship system.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

6. What assessment he has made of the level of satisfaction of participants and businesses with the apprenticeship system.

[Simon Kirby (Brighton, Kemptown) (Con)]

10. What assessment he has made of the level of satisfaction of participants and businesses with the apprenticeship system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vince Cable]

I do agree, but let me preface my remarks by saying what a success story the apprenticeship programme is. Not only has there been a big increase in scale—more than 60% over the last two years—but there is a very high satisfaction rate. Let me also take this opportunity to pay tribute to the work of the former Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes)—who has now moved on to higher things—and to welcome his excellent replacement, who is, indeed, part of an excellent BIS team.

The Holt study, which the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) mentioned, does acknowledge that there are barriers to SMEs’ access to the apprenticeship programme. We are trying to address them, most notably by channelling resources through employers rather than trainers: that will increasingly be the emphasis of the programme.

[Damian Hinds]

The Jason Holt reforms present great opportunities for the hospitality sector, which has considerable potential for employment export earnings and economic growth, but in which we need to drive productivity gains. As the quantity of apprenticeships continues to increase, how can we ensure that their quality keeps pace with it, or does better?

[Vince Cable]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to say that we need to maintain quality standards. I have asked Doug Richard, an entrepreneur with a background in this area, to give careful consideration to the quality issues and how we can shape the apprenticeship programme around genuine skills training, particularly at skill level 3 and above.

A great deal is happening in the hospitality sector. For instance, Hilton recently offered 100 new apprenticeship places. The Department will shortly hold a round-table discussion about the sector, and apprenticeships will be an important element of that.

Secondary Education (GCSEs)

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stuart]

Fortunately, my hon. Friend takes me to the issue I wanted to address next, which is the administration of examinations. Unfortunately, however, I am unable to comment on that now. The Education Committee has conducted a long inquiry into precisely that issue, looking at the trade-offs between a single board, competition between boards, franchising by subject and various other ways of cutting it. We have concluded our report, but because of the examination season—whoever leaked this story to the press last week was obviously less sensitive than us to the fact that children were taking exams—we decided to delay the publication of our report until 3 July. So, I am afraid that, until then, I cannot engage in that issue. However, we have looked at it in depth, and I hope I am not in contempt of Parliament if I say that the Committee came up with a unanimous recommendation and report. I hope that those on both sides of the House will wait until at least 3 July before allowing any of their opinions to solidify further.

If the Secretary of State is talking about a more rigorous GCSE system—whether it is given a new name or not—which is effectively a single examination system, as we have now, that would rather destroy the entire premise of my speech, leaving me short for words.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Time for a coffee.

[Mr Stuart]

Time for a coffee and to let others speak.

However, over the last two years the Government have made a series of announcements looking to put greater rigour into the system. They announced the ending of modularisation of GCSEs, tackling the culture of re-sits, ending equivalences and promoting the English baccalaureate, which, of course, rewards those students who achieve good GCSEs in English, maths, two sciences, a language and either history or geography. However, at the end of that process, if the leak is to be believed—I am in a state of confusion now—they suddenly announced the scrapping of GCSEs altogether. That does not seem terribly coherent.

Just last June the Secretary of State said the following about GCSEs:

“So next year the floor will rise to 40 per cent and my aspiration is that by 2015 we will be able to raise it to 50 per cent. There is no reason—if we work together—that by the end of this parliament every young person in the country can’t be educated in a school where at least half of students reach this basic academic standard.”

He went on to say:

“A GCSE floor standard is about providing a basic minimum expectation to young people that their school will equip them for further education and employment.”

That was the direction of travel then; suddenly, a year later—if we are to believe the Daily Mail—that has been scrapped. On the other hand, if I understood correctly what the Secretary of State said today, that was an entirely false idea and there is no plan to do such a thing at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Young people are working harder in our schools than ever before, guided by probably the best ever generation of teachers. Certainly, lessons are planned and progress tracked in a way that it never was when most of us were at school. Young people are also examined more, at considerable cost to our schools—the average cost of exams to maintained secondary schools was £44,000 in 2003 and £96,000 by 2010. Those pupils and teachers are being let down by a system that has allowed the erosion of confidence in their qualifications.

There is massive pressure on schools, as we all know, from the five-plus C-plus measurement in league tables. Although it is true, as many right hon. and hon. Members have said, that there have been real improvements in educational attainment, it is also true that ever since those league table ladders were created, ingenious schools have found ever more ingenious ways of getting up them, aided and abetted by public policy and the exams industry, with things such as double awards, short courses, half GCSEs, new subjects and, of course, the granddaddy of them all, equivalents, which make a 19 percentage point difference in the league tables. If equivalents are included, 75% of children get five or more GCSEs at grade C or above, but that goes down to 56% if those equivalents are taken out.

Like economic growth, improvements in grade have both a real part and an inflationary part. The real growth comes from better teaching, better teachers and more engaged parents, and I think we have see ample evidence of those things.

[Gloria De Piero]

In that case, would the hon. Gentleman listen to a maths teacher from my constituency and the 11th most improved school in the country from 2012, who says:

“The current GCSE system allows every pupil to achieve beyond their potential and is fully recognised by employers regardless of tier”?

[Damian Hinds]

I am always happy to hear from distinguished maths teachers, but I am not quite sure how the hon. Lady’s intervention relates to or contradicts what I just said. I was saying that there have clearly been real improvements, but I do not think there is anyone left, including that distinguished maths teacher, who doubts that on top of those real improvements there has been significant grade inflation, as acknowledged by the shadow Secretary of State.

There are four key elements to the grade inflation. First, there has been the gradual easing of what we used to call the syllabus—now called the specification—on the part of the exam board. Secondly, at the school end, there has been teaching to the test. Thirdly, there have been all sorts of elements in the design of examinations, including modularity or what is now called unitising, early takes, re-sits, the use of calculators and so on. Fourthly—this sounds a bit dull and technical but it is very important—there is the statistical tolerance in the results. Every year, there is rightly a normalisation to say what results, for example, a key stage 4 cohort should get relative to what they achieved at key stage 2, with perhaps a 1% tolerance either way on a finding—but of course the tolerance only ever goes up. That is the most pure form of grade inflation.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making these points about how people work within the rules to maximise the effect, but even when I was at school there were children who were thought to be marginal when it came to getting an O-level and were dissuaded because it was thought that they would skew the results and do the school down. Let us not pretend that this is something new.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Gentleman is very youthful looking but I am not sure the league tables were in place when he was at school, so I find that point slightly confusing.

Does it matter that there has been grade inflation? I think we have all heard from higher education institutions, employers in our constituencies and members of the public that it does matter. One witness who gave evidence to the Education Committee’s exams inquiry said they did not believe that employers expect to be able to compare exam results over time, but I have news for him: that is exactly what employers, higher education institutions and parents expect to be able to do, and quite justifiably so. However, the system does not support them in doing that. Although there have been many factors at play with grade inflation, there are three root causes among which there is interplay: the pressure on schools to deliver the results; the competitive land grab for volume market share on behalf of the competing exam boards; and a too malleable system that attempts to put everything on a single scale when everything does not necessarily fit together.

I think we have moved on a good way in this debate. Over the past few days, the phrase we have heard most often on this subject has been about not wanting to return to a two-tier system, but increasingly there is a recognition that there are two tiers now, with 40% of youngsters being left behind. One could even argue that there is a third tier, with the young people who are put on to other qualifications that are of so little value to them in later life. Even in the purer sense, within a single-subject GCSE there are the two tiers of the foundation level and the higher level. Although this has been talked about much today, it is in many ways the best kept secret in education. I keep finding, when I talk to the parents of 14 and 15-year-old pupils, that they are not aware of that distinction. In many ways O-levels and CSEs never went away—they were just rebranded, but into one thing.

Let us take the example of GCSE maths. If someone is entered for GCSE maths at foundation level, that decision will be taken when they are in year 10 and the highest grade they can then achieve is a grade C. That sounds very much like getting a CSE grade 1 in the 1980s. And it is not just maths. Other subjects that are tiered include biology, physics, chemistry, general science, classical civilisation, Latin, English literature, English language, geography and modern foreign languages— almost every one of the core academic subjects that most of us did at school, with the single exception of history.

[Liz Kendall]

Will the hon. Gentleman explain how having O-levels and CSEs would make that two-tier system better?

[Damian Hinds]

I have a great deal of respect for the hon. Lady, who is an erstwhile colleague of ours on the Select Committee, but I am not proposing a return to anything from the past. What we must do is build an exam and qualification system that is fit for the future and reflects the new reality in which the participation age is 18, not 16. We must make sure that all young people can reach their potential at 15 to 16 and that if they have not done so by that point, particularly in key subjects such as English and maths, they go on to do so at 16 to 18 and beyond.

[Nia Griffith]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Damian Hinds]

I am sorry, but I am running very short of time.

There is a bunch of complications in this two-tier system—for example, it applies to some subjects but not others, and there are even subjects for which students can enter one paper at foundation level and still score a grade B or A. There might be good reasons for all that, but one thing this system is not is clear. I understand the argument that all must have prizes, and in some ways that seems like a good thing, but it does young people no favours to kid them that the worth of the qualifications they are taking is greater than it really is. Instead, we must strive so that all merit prizes. We should aspire to the vast majority of children getting those key subjects aged 15 and 16, but as I said in reply to the hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), there must be the facility to return to them at age 16 to 18. One of the key points in the Wolf report was the lack of post-16 focus in our country compared with others on English and maths in particular—subjects that command a huge premium in the workplace.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Damian Hinds]

I am sorry, but I cannot.

For our country, we need world-class exams to win in the fiercely competitive new global economy. For our young people, we need worthwhile qualifications with the right breadth, depth and usefulness that will serve them well in their work and in their life.

Safeguarding Children

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

This issue is a matter of the most profound importance. From time to time it is jolted to the top of the media agenda in the most awful way, as happened with Victoria Climbié, Peter Connelly and the Rochdale case. Although it might top the headlines only periodically, its extent is vast and always with us. On the Select Committee’s recent visit to Doncaster, I was taken aback by the sheer physical scale of the call centre operation dealing with calls from the public and practitioners and data entry just for that local authority area and to hear about the huge number of households in the city that social workers call on regularly. We know that in the year to 2011 there were more than 600,000 referrals to children’s social services nationally and 49,000 child protection plans initiated. As for some of the other types of abuse, such as online abuse and child-on-child abuse, we can really only start to guess at their extent.

There have of course been positive developments, which it is important to acknowledge. A number of Members have mentioned what an encouraging sign it was that the first report to be commissioned after the change of Government was the Munro report, which contains a lot of useful material. The formation of the MASH teams—the multi-agency service hubs—is clearly a development that can hopefully deliver great benefits, but we must be careful not to identify a silver bullet and think that it will solve all problems.

I hope that the Government’s troubled families programme will also signal a further positive development in this area. People go on about the 120,000 families, but it is worth noting that, in fact, there are not 120,000 families who will receive additional help that is not available to others—the 120,000 figure is a statistical construct that comes from analysis done under the previous Government and the Cabinet Office report. The initiative is about encouraging local authorities to work together and having a lead person operating on behalf of each family to try to join up services.

The other thing I welcome is the motion and the way it unites both sides of the House. My only complaint, and a tiny one, is that with a little more notice we could have got more hon. Members here. I also want to pay tribute to social workers. Clearly, social work is not a job they do for the glamour, kudos or cash; it is a hugely difficult job, sometimes done in the most horrendous circumstances. Social workers should expect our constant support and acknowledgment for the difficult job they do. As Eileen Munro said, and as the Minister repeated today, their job is all about trying to predict the ability of a parent to bring up their child and to protect the child, and at the best of times that is an inexact science. I think that elevating the status of the profession in every way we can is vital, and that includes things such as the chief social worker and a properly founded college of social work.

There will always be a tension between trying to standardise approaches on the one hand and trying to devolve decision making on the other, and the pendulum will swing from one direction to the other from time to time. I think that most people would accept that it swung too far towards the template approach, so a reduction in the several hundred pages of guidance, which were well intentioned, to a much slimmer approach marks a further move towards trusting professional judgment. When the Minister appeared before the Select Committee—he called it a gruelling grilling, but in truth it was more of a walk in the park—he gave the example of what different GPs said they would do if a mother presented with a child who had bruises and signs of potential abuse. He said that the smartest and very best GPs said that they would phone the nursery school or some other professionals to ask if they had noticed something as well and, if so, they should proceed together. That is the kind of common-sense approach and professional judgment that we all want to see. One crucial issue is that there is somebody to report an incident to, and that one knows in all cases whom to report it to and one is confident that, as appropriate, it will be acted upon. That is why the issue of thresholds, which the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) brought up earlier, is so important.

It is also important that members of the public know how to report such matters. I hate to use the word “brand” in this context, but trusted brands such as ChildLine and the NSPCC play a vital role. We heard from the head of CEOP the other day that there might be a plan to introduce a new phone number, 114, 116 or something, in order to report incidents and abuse, but it does not sound like the smartest move imaginable when there are already recognised, accepted and acknowledged channels through which people can report.

During the bulk of the time remaining to me, I want to discuss the abuse of young people by young people. I welcome the Government’s plans to extend the definition of domestic abuse to under-18s, because we really do not know the extent of these problems as they affect young people, so I also welcome the Home Affairs Committee’s focus on the area. We were all shocked to hear what the deputy children’s commissioner said the other day about the prevalence of violence and of sexual violence among young people in and out of gangs, and, as the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) said earlier, hearing that 11-year-old girls are expected to perform sexual acts on a line-up of boys makes one sick to the stomach.

One relatively new issue is sexting—a word that, when I became a Member two years ago, I had not heard of. One might have thought that it was some sort of wordplay, but now we know that it has a terrible ability to do harm and is not yet taken seriously in many different areas. When we on the Education Committee asked the head of CEOP how such matters were reported to the police, how they dealt with them and how many cases they had heard of, it became apparent that, although he obviously takes it very seriously, in many places its prevalence is not yet fully appreciated or acted upon.

A dangerous relativism can sometimes creep into this subject, even among people who clearly care and are very knowledgeable about it, and in the case of sexting, for example, one occasionally hears somebody say, “Of course, sexting can be a part of growing up and an important part of sexual discovery.” Call me old-fashioned, but I just think that that is wrong. I think that 12-year-old, 13-year-old or 14-year-old girls being forced into, coerced into or voluntarily sending naked or semi-naked pictures of themselves around the internet or on mobile phones is just plain wrong. In society, in government and in schools we have to be unafraid to say that, because if we do not, we put young girls in particular in a very difficult position at a vulnerable time of their lives, when they might be under all sorts of pressure to do all sorts of things that they do not naturally want to do. I think we owe that to them.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

Oral Answers to Questions

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

That is an excellent point. Now that more than half the number of secondary schools are either academies or en route to becoming academies, those who attack the academies programme are attacking the majority of state schools in the country. It is a pity that there are people in the Labour party who are enemies of state education at a time when so many great head teachers are taking advantage of academy freedoms to raise standards for all.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

12. What steps he plans to take to improve the quality of teaching.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

Nothing has more impact on children’s achievement at school than the quality of the teaching that they receive. We are raising the bar for new teachers, helping existing teachers to improve, and, when teachers cannot meet the required standards, making it easier for head teachers to tackle underperformance.

[Damian Hinds]

As my hon. Friend says, far the most important factor in the quality of teaching is the presence of our dedicated teachers. Will he consider widening access to taster sessions for potential teachers, both to attract more good people to the profession and to give more people a chance to decide whether it is really for them before committing themselves to a BEd or a PGCE?

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. The Teaching Agency’s new school experience programme for people who are considering teaching maths, physics, chemistry or a modern language at secondary level provides precisely the opportunities to which he refers. It gives participants an opportunity to observe teaching and pastoral work, and to talk to teachers about day-to-day school life. More than 800 people have benefited from the programme so far, and many more placements are planned for the future.

16-to-18 Mathematics Education

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Last week, the Secretary of State for Education told the Association of School and College Leaders:

“Lest anyone think we have reached a point where we should slacken the pace of reform—let me reassure them—we have to accelerate.”

I completely agree, and one critical area for reform must be sixth-form provision, especially in maths where we have our largest issues.

Britain’s poor performance in maths is well documented. According to the OECD programme for international student assessment—the PISA study—the UK is ranked in 28th place for maths, although it is in 25th place for reading and 16th place for science. Too often, maths in Britain is seen as something that is nice to have, rather than as the vital tool that it ought to be in our modern society.

Perhaps our weakest area concerns our take-up of mathematics between the ages of 16 and 18. A study by the Nuffield Foundation found that Britain had the smallest proportion—below 20%—of students studying maths between the ages of 16 and 18, when compared with places such as Russia, Japan and Korea where virtually all students in that age group study maths, Canada where the figure is 80%, or France where it is almost 90%. Britain is a massive outlier in terms of maths education for that age group, and that runs contrary to our economic interests and to the interests of individual students who are taking A-levels or a vocational equivalent. A study by Professor Alison Wolf showed that maths A-level has the highest earnings premium of any subject, adding up to 10% extra to the earnings of a maths graduate.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I am following closely my hon. Friend’s important argument. As well as the earnings premiums for A-levels, Professor Wolf also identified the huge premiums obtained by maths and English GCSE. Will my hon. Friend go on to talk about the importance of GCSE maths retakes, as well as the A-level?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I will come to that point. It is important to give those who do not achieve maths at GCSE the option to retake that course in a different way between the ages of 16 and 18, so that they obtain a good qualification that will be useful for the rest of their lives. The 16-to-18 age group is particularly important, yet it is where this country has a gap. Those are the people who will go on to study maths, physics, information technology and engineering at university, yet we all know from speaking to businesses in our constituencies about the great skills gap in that area.

Services for Young People

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to lead the debate under your august chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I am delighted to see that four fellow members of the Education Committee have made it to this Thursday afternoon debate. The hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) is making a ticking movement with her hand, and she is right to imply that we deserve a medal of honour.

The debate is about our report, “Services for young people”. I intend to set out its key conclusions and the policy developments since its publication, and to comment on questions that the Government have still not answered. It is a pleasure to see the Minister present. I am sure that, given his personal commitment, those questions that have not yet been answered will receive answers this afternoon and that we will treasure them when they are duly delivered.

The Committee conducted its inquiry over six months during 2010-11. Our aim was to consider the relationship between universal and targeted services; who accesses services and what they want from them; the roles of the voluntary, statutory and private sectors; and the impact of funding cuts and the scope for commissioning services in future.

The Committee received 158 pieces of written evidence. We heard from young people, both in person and via an online forum, which we ran for several months with the Student Room and through which we received more than 200 responses. Young people were represented on the panels on many occasions when we took oral evidence—I say that for the benefit of anyone who may have ignorantly thought that young people were not involved fully and consistently throughout the process.

We published the report on 15 June 2011 and it was well received by the sector. The Young Men’s Christian Association said that,

“it focuses in on many of the key issues and problems that are being faced by youth service providers across the country.”

Children & Young People Now said that

“at long last there is an attempt from Westminster to address the challenge of serving young people in these austere times”,

and called on the Government to rise to that challenge. On receipt of the Government’s response, we decided to publish a further report commenting on it, because it did not tackle several issues satisfactorily.

Since then, the Government’s cross-departmental strategy on young people, Positive for Youth, was published in December 2011. The Government make a number of welcome commitments and take up some of the Committee’s recommendations. In other areas, however, they do not go far enough. I will return to the merits of that strategy document in a moment, but first I want to set out the Committee’s key conclusions.

Our inquiry found that young people spend more than 80% of their time outside formal education, yet local authorities spend 55 times more on formal education than on services for young people outside the school day. Acknowledging that inequality, we set out to understand which services are most effective at supporting and developing young people outside school.

Witnesses with different perspectives agreed on three key points: first, that public spending cuts had disproportionately affected youth services; secondly, that there was great potential for youth services to help transform young people’s lives; and thirdly, that services had long been poor at proving their impact and, thus, at making their case to Government—a weakness that is all the more pertinent in times of austerity.

On funding, the Committee concluded that the picture looked bleak and was likely to worsen. Funding had been doubly hit, with the removal of ring fences from central Government grants and the 11% overall reduction to the total value of youth service funds that go to local authorities and are redirected into the early intervention grant. We calculated that local authority spending on youth services in 2010-11 equated to only £77.28 per young person a year, which is about 21p a day.

Two surveys in 2011 showed that more than £100 million would be cut from local youth service budgets by March 2012, with average cuts of 28% and up to 100% in some areas. Even the Department for Education agreed, concluding that

“the scale of budget reductions and the pace at which decisions are being made”

was

“limiting the scope for… innovation and fundamental reform”.

The Committee was alarmed enough by the apparent extent of the cuts to urge the Government to consider using their powers to direct local authorities to commission adequate services for young people, which they have a statutory duty to do.

On the impact of services, we received strong personal stories from many young people about their value. One young person wrote on an online forum that

“when young people come to the centre they know they aren’t going to be judged and they can be who they want to be, for some of them it gives a break from stresses outside”,

while another stated that

“without my youth workers I would now be in a lot of trouble with education, work and drugs. But with their help I have been able to sort myself out and get onto the right path and stop the bad things I was doing over a year ago”.

We received a lot of anecdotal evidence about the efficacy of youth services and their individual impact, but, as I have said, collectively, services struggled to show the impact of their work in an easily defensible and statistically strong way.

The importance of youth services, coupled with the limited public resources available for them, makes it more vital that effective services are identified and funded. That is in line with the work of the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) on early intervention. The most important thing when spending limited public resources is to find those interventions that will make the greatest difference. Early intervention does not need to take place only during pre-school years; it could equally take place during the teenage years by getting involved with people who might be at risk and intervening early to support more positive behaviours.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate on the Committee’s report. Does he agree that it would be helpful if we moved away from the confusion surrounding the definition of early intervention? Some people take “early” to mean years 0 to 3, while others take it to mean early in the life cycle of an actual problem. Both things are, of course, important, but they are often conflated.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend is right. The hon. Member for Nottingham North is also right to not only emphasise the importance of early intervention, but to want to build an evidence base to justify additional public funding. If investing another £100 million into the lives of young people means getting a payback and saving many more pounds later, even the person with the driest heart in the Treasury will see the benefits. I am delighted—this is a tribute to the hon. Gentleman’s work—that the Government have agreed to fund an early intervention foundation that will do precisely that. I hope that, as that work develops, it will look not only at the early years but, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) has rightly said, at early intervention throughout a young person’s childhood.

[Damian Hinds]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for being so generous in giving way early in his speech. He may intend to address this issue later, but will he comment on some of the difficulties involved in measuring the effects of different programmes? We discussed and received evidence about those problems in Committee. The prisoner scheme in Peterborough is a perfect, text-book example of payment by results, but the proposition for a youth club is completely different because of the different client group, control group, time period and the different influences on people’s lives.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question. As he has rightly said, we considered the issue. In principle, I do not think that there is any division between the parties on payment by results. The question is: who is paid by results? Are we really going to try and collect data on a once-a-week youth club in a particularly deprived area which has a brilliant community leader who builds on the history in that area, where parents themselves attended clubs locally and there is great support, and it really brings the community together? Will the expense be completely disproportionate to the effort of collecting it? The answer is probably yes. The danger of identifying something at a micro level where we can easily pay someone to deliver results is that they will then always have to be able to provide that at that micro level before we support the whole principle, and that could limit its impact.

Payment by results is probably better introduced at a higher level. For example, Birmingham city council could have a partnership with Goldman Sachs for the money, Serco for certain other skills, and seek to bring in additional private money to support and strengthen the focus of the services it provides. That extra money could be brought in to support those services on an evidence base that makes the council—and the hard-hearted business people—believe that they can deliver those improved outcomes for young people. As a Government and as a society, we need to be more effective in ensuring that the money to deliver improved outcomes for young people, which we vote for in this place, actually helps to deliver them. It is important to get the mechanics right.

[Damian Hinds]

I promise to be quiet after this brief intervention. Does my hon. Friend agree that what comes up time and again in talking about how to identify a good parenting programme or a good programme for teenagers, is that we know it when we see it? For payment by results, the trick is to leverage the knowing it when we see it so that we can identify the individuals or organisations who are good, and then work out who else to invest money in for the future of our young people.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As long as there is accountability and people are driven by delivering the outcomes at the end, they should have discretion over how they use their budget. There could be investment in the Friday evening group I mentioned if there was confidence that it was helping to meet our overall goals for delivering change in the local community.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Stuart]

The Minister’s point was well made. We need to get everybody—in my example, from Birmingham city council downwards—focused on outcomes. The danger—this happens in all Governments; it is not peculiar to the previous one—is that, despite talking about rewarding success and penalising failure, the tendency is to reward failure. For those who deliver services, the less they succeed, the more money they get and the bigger the budget that comes to them. To break out of that and ensure that everyone is focused on outcomes and that the bureaucracies that administer these things see it as in their interests to change the lives of the young people for whom they are responsible, would be a good thing, and I wish the Minister luck in delivering it.

Returning to the difficulty of services demonstrating their impact, the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services told us that although

“anecdotal evidence and young people’s stories”—

were available—

“what is really difficult is some sort of set of statistics whereby we could show the total amount of investment and the total amount of return”.

That conclusion was borne out in independent evaluations, including by Ofsted.

Although the impact of youth work encounters with young people can certainly be hard to quantify, the Committee said that local authorities needed some indicators on which to commission services. The Committee recommended that the Government commission NCVYS to develop an outcomes framework that could be used across the country. However, we said that it should be not just a question of counting the number of young people using a service or the number of encounters—in some ways, failure would be rewarded again by such an approach—but a measure of young people’s social and personal development and that they should be involved in its design.

In addition to those three earlier points, the national citizen service—the Government’s new volunteering programme for 16-year-olds—was a key area that witnesses felt strongly about. We addressed that service in our report, and although we liked the idea of a community volunteering project and a rite of passage for young people and found the scheme’s aims entirely laudable, as did almost all our witnesses, we questioned whether the Government could justify its expense.

We discovered that, based on the cost per head of the 2011 pilot, the NCS would cost £355 million each year to provide a universal offer of a national citizen service to 16-year-olds, assuming just a 50% take-up. Even allowing for economies of scale, we felt that there was a risk that the costs of the NCS—a six-week voluntary summer service for 16-year-olds—could outstrip the entire annual spending by local authorities on youth services, which totalled £350 million in 2009-10. Instead, we recommended that the core idea of the national citizen service be retained, including its laudable aims, but that it be significantly amended to become a form of accreditation for existing programmes that could prove that they met the Government’s aims of social mixing and personal and social development, with the component parts of NCS, such as a residential experience and a social action task.

The Government could have said, but did not—I often thought that if I were a Minister I would have said it, although the Minister did not—that the NCS was just being piloted and that the aim of the pilots was to help to identify ways to deliver more. The Government said that they wanted to secure and leverage in more funding and to ensure that they did not scale up the prices that the initial pilot suggested.

We received our initial response from the Government both directly—orally— and in writing from the Minister, who seemed less than entirely thrilled. We felt that the Government, in their initial response to our report, failed to address fully a number of issues, so we wrote a further report, calling on Ministers to clarify their intentions on how the Government intended to measure outcomes from youth services, which is pretty important, given everything that we have been talking about so far, and the grounds on which they would judge whether a local authority had made sufficient provision, because there is a statutory duty on local authorities.

Although the Government said that they were prepared to intervene, they would not tell us on what grounds they would do so, other than in the most general terms. The Government would not describe what services would, or would not, look like if they were likely to trigger intervention, thus leading to the likelihood that councils could continue to make cuts to youth services that the Government described as disproportionate.

We also asked the Government to clarify the total public spending on youth services before the early intervention grant. The Government said that they did not accept our figure—£350 million—so we asked them to tell us what their figure was. As they did not accept our figure, we thought that a reasonable request. We also asked them to tell us how they planned to fund the NCS after the two pilot years. What have the Government said in response to our two reports and, subsequently, in their Positive for Youth strategy?

The aspirations of Positive for Youth have been well received in the sector. The National Children’s Bureau said:

“we are pleased with Positive for Youth’s holistic approach to giving young people more opportunities and better support”.

The National Youth Agency and the NCVYS both welcomed the Government’s publication of a comprehensive strategy, drawn up in consultation with the sector and produced in less than two years after the creation of the Government. However, many youth organisations are concerned that the strategy is vague about how its aspirations will be implemented, so reflecting a worry of the Committee that was mentioned in its report.

Catch22, which works with particularly deprived youngsters, commented that the levers for change in the Government’s policy “lacked bite”. That view was echoed by the Children’s Commissioner, Dr Maggie Atkinson, who said:

“without action this strategy will amount to no more than words on a page”.

The NYA qualified its support for Positive for Youth, saying:

“no vision or policy is worth anything if it isn’t followed by clear and decisive action”.

The chief executive of YMCA England, Ian Green, went further:

“the Government’s vision will come to nothing if those responsible for the delivery of services on the ground are not prepared to implement it, and the Positive for Youth statement is very light on how it intends to address this fact”.

[Damian Hinds]

I suppose that we get used to such e-mails, but does not my hon. Friend accept that it is a statement of the blindingly obvious to say that things will not happen if people do not implement them?

[Mr Stuart]

I was reflecting on those words even as I read them, but their implications are clear. If there is no firm action plan, the criticism—to spell it out for my hon. Friend in case he, too, is missing the blindingly obvious—is that if the strategy produced by the Government after such a long period of preparation does not spell out exactly what they are going to do and how they will hold to account those responsible for delivering services, there is every danger that we will have fine words and no real delivery. That might be a statement of the obvious, but there is a serious risk, with a strategy that is light on content, in respect of whether there is confidence that it will deliver on the ground.

Positive for Youth has the right focus on fostering young people’s aspirations and on their personal and social development. It is good to hear the Government praise the potential of young people and extol the qualities and achievements of the vast majority, especially in light of the negativity towards young people generated by last summer’s riots. The Government and the Minister are right to emphasise the positive. If all we ever measure are provisions averting negative behaviour by young people, we suggest that their natural tendency is to behave negatively. In fact, the Minister wants to emphasise—the Government are right about this—that most young people are positive members of our society and that we should support and celebrate their positive behaviour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Carmichael]

My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) is absolutely right, and his point is central to the matter. We should not think that youth services are just about statutory provision, because they are not. They are all part of the big society, which is encouraging many villages in my constituency to start thinking about providing the services that people need, including youth services.

I think that I have made my point about the rich variety of facilities, clubs, sports clubs and so on with which young people can get involved, and about the powerful role played by charities in providing facilities.

[Damian Hinds]

Before concluding his remarks, perhaps my hon. Friend will touch on the provision made by what these days we call faith communities and in the old days used to call Churches. There is an ongoing debate about the role of Christianity and other faiths and religions in public life, and a lot of churches provide important youth facilities that often are not restricted only to members of one particular denomination. The King’s Arms in Petersfield is one such example—

[John Robertson (in the Chair)]

Order. We are talking about the Select Committee report, and although it may be nice to mention every group in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, I doubt that we have got time for them all.

Oral Answers to Questions

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Monday 27th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Teather]

I am hugely grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s support, help and guidance on this issue. I absolutely agree that there is a moral as well as a financial case for investing in early intervention. It is a priority for the Government. He will be aware that I cannot say too much at the moment about the early intervention foundation, but we are working with other Departments to develop a specification for the foundation and are committed to ensuring that we get best value for money. My Department will issue a public notification shortly, in advance of an open and competitive procurement process.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

A challenge for early intervention can be that the beneficiaries are a self-selecting group, so what is my hon. Friend doing, working with local authorities and other Departments, to ensure that those who will benefit most from early intervention get it? Does this not stress again the importance of those decisions being made locally?

[Sarah Teather]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman on this point, which is one reason we are about to begin trials of payment by results with local authorities and children’s centres—to ensure that they are focusing on the families who most need early intervention. It is one of a range of areas where we are trying to focus much more on outcomes, rather than just inputs.

Oral Answers to Questions

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

I can confirm the first part of the hon. Gentleman’s question: the £3 billion is fully committed to and there are no mixed messages. On borrowing, it is not merely a question of the date, but of the fiscal position of the country.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

T10. This week’s National Audit Office report on apprenticeships shows that for every pound of public money that is invested, there is a return of £18. Will my hon. Friend reassure us that he is taking all reasonable steps to continue the successful growth of apprenticeships?

[Mr Hayes]

My hon. Friend will know that the figures published this week show a record number of apprenticeships across the whole country, in all sectors and at all levels. What does the NAO report say? As my hon. Friend described, it shows a massive return on public investment. This is success by any measure. By the way—I did not want to emphasise this, Mr Speaker—it also states that our policy is far better managed than was Train to Gain by the previous Government.

Financial Education

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Chapman]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. She tempts me to break a promise that I made to myself when I came into the debate not to have a rant about the economy and make a wider political point, because I thought that that probably would not be what this occasion demanded. However, she makes that point for me and I thank her for it.

Education is the armour against being misled and I believe that advertising is misleading us. I refer the House to my ten-minute rule Bill of about a year ago, which I am sure all hon. Members have followed closely, which would curb some of the advertising on financial products. Financial education provides protection against some of the most traumatic circumstances a person can find themselves in, from paying an additional fee on an unauthorised overdraft because one is not aware of how the charges work, to losing one’s home or having one’s belongings repossessed and being declared bankrupt. Many of us have been able to learn from our mistakes because either the economy has been in a good state or we have been able to rely on family or friends. We have been lucky but young people now, as the hon. Member for North Swindon said, are in danger of financial mismanagement having a much longer-term effect on their lives. On finishing education, young people immediately face tough monetary decisions. At 17, they are already in debt and tied into contracts that they did not fully understand for things such as mobile phones. I take the slack given to me by the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) who made a good point about gambling. If that is an issue at primary level, which I had not appreciated, it is right that that be included in the curriculum. Therefore, we need to be properly prepared to deal with these decisions. Put simply, an informed borrower is a safer borrower.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I appreciate the hon. Lady’s point, but does she not agree that if we have a problem with children under the age of 11 gambling, the most important place to start is not the curriculum, but access to online gambling?

[Mrs Chapman]

I agree completely. That goes back to the first point that I made about financial education being one of four strands of the solution, the others being debt advice, advertising and regulation. The hon. Gentleman is right to point that out.

In schools across England, the provision of personal financial education is ad hoc. We saw some good examples when writing this report. I took it upon myself to visit schools in my constituency and I was impressed with what I found. There is little teacher training on personal financial education and there is therefore limited subject knowledge and confidence among some teaching staff. It is stating the obvious to say that schools face significant barriers to teaching financial education, such as curriculum time, the absence of a statutory mandate and the lack of awareness of suitable resources.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

I am sure the hon. Lady is right; she thinks deeply about these subjects and makes intelligent contributions. The report, however, states:

“Personal finance education should be a compulsory part of every school’s curriculum.”

If that is going to be delivered, there must be some transmission mechanism. I am afraid that history teaches us, and future events will teach us, that exhortations from Secretaries of State—no matter how talented or eloquent they be—are not sufficient to make things a reality on the ground. As I say, there has to be a mechanism to make it happen.

In thinking about this issue, the Minister will need to clarify what the role of the national curriculum will be in a schools landscape where most institutions will not be required to follow it. How will that fit in with the original vision of a national curriculum to be taught by all schools across the country, as introduced by Kenneth Baker, now Lord Baker, who was the Secretary of State when I was a teacher back in the 1980s? How can the Minister ensure adequate teaching of financial education if most schools will ultimately be free to follow their own path?

[Damian Hinds]

The shadow Minister says that a transmission mechanism is required. Does he agree with me that if practical maths were made part of the GCSE syllabus for each of the main awarding bodies, such a transmission mechanism would exist?

[Kevin Brennan]

That is for 14 to 16-year-olds. If GCSE maths is taken between the ages of 14 and 16, young people would indeed receive some of this provision. The hon. Gentleman is correct about that, but the report goes much further in its recommendations for making financial education compulsory across all ages in the curriculum.

[Damian Hinds]

rose—

[Kevin Brennan]

I will give way again in a moment if the hon. Gentleman is dead keen. All right; I will carry on.

The Government are correct in their desire for people to take responsibility for their finances in order to reduce unaffordable debt, but they have to get the ball rolling, which means that they need to find some way of getting this going in our schools.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bingham]

It is not a question of showing off: my hon. Friend never saw the results. In fact, my mother still has the table lamp that I made at school in woodwork to this very day—

[Damian Hinds]

Still waiting for it to come on!

[Andrew Bingham]

I didn’t do the electrics; I left that to my dad.

Schools have moved on. They now teach subjects such as IT, media, technology—

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw) has just said, it is difficult to think of anything original to say at this stage of the proceedings, so I shall be mercifully brief. I must start with the obligatory fawning to my hon. Friends the Members for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) and for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) for the genuinely outstanding work they have done on the all-party group. The way that group has grown is not just impressive but phenomenal. In double-quick time it has brought to the British Parliament an issue that matters so much and about which so many people are genuinely bothered. The report and the depth of the analysis and work the group has done are already helping to stimulate debate here and more widely—and will do so further.

Today’s debate is not about approving every line in the report. I would have loved to remind the shadow Minister, if he were here, that the motion does not say that there should be compulsory financial education in free schools and academies or that it should be part of the national curriculum in primary schools. The key phrase in the motion is:

“That this House…believes that the country has a duty to equip its young people properly through education to make informed financial decisions”.

I could not agree more.

I shall not go into examples of the problems that we have all seen when people have come into our surgeries or when we have met people. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) has mentioned that some people, astonishingly, think that a high APR must be better than a low APR because it is a bigger number. These things would be funny if they were not so tragic. When we hear about them, our natural reaction is to say, “If we get them young and educate them, we will sort out all these problems.” There is, of course, as it says in the motion, a great advantage to equipping people with the capability to make smart financial decisions. There can also be a more immediate benefit, to which the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) alluded. If teachers get kids to bring in material—junk mail—that they have received at home, and they discuss it, messages can then get back to home, so there will be a beneficial impact even in the shorter term.

Even better than telling, of course, is doing, through schemes such as junior savers clubs. I was a member of the Abbey National junior savers. It used to have gold, silver and bronze; I only ever made bronze, but there you are. We have savings clubs in schools, and I pay tribute to credit unions in particular, although others do this as well, which run schemes in schools, often with parent volunteers and schoolchildren helping to manage them. That is another great way to pick up experience.

I have an issue with PSHE, however. It sometimes feels as though the answer to any social problem in this country is another module in PSHE. That is true whether the problem is that people are too fat or that people are too thin, or whether it is teenage pregnancy. Whatever it might be, we do it in PSHE. There are limitations to PSHE. When one mentions it to teachers, their response is not one that can be written down because it is just a groan. As a general rule, teachers do not like doing PSHE lessons. Although the report of the all-party group says “only 45%” of teachers in the survey had taught personal financial education, I have to say that that struck me as an extraordinarily large number. Almost half the teaching population has taken on the teaching of that subject. I think it unlikely that they are all experts in that area.

In PSHE in general, and this applies also to financial education, there is naturally a reliance on off-the-shelf—or more likely, these days, off-the-net—lesson plans and on input from third parties. Although I accept that the banks and building societies who take part do so with responsibility and do not use it as a way to ram home their brands, there is an element of indirect marketing. It certainly gets the message out there that there is a massive range of financial products, including ones that can get people into debt.

[Andrew Percy]

My hon. Friend’s points are exactly those that we identified during the inquiry and support the argument for putting financial education into PSHE to support maths and raise the profile of PSHE. He is quite right: a lot of the stuff that is used is photocopied hand-outs. That is not teaching a subject properly. If we link PSHE with maths, we can raise its profile and the standards of the teaching and lesson plans.

[Damian Hinds]

I recognise the point, and the report stimulates such debates, but I do not agree.

People mean different things when they talk about financial education. There is a whole continuum. If we talk about pure financial education, as opposed to a mathematical way of approaching it, there are two key dangers. The first I call the redundancy danger, and the second is the ubiquity danger. None of us did financial education at school, and although some people have great financial problems, not everybody does, and it is perfectly possible for somebody to get through life without the benefit of that education. Had we done financial education, we would have learned about cheques, clearing houses and endowment mortgages, and, spreading it out to the wider economy, the public sector borrowing requirement and sterling M3. None of that would be of particular relevance today. We would not have learned about debit cards and payday loans because, to all intents and purposes, they did not exist at that time. There is a real danger that although we think we are equipping people with skills, by focusing too much on financial services, as opposed to the underpinning principles, that education may become redundant.

[Andrew Percy]

It is true that the world does not stand still, but does my hon. Friend agree that if we give young people the ability to understand what is available now, we give them the skills to be able to understand products as they develop and move on into the future?

[Damian Hinds]

I cannot do geometry in a written speech without slides. I would be more tempted to go for the underlying principles, which could enable people to understand the things that used to be there and the things that will be there tomorrow.

The second danger is ubiquity. Already, on the television and the internet, when kids are at home or out, everywhere there are messages about debt. There is a danger that introducing discussion of specific financial services too early in schools might contribute to that feeling by normalising and legitimising the idea that everyone uses such products.

As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole, the key things are the tools, and I think that we agree on that but perhaps differ on how best to use them. To my mind, the key tools and principles that help inform financial decisions are mathematics, but not mathematics on its own. There is also a big element of personal responsibility, common sense and some of the maxims to which my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) referred. Make no mistake: young people do not learn common sense, wisdom and personal responsibility simply by turning up to PSHE. It is a much wider issue. I would welcome more emphasis on practical mathematics at GCSE, especially at foundation level, although it applies to both levels.

I am pleased to say that I have an original point to make. We also now have an opportunity post-16, because raising the participation age to 18 means that more young people who have perhaps not passed GCSE maths could, if we are to follow the guidance in the Wolf report, be encouraged to keep up maths and English. We need new, innovative, creative and engaging ways of taking on maths, and this would certainly be one of those. I thought that the sample questions that my hon. Friends who constructed the report included in it illustrated very well the practical ways we could use the maths curriculum.

The introduction of these concepts into mathematics is no panacea. The hon. Member for Makerfield and I agree on many things related to debt and personal finance, but I completely disagreed with her today when she implied that there was no element of personal irresponsibility in being over-indebted. There are of course times when it is purely a matter of a change in circumstances and completely unpredictable, but there is also a major issue of responsibility. She was right to say that there are broader concerns about regulation and too-easy access to credit that we must also address. The reason we need to address those concerns, even if we did financial education perfectly, is that in that market, alarmingly, the basic laws of economics, such as the way competition works and the assumption that consumers will be rational, frequently do not apply.

I congratulate the members of the all-party group again on the report that stimulated the debate. My view is that I would say no to adding more to PSHE and specifying exactly how these things should be done at a younger and younger age, but I would say yes on the need to refocus GCSE maths and to find new and creative ways to teach practical maths at 16-plus. I would also say yes to not being afraid to say that people must take responsibility, which is also a good thing to teach in school.