SEND Funding

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Commons Chamber

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

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the distribution of SEND funding.

I am delighted to have secured this debate, as it gives us an opportunity to highlight the situation we are facing in England, where children with special educational needs and disabilities are being left behind due to the inherent regional inequality in the high-needs national funding formula. There is a bigger issue. The more typical thing we talk about is the overall quantum of spending based on overall need, but too little attention is given to the distribution of the funding that exists, whether in healthcare, education, policing or otherwise. I know I am not the only Member being turned to by constituents at their wits’ end, trying to navigate what feels to be a broken system; I thank colleagues across the House for their continued advocacy on behalf of some of the most vulnerable children in all our communities.

My argument is a simple yet deeply important one: the current model of SEND funding is not only inconsistent but in too many cases profoundly unfair. It fails to account for genuine levels of need, the realities faced by families, and the systemic pressures that schools and local authorities are under. Unless that changes, we will continue to fail children who rely on Members to make their case and to get this right.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a profoundly important point. There is a real and urgent need to reform the SEND system, and that of course includes how it is funded. Does he welcome the £750 million ringfenced in yesterday’s spring statement for exactly that: to transform our SEND system to make it fairer for parents, better for young people and more sustainable for the future?

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman takes me to a point further on in my speech, but he is absolutely right. He makes the case to the Minister, exactly as I intend to: given that we have a broken distribution system and given the severity of its impact on so many children and families, will she ensure that the money in the spending review is, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, used precisely for that purpose and that we target those who are most left behind?

At the heart of this debate, I am calling on the Government to identify and commit to a clear baseline cost for delivering effective SEND support per pupil. The figure must reflect what it genuinely takes, in both urban and rural settings, to support children with complex needs across the country. Only then can we ensure that no child’s opportunity is limited by where they live.

I want to bring to the attention of the House a stark example that illustrates the postcode lottery in SEND funding: the disparity between the East Riding of Yorkshire, which covers my own constituency of Beverley and Holderness, at the lowest end of the funding spectrum—we are the lowest funded in the country—and the London borough of Camden, which happens to be the highest. Camden, by any standard, is a well-resourced inner-city borough with strong proximity to specialist services. It currently receives £3,564.95 of SEND funding for each pupil in its area. Meanwhile, in East Riding—a rural area with fewer nearby services, longer travel distances and greater challenges in recruitment and retention—per-pupil high-needs funding comes in at around £968. That is a gap of over £2,500 for every single child requiring extra support. In real terms, if East Riding’s funding was matched not with Camden but with the second most poorly funded local authority, we would have an extra £18 million per year on top of the £43 million we receive in the higher needs block—£18 million extra. If we were brought into line with Camden, we would have an extra £100 million.

Some might argue that urban areas face different pressures, and of course they do, but let us be clear: the cost of delivering quality SEND provision in rural areas is not lower. In fact, it is often significantly higher. Transport costs—colleagues across the House will be aware of children who have to be moved great distances to access their support—for children with complex needs can be astronomical. Recruiting specialist staff, such as special educational needs co-ordinators, to work in isolated schools is a constant challenge. When services such as educational psychologists or speech and language therapists are not based locally, schools and families face unacceptable delays in accessing the assessments needed to unlock further support. Why, then, is rurality not factored into the high-needs funding formula?

What that means in practice is that two children with identical needs, living in different parts of the country, will receive vastly different levels of support. One might have their education, health and care plan reviewed on time, access in-school provision, and benefit from local therapy services. The other might be left waiting months for assessment, with a school already at breaking point trying to bridge the gap. This disparity will have a long-term detriment to children’s outcomes.

This is not a criticism of any local authority—Camden, like all areas, faces its own pressures and challenges—but the system we have allows such disparities to persist without sufficient recourse or flexibility. These widely varying funding allocations create a two-tiered system in what should be a national commitment. Colleagues from across the House will be familiar with constituents whose stories lay bare the human cost of this imbalance, whether it is parents desperately trying to navigate the EHCP system, the lack of suitable school places nearby to cope with the measures required by their EHCP, or schools struggling to cope.

This is also certainly not a party political point. Successive Governments have sat over funding disparities and struggled with the politics. They have been unprepared to reallocate, perhaps for understandable reasons. The people you take money from tend to be much angrier than the people you give it to are happy: one marches on Westminster, the other grunts and says, “About time.” It is a truly difficult thing. I have been in this place for 20 years and have struggled to get Ministers to accept reallocation and reapportionment. Rather than asking for that demand, which I have so far failed in 20 years of effort to get anybody to implement, I hope to come up with something more practical, if compromised as a result.

[Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con)]

I commend my right hon. Friend on his length of service to this House.

[Graham Stuart]

My hon. Friend, the Opposition Deputy Chief Whip—and indeed my Whip—is very welcome. Thanks very much; I am grateful for that.

We have this issue of how we fix a broken and clearly unfair system. Newer colleagues, and there are many of them in the House, might think, “Well, surely people would want to fix it. There is no perfect system and there will always be dispute, but if the Government did a map of need—fundamentally, an assessment of what fair would look like—and then mapped against that line where everyone was, newer Members might think, “The Government might be prepared to do something with those who are most overfunded to help compensate the underfunded.” My experience is that they do not and will not, so I will discuss practical ways of getting change. What typically happens is that despite Ministers’ talk in debates like this one, we end up with the Treasury at a spending occasion like yesterday giving 3%; if inflation is 2.5%, it gives 3% to everybody. That means that the cash gap between one authority and another grows, and in a sense the injustice grows with it.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for leading the debate. I am conscious that York is in the bottom third, and that the level of children being diagnosed with SEND is rising sharply. Does he agree that in order to future-proof the system, we need to look at a more holistic, therapeutic and nurturing approach to our education system so that all children benefit? I looked at the situation in Sweden and saw how that not only brought down costs, but greatly benefited the children there.

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Lady is two things: she is quite right, and she is tempting me down a path I do not want to go down—I want to focus on the distribution, because it does not get the attention. However, she is absolutely right. Labour criticises the performance of the then Conservative Government, but I think funding for SEND actually grew 60% from 2019 to 2024. She is right that it is not about who is in government—somehow, we need to find ways of capping this demand, which will outstrip any Chancellor, however well intentioned. That is an issue.

I will turn back to the point on which I am focusing, which is distribution. If demand in a system is growing at a scale that no Government can meet, distribution, although ignored, becomes even more important. If a system is straining and struggling, having grossly unfair distribution that no one seeks to or is able to defend—it is not a case of one party or the other claiming they are getting it right; they recognise it is unjust—is a major mistake, and we must find ways to balance it over time. It is not obvious at the moment that anyone is able to stop this imbalance between supply, which is so small, and demand, which is so big.

Colleagues will have local champions back home who do their best to fight against regional inequalities. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to Councillor Victoria Aitken in the East Riding, who is the portfolio holder responsible for SEND, and her role with the f40 group. For any newer Members present, the f40 group fights on the issues of and focuses on the funding formula disparities. It is technical and quite dull, but it is vital for the provision of services to our constituents. In her role with the f40 group, Victoria has been tireless in campaigning to address these issues within the SEND system, but sadly, the work of Victoria and others like her is not enough.

I want to share the story of my constituent Ellie and her son Harry, who is nine and a half years old and has ADHD. From the very start of his education—as early as foundation stage—both Ellie and his teachers recognised that Harry needed extra support. However, without an EHCP in place, the help he required simply was not available, despite the school doing all that it could.

Last summer, as Harry was preparing to enter year 4, Ellie contacted me in desperation. Harry was still only just beginning to read, and was spending his break times playing with children much younger than himself. Ellie had fought tirelessly to secure an assessment so that he could access one-to-one support, but the process was gruelling, and caseworkers were at capacity. Ellie had to give up her job to dedicate herself to the countless hours needed to complete forms, lodge appeals, chase responses and provide support at home. She put her own education on hold and, in her own words, has had to “battle the system” every step of the way.

Just last week, after years of delay, Harry was finally granted an EHCP. However, the school still does not know when the funding will arrive to put the support, which has now been recognised, in place. Harry will start year 5 this September, several years behind his peers. Ellie describes Harry as a kind and lovely boy who has been failed—not by his school, but by a system that delays, deflects and denies the support that children like Harry need. Yet Ellie remains determined to keep fighting, no matter the cost to her or her family, to ensure that Harry gets the help he deserves.

[Daniel Francis (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. I declare my usual interests: my wife is a special educational needs co-ordinator at a local authority school in our patch, and my daughter has an EHCP and a complex set of disabilities, so I have absolutely fought this battle myself. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that what he has just described is a broken system that needs reform, and that whatever we see in the White Paper in the autumn, we will hopefully see reform that relies in particular on more training for all teachers across the profession? I think that is some of what he has just described.

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is right. There is a capacity issue, as I say, relating to demand. Getting people—not just specialists, but the whole system and everyone in it—to have a better understanding is really important. The hon. Gentleman will see that in his constituency, as I do in mine. It is not enough just to have the SENCO; it is about getting the leadership, the training and the right protocols in place to ensure that the whole system is better able to meet the needs of children, and that will then reduce some of the other impacts, including cost impacts, on the system.

In recent weeks, I had the privilege of visiting Inmans primary school in Hedon, where staff spoke candidly about the mounting pressure created by soaring demand for SEND provision—pressures that far exceed the funding currently available. At St Mary’s school in Beverley, headteacher Laura Wallis expressed her deep concern at the growing gap between pupils’ needs and the resources she has at her disposal, making it ever-more difficult to provide the tailored support every child deserves.

[Lee Pitcher (Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme) (Lab)]

I have met people from about 18 schools, both here in Westminster and at home in the constituency, and, more recently, have heard the voices of young people on SEND in Doncaster. At every single meeting, the first questions asked are about support, capacity, and young adults’ transition into work. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that to get the funding right, we need to listen to the voices of people with experience—those at the grassroots—to ensure that we understand their ideas and solutions, and direct funding into the right places?

[Graham Stuart]

I have to agree with the hon. Gentleman, who makes a powerful point. My appeal to colleagues in the Chamber—particularly, perhaps, to newer Members —is to focus on the distribution. It can be quite hard to get one’s head around the many issues that are involved—the overall national issues of quantum, service delivery, training and the rest of it—and distribution can easily get left behind, yet it is vital. I cannot say that it brings a great deal of joy or satisfaction to Members of Parliament to pursue it, because so many people look blank when it is mentioned, but distribution is important, and I hope that colleagues will want to take on the issue.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Very quickly, some children thrive academically, while some thrive practically. It is all about finding the right place for them, whether as a doctor, a mechanic, a plasterer or a farmer. When it comes to checking on a child’s ability, and ensuring that they find their place, we must acknowledge that there is not a standard box for all; it is different for each child.

[Graham Stuart]

As usual, the hon. Gentleman hits the nail on the head.

Many across this House will recognise the stories of the schools I have just mentioned, because the same thing is playing out in constituencies across the country. Parents are becoming de facto care co-ordinators; schools are dipping into ever-shrinking budgets to fund specialist provision; and local authorities are caught between legal responsibilities and budgetary reality.

[Paulette Hamilton (Birmingham Erdington) (Lab)]

I was contacted by a parent in my constituency who was forced to navigate a complex and lengthy tribunal process simply to challenge the decision to place her autistic son in a mainstream school, only to have the hearing cancelled at the last moment, and a place at a special school offered. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that education, health and care plans are not a silver bullet, that we should not need complex legal processes to ensure that young people can access good early support, that support must meet the young person’s needs, and that the money must follow the child or young person?

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. I was chairing the Education Committee when the coalition Government introduced the reforms that brought in EHCPs as a replacement for statements. I remember thinking then that lots of good improvements were made—there were very sincere Ministers working hard at it, and they brought in a better system—but the fundamentals remained as they were. One of the aims was to get away from an adversarial, legalistic process, in which articulate and typically better-off people were able to use sharp elbows to get their child what they needed, but pity the inarticulate single mother unable to engage with the system. What would she get? The then Government’s promise was to make that better, but the fundamentals remained.

If demand is so much bigger than supply, this is what we will get. With the best will in the world, local authorities will end up being defensive and saying no as a matter of course, and will give way only when they are forced to. Am I going on too long, Madam Deputy Speaker?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I could not possibly say.

[Graham Stuart]

For years, I have fought for a fairer distribution of SEND funding, and for years, I have got nowhere, as successive Governments—Labour and Conservative—have lacked the courage to rebalance the system. I hope Labour will not lack that courage again. I do not pretend to have all the answers to this problem, but I know that we must work out what fairness looks like and the minimum per-pupil cost required for SEND support, and commit to meeting that basic need, if not immediately, then at least over time.

This Government need to be prepared to take from those above the baseline and give to those below. Would they be prepared to do that? No previous Government have been, but perhaps this one will. If not, we must find some other way. We could identify, through a mapping exercise, those who have been left behind, and we could say as a matter of principle that whenever there is an above-inflation increase in the Budget—such as the £760 million that the Chancellor came up with in the spending review yesterday—it will always be used first and foremost to lift up those below the line, while doing nothing to cause a below-inflation increase for those who are above the line.

Even if the Minister agrees with that idea, there will still be crisis management. How do we begin to tackle systemic inequality? Above all, it is vital that we revisit the high needs national funding formula, because it does not sufficiently account for regional cost differences, or for the genuine cost of delivering services in dispersed or under-served areas. The formula must reflect both complexity of need and the geography of the area in which that need arises. It needs to account for the added cost of providing services in rural areas. It is vital, too, that the formula moves away from the historical spend factor—the part of the formula that bases current funding on what a local authority spent on SEND provision in the 2018-19 financial year, and how it administratively described that spend. The formula means that a large section of funding is determined by pre-covid demand for SEND services, despite a post-pandemic spike.

The Government have stated their intention to remove that factor, but progress has been painfully slow. Every year that we fail to act, we condemn another group of children with complex needs to struggling without the support that they deserve. The issue is not simply how much money is available; it is also how accessible and responsive the system is. Families are forced into adversarial processes, schools are burdened with bureaucracy, and children are too often treated as numbers on a spreadsheet, rather than individuals with potential. We need a system that is focused on early intervention, not crisis management.

I am here not simply to raise a problem, but to call for action. That action would ensure a fairer, more transparent funding formula that reflects real-world costs across the country, accounting for rurality and discounting historical spend. It would establish a clear baseline per-pupil cost for delivering effective SEND support, and ensure that every local authority was brought up to that level—if not quickly, then at least over time. It would create better accountability mechanisms, so that areas that are underperforming on delivering SEND provision can be supported and, where necessary, challenged. At the very least, I ask that the Government recognise the injustice of the system and the inequality that it produces.

Those are not radical asks; they are practical, deliverable reforms that would make a meaningful difference for my constituents in Beverley and Holderness—and, I believe and hope, across the rest of the country. We have a duty as parliamentarians to ensure that every child, regardless of background, diagnosis, or postcode, has the support that they need to thrive. The disparities in SEND funding undermine that duty. If we believe in a truly inclusive education system, we cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the structural inequities built into the funding model. We owe it to our constituents, our schools and, most importantly, the children to fix this.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

--- Later in debate ---

[Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)]

Over the past decade we have seen a 140% increase in the number of children identified as requiring an education, health and care plan. Today we have nearly 2 million pupils in England who are identified as having special educational needs. Unfortunately, the rise in demand has not been matched by a corresponding increase in funding. As of October last year, the Department for Education projected a cumulative deficit of £4.6 billion in the dedicated schools grant by the end of 2025-26, alongside a £3.4 billion gap by 2027-28 between high-needs costs and current funding levels. Our children have for too long been let down by previous Governments, and we have had 14 years of Conservative austerity. We must urgently re-examine the structure and long-term sustainability of our SEND provision.

In my constituency, the pressure is all too evident. Nearly 9,000 pupils are currently receiving either special educational needs support or have an EHCP—around 18% of the total pupil population. If we look at the data more closely, a stark pattern emerges. There is a clear correlation between the level of special educational needs and the index of multiple deprivation, which means that children in our most deprived areas are significantly more likely to require additional support than their peers living in more affluent neighbourhoods. This is not just a matter of education but a matter of social justice. We must invest in early years intervention and deliver a holistic programme of support.

Wolverhampton West is home to five state-funded special schools: Tettenhall Wood school, Broadmeadow special school, Penn Fields school, Penn Hall school—close to where I live—and Pine Green Academy. I am proud of all of them, as they have dedicated staff and specialists educating over 650 pupils. However, even with the tireless efforts of our dedicated school staff, our state special schools are under strain and operating beyond capacity.

I am proud that this Government have put forward £740 million for 10,000 new SEND places, and spending review documents reveal that the Government will spend £547 million in 2026-27 and £213 million in 2027-28.

[Graham Stuart]

Perhaps my question could go through the hon. Member to the Minister if he does not know the answer. The £740 million is very welcome, but as he says it is frontloaded in one year and then halves the following year, with no indication of where it is going thereafter. Although it may be a welcome short-term intervention, how is it part of a sustainable effort to improve SEN?

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Janet Daby)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) on securing this debate on this important subject. I know he has a strong interest in special educational needs and disability, and I commend him for his 20 years of advocating for change. He spoke widely about many areas, but especially about distribution. I also thank the many Members across this Chamber for their passionate and sincere speeches, which all advocated for their constituents and the children they care about.

Among the many Members who have spoken, my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Harpreet Uppal) talked about the difficulties for parents navigating SEND. The hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) spoke about the challenges involving EHCPs. My hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (David Taylor) gave some case studies, and like other Members mentioned these precious children and their experiences, which were all very vital and pertinent to this debate. I thank them for those case studies about Grace, Olivia, Hermione and others, which I really appreciate and acknowledge. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton West (Warinder Juss) spoke about the Government investing in early years, and that is absolutely what we are doing.

I will seek to address as many as possible of the issues and challenges that have been raised and brought to my attention, but I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Lloyd Hatton) for his strong advocacy for SEN provision in his area, which has been noted. However, I will push back against the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Joy Morrissey), who raised many issues to be addressed. I gently say to her that, given the past 14 years, we did not need to be in this position with SEND—we did not need to be here—and this Government have been left to fix the foundations. We do have a plan for change, and I will mention as many of the areas as I can.

The Government are committed to breaking down barriers to opportunity and giving every child the best start in life. That means ensuring that all children and young people receive the right support to succeed in their education and to lead happy, healthy and productive adult lives.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister give way?

[Janet Daby]

I would like to make some progress before I begin to give way.

Members from across the House will be aware of the challenges facing the SEND system—a system that is difficult for parents, carers and young people to navigate, and where outcomes for children are often poor. That has been mentioned by many Members. The Education Committee has undertaken its own inquiry aimed at solving the SEND crisis, which underscores the significant challenges we face. Improving the SEND system is a priority for this Government. We want all children to receive the right support to succeed in their education, and to lead happy, healthy and productive adult lives. The hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) quoted Hermione, who said that SEND needs to work for all, and I just wanted to acknowledge that.

[Graham Stuart]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. She will be aware that the title of this debate, despite what it says on the screen, is “Distribution of SEND Funding”. I hope, therefore, that she will focus primarily on that particular technical point. The distribution of SEND funding across the country is, according to f40 and campaigners across the House, unfair, broken and needs to change. Is that the Government’s view and the Minister’s view? That is the first answer, and then we can turn to how it can best be fixed. The most important thing is to recognise whether it is broken or not. I feel it is unfair and broken, and I would like to hear the Minister say so, if she agrees.

[Janet Daby]

I hear the right hon. Gentleman’s point, but he does need to allow me time to proceed. It would be wrong of me not to also respond to other Members from across the Chamber who have mentioned concerns with regard to the reason we are here.

Members across the House will be aware of the challenges facing the SEND system. Improving the SEND system is a priority for this Government. As I said, we want all children to receive the right support. We are prioritising early intervention and inclusive provision in mainstream settings. We know that early intervention prevents unmet needs from escalating, and that it supports all children and young people to achieve their goals alongside their peers.

These are complex issues that need a considered approach to deliver sustainable change, and we have already begun that work. We launched new training resources to support early years educators to meet emerging needs, and announced 1,000 further funded training places for early years special educational needs co-ordinators in the 2025-26 financial year, which will be targeted at settings in the most disadvantaged areas. We have extended the partnerships for inclusion of neurodiversity in schools programme to support an additional 1,200 mainstream primary schools to better meet the needs of neurodiverse children in the financial year 2025-26. That investment builds on the success of the programme, which was delivered to over 1,650 primary schools last year. We have already established an expert advisory group for inclusion to improve the mainstream educational outcomes and experiences of those with SEND.

All that work forms part of the Government’s opportunity mission, which will break down the unfair link between background and opportunity. We will continue to work with the sector as essential and valued partners to deliver our shared mission and to respect parents’ trust. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) mentioned, parents need to be respected, not exhausted.

The Department is providing an increase of £1 billion for the high needs budget in England in the 2025-26 financial year. Total high needs funding for children and young people with complex SEND is over £12 billion for the year 2025-26. Returning to the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness, of that total, East Riding of Yorkshire council is being allocated over £42 million through the high needs funding block of the dedicated schools grant—an increase of £3.5 million on 2024-25. The high needs block is calculated using the high needs national funding formula. The NFF allocation is a 9.1% increase per head for the two to 18-year-old population on the equivalent 2024-25 NFF allocation.

I will turn to the many issues raised by other Members. We know that families face issues with education, health and care plans, and that even after fighting to secure the entitlement, support is not always delivered quickly enough. EHC plans should be issued within 20 weeks and are quality assured for a combination of statutory requirements, local authority frameworks and best practice guidelines, but the latest publication data showed that just half of new EHC plans were issued within the time limit in 2023. Where a local authority does not meet its duty on timeliness and quality of plans, we can take action that prioritises children’s needs and supports local areas to bring about rapid improvement.

This Government believe that a complex legal process should not be necessary to access good, early support for children and young people, which is why we need to focus on addressing the overall systemic issues to make SEND support easier to access. We are continuing to develop the ways in which we protect support for the children who will always need specialist placements and make accessing that support less bureaucratic and adversarial.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stuart]

I thank all colleagues for coming to the Chamber on this Thursday afternoon, because this issue is just so important. We have heard really interesting and reflective speeches from right across the House, as Members have sought to champion the children who probably most need help in our society, so it is right that we should be here.

I thank the Minister for her response. I was slightly disappointed, because the title of this debate is “Distribution of SEND Funding”, and it is important to ask whether the distribution is right. Do the Government think that it is, or that it is not? I do not think that the system is defensible as it is, and it would be good to hear that said. Once one has recognised that the system is broken and unfair, the next question is: how shall we fix it? We did not get an answer to that, because we did not get an answer to the first question.

The Minister’s response morphed into what we talk about generally, which is SEN overall, what the Government are doing, the £1 billion extra and all the other things, many of which are welcome, but the question underneath that is whether the distribution is right. If it is not, are we going to do something about it, while making these other changes? We did not get an answer to that.

My appeal to the Minister—I think colleagues across the House will welcome this; I might even get a nod from some on the Government Benches—is to make sure that, in the White Paper, there is an opportunity to make the distribution fairer, if not immediately, then at least over time. We must recognise the problem and look to level up over time. That is not to penalise those who might be technically overfunded today, but to make sure that every child has a fairer and better chance of getting whatever we can best provide from the system. That is an important element of the overall discussion about SEND.

We will doubtless hear more about this topic. The Minister did not seem absolutely clear whether EHCPs were here to stay. Resisting my own strictures on sticking to the subject of distribution, I will use the few seconds that I have left to talk about the EHCP system. When a child gets an EHCP, they get a better outcome. Perhaps that is driving parents to push their children to get one, and that may be contributing to the financial unsustainability of the system that we have today. It would be enormously controversial to look to remove it. At the moment we have a system that from 2019 to 2024 was increased by 60%. The Government are putting in another £1 billion, and another £760 million was announced yesterday, and that is welcome, but if we do not find a way of stabilising the system, we will still have those who are sharp-elbowed getting something for their kids and those who are not losing out. That is not a system that anyone across the House should be satisfied with.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the distribution of SEND funding.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 28th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his passion and interest in this subject. Let me also congratulate him on his efforts in yesterday’s London marathon: he is not only a brilliant advocate for children, but a fantastic runner. He is right to say that this Labour Government have inherited a terrible mess when it comes to support with children with SEND. We want all children to have the support that they need in order to achieve and thrive, and as part of the wholesale reform that we will deliver, we will listen to parents, children, stakeholders and schools to ensure that we get the system right for children and deliver better outcomes, and that issues such as those identified by my hon. Friend are a thing of the past.

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

I thank the Secretary of State for her answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Bridlington and The Wolds (Charlie Dewhirst), but each child with special educational needs in the East Riding receives £968, whereas in Camden the figure is £3,564. I am sure she agrees that a child in Camden does not have four times the need of a child in the East Riding. Will she undertake to ensure, as part of the review, that in principle we will have fairer funding for children throughout the country with educational needs related to, for instance, dyslexia or autism at the end of that process, as opposed to where we sit now?

[Bridget Phillipson]

The right hon. Gentleman brings real expertise to this issue, and I know that he also cares deeply about ensuring that we get the system right for children with SEND. Our allocations were made on the basis of the funding formulas that were already in place. We intend to look carefully at all these matters as part of our wider reform of the SEND system, but, as the right hon. Gentleman will appreciate, they are complex, and it is important for any change to be made in a way that is responsible and focused on better outcomes for children.

Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [Lords]

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 31st March 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Janet Daby)]

I thank hon. Members for their constructive engagement throughout the debate. However, from listening to the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien), one would think that this was all doom and gloom, when it is actually a new season of growth and skills. We are springing into action, and I encourage him not to be stuck in the past.

As I have said before, including when we discussed the Bill in detail in Committee, it is wonderful to hear the passion that Members from across the House have for improving our skills system. It is clear that we all share a desire to better meet the skill needs of employers and learners. The Government are determined to unlock growth and spread opportunity, and the Bill will help us to deliver the change that we absolutely need.

I will start by speaking to new clause 1 before touching on the other new clauses and amendments.

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

Can the Minister explain, in answer to the points made by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) and others, the rationale behind eliminating level 7 apprenticeships?

[Janet Daby]

Information on that will come out in due course, but if the right hon. Member gives me a little more time, I will be able to elaborate and respond to Members as I go.

New clauses 1 and 4 relate to the creation of Skills England and its legal status. New clause 1, tabled by the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom), would require the Secretary of State to lay draft proposals for a new Executive agency, to be known as Skills England, within six months of Royal Assent. New clause 4, tabled by the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, would require the Secretary of State to establish Skills England as a statutory body.

Our position—that we establish Skills England as an Executive agency—remains extremely clear and is entirely in keeping with the usual process for establishing arm’s length bodies. The Department is complying with the robust and vigorous process for establishing Executive agencies, which applies across Government. The Executive agency model balances operational independence with proximity to Government. That is needed to inform policy and support delivery of the Government’s mission. That model enables us to move quickly, which is vital given the scale and urgency of the skills challenges that we face.

The Government have committed to reviewing Skills England between 18 and 24 months after it is set up. That will includes an assessment of whether the Executive agency model is enabling Skills England to deliver its objectives. That is consistent with good practice. Skills will power this mission-driven Government and our plan for change. Our approach means that we can get on with the job at hand: fixing the skills system and helping more people to get the training they need to build our homes, power our towns and cities with clean energy, and master new digital technologies.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Catherine McKinnell]

I will always share in the celebration of schools that are doing well, and the right hon. Lady is absolutely right to celebrate the schools in her area. I do question, however, the shameless pride we sometimes see in the record of her Government; when they left office, England’s schools were getting worse, standards in reading, maths and science were down, roofs were crumbling, children were struggling, and a generation of children were absent from school. We are determined to tackle those challenges head-on. The education that we provide for our children is not just for their future, but for all of our futures. It shapes society today and the society that we want for tomorrow.

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

It is good of the Minister, for whom I have a great deal of respect, to give way. As I know her to be an honest person, will she at least share with the House the fact that schools in England are better today than they were in 2010? Picking some tiny subset of time to make out that schools are deprived is not a fair assessment. Schools are demonstrably better in England today than they were in 2010. Please, Minister, at least acknowledge that.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his kind words and his assumption of my honesty. The fact is that one in three children starting school is not school ready. More than a third of children leave primary school without a firm foundation in reading, writing and maths. The disadvantage gap is widening. I will come on to what we want to achieve as a Government, but we are not satisfied, as Conservative Members appear to be, with leaving some of our children without the start in life that they deserve. We want the best for all our children, and that is what our changes will achieve.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister give way?

[Catherine McKinnell]

I have given way to the right hon. Member. I will do so again later.

It is essential that every child and family has certainty that they can access a good local school—a school that will set high expectations and standards for all our children, enabling them to achieve and thrive. We are bringing forward legislation to achieve our reforms, but there are reforms that we can make for which no legislation is required. We are designing a school system that supports and challenges all schools to deliver for our children. We want a rich and broad curriculum, delivered by expertly trained teachers, who have a good pay and conditions offer that attracts and retains the staff that our children need.

--- Later in debate ---

[Catherine McKinnell]

Try as the Opposition might to make their straw man argument, this Labour Government will demand high and rising standards for all our children. Recent polls of the profession show that, despite all the scaremongering, trust chief executive officers agree that there is nothing to fear from our sensible, pragmatic and common-sense measures, which will drive standards up in every school. Academies have grown from a Government-backed insurgency in our schools, and now make up well over 50% of our school system. That is not about to change. The shadow Minister will be pleased to hear that conversions to academy status are progressing faster under Labour Ministers than at any time since she joined this House, but it is right to look forward and consider how we will build a system fit for the next 20 years. The Bill is a step on that path. It recognises, in the words of one multi-academy trust leader, that parents deserve clarity and confidence in the standards that their children’s school upholds, and that is what this Government will secure.

The Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), led yesterday’s debate on part 1 of the Bill. I will use my opening remarks to speak to the Government’s amendments to parts 2 and 3. Members commented yesterday on the number of amendments, but the number of substantive amendments is small, and I shall focus on them today.

Many Members have a great interest in city technology colleges and city colleges for the technology of the arts, and they have raised with me the excellent practice supported by those institutions. The Government amendments ensure that these schools can be named on school admission orders, and make it clear that families with children attending those schools will benefit from other measures in the Bill, such as those tackling the cost of school uniform.

Just as we are committed to working with all our schools, so too are this Government determined to work with the devolved Governments to deliver higher standards of education and care in all parts of the UK. The majority of today’s amendments concern the extension of the “children not in school” provisions to Wales. The Minister spoke yesterday of our pride in working with the Welsh Government. Labour Governments in both Cardiff and London will deliver our shared ambition for a society where all children receive high-quality education, wherever they grow up. We will build a Britain where children come first. These 91 amendments will extend all the “children not in school” measures to Wales. There is a legislative consent motion on this change, on which we are working very closely with the Welsh Government.

Amendment 140 will include the Scottish definition of schools in the definition of “relevant schools” for the “children not in school” register clause. This amendment ensures that only those children who are intended to be captured by “children not in school” registers are eligible for registration. Without the amendment, a child who lives in England, but who attends school full time in Scotland, would be required to be registered on their English local authority’s “children not in school” register, despite being in school full time.

The previous Government said that there was no space in their King’s Speech to ensure our children’s safety and education, but for this Labour Government, our children are a priority across the whole of the United Kingdom. Amendments 189 and 170 will ensure that the amendments made on corporate parenting extend to the whole of the United Kingdom. Education is an essential protective factor, which can shield our most vulnerable children from harm. The “children not in school” measures include the new requirement for parents of children subject to child protection plans or inquiries to seek local authority consent. However, not every child subject to these inquires will be at risk indefinitely, so it would not be appropriate or proportionate for those home-educated children who are not at risk and who are receiving suitable education to be placed in a school if it is not their parents’ preference. This Government will respect parents’ rights to opt for home education, while keeping children safe from harm and securing their right to education. Amendments 141 to 148 will ensure that this intention is reflected through the school attendance order measures in the Bill.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister reassure home-educating parents that the requirements in the Bill will not be overly onerous? For instance, there is a requirement to record the time that each parent spends educating their child. Is that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year? How exactly would that work? Can she give us some reassurance that this measure can be made manageable and sensible, and will not be disproportionate?

[Catherine McKinnell]

Parents who are doing the right thing—home-educating their children and providing a suitable education in a safe environment—have nothing to be concerned about in relation to these measures. They are intended to ensure that no child falls through the cracks, and that is what we are delivering.

[Graham Stuart]

I am sure that the Minister intends to ensure that this does not happen, but would someone have to record all the hours and places in a week? I do not know how much the Minister knows about home education, but children are educated in all sorts of places. She has an opportunity at the Dispatch Box to say that she will come forward with regulations to ensure that they do not have to write down every time that they stop at an ice cream shop for some education about the vanilla flavour.

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[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

The Bill does not set out any kind of clear plan or vision for our schools. It does not address the big challenges that need addressing. It is silent on discipline and behaviour—one of the biggest issues. It comes after the Government scrapped simple Ofsted judgments and will be followed by moves to dumb down the curriculum and lower standards further.

The Secretary of State has no positive vision. She has axed programmes for advanced maths, physics, Latin and computing because she thinks that they are elitist. She has axed behaviour hubs with no replacement, even though schools that went through the scheme were twice as likely to be good or outstanding. Yet, somehow, she is able to find £90 million for advertising. The Bill is the worst of all. We have tabled numerous amendments to it. It takes a wrecking ball to 40 years of cross-party reform of England’s schools. Those reforms worked. There is much more to do, but England has risen up the international league tables even as Labour-run Wales has slumped down.

Under successive Governments of all colours, England’s schools have been improved by the magic formula of freedom plus accountability. The Bill attacks both parts of that formula. On the one hand, it strips academy schools of freedoms over recruitment and curriculum and reimposes incredible levels of micromanagement, taking away academy freedoms now enjoyed by 82% of secondary schools. On the other hand, it strikes at accountability and parental choice, ending the automatic transfer of failing schools to new management, reversing the reforms of the late 1980s, which allowed good schools to expand without permission from their local authority—a reform that ushered in parental choice.

Let me unpack this. First, the Bill takes away academy schools’ freedoms over the curriculum. We have tabled amendments to that. As Sir Dan Moynihan, who leads the incredibly successful Harris schools, explained:

“We have taken over failing schools in very disadvantaged places in London, and we have found youngsters in the lower years of secondary schools unable to read and write. We varied the curriculum in the short term and narrowed the number of subjects in key stage 3 in order to maximise the amount of time given for literacy and numeracy, because the children were not able to access the other subjects… why take away the flexibility to do what is needed locally?”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 71, Q154.]

Likewise, Luke Sparkes from Dixons argued:

“we…need the ability to enact the curriculum in a responsive and flexible way at a local level…there needs to be a consistency without stifling innovation.”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 79, Q167.]

Katharine Birbalsingh, the head of Michaela school, which has been top in the country three years in a row, wrote to the Secretary of State:

“Do you have any idea of the work required from teachers and school leaders to change their curriculum? You will force heads to divert precious resources from helping struggling families to fulfil a bureaucratic whim coming from Whitehall. Why are you changing things? What is the problem you are trying to solve?”

[Graham Stuart]

Like me, my hon. Friend finds these proposals tragic because of the removal of the curriculum freedoms that have allowed schools such as Michaela and Petchey and others all over the country to tailor their curriculum specifically to reach disadvantaged pupils so that they can engage better with their learning and have an achievement that previously they did not have. That door is being closed. I hope that Government Members reflect on this and seek a change of policy, if not in this House, then at least in the House of Lords.

[Neil O’Brien]

My right hon. Friend is completely correct. Some Government Members have reflected on this: the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh) said that the proposal to make it compulsory for academies to teach the national curriculum was of particular concern to her, and she is right. Ministers have never explained what they are trying to solve with this change, but the unions like it, so into the Bill it goes.

We have tabled further amendments on qualified teacher status. The Government are getting rid of academy freedoms over recruitment and the freedom to employ non-QTS teachers. Sir Martyn Oliver from Ofsted gave us a good example of how these freedoms are used. He said:

“In the past, I have brought in professional sportspeople to teach alongside PE teachers, and they have run sessions. Because I was in Wakefield, it was rugby league: I had rugby league professionals working with about a quarter of the schools in Wakefield at one point..”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 49, Q108.]

Brilliant. The Government’s own impact assessment to the Bill says of this change:

“some schools may struggle to find the teachers that they need.”

Rebecca Leek from the Suffolk Association of Headteachers gave a good example of how this freedom is currently used. She said that she urgently needed an early years lead, and was able to take on someone who had run an outstanding nursery, even though they did not have QTS and nor did they plan to get it. But in future, she would not be able to do that. Former headteacher David Thomas told us in Committee that this freedom allows them to recruit people who may be at the end of their career, who have a huge amount of experience that they want to give back to the community. They do not want to go through the bureaucracy, and if we put up barriers, they will not end up in the state sector.

Ministers have not produced a single shred of evidence that teachers without QTS are of lower quality, or for why they cannot be a good supplement to QTS teachers. Ministers have never explained why they, sitting in Whitehall, think that they are in a better position to judge who to employ than headteachers on the frontline. Ministers claim that is vital, but a footnote at the bottom of page 24 of the impact assessment reveals it would, in fact, not be applied to lots of different types of schools, including 14 to 19 academies, 16 to 19 academies, university technical colleges, studio schools, further education colleges and non-maintained school early years settings. It is supposedly vital but is not being applied to loads of different types of school. Yet Ministers are imposing it on loads of other schools. As the former head of Ofsted pointed out this week, taking that flexibility out of the system feels like a retrograde step, and she is right.

Under the Bill, Whitehall micromanagement is back, too. Clause 44 allows the Secretary of State to direct academy schools to do pretty much anything. The Confederation of School Trusts is really worried about that and has suggested a way to bring such unlimited power under some limits. They say:

“We do have concerns about the power to direct…It is too broad and it is too wide. We would like to work with Government to restrict it to create some greater limits. Those limits should be around statutory duties…statutory guidance, the provisions in the funding agreement”.––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 81, Q169.]

Yet Ministers voted down our amendment to put that suggestion from schools into effect.

Likewise, as we discovered in Committee, clause 34(5)(2) will require academy schools to get permission from the Secretary of State to make any change to the buildings they occupy. That includes any change to

“(ii) either part of the building, or

(iii) permanent outdoor structure”.

Literally, if an academy school wants to build a bike shed, it will have to go to the Secretary of State. It was clear in Committee that Ministers had not even realised that that would apply to academy schools. Those are just two of the many, many centralising measures in the Bill.

While freedom is being taken away on the one hand, accountability on the other side of the ledger is being watered down too. The Government already got rid of single-word Ofsted judgments and replaced them with something much more complicated that does not seem to have left anybody very happy. Then, clause 45 ends the automatic conversion of failing schools into academies. The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden has said,

“The current system, in which failing schools automatically become academies, provides clarity and de-politicisation, and ensures a rapid transition. I fear that making that process discretionary would result in a large increase in judicial reviews, pressure on councils and prolonged uncertainty, which is in nobody’s interests.”—[Official Report, 8 January 2025; Vol. 759, c. 902.]

She also said,

“the DfE will find itself mired in the high court in judicial review. When we tried to transfer our first failing school to a Harris academy we spent two years in court, and children…don’t have that time to waste.”

She is so right.

Rob Tarn, the chief executive of the Northern Education Trust, has made the same point:

“If there’s no longer a known, blanket reality…There is a risk that, where it’s been determined a school needs to join a strong trust, it will take much longer and we will go back to the early days of academisation when people went to court.”

The Children’s Commissioner makes that point too. She says that she is

“deeply concerned that we are legislating against the things we know work in schools, and that we risk children spending longer in failing schools by slowing down the pace of school improvement.”

She is right.

The Confederation of School Trusts has said that the current system offers struggling schools “clarity” as they

“will join a trust, and that process can begin immediately”.

In contrast, they warn,

“We are not clear on how commissioning part-time support through the RISE arrangements makes that any easier.”

The former national schools commissioner, Sir David Carter, has warned that the

“arguments and legal actions that will arise if a school in Cumbria is told to join a trust while a school in Cornwall just gets arm’s length support will only add delay to delivering a fairer and better offer to children.”

Worse still is clause 51, which attacks school choice and the freedom to go to good schools. It was in 1987 that Mrs Thatcher announced that

“we will allow popular schools to take in as many children as space will permit. And this will stop local authorities from putting artificially low limits on entry to good schools.”

That agenda became known as local management of schools and of it the former Labour Minister Lord Adonis wrote,

“Local Management of Schools was an unalloyed and almost immediate success…school budgets under LMS were based largely on pupil numbers, so parental choice came to matter as never before.”

In contrast, the Government’s impact assessment of the Bill says:

“We want the local authority to have more influence over the PANs for schools in their area”.

It goes on to say:

“It could also limit the ability of popular schools to grow…If a school is required to lower their PAN, some pupils who would have otherwise been admitted will be unable to attend the school. This will negatively impact on parental preference”.

Michael Johnson, the leader of the very successful Chulmleigh trust, warns that that “could be disastrous for successful schools…The Government are not better placed than parents to decide which school a child attends.”

[Graham Stuart]

Does my hon. Friend, like me, reflect on the irony that the success from 2010 to 2024, which we on the Conservative Benches would naturally celebrate, was only possible because of the Labour visionaries who drove the academies programme forward, made changes, developed the argument, rolled the pitch and allowed us to lift our schools to much higher levels of performance and our children from deprived backgrounds to much better results. Labour Members were the creators of that, and now this Government are disowning it.

[Neil O’Brien]

It is tragic. It is not us criticising the Bill; it is the professionals—the people who have given their lives to education. I will give another example. Gareth Stevens, leader of Inspiration Trust, another high-performing trust, gives the example of his local council wanting to halve places at an outstanding school to prop up other schools. He says that

“the idea that we could have the rug pulled out from under us and the number of places in our high performing school cut is the most worrying thing…It will mean fewer places at high performing good or outstanding schools”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Witherden (Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate and express my support for the Bill. For far too long, school children have borne the brunt of academisation. Fortunately, the Labour Government in Wales rejected this model, but, having been a teacher on the border for most of my working life and a national executive member of the NASUWT, I have seen at first hand the negative impact of academies becoming the default model, while local authorities have been sidelined.

Since the introduction of the Academies Act 2010, the freedom for academies and free schools to set their own pay, terms and conditions has led to the exploitation of teachers. For example, teachers at Ark schools are expected to work 1,657 hours more annually than a maintained school teacher, while earning £7 less per hour. The lack of national consistency not only allows these schools to undervalue and overwork staff but undermines basic rights such as pension schemes, maternity and sick pay. Our Bill will tackle those disparities by extending the statutory pay and conditions framework to all teachers in academies, ensuring greater consistency and fairness between academies and maintained schools.

There is also the issue of admission policies. Too many schools misuse their control over admissions to break with inclusive local authority policies, selecting what they consider to be a more favourable intake of students. The Bill’s extension of the power to direct admissions to academies will ensure that local authorities can secure places for hard-to-place and vulnerable students, rather than allowing academies to exercise shameful selective admissions. Furthermore, by ending academy presumption, the Bill takes a significant step towards increasing academy accountability, empowering local authorities to better serve the needs of their communities, particularly helping SEND students and reducing reliance on unaffordable independent providers.

I hope to see the severe disparity between teachers’ pay and the high salaries of academy CEOs reviewed and addressed in future education legislation. We must ensure that funding is directed where it is most needed: to teaching and learning. This Bill marks an historic first step towards creating an accountable and fair education system that will benefit all our children.

[Graham Stuart]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden), who has done us and the nation a great service with the clarity of his speech. The Labour party is often accused of working to serve the producer interest rather than the consumer interest, looking after the needs of the trade unions and not those of the ordinary citizen or, in this case, the child. But rarely does any Labour Member make it quite so explicit as the hon. Gentleman just did, with a total betrayal of the child and a total focus on the needs of the professional, their interests, their pay, their disparities and their conditions. There was nothing about the child, nothing about the standards of education. Never have I seen a Labour Member speak up so honestly about what this Bill is really about. We should be enormously grateful to him for doing that, and for doing it so clearly—and in not many words.

This Bill contains 38 policy proposals all linked by a troubling theme: the misguided notion that the bureaucrat knows best. In advocating for new schools to be opened and controlled by local authorities, the Government choose to ignore the evidence that competition and innovation are what drive up standards, and instead they consolidate power in the hands of bureaucrats.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

Under the current system, a third of our children leave school without the basic qualifications to succeed in life, so does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that that shows that the current system is failing and needs change? Furthermore, in the communities with the most disadvantaged—I mean those outside of London—the academisation approach has not made an impact and has not turned around the life chances of children growing up in the most deprived wards. I have worked in those communities and with those schools and seen the impact of trust after trust failing those children. I will not accept that. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that that is unacceptable and that we have to move forward from this day to make greater improvements to make sure that the most disadvantaged students genuinely get the opportunities they deserve?

[Graham Stuart]

I thank the hon. Lady for her speech, if not intervention, and I certainly applaud her passion for the interests of children, disadvantaged children in particular, and her rage at failings in the system and her desire to see improvements, which might need to be radical, but we have not heard how the mechanics of the changes proposed in this Bill will raise standards. They will in fact dismantle them. The hon. Lady’s intervention comes in the context of my following the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr talking about Wales, and it is clear that the system being created by this Bill is much more akin to that in Wales, exactly as the hon. Gentleman so honestly said. Does the hon. Lady suggest that deprived children in Wales have better outcomes than they do in England? [Interruption.] She moved to stand up but then thought better of it, which was wise because she knows that the situation in Wales—which, as the hon. Gentleman said, is exactly what this Bill is trying to create—is infinitely worse than it is in England. Whatever the failings of the system in England, it is demonstrably better than it was 15 or indeed 25 years ago, and it is demonstrably better than it is in Wales.

[Sarah Smith]

rose—

[Graham Stuart]

I happily give way to the hon. Lady again.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. I remind hon. Members that interventions should be short.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stuart]

I thank the hon. Lady, but she again could not explain anything about the Bill. Her passion for improvement is great—we would all applaud that—but her linkage to anything in the Bill that will improve matters was distinctly missing.

Many people, including Sir Jon Coles of United Learning, have criticised the proposals in the Bill; he said they will effectively destroy the academy system. I could not tell where the hon. Lady is on that, but the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr spoke with great clarity. Where once Labour promised us “education, education, education,” it now promises us bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy. Tragically, it is our children who will bear the consequences.

The outcomes of the last Labour Government serve as a stark warning of where the Bill will lead. In 2010, notwithstanding the nascent academy movement, we inherited a country where our children ranked 27th globally in reading. We spent more on education than Germany, yet achieved results that lagged behind nations like Poland. By the time we left office, England’s students were ranked as the best readers in the western world. In 2010, just 68% of schools were rated good or outstanding, but today that figure is 90%. These dramatic improvements did not happen by accident; they are the result of a system that puts freedom, competition and accountability at the centre of education, and equally importantly leaves mediocrity with nowhere to hide.

If the Conservative education reforms were great, it was only because we were standing on the shoulders of giants.

“Academies were introduced in the areas of greatest challenge, harnessing the drive of external sponsors and strong school leadership to bring new hope to our most disadvantaged areas.”

Not my words, but those of the longest serving Labour Prime Minister, Sir Tony Blair, in 2005. To his credit, he recognised the failings of our country’s overly centralised education system and started the reforms that paved the way to make our schools great again.

From tiny acorns do mighty oaks grow, and that is what the Conservatives delivered. In 14 years, the number of children attending academies skyrocketed from 192,000 to 4.9 million. That was transformative for pupils across England, particularly those living in deprived communities. One example is Harris Academy Battersea. Formerly known as Battersea Park school, it was considered inadequate before joining the Harris Federation in 2014. At that time, 68% of students achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C. By 2017, that figure had risen to 83%, and in 2018 Ofsted rated the academy as outstanding, noting that teachers were proud to work there, morale was high, and pupils of all abilities made very strong progress. By putting a strong emphasis on cultural enrichment and academic excellence, the life chances of the working-class pupils that academies predominantly teach and who Labour claims to represent were transformed.

I am pleased that the Government have seen sense on one issue—I congratulate the Minister on that—and have amended the Bill to stop the extension of national pay rules to academies, and only require academies to have due regard to the school teachers’ pay and conditions document, rather than impose a ceiling on pay. That would have undermined the remarkable progress made by these institutions in raising standards, particularly for disadvantaged pupils.

New clause 38 goes one step further, making the pay set out in the school teachers’ pay and conditions document a floor and extending freedoms over pay and conditions to maintained schools. One of the strengths of academies is their ability to respond flexibly to local needs, including offering competitive salaries to attract and retain the best teachers in challenging areas. Limiting that flexibility would ignore the realities of teacher recruitment and retention, especially in communities where the need for high-quality education is greatest, because people respond to incentives. If academies cannot pay the best maths or physics teacher more, the children who would benefit from their skills the most will be left behind.

Building on the need for greater freedom and flexibility to raise standards, we introduced free schools, an initiative that helped to spark a renaissance in English education. Walking hand in hand with its union paymasters, who decry those schools as unaccountable and underfunded, as we heard set out in the previous speech, Labour wants these engines of social mobility to be destroyed. Its proposal to allow local authorities to open new schools, along with its planned review of the free school programme, would shift control of our children’s education away from communities and teachers and back into the hands of bureaucrats.

Unfortunately, the process has already started. In October, Ministers paused plans to open 44 new state schools in England, putting parents who planned to send their children there in limbo, so I am pleased to support new clause 39, which would reverse that pause and allow those schools to open as planned. Let us be clear: in 2024, 21% of GCSE entries from free schools achieved a grade 7 or above compared with 19% in comprehensive schools. Labour may not want to face the facts, but the reality is that sometimes the bureaucrat and the trade union shop steward do not know best. The Secretary of State is Labour’s Miss Trunchbull, putting our teachers in the chokey to satisfy her union paymasters.

This Government are so certain in their belief that they know best that they will not even allow parents the freedom to educate their own children without state interference. Buried within this Bill is a new legal requirement for local authorities to maintain a register of children not in school—a policy that I recognise was in the Conservative party’s manifesto, but which has the potential to be not just unhelpful, but actively harmful to children.

Our country has long upheld the primacy of parents, not the state, in determining the best education for their children, and this proposal seeks to undermine that fundamental covenant. That is why I support amendment 200, which would require a local authority to submit a statement of reasons when it does not agree for a child to be taken out of school to be home educated. It should at least have to account for itself. Compulsory enrolment could have serious consequences, as families may simply refuse to comply and potentially disengage from state involvement altogether because of this overreach, leading to negative unintended consequences that could impact on the child’s wellbeing.

The state thinks that it has a divine right to infringe on every aspect of the child’s life—or, at least, this Government do. They want to know what home-educated children do at the weekends and during the holidays. If that information is not required for children who attend mainstream schools, what is the justification for demanding it for children who are home-schooled? Why, in response to my repeated interventions, could the Minister not provide any reassurance that some sensible and proportionate rules would be put in place? I therefore support amendment 197, which would remove that requirement.

It was John Maynard Keynes who said:

“When the facts change, I change my mind”.

In the same spirit, I ask colleagues across the Chamber what they do. The evidence is clear: freedom and flexibility in education drive up standards and deliver better outcomes for children. In government, we followed the evidence and built on the previous Labour Government’s body of work, and the results speak for themselves. England now has the best readers in the western world, a record number of schools rated “good” or “outstanding” and greater opportunities for working-class children, albeit never at the level we would like, which is why that needs to be built on, not knocked to the ground.

As proud as I am of our record, this debate is not about party politics. At its heart, it is about ensuring that every child, regardless of their background, has access to the highest-quality education that we can provide. I urge the Secretary of State to follow the evidence, not ideology. I will vote against this Bill, but given the Government’s majority, we accept that however misguided these policies are, they will probably pass. All I can do is finish by appealing to colleagues across the Chamber to show courage, stand up for the poorest in society, stop the wreckers and support our amendments this evening when we come to vote.

[Abtisam Mohamed (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I commend the Minister on all the excellent work that has taken place so far on the Bill. My representations will be on home education. I recognise the importance of safeguarding and making sure that vulnerable children do not fall through the net; however, the home-educating community is growing, diverse and caring, and those involved are fiercely passionate about their children’s education and learning.

Amendments 4, 13 and 14, which stand in my name, would add to the Bill the definition of “suitable education” that already appears in section 7 of the Education Act 1996. Without these amendments, it would be left to individual local authority officers to decide what they think is suitable education.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lizzi Collinge]

I acknowledge the complexity of that case and that the absolutely unacceptable failings before Sara’s death were abject across many organisations. However, she was removed from school partly so that her parents could prevent the detection of the abuse. I have recognised, and will continue to recognise, that that obviously does not speak to the vast majority of people who home-educate their children. However, as parliamentarians, we have a duty to protect the most vulnerable, and sometimes that includes regulating the majority, who are decent, honest people.

I want to reassure parents that the new regulations, such as registers for children not in school and the capacity to compel school attendance in certain cases, are not aimed at limiting home education as a whole or about policing how people choose to educate.

[Graham Stuart]

The intention is not the thing; it is the actual impact that counts. Let us take the example of someone who has taken their child out of school for the reasons that the hon. Lady has mentioned. Perhaps they have an autistic child who is miserable every day, and after letters to the headteacher and the local authority and failure after failure, they are forced to go into home education. Can she understand why parents are fearful of a representative of—as far as the parents are concerned—that failing local authority having the right to enter their home and sit in judgment over the child that they have been forced to home-educate? Can she understand why they would be fearful of the imposition a hard, top-down register, especially after so many years of successive Governments failing to provide any proper support for home educators?

[Lizzi Collinge]

I accept wholeheartedly the amount of parents of children, particularly with SEND, who have been absolutely failed by our system and by 14 years of Conservative Government. What I do not accept is that the proposal is somehow a major imposition. I do not believe that checking that children are receiving a decent education and are safe and well cared for is a major imposition on parents, and I think all good parents would welcome that.

These measures are being put in place to protect and safeguard vulnerable children. Having no oversight of children not in school is an unacceptable risk to children’s welfare. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is crucial, and cannot come too soon to protect our most vulnerable children and to support families up and down the country with rising costs. It has the welfare of children at its heart, and I am proud to have served on the Bill Committee and to have played a role in shaping this vital legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stuart]

Has my right hon. Friend seen Tim Leunig’s article in Schools Week talking about Ofsted’s new report card system following the Labour manifesto commitment? One danger is that, if my right hon. Friend is right and we see a reduction in standards, the Bill could switch off the light that allows us to see that, because

“reliability and validity are in tension”,

as Tim Leunig puts it. Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that Ofsted must ensure that it continues to put a bright and reliable light on the education system, so that we can see whether the policies in this Bill work?

[Damian Hinds]

I do, and my right hon. Friend gives me two valuable opportunities. The first is to pay tribute to the great Tim Leunig. We do not often talk about him in this House. He has friends here, and he is a perceptive thinker. I will look up his article.

The other opportunity that my right hon. Friend gives me is to highlight the discrepancy we can get when things appear to be getting better, when in fact they are not. That is what happened under the last Labour Government when, in spite of us falling down the international comparisons, they managed to find 11 different ways in the system to make it look like our GCSE results were improving year after year. We do not want that to happen again. There were those champions in the new Labour years who made these great reforms happen and would want to continue them now, so I say to those on the Government Benches: where are the champions today? Where are those in the modern Labour party who will say, “No, we will not be bound by ideology. We are going to do what is in the best interests of the children”? I hope there will be some of those champions in the other place.

To be fair, I was mildly encouraged this morning to hear the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, when questioned on the radio about the fate of this Bill, appearing to be somewhat open-minded, shall we say, about what might happen. To be fair, I have even been slightly encouraged listening to the Secretary of State for Education in recent days and weeks. She has sounded like she might be a little bit open to rowing back from some of the worst excesses of this legislation. There is still time. There will be weeks of this legislation being considered in the other place, so I just ask the Government to please take that time to think carefully about the legacy they will be leaving and to turn those words into deeds.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vikki Slade]

I think a lot of people who do not know anything about home education miss the fact that there is a whole community of home educators, and home-educated children spend plenty of time with their peers, but they are just different peers—others who prefer to have their education outside a school environment—and there is a risk of such organisations being driven underground or lost altogether.

Under section 7 of the Education Act 1996, parents already have a duty to ensure that their child receives a suitable education, whether through school or otherwise, and local authorities can already conduct informal inquires and issue school attendance orders if they believe a child is not receiving an appropriate education, so this is simply overkill. A formal register would help to ensure accountability, but this is overreach. My amendment 221 proposes a more practical solution of requiring only those who provide more than six hours per week of education or activity to be included in the register. That strikes a reasonable balance by ensuring that key educators are identified without overwhelming families or local authorities.

While there are genuine safeguarding concerns, local authorities already have the power to intervene under section 47 of the Children Act 1989. The Victoria Climbié Foundation stated that the provision proposed in the Bill would have done nothing to help Sara Sharif because the local authority had already decided that the child was not at risk.

[Graham Stuart]

I hope colleagues in the other place will follow up on the hon. Lady’s excellent speech. To focus in on that point, if a register does go ahead—the hon. Lady supports that; I do not—it should start with the minimum requirements, and then it could be expanded if that is needed, rather than be spread out in this way. To reinforce the point she makes, local authorities already have the power to intervene if it appears to them that someone is not having a suitable education, and they have all the powers required if there are concerns about welfare. Conflating welfare and education in the way this Bill does particularly irritates and upsets home educators.

[Vikki Slade]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. In fact, Kathryn from my constituency wrote me a very long email talking about welfare versus education—two totally separate issues. People are really upset and would have been devastated and distraught to hear the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) effectively make them feel like they were some sort of pariah. I was really upset to hear that, especially as I asked home educators in my constituency to listen to the debate and give me their feedback.

I support amendments 195 and 197, tabled by the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), which seek clarity that educational activities outside regular school terms should not be subject to this overreach. My children are not subject to them, and children in home education should not be subjected to anything more than the rest of us. Children receiving education out of school should have the same rights to take their public examinations as their peers. It should not be based on a parent’s ability to fund that. After all, the Treasury already saves many thousands of pounds for every home-educated child. New clause 53, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), would provide support for parents by providing for home-educated children to sit any relevant examination and to be fully funded where requested.

I thank the Minister for confirmation on one point: as I sat here this afternoon, I received a letter to say that the challenges faced by summer-born children will now be considered. I would like to pass on the thanks—[Interruption.] Well, I’ll save the rest of it for you.

I was not going to speak about academies, but as I sat here over several hours I received two more emails relating, in particular, to concerns about their governance. I heard the challenge from those on the Conservative Benches about the comments by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden) on teachers, but I cannot tell the House how many times I hear complaints about the way staff and whistleblowers are being treated in multi-academy trusts. While I have sat here today, I have heard of another who has been suspended by a multi-academy trust. This is not about them getting better treatment; it is about them getting worse treatment. If teachers are treated badly and leave the sector, that has an impact on our children. It is about the children, not just the teachers.

In summary, I support the principles of the Bill, but I urge the Government to consider the amendments on excessive and potentially harmful requirements imposed on home-educated children. They are common sense amendments that would allow children to be protected without placing undue burdens on families.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Morgan]

Along with my hon. Friend, I am delighted that so many schools in his constituency are receiving significant investment through the school rebuilding programme. Ensuring that schools and colleges have the resources and buildings that they need is a key part of our plan to break down barriers to opportunity and ensure that every child gets the best start in life.

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

The Minister may remember that the last Labour Government had Building Schools for the Future. Some £55 billion was spent on buildings and IT to transform education—except buildings and IT do not transform education. There was global evidence to back that up, because building schools is not a new thing. Can the Minister reassure the House that we will never have a repeat of that extravagant and wasted programme, but that we will ensure we have functional schools with brilliant teachers able to teach our children?

[Stephen Morgan]

Ensuring that schools and colleges have the resources and buildings that they need is key to our mission to break down barriers to opportunity. I will take no lectures from the Conservative party on education.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Catherine McKinnell]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. Rather than obsessing about structures and names over doors, we are determined to ensure that every child in every community has a good school and that schools work together in communities with their local authorities to co-operate on place planning and admissions, with every child getting the best education and every school having high and rising standards.

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

At just £952, the East Riding of Yorkshire has the lowest high needs block funding of any local authority in the country. Ministers have committed themselves to looking again at the formula so that we can have the right one. Will they please commit to doing everything they can to bring it in for the next financial year so that we do not have another year of grossly unfair and disproportionate distributions of funding?

[Bridget Phillipson]

The right hon. Gentleman will know that this is a complex area. It would not have been possible to make any changes to the funding formula this year, but we will look in the future at what changes might be required. I am sure that as part of that process he will make representations on behalf of his constituents.

A Brighter Future for the Next Generation

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) in this important Queen’s Speech debate. A brighter future for the next generation—what better gift can we give to our young persons than the gift of determining their own future? Of course, in Scotland, we already offer the young adults in our country the right to vote, having extended the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds. In the recent Scottish general election, and that across England and Wales, we saw parliamentary democracy in action. The people we on these SNP Benches represent in greater numbers than ever before made their views known. Scotland has spoken and our democratic will has been made abundantly clear. I am in no doubt that the strong voice of the Scottish people has echoed right through the heart of these Chambers and into the Government offices.

Scotland has had enough of being disrespected. Brexit was and is the final straw. While the recent election was different in many ways, the results in Scotland were once again the same. The UK Government’s programme was roundly rejected, Tory ideology was rejected, and once again the good people of Scotland put their faith in us, the SNP, and returned Nicola Sturgeon as our First Minister. The SNP has been re-elected for a historic fourth consecutive term of Government in Scotland. The Scottish people have chosen to ensure that Scotland’s future is firmly in Scotland’s hands. The Tories must not, cannot and will not stand in the way of our democracy.

The last time Scotland let the UK Government take our sovereignty hostage, we were ripped from the European Union against our will. With that came uncertainty for the lives and livelihoods of everyone across these nations, but particularly for our next generation and their chance of that brighter future. Is it any wonder that our next generation in Scotland are completely fed up of Tory regimes and their overlords that they did not ask for, and certainly did not vote for? They are a generation fed up with the lack of accountability and lack of integrity of successive, continual Tory Governments, a generation who grew up hearing from the supposed Opposition that they were going to stop the Tories and going to win, in the hope that it might be less bad for Scotland, and a generation fed up with hearing their representatives who are sent here to these Benches being roundly ignored time and again and our democratic views and constructive suggestions to safeguard Scotland being utterly rejected. They are a generation who are fed up with a Prime Minister who simply bumbles from one ill-considered strategy to the next, leaving only a trail of woe in his path.

It is no wonder that recent polls from Ipsos MORI Scottish Political Monitor show huge support for independence among the young people of Scotland, with 79% of 16 to 24-year-olds and 68% of 25 to 34-year-olds now saying that they would support leaving this Union, for it is only a Union in name. They know that we are not on a two-way street but on an endless path of right-wing destruction.

The question therefore must be: why are the UK Government looking for any which way to block the wishes of Scotland’s electorate and of new generations to have their say on Scottish independence? If the Government really wanted to reform the voting franchise that this place uses, why not empower young persons across the United Kingdom by extending the vote to them? Instead the Queen’s Speech proposals in this area will lead only to further disenfranchising of the young people across these nations, as my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara) said.

With 16 and 17-year-olds now able to vote in Scottish elections, seeing many of our young people engaged and energised truly inspires real hope for our future. In the recent Holyrood elections, for the very first time, foreign nationals and refugees also had the right to vote and take part in our democracy. That is a tangible symbol of the inclusive country that Scotland is.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Trade (Graham Stuart)]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman could confirm that the majority of voters last week voted for parties opposed to a second independence referendum, and that therefore, if the Scottish Government respected Scottish democracy, they would realise that there was no such appetite.

[Steven Bonnar]

I thank the Minister for his contribution. It is worth noting that the SNP winning 62 first-past-the-post constituency seats is comparable to one of the UK parties—the Conservatives, Labour or the Lib Dems—winning 552 seats in this place. Would that be a mandate for a Government? Yes. I think I have answered the question.

SATs Results

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner (Ashton-under-Lyne) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that every child deserves an excellent education which enables them to grow and thrive; notes that the Government has published figures showing that a lower proportion of children were meeting the expected standard at the end of Key Stage 2 overall in 2016 than in 2015; further notes that, as a result, in 2016 47 percent of children will be told that they have not reached the expected standard in at least one of their SATs papers; regrets that the Secretary of State for Education has pushed ahead with chaotic and confusing reforms which mean that thousands of children will be unnecessarily labelled as failures, and that the Secretary of State is steadily losing the confidence of teachers; and calls on the Government urgently to review primary assessment and the 2016 SATs results and to clarify that these will not be used for measuring and judging school performance.

The 2016 key stage 2 standard assessment tests, which assess children in reading, writing, spelling, grammar, punctuation and maths, are the first to assess the new primary national curriculum, which was introduced in 2014. The Government claim that they have raised expectations for pupils at the end of key stage 2, but those at the chalk-face—primary school teachers and school leaders—say that the expected standard for SATs has been set at a level that is beyond the reach of the majority of children.

Our children are being set up to fail. Almost half of England’s 11-year-olds will now go on to secondary school, having been told by this Government that they are failures. However, the real failures are this Government, particularly the current Secretary of State for Education who pushed ahead with this flawed system despite all the warnings from the education profession that the primary assessment system was not fit for purpose.

Under this Government, children who fail to meet the totally unrealistic expected target at the end of key stage 2—47% of children—will be required to resit these tests in future. School leaders were told yesterday that the catch-up funding for secondary schools will not increase despite the rise in the number of pupils deemed to be below the expected standard. For these pupils, the first year at big school—and all the excitement and anticipation that it should bring—will instead become an anxious replay of drilling for tests in English and maths, which they sat in primary school. I can only imagine the impact on those young lives—to have to go through it all again, to feel a failure, to see their friends getting on when they should be looking ahead to new challenges and new opportunities.

I remember being told that I would never amount to anything, but look at me now. I want—teachers want—every child to know that they are amazing. I want an education system that helps every child realise their full potential.

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

The hon. Lady may remember that under the last Labour Government we had such a system. It was fantastic. Every child was told that they were succeeding. It was just that when we looked at the international league tables, we went down, down and down. We had grade inflation. Whatever her critique of SATs results this year, does she not agree that we must have high standards and we must maintain those standards over time; otherwise we will go back to those days under Labour when we let down the future of young people by pretending that they were successful when, in fact, they were not?

[Angela Rayner]

I remember that under Labour we had Sure Start, we had Every Child Matters, we had new schools, we had teachers in the profession, we had people and children feeling that they were happy. At present we have teachers taking unprecedented industrial action and leaving the profession at record rates, so I take no lectures from those on the Government Benches regarding the current situation.

The Opposition recognise that ongoing assessment and consistent testing in schools is extremely important to help teachers and parents support and provide new challenges for all children. Such tests can identify and close any gaps in knowledge so that all pupils can do well. But a proper assessment regime needs consistency and needs to be understood by all.

The Government have utterly failed to deliver on this. The current SATs tests go too far. The Secretary of State has chopped and changed too much. She has caused disruption and chaos in our schools and extra bureaucracy for our teachers. The key stage 2 assessments have been an unmitigated disaster and a nightmare for thousands of children, ending in disappointment and prolonged uncertainty. They also have serious consequences for thousands of schools because of the way this Government use them as part of the school accountability system.

KS2 SATs are used to rank schools in league tables. They are scrutinised by the Department for Education and regional schools commissioners, who form judgments on schools’ performance. Ofsted uses SATs results when forming its inspection judgments, and parents take them into account when choosing their children’s school. Schools’ reputations are heavily dependent on how their pupils perform in these tests.

The National Association of Head Teachers asked the Secretary of State not to publish the data, as she herself has conceded that it is not to be compared with that for previous years. The NAHT general secretary, Russell Hobby, said:

“Given the changes to SATs this year, and the mistakes we’ve seen, it is hard see how valuable this data will be to parents who want to understand how well a school is performing year on year or compared to other schools. But the government does love a league table, regardless of how accurate it may be.”

Worryingly, the schools commissioners are already using the provisional results from these tests to identify those schools to which they can apply their extensive legal powers to force them into academy status on the spurious grounds that they are failing, coasting or underperforming.

Does all this remind us of anything—children who are judged failures at an early age, being separated from their primary school classmates; schools which are being wrongly condemned as second class? That sounds to me like the dark days of the 11-plus, with children branded failures before they have even reached their teens and separated from their classmates, with all the stigma that that can bring. Many adults today still recount the lasting effects that that had on them.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Secretary of State for Education (Nicky Morgan)]

I wanted to give the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) the benefit of the doubt, because she has not been shadow Secretary of State for Education for very long and I can sense her passion for the subject, in terms of her own experiences in education and her family. However, her speech captured everything that is wrong with the Labour party at the moment: mad conspiracy theories, deferring to the unions, and zero answers to the problems facing this country. This is about young people who were let down by a Labour Government who consistently sold them short in terms of their life chances.

The hon. Lady was wrong on all counts—wrong on tests, wrong on selection, and wrong on giving young people the best start in life. Nothing—nothing at all—is more important than making sure that young people master the basics of the three R’s, and master them early. If they do not, they face a struggle for the rest of their lives and are denied the opportunity to realise their full potential. That is why making sure that every child in this country has a good grasp of literacy and numeracy is a matter of social justice.

[Graham Stuart]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that what is particularly sad is that Labour Members appear to think it is more important to let children think that they are ready for secondary school than actually to ensure that they are?

[Nicky Morgan]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, a former Chair of the Education Committee. He is absolutely right that Labour Members appear to want to sell young people short, rather than being clear with them about the standards that are needed to compete not just with the best in this country, but with the best in the world.

When this Government came to office in 2010, too many young people entering secondary school were not able to read, write or add up well enough. England’s pupils were far behind their peers in top-performing countries right across the globe. International test after international test showed other nations surging ahead while England’s performance stagnated. In fact, the OECD identified England as one of the few countries in which the basic skills of school leavers were no better than those of their grandparents’ generation. To me, that is nothing short of a scandal, and central to that scandal was that the curriculum being taught in many primary schools, and the tests that the pupils were taking, were not up to scratch.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stuart]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman is as disappointed as I am that when we had inflation in standards—when we had the perception of success, but not the reality—headteachers such as the one he speaks about did not write letters home to parents. It would be good if, in response to that selling out, they had showed outrage similar to that which they showed at the early implementation of a new, higher standard.

[John Pugh]

I am sure that this headteacher would have done whatever was professionally necessary at the time. I am not sure that he was a headteacher at that time, so I cannot really comment for him. He concluded his letter to his pupils:

“We don’t need tests to tell us how great you all are.”

The worst thing about the letter is that it shows that there was a clear need to remove the feeling among those good, hard-working children that they had failed. I do not think that anyone here is against the summative assessment of primary school children’s progress. I do not think that any Labour Member said that. Nobody is against meaningful feedback or having a tool to establish a baseline for improvement. No one wants to go back to the days of total freedom where there were no reasonable expectations, but we must all—including the Government—be prepared to learn something. We must learn from places such as Finland, which has few tests like our SATs but which, as everybody knows, does very well. We must learn from experts and from teachers who have to implement what we impose. We need a sense—this is clearly lacking from the Secretary of State’s comments—of common enterprise between the teaching profession and the Government. I know that the NUT is the teaching profession, but the Secretary of State needs to incorporate some measure of support for what teachers have been trying to say to her.

We need a bit of humility, which perhaps I can illustrate by using the vexed issue of grammar—I took a look at the grammar sections of this year’s tests. I think that grammar has its place. It provides a recursive definition of a living language and, like a language, it evolves. I happen to think that grammar helps more in understanding foreign languages than our own, and I argue that the greatest orators in this place are not necessarily the greatest grammarians. If someone was stopped mid-sentence and asked what type of clause they were using, they might be in some difficulty. Most people have been speaking grammatically for most of their life with a fair amount of success—it is rather like Molière’s character Monsieur Jourdain, who found, with some surprise, that he had been talking prose all his life.

There may be value in trying to understand the rules that one unconsciously follows, and there is genuinely value and fun in a bit of clause analysis—I certainly enjoyed it when I was at school. However, it is arguable how far that benefits the users of language, and how much meta vocabulary one needs to acquire, particularly as there seems to be no particular consistency as to what vocabulary one ought to have, and there seems to be some opacity in what terminology one needs to pick up. Fronted adverbials certainly were not there in my day. I did Latin, preferring the imperfect to the past progressive. All these things are fairly arcane, esoteric stuff, and it is arguable how far you can go down that road without descending into the kind of pedantry that dismisses split infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions. But it is simply unarguable that imposing, in haste, a curriculum and test of limited value, with scant preparation, and discouraging well-intentioned pupils and teachers in the process, is rash. It is rash, and it requires some serious explanation and apology.

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

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to talk about SATs this year. I remember that when I chaired the Education Committee a number of years ago, we had the SATs fiasco under the previous Government. That was when a true mess was made of SATs. This year a new assessment has been brought in, and I can share with the House, having chaired the Committee—my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) is in that Chair now—that whenever new assessments are brought in, there is some level of volatility. We will not get everything right, and I would not try to claim that we necessarily have this year, but at first there is volatility and then, over time, outcomes improve.

The central question is, how are we going to raise standards? Well, actually, the first question is: are we doing a good enough job? That would have been a good question for the shadow Secretary of State to ask. Were we doing a good enough job in 2010? Are we today? Things are always partial, and it is always hard to get data that are entirely comparative, but the answer is that, in the context of what is happening around the world, it would appear that too many of the children in England are not given the requisite skills, capability and knowledge to flourish in secondary school, with lifelong negative impacts on them and their families.

That would appear to be the evidence, but we did not hear that from the shadow Secretary of State. Instead—I do not mean to be too harsh on one of her first outings—we had a rather incoherent if passionate denunciation of testing, because if we feed back the results of tests to people, some will be told that they are not at the required standard and others will be told that they are. The hon. Lady’s speech seemed to be an attack on that in principle, yet that passionate denunciation was married with a public statement that she and her party believe we should still have tests. I do not see how those two things can be put together. It seems an extraordinary conjunction. The shadow Secretary of State needs to think clearly: that is what education policy requires. It is not just a political fight in this House; what happens in schools has real-world effects on children. That was disappointing and it would be really good to hear what the Labour party thinks about tests.

The shadow Secretary of State’s strong, lurid language around failure and failing is unwelcome. We aspire to a high standard. Not everyone is going to reach it, but that is the nature of high standards. It does not mean that everybody else is worthless and it does not mean their learning is worthless. It does not mean that they have not done a good job or worked hard. None the less, do we not have to give people objective ideas about where they would ideally like to be, or do we throw that away because it might demoralise some? She appeared to contradict herself on two sides of the argument.

[Neil Carmichael]

It is a great pleasure to have an opportunity to comment on my predecessor’s observations. Does my hon. Friend agree that the tests are part of a wider mission to improve standards? They are linked to differences in the curriculum and to the attitude we have, which is to give young people aspiration and the tools to deliver on that aspiration. Does he agree that that is part of our complete determination to give young people more opportunity in life?

[Graham Stuart]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Although I defer to the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh), who made such a fine speech, I would have to say that I did not agree with him about his use of the split infinitive and would prefer it was not used in this House, orally or otherwise; but that is because I am a bit of a pedant in that respect. There is a genuine argument to be had.

The hon. Member for Southport rightly started to unpick some of that grammar. How practically useful is it? What exactly is it designed for? Is it excessive in its extent and application, compared with what is sought from it? Those are legitimate questions and perhaps we do need to row back. I do not know. I have not studied it and I would like to hear more. Focusing on those practicalities might be a much more useful dialogue. Instead, the shadow Secretary of State moved on from her two contradictory positions to a rather crazed assessment that this was like the 11-plus. The whole point of the 11-plus was to divide children and select them. I do not think that anyone can suggest that that is what has happened with the SATs this year.

[Vernon Coaker]

To stop this becoming a sterile debate, let me say from the outset that I do not think there is anybody in this House who is in favour of not trying to improve standards in schools. I think there is also a consensus that testing is part of improving standards in schools. I was disappointed that the Secretary of State’s speech did not address the very real problems with the SATs tests this year. The hon. Gentleman has made that point, but we did not hear from the Secretary of State what she intends to do about those problems to put them right for next year.

[Graham Stuart]

As I said a few minutes ago, all new assessments and tests go through, and create, additional volatility. Members will remember the changes to the English GCSE. They were called a fiasco; I would call them a furore. The unions said they were a disaster and a disgrace, and the schools said it was nothing to do with them, but when they went to court they lost on every single count. It was a new test and it took time. The following year, with pretty much the same test, the schools that had done badly had learned how to do it better. They read the spec in a way that they had obviously failed to do previously, and other technical changes were made.

This is a new assessment. It is not a disaster. We need to unpick its components and look at them carefully to find out whether there is the right balance between raising standards, having high standards and not creating something that is negative in the way it is perceived by children and schools.

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

This year, of course, it will be very difficult to embed the new assessment. Does my hon. Friend agree that the new curriculum assessment gives children a mastery of the subject before they move on? That is far preferable to them moving through the system without having that grasp of the subject.

[Graham Stuart]

I agree with my hon. Friend. If the answer to my first question—about whether we are doing a good enough job—is no, it is not because we have lazy teachers. Fundamentally, if we are not doing a good enough job or as good a job as our neighbours and competitors, we need to raise standards, and when that happens, there is going to be a shock to the system. That is partly because of the volatility and adjustment and partly because the system needs that shock. It needs to be told.

I sometimes clashed with the hon. Lady’s predecessor on the question of what simply raising the bar did to raise standards. It is a mixed answer, but I have seen standards in the system raised partly because the bar was raised and there was clarity about what was required. Whatever the difficulties—there are all sorts of issues and complexities, including academisation—and notwithstanding some of the downsides, we have fundamentally better schools now than we did six years ago, and that is partly because we have stated clearly what we want and asked schools to meet the challenge. I have absolute confidence that next year, as schools learn to adjust to the challenge and headteachers work out how better to use their people and their funds, including the pupil premium, more than 53% of children will meet the standards.

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

Going through change is difficult. Do the Government have a role to play in keeping our teachers with us, which is what I worry about most of all? Change is hard for the children and teachers, but our teachers are under unprecedented stress, and I worry for them. Do the Government not need to keep a close eye on that and listen to teachers at all times?

[Graham Stuart]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The whole House has a role to play and ought not simply to trumpet the negatives, as the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) did, in this early outing as an Opposition spokesperson. It might have been more devastating to be understated than to suggest that this was a return to the 11-plus, which it clearly is not. But there are issues about maintaining engagement with teachers.

People might think that the Secretary of State’s fairly vicious assault on the NUT was over the top, but, given my experience of the NUT, I do not think it was. The NUT opposes almost everything. It is tragic. All I can say by way of uplift is this: when I go to primary schools, yes, I meet teachers concerned about the changes in the curriculum and the assessment and about the speed, from their end of the telescope, so to speak, at which they feel the change is happening—they genuinely find it difficult and challenging—but I find them to be a lot more positive than their national representatives on the NUT. It is unfortunate that the NUT is so often seen as speaking for all our teachers. I do not think it does.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) is right that we need to keep teachers on board. We must recognise that the teacher is the most important person in the system. Teacher quality is the key. The one thing I learned in five years chairing the Education Committee was that teacher quality was the most important thing. Leaders are important only insofar as they help to bring out the best in teachers. Teacher quality is transformational.

[John Pugh]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Graham Stuart]

I promised I would not be that long, but I have obviously broken my word—not for the first time.

[John Pugh]

What does the hon. Gentleman make of the example of Finland, which is very light on tests but very strong on teacher buy-in? What conclusions does he draw from its favourable ranking in the PISA table compared with us?

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is right to lay down that challenge—though before mentioning Finland, he said he remained in favour of tests too. When a system moves to a certain level of excellence, as in Finland, and starts to recruit teachers from the top 30% of graduates in the country, and when 10 people are competing for each job—these are old data, admittedly—not only does it get people with high academic ability but it can select on empathy, enthusiasm and other skills as well, and then has a first-class workforce.

We are a much bigger country with different challenges, and we do not recruit our teaching workforce from the same pool as Finland. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman ever saw the work by McKinsey about how good systems keep getting better. It is a fairly basic thing when one hears it, but one has to hear it to realise it. Systems are different and require different interventions at different points in their development. I look forward to the day when we have such a self-confident, self-critical, self-improving education system that we can slowly cut down Ofsted and the accountability system and leave it to keep improving by itself. The reason why the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne, the hon. Member for Southport and my hon. Friends have not reached that point is that we do not yet have the confidence, but I hope that one day it will come.

I have one final point on the issue of children’s stress. It is important not to talk up lurid references to failure and it is important to say to schools generally that they should look at the schools where the children are not showing any stress. Does the system mean that all children have to be stressed? No, because we can find many instances where children are suffering no stress. They can be prepared for SATs without it feeling like some great ordeal coming down the road on which their whole future depends.

The message that the House should send—hopefully from all sides—is that schools should look at and learn from the schools that do not put stress on kids and use the SATs as an “assessment for learning”—call it what we like—rather than making them into an ordeal. Teachers and headteachers need to ensure that whatever the stress they are feeling—they are accountable for their results, so they should be feeling some—they do not pass it on to children. It is possible for that to happen; it does happen; it needs to happen everywhere.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Huq]

I thank the Secretary of State for those constructive and collegiate remarks.

I conduct a great many assemblies in my constituency. Ealing is a leafy suburban borough, and my seat was a Conservative seat as recently as May 2015. While I am standing opposite the Secretary of State, let me point out that one of the issues that arise is the retention rate of teachers in a borough such as Ealing. Headteachers tell me that they can easily recruit trainees in their 20s, but once those young people want to put down roots and settle, they are off to Slough, Milton Keynes, or whatever is the nearest affordable place to live near the M25. I know that this is slightly off the subject, but headteachers have suggested the introduction of tied housing, which exists on some university campuses, because that would make the jobs more attractive. Some heads say that they have lost people to schools where new arrivals can be accommodated in a caretaker’s house.

Conservative Members have suggested that this is just an NUT diatribe. That is why I wanted to raise the subject of real people—the kind of people who would naturally have been on their side. If the Government are losing the good will of people who would naturally be conservative with a small “c”, I think that they have problems. My constituent told me that education was in crisis. The word “crisis” is much overused, but she was in despair, shock and anger as she told me that.

Both the Secretary of State and I were guinea pigs in 1988, the first year of GCSEs. I realise that any system will have teething troubles, but I understand that teachers and educationists have begged the Government not to introduce these changes so rapidly, and to wait for a year. We are where we are. I know that “NUT” has been portrayed as something of a dirty word during this debate. However, the NUT’s Kevin Courtney has described the key stage 2 SATs as rushed and inappropriate, and has said that the curriculum is wrong and bad tests have been poorly marked. I talked about poor marking earlier. This kind of tinkering has led to chaos and confusion. It seems that these kids are guinea pigs as well. Schools should not be exam factories.

Friday’s edition of the Times Educational Supplement quotes Brian Walton, the head of Brookside Academy in Somerset, of whom I had never heard. He argues that we have a “results illusion”, and says:

“So much rides on SATs that the real purpose of education is lost”

in “statistical positioning”. It seems that we are being seduced by the numbers, and not recognising the whole child for who that child is. According to some assessments, one in 10 teachers has left the profession as a result of falling morale. The housing issue is intrinsically linked with that in areas such as west London, and something must be done about it. It is worrying that Ealing should be a borough in which its teachers cannot afford to live. We are seeing a hollowing out of our capital, and that is obviously wrong.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Dr Huq]

This was really meant to be an intervention, in that it was intended to be very short, but I have managed to spin it out into a speech. I will give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Graham Stuart]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for spinning out an excellent intervention.

I suppose that what frustrates Conservatives is that the Labour Party wants tests, but then talks about the tensions that they can cause. What kind of tests are required that do not already exist? We have heard nothing constructive from Labour Members. The hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) at least suggested that the grammar test might be a bit over the top. What is wrong with these tests that could be put right, and should be put right, for next year? Any suggestion would be helpful.

[Dr Huq]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was listening to the anecdote from the deputy head that mentioned earlier, but it seems that this time round the proper curriculum has not been in place, and the marking is all over the place. It is not testing per se that is wrong; it is the maladministration of this year’s key stage 2 SATs.

In the recent Brexit debate the Lord Chancellor said we have had enough of experts. That is a real mistake; we ignore the professionals at our peril. These are people at the chalk face. Educationists, heads and deputy headteachers like Katie Tramoni and—dare I say it—the NUT have been warning about this. I hope these problems can be rectified and that we hear from the Secretary of State what will be done to minimise next year’s disturbances so that there are no disturbances; otherwise, it will feel as though we are losing sight of the child.

EBacc: Expressive Arts Subjects

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend is right. I hope that the Minister comes to that in his round-up, and perhaps he will also talk about Tottenham.

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

The right hon. Gentleman is making an impassioned speech on behalf of the creative arts, but I want to challenge him. Given the small percentage of children in private schooling, if the number of GCSE music entries has gone up, it rather belies his central point.

Maths, the sciences and English are not utilitarian subjects. They are fundamental, and too many children from poor communities were not getting access to them when the Labour Government left power. There has been a significant improvement in access to those very courses that help people to get on in life. As much as I sympathise with many of the points that the right hon. Gentleman makes, there is a balance to be struck.

[Mr Lammy]

I do not want to get into the “either/or” debate as it is not helpful. We could also have a discussion in this House—I would certainly be back for this—on the importance of religious studies education. I know some colleagues who would come to that debate as well.

It is depressing that we are having this argument in the country of Shakespeare, the Beatles, so many wonderful actors who pick up awards internationally and domestically every single year, the west-end theatres, and some of the world’s best musicals. I was Minister for Higher Education and I remember that successive Governments made some very poor decisions which resulted in a huge diminution in language learning. There has just been a big national debate on the importance of Europe; the potential for exchanges like those that people of a certain age in this room may have had with young people in Germany and France has been diminished. This debate is so important because there is a sense, in the petition and in the House, that in this fundamental area of our lives, we are taking the wrong course.

“Educational Excellence Everywhere”: Academies

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

I think the right hon. Lady needs to read the White Paper. Let me also point out that we have the highest number of teachers ever in the profession, and we have created 600,000 more school places since 2010. When the Labour party was in power, it took 200,000 places out of the system at the time of a baby boom.

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

May I join colleagues—

[Fiona Mactaggart]

Give us an answer!

[Graham Stuart]

I think you have had your question. May I join colleagues in congratulating the Secretary of State on her statement and on the way in which she has engaged with colleagues on both sides of the House? The Education Committee described the healthy tension between local authority schools and academy schools, which has contributed to 1.4 million fewer children being at weak schools. Does the Secretary of State agree that if local authorities that do manage to deliver outstanding schools and excellent overview and intervention, they can continue?

[Nicky Morgan]

I thank my hon. Friend for the conversations we have had. Yes, of course—this is all about lifting standards and making sure no child is in a school that is failing or underperforming. Of course, if a child is in a good school being supported by a strong local authority, I want the authority to get on with doing that.