Student Maintenance Grants
Graham Stuart Excerpts(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
I received a full maintenance grant when I was at university, and its impact was not just money in my bank account, but the feeling of confidence and freedom that I could choose the degree that I wanted at my first choice of university—that important point has not really been covered by the debate. When I graduated, I did not have £53,000 of debt, which is what the poorest 40% of students will graduate with. I remind Conservative Members that we are talking about the poorest students from the poorest backgrounds in our country. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) said, these are the sons and daughters of dinner ladies, bus drivers, and care workers on zero-hours contracts, and we should not forget the reality and background of those students. Let me say to the Minister, and to other hon. Members—particularly those who are chuntering from a sedentary position—that this is not scaremongering. This is a serious debate—
Emma Reynolds
There he goes again. This is a serious debate about the impact of the proposals on our poorest constituents. That debate should be taken seriously by the Minister and by Conservative Members. This is not just about participation; this is about fair access and about which university someone chooses to go to, if they have that first choice. Some of my constituents in Wolverhampton might not choose to apply to Oxford, Cambridge or even perhaps the University of Sussex, because it is too far away and will be too expensive. This is about the choices that the poorest children must now make, given the level of indebtedness that they will face.
Wes Streeting
That included arguments with my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). But even with landslide majorities there was always a full debate and a vote in the House, whether they were abolishing student grants or, more wisely, reintroducing grants following the introduction of top-up fees.
This afternoon, these proposals will impact on 500,000 students from the poorest backgrounds. In my local university, the University of East London, that equates to about £30 million of financial support for students—gone. At my alma mater, the University of Cambridge, the figure is more like £9 million. If there is one thing we know about the higher education sector, it is that not only opportunity but financial support is unevenly distributed. It is completely unfair that students from the poorest backgrounds will now face a postcode lottery when it comes to determining how much non-repayable support they receive.
The very existence of student grants was won as a result of hard-fought negotiations. Student leaders argued that, if we were going to ask people to make a greater contribution, it was only fair that the poorest students received a non-repayable contribution. How must Conservative Members and the few remaining Liberal Democrats feel about the fact that when, under the coalition Government, the then higher education Minister justified the trebling of fees, they were told, “Don’t worry. We’ve got the national scholarship programme, student grants and the £21,000 threshold going up by inflation.” What has happened since? The national scholarship programme has been abandoned; the threshold frozen at £21,000; and now we see the abolition of student grants. We cannot trust a word that these people say, particularly when it comes to fair access to higher education and support for the most disadvantaged. It is an absolute disgrace.
I am proud of what the last Labour Government did to widen access and opportunity to people from working-class backgrounds. I was one of the beneficiaries, from the excellence in cities work that was done in schools right through to the opportunities provided through expanded places.
Graham Stuart
The hon. Gentleman is doubtless equally proud of the fact that the Labour Government said that they would not introduce tuition fees, and then did; and said that they would not introduce top-up fees, and then did. Does he accept that he and others who said five years ago that the introduction of increased fees would lead to a reduction in those from poorer backgrounds going to university were wrong? They were wrong then, and we believe that they are wrong today.
Wes Streeting
I remember the debate here in 2003, and I think it was to the credit of the Government of the day that the introduction of higher fees did not come in until after a general election, when at least the voters could make their judgment on whether they wanted to re-elect a Labour Government, which they duly did.
So much has been said about participation numbers this afternoon. I am certainly not going to make prophecies of doom about participation, but we should bear in mind a few facts. First, there is the issue of equity. How can it possibly be justified that students from the poorest backgrounds graduate with the largest amount of debt? How can it possibly be fair that under these repayment mechanisms, the wealthiest graduates who go on to the most successful jobs will end up paying less over the course of their working career than people from middle and lower incomes? That cannot possibly be justified as fair. We should take seriously the evidence from the Institute for Fiscal Studies published in 2014 showing that a £1,000 increase in the maintenance grant led to a 3.95% increase in participation. Removing the grant does not necessarily mean that participation will plummet, but I think there is a risk that it could suffer.
There is a huge amount of complacency from this Government about the impact of higher tuition fees on applications to part-time routes and for mature students. It does not have to be that way; other choices are possible. We should look at what the Labour Government in Wales have done. They have not chosen to abolish student grants; they have kept those grants in place.
If the Tories want to talk about hard choices, how are they going to look the poorest students from the poorest backgrounds in the eye and explain why this Government continue to alleviate the tax burden on the wealthiest, while making the poorest pay the cost of their higher education? A 75% contribution to the cost of higher education is, by anyone’s estimation, too much, and there is not a single item in the Conservative manifesto that Government Members can point to in order to justify this outrageous attack on the poorest students.
Kevin Brennan
The hon. Gentleman told us in his speech how hard he has worked. Given that he is from Cardiff and that he has such an accent, I can absolutely acknowledge that he is a very hard-working individual. He will know that a general election was fought following that decision being taken and before they were introduced.
We all know that the Chancellor prefers governing from the shadows, and this shameless betrayal of previous promises and the shabby manner in which this has been handled in Parliament bear all the hallmarks of the current Chancellor of the Exchequer. Being young in Britain should be a time of opportunity—a time when opportunity knocks. Instead, we have the Chancellor introducing an opportunity tax. His proposals are an assault on aspiration, on opportunity and on those who want to get on in life. That is why we oppose them and also why the Welsh Government, under Labour First Minister, Carwyn Jones, is keeping maintenance grants. By the way, those who say that these proposals affect only England should think again—I say this to Welsh Conservative MPs as well: of the 30,000 students studying at Cardiff University, nearly 9,000 are from England.
Graham Stuart
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am sure that the shadow Minister would not wish to mislead the House, but he has just said that tuition fees were introduced not after the 1997 election, but after the following general election. That is not true. They were introduced in 1998. Having said that they would not introduce them, the Government started the process 12 weeks later.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
The hon. Gentleman is making a point of debate, not a point of order for the Chair. We have very little time.
School Funding
Graham Stuart Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered funding for schools.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker, and, equally, to see so many colleagues from both sides of the House filling the Chamber on a Thursday afternoon. It shows the strength of feeling on fairer funding for schools and that many colleagues want to see a fair and just system.
I want to place on the record my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for granting the time for the debate. The issue has support from more than 110 colleagues from both sides of the House; only a fortnight ago they signed a letter to the Prime Minister championing fairer funding for schools.
The premise of fair school funding awarded in accordance with a rational formula assessed on the basis of pupil need is a simple one and, one might think, uncontroversial. That statement, however, falls a long way short of the reality in England. The Association of School and College Leaders has calculated that this year the 10 best-funded areas will receive an average schools block grant of £6,300 per pupil, compared with an average of only £4,200 per pupil in the 10 most poorly funded areas. For a typical secondary school of 920 students, that equates to a budget of £5.8 million in the best-funded areas and £3.9 million in the least well-funded areas—a difference of £1.9 million in a relatively small secondary school.
Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
Is my hon. Friend aware that I have had a meeting with the Secretary of State for Education, my right hon. Friend the Member on Loughborough (Nicky Morgan)? She is of the view that the existing formula is wrong, is unsustainable and needs to be changed, and she is consulting on that. Does he agree that the Government should be congratulated on being prepared to look at the matter? Furthermore, does he agree that Conservative Members seem to be pushing against a door that is, if not fully open, certainly ajar?
Graham Stuart
I am delighted to hear that my right hon. Friend met the Secretary of State. The delivery of fairer school funding was of course a manifesto undertaking by the Conservative party at the most recent general election and, I hope, played a part in securing the majority that our party enjoys in this Parliament.
Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate, on the extremely skilful way in which he has run this campaign over the past few months and on the levels of support generated. I come from a county that is one of the worst-funded areas in the country, so I take his point, but does he share my view that things are made even worse when the effect of the tight local government settlement means that schools have to bear additional costs, such as for transport, as well as the unfair funding formula with which they are already landed?
Graham Stuart
That will have meaning in many rural constituencies. Separately, as my hon. Friend knows, the Rural Fair Share campaign on local government funding, which it is my pleasure to chair, shows up the great disparities. An interesting point about fair school funding is that the issue is not about rural and urban; it is an entirely arbitrary, random and grossly unfair settlement. If we look at the F40 group’s proposals, Barnsley would be the biggest gainer, Sunderland and Leeds would be gainers, and other areas might do less well.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)
I, too, add my voice to the congratulations on my hon. Friend’s superb campaigning over many years and on getting this number of people to the debate. May I emphasise that the issue is one of basic fairness? Children in similar circumstances wherever they live in the country should get the same resources from the taxpayer. The sooner we move towards a national funding formula the better.
Graham Stuart
As I said, the issue should be uncontroversial, but because the discrepancies are so great any change will mean that money is removed from some schools and some areas. The losers will, understandably, fight and try to find an argument with which to defend what is fundamentally indefensible, because there is no rationale for it. I will go into that later in my speech.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
: I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does he agree that one of the stark differences between rural and urban is shown in a recent Public Accounts Committee report? It identified that funding for deprived pupils can vary by £3,000 per pupil because of the existing formula.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
I am sure that my hon. Friend knows, from going around schools in his constituency, that when it comes to the sort of equipment that our schools have—whether books or insulation—and the facilities available for children, they are significantly inferior to those in other parts of the United Kingdom. That is simply not fair for the education of our children.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
Schools in my constituency, from All Saints’ academy in the west to Balcarras in the east, are facing significant pressures from rising wage bills and pension obligations. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need clarity not only on the principle of fairer funding, but on the programme? Only by knowing the timeline can excellent schools in Cheltenham and elsewhere budget for a secure future.
Graham Stuart
My hon. Friend is right. Of course it is difficult at a time of flat cash and increasing financial strain to carry out redistribution, but it is when cash is flat, and no additional above-inflation increase is coming, that the discrepancy between areas becomes more important. Although it is politically more challenging to redistribute when there is a tight cash settlement—that is why it is so important to show the weight of opinion in the House—morally and educationally it is more important to bring that about. That is why we have pushed so hard, and I am grateful that the Government have listened and are prepared to seize the nettle.
Mrs Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)
My hon. Friend is right; there is not only rural-urban disparity, but urban-urban disparity. Two wards can be side by side, with identical socio-economic profiles, but have a big difference in funding. The fair funding situation can be aggravated if a pupil moves from one ward across the border into the identical ward, because they do not bring the additional money with them. Unlike in health, the money—apart from the pupil premium—does not follow the pupil.
Graham Stuart
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. That, too, has been a feature of the system for a long time. It is, in a way, a separate issue. If a child from Hull, perhaps from a deprived area, moves to a school in my constituency, which neighbours Hull, rightly or wrongly the additional funding given for that child will not follow the pupil who crosses the border to a school perhaps only a quarter of a mile away—for example, in Bilton on the edge of Hull in my constituency. That, too, is an indefensible feature of the system.
David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) hit the nail on the head when he said that the issue is one of fairness. We have heard about the disparities, which are nowhere more stark than in a constituency such as mine. I represent a seat next to the urban area of Manchester, and in Macclesfield the discrepancies are huge. That causes real angst not only among teachers, but among parents and pupils. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) agree?
Graham Stuart
I do agree. As a result, the children of a multi-millionaire in one constituency or area receive more funding for their education than do the children attracting a pupil premium and from one of the poorest families in a neighbouring area. That is indefensible. The discrepancies are so enormous as to require change, notwithstanding the political challenges and difficulties of doing so.
David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)
There would appear to be consensus on the Government side, and perhaps on the Opposition side, that enough is enough. This is the third Westminster Hall debate I have attended on this issue since I became an MP five years ago—the first was in April 2012—and at each debate it has been agreed, including by the Government, that this had to be fixed. If the door is ajar, as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) said earlier, there would appear to be a wedge in it that is still to be removed. Does my hon. Friend agree that we must hear from the Minister about timing and not just about whether he agrees that the principle is wrong?
Graham Stuart
My hon. Friend is right and I hope and expect that we will hear from the Minister on when the House will get the detail about what the Government propose to do.
To bring to life the example I mentioned of a relatively small secondary school with 920 pupils, the £1.9 million difference between two such schools in different areas is enough to pay the total costs—salaries and pension contributions—of 40 full-time teachers. That huge funding gap cannot be justified.
The gap is not explained by pupil deprivation. People might think that the system is designed to give more to areas of concentrated deprivation, whether urban or other. In 2011, Department for Education analysis showed that a school with 43% of pupils eligible for free school meals can receive £665 less funding per pupil than a school with less than 10% eligible pupils. Therefore, a school that serves the most deprived, as opposed to one that serves a remarkably affluent population, can receive hundreds of pounds less per pupil simply because of where it is rather than the nature and character of the children concerned, let alone their needs. Given the flat cash settlement for schools since that time, those figures will not have altered significantly.
I will give another example of the disparity that can exist between authorities. A secondary school pupil in York who receives the pupil premium, which is worth £935 this year, still has less spent on his or her education than an equivalent pupil in Birmingham who is not eligible for the pupil premium. Therefore, the child of the wealthy entrepreneur or lawyer in Birmingham receives more than the child from the poorest home in York.
Colleagues have mentioned the cross-border issue. The same applies in the relationship between Nottingham and the county that surrounds it: a 13-year-old pupil in the city gets more for their education than a disadvantaged child from the county next door, even though that child receives a pupil premium. Indeed, it is worse than that: a child who is in care in a certain area of the country and receives the pupil premium plus, worth £1,900, to reflect their needs, will still receive less than the child of a wealthy lawyer in Islington. That cannot be right. It needs to be fixed in a timely way and that is what we are gathered here today to tell the Minister.
We might think that if the disparity does not reflect deprivation, perhaps it reflects underlying performance in the system such as the quality of education in the schools, with more money going to help those areas doing less well. However, that would be wrong. Some of the best performing areas, notably in London, continue to receive thousands of pounds more per child than areas that are really struggling with education outcomes. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea receives 39% more funding per pupil under the schools block grant than my own area, the East Riding of Yorkshire, which loses out badly under the current funding arrangements.
The East Riding struggles with many of the challenges identified by Ofsted Chief Inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw in rural and coastal areas of England, where it can be hard to recruit and retain high-quality teachers, and partnerships between schools can founder because of the distance between them. We could take a coastal town and ask, “Why can’t we replicate the London challenge in East Yorkshire?” but anyone who drew a circle around Withernsea in my constituency to find all the schools that might be able to provide mutual support would find that half the circle was in the sea and the other half took in a swathe of rural East Yorkshire. That does not create easy conditions in which to build the collaborative regimes that have made such a difference in London and that is a further reason why such areas need to be fairly funded.
Contrary to any lazy misconceptions that areas such as the East Riding are rural idylls, there are areas of deep deprivation. Withernsea ranked in the top 10% of most deprived areas in England on both the income and employment indices of multiple deprivation in 2010. In a devastating speech in 2013, Sir Michael Wilshaw warned that
“many of the disadvantaged children performing least well in school can be found in leafy suburbs, market towns or seaside resorts”.
The East Riding also faces the additional costs associated with needing to run small, rural schools because of its geography. There is a limit to how far we can expect children to be bused, so it needs to run small schools, which are necessarily more expensive. It therefore has higher natural costs, and greater challenges in delivering high-quality education.
On top of that, the East Riding targeted as much funding as possible at its schools. Various blocks make up the dedicated schools grant, and historically the East Riding chose to stick most of the money for special educational needs in the schools block—it was entirely free to do so. It said to schools, “Use your budget to deliver that.” There was practically nothing in the high needs block, because that money had been put into the schools block. When the dedicated schools grant came in, which was based on what had been spent at that time and how it was accounted for, the East Riding received among the lowest levels of SEN funding in the whole country. That was not because there was a lack of challenge, but because of how the accounting had been done.
Our high needs funding is now the lowest in England, so the East Riding has had to move funding over to try to compensate for that. The situation was unfair already. Then we moved to the £390 million the Government came forward with last year to help lower-funded authorities, but that was distributed on the basis of the schools block, one of the three blocks that make up the dedicated schools grant, and as my local authority had its money in the schools block and not the high needs block, it ended up receiving a very much smaller share of the cake.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Mr Sam Gyimah)
I thank my hon. Friend for bringing this debate to the House, and I look forward to all the contributions. He mentioned the £390 million that the Government put into schools’ funding to help make the funding formula fairer. I want to clarify that that has been done twice: it was done for 2014-15 and it is being done for 2015-16. We are taking, and have already taken, steps to make the funding formula fairer. In response to the point about timing made by my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat), that shows our intent.
Graham Stuart
I am grateful to the Minister. I am also grateful for the £390 million, which was a significant amount to find to help the lowest-funded authorities. A method for distribution had to be found and, under his predecessor, a decision was taken on that, which led to certain discrepancies, though overall there was certainly an improvement.
Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)
Bury St Edmonds and the broader area of Suffolk were grateful for that uplift. However, it took us from 121st to 116th. We are still £260 a pupil behind the national average, which means we are very far behind the schools with the highest funding.
David Mowat
The Minister mentioned my point, so I want to come back on that. While the £390 million was welcome, it was not a change to the funding formula. We still do not have a national funding formula and, in fact, that £390 million affected Warrington much more poorly than the better-funded Westminster. After the £390 million, Warrington remains 11th from bottom of the 152 authorities. We will come back to that.
Graham Stuart
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. That is why we need a whole new look at this and a national funding formula. As a result of issues relating to the blocks that colleagues may or may not have followed—it is complicated—after the £390 million, the East Riding became the lowest-funded local authority in the whole country. Members can imagine the gratitude my constituents felt: the then Chairman of the Education Committee and leading member of the campaign for fairer funding had somehow dragged the East Riding from being the third or fourth lowest-funded authority to the very lowest. I had to put my hand up and say, a little plaintively, “Well, we did get £1.8 million more.” But relatively speaking, we fell to the bottom. We can all see why people were not very happy, and they would like to know that there was a rationale. Someone has to come bottom, but let there be a rationale for that.
If we cannot develop a rationale, we should put people on the same money. In the Parliament before last, the all-party group on rural services conducted an inquiry on health and education funding. Professor Mervyn Stone, emeritus professor of statistics at Oxford University—a marvellous man with a beard like a biblical prophet’s—said, “If you move to equal funding per pupil or per patient across the country, you’d have something fundamentally unfair, because of the variety of costs”—I hope I am not unfairly putting words into his mouth—but we would still have something far fairer than any of the structures that anyone has come up with so far, let alone implemented in Government. Equal funding would be fairer.
Our call today is not for perfection but for a significant move to close the gaps. It is worth saying to colleagues who represent London seats that some areas of London—a few, admittedly—would benefit from a new national funding formula. Under the recommendations submitted to Government by the F40 campaign, which is the group of lowest-funded local authorities, there would still be, on average, more than £1,000 more per pupil in London than in the rest of the country. Take a class of 30. Whether it is in London or Warrington, there will be a classroom, kids and a teacher, and there might be a support assistant. A school in London will have £30,000 more a year to run that. Costs are higher in London, but not that much higher. It has to be right to move to something that is fairer to everyone.
Before the debate, I asked headteachers in Beverley and Holderness about the challenges they face. I will quote some of the problems that they highlighted. One said:
“We reduced staffing by reducing the number of cover supervisors and downsizing a number of teaching subject areas.”
Another said:
“Fewer sporting competitions—we can’t afford to pay for transport to away fixtures”—
imagine the cost of doing so in a sparsely populated rural area. Another said:
“Provision is stretched and children receive less intervention time”.
Another said:
“Resources are not being replaced or updated as we would like. The school guided reading scheme has been on the subject leaders’ development plan for the last 2 years and it is something that we cannot afford.”
That is the reality on the ground in schools in my constituency.
Those problems are not unique to the East Riding of Yorkshire—colleagues from up and down the country will testify to that, as is evidenced by the fact that there are so many of them here today. That is why the F40 group of local authorities, for which I serve as a vice-chairman, has come together to make the case for fairer funding. I pay tribute to the F40 campaign. It is led by Leicestershire Councillor Ivan Ould, who along with other F40 representatives has campaigned with great determination for almost 20 years. It is to the credit of the Government and Ministers that they are now listening to the campaign and are going to act.
I know colleagues will want me to say that we all owe a debt of gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker). He was a tireless champion of the issue in the previous Parliament, and I know he continues to be highly supportive in his new role as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State. It is a delight to see him here.
Progress is being made, in the form of the extra £390 million that was allocated as a down payment towards fairer funding in 2014, as well as through the Government’s manifesto commitment to make that extra resource part of the baseline funding settlement. The Minister said that there have been two parts to this: last year’s £390 million and this year’s; I know it is going to be every year from now on.
Graham Stuart
Listeners might have thought that it might not appear next year, and I would not want anyone to have that misapprehension.
Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)
My hon. Friend is paying tribute to many people for their work on this issue, but no one has done more than he has, so I pay tribute to him, as I am sure they would. Derbyshire too is disadvantaged by the budget. He mentioned the £390 million and used the term “down payment”. It is pleasing that the money is now in the baseline, and that the budget is there, but it is still only a down payment on solving the problem, and not the solution. Does he agree?
Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)
Order. Before Mr Stuart continues, I remind him that he has spoken for nearly 25 minutes. He has been very generous in taking interventions, but a huge number of colleagues wish to take part in the debate.
Graham Stuart
I am grateful to you for that timely reminder, Mr Walker, although I find that I am horribly few pages into my speech. I will have to truncate it.
The clock is ticking. We want to hear from the Minister about when we will have proposals for consultation. The gap between the highest and lowest-funded local authorities has grown steadily. Let us say that one local authority is on £6,000 per pupil and another is on around £4,000; if we give 2% to each, the cash gap will widen—that is obvious, really. That cannot be allowed to continue.
I am aware of how many other colleagues are ready to speak, but I will say just a little more. I have touched on how a fairer system would affect different areas. Barnsley would see the largest funding gain if the F40 proposal were introduced, and other deprived councils, including Leeds, Doncaster, Knowsley, Gateshead, Sheffield and Sunderland, would all make triple-figure gains per pupil under that proposal. A new formula would also restore fairness for the more rural counties of England, such as the East Riding, which failed to benefit from new Labour largesse.
A redistribution of resources is both right and fair. It should probably be phased in—I would say over three years—to mitigate the impact on those who will lose out. Russell Hobby, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, supports fairer funding. He is right when he says:
“There is no possible way to arrive at a fairer formula without taking money away from schools already facing cuts.”
He is running a members organisation, but has taken that on board. It is brave for a trade union leader with members in schools across the country to accept the logic and say, “Some schools will have to lose, but that has to happen for us to have fair funding.” If he and Brian Lightman at the Association of School and College Leaders are prepared to face their members, some of whom will lose out, and say that a different settlement is right, surely Ministers should grasp the nettle and make sure it happens. There is no way that we can defend a settlement under which there is a gap of more than £2,000 per pupil between the best-funded and least-funded 10 authorities.
I am delighted to see so many colleagues in the Chamber, and to see the Minister in his place. I know he has worked tirelessly on this issue in a difficult funding environment. We all look forward to hearing what he will do to bring about an end to this inequity, which has gone on too long.
Several hon. Members rose—
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) for his persistence. I also thank the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw). Similarly, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), who fought hard in the last Parliament for fairer education funding, and who continues to do so in this one.
All of us seem to have been fighting for a change for years. I have huge faith in the Minister—I really have. In “Yes Minister”, one of the characters says, “That will be a very brave decision, Minister,” and we want this Minister to make a very brave decision. The £390 million in funding that was introduced in the last Parliament, and which is going into the base budget, is very welcome. In the end, however, it will not cure the underlying problem. If we just put a bit of money in each time, we will not alter the league table at all. Devon went from fifth from the bottom to sixth from the bottom. While that is welcome, we want a huge amount more to be done.
My constituency, which is by far the most beautiful in the country—not that I am biased—contains a huge number of small schools, which have federated. The headteachers share many schools. There are great teachers and great classroom assistants. People are working really hard, and they deliver a very good education. However, if they can deliver a good education, why are some other areas getting so much more money? Why is it fair for things to be like that? Why can some of that money not be shared with other areas?
Local government funding seems to be one of those issues, like education, that is so complex that Governments over the years have decided—almost with fear and trepidation—not to alter it, because that would cause so many problems. However, we have to alter it; otherwise, we will not deliver on what we have promised.
Graham Stuart
I would like my hon. Friend to know that, when I started campaigning for fairer funding in local government and education, I had blond hair. I have been doing this not just for eight years—I first raised the F40 in 2005. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to be courageous when they come forward with proposals? They need to be ambitious and really lift authorities that have been disadvantaged for too long. At the end of this, we have to have the courage to do something significant and level the playing field, albeit that it will take time to bring these things in.
Neil Parish
I am glad to see that my hon. Friend still actually has his hair, albeit that it is white. Seriously, though, all of us here—there are 30 Members here, and there were more when we started the debate, on a one-line Whip on a Thursday—have been fighting hard on this issue. What I want to tell the Minister is that we need to be brave enough about funding. We need some sort of siphon to take money from the top and spread it gradually to the bottom, or the anomaly will never be put right. The current situation is wrong for those of us whose constituents have high aspirations but who need more funding to raise them even higher. We need that to be dealt with. All our constituents pay the same taxes, so why should their children not benefit? Other hon. Members have mentioned how schools have great parents, who raise money to help; and that is all very good, but, as I have said, it will not deal with the funding problem.
My constituency has further education colleges in Axminster and Honiton, and Petroc college in Tiverton, and all receive reduced funding. If we have aspirations for young people going from primary through secondary and on to FE or university, the education must be provided. What the Government are doing about apprenticeships is great, but good colleges are necessary if the apprenticeships are to be of real value. All those things fit together.
Tiverton high school is on a flood plain, and in 2012 it was nearly flooded. We need to find funding so that it can be rebuilt on higher land—land is available. All that takes time, I know, but we must ensure that we are treated equally. Our fear is that we are not being treated equally. Since the general election the west country is virtually all Conservative—apart from the little patch of red that is the constituency of the right hon. Member for Exeter, which we understand. My point is that the Government have a lot of responsibility. My hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan) mentioned, as other Members have, the Government’s commitment to put the situation right. I reiterate my huge confidence in the Minister and I will invite him to Devon to see what a great job our schools are doing, and what refurbishment and extra funding they need. The Government will settle the matter, and put it right. Again I ask the Minister: please, be brave.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Sir David. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) and the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) on securing this debate.
Thanks to the good education that I received, I know that 5 November is quite an ominous day to be giving a speech in Parliament, but thankfully I am not a king and it is not nearly four hundred years ago, so perhaps we will be safe today.
It was interesting to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey) talk about aiming for mid-table mediocrity in the premier league; I think that at the moment Torquay would be happy to be in the league.
Coming on to the serious point, I am delighted that this debate has been secured so that we can talk again about the unfairness in the current funding system. That is why I am particularly delighted to see my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) here today. I know that he will be noting down every point made today, given the impact of this issue on his own constituency and his own lengthy record of campaigning about it.
I will focus on the fact that there is a need for a fairer settlement and a fairer funding system overall. It is tempting to get into Torbay versus Tower Hamlets, or Torbay versus Plymouth, but for me this issue is actually about having a fundamentally fairer system for the allocation of resources, and not a system based on history. In 10 or 20 years’ time, thanks to the massive success of the long-term economic plan for the south-west, Torbay might have become one of the most prosperous parts of the country, so the formula may change and changes made now might not help us in the future. However, I would like to see change, because this is fundamentally about fairness—allocating today’s resources to today’s priorities, and not funding according to historical council spending patterns or considerations that might have been relevant once but are now distant.
What particularly brought this situation to light was the Public Accounts Committee report on the pupil premium, which discussed the fact that the funding for deprived pupils with exactly the same needs can vary by up to £3,000 per pupil. That is a staggering difference and, as our report concluded, such variations make it much harder to bring effective strategies to bear.
Graham Stuart
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is not just the Minister whom we are challenging today? It is delightful to see the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) representing Her Majesty’s Opposition, as today is also an opportunity for the Labour party to set out that it is committed to fairer funding and accepts that there will be the need for redistribution; it will be painful, but it is right that it should happen.
Kevin Foster
Yes indeed, and let us be clear that the council that would benefit the most from the F40 proposals is Barnsley. If one was looking for an example of an area that one would have thought the Opposition would be committed to wanting to do something for, it would be that one.
For me, this is not about wealthy parts of the country versus deprived parts of the country. There are parts of my constituency that are quite wealthy, but they are the older parts—the places that are less likely to have young families with children going through school. The areas in my constituency that are the most deprived and that have the most challenges are the ones that have the most young families with children going through school. I was delighted to hear my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge) make the point that education is the ladder out of deprivation.
Kevin Foster
I totally agree with my hon. Friend. We need up-to-date information and an up-to-date funding formula. Let us be candid: a hundred years ago, Liverpool was a booming port that was producing a tax surplus. Now, the situation there is the other way round, because of changes in industry. It would be strange to hear arguments that we should base funding today on what the economy was like a hundred years ago. Equally, if we do not change the formula and do not move on, people can find themselves living in areas that were once deprived that still receive extra support even though they are no longer deprived.
This is about making sure that pupils are fairly funded, because even in the most prosperous parts of this country there will be families who are struggling and who need the ladder of opportunity that good, solid education provides, so that they can get the jobs and the skills, and share in the aspiration that many of us have.
Graham Stuart
My hon. Friend is very generous in giving way to me again. It is also important that people outside this place do not think that this issue is about stopping recognition of deprivation. The pupil premium exists precisely to meet the needs of those in deprivation, but we must ensure that there is not double-counting of deprivation and that we have a system that is fair to every child, wherever they live.
Kevin Foster
Absolutely. I agree with my hon. Friend that what we want is the funding following the need and not following the postcode that people happen to live in. That is why the pupil premium was introduced and it is why the PAC was right to highlight a £3,000 difference in pupil premium funding based not on need or the type of education that a school has to provide or the facilities it needs, but on the different postcodes in which pupils live. Nobody feels better off because they move from one postcode to another; nobody says, “I’m feeling hugely better off because I’ve moved a couple of hundred metres down the road and I’ve crossed a municipal boundary.” People feel better off if there is actually more money in their pocket and more income in their household. It is right that our funding formula should follow the need and not historical funding allocations.
That is not to say that schools in my area are not doing well. There are schools, such as Curledge Street academy and Ellacombe academy, that do extremely well and that have really turned around, partly due to the academies programme during the last few years. They deliver excellent results and give students the ladder of opportunity that we all want to give students. We want to send a message to them that a fairer funding scheme is on its way.
That is why the Government’s actions over the last five years are very welcome. They have made a difference. I accept that things cannot change overnight, but what we want to see is what the PAC called for, which is a timetable to resolve this issue, which we can then use to move forward.
This is not about rural versus urban, or about the north of England versus the south of England. We can see that in the diversity of constituencies that are represented in the debate today, ranging from Stockport to the south of Devon. This is about fairness, and having resources allocated on the basis of need and not on the basis of historical anomaly. That is why it is right that we have had this debate today; that is why I hope the Government will now take things forward and find a solution; and that is why I am pleased to have spoken in this debate.
Carol Monaghan
The Minister must have different figures from me, because across Scotland we are seeing the attainment gap reduce and pupils from more disadvantaged backgrounds being more successful in accessing higher and further education than ever before.
One of the great things this afternoon has been the positive language used about the teaching profession, which is reassuring to hear. Often teachers hear phrases like “failing schools” and “poor teaching”, and they end up being blamed for a lot of society’s problems, rather than credited for the work they do in trying to tackle the very same problems. I am reassured by what I have heard, and I suggest to all Members here today that they continue to use that positive language, because it makes such a difference to teachers.
The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness talked about flat cash and not wanting to increase the education budget. I would argue with that. Governments have difficult choices to make, and they decide where money is spent. If education is a priority and our young people are valued for the contribution they can make to the country, we should be investing properly in education.
Graham Stuart
It is worth putting on record that with the number of pupils expected to increase by 7% in England over this Parliament, there will be a 7% increase in cash terms in the schools budget. That is in the context of a need for a big readjustment across Government spending to take us into surplus and not to give the very children we are trying to educate further debt to shoulder in years to come.
Carol Monaghan
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. He spoke about the discrepancy between neighbouring schools in neighbouring areas, which was a real eye-opener for me. We do not have those discrepancies in Scotland, but I imagine they impact on parental choice on the schools they wish to send their children to, which is an issue.
The right hon. Member for Exeter talked about further education underfunding. We have to consider that education does not always stop on leaving school. Different pathways are open to our young people in education. For many young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, further education offers a pathway for them to continue their education.
Carol Monaghan
The right hon. Gentleman raises some points that have been raised time and again. Difficult choices had to be made on college places. Places were cut—places that were not leading to employability and places that did not give our young people the best chances. Tough choices had to be made, and places that led to employability were protected. The overall number of college places has not changed; the range of courses may be different.
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned attainment dropping since 2012. It is interesting that we see attainment dropping at the same time as austerity was biting. We cannot separate attainment and poverty. The two are inextricably linked. As soon as we see austerity, we see issues with our children.
Carol Monaghan
No, I am fed up of giving way. [Laughter.]
I have already mentioned the targeting of pupils in deprived areas, which is really important. Early intervention and the Scottish attainment challenge, which is supported by a £100 million Scottish attainment fund, are targeted at primary school pupils in deprived areas to ensure they are able to reach their potential.
The hon. Members for Stockport (Ann Coffey) and for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) talked about all the extras that may go when education funding is tight. There was mention of outdoor education and parents raising money. Another issue is that teachers end up buying resources for the school. Teachers’ salaries are not at the levels they should be, and if they have to eat into their salaries to buy resources, that is a huge issue, so we need to think about that.
Various Members mentioned teachers’ pay. Again, this is another fascinating point for me. The hon. Members for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) and for Cheadle (Mary Robinson), to name but a few, mentioned issues with attracting highly qualified, good teachers to their schools. In Scotland, there is parity for teachers’ pay across all local authorities and schools and pay is set by the General Teaching Council for Scotland in collaboration with the unions, so we do not have the same issue. A similar situation in England might make a huge difference to some of the problems that have been discussed.
I am almost finished, but I want to pick up on something that the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) said. He described his constituency as the most beautiful in the country. Although I have not been there, I accept that that is true in his country, but in my country, there are many more beautiful constituencies.
As education is a devolved matter, I have suggestions, not questions. First, ensure that teachers are valued and that they understand that value by continuing to use positive rhetoric, and by ensuring that wages are set at a level standard across the country. Intervention for pupils with particular difficulties, who are disadvantaged by poverty or background, should continue. If that needs funding, it should be funded. If the Government are truly interested in ensuring a level playing field, not only across the country but for pupils from different backgrounds, I suggest that reinstating the education maintenance allowance for 16 to 18-year-olds from deprived backgrounds would make a huge difference in allowing them to remain in education and to access further and higher education.
Pat Glass
Before the election, Labour also promised to introduce a review of school funding. We want to support the Government as they move forward with their review, but we are clear that funding has to be fair and just. It cannot simply be a recycling or shifting of existing resources within the system from those with greater needs to those with less great needs. One or two people said that children with the same levels of need must receive the same levels of funding. We support that in principle, but we want to see new money in the system.
The basic inequalities in the system go back a long way. My right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter was absolutely right when he said that its roots lie in the old standard spending assessment. I read the Hansard from the previous debate just before the election. The then shadow schools Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), said that the formula was known only to three people and
“one was dead, one had gone mad and the other one had forgotten”.—[Official Report, 10 March 2015; Vol. 594, c. 260.]
I am not sure where I fit into that, but there are advantages to being around the education system for a long time and having some degree of shared memory of all this.
Pat Glass
I will just finish this point and then I will be happy to give way.
Historically, local authorities that prioritised education and spent above standard spending assessment—sometimes a great deal above SSA—were often metropolitan authorities that had their funding simply rolled forward into the schools block of the dedicated schools grant, and those authorities, often counties, that spent at or under—sometimes significantly under SSA—had their underspends rolled forward into the schools block of the SSA. Those are the roots of why we are where we are today.
Graham Stuart
I am grateful to the shadow Minister for giving way and I congratulate her again on her post. She said she would expect new funding to come into the system. Was she ruling out redistribution? It is politically difficult. The previous Labour Government did not want to go there: although many Labour areas would benefit, perhaps more would lose. I recognise the political difficulty, but surely similar children in similar schools in similar circumstances should get similar funding. If we accept the principle and accept that it is wrong now, we have to accept redistribution. Does she accept that principle and support those of us who, like the Minister, will have to take the difficult decisions?
Pat Glass
I will address that point as I make my argument.
It has been made clear today that however we came to be where we are, we all now agree that pupils with similar or the same needs throughout the country should not receive such different levels of funding. It is less clear how to resolve that, and it will not be easy to achieve. The Prime Minister has decided not to protect the entire education budget in real terms. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has highlighted that over the course of this Parliament per-pupil funding will fall for the first time since the mid-1990s, which will make it that much harder for the Government to deliver a genuinely fair funding system.
The Secretary of State told the House last week that the Government remain committed to implementing their manifesto pledge to make funding fairer. She told us that she will protect the schools budget, which she has promised will rise as pupil numbers increase. The IFS says that that is not going to happen, but we will give her the benefit of the doubt. She also highlighted the progress she has made in providing the additional £390 million this year for those areas with the lowest levels of funding, and said that that will continue next year.
But that is the rhetoric. As the hon. Members for Beverley and Holderness and for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) said, the reality in schools is very different. According to the latest National Union of Teachers survey, 60% of school representatives stated that teaching posts have been lost in their school; more than 60% stated that classroom support posts had been lost; and 55% stated that other support posts had been lost. Nearly 60% reported larger class sizes; more than 65% reported a reduction in spending on books and equipment; and nearly 45% stated that teachers were paying more for materials than they were previously. Of particular concern to the Members who mentioned it in their speeches will be the fact that 50% reported cuts in support to pupils with special educational needs. Respondents also noted a greater reliance on non-qualified teachers and teaching assistants.
Although we all agree with the principle that pupils with similar levels of need should receive broadly similar levels of funding, the Minister should reflect on some of the very real concerns that Members have raised today when he is considering the matter and ensure that any further changes are not only fair but just. Like the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), I am interested to hear how it is going to happen, how it will be paid for, and what the time scales will be. I want to hear the what, the when and the how.
Schools are grateful for the additional £390 million allocation, but we must be clear that it is not new money and has come largely from a 25% cut in funding to the 18-plus pupil-funding stream and from the massive cuts we have seen to further education funding, with further massive cuts to come. Pupils who access FE or remain in school over the age of 18 are often pupils with SEN, vulnerable children, or children who simply learn more slowly and need an extra year or two to get to the level of their peers. They are the children closest to being NEET. It is neither fair nor just to take funding from that group of children to distribute across the rest of the sector, and it is not fair to take funding from other less well-off parts of the education sector. We particularly do not want to see another smash and grab on the FE sector.
I agree with fair and transparent funding in principle, but I repeat that new money is required. Funding must be fair to other parts of the system, especially those parts supporting children with SEN, looked-after children and other vulnerable children. It needs to be fair to the higher education sector, and particularly to the FE sector, given what has already happened. It must be fair to rural areas with small schools, which have been mentioned by a number of Members. My constituency is rural and has a school with just 12 children. The very existence of such small schools would be threatened by a system that makes no financial allowance for size. There will have to be transitional arrangements to ensure that no area or school loses out heavily.
I want to give the Minister the benefit of my experience, which I feel I will be giving him quite a lot in the months to come. I have a little time, so I will give him two examples. I remember being involved in a local authority where we wanted to change the funding system to make allowances for children from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. We made what we understood to be a small tweak to the system that resulted in a big change, with funding going to a school that was educating the children of the directors and senior managers of a Japanese car factory. They clearly did not need the money. The Minister should be aware that there can be unintended consequences.
More importantly, I do not know whether other Members remember, but in around 2005, schools started to scream that their local authorities were not handing over funding—that it was being top-sliced. The Blair Government at the time responded by naming and shaming local authorities, which then started to scream that it was unfair and was not happening. Someone had the bright idea that it was SEN funding: “SEN funding has gone up massively; that’s what’s causing this.” There was an investigation, and it turned out that an accountant in the Treasury had tweaked a tiny bit of the formula here, which had a massive impact over there. Whatever happens, the Minister must be clear that the changes are properly consulted on; that we know exactly who will be the winners and losers, and by how much; that they are piloted; and that there are transitional arrangements over a period of time.
The Chancellor and the Minister are in real difficulty. Perhaps Government Members did not see, but the Secretary of State’s face was a picture when the Prime Minister promised to continue the infant free school meals programme at PMQs last week. We hear a lot every week about the promise of 30 hours of free childcare, but that is already under-funded by £l billion. I have sympathy for the Minister, because I have been in his position, albeit to a lesser extent. I have been the person who has had to deliver good and outstanding services, but who had to balance the budget amid all the cries for additional money.
I ask every Member present who has called for fairer funding for schools to remember where the last tranche of funding came from—a smash and grab on FE. Every one of us has an FE college in our constituency. We know that they have been hit massively already and are facing a further 24% cut in funding. Our colleges have been more than decimated by cuts, and we do not want to see more. All Members present will want to see a new funding system that is fair and just to all children and all sectors. With that, I am happy to sit down and let the Minister try to square the financial circle.
Mr Gyimah
As the right hon. Gentleman knows, there has to be a referendum for a council tax increase of more than 1.99%. We are talking about how central Government deal with revenue funding for schools. We have got to the point where schools’ capital needs are based on need. If the schools in a constituency have serious problems, we have a thorough process for identifying their needs and allocating funding appropriately, but we do not have a similar process on the revenue-funding side.
It is patently unfair that Knowsley receives nearly £750 less per pupil than Wandsworth, given that more pupils in Knowsley are entitled to free school meals. It is unfair that a secondary pupil with low prior attainment would attract more than £2,000 in Birmingham but only £35 in Darlington. In four local authorities they would not attract any funding at all. That is not right. The hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) spoke very clearly about that injustice.
In the previous Parliament, we took a big step. To those who say that the Government should be brave, I say that we have been brave. In an era of austerity, we invested £400 million to help level the playing field.
Graham Stuart
The £390 million is in its second year, and that will be the baseline. Will the Minister consider looking at the allocation again, because only a little more than half of it went to the lowest-funded authorities? If those that should not have had it have only recently received it, their pain in losing it will be less. The £390 million could be repurposed to lift up the lowest-funded authorities together. That would remove the outliers, even before we get to the national funding formula.
Mr Gyimah
I thank my hon. Friend for that point. I agree with the hon. Member for North West Durham that this is a complicated area. What happened with the £390 million is that local authorities whose spending was low on the high needs block but high on the schools funding formula did not see the full benefit, because the £390 million was allocated purely on the basis of schools funding. That means that any reform in this area has to take into account the different blocks of the dedicated schools grant: schools funding, high needs and early years. Some local authorities shift money among those different budgets, so we must look at this in the round.
Let me return to the difference that the £400 million has made. Buckinghamshire received a further £80 million and Cambridgeshire received more than £23 million, or £311 for every pupil. Bury, Surrey, Shropshire, Salford and more than 60 other authorities benefited from additional funding for their schools. Money was not being shuffled into Conservative areas from other local authorities. The beneficiaries of the £400 million, which is now the baseline, are underfunded local authorities. We looked at underfunding based on characteristics; we did not pick an arbitrary number.
Graham Stuart
Westminster was a beneficiary, was it not? I may have got that wrong. Clearly, the money was not always going to the lowest-funded authorities. Only a little more than half went to the lowest-funded authorities. There is a real opportunity to look at this again.
Mr Gyimah
As my hon. Friend knows, we are having this debate because the Government want to go further than £390 million. The changes in some hon. Members’ constituencies over the past 10 years have been significant. In Dorset, the funding schools receive does not reflect the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals, even though that proportion has almost doubled. In Lincolnshire—this relates to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins)—the proportion has doubled, but the funding has not changed at all. In other areas, the number of children eligible for free school meals has gone down by 40%, but the authority still receives the same amount of funding. The distribution of funding today does not reflect the needs of our children, so it has to be changed.
It is widely recognised that the impact of the distribution is hugely unfair, as many hon. Members have said today. A child who goes to school in Trafford will attract £4,228, but in next-door Manchester they will attract £5,081. At the extremes, Wokingham—my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) is no longer in his place—receives £4,151 for every school pupil, while Tower Hamlets receives £7,000, or 70% more. Of course, we have to ensure that Tower Hamlets receives the funding it needs, based on the characteristics of its pupils, to enable its schools to do their job, but a discrepancy of 70% or more shows that rooting the funding formula in the historical allocation has allowed things to get out of kilter.
As I said, we have made some progress, and many schools that are doing an excellent job are benefiting. I want to draw hon. Members’ attention to York, because my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) is here. It is one of the lowest-funded authorities in the country, yet 86% of its primary pupils and 93% of its secondary pupils are in good or outstanding schools. I congratulate the teachers in York on the excellent work they are doing. However, schools in York could do even more to help us in our mission to build a world-class education system if their funding matched the schools’ and pupils’ needs.
A system in which a school can get 50% more money for providing the same education to the same pupils just by moving from Barnsley to Hackney is not fair to schools, parents or children. To be fair to taxpayers at a time of austerity, we need to ensure that we get the most out of every pound we spend on our schools. Although we have protected the schools budget overall, we will not make the most of it until it is targeted where it is needed.
Graham Stuart
Perhaps the Minister is about to move on to what I am going to ask him. Can he set out the principles that will be used, so that we have some idea of the parameters that will be used to determine allocation? This will be politically challenging, so it is important that the terms on which it is done carry the widest possible support across the House.
Mr Gyimah
I thank my hon. Friend for his third intervention so far. The good news is that there is consensus on the need for reform, and support for how we plan to get there. Devising the new system will be a big, difficult job. There is no other way of describing it. We are being encouraged to move quickly, but also to listen; the best thing to do as we set out our proposals, soon after the spending review, is consult carefully and widely with local authorities and schools. That will be our approach.
Also, I received the letter sent to the Prime Minister from over 100 Members, led by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness.
Graham Stuart
It has been a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. What a delight this is! It was 10 years ago when I first asked a question about F40 funding to a Labour Minister, and I got a singularly inadequate reply. It was in March 2006 when I got my first debate on this subject. I called for an urgent debate in January 2007, and secured one in May 2007. This has been going on for a long, long time. The Minister and the Government are committed to delivering fair funding for our schools; that is long overdue and very welcome.
I think colleagues would like to hear more about the principles; we will perhaps do so when the Minister comes forward early in the new year—certainly by the end of January—with proposals to be consulted on.
Graham Stuart
We need more on the timing, because while consulting widely and seeking consensus is credible, the Government are committed to this. It does not require consensus; it requires the implementation of the manifesto promise. Seeking consensus is entirely right, but requiring it is a different matter altogether.
Then there is the element of ambition. How far are the Government prepared to go? I think it was a Treasury official who said, years ago, “Minister, the people you make happy, you never make as happy as the people you make unhappy, unhappy.” That is the problem. When we finally get the proposals, we and our constituents will grunt and say, “About time,” but there has to be redistribution; it is unfortunate that the Opposition spokeswoman, the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), was not prepared to say that. As it is, there has been a 7% increase in the education budget in this Parliament because of the number of pupils. Given the context, there has to be redistribution. Some people will lose, which means looking them in the eye and explaining why it is fair and right that they should do so. That takes courage, but if we are going to do it, we could do with both sides of the House joining in and accepting that principle. I welcome Labour’s support for fairer funding, but it needs to be followed by the recognition of the need for redistribution.
In my final seconds, I want to comment on the contribution of the hon. Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan), the Scottish National party spokeswoman. It seems that the free university education of middle-class children, who are predominantly the most likely to go to university, has been funded at the expense of working-class kids in further education colleges, who have had their vocational opportunities stunted as a result. I do not think that the SNP has much to teach us about that, although they do seem to have more equal funding of schools, per pupil. It seems a good principle to have pretty much level funding, except when the reasons not to are overwhelming, such as higher teaching costs in London. That does not mean, however, that we need have the gross discrepancies that we see today.
It has been a great debate, and I thank all my colleagues for being here. I look forward to the Minister coming forward with proposals as soon as possible.
School Funding Formula
Graham Stuart Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
Yet again, my hon. Friend is leading off the debate—in 10 years in the House, I have raised this matter only eight times, so I stand behind him in that respect. Does he agree that the Government did the right thing last year by closing the gap a little but that we need all parties to commit to a new funding formula in the next Parliament, as the Conservative party has done, to ensure that we have a fair and just settlement, not just in rhetoric but in reality?
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow both the excellent speakers whom we have heard so far. We all agree on the need for a fair and transparent system. As has been said, much of that is in the eye of the beholder. However, the Ministers in the last Government whom I lobbied knew perfectly well that the system was not fair, although they did not have the political courage to face down their own people and say, “We are going to have to redistribute your funds to areas that we do not typically represent, because that is obviously fair.” This is not just about perception. I have never heard anyone attempt to explain why the present system is fair, because they cannot do so. The system is not fair. It is time for someone to recognise the need to do the right thing regardless of party-political interest, which may be something of a challenge.
I am delighted that the Conservative party is committed to a new national funding formula, and I am also pleased that the F40 group is presenting detailed proposals. Its members have worked out who will be losers and who will be winners, to narrow the gaps. Whichever party is in government, whichever system is used to fund schools and regardless of whether 16 to 19-year-olds are protected, money will be tight, so we must have the courage to do the right thing, and then find a way of explaining it to people and carrying them with us.
The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) was right to say that we must do what all fair-minded people would recognise as the right thing. I say that on behalf of the people in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the area I represent. It is rural, coastal and absolutely has the problems the chief inspector of Ofsted has identified, yet from this coming year, although it will have slightly more money thanks to the £390 million, it will be the lowest-funded area in the country. If the Minister gets a chance to do so in his time-limited five-minute speech, perhaps he will say something about the technicality by which, because of our high needs block funding, we got a disproportionately small amount of that £390 million, to add to our existing inequities.
Mr Laws
That is certainly a sensible principle, and it is exactly what we have tried to do through many of our reforms.
Throughout the Parliament we have introduced major reforms that have improved the fairness and simplicity of the system and laid the essential foundation stones to allow us, the two coalition parties, to introduce a full national funding formula in future. The major reforms we have made are changes to the local funding system, and changes to the way in which we fund disadvantage, with the introduction of the pupil premium and minimum funding levels. Time does not allow me to speak in detail about the first two changes, but I would like briefly to say something about the third—minimum funding levels.
We introduced minimum funding levels last year. I thank not only all the Members who lobbied for that change in the system but the excellent officials in our Department who worked hard, over a sustained period, on the new model. This Government have introduced the first reforms to the distribution of funding between local areas in over a decade. In 2015-16, every local area will attract a minimum level of funding for each of its pupils and schools. The £390 million increase in funding that we introduced as part of minimum funding levels represents a huge step towards removing the historical unfairness of the schools funding system. It ensures an immediate boost to the least fairly funded authorities and puts us in a much better position to implement a national funding formula in the next Parliament. All the logic of the reforms we have made indicates that they should be baselined into funding in the next Parliament. I can certainly make that commitment on behalf of my party; it is for others to make commitments on behalf of their parties.
Mr Laws
I will not, I am afraid, because of the lack of time.
In the next Parliament, multi-year spending plans will allow us to give certainty to local authorities and schools about how we transition to a national funding formula. Meanwhile, no local authority or school will lose out from the introduction of minimum funding levels from 2015-16, but about four in 10 areas will gain. We have already heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester, whose area gains some £100 per pupil—an increase of just over 2%—as a result of the changes for which he lobbied. My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon has been a great campaigner on this issue for many years and has helped to secure an uplift of about 5% in his part of the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge has helped to secure a huge increase of about 8% for funding in his part of England—an additional £311 per pupil that will make a massive difference to schools. This is only one step in the transition to fairer funding and a national funding formula, but it is the biggest step towards fairer schools funding in a decade.
The three major reforms over this Parliament do not, of course, complete the reform of school funding. We recognise that we still need to introduce a full formula to ensure that pupils with similar characteristics attract the same level of funding regardless of where they live. Nevertheless, I am proud that the changes we have made have delivered the big improvements that we have seen. They put us in a much better position than we were in at the beginning of this Parliament. We now have to do the important preparatory work that will be necessary to put in place a national fair funding formula in the next Parliament. We also need to review funding on deprivation to make sure that it is fair across the whole country, and that we can build on the enormous improvements made in this Parliament and the massive contribution that the pupil premium has made.
We are now in a position to finish the job of introducing, for the first time in decades, a fair funding system for schools in this country. Once we have long-term spending plans, we will be in a position to introduce, in a stable and sensible way, the full national funding system for schools for which Members have argued. Both governing parties in this House—both coalition parties—have put on the record very clearly their commitment to a national fair funding formula. Those of our constituents who care about this issue can best ensure the delivery of this policy through the choices they make—
Child Sexual Exploitation (Oxfordshire)
Graham Stuart Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Nicky Morgan
The hon. Gentleman is right that what we have seen in Oxfordshire and elsewhere are abhorrent, sickening crimes, and they are crimes. He is right to say that any of us in any position of authority feels that those are a stain on our society and must be eradicated. He is right to say that we do not want to rush into responding, but where immediate action must be taken, it is important that it is taken. That is what we have seen in Rotherham, for example, with the appointment of the commissioners. The Secretaries of State have been meeting since last autumn to discuss the Government’s response to Rotherham in particular, which will be announced at Downing street this afternoon. We have taken time and there will be further consultations coming out of the response. We have already announced reforms to children’s social work practice, and that is a long-term response about improving training. He will understand that there needs to be a mixture of responses to something as sickening as this.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
We must do everything we can to reduce the vulnerability of the young people we have heard about today. Further to the question from the Opposition spokesman and the Secretary of State’s response, my Committee agrees about the need for excellent sex and relationship education in schools precisely to give resilience to young people, to enable them to talk about consent in a meaningful way, as one witness put it, and to tell them about age gaps and predatory behaviours so that they start to recognise those. We wrestled with how we would get the curriculum time and the investment in teacher quality if we do not make such education statutory—reluctantly, because we do not want to impose further duties on schools. We came to the conclusion that that had to be made statutory if we are to deliver it. If the Secretary of State thinks it should not be statutory, will she tell us why, or tell us what else could be done in lieu of what we suggested to make these things happen?
Nicky Morgan
I thank my hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee for his remarks. The Committee produced an interesting report and I know that the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), gave evidence to the Committee. We will consider the conclusions carefully. In relation to consent, it is important to know that the victims in these cases knew that they had not given consent. There was no question about consent being given. They knew that what was happening to them was absolutely wrong. Sex and relationship education is already compulsory in secondary maintained schools. Most academies and free schools also teach it, and I suspect that many primaries do so in an age-appropriate way. I was at Eastbourne academy last week talking to the students there about what they call SPHERE, which is like PSHE. The academy taught it in a fantastic way. It did not need to be told to do so; it did not need such teaching to be statutory. It was doing it because, exactly as the Chairman of the Select Committee said, it was preparing young people to be resilient.
Oral Answers to Questions
Graham Stuart Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
7. What assessment she has made of which of her Department’s policies since May 2010 has been most successful in achieving its original objectives.
The Secretary of State for Education (Nicky Morgan)
There have been many outstanding achievements during this Parliament, but I particularly highlight our reforms to raise standards in schools as a key success. This has led to more children than ever before—as I said, almost 1 million pupils—attending a school rated good or outstanding by Ofsted.
Mr Stuart
We currently have the fastest expanding economy in the western world, which is obviously extremely welcome, but the improvement in standards in our schools has come about because of recruitment of the best possible graduates into the profession. What more can the Government do to ensure that these graduates come into our schools, particularly those in rural and coastal areas?
Nicky Morgan
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. We now need to see excellent teaching right the way across the system in every school. Every child’s life chances are only as good as the quality of teaching they receive. That is why the Prime Minister recently announced that our manifesto would include a national teaching service to encourage more good teachers to enter the profession and to be represented in all schools right across the country.
Mr Speaker
Order. I feel sure that there will be a full debate on this matter on one of the long summer evenings that lie ahead of us.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
T6. Will the Secretary of State commit himself to maintaining a focus on social justice and rooting for those who do not go to university? Will he reject out of hand a policy that has been described by the New Statesman as “dire”, by Martin Lewis as “financially illiterate”, and by The Times as Labour’s worst policy? Tuition fees cuts amounting to £2.7 billion would subsidise the very richest at a time when we need to do more for the very poorest.
Nicky Morgan
My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. We are taking money from the welfare budget to pay for apprenticeships that will set our young people up in life, while the Labour party is taking money away from pensioners in order to fund a misguided policy on tuition fees. According to the vice-chancellor of my own university, Loughborough, that policy would make 500 people redundant. Which 500 people in Loughborough does the shadow Secretary of State think should be made redundant?
Careers Advice (14 to 19-Year-Olds)
Graham Stuart Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Williams. I thank the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) for securing this excellent and important debate.
I come at the matter from two perspectives. My key priority is the people of Hartlepool. There is huge potential in my constituency. We have a nuclear power station providing well-paid jobs, and there is the prospect of an additional power station in the next 10, 15 or 20 years. We have got Nissan up the road. We have got Hitachi in Newton Aycliffe. We have the largest concentration of chemical engineering anywhere in western Europe, and we have the potential for carbon capture and storage. There is massive opportunity in my local economy, and yet the Office for National Statistics report from last year on young people in the labour market shows that Hartlepool, alongside Wolverhampton, has the largest number of young people unemployed and outside education or training anywhere in England and Wales. Why is that the case? Why is there such a mismatch between potential, skill shortages and the level of youth unemployment? Careers advice has a role to play in making sure that we address that mismatch.
My second consideration is that for the last 11 months of the previous Labour Government, I was the Minister in charge of 14-to-19 reform and apprenticeships, and I had responsibility for information, advice and guidance. I was conscious that in far too many cases, careers advice was seen as a secondary activity—often even a nuisance—that took time and attention away from the core business of learning. Careers advice was often delivered as a one-off event in a single afternoon. I was keen to see a new approach, which was the purpose of the new strategy for information, advice and guidance published in October 2009. I am not suggesting that there was ever a golden age for careers guidance, but as a Minister I was keen to push it up the agenda.
As we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), the provision of careers advice to young people under this Government has got markedly worse. Reductions in funding and personnel, increases in fragmentation in the school system and organisational change, such as the dismantling of Connexions, have meant that young people often face real barriers to navigating what is on offer. Good careers advice can also be an important tool of effective social mobility. A young person should get good careers advice regardless of where they live, their background, who their parents are or who they know. That is often not the case, however, and it is a question of who they know and their connections when it comes to getting into a good career or profession.
The CBI has said that 93% young of people are not getting the careers information that they need, but good careers information, advice and guidance are needed more than ever, because the certainties of the past have gone. In my patch, my grandfather’s generation could leave school at the age of 15 on Friday and be working in the steelworks or the shipyard the following Monday, and they would stay there for 40 years. That certainty and that clear route have gone for ever. The futurist Thomas Frey has said that 60% of the best jobs in the next decade have not even been invented yet. At the same time, technology threatens a third of all UK jobs over the next 20 years, especially at the low-skilled end of the employment market. As Andreas Schleicher of the OECD has said,
“because of rapid economic and social change, schools have to prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created, technologies that have not yet been invented and problems that we don’t yet know will arise.”
In those circumstances, there needs to be much greater alignment between education policy and business and industrial policy, with effective careers advice and meaningful engagement between businesses and schools acting as the bridge, but the Government have to help. Government policy is not addressing the issue, and a narrowing of the curriculum by Ministers means that creative learning, problem solving and team building in the widest sense—enterprise education, in the widest definition, is required for the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century that will allow us to compete in the modern world—are not being championed, and careers advice is being downgraded.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is right to say that there was no golden age. The careers system that he left behind at the end of the Labour Government was pretty weak. Does he agree that there has been a failure to change the incentives in order to ensure that all schools provide first-class careers advice and guidance, as a small number currently do? One of the major things is to ensure that, in places such as Hartlepool, young people get qualifications that add value. He will be delighted, as I am, to see the number of young unemployed people aged between 18 and 24 in his constituency go down from the 1,200 when he left government in 2010 to, I think, 615 according to the latest figures. That is fantastic news, and we are seeing that transformation across the country under this Government.
Mr Wright
The hon. Gentleman will understand that we want a universal and properly resourced careers service that is staffed by committed and professional people with the necessary breadth of knowledge and experience to be able to say, “This is what the future looks like. The potential for you, as a young person, is huge. This is what’s on offer. Let me guide you through it.” That is not happening at the moment. I have six specific, brief points.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Williams. I strongly congratulate the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) on securing this debate on a crucial subject. I represent one of the youngest constituencies in the country. I can barely walk down the street, and I can certainly never visit a school or educational establishment, without young people directly raising their concerns and demands about the careers services that they want. I am here to speak for them.
I completely endorse the comments of most hon. Members who have spoken today. Young people tell me that they want face-to-face guidance when they need it. That is particularly important in my constituency because many young people do not have connections. They do not have parents with understanding and knowledge of the modern world of work. Many of them have come to this country, and perhaps their parents do not have good English.
On Monday, I was at the KPMG City academy in my constituency with my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt). A year 12 pupil told us that she wants to be a doctor but that her mother is a single parent. She said, “I don’t have the connections that some of my friends in the school have.” The school helps to provide her with the connections that help to level the playing field. KPMG and the City of London sponsor the academy, and KPMG helps to provide her with support—other pupils also have mentors through KPMG. Those business links, as my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) said, are vital.
When I talk to businesses in the community and head teachers, one of the key things they mention is linking those businesses with individual pupil achievement in the school, as well as giving pupils a view of the world of work. That is more complicated than simply careers advice, but I have always supported embedding business connections in schools, and it is one of the reasons why I am broadly in favour of the academies programme.
On careers advice more specifically, I am delighted to have worked from the outset with the charity My Big Career. We found each other because I had been working to encourage professionals in my area to become the family for young people in Hackney who do not have their own connections. I got professionals and sixth-formers into networking events, where they shared notes and found each other. Those young people made their own connections.
The redoubtable Deborah Streatfield decided to set up My Big Career because she is a professional careers adviser working in the private sector and, as well as the private school that employs her, she is often privately commissioned by parents. She realised that the careers advice in many state schools was not of the same standard, so she set up the charity. Happily, I was able to secure office space in Cardinal Pole school in my constituency, which now has an outstanding sixth form. Deborah Streatfield has been offering face-to-face advice, and it is not just her. She has been getting in volunteer careers advisers and, crucially, professionals from business who are trained to give the right kind of professional advice to pupils.
The charity also offers a results day service, which was so effective last year. Shockingly, it was the first time in Hackney’s history that pupils received a results day service from volunteers trained to go in at 7 o’clock in the morning so that young people who had missed a grade could access discussions with universities. For example, four young people who would not have got on to their nursing degree did so because of that input, which should be standard. That happened because a professional, qualified careers team was there at that point.
Young people tell me that they want such advice. For many young people, face-to-face advice is so important because they are just not getting it through other routes. The key thing about My Big Career is the service’s high-level professionalism. I echo the point raised by other colleagues that we need good, properly qualified careers advisers.
I also echo the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) about ensuring that teenagers make the right choice early on. One of the things that My Big Career has discovered is that many young people are being encouraged, quite rightly and effectively, to get a good GCSE in maths, but for many a C grade was just not enough for the course they wanted to take at university. They needed a B grade, and even many heads of maths did not understand the significance of a B grade for the future career choices of their pupils. Bright, able and capable sixth-formers were finding that that one dropped grade in GCSE maths was limiting their future career options. That goes to show that the professional understanding of good, qualified careers advisers makes a difference throughout a school, not just at 14.
The Government have thrown money at careers advice. At one level, we should accept the £20 million that has gone to the careers company, but I have serious questions about how that has been tendered and whether it is really best at national level. There is no road map for how the careers company will deliver good quality careers advice throughout our educational establishments. I hope the Minister can give us more information, because we are all desperate to know how that will help people in Hackney, Hartlepool, Scunthorpe and around the country. I want to know how we will be monitoring the independent advice and guidance provided directly by schools, because the quality varies enormously, as we have heard.
I, too, have a list of asks for the Minister. First, as the hon. Member for Eastbourne described, we want a clearer set of requirements on appropriate and good guidance. We do not have a common set of standards at the moment, and it is vital that we do. It is not fair that a young person going through a school—sometimes a very good school—might have their future completely altered by the lack of quality careers advice. We want a common standard.
Crucially, we need really good evaluation of what works and quality control. The key thing is the bit in the middle, which my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe talked about—the broker between businesses and young people. The broker could be the careers adviser, but there could be work placements. Rather than young people just being thrown at work placements that have been brokered by a careers service, they could say, “I want to do this, and I need to know who I can speak to so I can go and do that particular role.”
I represent Shoreditch, which the Prime Minister and the Chancellor called “tech city”. It is a hub for future jobs and growth in this country, but most of the jobs in Shoreditch do not exist as such. They do not have job titles, because they are so new and emerging. I can sometimes broker the connections, because of the peculiarity of an MP’s role, where we see a lot of different things. We need to make sure that our teachers and particularly our careers advisers are aware of the opportunities and can make those links. That crucial bit in the middle is the broker. When the broker finds a young person with a particular skill, the broker will know how to make the two or three phone calls that will get the young person the connection to the career opportunity that they can really learn from. We also need to see greater stability of funding so that we can be sure there is a career path for good quality careers advisers.
I welcomed the Government’s decision to include outcome data as a key part of schools. We still do not have much of an update from the Department for Education on how it is going to work. Many schools in my area feel challenged about how they are going to deal with it. I believe—I represent Shoreditch, so I would—that good, well-worked-up software that would allow alumni to be tracked and, crucially, give alumni something back in terms of networking, could be very useful. I have been talking to UBS, the bank that sponsors the Bridge Academy in Hackney. There is a real opportunity to be grabbed, but it needs to be fleshed out. I hope the Minister will do so.
I have mentioned the issues about grade B maths. Such issues underline the need for clear understanding throughout schools of how early choices can affect careers and damage career options. The Government need to ensure that that is embedded through a set of standards.
I have set out my asks. Careers advice is crucial. My young people in Hackney want action. They want to see the best provided to all and I back them in that.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
Thank you for fitting me in, Mr Williams. I am afraid I was not originally down to speak because I was chairing the Education Committee this morning.
Careers advice and guidance is such an important topic. The Select Committee produced a report. People are listening to thoughtful speeches from many colleagues, but the heart of the problem is a simple one. It does not come out in myriad reports that have been produced on the subject, or indeed in enough speeches given by colleagues in the Chamber. The problem is that there are insufficient incentives for schools to take the matter seriously. That is why 80% of them do not. It is simple: they do not have to take it seriously. No one loses their job and no one gets fired or publicly humiliated for failing to do it properly, but they do if five good GCSEs are not achieved. We therefore have to change the accountability regime and have a high-stakes environment in which someone very easily gets publicly humiliated or sacked. That is the central problem.
We need a better balance—perhaps a nudge that does not simply add further burdens on leaders within schools and colleges, but addresses the central problem. The Committee did not have any perfect solutions, but we said—I will say this to the Minister—that schools should at least be made to publish their careers plan, so that parents and employers can have a look at it. Ofsted could check in advance. Hard-working Ministers could sit in Whitehall, as I know my right hon. Friend the Minister for Schools often does late at night, and look at it on the website.
The Government helped to fund a quality in careers standard for schools. It exists, so we can make schools work towards it and keep to it. I know it is bureaucratic—a bit input-esque—but we have not got great destinations data yet and we do not have another solution, so we have to give it a nudge. Let us not have any more reports from the alphabet soup of organisations. Teach First has done one this week that has some good stuff in it, but the central issue is that schools are not incentivised to take the matter seriously, and they have perverse incentives such as filling their sixth-form places, which means they will not even let colleges in.
Let us address the incentives, get the framework right, stop faffing around with all the other talk, and we could make a real difference to the lives of children. It is worth looking at what happened under the previous Secretary of State, who, it is fair to say, was pretty dismissive of this agenda, but he was not dismissive of the need to raise standards in schools, to challenge the low standards that prevailed for too long, and to put in place a pressure on the system to get people to sit for qualifications and do a curriculum and syllabuses for exams that matter to people and were of some value. That is already starting to pay off. Combined with an economic plan that focuses on enterprise and growth, we see transformations.
I am sad to say that for those who are trying to be fair-minded, those transformations do not get properly reflected in speeches by Opposition Members. I admire enormously the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), as I do all the Opposition Members in the Chamber, but he does not mention that youth unemployment in his constituency has gone from more than 1,000 when the Labour party left office—there were more than 1,000 young people in his constituency who were scarred for life by unemployment, because we know that youth unemployment scars people for life—to 425 today. Similarly, in Hartlepool, about 600 young people’s lives have been transformed by a Government who are delivering and not just talking. The youth unemployment figure there has gone from 1,200 to 600, so another 600 young people have had their lives turned round. In south Hackney, the youth unemployment figure is down from 750 when Labour left office—750 young people just sitting there—to 250 today. That is all great news.
Hywel Williams (in the Chair)
Order. This debate is about careers advice and not about unemployment among young people.
Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) on raising this important topic. I also congratulate all the hon. Members who have spoken; their speeches demonstrate the importance of this subject.
Careers advice is “broken”; it is on “life support”; and the Government show a “reluctance” to take it seriously. Those are not my words as an Opposition Member; they are the words of the CBI and the Skills Commission. Also, the Education Committee has been fairly critical; in 2013, it described
“the worrying deterioration in the overall level of provision”.
That is all pretty damning, because careers advice is absolutely vital, as I think we have heard from everyone who has spoken today.
Young people need to know what the options are—not only which A-levels to take or which university to go to but what training they may need to become an engineer or to work in IT. They also need to know what the emerging jobs market in their area is, and what they need in order to access the full range of education and training options, as the Association of Colleges has said in its excellent report. But what have the Government done? They have pushed the responsibility for careers advice on to schools and colleges.
Schools must provide access to impartial careers advice for young people aged between 14 and 19. They are told that this advice should be independent and involve outside providers. However, the schools have a vested interest in keeping up the number of students studying A-level courses, to ensure a viable number if they have a sixth form of their own; in some cases, the survival of a school’s sixth form depends on the school keeping those students. I have heard from some sixth-form and further education colleges that they are being denied admission to schools, and consequently they are not being allowed to give the full range of options to students.
Many teachers follow the academic route so they do not have experience of the world of work, know the local economic conditions in their area or understand the range of experiences that are offered by going down the “earn and learn” route. Indeed, I have heard from some young people about the pressure they are under to stay on at school and take A-levels, rather than starting apprenticeships. One young person told me that they were ostracised by the school when they said they wanted to do an apprenticeship. Another particularly savvy young person said to me, “I’m just seen as a walking pot of money.”
Mr Graham Stuart
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising the issue of apprenticeships. The TUC and Unionlearn have said—I think it was in the past few days—that they completely oppose the Labour party policy to abolish level 2 apprenticeships. Will the Labour party look at that policy again? Level 2 apprenticeships, where they transform income and provide high-quality training, should be retained; we must not lose this vital building block in providing support to young people.
Yvonne Fovargue
I will not go into that issue too far, but I will say that level 2 will not be branded as apprenticeships, and the training will certainly not be going; it will be a pre-apprenticeship. However, that is a different issue.
It is no wonder, therefore, that careers advice is simply not being provided. Three quarters of schools that Ofsted visited were not providing adequate advice—so far, not so good. And what else has happened? We have heard about the new careers and enterprise company, and a number of questions have been asked about it. I wonder whether the job it will do is already being done. The Chairman of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), who is here today, has said:
“It is clear that the…new body replicates the very role and remit of the National Careers Service...and only the leadership and governance is different”.
I would like to hear more about what will happen with that situation.
The fact is that we need more than an unenforced duty on schools, which simply leads to buck-passing. One in three teachers say they do not have the right expertise and resources to adequately provide effective information, advice and guidance. We need a complete rethink about how we deliver careers advice to young people, and rebuilding the careers advice service will be an early and vital priority for a Labour Government. Fragmentation and short-term and unsuitable initiatives are absolutely endemic. We need a careers service that is modelled around what provides the best outcomes for the young person and for the country, because young people are our future work force, as we have heard today. We need a careers service that guarantees that face-to-face, one-to-one guidance is available for all young people who need it, and that ensures that businesses and employers are linked in with it, the importance of which we heard about from my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin).
Building closer links with industry is absolutely vital, but I would like to add my support for the face-to-face guidance, as somebody who has worked in providing face-to-face advice, even if it was not in this sector. Websites can help many young people, but many more will need face-to-face contact. The level of contact may well be different: it may just involve initial contact, or there may be contact that takes young people further through the process. As Centrepoint has said, particularly young people who have little parental support, as well as those with poor literacy or who have other support needs, may need more assistance.
Working together is the other watchword. That is why I support the idea of careers hubs, which we have heard about from a number of hon. Members today. I visited the Bristol campus of South Gloucestershire and Stroud college the other month. The college has an excellent careers hub, working with schools across the area—independent schools, academies, state-controlled schools and primary schools—and providing one-to-one advice from professional careers advisers, which it employs. The college is the point of contact for all employers, it works with the local enterprise partnership, and it is considering expanding its service. It is an excellent model for the careers advice of the future. If such hubs were rolled out across the country, they could provide a single point of information about careers advice and career options in each area and employ the professional careers advisers whose work is so valuable.
Careers hubs could also co-ordinate work experience. We have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) how important work experience is for young people. Currently, however, work experience provision is another postcode lottery.
A taster session of work experience is valued by young people and employers, but not enough employers are incentivised to provide them, even though they can provide real benefits, including introducing the reality of work to young people. My daughter found that out on her first day of work. Horrified, she told me when she came home, “The manager told me what to do, and d’you know what? It wasn’t sensible!” I thought, “That’s a good life experience for you.”
Taster sessions also allow students to consider a wider range of roles than they may have been told about. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool said, young people put their toe in the water and they might not like it. However, they might like it, especially if taster sessions give them a wide range of roles to consider. It is also indisputable that if people have an early experience of work, they are less likely to end up unemployed and more likely to get better jobs and earn more money. However, at the moment less than half of young people have access to high-quality work experience. We have really fallen behind countries such as France in this regard.
We also need to work more with employers to break down some of the barriers faced by young people who are perhaps harder to place than others, including those with disabilities, in order to dispel the preconception that the employers themselves may have that those young people cannot do the jobs that are on offer. A careers hub could help those young people, as well as others who are perhaps more in the mainstream.
We believe that destination tracking is another activity that should be taken further. Schools actually have a responsibility for their pupils that goes beyond simply where they go on leaving school. A young person who goes to university and drops out in the first term because the course is unsuitable for them is not a success; a young person who takes an apprenticeship and completes it is a success, and should be celebrated as such. We therefore need to track destinations for much longer than we do now. Also, there has been a worrying rise in the number of “unknowns” recorded by the local authorities. We not know where those people are, which is a concern from a safeguarding point of view as well.
Our young people are the work force of the future, as we have heard before; we rely on them to pay and look after our pensions, basically. They need to be given every opportunity to have a worthwhile and satisfying career, and to develop their skills throughout their working lives. If we do not give them access to advice at the beginning of their working life, when they are thinking about what work to do, in order to help them navigate the confusing landscape of the world of work, which is becoming ever more confusing, we are failing them. In fact, we are not only doing that but we are jeopardising our future economic success as a country.
The Minister for Skills and Equalities (Nick Boles)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Williams. This has been an excellent debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) on securing it and congratulate all hon. Members on their contributions. However, I am clearly not able to respond to every question asked and every point raised.
I start by observing that, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) said, there has never been a golden age of careers advice and guidance. I think we can all agree about that. He is a former Minister in this field and took office at the end of a long Government full of largesse, so I think he will have noted that large Government budgets have not proved to be the solution to the lack of advice and guidance. He made a perfunctory reference to Connexions, but nobody has come up to me, either since I was elected to Parliament or since I was appointed to this job, and mourned the scrapping of that service. There may well have been good intentions behind it, but the reality is that it achieved very little, with a relatively large budget. When we faced the largest peace time budget deficit in our history, it was a right and proper economy to make to get rid of Connexions as it was then constituted.
There was never a golden age and, certainly, the previous Government did not manage to produce a system of careers advice and guidance that led to high-quality advice for young people throughout the country and in all schools. We as a Government have recognised that, thanks to the good work done by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), the Chairman of the Education Committee, and others, and have taken steps to ensure that schools are more focused on their responsibilities. Hon. Members have mentioned the introduction of statutory guidance requiring schools to provide independent advice and guidance. We certainly recognise that too few schools are doing so. There were many calls from Opposition Members for proper resourcing for this. However, there is a difficulty here, because proper resourcing means more money either dedicated to or ring-fenced for the provision of careers advice and guidance and the employment of more careers advisers. In that case, Opposition Members have to answer questions—I know they never like doing so—about what other things they are going to cut, what taxes they will raise or what borrowing will be increased to provide that resourcing; otherwise, that resourcing will have to come from within the existing schools budgets.
The reality is that good schools of all kinds—grant-maintained schools, academies, and all kinds of schools—realise that it is critical for them to make an investment from their budget and employ a careers adviser or co-ordinator. Lots of different models work. Good schools realise that this is a priority and there is nothing stopping any school deciding to invest some of their resource in proper advice and guidance.
Mr Graham Stuart
Just for the record, the Committee did not call for additional money. It recognised that, in an ideal world, it might have been a good thing, but that the most important thing was to change the incentives for schools, because the fact that 20% of schools can find the budget—they tend to be successful schools delivering outstanding academic results as well—shows that it can be done. In fact, those things are mutually enhancing.
If the Minister wanted a crude proxy for the success of the education system—I remember saying this to the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) when he was a Minister in the Labour Government—it would be how many young people end up as NEETs. I am pleased that the number in the shadow Minister’s constituency has gone from 900 when Labour left office to 140 today.
Nick Boles
Of course, I am always particularly grateful to my hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee. I will come on to his point on incentives, which is a good one.
Probably the most useful thing I can do for hon. Members who participated in this debate is to answer some questions about the new careers company, because I understand that although people are broadly and in principle supportive of it, they question how it will fit into the landscape and particularly what its relationship with or functions relative to the National Careers Service will be.
The key point about the new careers company is that we observed that there is no shortage of organisations offering high-quality activity. Straight after this debate I am meeting the people who run Inspiring Futures, which is an excellent programme with speakers for schools and any number of online resources. Of course, the National Careers Service provides high-quality advice to lots of young people as well as to adults. There is no shortage of provision, but schools face great difficulty understanding what is available, what is high quality and what would really meet the identified needs of their young people.
The point of the careers company, under Christine Hodgson, is to create a structure whereby every school has somebody it can ask to help it through this forest and identify the resources and the providers who will help provide a much better range of experiences and inspiration to young people. It will focus initially on mapping what is out there, because people have to know that before they can start offering guidance. It will then focus on Lord Young’s excellent idea, in his report to the Prime Minister, of appointing an enterprise adviser. That person will be a current or recently retired local executive from the public or private sector, who will be attached to a school and whose role will be to help it identify local businesses and employers that can come in to the school and provide work experience, and resources relating to programmes relevant for the school. A school will identify that local enterprise adviser with the help of their local economic partnership.
I agree with those who have said that local economic partnerships have an obvious role to play in helping schools understand who out there can help them deliver on their duty. I do not think many teachers or head teachers are failing to provide careers advice and guidance because they do not believe in it; it is because they are busy and not particularly qualified to do it. It is no criticism of them to suggest that. They need some help. As we have heard, a plethora of local business executives is only too willing to get involved. However, we need some structure of brokerage in that regard and some guidance to schools on how they can give better advice and guidance to their young people.
Those will be the two main priorities for the careers company. It will have a small pot of money of about £5 million—a small part of the £20 million—from which it will be able to back new ideas for new kinds of experience and advice and guidance. That will act more as a sort of seed fund or a venture fund. It will also work more long-term on Lord Young’s other idea, which is for an enterprise passport that would probably be an online record of all of the non-formal educational achievements of a young person—all the volunteering and holiday jobs they have done, all the clubs they have joined and all their other extracurricular achievements at school—so that employers have an objective record of the full range of a young person’s contribution to their community when judging their fitness for school.
In the final minutes of this debate I should like to focus on the point of careers advice and guidance, although I am happy to answer in writing any questions from colleagues about the careers company. The point of careers advice is to lead to a career, and the point of every career is to have a series of satisfying and fulfilling jobs. I hope that every hon. Member of every party will recognise the signal achievement of this Government, which is to have created more jobs in Yorkshire—as my right hon. Friend the Minister for Employment reminded us—than have been created in France, and to have created more jobs in the United Kingdom than have been created in the whole of the European Union.
The key to a career is having an economy that creates jobs—new jobs in new sectors, requiring new young people with new skills. Of course, they need advice and guidance, and of course they need clear data that help them understand which choice of qualifications leads to which possibilities regarding a career. However, ultimately, without an economy that is creating employment at the speed we have been doing so in this country, there is no point having even the best careers advice and guidance in the world. Right now, even with fantastic careers advice and guidance, someone who has the misfortune to be a young person in Spain will have a pretty small chance of having a fulfilling career because youth unemployment there is pushing 40%.
Let us remember the point of careers advice and guidance, which is to guide people on to a path that will give them a satisfying range of jobs in the economy, creating jobs like no other.
Young People in Care
Graham Stuart Excerpts(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House notes the Second Report from the Education Committee, Into independence, not out of care: 16 plus care options, HC 259, and the Government’s response, HC 647; welcomes the progress made and the commitment to improve the care provided to these vulnerable young people shown in the Government’s response; regrets that the Government has not gone further by exploring with local authorities how to ban the use of bed-and-breakfast accommodation for this age group and by moving to inspect and regulate all accommodation provided to children in care; and calls on the Government to do all it can to improve the accommodation and care given to these young people.
The motion stands in my name and those of other members of the Education Committee, many of whom I see across the Chamber.
I am pleased to lead this debate and to have the opportunity to discuss our report, “Into independence, not out of care: 16 plus care options”. The reason we are here is that the issues considered in our report will have far-reaching consequences for some of the most vulnerable young people in our society. We were moved to inquire into this subject by our concern, raised during previous work on child protection, that the needs of older children in the care system were not being properly met. The horror stories we heard about children being placed in unsuitable and unsafe accommodation, often far from home, made it a matter of crucial importance for us to explore what could be done to improve the situation.
During the inquiry, we took evidence from charities and experts, from the Minister, whom it is a pleasure to see on the Front Bench, and from those closely involved in providing care services to young people but, as I think my colleagues will attest when they speak during the debate, the most important and powerful evidence we heard was from young people themselves who were in care or had previously been in care. We were grateful to those who were brave enough to come and speak to a bunch of MPs and speak about often troubling periods of their lives and about their experiences.
Our inquiry looked at the kinds of accommodation that are provided for young people aged 16 and 17 who are looked after by local authorities—young people still in care; the suitability, safety and regulatory nature of alternative accommodation; whether the “Staying Put” principle whereby young people are allowed to stay in their accommodation for a longer period should apply to those in residential children’s homes; and whether the provision of alternative accommodation should be extended to the age of 21. We made a series of recommendations in each of these areas, all of which are important and many of which were picked up by the Government response, which was published in October 2014. Others may wish to touch on some of those issues, such as “Staying Put” or ensuring that young people’s voices are heard in planning their care.
I hope the Minister will forgive me if I concentrate on two areas where we think the Government should have gone further towards making the changes that we want to see in order to deliver a vision which I know we share with the Government of improving care for these young people. In doing so, I stress the fact that as a Committee we do not doubt the Minister’s commitment to addressing the problems faced by older children in care, nor do I think that progress has not been made: it has.
For example, the new pupil premium plus has seen funding to support children in care at school increase by £1,000 per pupil. Children are covered as soon as they enter care and 10,000 more children in care now benefit, bringing the total to 50,000. The care leavers strategy that the Minister launched in late 2013, which encompasses action across a range of Departments, from the Department for Work and Pensions to housing to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, is giving care leavers a helping hand as they enter adult life. The Ofsted single inspection framework is doing a better job of drawing together data and insight into the lives of older young people and making sure that local authorities can be held to account for the provision that they give them. That is all good news.
Our disagreement today is over how fast we should now move towards tackling what my Committee sees as matters needing urgent attention: the regulation of accommodation provided to children in care, and the use of bed-and-breakfast accommodation for that age group. I shall start with bed and breakfasts. The Department for Education guidance says that bed-and-breakfast accommodation is not suitable.
One young person told us of being placed in a B and B as an emergency placement—I repeat, emergency placement—for three weeks. She was the only young person in the building and older residents would come knocking on her door asking her to join them in their rooms, which was an incredibly frightening experience. Imagine being that child, sitting behind the door, waiting for the next knock. For vulnerable young people, many of whom have self-esteem issues and who are desperate for love and attention, such an environment leaves them at the mercy of people who are keen to exploit their situation and weakness.
So why, we asked, is bed and breakfast still being used? We found that it is used mainly as emergency accommodation in cases where a young person needs shelter urgently and nothing else is available. At least, that is the reason we were given, although when we met young people as we travelled around the country we heard about people being kept there for a long time, such as the young lady I mentioned. It was argued that if the local authority did not have the option of using bed and breakfasts, then young people could be even worse off. In our report, we recommended that the Department consult local authorities in order to determine a reasonable time frame to allow them to build up capacity so that there could be a total ban on using B and Bs and they could follow the example of Wiltshire, for instance, which has built up a resource such that it does not need to use them. We also say that there should be a strengthened requirement for local authorities to commission sufficient emergency facilities.
In its response, the Department accepted our recommendation on temporary measures and asserted that there should be a limit of two working days on the time that a young person could spend in a B and B. That is welcome, but it still falls short of an outright ban. Many children enter B and B accommodation in an emergency on a Friday night, so the limit of two working days means that they could still be there on the Tuesday evening. The Government response said:
“We want to test further the arguments for and against the flexibility for local authorities to use B&B where it is the best way of meeting a young person’s needs. Over the coming months, the Department for Education will undertake work with stakeholders to better understand these issues.”
We welcome the seriousness with which the Government have taken this, but we do not think that is good enough. Young people are being failed now—as we speak—and no amount of stakeholder consultation will disguise that reality. I urge the Minister to set out what the DFE has learned from the consultation to date and when we can expect further action on this issue, with a view, in the opinion of my Committee, of moving towards an outright ban.
The other issue I want to raise is the regulation of “other arrangements” for looked-after 16 and 17-year-olds. Some Members unfamiliar with this area of policy many wonder what “other arrangements” are. They include placements in a family or domestic setting where the adults responsible for their care are not approved as foster carers; foyers, which are meant to offer integrated housing, learning and personal development services, and other kinds of supported accommodation; and placements in independent accommodation with “floating support” where housing support workers make regular visits—or are supposed to. Ofsted’s single inspection framework assesses the experiences and progress of care leavers through scrutinising a representative sample of 25 tracked cases. Individual properties or settings are not inspected. That would not be an acceptable approach towards other settings, and it should not be acceptable for the accommodation in which some of the most vulnerable, abused young people in our society are placed.
We therefore recommended that the DFE consult on a framework of individual regulatory oversight for all accommodation that falls within “other arrangements” to ensure suitability, while allowing for diversity of provision. Many will ask why, as a Conservative, I am so keen on regulation. I, and my Committee, think that children who are as vulnerable as these young people—they may have learned to have a very tough exterior, or a streetwise front, but are in fact deeply vulnerable—deserve to have their accommodation individually inspected to ensure that the injustice they have suffered so far in their lives is not compounded further by a failure of oversight by those in loco parentis, namely us.
Ministers said that they wanted to maintain what they described as the “flexibility” of current arrangements, emphasising that they will hold under-performing local authorities to account when poor practice is uncovered. However, that logic is not applied to the quality and safety of settings for children and young people across the rest of the DFE’s remit. If there were a consistent approach in saying that a sample approach delivers better outcomes, one would expect that to be found across the piece, but it is not. Childminders, foster carers, residential children’s homes, secure training centres, schools, sixth-form colleges and further education colleges—each of those is individually inspected. It cannot be right that we do not do the same for the accommodation of 16 and 17-year-olds who have had an extremely tough start in life. As a society, we owe them that.
I ask the Minister to think again, or at least to explain why he believes that a new regulatory framework will not lead to the improvements in quality that we have seen in other settings that are individually regulated by Ofsted. I know that he cares deeply in both a personal and a professional capacity about making improvements. I hope that I have fairly stated that I recognise that the Government and the Minister have made significant strides in improving outcomes for such young people. He has done a lot of great work, and I sincerely hope that he will now take further steps to ensure that young people on the cusp of leaving the care system get a fairer, safer start in life.
Mr Graham Stuart
Further to the question from the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson), we recommended in this report that there should be greater awareness of the right of young people who leave care and get into difficulty to come back into care. The Government said that they would look into that more closely. Perhaps the Minister will reflect on that in his remarks and let us all know what progress has been made.
Bill Esterson
I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point. He is absolutely right.
We made recommendations about better preparation for young people who are leaving care, including through the development of life skills. We highlighted a number of areas where support was crucial, based on the evidence that was presented to us.
The concept of instant adulthood has been raised with me. It describes the sudden change in the lives of people who have been very much looked after and who have had everything done for them and everything provided for them. It describes how corporate parenting is not working in the way we would expect for this group of young people. The concept of corporate parenting had been used as a way of identifying how we should look after such young people.
A point that has been made to me is that young people must value the support that they receive. It is not good enough for the authorities to describe what type of support should be available and who should provide it. Young people often have relationships with those they do not necessarily want supporting them, whether a social worker or somebody else they come across while they are in care. It is really important to listen to young people in deciding who is best placed to provide support for them. It is a matter of trust—I have heard that word mentioned a number of times.
Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for making time for this important debate. As the Chairman of the Education Committee said, the report came out of an earlier inquiry in which we found that older children are neglected in the care system. I pay tribute to the Minister for the real interest he has taken in these areas and for the way in which he has tried—and often succeeded, I think—in bringing about improvements for this group of vulnerable children. There is no doubt that he cares about these young people, and it is in that spirit that I make my speech.
In my former life, I managed many areas of education that are closely linked to social care, child protection and safeguarding, but I was always careful to stay removed from managing those areas directly, arguing to myself that I did not have the necessary expertise, and that issues such as safeguarding and child protection were better left to those who had been trained to manage them. In reality, however, there was always a healthy dollop of fear in there as well: fear that some actions that I had caused to be taken, or had recommended, would result in further harm to a child who had already been harmed by those who should have cared for them the most.
Even as an MP, when I first entered Parliament, I tried not to become too closely involved in children’s social care, but, in practice, that has proved to be impossible. Along with my fellow members of the Education Committee, I felt that, given what appeared to be a lack of interest in the Department for Education, I had a duty to ensure that 50% of our time was spent on scrutinising and challenging Government policy on children’s social care. I recognise the Minister’s input, but it often seemed that he was a lone voice in a Department that is focused almost entirely on education.
When we discuss these matters, I like to put them in context. The United Kingdom probably has one of the best records in the western world when it comes to safeguarding and child protection: we are much better at it than most—not all, but most—European countries, and we have a far better record than the United States. Even in that context, however, we still do very poorly in some areas and in respect of some children.
I think that what shocked me the most during the Committee’s investigation of areas of social care and child protection were the findings of our short inquiry into 16-plus care options. We saw placements that we considered to be unsafe. Close as I am to this subject, I did not quite realise how difficult life is for these children, and how little support they are given by us—by, for instance, the Government, Parliament and local authorities. Like others, I listened in horror to the stories of young people leaving the care system about what had been done to them and how little support they had had. That comes on top of what we are now learning about what was done to young people— many of whom were living in the care system at the time—in places such as Rochdale, Oxford and Rotherham; and we know that many other cases have yet to become public.
One of my lasting worries following the inquiry is that, while the public are shocked and morally outraged when they hear stories about such places as Rotherham, the bottom line is that we—the Government, Parliament, MPs, local authority officers, the press and the public—simply do not care enough about the children involved. If we did, these things would not happen. It is easy to blame hapless, overworked officials who often work without structures, support or adequate resources, but we are all responsible for those children, and we do not, as a society, take our responsibilities for them seriously enough.
One child, a care leaver, said to me that not only should we be providing additional funding for the education of such children, but if every child who went into care at the age of 10 was given the vote, people like us would take what happened to them seriously. Because they do not have that leverage, I doubt whether things will change very much for them—even given the recent press coverage and the moral outrage—but I always try, at least, to travel in hope.
Two facts motivated our inquiry into 16-plus care options: the fact that “other arrangements” are unsuitable, and the fact that the current “Staying Put” policy is inequitable. My fellow Committee members and I call on the Minister to address three issues as a matter of urgency. First, we ask him to outlaw the use of bed-and-breakfast accommodation for 16-plus care leavers. We have heard all the arguments from the local authority officers, and even from the Minister himself, about the need for it as a provision of last resort and for emergency use only, but we believe that, while it remains an option, it will become the default provision in far too many cases. Local authorities can plan not to use bed and breakfast for this purpose. Some of them have put real effort and resources into doing something else, something better and, in the long run, something more cost-effective for those young people.
I remember exactly the same arguments being used when the Government of the day were pushing local authorities to provide full-time education for young people who had been excluded from school. At the time, local authorities were saying, “We can’t possibly do this, we need to be able to provide part-time education in emergencies,” but the fact is that the default position then was that most children who were excluded got less than 10 hours of education and many got none. It took a Secretary of State really to lose patience with local authorities and to make it illegal, and I am glad that he did. I am a great believer in the saying that we are never as swift as when we are chased, and I am absolutely sure that some local authorities still provide hours that are below the legal limit, but the vast majority got their act together and did some proper planning, and the situation is much better as a result. Now that the situation is very clear and we have outlawed providing less than full-time education for excluded children, those children have redress. If bad local authorities are not providing that education, there is redress, and there is also a role for Ofsted.
Secondly, we are calling on the Minister to regulate 16-plus care provision. I find it unbelievable that we have stronger regulations to cover the provision of dogs homes than we do for homes for children leaving care at 16. The Minister has argued that he does not want to drive the best providers out of the market with regulation, but that is simply not going to happen, because this is lucrative. It is so lucrative that hedge funds are getting into it, but I think it is fair to say that the bottom of this market, as the Committee has seen, is not merely inadequate—that is a huge understatement—but dangerous, and it is unsafe. It puts children who are at risk—the most vulnerable of our children—at greater risk and we simply cannot allow that to continue.
Mr Graham Stuart
The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech. Does she share my concern that in a market of supported accommodation, where there is no real and effective regulation, entirely unqualified people can sit there supposedly supporting some of the most vulnerable young people? When we were doing our inquiry, we heard of such people sitting boarded up in their office while the young people were rioting outside. That is the situation we are putting some young people in by failing to regulate these individuals.
Pat Glass
I absolutely agree and we did see some of that when we went on visits across the country.
Finally, we are calling on the Minister to extend “Staying Put” to all young people in care. It is great—and I again have to pay tribute to the Minister—that young people in foster care can remain beyond the age of 18, but in many respects those young people are the ones who are the least vulnerable and who arguably have the best outcomes, and it is now time to do the same for the others.
We are talking about a surprisingly small number of children each year. It has been said that £75 million is the sum required to deliver this. We should contrast that with the £2 billion overspend on the academies and free schools programme. If the Department can spend that virtually without comment, surely it can find the money to provide this desperately needed safety and security for this group of young people, if those young people want it—I am not saying they have to have it.
We are pleased that the Government have taken forward many of our recommendations and we ask the Minister to look again at the rest, as they are necessary steps to ensure that there are improvements in providing stability and support for young people as they move to greater independence.
Steve McCabe
That is exactly the point. We should concentrate on continuity and relationships. At times we are sidetracked by posts and appointments.
I want to move on to local authorities, whose responsibilities change when a young person turns 18. Too many people think that local authorities interpret that change as meaning that their responsibilities diminish, despite the fact that they have a continuing obligation to those young people until the age of 21, or 25 for those still in education and training. As we have heard several times, the Minister has recently extended the previous Government’s pilots to create a new obligation or arrangement for staying put in foster care until the age of 21. Like others, I think that that is a welcome measure, although I urge him to look at authorities that are trying to avoid paying foster rates, arguing that such arrangements are in fact board and lodging provision. I have recently been made aware that that is happening in one or two places, and the Minister will agree that that is certainly not what he had in mind.
I welcome the part of the Government’s response to the report which says that they believe that fewer young people should leave care before the age of 18 unless there are exceptional circumstances. In his reply, can the Minister say a little more about what practical steps the Government will take to translate this belief into reality? Despite personal advisers and strengthened guidance, the Committee found that young people are often given neither a choice of placement nor the opportunity to voice a preference. The Coram Group, an excellent organisation, said in its evidence:
“The young person’s views are frequently not adequately considered and advocacy support is vital to ensure this happens”.
An independent advocate is a statutory requirement, yet it is not a service that is always offered or that enough young people are made aware of.
The Government say in their response that they have given the Children’s Commissioner a new power to provide advice and assistance to individual children in receipt of social care services and to make representations on behalf of care leavers. Am I right in thinking that the commissioner has no real new powers? Is the Minister satisfied that the power to make representations is a sufficient new power for the Children’s Commissioner? The Government argue that they have strengthened the guidance on pathway planning and point to the fact that directors of children’s services are now required to sign off the arrangements for any 16 or 17-year-old leaving care. However, as we have heard from a number of speakers today, the evidence suggests that the pathway plans are weak, and one glaring omission is the failure to consider maintaining positive relationships with siblings and other people thought to be important in the young person’s life.
My hon. Friends the Members for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Stockport (Ann Coffey) both drew attention to the impact that this can have, particularly when it is almost ignored in the planning arrangements. Like others, I wonder how we can expect young people to develop into normal, well-adjusted adults if we deny them the opportunities that we take for granted for our own children and many others. I welcome the addition to the guidance on the pathway plans in this respect and I trust that the Minister will continue to focus on this area in the months ahead.
One of the inevitable results of the “Staying Put” initiative is that, as we heard, it has raised the question of those in residential care and the related issue of staying close. There appears to be a perception in some local authorities that their responsibilities decrease when a child reaches 16. That is certainly the sense among young people who feel that 16 is the cut-off point when they are required to leave care. This came across in the evidence that the Committee took. I am not sure about the equality aspect of “Staying Put” for non-foster care. I do not know whether it would withstand a legal challenge. From his previous incarnation the Minister might be much more familiar with how the law would deal with that. Aside from that, my own view is that 16 is the age for most young people to set out on their own. Like the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) I attended a recent meeting of the all-party group for looked-after children, where many of those said that even at the age of 18 they did not feel that they were ready to move on.
I know that this is a difficult matter for many people. I have some doubts about whether it is realistic for someone to continue in a children’s home to the age of 21 or beyond, although I am rather sceptical of the validity of some of the counter-arguments. Particularly on safeguarding, I tend to agree with the Every Child Leaving Care Matters group, which said that it is difficult
“to see how a young person who is settled in a children’s home and enjoys positive relationships with staff and peers should suddenly become a safeguarding risk at 18 when they never were before.”
I am keen that the Government set to work as soon as possible on addressing this matter. We have heard about some of the work involving the National Children’s Bureau, the Who Cares? Trust, Barnardo’s and others. Will the Minister tell us how much money from the innovation programme has gone into that work to date, and what time scale he is considering for further proposals indicating his plans for staying close and “Staying Put”?
Mr Graham Stuart
The hon. Gentleman says that he has misgivings about the extension and that some of the arguments are bogus or weak. What are his concerns? As a Committee, we made these proposals in a cross-party spirit in the hope that parties such as his would adopt them and put them in their manifestos. Why will he not be making that recommendation to his party’s manifesto group?
Steve McCabe
I said that I had some doubts. The hon. Member for Calder Valley said that the difference is that there is not necessarily the same stability with regard to children’s homes. The situation is not guaranteed in the same way. Fostering arrangements, by definition, tend to be stable. The turnover of staff and other children at a children’s home means that the situation may not be the same. That is my major reservation.
Mr Stuart
The idea of staying put, wherever it is, is that it is suitable for all concerned. The aim is not to impose it on anybody. Like our recommendation on extending care services to the age of 25 for those who are not looking for a job or training, it is there if people want it, and if it is not appropriate, there is no suggestion that it should have to happen.
Steve McCabe
I entirely accept the point that the Committee Chairman is making. The hon. Member for Calder Valley said that there may well be options. My point is simply that the situation is not directly comparable. I am minded that we look at this carefully. We cannot say that children in foster care get the benefit of “Staying Put” until the age of 21 and children in children’s homes are completely disregarded. That would not be acceptable, and I do not think that anyone is saying that. I am simply suggesting that the situation may be slightly different.
I want to take up the Committee’s point about the problems of making full-time education and training central to continuing support until the age of 25. We were all rather encouraged when the Minister said in Committee that he intended to rewrite the guidance so that it would be sufficiently clear that he was concerned about those who were in danger of falling through the net. So far, the rewritten guidance does not appear to have achieved that. Surely the real issue is that it is too easy for those we refer to as NEETs— not in education, employment or training—to disappear. Unless directors of children’s services and others are under a specific obligation to track and monitor these young people, there is every danger that they will fall by the wayside.
I want to turn to “other arrangements”. As we have heard, the Committee was very concerned about accommodation that it felt was not of an acceptable standard and might fail the statutory guidance tests of being suitable for the child in the light of his or her needs, including health needs, and of the responsible authority having satisfied itself as to the character and suitability of the landlord. I acknowledge that the YMCA said in evidence to the Committee that some local authorities provide a decent variety of accommodation, and I do not dismiss the fact that there are examples of success out there. However, Ofsted found significant variations in the quality and sufficiency of accommodation for care leavers. The Who Cares? Trust has also reported examples of unsafe and unsuitable accommodation. I will not go over them all, as they have been mentioned by other speakers, but they include people being threatened or assaulted; living with those with drink and drugs problems; and having dirty accommodation infested with bedbugs and cockroaches. The British Association of Social Workers has said that it is
“firmly of the view that the government needs to apply regulatory duties to all accommodation providers who accommodate looked after children in order that they are appropriately safeguarded and the provision meets acceptable standards.”
I noticed that the report highlights an interesting dilemma on regulation. It is fair to point out that one witness warned of the risk that if regulation is too onerous it will stifle creativity in support arrangements and inhibit independence projects. I was interested in Catch22’s suggestion for a national standards framework, which, if I have read the report accurately, the Committee appears to have liked. I am not sure that the Government’s proposals go anything like far enough, and I urge the Minister to reflect again on that point. About 3,000 young people are covered by other arrangements, and that is an awful lot of lives at risk.
Mr Timpson
Of course we want every local authority to do it, and the more that we can help them achieve that the better, but we have to consider the practicalities of a ban, bearing in mind the mixed views about how it could be implemented and the emergency situations in which bed and breakfast might be required. We must also ensure that local authorities that are falling short understand how ending the use of bed and breakfast can be achieved, and that is one purpose of the innovation programme—to spread good practice so that places such as Wiltshire and Hartlepool do not hold a secret but can impart their knowledge successfully across the country.
I can confirm that, following the Committee’s report, we have further strengthened our statutory guidance to make it clear that for 16 and 17-year-olds emergency placements in B and B should be used only in exceptional circumstances and be limited to no more than two working days. I will write to all directors of children’s services shortly on a range of matters relating to children in care and care leavers, and I will bring to their attention in that correspondence the amended guidance on bed and breakfast. It may be a good opportunity to let them know about the good practice in other parts of the country.
On 31 March, we will receive data collected on the accommodation of 19, 20 and 21-year-olds and whether it was deemed suitable, including a breakdown on bed and breakfast. For the first time next year we will collect data on 17 and 18-year-olds too, and that will help us to establish the impact of the strengthened statutory guidance on bed and breakfast. I return to the arguments made by the chief social worker and the central premise that if we have a high-quality professional body making sound decisions and backed by tailored support, no care leaver need be put in unsuitable accommodation.
Mr Graham Stuart
The Minister said that data are collected on 19 and 20-year-olds and next year they will be collected on 17 and 18-year-olds. What is the situation for 16-year-olds?
Mr Timpson
I anticipated that I might be asked that question and, in his usual manner, the Chairman of the Committee has established my exact thoughts. I am told that, for technical reasons, we cannot collect data until after the age of 16 as young people are still in care before that point, but we intend to refine the data when we receive them to establish whether any 16-year-olds are in bed and breakfast. The data are collected on the young person’s birthday as opposed to at financial year end. They cannot be collected on their 16th birthday so we have to wait until their 17th birthday. We will look at how we can retrospectively analyse the data and establish how many 16-year-olds have been in bed-and-breakfast accommodation during that year. If we can refine the data in the future, we will look to do so.
Several hon. Members raised the issue of alternative accommodation. It is right that all forms of alternative accommodation—bed and breakfast, supported lodgings, foyers and so on—should provide care leavers with a safe and secure place to live. Clear legal duties require that children are placed only in accommodation that meets their needs. Ofsted, through its new single inspection framework, monitors local authorities’ performance in supporting care leavers in the round, including the quality of accommodation provided. Care leavers have access to a personal adviser who can advocate on their behalf and challenge decisions by the local authority if, for example, they believe that the accommodation provided is unsuitable.
We are considering whether further external oversight is needed of the decisions that local authorities make. I am not persuaded, having listened carefully to hon. Members, that we need to establish a new inspection regime in order to achieve our aims, and others share that view. The chief social worker, Isabelle Trowler, has said that regulating all alternative accommodation would severely limit placement choice and the ability of professionals to use their discretion. Social workers should be visiting placements on a regular basis to ensure that the accommodation remains suitable for the individual. Most critically, we already have checks and balances in place.
As I have said, Ofsted inspects the quality of support provided to care leavers as part of the single inspection framework, and independent reviewing officers consider the decisions made about a child and would, of course, be expected to raise any concerns about unsuitable accommodation placements. We need to trust and support professionals to make sound judgments in the best interests of the child, rather than creating further bureaucratic processes. Local areas already have a clear duty to ensure that children are placed only in accommodation that meets their needs and, as mentioned, we already have checks and balances in the system to ensure that the best interests of the child are met.
Mr Graham Stuart
The Minister should not have feared my words so much that he needed to limit them quite so strictly.
One thing we should say at the end of this Parliament is that there has been a significant advance in this Parliament, against a pretty tough economic backdrop, to improve material outcomes for some of the most vulnerable children in care. That is something we should be proud of. Casting aside my impartial Select Committee hat, as a Conservative politician I have to say that, as part of this coalition Government, that is significant. Regardless of who wins the election in May, I hope we can take that forward and that we have a Minister in place as committed as this one to ensuring that we do more to look after young people whose life chances we know are horribly stunted by their time in care. We have a duty to act as their parents. We should give them the care, consideration and extended support that we would give to our own children, because the children in care are our children. We have the same responsibility to them.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House notes the Second Report from the Education Committee, Into independence, not out of care: 16 plus care options, HC 259, and the Government’s response, HC 647; welcomes the progress made and the commitment to improve the care provided to these vulnerable young people shown in the Government’s response; regrets that the Government has not gone further by exploring with local authorities how to ban the use of bed and breakfast accommodation for this age group and by moving to inspect and regulate all accommodation provided to children in care; and calls on the Government to do all it can to improve the accommodation and care given to these young people.
Oral Answers to Questions
Graham Stuart Excerpts(9 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Laws
I think I can reassure my hon. Friend on behalf of both coalition parties that we are committed to the delivery of a fair and transparent national funding formula in the next Parliament. We have already made the first big step and I agree with him that it is vital that we deliver a full solution to this long-standing injustice, which Labour failed to tackle in its long years in office.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
21. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) is right that we need a fairer funding formula for our schools and as part of that we need capital funding to be allocated over three years rather than one. Does the Minister agree that the long campaign for the consolidation of St Nicholas primary school in Beverley will be more likely to be realised if such a change can be effected?
Mr Laws
I agree with my hon. Friend that long-term capital funding is highly desirable and he will know that we have already moved to multi-year allocations of basic need funding. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I are now looking very carefully at the argument for moving to longer term allocations of other parts of the capital budget.
Oral Answers to Questions
Graham Stuart Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Laws
I am delighted to hear about the success of that school in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. I hope that other schools in the region, and in those regions where there has been underperformance, will look at was has been done there and realise that there is nothing inevitable about failure in any part of the country.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
9. What assessment she has made of the potential merits of allowing nursery schools to become academies.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Mr Sam Gyimah)
Many maintained nursery schools are delivering high-quality early education, often in disadvantaged areas where that provision can make the greatest difference. Our aim is to improve parent access to high-quality early-years provision, enable a diverse market and ensure that nurseries are part of that market. However, the current legislation does not allow maintained nursery schools to become academies, but we will keep that under review.
Mr Stuart
I welcome the Minister’s response—or I think I do—that this is going to be kept under review. Too many maintained nursery schools—centres of excellence anchored, for the most part, in the poorest communities in the country—have been lost under successive Governments. Would not academy status give them the opportunity to ensure that they continue to help the Government in raising standards for all and, most importantly, closing the gap between outcomes for rich and poor?
Mr Gyimah
I welcome the enthusiasm of the Chairman of the Education Committee for maintained nurseries. I have visited Pen Green maintained nursery in Corby, which is an excellent example. He mentioned harnessing their quality. We have invested £5.5 million in teaching schools so that maintained nurseries can spearhead this and help to spread quality across the sector. He is right to indicate that 4,000 schools have benefited from academy status. As I said, we will keep the situation under review as opportunities arise to reconsider the legislative framework for maintained nurseries.
Oral Answers to Questions
Graham Stuart Excerpts(9 years, 6 months ago)
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Nicky Morgan
As the right hon. Gentleman said at the end of his question, we already have a monitoring process, which is that Ofsted has a duty to look at the independent careers advice available to schools. I would not want to say that everything is all sorted out and that there are not patches across the country, but I would just point out that a recent survey carried out by CASCAiD, a careers advice company in my constituency, said that, I think, about 86% school students said they had already had access to some form of careers advice. He is right, however, to say that there is more we can do.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
On Friday. alongside the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) and the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) I helped to launch the Humber careers gold standard, a new programme developed by the Humber local enterprise partnership to provide a rigorous but realistic framework to encourage the delivery of impartial, relevant and inspiring careers guidance for young people that will be rolled out across schools in the area. Will the Secretary of State encourage schools and colleges to participate in the Humber careers gold standard, and will she monitor its performance so that we can derive lessons for the nation as a whole?
Nicky Morgan
I thank the Chairman of the Education Committee. I encourage schools and colleges to take part in the Humber careers gold standard. I think my hon. Friend’s more general point is that there are already some exceptional schemes across the country and we need to harness them. We need to work with businesses, employer organisations, schools and colleges to ensure that such opportunities are available to all students right across the country.