Secondary Education (GCSEs)

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes a characteristically acute point. One problem with the current system is that GCSEs are not, in many cases, adequate preparation for A-levels, and A-levels are not adequate preparation for university, particularly when our students are compared with those from other jurisdictions. That is because, notwithstanding the incremental improvement in state education over the past 15 years, other countries have reformed their education systems faster than we have reformed ours. We have to match them and that means reform.

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

Will the Secretary of State give way?

[Michael Gove]

I am happy to give way to the Chairman of the Select Committee on Education.

[Mr Stuart]

The Secretary of State wants more rigorous exams that more people pass. That is an aspiration that we would all share, but it is not immediately obvious how it is to be brought about. Today, 42% of children do not get five good GCSEs including English and maths. If we make the tests more difficult, it is not immediately obvious how more people will pass them. I welcome that he is aiming higher and that we will have more rigour, but we need more detail. He is very good at explaining what is wrong with what Labour did, and I agree with every word, but he is not so good at giving us the detail of precisely what this Government plan to do.

[Michael Gove]

It is perfectly clear what we need to do to get more children to pass more exams: we must press ahead with the reforms that we have introduced to create more academies and free schools, to get better teachers in our schools, to have continuous professional development in which we invest in the very best people, to expand the Teach First programme, and to ensure that we have a relentless focus on raising the bar. Complacency on performance in our schools will lead us only to continue to be backmarkers. One point I would make to the Chair of the Education Committee and the House is that some schools manage to do every bit as well as schools in Singapore by getting 80% or more of their students to five good GCSEs or equivalents. We should ask ourselves why more schools are not doing as well as them. The whole point of the Government’s education reforms is to ensure that we raise standards for all.

The Chair of the Committee asked what the Government will do to change things. We have already taken some steps. We have banned modules and re-sits, and introduced the English baccalaureate to put a stress on rigorous subjects. It is not clear whether the Opposition agree with us. We have explicitly said that we believe there is a case for one exam board per subject in English, maths and science. The Opposition inched towards agreeing with us, and I hope we can reach a consensus.

One problem I have in attempting to tease out where the Opposition stand in order to build the consensus we all want is that whenever the Government put forward a case for reform, it is difficult to know where the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby stands.

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

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, and to rebut allegations of fatalism thrown at me by the Secretary of State. I hope I am no more of a fatalist than he is. I have observed in many of our debates that able politicians, on both sides of the House, are brilliant at describing and critiquing the inheritance from the Labour party and at painting a picture of the kind of country we would like to be, but our job in this House is to address the third aspect and examine the route map to get from position A—not very good—to position B, or nirvana and where we want to be. Too often in our education debates in this Chamber, we spend an awful lot of time on aspects one and two, and not a lot on the third aspect.

Following the Secretary of State’s speech, I am a little clearer about what his plans are. I think he has said—I hope he will intervene on me if I am incorrect—that the Daily Mail was mistaken, and that there is not going to be a return to a two-tier system. He did not, for whatever reason, try to spell this out, but it sounded as if he was talking about a more rigorous GCSE. It is progress that the Labour spokesman, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), acknowledges that there was grade inflation during his party’s time in office, and the Secretary of State makes powerful points about equivalences. The Government have certainly had my support in tackling that and in tightening up in various ways, such as by removing entirely the vocational qualifications that Alison Wolf identified as offering no real labour value to people.

So what is the vision? If we were just talking about a more rigorous GCSE with a removal of the perverse incentives to dumb down over time—it has now been acknowledged that that was the case, even by Labour—I think there would almost be cross-House consensus. There is a recognition by Labour that it did not get everything right, even if Labour Members cannot quite bring themselves to say that yet; it is fair enough for the Secretary of State to tease the shadow Secretary of State for his failure to do so. It seems that the Labour party is beginning to recognise that a lot of the Secretary of State’s moves towards rigour have been correct. However, if we are to have a beefed-up GCSE, and if we are not moving towards a system that is more two-tier than what we have now, I would like to see more detail. I know that a consultation paper is coming, but it seems disappointing that we did not get more detail from the Secretary of State today.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Stuart]

I give way to my hon. Friend.

[Dr Lewis]

I am very grateful to the Chairman of the Education Committee for giving me the opportunity to ask the question that I was hoping to ask of the Secretary of State. Given that both sides now seem to accept that there has been a problem of grade inflation, could we pay a little bit of attention to the marks that underlie the grades? One of the problems that I felt many years ago with the introduction of grades for O-levels, rather than marks, was that it did not matter if somebody got 70%, 80% or 90%: anybody who reached a certain level—70%, I think—still got the same top grade. This was the beginning of an inflationary process. Would not the stating of actual marks—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Thank you. That is quite enough. That is a very long intervention in a very short debate.

[Mr Stuart]

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

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

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Time for a coffee.

[Mr Stuart]

Time for a coffee and to let others speak.

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

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

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

He went on to say:

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

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

[Kevin Brennan]

I think we are all trying to decipher what the Secretary of State said. Is it the hon. Gentleman’s understanding that the Secretary of State said that he would expect 80% of pupils to sit this new single-paper GCSE, and if so, what does he think ought to happen to the other 20%?

[Mr Stuart]

As I have said, I think that increased rigour throughout the system is necessary and important. I think that the accountability system for schools needs to be changed so that it does not have perverse outcomes, such as putting people on courses that lead nowhere but allow the institution to meet its benchmark—we on the Committee have been critics of that for some time. Perhaps the announcement, or the leak, suggests a change in view by the Secretary of State on that front.

If we look across the system, where we need more rigour and we need to ensure that we end the perverse incentives, we find that the biggest problem we face in a global knowledge economy, where the first rung of the ladder keeps rising up, is what we do about people who are not getting those basic skills and that basic education. The Government have two priorities for education: raising standards for all; and closing the gap. Those are right, but when setting priorities it is terribly important to show what the top priority is. I am yet to understand how the changes specifically will help the least able, but then again I am unclear as to what exactly the proposal is—even if I have not quite fallen to the level of the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), who of course got so confused about percentages last week.

[Kevin Brennan]

I did get a grade A O-level—

[Mr Stuart]

That is a lot better than I did, so I will leave it there.

Ofqual now has a statutory duty to ensure two things, one of which is that we maintain standards over time. We shall see whether it does its job right; it is relatively newly empowered and we need to give it the chance to see whether it can reverse this grade inflation and keep us up there with our international competition. Has it said that there needs to be a restructuring of the examination system, not necessarily the administration of it, but the whole quality of it and the possible tiering of it? I would like to hear from the Secretary of State about that.

I have only a minute left, so I shall finish by repeating that the central problem is what we do about the young people, all too many of whom are now not in education, employment or training—NEET—and are being left behind. A more rigorous system is great, but the only way to raise standards ultimately—this is the only thing that matters in education—is through quality of teaching. We need to ensure consistent, high-quality teaching and an excellent institution for everyone, everywhere. At the moment, there are all sorts of incentives in the accountability system to focus on borderline pupils at the expense of those at the bottom, and within the system for people to move from a school that is very challenging to one in the leafier suburbs—a much more congenial place for many people to teach in. We need to look at re-gearing our whole system in a way that the Labour Government failed to do, despite efforts in that direction, to ensure that we provide opportunity for all, because both socially and economically we cannot afford to have so many children left behind, unable to get on the first rung of the economic ladder and thus be full members of our society. If any proposals from the Secretary of State are driven by that central insight, he can certainly look forward to my support.

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[Damian Hinds]

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

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

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Damian Hinds]

I am sorry, but I cannot.

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

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[Dan Rogerson]

The hon. Gentleman is welcome to the Chamber. We look forward to interjections from him.

What was presumably billed, as Opposition day debates are, as a good knockabout seems to have collapsed into consensus. I am left feeling that I agree with much of what has been said from both sides of the House about the way forward in terms of rigour and a genuine consultation and re-examination of the examination system. I am left disagreeing only with the Daily Mail, a situation in which I often find myself, so it is reassuring territory for me.

If we are to consider the key points of the debate, we should look at what was floated in that esteemed publication as a bid to end the GCSE and restore the O-level and a qualification equivalent to the CSE. It is a little like those debates about selection, in which one hears a lot about grammar schools but not so much about secondary moderns. That is not to say that there are not excellent schools out there which are now no doubt called comprehensives or academies, but which once upon a time were known as secondary moderns. They are doing good work in areas where selection still exists, but that it not a position that my party would seek to push forward.

I was delighted to hear the Secretary of State at the Dispatch Box talking about a thorough examination of the GCSE, what it is, what it offers, how testing it is of young people, and its ability to stretch young people at all levels of ability, so that we celebrate the fact that not everyone will get an A*, and for those who were at one time predicted to get an F in some subject but who manage to get a D, that is a real success for them.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

We are raising the participation age by looking to use the extra years up to 17 and 18 to deliver a basic and rigorous standard. The most successful state school in the country, which I think is Lawrence Sheriff school in Rugby, uses a three-year course for its GCSEs and gets a tremendously high level of success. Perhaps it would be helpful to find out more about how education can be structured so that children can keep on learning until they get to that very high standard.

[Dan Rogerson]

The Chairman of the Select Committee said that he had to rewrite his speech. He has clearly been doing that and has made an additional contribution to the debate. I welcome his intervention.

The debate is about how we can ensure that all young people are stretched by the system—that they are driven forward, that they are inspired and that they can aspire to reach the very best. That is what teachers, head teachers and their parents want for them. It is clear that there has been grade inflation, a topic that has been covered by several right hon. and hon. Members. People are perhaps being given the impression that there is an endless arc upon which we will see results improve. We had a brief discussion about the Deputy Prime Minister’s progress at the Rio summit and the issues there of exponential growth without due consideration being given to sustainability. Perhaps what we are talking about in this debate is sustainability in the examination system.

When the Secretary of State came to the Dispatch Box last week to respond to an urgent question from the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), we had a slightly more Daily Mail-influenced discussion across the House, as the news was hot off the press. The Secretary of State at that point was clearly responding to the leak, from wherever it came, and was not able to present a more thorough position, as he has done today. He ruled out the idea of returning to the 1950s with the O-level and the CSE, and instead proposed re-examining the GCSE and moving forward. I welcome that.

The proposal relating to examination boards seems to be moving forward to consultation. I can see the strengths of a system in which a board concentrates on a particular subject area. There are those of us who might be surprised not to see the Secretary of State looking at a more market-based solution. The proposal could be said to be a little centrally directed, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) pointed out, young people are increasingly moving with their families to other parts of the country. If they join a school or college part-way through a course where the syllabus is different from their previous course, that presents problems. There have been one or two examples where the head teacher of an academy, who is responsible for admissions, has said that they are not able to take a young person on a course offered at their institution because the syllabus is different. Perhaps progress could be made in that respect.

These issues would need close examination to ensure that a range of courses was available so that all young people are inspired by what is on offer. There must be no sad homogenisation, and teachers must have the scope to ensure that they cover a broad curriculum.

We have an opportunity to look closely at the issue of rigour. I am delighted that we are not moving towards a wholesale change of the system, which could prove to be a distraction. As a Government the coalition has rightly moved to lift burdens on teachers and to remove unnecessary bureaucracy. Teachers want from us the support to use the skills that they have acquired. The Secretary of State was absolutely right to point out that we have a fantastic generation of teachers out there inspiring and working with young people. They do not want another upheaval and change; they want the confidence to know that the examinations to which they are submitting their students will be correct, robust and a fair assessment of those young people’s attainment, and, in some senses, of the attainment of the school or college in supporting those young people to the best of their potential.

I am delighted to say that the motion hangs on the words of the Deputy Prime Minister, unlike the shadow Minister, who sadly is not hanging on the words that I am offering to the Chamber. He clearly was hanging on the words of the Deputy Prime Minister last week, and it is good to see that the Opposition take such close account of what he has to say, as they did earlier this afternoon. The motion talks about a Government proposal to do certain things, which, as has become clear, the Government are not proposing to do. Therefore, it would be entirely the wrong thing to support a motion based on such a false premise. On the other hand, we have an amendment, around which I hope the House can coalesce, which talks about rigour and the need to ensure that there is a broad-based curriculum focused on the key areas of study and encouraging all young people to aspire to the best of their potential, and tackling social mobility, as the coalition agreement and the Government have set out to do, to ensure that all young people, no matter where they start out, are given every opportunity to achieve the very best for them and for their communities.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

An interesting outcome of this debate was texting my office to ask how many people—I realise that as Chair of the Select Committee I should know this—take these foundation GCSEs. The answer I got back is that that information is not collected by the Department for Education or by the exam boards. Go figure.

[Tristram Hunt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. That is why I found the discussion about employers knowing the difference between a C at GCSE at different levels attained wholly fallacious. If the big problem of educational attainment is the long tail of under-achievement, the measures to combat that need to be there for all. There is no evidence to suggest that dividing at 14 will help that. We had an interesting contribution today on some of the neurological evidence of the potential for growth from 14 to 16. What we do have evidence for is how overwhelming it will be for the poor and those from socio-economically challenged backgrounds who will be condemned to the new CSEs. That is why the 1980s Conservative Government abandoned this policy. In 1985, Sir Keith Joseph, who became Lord Joseph, unveiled evidence that there is a

“strong association between low achievement and the poverty-related factors of poor housing, single-parent families and a low proportion of children in higher socio-economic groups”.

This policy of division was too divisive even for Sir Keith.

We also hear that with the new O-levels there will be no national curriculum—although a back-door one because of a single qualification authority. This strikes me as a rather strange route to developing the kind of curriculum we want, drawing on a wide knowledge base. It also flies in the face of the Secretary of State’s ambitions to create a national narrative of British history, to teach in all our schools a single notion of British history that imbues notions of citizenship which develops a—rather Whiggish in my view—conception of the British past that all will share. They will not all share that if there is no national curriculum. The greater the division between schools, the greater the division in the teaching of history. Any ambition to teach a cohesive notion of citizenship through the teaching of history is totally undone by the elimination of a cohesive national curriculum.

Internal reforms of the GCSE would be welcome. Clampdown on grade inflation and the proposals vis-à-vis the examinations board are to be welcomed. An end to generalised humanities GCSEs—the merging of history and geography—are to be welcomed. We can learn from the international GCSE, the I-bac. But all that can be achieved within the current system. That is the tragedy of what the Secretary of State is up to.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Gavin Barwell]

I will not take interventions, for reasons of time.

I do not want to go back to a CSE system, but we need the radical reform of our GCSEs in order to bring back a degree of academic rigour. The Education Committee Chairman made a very important point to the Secretary of the State about how raising the threshold will raise the number of people who succeed. I believe passionately, as a parent and from my experience of visiting schools, that paradoxically if we raise the threshold we will find that young people respond to it. That is the experience of schools that have switched to the IGCSE exam.

In the briefing pack for this debate, I saw some research from King’s college, London, showing the decline in maths over the past 30 years, with many 14-year-olds not understanding concepts such as algebra and ratios. I am not satisfied that my nine-year-old is stretched at his primary school, so I work with him on his maths at home, and he has already grasped those topics. I do not think that he is especially bright or clever, but I passionately believe that our young people are full of talent, and if they are pushed and stretched they will respond.

We also need to acknowledge that at 16 years old the right outcome for all our young people is not necessarily to sit a full suite of academic qualifications. For years and years this country has lacked a proper, respected vocational alternative, but if we secure such an alternative, we should not deride it as part of a two-tier system in which people doing vocational qualifications are somehow failures or second best.

Secondary Education

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 21st June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I do not intend to allow this to run beyond 11.30 am, because there is very substantial pressure on time. I am sure that Members will draw their own conclusions as to the importance in these circumstances of brevity.

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

I welcome improved rigour, stretch and achievement for our most able pupils, but the central problem facing this country is not about its most able pupils but about the lowest-performing and, all too often, the poorest. How will these changes and proposals improve the outcomes for the lowest deciles of achievement in our population? Socially and economically, we cannot afford the tail that we have inherited from the Labour party.

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. One of the principal problems with our education system is not only that it has fallen behind other nations, but that it is one of the most inequitable, stratified and segregated. The way in which we tackle that is not by dumbing down on qualifications, but by raising expectations at every level.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Getting reading right in primary schools is fundamental to children’s future education. That is why we have introduced match funding for primary schools—£3,000 per school for new training and materials—and why every six-year-old will undergo a phonic check this June so that we can ensure that we spot the children who are struggling with reading. We are determined to end the scandal of one in 10 boys leaving primary school with a reading age of seven or less.

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

We should celebrate and support the best teachers in our schools. Is the Minister aware of research by the Sutton Trust which shows that if a below-average teacher can be raised to the average, the impact on the lifetime earnings of that teacher’s classroom can amount to more than £250,000? The importance of teaching is critical not only to our society, to our culture and to social justice, but to the economy. What more can the Minister do to improve the quality of teaching?

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend, who is the Chairman of the Select Committee on Education, is absolutely right. We are doing a huge amount to raise the bar both for entry to the teaching profession and for continuing professional development. That is what is behind the whole teaching schools programme. Already 218 schools have been designated teaching schools, which promote peer-to-peer training. The Government are determined to restore the centre of academic life to our schools.

Services for Young People

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Westminster Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children & Young People Now said that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

was

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

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

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

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

while another stated that

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

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

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

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

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

[Mr Stuart]

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

[Damian Hinds]

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

[Mr Stuart]

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

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

[Damian Hinds]

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

[Mr Stuart]

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

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

May I help my hon. Friend on this subject? Social impact bonds and payment by results are an important subject. I will give him two examples. The City Year London scheme is being piloted in many London schools, with the help of the Mayor’s Fund and Private Equity Foundation money. It can show, very clearly, a return on capital in terms of the kids catching up. The Private Equity Foundation has been funding literacy schemes, in partnership with local authorities and other public providers, that clearly show a benefit for those children in social outcomes, which are so important, and can be linked back to a return on capital. There are great possibilities for the youth service, too.

[Mr Stuart]

I agree with the Minister; that is exciting and interesting. My note of caution is that there must be many positive services, including youth services, which would struggle to collect the evidence, dissociated from all the other impacts and influences on young people’s lives, to prove that they were delivering. Perhaps that is why, in many cases, we might want to have the payment by results managed and triggered at a higher level, with those people making a discretionary decision. When they see great work—when they see it they can recognise it—they will realise that it is offering value for money. They could take things that did not have an individual evidence base, yet would none the less continue to be commissioned. A dangerous and perhaps self-interested parallel with my previous life as a publisher is an advertiser who places an advert for £1,000 and immediately receives £2,000 back in directly attributable profit on sales. He may spend the rest of his career thinking that advertising is just about getting money back immediately without any other elements to it, which would be a mistake. Life is more complicated than that, and the danger of finding such things as the work in Peterborough, or, possibly, the initiatives mentioned by the Minister, is that we are looking for everything to be able to justify itself on a payments by results basis. Perhaps councils, or other bodies at a higher level, should commission without having to expect that from each initiative in their portfolio.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

While we are on this interesting issue, may I encourage the hon. Gentleman in his caution? Although the Minister made a good point about how one can hold an institution to account for services for which it is responsible, is it not the case that, for the youth service, good youth work in deprived communities is good at—we need it to be good at—helping reduce offending behaviour? Of course, offending behaviour and its impact has nothing to do with the youth service, but it will be measured by the police or the youth offending team in the local authority. Often, the youth service will be targeting those most at risk of offending behaviour anyway. Is it not the case, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, that this is very complex? It would be quite dangerous to encourage an organisation like an individual youth club to be held too much to account for an issue such as offending behaviour.

[Mr Stuart]

I think I agree with the hon. Lady. One of the criticisms we have made of the sector is the need, collectively, to make a better case. When Ministers—we have one with us today, and the hon. Lady was one previously—go to the people in the Treasury, they need a strong case, especially when it is, “Give me money today and I will give you savings tomorrow.” There is a certain natural and understandable scepticism in the Treasury, and a strong evidence base is needed from which to make the point.

[Tim Loughton]

At the risk of holding a third-party debate through the Chair of the Select Committee, may I say that the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) makes an interesting point? In the borough next to her own, Hammersmith and Fulham has pooled budgets between the youth service and the youth justice system, and there is a clear imperative to incentivise local youth services to work with legal services, to keep young people out of youth offender institutions and the youth justice system. If we are to hold local authorities to account for doing good stuff, positive stuff, proactive stuff and preventive stuff with young people, we want to penalise them if they do not do so—the result is that children end up in young offenders institutions—but reward them when they keep young people away from offending behaviour.

[John Robertson (in the Chair)]

Can we keep interventions to intervention length, rather than speech length?

[Mr Stuart]

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

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

“anecdotal evidence and young people’s stories”—

were available—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Damian Hinds]

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

[Mr Stuart]

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

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

[Ms Buck]

Mr Robertson, I wonder whether it is appropriate—I know it is not normally done—to welcome the young people who are listening to the debate, because it is to be appreciated. The message that the hon. Gentleman has just given about the majority of young people being positive and aspirational for themselves will be heard in this Chamber as well as outside it.

[Mr Stuart]

Yes. Having served as a Minister, the hon. Lady will know that we can be as positive as we like for as long as we like in as many speeches as we like, but as soon as we say something negative, that will appear in the newspaper. That is the nature of being in power and the nature of news.

It is right to call the paper “Positive for Youth” and immediately emphasise the positive and recognise that we regard young people not as a problem, but as an immense, positive force for good in our society. That is important and we cannot say it too often, although it will never appear in any form of press thereafter. But we have to live with that.

[Tim Loughton]

By the Committee Chair’s own token, does he therefore think that it was helpful, in trying to create a positive account of young people, that about three quarters of the press release accompanying his report—it is a good report and I will comment on it—about activities for young people, aged between 13 and 25, beyond the school or college day concentrated purely on the national citizen service, which deals only with young people aged 16?

[Mr Stuart]

Mr Robertson will recognise, even if the Minister does not, that it is relevant to mention that a proposal from the highest levels of the Government might, if scaled up to a 50% take-up, lead to spending greater than the entirety of spending on young people outside the classroom, as stated in Government figures. It is in the nature of issuing a press release that 29 points are not included if one wants it to become part of the press story. Although the Minister was upset that a project with such laudable aims was the subject of criticism, he has not been a Minister that long and will doubtless become thicker skinned and will get used to the fact that a more independent Select Committee system than we have had before and a more assertive legislature will be prepared to criticise even the most favoured schemes of the most powerful in the land, because it is our job to do so. If we emphasised that in our press releases, rather than all the other issues, I am sorry that it caused such upset and sorry that the hurt to the Minister continues to this day.

On a positive note, I welcome the commitment to publish annually national measures relating to young people’s positive outcomes, with an audit at the end of 2012 of overall progress towards creating a society that is more positive for youth. That is as a result of the work carried out by the Minister, which I am happy to celebrate and emphasise, even if it does not occupy more than three quarters of my speech. I am also pleased to see the Government emphasis on involving young people in developing policy and monitoring progress—for instance, the pledge of £850,000 to the British Youth Council for 2011 to 2013, to set up a new national scrutiny group of representative young people to advise Ministers on how policies affect young people and their families.

I pay tribute to the Minister for regularly meeting young people in care, to ensure that his understanding of the care system is not only theoretical but a personal, direct, linked understanding from young people affected by the policies that he and the rest of us make in Parliament. That, too, is a good thing—as well as having young people in the Public Gallery listening to me going on at such length today.

Positive for Youth does not fully address three outstanding areas, which the Committee was concerned about. First, we welcome the Government’s commitment to retain the statutory duty on councils to secure young people’s access to sufficient activities and services, including their duty to take account of young people’s views in decisions about such activities, which was a key recommendation of our report. We also welcome the commitment to intervene in response to

“well-founded concerns about long-standing failure to improve outcomes and services for young people”—

again, a key Committee recommendation.

Our second report, however, called on the Government to specify their minimum expectation for adequate provision of youth services. We asked how communities could know the grounds on which Ministers might be expected to intervene if they did not know what “adequate” looked like. Positive for Youth and the draft statutory guidance currently out for consultation decline to do that, instead stating that a local authority’s efforts to secure a sufficient local offer will be judged by whether it has considered guidance and by its relative performance in improving outcomes for young people. Although we agree that outcomes for young people, rather than inputs, are the right thing to measure, some consideration of what services, if any, are being provided locally must surely form part of the assessment. The duty calls on local authorities to secure

“so far as is reasonably practicable, a local offer”.

I am interested to hear why that caveat was considered necessary and how well received the draft guidance has been in the consultation responses so far.

Secondly, as I have already mentioned, we highlighted confusion about public spending on youth services that the Government have yet adequately to address. The Government continue to dismiss our estimate for public spending on youth services of £350 million a year, which was based on their own figures. When asked repeatedly for their own estimate, they did not provide one, instead challenging the spending figures that the Government have been using for years in answering questions on youth services spending.

I would be grateful to the Minister if he clarified today whether the Government intend to stop using the accounting line on youth service spend and, if so, what alternative instructions his Department has given to local authorities about collecting and reporting data on youth service provision. For instance, if reporting is to change under the early intervention grant, perhaps he can clarify how the Government intend to measure national spend on youth services in future under that grant.

Thirdly, the Committee felt that the Government remained vague about how the national citizen service was to be funded after the 2011 and 2012 pilots. Their response to our report remained ambiguous on that point, stating that they had

“no plans to cease funding for National Citizen Service beyond the pilot years”,

but that

“the Government does not expect to fund the full cost of delivering the programme”

in the long term. Perhaps the Minister could update us on the Government’s latest thinking with regard to what proportion they do expect to fund beyond 2012.

There is much to be welcomed in the Positive for Youth strategy, but significant anxiety clearly remains in the sector about the hard reality of funding on the ground locally. Even organisations that are signed up to the Government’s approach of restructuring services to deliver them for less are worried about the extent of cuts. The NCVYS, the Government’s newly appointed strategic partner, said in response to the consultation on Positive for Youth that

“the papers made little reference of how services would be funded to deliver support to young people. This is especially concerning given the implicit assumption that voluntary and community organisations will be expected to fill in gaps left by retreating services.”

Regular reports of the closures of local youth services bear out that fear.

If we are to provide adequately for the 80% of young people’s time spent outside school, we must retain the best youth services—in particular, those whose effectiveness has the confidence of local commissioners. The Government must be prepared to intervene when those are threatened, and they need to clarify precisely the grounds on which they will do so.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lisa Nandy]

I am acutely aware that in this place we often talk about young people, but we do not often talk to them. An important feature of our report was the fact that we heard a great deal from young people about the effect of youth services on them.

I spent nearly a decade in the voluntary sector before I came into the House of Commons, and I am a firm believer in the value of youth work and services, having seen for myself the dramatic transformation possible in many young people’s lives. In the Committee, we were glad to have the opportunity to give deeper thought to the value, structure and funding of youth work, and to how outcomes are measured. It has long struck me that the strength of the service is also a weakness—by its very nature, it is flexible, dynamic, youth led and localised, but that can create some of the problems discussed by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) in his introductory speech. When we began to hear evidence, we had to consider what we meant by youth work, and it soon struck us that there was no definition of youth work or of the youth service, and no job description for youth workers. That is a strength, but it also creates problems.

Inevitably and unfortunately, we spent a great deal of time and energy during our inquiry looking at the effect of cuts, in particular to local authority budgets, and what that has meant for youth services. It emerged that the nature, scale and impact of the cuts have been dramatic and, in some areas, extremely stark. The 10.9% cut to the value of funds into the early intervention grant and the removal of ring-fencing for youth provision seem to have had dramatic effect. Local authorities understandably seem to be prioritising statutory and high-risk services such as child protection. It is easy to understand why, faced with such dramatic cuts, but it is extremely worrying when we consider the hon. Gentleman’s comments on early intervention and the need to prioritise particular groups of young people.

Concern and criticism were aired in evidence to our inquiry, from local authorities and charities. The chief executive of NCVYS—the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services—the former Children’s Commissioner, talked about what the cuts will mean for young people in the long term, if they fall through the net. What will that mean for their future life chances? The former commissioner, Al Aynsley-Green, called it “the end of hope”. I hope that that is not the case, but when the union Unite made a request under the Freedom of Information Act to a number of local authorities, it found that, on average, funding to youth services was down 12% in only one year. The reality of that for young people is stark indeed.

When the Minister gave evidence to the Select Committee, he said that although the Government would be prepared to intervene if local authorities were failing in their statutory duty to provide services, what local authorities spent their money on was largely a matter for them. Ministers, however, need to acknowledge the serious reality of what is happening out there throughout the country as a consequence of the huge cuts being made to local authority budgets. My own local authority, Wigan, has prioritised youth services. In the past three years—between 2008 and 2011—investment in youth work has gone up 4%, but the question is how long that high spend can be sustained, given that the local authority has suffered a £66 million cut and that many services are, therefore, inevitably disappearing, in particular because the cuts were front-loaded, giving us little time to prepare, plan or find alternatives or efficiencies.

Ministers told us that youth services should rely on different sources of funding and should not be overly reliant on the state. In reality, as the Committee’s report and the evidence we were given show, that was already the case. The vast majority of organisations we took evidence from got their funding from a variety of trusts, grants and charitable and public sources, as well as from statutory sources; indeed, one organisation—the Scout Association—was 100% non-funded by the state.

In my constituency, there is a good example of the partnership working that Ministers said they wanted to encourage. Wigan Youth Zone, which is opening in 2013, will provide a huge range of facilities for young people, including climbing walls, sports halls, cinemas, cafes, music rooms and training facilities. The focus is on helping young people to improve not only their softer skills, such as confidence and resilience, but the harder skills that they will need to find what work there is and do it.

The organisation will be 10% funded by the young people themselves, who will pay 50p a time to visit, although there will be additional help for those for whom that is too much. The organisation’s running costs will also be 40% funded by the local authority and 50% funded by the private sector and local fundraising initiatives, which the whole town has got behind. The board is chaired by Martin Ainscough, a local business man with a strong commitment to, and passion for, young people. He was inspired to contribute a significant proportion of the capital costs after visiting the Bolton lads and girls club and coming away feeling strongly that we should have similar provision in Wigan.

There are many such examples around the country, but there is a significant issue about the loss of statutory funding. In many places, alternative sources of funding are simply not available, because they are already being utilised. I strongly disagree with the Minister that spending £77 of statutory funding per young person is a large slug of public money, as he told us when he gave evidence to the Committee. This is really important, considering how much time young people spend outside the classroom and how few resources are spent on activities for young people outside the classroom.

It will be particularly hard for smaller charities to find alternative sources of funding. When I worked for the Children’s Society, we, like many other larger charities, had huge teams of fundraisers, whose job it was to look for sources of funding and to navigate complex regulations and processes to ensure that our funding applications were successful. Smaller charities will not be able to compete, and the Committee heard about many that had only one paid employee, who was trying to keep the whole thing going and whose real passion was working with young people, not filling in forms. It is not enough to say that organisations need to look for alternative sources of funding; they need help and, in particular, signposting from the Government if they are to do that.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

There are positives from having a more big-society approach to youth services. I was speaking to a youth worker from Hull the other day, and he said that he and his colleagues were working more closely with the voluntary sector, in a way he felt they should have been years ago. We should also not send out too negative a message about small charities. They can sometimes be vulnerable, and they are threatened, but they are resilient, and they have an ability to innovate and find ways through. One tends to overstate how desperate things will be, but small charities are good at levering in additional support.

[Lisa Nandy]

I take the point that those youth workers should have been working closely with the voluntary sector, but the point I am making is that such things are already happening up and down the country. People are innovative and they are seeking partnerships. In my constituency, people know each other, they work together and they have built relationships over a long period. I am saying not that those charities are not resourceful, energetic and passionate, but that we are stacking the odds against them, and we should give them more support.

Multiple funding streams can be a bureaucratic nightmare, even for large organisations. I say that as someone who, over 10 years in the voluntary sector, suffered the extreme pain of having to report regularly on such things and to demonstrate impacts and outcomes to funders. I filled in the forms, went to the meetings and prioritised that work, because it is important for funders to see what they are getting for their money, but what about smaller organisations with perhaps one member of staff? The Committee came across an organisation with one paid member of staff and 27 funders, which is not unusual, in my experience. What does that mean? It means 27 regular reports.

Such an arrangement also means that people never get the opportunity to catch their breath, because they constantly have to reinvent or repackage the service they offer. In my experience—I think it was shared by a lot of the organisations that gave evidence to us—funders are not keen to fund something that is not new; they generally want to fund something new, not the continuation of a service. As a result, charities are constantly repackaging and reinventing something they already know works. Removing statutory funding at an accelerated rate will therefore have a dramatic impact, which will be felt most by those organisations that are often closest to the ground and that are doing some dynamic and important work with young people.

In the light of all that, I very much welcome the national citizen service, but as an addition to existing youth services, not as an alternative. As we heard during our inquiry, youth services are a lifeline for some young people; they are a source of stability when there is no other source of stability. Many young people talked about the youth service or the youth club they accessed being a family or a home to them, and many had been accessing those services for years. I had a conversation with a young woman who had acted as a National Children’s Bureau mentor for a young man since he was nine years old—he is now 18. She said that, during all that time, she had been the only adult who had remained constant in his life. Everyone else—social workers, of whom there had been many, foster carers and parents—had come and gone, but she had been the one source of stability for that young man. We must not forget how important that is.

A girl called Chloe posted a comment on the inquiry site about her youth centre:

“It’s like a second home to some of us... I’ve been coming to this youth centre for two years now. I’d be lost without it”.

We heard that from so many young people. I am therefore concerned about the cost of the NCS—£37 million this year and £13 million the year before. It cannot be right to prioritise a six-week scheme for young people from different backgrounds, including more affluent ones, when youth services that are a lifeline to young people such as Chloe are disappearing up and down the country.

The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness said the Committee was concerned by the cost of NCS, given what it is delivering, and I would associate myself with those remarks. The Committee visited Germany and saw some excellent youth services, but the cost of those services per person for 12 months was the same as the cost of the NCS per person for six weeks. I cannot understand why there is such a huge disparity, and I urge Ministers to look at the issue.

I want to question the Government’s vision on youth services. Over the past few years—this predates the coalition’s coming to power—we have seen the gradual prioritisation of targeted services over open-access services. What I am about to say might sound a little counter-intuitive, given that I have just made a strong case for ensuring that we reach young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds and that we prioritise them above all others, but, as I have seen for myself, and as the Committee heard in a lot of evidence, open-access services work with many of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged young people, whom targeted services sometimes find it hard to get through their doors. They work precisely because there is no stigma around open-access services, and because a lot of young people who have been through various systems, including the care system and the criminal justice system, and who often have a deep distrust of services that label them and that are targeted at them, will go to open-access services when they will not go to targeted services. At a time when not enough funding is available, it concerns me that we will prioritise targeted services along with the NCS.

When young people from the backgrounds I described access open-access services, which do not necessarily have a label attached, staff can also identify the fact that those young people have problems, which goes back to the point about early intervention. The Committee heard strong evidence that such young people often go on a journey: they go to an open-access service, such as a youth club, and get talking to a member of staff. They build a relationship of trust, and it emerges that they have significant barriers to overcome. They are then referred to a targeted service and end up going full circle—coming back to the open-access service, having had the support they desperately needed. We need to be careful about prioritising targeted services, because the evidence that we heard shows that there is a need for open access and for targeted services that work.

The question of what works—the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness referred to it earlier—exercised the Committee. A witness to the inquiry described the measuring of outcomes as the Holy Grail, and I could not agree more. That can be difficult to do, and it is necessary to be incredibly careful, think about what is being measured and avoid setting up perverse incentives. With the increase in payment by results and targets under the previous Government, organisations cherry-picked the easiest cases and left the remainder, so resources were directed precisely where they were needed least. Often, the targets set for us in the voluntary sector, and for others, completely ignored the reality that many young people face.

In the youth justice system at the moment, for example, the Government are rolling out a system of payment by results, which is about trying to get young offenders into work as soon as they leave an institution. I applaud the focus on getting young people into structured work and giving them a reason to carry on, but the way those targets are set will be important. I worked at Centrepoint, the youth homelessness charity, for several years, and there were some young people for whom just getting out of bed and having breakfast every morning was a significant achievement that constituted real progress; it took months of work, support and encouragement from the staff. That is something we need to be careful about.

I am also quite concerned about measuring outcomes and the focus on payment by results. Constructing intelligent frameworks for what is measured and how that is done involves more than skill. When I worked for the Children’s Society, it constructed a well-being index, which took several years to complete, and while such frameworks can usefully be shared with other organisations—the Government have commissioned work on that, which I welcome—I also urge them to pay attention to the fact that it also takes time to collect and record information in a meaningful way. Many of the young people I worked with in the voluntary sector were sick and tired of being part of the system and of being asked questions, quizzed and grilled. It is important to find useful, meaningful, non-harmful ways to engage young people in the framework, and to get the right information from them, so that the process does not turn into a tick-box exercise.

We heard a lot of evidence that measuring soft outcomes was important, and I completely agree with that; confidence and resilience are examples. Often, causal links are too complicated. It is difficult to say, “This young person came to us and has gone on to commit crime. That is because we failed.” That would be to ignore every other thing going on in the young person’s life at the time. There are so many influences on young people, and it is difficult to measure the direct impact. I was encouraged by the focus on positives in the plan that the Government have produced. If outcome measures are constructed in a negative way, the focus on positives, which is so valuable to youth work, and which we should value and prize above all else, is lost.

Having read the Government’s plan for young people, I thought it was long on policy, which I welcomed, but short on vision. It did not seem to consider the future impact on young people of many of the things in question. The creation of the Department for Children, Schools and Families, instead of an education Department, was a significant step forward for children. It meant that, for once, all Departments had to work together to deliver for young people. Things were brought under one umbrella, with a strong Secretary of State who drove through improvements for young people. I saw that for myself, particularly in areas where children had traditionally been left outside the system. For example, refugee and migrant children came under the umbrella of the Children Act 1989 and the UN convention on the rights of the child for the first time as a direct consequence of the fact that the Department brought things together. If the Minister wants to consider the long-term future of young people and what the decisions we take will mean for them, he needs to look at youth work and immediate support and intervention, but he also needs to look closely at what his colleagues are doing in housing, pensions and care for the elderly—a host of things. Our failure, as a country, to tackle those things will affect young people for the rest of their lives.

A generation is growing up who are losing youth services and support, particularly for the most disadvantaged, but who also face the prospect of high unemployment, with a million young people out of work. They face depressed wages for the rest of their lives, and interrupted work patterns. They also face high debt if they manage to get through university, difficulty getting on the housing ladder and having to fund care for their elderly parents while paying hefty funds into their pension schemes and bringing up their children. The Minister needs to consider what he does for young people now, but needs also to look carefully at his colleagues’ failure to act. Otherwise, young people will feel the results for many years to come.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

I apologise for arriving late for this debate [Interruption.] It was outrageous. We should always arrive on time, but I have a very good excuse: I was meeting a contingent of young people from Stroud high school in my constituency, who are involved in fundraising, and are doing a lot of thinking about the role of Oxfam. That, ironically, is a good example of the kind of thing that young people should be involved in. I applaud the girls from the high school for doing what they have got in mind. They have been raising a huge amount of money through cake stalls, footprint contests and so forth. They are doing so because they want to be part of the community and are endeavouring to become responsible individuals, and because they think carefully about the world beyond their habitat. That is fantastic, and their example and commitment to some extent underpin what I shall be saying in my brief remarks.

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) who made a thoughtful exposition of the situation, coming from the huge experience she brings to the Education Committee. We all derive value from that, and it is great that so many members of the Committee are here. I think that half of us are present.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

More than half.

[Neil Carmichael]

More than half; that is fantastic. We work well as a team and are very effective, coming up with some useful reports. I have voted against only one report so far, which was on the English baccalaureate. We had a lengthy process to discuss whether we should support the Government’s proposals, and I disagreed with the whole thrust of the report. I noted that although the evidence we had in support of its conclusions was persuasive, we nevertheless should not stop thinking beyond its remit.

[Mr Stuart]

I just wanted to applaud my hon. Friend for his courage in acknowledging that the evidence was all one way, and his conclusion was entirely the other.

[Neil Carmichael]

I am grateful. I am not entirely sure whether I can describe that as a compliment to my position, but there is much more evidence out there that we should be mindful of. That is what I shall talk about. I referred to the E-bac report not because I wanted to ram home yet again the fact that the Government are absolutely right to introduce the E-bac—they know that, and most people are beginning to realise it—but because there is more to our thinking on youth services than is contained in our report.

My other more general point is that it is absolutely right that 80% or 90% of young people’s time is spent in activities other than schooling, but we must get our education system right. That must be the top priority, and public money must be allocated on the basis of priorities. I want to make it absolutely clear right now that my priority is to ensure that our children receive an education that will equip them to deal with the challenges facing them and the opportunities and lifestyles that they wish to pursue. That is a cornerstone of my contributions to the Education Committee.

A key theme of the evidence that the Committee received in our various meetings showed that the picture is extraordinarily mixed, and it was difficult to analyse outcomes, and to elicit clear messages. In broad terms, the range of providers, the complexity of provision, and the different priorities that many providers had, made it extraordinarily difficult to make a judgment about outcomes and processes. That must be properly understood in the context of expenditure levels and the way in which the Government have reacted to the challenge of the pressures on public expenditure.

My constituency has a huge number of youth providers, and not all of them would be recognised in the context of the Committee’s report. We must acknowledge and salute those organisations that provide a huge amount of good value for our young people, and which would not normally come within the remit of our discussion today. For example, the Door project in Stroud provides fantastic support for young people who have been let down by everyone, including in most cases their own parents. The project is supported powerfully by the local community, delivers outstanding outcomes, and is a strong and useful part of our community. It is a good example of the sort of things we need.

Nailsworth has a community workshop, which I visited not long ago, where young people can learn about crafts, and to be craftspeople. It is fantastic, and is growing up from our local community. Not far away in Nailsworth is a youth centre that is very well supported by the town mayor and many others. It has been the victim of cuts by Gloucestershire county council, but nevertheless continues to deliver fantastic services that are really worth having.

In Dursley, another key town in my constituency, the Lower King’s Hill management co-operative provides great opportunities for young people to do all sorts of things, including gardening and so on. It is also where I hold some of my surgeries, so I am connected with its work, and its aims and objectives. It is yet another example of the sort of structure that we should be supporting, but which might not be covered by our report.

With that degree of diversity, we have some great structures, and I have not even started talking about some of the others, such as Outreach, which provides support for young people in very difficult circumstances. The staff’s dedication to young people, and the opportunities that they gain because of the support, framework, comfort and succour that they receive is fantastic. I applaud that.

All the organisations that I have mentioned are well supported by local people in their local communities, because they recognise local needs and work extraordinarily hard to produce outcomes that are surprisingly easy to measure. As a Member of Parliament, I visit them all, and I see the outcomes and am impressed. What often worries me is the number of people who need those services, rather than the outcomes. We must not ignore the fact that many good things are happening in our constituencies. Mine is a good example, but I think all hon. Members can say the same.

[Neil Carmichael]

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment. She is absolutely right that people must be able to get to facilities. In constituencies such as hers and mine, where there are many villages, transport is a factor. My son is a member of Rodborough Eagles, a football team that does extraordinarily well. He is a much better footballer than I ever could have been because he is not flat-footed and is a really good defender. The key point is that he visits many different parts of my constituency, and I join him as often as I can. That football club is a youth service, and an option for him and his friends to enjoy, and is part of youth service provision. A variety of different services can be tapped into.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend is right. It is important when considering statutory services, which have an important role to play, as I said during my speech, to remember that there is a vast range of other services, such as sports clubs—Beverley rugby club, Beverley cricket club, the Meridian gym, which my younger daughter attends, and the Eastside gym which serves more than 700 children at Hedon in my constituency. I pay tribute to people such as Andy Dickinson and Steve Crane who do such a good job of providing services on a voluntary basis.

[Neil Carmichael]

My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) is wondering whether he can read out a list of places in his constituency.

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[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I am not entirely sure how to follow that last speech, but I will definitely get a copy of Hansard tomorrow and read it. I am sure that it will be even better the second time round.

I have never spoken in a Westminster Hall debate on a Select Committee report before, and I was not sure what to expect. So far, however, it is exceeding even my wildest imaginings. I am pleased to speak in this debate. Having seen what happens, it is now clear to me that the purpose of such a debate is not for members of the Committee to get together—in a sense, we could have had this debate in a bar—but for us to duff up the Minister verbally, and hopefully get a response from him that will satisfy some of the recommendations that came out of an incredibly well researched and evidence- based report.

It is difficult, particularly in my part of the country, to speak in a debate about youth services without seeing them in the wider context of, for example, youth employment and unemployment. The timing of this debate is particularly opportune, given that youth unemployment currently stands at more than 1 million.

In my constituency of North West Durham, unemployment has doubled in the past two years, and 13% of all jobseeker’s allowance claimants are aged between 18 and 24. In human terms, that is 1,290 young people aged between 18 and 24 in my constituency who are not receiving any form of education or training and are not in employment. That is a human tragedy for them, but from my point of view, it is a case of déjà vu. It is like a rerun of the 1980s. We are in danger of creating yet another lost generation, with all the costs that that has for society.

I know that the Government are concerned about the issue. They talk about families living in dependency and they launch initiatives to deal with the most complex and costly families, who collectively, across the country, are costing us billions of pounds in benefits and in terms of health. They take up the vast majority of the time and resources of housing services, the police and justice services. Much of that has its roots in mass youth unemployment—what we saw in the ’80s and ’90s.

I see families in my constituency who do not work, and my constituency is not so different from many others. It is a large rural constituency, with an urban population in one corner—

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Lady is very fair-minded and will want to recognise the fact that mass youth unemployment has been a reality for the entirety of the time that we are talking about. From the beginning, it was pretty solid. It did not move in the boom years of the previous Government. After the financial crisis, it went up. Although there was a temporary drop before the last election, the upward movement was there. It is a systemic issue, which we need to tackle. It is certainly not the result of any immediate policies of a Government who have been in power for 22 months.

[Pat Glass]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. Youth unemployment was not invented by the current Government, but it clearly has not been helped in the past two years.

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[Pat Glass]

As an education funding geek, I have an answer for that. There was an element for small schools. For small rural schools, most local authorities had an element of funding for vulnerable and poor children that was separate from AEN funding. Those schools were already catered for by other parts of the funding formula.

[Mr Stuart]

The East Riding of Yorkshire was, for a long time, the fourth lowest funded authority in the country and is now the eighth lowest, despite the demonstrable increase in the cost of delivering education in a sparsely populated rural and coastal area. It is not obvious, however one looks at the complex formula, how to work out whether it properly recognises the needs of an area. The pupil premium has the elegant benefit of directly targeting an additional sum to help schools provide educational support for children on free school meals.

[Pat Glass]

The beauty of the education funding formula—it is complex and if we tweak one end of it we cause a huge tsunami at the other end—is that it was locally driven. Each local authority looked at its funding formula and had the opportunity to take into account things such as small schools, rural schools and small areas of deprivation. No one, I think, would accept that it is good to take money away from schools in which more than 50% of the kids are on free school meals and share it out among schools in which only 2% or 3% of the children are on free school meals; it does not make sense and it is certainly not what was intended. The scheme was well intentioned, but it is driving money from those schools that have high concentrations of poorer children and moving it to schools with small concentrations.

Everything that is happening in youth services and careers services, and everything that has happened with EMA, young people’s funding and higher education, where participation from poorer young people from the poorest regions has collapsed in parts of the country because of the tripling of tuition fees—when the Chairman of the Select Committee gave the audience in the Guildhall in York the benefit of the Government’s policy on this, it was clear that people had glazed over and were not listening—has a cumulative effect, and it will take a generation to replace and restore services for young people.

[Neil Carmichael]

rose—

[Mr Stuart]

rose—

[Pat Glass]

My greatest fear is that we are creating for ourselves and our young people a further legacy of long-term unemployment and what comes from that—welfare dependency and its massive cost to the country for generations to come.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

We have had an interesting and, indeed, rather different debate this afternoon, and I congratulate the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), on ensuring that we have had time to debate youth issues. We do not do that enough in the House, and I absolutely welcome anything that Parliament—Select Committees, Ministers, Opposition Members and Back Benchers—can produce to highlight the panoply of issues and challenges that young people face. Young people and children are 20% of our population and 100% of our future, and they need to feel that their concerns are taken more seriously. This debate is just one opportunity to flag up a whole lot of issues that affect young people at the moment.

At times, I thought that I had strayed into the wrong debate. This is a debate about the youth service report, which covers 13 to 25-year-olds, but somehow we got on to the education maintenance allowance, the English baccalaureate and various other things. I thought that the Chairman of the Select Committee was restrained in not upbraiding his hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), as I gather he was previously at pains to point out that, because of his own educational experience, he would have failed the E-bac. However, we did at times get on to the Select Committee report.

I have a speech, but I want to discard it and try to address some of the issues that have come up. Then at the end, if we have time, I will perhaps give the Chairman of the Select Committee a right of reply, as is traditional. I will perhaps also come on to some of the things that I had planned to say.

I think that we all share the same aims. I do not think that there is any difference between us in that we all feel a need to get a better deal for young people. There might be some concerns about the national citizen service, but I think that its aims are absolutely shared and that we all appreciate that everyone getting those sorts of life-changing experiences would be a good thing.

I absolutely welcome the fact that the Select Committee undertook the study and produced its report, but I have been critical of how the report was produced, because it dwelled disproportionately on the national citizen service, which covers only a small part of the age group that the Committee considered. I also have the criticism that, although the Committee was concerned to flag up some inadequacies of the national citizen service, it did not interview any young people who had been on national citizen service. There are many willing volunteers who would have given their testimonies.

It seems slightly odd that, in its critique of national citizen service, the Committee went to Germany to try to make a comparison with the Zivildienst scheme, which was the alternative to military service in that country, where, at the age of 19, young people could either do 11 months’ military service or 13 months’ civilian service. When compulsory military service was suspended in 2011, the Zivildienst was also suspended.

There are big differences between that scheme and national citizen service. Young people tended to volunteer in old people’s homes, hospitals or churches, for example. They would get a small salary for doing so and the organisation hosting the young person contributed to the cost. So it was a completely different sort of scheme that was born out of completely different circumstances with completely different funding arrangements. That is why I am concerned that the Committee appears to have been initiating criticisms about national citizen service based on something that happened in a different country.

Although I was very glad that many young people contributed online and in the discussion forums, which is absolutely right and is something I strongly encourage, I was concerned that few young people were called as witnesses in front of the Committee. I am also not aware that any young people worked on the report with the Committee’s special advisers and Clerks.

When we produced Positive for Youth, of which I am very proud—it was a long-standing piece of work that absolutely rightly took a while to produce—young people were involved at every stage. They were given drafts and various policy proposals to tear to bits and asked to come back with their responses. In considering one of the later drafts, 150 young people assembled at the O2 arena. They pulled various parts of the report apart and came back with their suggestions.

We had a big event at the Queen Elizabeth II centre that involved more than 300 people. More than 50 young people were there and, at every stage, they had their input and felt ownership of Positive for Youth. Whether or not someone agrees with the document’s contents, I do not think that many people are arguing about the fact that we exhaustively consulted a load of people in the youth sector, particularly young people themselves.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The Minister is spending a disproportionately inordinate amount of time on something that is not central to the issue, but I would like to correct him. The process was that we took evidence from young people on panels in multiple oral evidence sessions, and we also conducted the student forum. As we are a parliamentary Committee, young people cannot form part of the team that puts the report together, but we had massive engagement with young people throughout the whole process—for example, by using the student forum and so on. I thought that I had written to the Minister to set him right on that issue because he was clearly so misinformed. If I failed to do so, I apologise for allowing him to continue in such a position of ignorance.

[Tim Loughton]

My point holds clear. The fact that there was the online forum and other people not on the Committee consulted young people does not mean that young people appeared in front of the Committee itself. The Committee visited no youth projects in the United Kingdom; it went to Germany. Indeed, the report contains an apology for the fact that the Committee did not get out and visit some of the projects that it was due to see. I think that I am correct in saying that young people were not involved in the compilation, road testing or critique of the final report. That is the point I am making. If the Chairman of the Select Committee wants to correct me on that, he can do so.

The contrast with Positive for Youth is that young people saw the drafts, wrote the words, changed the final results, were consulted around the country, came into my office and went to the O2. In addition, we went to lots of different projects around the country to get young people’s views and those of other people involved in youth services. That is why I think that Positive for Youth was a fantastic exercise in involving people, particularly young people. Select Committees could gain some experience from that.

I am particularly pleased—I was going to mention this in a moment—that we are funding the British Youth Council to set up a youth select committee, which will act as a shadow select committee and, I hope, meet in this place and take evidence from the Chairman of the Select Committee and others, particularly young people. That sends out a fantastic signal that we value young people’s input in the place where it matters—here—as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Stuart]

Will the Minister tell us how he would streamline that, because I am sure that if we talked to Ministers 10 years ago they would have said the same thing, and five years ago they would have said the same thing? Whoever was in government, they would have said the same thing. We need practical ways of making it happen. For example, will he speak to his colleagues in the Cabinet Office to try to ensure that we get streamlining?

[Tim Loughton]

The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), who has responsibility for civil society, has been working with many voluntary organisations, charities and others to reduce bureaucracy. I have been working with the inspectorates. Many organisations in the youth and education sector in relation to children’s social care will be inspected by as many as six inspectorates. That is clearly nonsense, clearly overlapping, and clearly causes huge amounts of chaos for the outfit being inspected. I spent a morning with children’s services in Birmingham, which were about to have another inspection.

We are now making good progress. Indeed, the Chair of the Select Committee may wish to call me to give evidence on joint inspections in one of his inquiries. For the first time—I have had them all around the table in my office—we are making some real progress. That must be the way to go. We need to ensure that organisations that do good stuff for young people and children are able to get on with the job of providing those activities, rather than having to spend every other day being beholden to inspectors in a very bureaucratic manner.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful for that answer, which addressed inspection, but perhaps not accountability. I know that the Cabinet Office has considered how we can use digital platforms to deliver Government for less and more effectively. I wonder whether small charities and youth services could have one website where everyone comes together to say what they want—or at least are able to go to one place—which provides one set of accounting for themselves in a way that answers the questions that are collectively required by all those who fund them.

[Tim Loughton]

I think that the sum of the bureaucracy around small charities in particular is already being addressed. I just referenced the work that we are doing with Business in the Community, NCB and that consortium to provide a portal for organisations that need funding, advice on how to get leverage on the funds and resources available, and on how to partner up different organisations. That is what we are trying to create in that brokerage, and I think that that addresses the concern.

There have been quite a lot of myths about national citizen service. It has been covered disproportionately, at least in the press releases relating to the Committee’s report. I would be more than happy if the Committee produced a discrete report on national citizen service that was based on the evidence that we are amassing from people who have already been on it, and based on actually going on the projects and seeing the young people and the providers. The Chair of the Select Committee has met some of his local providers, and I think he was impressed by what he saw.

Let me first say what national citizen service is not. It is not just some six week summer camp—that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is all about. National citizen service is about a life-changing experience that starts with a two-and-a-half week window, mostly over the summer, with young people going on an outward bound type course and being thrown in at the deep end—quite literally in many cases. It gets people together from different sides of the tracks socially and ethnically—kids who have been in the youth justice system, kids from independent schools, kids with disabilities. It mixes them all up and they have to rely on each other and understand each other. It is about a rite of passage as well. Anybody who has been through the national citizen service course and graduated—it is not a walk in the park; it needs to be stretching and it needs to be challenging—has earned the right to be treated more as an adult. It is about engaging those young people with society in the longer term. It is about getting them embarked on volunteering activities. It is about getting them to develop their social action project, which they start up as part of the summer experience, and which will hopefully run for months, if not years, after that, in collaboration with other local youth organisations, the local council and local businesses.

I want thousands of signs around the country that read, “National citizen service project initiated by, run by, managed by, inspired by young people”, so that even some of the most cynical people in our society, who think that every teenager is a potential hoodie-wearing mugger, will have to say, “Wow, there is some really good stuff going on in my town, my village, my community, my city, and it is being led by young people.” That is what national citizen service is all about.

I do not recognise some of the figures in the report that have been attached to national citizen service, simply because they are not figures that we have calculated ourselves. We are in the middle of a pilot. We are evolving the scheme. We have made a number of changes since we started the pilots. We will be rolling out 30,000 places this summer, and there will be some variations. Some will be run over a series of extended weekends for those who cannot commit for the summer. There will be some pilots in Northern Ireland, because this will be a UK-wide exercise.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to the Minister for resiling from his earlier remarks about the disproportionate attention the report paid to the NCS, because in six chapters I think that half a chapter deals with it. It is also worth noting that, at the time, it was the only youth policy the Government had, but none the less we looked more widely. The Minister says that he does not recognise the figures in our report—a statement consistently made by the Government about our figures. However, the Government have not provided us with their own. Will he please do so now?

[Tim Loughton]

We could not possibly come out with a total figure for complete roll-out because we have not remotely reached total roll-out. We are getting economies of scale. We spent approximately £13.5 million. In addition, some philanthropic and other money came in. We are being approached by people who want to add money, on top of the Government money. We are considering converting it into a contractual scheme. We will then start to have some long-term estimates of the amount of money involved. Simply to do an extrapolation of the costs in the first year, which are likely to be the highest and will gradually come down, and come up with a figure of 50%, and then come up with this figure is, I have to say, disingenuous. It is also slightly disingenuous and unfair of the Chair to say that I am dwelling disproportionately on NCS. The point I made earlier was that his press release, the headline, how this report, which contains some really good stuff, was launched, was all about NCS affecting one year out of the 13 to 25-year-old cohort.

It is also not fair to say that, at the time my hon. Friend mentioned, the Government had no other youth policies. Let me remind him that in the teeth of the toughest spending round that we have had, we secured for the Department for Education £141 million of capital to fund the remainder of the 63 Myplace projects, which is an excellent scheme started by the previous Government. We ensured that the outstanding projects had financial sustainability, which some earlier ones did not have. That important youth policy, again, did not feature greatly in the report, which is a shame, because it is doing some fantastic stuff.

Last week I was in Lincoln, speaking at the Myplace network conference, seeing some fantastic examples of how Myplace centres are being used as hubs of youth activity in local communities and, particularly, focusing on how we deal with what are commonly called NEETs, which is a derogatory term. I prefer the term GREETs: getting ready for education, employment and training. Those will be centres for the youth contract, for organisations to come in and do their training, and where we can get some of the more difficult-to-reach young people into some form of employment, education and training.

Myplace centres are key to the Government’s youth—and Positive for Youth—policy. I should have liked them to feature in this report. If the Chairman of the Select Committee would like to rectify that by doing a study into Myplace centres, I should be more than happy to co-operate and give him all the resources he needs.

[Tim Loughton]

I have said that I respect the Select Committee and that I encourage it to study youth services and anything to do with young people. In my opening remarks I said that, whatever I may like, or not, in the Committee’s report, I welcome it. However, the report was about out-of-school activities for 13 to 25-year-olds. Myplace centres cater for out-of-school activities for that cohort and more; they were in place in part under the previous Government and money was secured for their expansion under this Government when the report was being prepared. Why did they not feature in the report? That is my point. Whether the Committee wanted to criticise them or be positive about them, they should have featured as another example of what the Government are trying to do, then the Committee could have said whether the Government needed to do better or to do it differently. Are we wasting £141 million? Why just talk about wasting £13.5 million on the national citizen service when we are wasting more than 10 times that—if that is the Committee’s view—on Myplace?

[Mr Stuart]

The Minister is wrestling with his understanding of what the Select Committee is for. The purpose of the inquiry was to focus on youth services. Perhaps we could address what the report contains. Can the Minister share with hon. Members the numbers, which we know are far from definitive, on the national citizen service? This Government are committed to transparency and openness, not least on public expenditure. Could we have some of that today on the NCS as it stands to date—and the Minister’s best understanding?

[Tim Loughton]

The Committee conducted an inquiry into the provision of services beyond the school/college day for young people, primarily those aged 13 to 25. That takes in a whole host of things, of which I mentioned Myplace, which cost £141 million—substantially more than the amount that has been spent, or will be spent for some years, on the NCS. I have told my hon. Friend that last year it cost some £13.5 million. The budget for this year, if we provide 30,000 places as we are looking to do, will be roughly triple that, but hopefully it will a bit less because we will get some economies of scale.

Depending on how we evolve the pilot—we are genuinely learning from it and adapting it by reference to all our partners with expertise in this regard—it may become a shorter experience in the summer, which would reduce the costs, or there may be different ways of doing it. To say that it will cost £300 million, or whatever, in a few years is entirely illusory, because I do not know how many people will be doing it.

There is a fundamental misconception here. The money is not coming from the Department for Education or from a youth budget and would not otherwise be going into youth services. The money for the national citizen service is going into youth services. This money is not being used to fund some army of central Government people; it is being provided by a host of youth organisations—the Prince’s Trust, the Football League Trust, Catch22, Groundwork and the National Youth Agency—doing youth work now. If that money were not going into the NCS through a direct funding stream from the Treasury, it would not be going into youth work. That is why I cannot understand why the Committee is not welcoming these growing resources going into a youth activity. One only has to speak to the people who have done such activity, read the surveys that we have conducted, and look at the serious work that is being done, to see its efficacy and that it is having a positive impact.

[Tim Loughton]

The hon. Lady ignores the fact that a host of youth organisations has come forward to provide national citizen service places, because they think it is a good thing to do and think that they have the expertise. In particular, we are using a host of smaller providers with real expertise in engaging with more difficult-to-engage young people, including young people who have been in the youth justice system and young people from various black and minority ethnic communities, who are not necessarily easy to engage in some youth services. Those people value it.

I do not know whether the hon. Lady went to the NCS providers in her locality, but I ask her to speak to some of those young people and to come to some presentations, such as the ones we have done with them, and see the value that they place on it.

I cannot give hon. Members a figure for what NCS will ultimately cost when we go to full roll-out, and I do not know how soon roll-out will be or what it will be, but we will not compromise the quality of this service. An absolutely key point in that regard is the fact that it is a high-quality service that is, for the young people who go on it, a life-changing experience about personal and social development.

[Mr Stuart]

Will the Minister give way?

[Tim Loughton]

I will, but my hon. Friend is eating into his time for a right of reply, and I have not even started my speech yet.

[Mr Stuart]

The Minister is generous in giving way, but I am still at a slight loss as to why he is so hostile. Our job is to probe this. We did not say it would cost that much. We said that, if it was scaled up at the current cost, it would cost the amount we stated, and we did so precisely to invite—we hoped—a polite, respectful response from the Ministry about what it thought it might move towards.

Derek Twine, chief executive of the Scout Association, noted that

“for the same cost per head that the NCS is anticipating spending in the first tranche of pilots we could provide two or three years’ worth of the experience, week by week, for young people in the same age range”.

Evidence of that sort led us to probe the matter, hoping that we would get a proper, civil response from the Government in due course.

[Tim Loughton]

That is a strange thing for the chief executive of the Scout Association to say, because it relies on no public money at all, so why is he saying that he could use that money for something else? The Scout Association is completely different.

We want NCS to be the recruiting sergeant for the Scouts, the Air Training Corps, the Army cadets and all sorts of youth organisations. They are not there to recruit people for NCS; they are recruiting people for community-minded organisations that are doing great stuff in their local communities—and the Scouts and Guides just happen to be two such organisations.

I am not sure what to do, because I have not actually started the speech before me. I will try, however, to deal with some of the points made by members of the Select Committee. I ought to give my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) a look-in, because she has had the courtesy to stay throughout the proceedings. She made a number of points, in particular about transport and its availability to convey young people to certain facilities, notably in rural areas. That is exactly why I welcome the work of the United Kingdom Youth Parliament, which we are now helping to fund, in setting up a select committee on transport, this year’s favoured UKYP campaign. I have hosted some round-table meetings, one involving the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), on transport to schools and other educational facilities and on transport for young people. I am particularly sympathetic when 16-year-olds complain, quite rightly, that they have to pay adult fares on buses and public transport. I want to find solutions to ensure that we are not laying on facilities that the very people whom we want to access them are prevented from doing so because of transport logistics.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wells also mentioned social mobility and mental disorders. Having seen some good examples, I can recognise a good youth organisation —a feeling of belonging, I think she said—which can give people confidence that they have a place in society, helping their health, and not least their mental health. The problem has been under-appreciated, with one school-age child in 10 suffering from some form of mental illness, so I welcome the Government’s paper “No health without mental health”, which has, for the first time, placed mental health on a level playing field with physical health. We need to ensure that they are getting the right interventions—early and appropriate—which in too many cases they are not. That is an important part of youth engagement as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Graham Stuart]

With the leave of the House, it is a pleasure to serve—if one serves in this Chamber—and to debate under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I am grateful to all those who have participated in the debate. More than half the members of the Select Committee were present today, and we had excellent speeches from the hon. Members for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) and for North West Durham (Pat Glass), from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck), from my hon. Friends the Members for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) and for Wells (Tessa Munt) and from the Minister himself.

We have repeatedly put one question, so although the Minister might be breathing a sigh of relief on ending his speech, I ask him, if possible, to respond now or to write to me about how much is being spent on youth services. There was a line in the Government books that they used for years to say how much they were spending on youth services, but when we quoted it the Government and the Minister said, “That number is completely wrong.” What is the right number? Where do we look to find it?

[Tim Loughton]

Under the local authority returns, to which my hon. Friend is privy and which I thought he had used, the spending on combined youth services for 2009-10 came to a total of £1.104 billion—spent on services to young people, such as positive activities, information, advice and guidance, teen pregnancies, substance misuse and specific youth work.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to the Minister. The figure that we used was provided by Select Committee staff from Government figures, which I understand had been used for many years. That sounds like a different figure. Is that because of the early intervention grant, and pooling it? Can the Minister throw any other light on the matter, because it does not seem to fit with our understanding?

[Tim Loughton]

I have quoted the figure for 2009-10, which was before the early intervention grant existed.

[Mr Stuart]

The Committee will look forward to pursuing that further with the Minister, but if it is a correction I am grateful for it.

The purpose of our inquiry was to recognise that so many youth services struggle to show their impact—we criticised them for that and also sympathised with them because of the impossibility of doing so—but we know anecdotally from young people that those services are important. We wanted to provide a platform for youth services to be heard to ensure that time was found to focus on them. We hoped that the process of conducting the inquiry would make it less likely that ill-thought-out and disproportionate cuts would be made by local authorities in a tough situation—caused by the profligate behaviour of the previous Government, to reinforce the Minister’s point and to make a tiny rebuttal of so many partisan remarks from Opposition Members.

Despite the Minister’s occasional tetchiness at our probing—

[Ms Buck]

Occasional?

[Mr Stuart]

I say “occasional”, but we are working together, and the Minister is committed. One of the best things that the Prime Minister is doing for the governance of this country is keeping Ministers in place for a decent period, at least so far. Notwithstanding the Minister’s tetchiness, I hope that Ministers remain in office for longer periods, because that will lead to better understanding of the issues with which they are wrestling. Select Committees, which probe and challenge, and write reports such as ours, do so because they care about the issues. I hope that any heat, as well as light, that we might generate will strengthen the Minister’s arm. I know that he is personally committed to the matter, and works tremendously hard to look after the interests of our young people.

Technology (Primary Schools)

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[John Pugh]

I thank the hon. Gentleman very much for that intervention, because there is a need to pay tribute to the awful lot of very good practice in this area. I have been inundated with exemplars of schools that have done astounding things under the banner of design and technology.

The point I wanted to make with my reference to Steve Jobs was that technology can be a catalyst in a child’s education, in the early years. In pre-school education, that should be a fairly familiar concept to us, because we recognise that as well as introducing little children to books to encourage their development, there is also a need to introduce them to constructive toys and toys out of which they can make constructs. Technology, almost from the word go, plays an appreciable part in a child’s general cerebral and educational development.

A point that eluded me before I started looking further into the subject—a point that is not particularly well understood—is that technology is a catalyst. It not only gets people into technology, but gets them comfortable with areas of education with which they had previously not been comfortable—mathematics and literacy, for example—because the design elements of the design and technology curriculum have a real drive on presentational as well as constructive skills. Many additional gains, aside from pure technological ability, are driven by good design and technology education. There are many excellent examples of that, including those mentioned by the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti).

It is not my supposition that every child will be technically gifted in the same technologies. There is a huge diversity of potential and of things to be good at, which is why we want the curriculum to be as varied and imaginative as possible. I do not think that that is disputed; there is wholesale agreement right across the board that that is a worthy ambition—one that I think the Minister would be perfectly happy to own and espouse.

The difficult thing is the technical question. Although we can all agree that fulfilling every child’s potential and stimulating their talents is a laudable ambition, there is an interesting debate about how to do that, and what the Government and the forthcoming curriculum review can do to encourage it. There is excellence in technical education, but it is fair to say that although there is a constant stream of improvement in both primary and secondary schools, there is also some patchy performance. Errors can be made. If we look at information and communications technology teaching, which the Secretary of State touched on today, we see that quite a few significant errors have been made in how ICT is used in the classroom. I will return to that in a minute or two.

We must also acknowledge that, however good design and technology might be, there are other equally good things, such as numeracy, literacy, imagination, music and all sorts of other things, that the Government wish to encourage and schools wish to incorporate in their curriculum. A further dimension to the problem is that even if we have the most laudable ambitions, we still need a work force who are trained to implement them effectively. Of course, the poor old primary school teacher is meant to be a jack of all trades and to be equally good at an astounding number of things, which is a tough call.

In passing, looking at the wider implications, some of the greatest successes in technical development often take place outside the school curriculum, rather than in the classroom. Reading about the development of the IT industry in California, we find that boys leaving school and going off to things such as the Homebrew Computer Club—Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were among them—made significant developments that ultimately had spin-offs for the whole culture of California. That was not necessarily in the curriculum, and it could not necessarily have been easily incorporated.

The design and technology sector has genuine fears of the educational world. The principal fear is that, in slimming down the curriculum, technology may suffer. In other words, if we reduce the demands of the national curriculum in total, which most people would support, technology may drop out or be put on the back burner. Some people argue that the absence of a standard assessment test or rigorous measurement will not do much to improve the overall quality of the subject. There are complementary and opposed fears that heavy-handed state intervention or diktat will have perverse effects, particularly if, as we all believe, design and technology is a blend of both technical skills and genuine creativity.

There are certain dilemmas involved in ensuring that present good practice is further built on and developed. Ofsted has recorded significant progress in recent years, but I worry that that might be lost in curriculum revisions simply because it is not fully assessed or seen to be assessed.

I turn to two other connected issues. One is the speech by the Secretary of State today on the state of the ICT curriculum. I entirely echo his sentiments. In a Guardian article I wrote after tabling an early-day motion, I said:

“we will end up with second-rate education for pupils, who will have no understanding about how IT is developed or is likely to progress. The future of IT in business in the UK is not going to be just about using PowerPoint presentations.”

Pupils must

“become innovators of software, rather than people who just punch data into keyboards.”

That article was published in 2007, so I like to think that I am five years ahead of my time.

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

The picture that my hon. Friend paints is an accurate and grim one. There are 100,000 IT vacancies in this country at the moment, and the people are not there to fill those posts, because the number of people taking computer science courses at university has halved since the year 2000, and the number of drop-outs has risen. That is because the basic science in schools is not being taught, which is why I think the Secretary of State’s speech today is timely, if not long overdue, as my hon. Friend would say.

[John Pugh]

I certainly subscribe to the general view that a crash-course in Boolean algebra is probably more useful to the future of IT in this country than learning how to use Word or any other Microsoft product, but the insistence that ICT and technology education are about using applications shows how sometimes, when the state or organisations associated with it weigh in, they can get things wrong.

A lot of what we have is in part, although not entirely, a consequence of distinctly poor procurement, encouraged by the defunct Becta—Bringing Educational Creativity to All—which the Secretary of State had the wisdom to abolish. There are lessons to be learned. I genuinely think that when we intervene to advise schools, we must accept that schools, from their own practice, might wish, for good reasons, to be diverse and different, rather than aligning themselves with some common curriculum idea that could perish as rapidly as it emerged.

The second issue is a little contentious as well. Part of what I wanted to say today and might not have expressed adequately involves gender. I suggest, tentatively, that boys in general might benefit a little more than girls from good technical education. That might play some part in addressing the problem of children leaving schools without any qualifications, a disproportionate number of whom are boys.

In saying that, I accept that girls are and can be excellent technologists, and that technology is much more varied than the sorts of thing that boys first fixate on. I accept that gender is a spectrum and that boys and girls are all different. I also accept that the Department for Education has invested in efforts to prove that I am speaking nonsense, and that what I say can be both challenged and refuted. I have studied the Department for Education’s website, which has some excellent documents, largely written by female members of staff, suggesting that much of what I will go on to say is mythology, and that in fact boys and girls approach the curriculum in broadly similar ways. The similarities are far more important and prevalent than the differences, but I am not convinced by the argument that there are no differences. Although some views can be challenged, they are not necessarily refuted.

It is a basic biological fact that male and female brains are structurally different—males and females are, obviously, hormonally different as well—and that, irrespective of social conditioning, the two behave quite differently. That can be evidenced not only by anecdote, but by the performance of girls at any linguistic task; their abilities are far in excess of the abilities of boys, both in the UK and elsewhere. We have to recognise that and ask ourselves whether technology, if properly construed, might do something to balance out the attainment levels of the sexes in that respect. I make that proposal in the knowledge that, to some extent, it is controversial, but I think that it would benefit from some examination.

The essential problem remains that if we want design and technology to be embodied adequately in the curriculum, as we do, and if we genuinely want to spread good practice as best we can, how will we do it within a narrowing curriculum, and in an environment where teachers face a variety of demands? Moreover, how will we do it at a stage at which it is immediately relevant to children? My supposition is that some children who attend primary school, and who are not naturally bookish or who do not come from bookish homes, may find it difficult at times to engage with what they are offered and therefore detach themselves from the curriculum. That will eventually lead to poor attainment and to them being transferred to secondary school as underperformers. Giving them a series of other activities simply because they are not very good at what the school has to offer is less likely to be successful than finding out at an early stage where their talents lie and giving them an opportunity to explore them through design and technology. I believe that that opportunity exists, and we have to capitalise on it.

I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response, particularly on how he sees D and T fitting into the curriculum and its revision, as planned.

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (John Pugh) on securing this important debate and on his interesting opening speech. He need not apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) or me for a second contribution on educational matters—these are important issues and it is always a pleasure to hear what he has to say.

My hon. Friend the Member for Southport is right to say—we need to reiterate this—that design and technology is absolutely not just an alternative for those young people who are not academically inclined; it is an important subject in its own right. Indeed, the expert panel that we appointed to look into evidence from around the world for our national curriculum review recommended in the report that we published before Christmas that design and technology should become a basic curriculum subject, with greater freedom for schools to teach what they want, free from the constrictions of a programme of study, to encourage innovation and an individual approach. The national curriculum review will consider that before providing final recommendations to the Secretary of State.

My hon. Friend has strong views about the importance of technology in primary schools and schools in general, and has voiced his concerns about the risk that too rigid a policy on the provision of technology to schools can stifle the very innovation that we all seek. Of course, technology can never supplant good teaching, but the effective use of digital technology can support good teaching and help raise standards in schools. We need to support the effective and innovative use of technology in schools, with good practice being developed and shared between them. That means not only exposing children to technology and encouraging them to feel comfortable with it, but promoting technology as a useful tool in itself and as a means to help develop general teaching in schools.

We do not seek to micro-manage the application of technology. As we stressed in the schools White Paper, it is for individual schools to identify their own needs and to address them as they think best. We need to encourage and enable teachers to take better advantage of the great opportunities presented by the burgeoning range of digital technologies, and to use them to improve their teaching and efficiency.

As my hon. Friend has said, the Secretary of State emphasised the fact that technology is a priority in his speech to the Schools Network conference last month and at the BETT technology show this morning. Like me, he wants to encourage the innovative use of technology both within and beyond the classroom. We need to equip our pupils with the technical skills and the knowledge to meet the needs of the 21st-century workplace.

This country has an exemplary record on the use of technology in schools. There is on average one computer for every seven primary school pupils, and one for every three in secondary schools. Primary schools spend an average of £12,400 each year on information and communications technology, and an additional sum of almost £1,500 on software and content. No one should doubt the importance that we attach to the use of technology to support our teachers.

I recognise that some will fear that the passing of Becta, to which my hon. Friend referred, has left a gap in the provision to schools of specialist advice on technology. We are in a period of transition, but this should be seen as an opportunity for the commercial sector and professional organisations to adapt their services to fill that gap.

My hon. Friend has spoken about the curriculum. We are in the process of reviewing both the national curriculum and the suite of qualifications. I think that we all agree that the current ICT curriculum, to which he has referred, is in need of an overhaul. It is outdated and needs to be reformed. We see the teaching of technology-related knowledge and skills as an important part of a broad and balanced curriculum that schools offer their pupils, but it is also our belief that, in a fast-moving and continuously evolving area such as ICT and technology in general, central Government are not necessarily best placed to define the knowledge that pupils need to acquire. As my hon. Friend has said of the early career of Bill Gates, he did not learn the skills that he used to build the Microsoft empire from technology lessons at school. He had a general, good education and he used it to develop his own work in understanding computers and software.

I have been fortunate over the past few months to meet representatives of those who work in the industry, particularly the ICT industry, who are concerned about the lack of a rigorous foundation in programming and the consequences of that for the wider economy. They are persuasive advocates and their detailed submissions to the national curriculum review have been very welcome.

As my hon. Friend has mentioned, the Secretary of State addressed the BETT technology show and took the opportunity to announce that the Department for Education will shortly open a consultation on the withdrawal of the existing national curriculum programmes of study for ICT from September this year. This is an interim measure that is intended to give schools more flexibility to develop their own programmes of study to meet the needs of their pupils more effectively. This move may have come as a surprise to many people, and we recognise that we are taking a wholly new approach.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Gibb]

I will happily give way to my hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Select Committee on Education.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to the Minister. I, too, have met, in recent months, representatives who have made an impressive case. Can he explain—because I do not know the answer—why, until last year, there was not a single computer science GCSE? All we had were programmes of study and qualifications in, as he has said, operating programmes. The actual educational material was not in the courses. Why was that? How did we get into that position, and how will we make sure that we will not allow such things to happen in future?

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend is right and that situation undermines the status of ICT. We have seen that in the GCSE figures. In 2000-01, something like 95,200 people took the GCSE in ICT, and last year that figure went down to 31,800, so something has gone very wrong with the content of the specification in ICT GCSE and in the programmes of study that were in recent reviews and that have led to this problem. There is a widespread belief that the existing programmes of study for the subject lack ambition, and that they serve to inhibit schools from engaging with innovative and inspiring ICT initiatives. We have heard that from so many sources—from teachers and pupils, from industry and, indeed, from my hon. Friend just now.

Some of the biggest names in the computer-related industries have told us that, in its current form, ICT is turning pupils away. That, in turn, is hampering the development of more relevant ICT-related GCSEs, with a focus on the more rigorous disciplines of computer science programming. That has had disastrous consequences for our digital industries, which face ever-increasing competition from emerging economies all around the world.

Eben Upton, a computer science academic at Cambridge university, was reported in yesterday’s Guardian as saying of applicants for degree courses whom he was interviewing:

“None of them seemed to know enough about what a computer really was or how it worked…Children were learning about applications, which are pretty low-value skills. They weren’t being properly equipped to think about how computers are programmed…Computing wasn’t being seen as the exciting, vibrant subject it should be at school—it had become lack-lustre and even boring.”

Our proposed change to the ICT curriculum will offer a chance for the subject to be rejuvenated, freeing teachers to explore and innovate, and hopefully to inspire a new wave of pupils to pursue computing and ICT. We need highly-skilled programmers if we are going to continue to compete in today’s and tomorrow’s markets, which will be increasingly dependent on, and driven by, the new digital technologies.

That is why the Secretary of State made the announcement that he did this morning. Pending the outcome of the national curriculum review, ICT will remain compulsory at all key stages in schools and it will be taught at each stage of the curriculum. The existing programmes of study will no longer be compulsory, but they will still be readily available for reference purposes on the web, although no school in England will be required to follow them. Subject to the consultation, from September this year, all schools will be able to use whatever resources they choose to teach the subject, and there is a wide range of excellent materials to choose from. I know that industry and specialist organisations, such as the British Computer Society, e-skills UK and Naace are already working on an alternative ICT and computing curriculum.

Education Bill

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

Yes, of course, but we are talking about the effect on individuals, and if there is just one case of someone suffering such publicity about what turns out to be a false allegation, that is one case too many, as such allegations can have devastating consequences on teachers both socially and career-wise. The publicity that just one such case receives also reverberates throughout the teaching profession, undermining teachers’ morale and making them unduly cautious about maintaining discipline in our classrooms. If we are interested in the welfare of pupils in our schools, we have to make sure they are taught in ordered and safe environments, free from bullying and other disruptive activities.

I thought, however, that the hon. Gentleman was concerned in Committee less about the prevalence of such allegations and more about the question of whether these provisions should be extended to other sectors of the workforce. We have proceeded extremely cautiously, taking into account the fact that we must preserve press freedom as well as the integrity of teachers and their being innocent until proven otherwise.

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

As my hon. Friend knows, I am sympathetic to the Government’s intentions in this regard as well, but I am concerned about press freedom and I would be grateful if he could set out the case for teachers alone being given this exemption from publicity. Such allegations could be equally devastating to members of a different profession. Might this provision prove to be the thin end of the wedge in that there could be a great deal more press censorship and the public will not be able to know about allegations made against people in their local community?

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Education Committee, makes a good point, but teachers are very much on the front line of maintaining discipline in the classroom. We conducted a survey of 116 local authority designated officers—LADOs—and its findings support the view that teachers are particularly vulnerable to false allegations. Some 23% of allegations against staff in all sectors were made against teachers, and almost half of those were found to be unsubstantiated, malicious or unfounded. The proportion that related to other staff in schools was significantly low: from recollection I think that it was about 14%, compared with the 23% that applied to teachers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gibb]

I am happy to think further about those issues. However, the point of the proposal is that it is difficult for schools to achieve from Ofsted the accolade of outstanding. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) have visited schools that are categorised by Ofsted as outstanding. It is clear why those schools have been so categorised. I was at a school last week in Wiltshire that had been categorised by Ofsted as outstanding in all 27 categories. I believe that it was the first school to be given such a grading.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The Minister is absolutely right to have proportionate inspection. We need to be careful to ensure that outstanding schools that may end up coasting or dropping their standards are picked up. If the shadow Minister is suggesting that it would be a better policy to inspect every school, however outstanding, all the time, he is completely wrong. A proportionate approach with the right safeguards and triggers in place and with constant review of those triggers is the right way to go. The Government are right on this issue.

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend is right that one has to be proportionate in these issues. Ultimately, this is a matter for the chief inspector of schools. If the results of an outstanding school start to decline, as was hinted at by the hon. Member for Cardiff West, it will be picked up in the risk assessment. He has made important points and we will, of course, reflect on them in the usual way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Graham Stuart]

In the Lords, the Government accepted various amendments to limit the impact of such fines on global companies, which is welcome, but the measure was introduced with very little consultation. What is the evidence that we need fines to get awarding bodies to comply with Ofqual? What is the evidence that there is a problem to which fines provide an answer?

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend will have seen over the summer some of the errors in the exams. They are unacceptable. We believe that the awarding organisations should not make the quantum and seriousness of those errors again. Other regulators have such powers, and if he bears with me, I will try to set out why we introduced those provisions.

The provisions in Lords amendments 16 and 17 are broadly consistent with the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Act 2008. As many hon. Members will know, including my hon. Friend, the Act provides many other regulators with a toolkit of sanctions that are risk based, consistent, proportionate and effective. Ofqual currently has only two types of sanction available to it: the power to direct an awarding organisation; and the dramatic, nuclear option of partial or full withdrawal of recognition. In addition, before Ofqual can use its current enforcement powers, it must be the case that an awarding organisation’s failure to comply with a condition has prejudiced, or is likely to prejudice, either the proper award of a qualification or students who might reasonably be expected to seek to obtain such a qualification awarded by that organisation.

The Government believe that those tests unnecessarily limit Ofqual’s powers and could reduce its capacity to take timely and proportionate enforcement action. Removing the tests and giving Ofqual a power to fine will help to prevent the kind of mistakes in exam papers that we saw last summer, which undermine the hard work of the pupils who sat them. That is the purpose of Lords amendment 16, and Lords amendment 17 confers similar powers on Welsh Ministers as the regulators of Welsh qualifications.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the Government’s thinking, but I am not entirely persuaded. The currency on which awarding bodies trade is their reputation. Notwithstanding the problems this summer, they needed no fine or massive regulatory hammer to bring them to book. All awarding bodies would immediately seek to improve their systems following such errors—I believe they did so. It feels as if we are introducing sanctions that are unnecessary for the workings of that market. The Government have pledged to eschew unnecessary regulations unless there is an overwhelming case, but I am not sure that the errors last summer make that overwhelming case.

[Mr Gibb]

I must disagree with my hon. Friend, because the seriousness of the errors was not just in their number—I believe there were 13 errors in exam papers this summer. What was particularly serious was the fact that when we asked awarding bodies to check that there were no further errors, they affirmed that they had done so or that they would do so, but then new errors appeared. That is why what happened this summer was so serious rather than the initial errors in the papers.

On reputation and the market, all the main awarding bodies had errors, so there is no market mechanism—no one of them could say, “We had no errors but the others did.” My third argument is that all regulators have such powers. We cannot rely on the nuclear option of ending accreditation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

I was indeed going to be generous—about the powers of persuasion of our Front Benchers in the House of Lords. They persuaded the Government—more effectively than my hon. Friends and I in the Commons did—to change their mind on one or two issues, which I shall come to in a moment.

The Minister has taken the trouble to talk us through the Lords amendments, as he said he would, but some questions emerge from what he said that, if he has the leave of the House to speak later in the debate, I hope he will answer. Lords amendments 1 to 4 relate to clause 8 and the Secretary of State’s functions in relation to teachers. The Bill abolishes the General Teaching Council for England. I note that some criticisms have been made of its operations. One year after the publication of the White Paper, “The Importance of Teaching”, in which the Secretary of State said—I agree with him about this—that there was

“no calling more noble, no profession more vital and no service more important than teaching,”

it is significant that he has taken the opportunity to abolish the professional body.

The Bill transfers some of the General Teaching Council’s functions to the Secretary of State, among which is the power to prohibit a teacher from teaching. In Committee in this House, we debated an Opposition amendment—which, surprisingly, was not successful—that would have required the Secretary of State to keep a list of persons prohibited from teaching. I note that Lord Hill confirmed in the other place that the Government believe that a database of teachers prohibited from teaching will be established. We tabled amendments here and in the other place to require the Secretary of State to keep a register of qualified teachers—again, to our surprise, without success—but Lord Hill indicated that he would consider the matter, saying,

“we have been persuaded by concerns raised in this House and elsewhere that there is a genuine need for the Government to help schools to know who has qualified teacher status and who has passed induction.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 18 October 2011; Vol. 731, c. 257.]

That is welcome. He went on to confirm that there would be an online database from 2012.

Another concern is the proposal to give employers discretion over which cases of misconduct—those that might lead to the prohibition of a teacher—to refer to the Secretary of State. Again, colleagues in both Houses raised concerns about transparency and consistency. I welcome Lord Hill’s notification to Baroness Jones that the Government are developing advice on the new system to help professional conduct hearing panels determine when a teacher should be prohibited from the profession and that such advice will be available publicly.

Lords amendments 1 to 4 would enable the Secretary of State to issue interim prohibition orders—quickly imposed orders that prevent a teacher from undertaking work while the Secretary of State is considering their case—where he considers it in the public interest to do so, and they must be reviewed every six months. The amendments were tabled in Grand Committee in the House of Lords, but I do not think they were debated there. Their rationale was not given, so when the Minister replies he might like to emphasise what the rationale was, what the amendments will achieve, why they are so important and perhaps why they were not included in the first draft.

Lords amendments 5 to 15 relate to restrictions on the reporting of alleged offences by teachers, about which we had an exchange earlier. We have supported the Government’s intention to help protect teachers from malicious allegations, but we have also been keen to ensure that the provisions are properly scrutinised, as there is a possibility of unintended consequences.

The Lords amendments would extend the reach of clause 13 to cover tentative allegations against teachers. As the Minister rightly pointed out, following advice from the trade unions and others, we argued that the clause’s reach could be extended so that the restrictions apply not only to teachers in schools but to other school staff. The Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart)—I am sure it is only a matter of time before he becomes a right hon. Gentleman—mentioned this earlier. In our view, other school staff and staff in further education colleges should be included. The impact of a publicly reported unproven allegation, which the Minister eloquently described, applies to those people, too, and is potentially equally damaging. I understand the Government’s general desire to limit the number of people on whom the provisions will have an impact, but I do not understand why teachers in FE colleges should not be covered when teachers dealing with young people of the same age group in sixth forms—quite possibly teaching exactly the same subjects—are covered. This seems to be an inconsistency in the Bill.

I note what the Minister said about extending the provisions to cover tentative allegations. I make it clear that we do not object to that, but we ask him to be absolutely clear about his motives for including the amendments at this stage. Does he have any further thoughts on the desirability of extending the scope to include non-teaching staff and all staff in FE colleges? If he has any compelling reasons why those staff should be excluded, we would like to hear them. Having listened to him earlier, I am not sure what his evidence is for excluding these staff from the scope of the provisions. I understand why he might want to limit the number of people covered—perhaps that is why he has put a ring fence around teachers—but I do not understand the rationale for failing to include the other staff.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman talks about extending the provision to other staff in schools. Do he and his party believe that it should be extended further to other workers? For example, a social worker dealing with children at risk could be equally devastated by publicity surrounding allegations against them—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The disadvantage of the hon. Gentleman’s intervention was that, interesting though it was, it bore no relation to the amendment we are discussing.

[Kevin Brennan]

As always, the hon. Gentleman makes a thoughtful point but, as you have confirmed, Mr Speaker, it unfortunately falls outside the scope of the Bill.

Lords amendments 16 and 17 deal with Ofqual’s enforcement powers, which the Minister mentioned earlier. The Labour Government began the reform of the examination system in 2007 with the “Confidence in Standards” White Paper. It proposed the establishment of an independent regulator, Ofqual, which would be separate from the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency and would be able to fine exam bodies. Currently, the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 allows Ofqual only to direct an examination board to change its practices and, as the Minister said, to withdraw recognition.

I agree that it would be helpful for Ofqual to have more sanctions at its disposal to ensure that examination boards minimise their errors, but to an extent I share the concern expressed by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness. This proposal has appeared at a late stage. I know that Christmas is approaching, but, as I am sure the Government Whips will confirm, using Bills as Christmas trees on which to hang whatever a Government wish to hang on them is not always a good way of legislating, and I had thought the Government had pledged not to do that.

[Mr Stuart]

As I debated the abolition of independent schools only a couple of weeks ago with the hon. Gentleman, who supported the motion, it is a pleasure to find something on which we can agree. He is right: we need to hear more from the Government to justify the measure. It is like the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991. Legislating instantly following an incident in the summer, rather than checking and thinking through the principles behind the proposed legislation, could be a mistake.

[Kevin Brennan]

Let us hope that this will not be another Dangerous Dogs Act.

I am not going to suggest that Labour has not been guilty in the past of hanging proposals on to Bills as they progress through Parliament, and, as a former Government Whip, I am not going to suggest that I have not occasionally tried to lecture Ministers about the practice, but it often causes problems further down the line. We can understand how it happens.

On 22 June 2011, a newspaper headline announced “Cameron promises ‘tough action’ over GCSE and A-level exam blunders”, and a sub-headline added “Prime minister says mistakes are unacceptable and assures Ofqual will rectify system to prevent further errors”. That was converted into a panic in Government, which rippled into the Department for Education, and the Secretary of State said that the Prime Minister was exercised about the issue. “What can we do? Oh, we have a Bill going through Parliament: perhaps we can dream up a few clauses to put into it. Wasn’t there a proposal at some stage to introduce fines? Let us use that: it is already half written.” However, the proposal was never properly scrutinised. It should have been subjected to proper pre-legislative scrutiny.

As I have said, we are not going to oppose the amendments, but I want to record our concern that something that the Government said they would not do is happening now, before our very eyes.

--- Later in debate ---

On academies and issues relating to land, some of the amendments show the complexities of land issues in education. No doubt, the Government will have to amend the legislation in a year or so as more problems are thrown up, especially with the conversion policy, as more and more land that has hitherto been owned or managed for an institution that was established by a local authority is transferred out of public ownership and management. It is likely that where public resources have gone into developing and enhancing land, resources might fall permanently into the private sector. In effect, amendments 89 to 91 seem to mean that if an academy is established on private land, any public money that goes into the land or buildings on the land will remain in the private sector. Will the Minister confirm whether that interpretation is correct and will he explain to the House the effect of those amendments and why they are being introduced? Will he also explain the complexities regarding private finance initiatives and academies?

[Mr Graham Stuart]

It is a pleasure to participate in the debate and to see so many members of the Bill Committee present. I know that a lot of effort has gone into improving the Bill and I am delighted that their noble lordships have made many constructive contributions. I am also delighted that Ministers have been prepared to listen—as, to be fair, they have throughout the process—and have made amendments accordingly.

One issue that I raised in Committee concerned schools’ discretionary referral of teachers who have been sacked for misconduct. In the other place, Lord Hill said that we could be assured that all the most serious cases would be referred, and I would be grateful if the Minister could help me to understand how that will necessarily be the case if discretion lies with the school. I am happy to take an intervention now if he is able to give me that information, but if he is not I shall move on.

Interim immediate barring orders will be in the hands of the Secretary of State for cases in which the concern is sufficiently great, and where someone can be referred, we are talking about a great sanction. Such sanctions are probably appropriate for teachers who have been, or who are suspected of having been, guilty of gross misconduct, but how do we ensure consistency? One can imagine a case in which two teachers have behaved in exactly the same way but in which one of them is let go by the school and that is it—they go off and their CV is doubtless marked and harmed but fundamentally they can carry on with their career—whereas another is referred upwards into the national machinery, which Ministers themselves accept is cumbersome and comes with heavy sanction. I am not yet entirely satisfied that there will be justice and equality of treatment in such circumstances, and I ask the Minister to respond to that point later.

In respect of reporting restrictions, the shadow schools Minister is right to say that all of us who have focused on the provision have worried about its possible unintended consequences. We all recognise the vulnerability of teachers to malicious allegations, which can spread from chatter around the school yard to chatter around the community. If an allegation is formally made and appears in a newspaper, that can have a devastating effect on a teacher who might have dedicated their life to supporting and educating young people. All Committee members, and everyone to whom I have spoken on this issue, sympathise with the Government’s approach, but questions remain. The Newspaper Society submission may not have caused my views to undergo a complete U-turn, but it raised a lot of questions as to where this protection should stop. The Opposition suggested it should be extended to other teachers, and I have mentioned social workers. I have yet to grasp the point of principle that justifies limiting this provision to teachers alone, rather than its covering many other professions as well, which might result in the public losing their right to know what is going on.

[Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that even if such allegations are not reported in the media, they may get out into the community and may influence head teachers when they make decisions about appointments? The operation of these provisions will therefore need to be examined after they are put in place.

[Mr Stuart]

I agree that we will have to keep a close eye on the provision, but I hope it does the job it is intended to do in a fair and just way, and we can give Ministers a great deal of credit for having listened to the debate in the Lords and for having come forward with amendments to ensure that it does, indeed, work in the fairest possible way.

In respect of exemptions, there is an anomaly which I highlighted through an amendment in Committee. Further education lecturers and teachers in sixth-form colleges, who come under the same administrative banding of FE for these purposes, do not receive the same level of protection as schoolteachers. To reiterate the point made by the shadow Minister, a lecturer and a schoolteacher might be teaching the same people the same subject in the same kind of classroom, yet the lecturer will not have this protection while the schoolteacher will.

[Kevin Brennan]

Further, a school student might be attending an FE college as part of their school sixth-form studies, and the regulations would be different in those two institutions.

[Mr Stuart]

Yes, and Alison Wolf suggested in her report that more 14 to 16-year-olds should attend FE colleges, so this provision would affect them as well as 17 to 18-year-olds, for whom the provision might be less relevant. I hope Ministers will think about this anomaly and find a way of equalising the situation.

The Government make what seems like a very reasonable case on strengthening Ofqual’s enforcement powers. Ofqual does not have as wide-ranging powers as other regulators, and there is a very quick step from its making requirements on awarding bodies to the nuclear option of removing their ability to provide awards at all. It therefore seems reasonable to have more moderate powers in the middle, such as the power to make fines, but this Government are committed not to following such easy logic unless there is a very strong—nay, an overwhelming—case for giving new powers to some non-governmental, unelected quango, such as Ofqual, so in an intervention I asked the Minister to make the case. He made a brave effort, as he always does, being a highly esteemed colleague and an excellent schools Minister, but he really did not make the case.

We did not hear about the number of times that awarding bodies have deliberately flouted Ofqual’s requirements—that OCR, when required to do something by Ofqual, just ignored it, left it as long as possible and did it only if it felt like it; or that the lack of anything other than a nuclear button meant that OCR did not want to comply.

Following this summer’s examination paper errors fiasco, no one was more embarrassed and determined to put it right than the awarding bodies. They collectively and individually felt that it was embarrassing, and they wanted to put it right as quickly as they could. The numbers were somewhat higher than in previous years, but the attention paid to them this year was rather greater than the increase in problems, and I know at least one case in which there was only one error in 100,000 questions.

I want to see all such errors eliminated and to know that those bodies are straining every sinew to put the situation right, but I am not yet convinced that a fining regime, however conveniently it may fulfil the Prime Minister’s promise to do something about the situation, is the right approach.

[Mr Gibb]

rose—

[Damian Hinds]

rose—

[Mr Stuart]

I give way to the Minister.

[Mr Gibb]

The measure is about incentives. If a not-for-profit or commercial operation seeks to ensure that there are no errors, the exponential cost of ensuring that there are zero errors is a cost to that organisation, so the fining powers provide an equal and opposite cost to the organisations that do not incur those costs to do their best to eliminate errors. That is the purpose of the fining provisions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to the Minister for that comment. Perhaps he did mean what he just said, and it may be possible to create an examinations regime in which there are zero—no—mistakes, but the cost of examinations, which this Government inherited from the previous one, is already entirely outwith the value that those qualifications bring to this country. Our system is already over-reliant on examinations, and aspiring to zero errors—ever, in any examination question—will have a deleterious impact on their quality.

Awarding bodies may seek to change the questions that they ask to make it less likely that they ever include an error, and, if the measure suggests that it is unacceptable for them ever to include an error in any examination question, it will be extraordinarily expensive and impact in all sorts of unintended ways.

As Chairman of the Education Committee, I am not yet convinced that awarding bodies are so careless of quality, whatever the errors this summer, that we need such an incentive to make them improve. We need a balanced and proportionate approach, but I fear that the Minister’s words, suggesting that there should be zero errors ever, will lead to something quite different.

[Damian Hinds]

I wonder what level of error Japan, or the other strongest education systems in the world, are targeting. However, notwithstanding my hon. Friend’s point about the relatively small number of errors in this country, I wonder also whether he agrees that following those errors there is a problem with public confidence in examining bodies, and that, when it comes to qualifications, trust and confidence are absolutely all.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend makes my point for me: public confidence, particularly as far as a political party in power and a Prime Minister who wants to be seen to be doing something are concerned, is all, so they have come forward, as the previous Government did all too often, with a legislative response to something that needs no such response, and on the basis of no proper or considered analysis of the situation. We had 13 years of vast increase in legislative provision, but very little increase in public confidence, so I say, “Don’t stick it in a law because it looks good in this week’s papers; actually think for the long term.” If we had done so, we might not have introduced this provision.

[Richard Fuller]

Many of us have strained to have zero errors in exams. I note you achieved that on many occasions, Mr Deputy Speaker, but it is a strain for the rest of us. We therefore understand the difficulties faced by the bodies that are setting exams in reaching that accomplishment. However, I am listening intently to my hon. Friend. Does he agree that the Lords amendments could have an inverse consequence? If we set a cost for the errors made, we will essentially replace a self-correcting mechanism whereby bodies seek to achieve the highest levels because of the risk to their reputation, with a mechanism whereby the errors made are considered to be a part of the cost of doing business. That stick will end up with someone saying, “Well, if we make three or four errors, we can afford it—we’ll get away with it.” However, nothing can reimburse an organisation that has lost its reputation.

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making my point both more succinctly and fluently that I was.

The Government may not necessarily be wrong, but we have not heard the argument. There are many awarding bodies in this country, and perhaps some have flouted and ignored Ofqual’s requirements because they can afford to do so as a cost of doing business. If there is such a case, we need to introduce the sanctions to bring those bodies into line and ensure that public confidence and quality is delivered. However, I have not heard that argument; I have only heard arguments about public confidence. As I say, that does not seem a good reason to legislate.

The explanatory notes state:

“Subsection (5) of the new clause would insert into ASCLA 2009”—

the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act—

“new sections 152A to 152C which confer on Ofqual the power to require a recognised body on which a sanction has been imposed to pay the costs incurred by Ofqual in relation to imposing the sanction.”

So those bodies have to pay not only the sanction, but the costs related to the sanction. I may be a bit of a cynic about quangos, but if they see a way of buttressing their income, their number of employees and their powers, and they can get someone else to pay for it, I suggest that they will be more inclined to go down that road. I do not want such bodies doing overstretch.

The explanatory notes go on to state:

“The costs concerned would include the costs of carrying out an investigation”—

ooh! you can’t be too careful there—and doubtless those bodies would want to get quite a lot of people involved. The explanatory notes then refer to “relevant administration costs”—load on a bit more for that—

“and the costs of obtaining expert advice.”

This is an open, blank cheque to Ofqual to impose charges on awarding bodies if it sees fit to do so. Personally, I would like non-elected quangos kept on a fairly strict and short rein unless it is appropriate to do otherwise.

[Richard Fuller]

My hon. Friend has already alerted the House to the risk that the Lords amendments will result in the examination bodies treating accuracy as a cost of doing business. He is now alerting us to the risk that that may be an open-ended cost of doing business. Does he agree that the risk of the amendments is that we are replacing a self-correcting mechanism with a bureaucratic structure that has unlimited costs to the examination bodies?

[Mr Stuart]

The measures seem terribly redolent of provisions I saw in the House during the previous Parliament. I had hoped to see fewer such measures in this Parliament. My hon. Friend is right: we believe in creating the right framework and allowing the incentives within that to do their work. As far as awarding bodies are concerned, those incentives are correctly framed and their incentive to do the right thing is right. If Ofqual feels in the future that those bodies are paying insufficient attention to reducing errors in examinations, it will be able to say so. If awarding bodies then fail to comply with the direction suggested by Ofqual, that is the time to come here and discuss the matter. Ministers would be able to give instance after instance where awarding bodies had failed to act on the very clear and reasonable directions given to it by Ofqual.

[Louise Mensch (Corby) (Con)]

I am fascinated by my hon. Friend’s speech. I understand that he feels zero errors is too high a threshold, but will he tell the House if he thinks there is an acceptable level of errors that Ofqual might be able to specify, or is he uncomfortable with labelling any level of errors as unacceptable?

[Mr Stuart]

Conservative Members have found that artificial targets led to precisely the kind of mechanistic, cost-of-business approach that my hon. Friend speaks about so well. That is why we set up a body of experts such as Ofqual to work within a framework, also established, of different awarding bodies wherein together they come up with the right approach. I am not sure that it is necessarily right to set a percentage. If there were a consistent period in which the awarding bodies showed themselves to be careless, or if we found on international comparison that ours were not up to scratch compared with those elsewhere—whatever the aspiration of the Japanese examination system, I doubt that it delivers 100% accuracy in all exams—it would be better if we trusted Ofqual to work with the bodies without necessarily bringing more bureaucratic sanctions into the process. Given the terms of subsection (5) of the new clause, there seems to be little incentive for Ofqual to control the costs of this, and it may simply add further to the expense of our qualifications system.

[Stephen McPartland (Stevenage) (Con)]

These awarding bodies are very large businesses; I believe that the largest is worth about a quarter of a billion pounds. Does my hon. Friend agree that they no doubt have legal insurance that would meet the cost of these interventions?

[Mr Stuart]

That may well be the case, but if they do have such insurance, the premium will reflect the cost of doing businesses. In all contexts, whenever anyone suggests that having insurance somehow means that there is not a problem, it usually means that there is a broad raising of costs across the piece, which is something that we should minimise. One of the changes that was made in the Lords and has now come before us recognises that some education awarding bodies are part of educational companies globally, that there should be a cap on how much they can be fined, and that that cap should be relevant to the amount of business that that organisation does in this country rather than in global operations. That is welcome.

We now have a repeal of the repeal of the duty to co-operate. The shadow Minister was right to say that we are glad to hear confirmation that this partnership working can continue. I am also glad to hear from the Minister, citing his noble Friend Lord Hill, that the Government are committed to that form of partnership. In all the high-profile cases, and others, of children who are found to be neglected, it turns out that people at the agencies have not talked to each other, and we need to ensure that they do. It may be possible that a particular duty to co-operate in a certain way leads to a mechanistic response. If there is another way of framing the whole conversation that encourages it without there being a bureaucratic or legislative solution, that is something that I would be open to, but until we have a convincing argument as to how the overall picture will work, it is a good thing that schools co-operate with the other bodies.

On admissions, we have the change whereby anyone can refer a case to the regulator. I assume that the impact assessment has taken account of this, but I would be grateful if the Minister could comment on that. If anyone can refer to the regulator on admissions, how many more referrals do we expect? If other hon. Members’ caseloads are anything like mine, they will know that an awful lot of parents are concerned about admission arrangements and many of them go through the appeals process. I wonder how many would seek to question and make complaints to the admissions regulator using the power in the Bill.

Again referring back to the remarks of the shadow Minister, can the Minister give the House a reassurance on the time frame for an admissions body to correct itself? Is it really possible that we could have a 10-month delay? One of the dangers in this place is that so many Members are so high-minded. The Minister is one of the most high-minded, and there is a tendency to assume that all others in the system share his ethics, commitment and fairness. Perhaps I have led the wrong life, but I have met many people who are capable of spite. It would seem to me a mistake to have a system that allowed somebody who had appealed and won to be thwarted in an act of spite by a school because it could use the rules to avoid acting in time to provide justice to the person who had brought the complaint.

On Ofsted inspections, as I said earlier, I welcome the Government’s proportionate approach. I would be grateful if the Minister talked us through the implications of the reduction in Ofsted’s budget. Perhaps surprisingly for some Government Members, the previous Government brought in pretty strong reductions in Ofsted’s budget. It is greatly to the credit of the then chief inspector that Ofsted coped with that without a discernible drop in quality. The budget is now going down even further—from well over £200 million, it is dropping to about £143 million, from memory. I am interested to know how that will impact on Ofsted’s ability to provide inspections.

The noble Lord Hill said in the other place that 72 outstanding schools had had inspections triggered by Ofsted’s risk assessment process. That meant that about 2% of outstanding schools had been inspected in the period. He said that it had been agreed with Ofsted that the aim should be to inspect at least 5% of outstanding schools. I wonder how able Ofsted will be to deliver that 250% increase in workload just in the area of outstanding schools.

In winding up, the Minister might also like to comment on primary schools, because all schools are not the same. It has always been of concern to me, when talking about greater autonomy and academies, that primary schools are fundamentally more fragile than secondaries. The departure of a head or a chair of governors, both of whom might contribute to a school being outstanding, can lead very quickly to a school’s standards falling. I would like a reassurance that there are different approaches for primaries and secondaries, for example in the speed of reaction and the attention given to certain factors, such as a change of head at a primary school being given greater weight and being seen as more of a trigger to get Ofsted to come in and check that all is well.

With those remarks, I will leave it there. I hope that the Minister will respond in due course.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Fuller]

I appreciate my hon. Friend’s intervention, although with respect, I will stick tightly to the Lords amendments on this issue. She gives another example of how the duty on schools and local authorities to co-operate has evolved. Given that their noble Lords went so far in putting that duty back in the Bill, may I encourage the Minister and his ministerial colleagues to think further and more deeply about the evolving landscape and what that is likely to mean over the coming years?

I thank the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) for his comments about school admissions, which many of us share, and I thank the Minister for the changes that have been proposed or made. If we wish to see a substantial change and more liberalisation of schools in terms of where the authority lies, we should be aware that most families and parents want schools’ admissions policies to be clear and fair in their communities. That does not necessarily mean that they have to be uniform, although many of us would indeed hope to see uniform entrance policies, particularly with free schools, because that would reinforce the success of this new idea and new policy. I therefore very much welcome Lords amendments 20 and 21. I have listened to different points of view on free schools, and I know that support for this radical idea among Opposition Members has been “on again/off again”. Indeed, it would be interesting to know whether those on the Opposition Front Bench are “on” today or “off”.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Which one is on and which one is off?

[Richard Fuller]

Indeed. I will happily listen to the hon. Member for Cardiff West if he wishes to—[Interruption.] I can see that those on the Opposition Front Bench are not quite sure whether they are on or off, or on the fence.

--- Later in debate ---

For this policy to work effectively, however, the concentration of hon. Members here should not be on the two thirds who accepted but on the reasons why one third did not. What is holding back these individuals from taking on the responsibilities of individual budgets? The benefits have been extolled quite broadly and it would be interesting to understand why those one third of individuals have not taken that view. My guess is that there will be more of an issue with this policy from people who are reluctant adopters and we will need to work through how to enable them to have the benefits from individual budgets.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I am perhaps more optimistic than my hon. Friend. Historically, we have not had direct budgets in this area. As more people receive direct budgets, those who provide in response to them will grow in their sophistication and capability, so they will be able better to sell, communicate and market what they do for families, who will then see that they can take on a budget without having to try to commission those services from scratch themselves. My hon. Friend is right—although things might develop over time—that this might never be appropriate for some people and we must ensure that we look after their interests. However, for perhaps even more than 75%, direct budgets might prove to be the way forward.

[Richard Fuller]

I appreciate my hon. Friend’s intervention. As Chairman of the Select Committee, he is very knowledgeable in this area, and I look forward to discussing the issue with him further. Let me add a couple of additional concerns. Although we agree on the overall direction of travel, we might also reach some concordance over concerns.

The proposal in Lords amendment 37 is to deal with this issue through setting up pilot schemes in some areas. I am in favour of that. What will be the benefit for children with special educational needs? Their parents already put an enormous amount of effort into supporting their children. We call on them not only to go out and work hard, but to provide that support at home and that takes up an enormous amount of time. To place on top of that the burden of an individual budget—however it is implemented—places significant additional burdens. Let me explain a couple of them.

I have spoken to parents of children with special educational needs in my constituency. Overall, they are enthusiastic about some of the proposals in the Government’s Green Paper, but they strongly voiced their concern about the complexity of placing additional burdens on parents. They want these responsibilities, but the complexity involved is significant.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

I want to talk about five aspects of the amendments. The first is the question of Ofqual. I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), the Chairman of the Education Committee, about the fines. [Hon. Members: “Surely not!”] He is fairly used to disagreements, and always accepts them cheerfully, as he has just demonstrated.

The Government are right to think in terms of fines. My hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) put his finger on it when he noted that it was difficult to change examination boards in a timely manner if there were mistakes. There must be no mistakes in the preparation of exams.

The real problem, it seems to me, is that we have far too many examination boards, and I believe that the Education Committee will consider that in due course. We need accurate examinations so that students can feel confident that they are taking tests that are fair, proper and competent, and fines should be applied when those priorities are not honoured.

There is the important question of whether Ofsted should inspect outstanding schools. We must ensure that it concentrates on schools that are failing or coasting: as the Prime Minister rightly says, we must never fail to recognise that some schools are not doing a good enough job at present, and that they require our full attention. An Ofsted report is, of course, a snapshot of the situation that the Ofsted inspectors found during their visit, and is likely to convey contradictory messages. What I frequently find in my constituency, and certainly found when I was involved in education as a governor, is that such reports may not tell the story that other statistical evidence might tell.

I raised the problem when the Education Committee was considering Ofsted and its future. I asked witnesses what should be done when a school that is able to brandish very good exam results—five passes graded between A-star and C—receives an Ofsted report that tells a different tale. I know of two schools in my constituency that have been able to counter one bit of evidence with another, and both cases involved Ofsted reports. I therefore think that the Government are right to use the tool of Ofsted to focus more on the schools that are failing or coasting.

There are many different ways of measuring performance. We must enable parents to see, from year to year, that things are moving in the right direction in the schools that they choose—or may choose in the future—for their children. An annual assessment will be helped by effective league tables and the right kind of evidence presented in the right way.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Is my hon. Friend comfortable with the idea that some schools might not be inspected for 10 or 12 years?

[Neil Carmichael]

I would certainly be willing to see schools go without an Ofsted inspection for some time if they are consistently performing effectively and efficiently. Several years might elapse before an inspection, but I do not believe that we are talking of decades.

We must bear it in mind that there are other accountability mechanisms: the choice that parents make; the measurements that league tables offer; and the role of governors. I know that the hon. Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) is not going to press the issue to a Division, but I consider it very important, and I think that the Government are right to be less prescriptive than they have been in the past. It is critical that we focus on what governing bodies should be, and on the role that they should have.

I have been involved in the establishment of an all-party parliamentary group on school governors, because I think that the issue has been overlooked for far too long. One of the key themes that the APPG is developing is the need to focus on skills rather than representatives of governing bodies, and it is reflected in both the Bill and the amendment. It is obvious to me, and, I believe, to most people—it was certainly obvious to all who were involved in the formation of the APPG—that a great many skills are required. It is a good idea to ensure that a local authority appoints a governor in consultation with the governing body, so that together they can come up with the right person to fill the skills gap. The school will then have a governing body that reflects its priorities and has the appropriate skills. I am glad that the Bill mentions the crucial role of governors, on whom I think we should turn the spotlight when we think about accountability.

That brings me to the question of reporting restrictions. Over 20 years, I have been involved in situations in which members of the teaching profession have had to undergo disciplinary procedures. Ironically, none has been connected with pupils, and I am pleased about that, but I could have done with a few reporting restrictions in one instance in particular. It is very difficult to manage such situations when they are being second-guessed by the press, which may investigate or discuss them in ways that are not helpful to the requirement that evidence is presented fairly and honourably so that people who are not involved in a case can make proper judgments and reach an unbiased conclusion. I discovered that if someone wants to get something published, they should simply mark it “private and confidential” and away it will go. It is right that the Bill examines this issue, because we have to ensure that our processes can be properly managed and controlled so that investigations can be undertaken and judgments made consistent with justice and good practice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I am glad to say that Lord Hill said that he and Sir Michael Wilshaw—I think he specifically named him—believed that changing a head would not automatically trigger an inspection but would trigger consideration. The Government and Ofsted are aligned with my hon. Friend on this requirement.

[Damian Hinds]

That highlights the point about having people running organisations whom we trust and who can make professional judgments, and about their weighing all the evidence and not being hidebound by particular formulae.

In an earlier intervention, I mentioned that we will have much richer data than ever before in the schools system. That is not unique to this country, because a revolution is going on in the education world, as was reported a few weeks ago in a good article in The Economist. We know much more about schools and can therefore do much more predictive modelling than was possible before.

In an intervention, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) argued in favour of contextual value added. The Government will not use CVA—and thank God for that; I have yet to meet anyone who understands it. I have served on the Education Committee for 18 months and we are still waiting for our first teacher, head teacher, pupil, local authority officer or anyone else from the education establishment to talk voluntarily about CVA as a measure of school performance. Instead, we have what most people would understand as a value-added measure—progress from key stage 2 to key stage 4—which will do most of that job without the extra complexity and formulaic high jinks that the contextual bit introduces. Of course, it is only one of a large basket of measures and indicators that can be used.

I am sure that it is not in the minds of Ministers or the leadership of Ofsted that any school should go a long time without inspection. I would be amazed if any head teacher wanted to go long without his school being inspected. Many of the indicators are what we might call “digital indicators”, but Ofsted produces an analogue report with much richer evaluation and comment than some of those measures. I am sure that many parents will want to know that there is a relatively recent report informing them about some of the things that they cannot necessarily read in league tables, but I do not think that any of that calls necessarily for the formulaic approach of automatic triggers that Labour Members suggest.

The next area I want to touch on is the anonymity of teachers. Reasonable questions have been asked about why schoolteachers should enjoy special treatment, and why those who work in further education colleges are treated differently. I accept that that is an anomaly, although it is hardly the first anomaly to arise between secondary schools and sixth-form colleges.

[Mr Stuart]

The Government listened and used the Bill to correct an anomaly and allow FE teachers to teach in schools. I led a debate in January and am delighted that Ministers listened to that appeal and are seeking other ways of levelling the playing field for FE and sixth-form colleges and schools.

[Damian Hinds]

Indeed. As ever, my hon. Friend makes a pertinent point.

Teachers are unique—there is something special about them, as opposed even to other people working with children, although I accept the arguments about them—as they have to stand before a class, in a position of authority, and keep discipline. Most of us will have been struck by the number of teachers whom we know who strongly approve of the change introducing anonymity. For the avoidance of doubt, let me say that those teachers would never in a million years get up to the sort of no good that we want to avoid. There is something symbolic in saying that we understand their difficult position in keeping order in their little community and that they deserve our support and this type of anonymity.

Ofqual has already stimulated some fascinating exchanges. In an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness, who chairs the Committee on which I serve, I wondered what level of defect the Japanese would look for. I specifically picked Japan, rather than Shanghai, Finland or any of the popular examples because of my experience of joining the Manchester and Merseyside branch of IBM as a tender 17-year-old. The story new starters were told might have been apocryphal, but it was that that IBM specified a 99.99% success rate in the contract with its Japanese microchip supplier. The Japanese were a bit confused, but dutifully smashed one in every 10,000 chips to ensure that they complied with the rate. The point is that other systems do things better than ours does and that people with other systems accept nothing but the best. Following that experience, IBM adopted the principle that is known in business as zero defects.

[Mr Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Damian Hinds]

Only if my hon. Friend will speak in Japanese.

[Mr Stuart]

Double Dutch perhaps, but not Japanese.

My hon. Friend asserts that other areas do better than we do—in the accuracy of their examination questions, I assume —but does he have any evidence to back that up? The paucity of such evidence from Ministers makes me question whether we have made the case to introduce such measures.

[Damian Hinds]

I suspect that my hon. Friend knows that my point was a more general one about other people doing better than we do and about their tolerance of failure and imperfection. I recognise that humanity is ultimately susceptible to failure, but I worry about what we should accept.

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“we remain relentless about combating entrenched failure. We will soon have taken over more failing schools with new academies than in the whole eight years of the programme under Labour. But it’s just as important to tackle those all over the country content to muddle through—places where respectable results and a decent local reputation mask a failure to meet potential. Children who did well in primary school but who lose momentum. Early promise fades. This is the hidden crisis in our schools—in prosperous shires and market towns just as much as the inner cities.”

[Mr Graham Stuart]

My hon. Friend is right to quote the Prime Minister, who in turn is right to identify this issue. What practical steps can be taken under the current regime to target those schools that are above the floor targets for five good GCSEs and that have limited resources for Ofsted? How will it be possible to ensure that they get the focus that the Prime Minister, the Minister and I would like to see?

[Mr Gibb]

rose—

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

Can my hon. Friend give examples of instances in which such a measure might have been triggered in the past?

[Mr Gibb]

The incidents I would cite are those from this summer when there were persistent errors. The persistence came, in particular, after we had asked the awarding organisations to check that there were no further errors. They did those checks and confirmed that there were none, but then further errors were discovered and damage was caused. That is an example of persistence in the errors we are trying to eliminate from the system.

The hon. Member for Cardiff West asked for an explanation regarding Lords amendments 89 to 91 about land. The Bill introduces new powers to transfer the publicly funded land of foundation and voluntary schools and academies to free schools and academies when those schools close or the land is to be otherwise disposed of. Lords amendments 89 to 91 reduce the reach of those new powers so that they do not apply to land that is leased to a new academy by a private landlord. Where we are engaging in commercial negotiations with private landlords for the lease of land to new free schools, we think it is more appropriate to protect any public investment in that land by contractual means rather than in statute.

The hon. Gentleman also raised the PFI issue and I am happy to restate the purpose of amendment 34. Under section 6(2) of the Academies Act 2010, a local authority “must cease to maintain” a school once it converts to academy status. Some banks and local authorities have asked whether that prohibition on maintenance might prevent a local authority from making a payment under PFI or other contracts. Our view is that local authorities have always been able to use their own resources to provide assistance, including financial assistance, to academies and to enter into contractual commitments and incur liabilities on their behalf. We are clear that section 6(2) of the Academies Act does not prevent the continuation of those activities. All academies are and will continue to be maintained by the Secretary of State under funding arrangements entered into under section 1 of the Academies Act, and any assistance provided by local authorities to academies, whether financial or otherwise, will only ever be a proportion of the total expense. Amendment 34 therefore confirms that local authorities can continue to make payments for academies under PFI and other contracts.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bedford and the hon. Member for Cardiff West raised the issue of direct payment pilots. The Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather), who has responsibility for children and families, wrote to peers in the other place explaining the importance of introducing this new clause and consulted on the text of the draft clause, including in relation to special educational needs and disability organisations as well as local government interests. The principles behind the clause—greater choice and control for the families of children with SEN—are shared across the House. Indeed, the clause is modelled on legislation on the direct payment health pilots that were introduced by the previous Government. Let me reassure hon. Members that the orders needed to give practical effect to the clauses are subject to the affirmative procedure. These are, after all, powers concerning pilots rather than a national scheme and the clause has a sunset provision of four years.

My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness asked about anyone being able to refer complaints to the adjudicator. We do not believe this change will lead to many more complaints. The regulations on which we are currently consulting will ensure that repetitive, vexatious or anonymous complaints cannot be made. I hope that will provide him with some reassurance. On the issue of spite, which he also raised, “anyone” does mean anyone, so it could be a school or a charity. The only proviso is that they must be willing to put their name to objections and to refer matters that are new or substantially new to the adjudicator.

My hon. Friend asked about consistency in the referral of misconduct cases by schools to the regulator. Evidence suggests that there is already variation in referrals despite the blanket duty on employers to refer all cases, and this duty has not been affected. Employers will know when a case of misconduct is serious enough potentially to require a referral from the profession, and they can use the draft prohibition guidance, which I can send to my hon. Friend, to help them make this decision. If a member of the public is not happy with the decision, they can refer a complaint to the Secretary of State.

My hon. Friend also asked about Ofsted’s capacity to deliver more rigorous assessments. We have discussed and agreed the more rigorous risk assessment, and Ofsted has the resources necessary within its budget to achieve this. Every organisation has to prioritise its resources in the current economic climate and Ofsted is no different.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford for his continued and vocal support for academies and free schools. I assure him that it is right that admissions at academies and free schools must comply with the admissions code as set out in their funding agreements. As with all other state-funded schools, complaints about admissions will now go to the adjudicator.

My hon. Friend also raised concerns about particular families who do not adopt personal budgets—one third is the figure he cited—and the support they require. He argues for having pilots, and that is what the new clause does. I share his concerns about the possible burdens on families. That is why the pilots will look at the support available to families and how the system can be as straightforward as possible to use, as well as at which families take up those payments and which do not. On the point that the hon. Member for Cardiff West made, cost-cutting is not a driver for this policy—it is about having greater choice and control.

On the issue of Ofqual and how the Conservatives could support a regime of fining by a regulator, my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire set out the reasons why the qualifications market needs to be regulated. I should like to make it clear that turnover will be determined in accordance with an order made by the Secretary of State and that Ofqual will consult on how the fining regime is to operate.

I listened carefully to the comments of my hon. Friends the Members for Bedford and for Stevenage about primary schools. Primary national offer day will be 16 April. The idea is to co-ordinate the date rather than to put any new pressure on parents to get their children into certain primary schools. It merely makes things easier and less stressful for parents rather than more stressful.

Let me deal briefly with some of the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Cardiff West. He will know that we have listened carefully to the concerns expressed in this House and in the other place in response to our original intention to withdraw schools and colleges from the duty to co-operate. The evidence of that engagement is clear in these Lords amendments. We have removed the “duty to co-operate” clause as well as the clause that the hon. Gentleman seeks to amend regarding the children and young people’s plan.

The hon. Gentleman’s amendment (a) to Lords amendment 23 relates to our plans to allow anyone to refer an objection to the schools adjudicator about the admissions arrangements at any state-funded school in the country. The amendment would require admissions authorities and others to comply with the adjudicator’s decision within 14 days of receiving written notice of that decision. Current legislation in this area, which was introduced by the Labour party, requires compliance to be forthwith. Let me assure the House once more that our changes to admissions do not affect the adjudicator’s power to consider and decide on the matter put to him and other matters as he sees fit, or to make binding decisions as a consequence. The amendment would impose a stringent national timetable for the implementation of such decisions. It is based on two false assumptions—first that schools do not wish to put things right, which they do, and secondly that all situations are the same, which they are not. On that basis, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not press his amendment to a Division.

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[Mr Knight]

rose—

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Hayes]

Once more, and then I must return to my notes.

[Mr Stuart]

My hon. Friend could see one of the reasons for the need for flexibility if he came to visit Beverley, as I have frequently invited him to do, where our excitement grows with each delay until he does so. He would see the area where the new East Riding college was to have been built but, because of the mess that was made of FE capital funding under the previous Administration, it looks like a bomb site in the middle of Beverley. As we move forward with these freedoms and with the excellent leadership that we have at East Riding college, I hope that we will see the college on that site in the near future.

[Mr Hayes]

Every day a new invitation for me to visit a different part of the country arrives, each one more seductive than the last, but none more attractive than the overtures of my hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee. Tonight I will do what I rarely do in the House: I commit, from the Dispatch Box, to visit his college, because he has made this case so frequently and persuasively that I feel that I have been less than generous in my response thus far. I will certainly come to look at the specific circumstances that he described in his—as usual—pithy and well-informed intervention.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

I would like to take the Minister back to the intervention from my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr Knight). In East Yorkshire, the Harrier was developed with a lot of taxpayers’ money and then shipped abroad to become an American aeroplane. We rather fear that the Hawk will follow. Will the Minister reassure us, in more specific terms than he used in response to my right hon. Friend, that a college will not be so free that it can leave the country with its assets, if it suits the organisation rather than the needs of the taxpayers?

[Mr Hayes]

As I have said, where public interest is in jeopardy, the Secretary of State will retain powers under the Bill to intervene as necessary. I paid tribute to my hon. Friend a few moments ago for his patient endurance in respect of my forthcoming visit to Beverley. It was Ruskin who said,

“Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.”

We can therefore take it that my hon. Friend is a patient endurer, more noble than strength and beauty. It is likely that the circumstance he describes would happen only rarely, but it is important that when a college wishes to transfer its property, rights and liabilities to another provider, the Secretary of State retains the kind of powers that he requested.

Lords amendments 53, 56 and 62 reinstate statutory safeguards relating to the specific governance and constitutional arrangements of voluntary sixth-form colleges that were inadvertently removed by the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act. It was the previous Government’s view that legislation should reflect the distinct constitutional position of voluntary sixth-form colleges, and they confirmed that they would look to reinstate those protections through legislation. We agree with that view, and it is what the amendments do. The new provisions cover what was afforded by previous legislation or Secretary of State directions.

As Members know, I am a keen advocate of freeing colleges from central prescription, direction and control. Such things inhibit a college’s ability to become the master of its own destiny and stifle innovation and growth in our further education sector. The changes in the Bill will enable the Government to present the best case possible to encourage the Office for National Statistics to review its decision to reclassify colleges into the public sector. However, we are not merely responding to the ONS; we began this programme of reform long before we knew about the ONS reclassification. Indeed, it was one of the first things that I set out when I became a Minister. The changes that we have made in the Bill, including the ones that we have introduced at a later stage, are entirely in the spirit of the policy direction set out in the skills strategy which I published, following extensive consultation, last autumn. Indeed, they are in the spirit of the further consultation in which we were involved over the summer, which will lead to the publication of “New Challenges, New Chances”.

The truth is that the ONS reclassification has been a further spur to us, but has not caused us to change direction. If anything, it has cemented our determination to consider every aspect of college management and every means by which we could free colleges from bureaucracy and direction. That fresh thinking has inspired the changes that have been made to the Bill.

As I have said, the changes, and our efforts to secure the private sector reclassification of colleges, have been welcomed, not least by the Association of Colleges. It considers that they will provide colleges with additional flexibility, allowing them to respond effectively to their local community and economy. I should like to place on record my gratitude to the Association of Colleges for its guidance and support, and indeed for how it has challenged us, in helping the Government develop this impressive legislation.

Lords amendments 28, 29 and 39 concern the business of colleges and inspection. You will remember, Madam Deputy Speaker, the report that the previous Government commissioned from Sir Andrew Foster. I have a copy of the summary here. They asked him to examine the potential of further education, and he concluded that the landscape that it faced was

“crowded with organisations charged with inspection, improvement or regulatory functions. There is unnecessary complexity and duplication of effort and further rationalisation is required.”

He also recognised, I think, that we needed to rethink how colleges were gauged, inspected and monitored. Knowing that we had some outstanding further education colleges in this country, we decided that the time was right to look afresh at inspection and regulation.

In that context, some of the comments that the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), made about schools pertain to colleges too. He dealt with the issue of the inspection of schools earlier this evening, and some of the same principles apply to colleges. In my visits to colleges across the country, I have continually been impressed by the quality of teaching, the standard of learning and the innovative systems that colleges put in place to maximise learners’ potential.

Lords amendments 28 to 30 provide for greater parliamentary scrutiny of regulations exempting further education colleges from inspections, by requiring that all regulations except the first set be subject to the affirmative procedure, so that both Houses can be assured that a full debate will happen before further colleges are exempted. We decided very early on that we wanted to limit the inspection of further education colleges, as we did in the case of schools. However, it is important that that exemption is qualified in the way that I have described. The Prime Minister spoke today of coasting schools, and nor do we want to see any coasting colleges. Although there is little evidence of them, it is important that the House can debate the matter as further exemptions take root.

I turn to Lords amendments 36, 43 and 100, which put the legal framework for apprenticeships on a more sustainable and realistic footing. I need not regale the House at length with how passionately I support apprenticeships—at least, not for more than a few minutes. As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have championed apprenticeships both in opposition and in government, and the Government have turned our rhetoric into action by delivering the biggest growth in apprenticeships in modern times. I have said before, and I am happy to say now, that there is more work to be done. As we make that growth sustainable, we will need to consider bureaucracy and the quality and age spread of apprenticeships. It is absolutely right that we should do that, but let us not understate the growth that we have seen—29% growth in under-19 apprenticeships and 64% growth in 19-to-24 apprenticeships over two years, and a big jump in post-25 apprenticeships.

It is important to say that the previous Government had the same aims. Many times, previous Ministers, including the previous Prime Minister, estimated the likely jump in the number of apprenticeships and the number that would be necessary to fill skills gaps. However, this Government are actually delivering. We are making more opportunities available to more people to add to their skills, which will increase their chances of getting, keeping and progressing in jobs. We know from independent research that someone who has a level 2 apprenticeship is likely to earn £70,000 more over their earning lifetime than somebody who has not, and that somebody with a level 3 apprenticeship is likely to earn more than £100,000 more. That is roughly equivalent to a degree.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Hayes]

Is this about happiness?

[Mr Stuart]

I am always focused on happiness. I thought I could increase the Minister’s sense of contentment if I attempted to correct him. Under the previous situation, there was an obligation not to fund an apprenticeship for anyone who wanted it but to provide one, outwith any ability necessarily to ensure that an employer came forward. That is why the Minister and the Government were right to make that alteration, not withstanding the complaints of Opposition Members.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. I am very glad that the hon. Gentleman got his point on the record, but we are not debating the previous Government’s record or apprenticeships generally; we are debating amendments on quite narrow points in the Bill. I know the Minister is really eager to come back to that.

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[Stephen Twigg]

I am delighted to join my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour in congratulating Liverpool city council, which, despite one of the worst funding settlements from central Government, has been able to create a new programme. I thank him for that opportunity, although I am in grave danger of moving beyond the scope of this debate, so I shall return to my speech.

Our amendment would change the term “reasonable” in Lords amendment 36 to “best”. In contract law, making a “best effort” requires a higher level of commitment than making a “reasonable effort”. Our amendment would place a greater duty on the chief executive to secure employer participation in apprenticeships for the specified groups and would reintroduce, in part, the previous Government’s commitment, which placed a duty on the chief executive to find an apprenticeship for all who wanted one.

This is a major challenge for us all. In a recent speech, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition set out a new policy on apprenticeships, giving a commitment that in future all major Government contracts should

“go to firms who commit to training the next generation with decent apprenticeships,”

and that none should

“go to those who don’t.”

I invite the Minister today to consider making a similar commitment on behalf of the Government. I seek assurances from him about how the new clause proposed by Lords amendment 36 will be implemented in the context of the Government’s broader approach to apprenticeships. For example, concerns have been raised about Train to Gain places being replaced or rebadged as apprenticeships. Today we have seen early coverage in the media of a report—to which I understand the Minister has contributed—by the Institute for Public Policy Research, due to be published later this week, setting out concerns that younger people are not getting a fair share of the increase in apprenticeships. I appreciate that there is a balance to be struck, and we very much welcome older workers having the opportunity to take up apprenticeships, but with youth unemployment almost certainly set to hit 1 million this week, we need to maintain the important focus on young people and the opportunity that is provided by having an apprenticeship place.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is giving a thoughtful speech. In light of his amendment (a) to Lords amendment 36, which seeks to ensure that the chief executive should try to make reasonable efforts to secure employers’ participation, does he agree that we would not wish this or any other Government to get on the hook over the numbers? We must maximise the numbers, but also ensure that we have quality. If we have apprenticeships that do not lead to a major improvement in the earning potential of the young people in question, we will have betrayed them. If courses do not last long enough to give them the skills to raise their value in the market place, we will have betrayed them. It is important not only to provide opportunities, but to ensure that they are valuable opportunities that deliver lifelong benefits.

[Stephen Twigg]

I found myself in agreement with much of what the hon. Gentleman had to say in the earlier debate on schools, as I do with what he has just said. He makes a critical point, which enables me to bring my remarks to a close. Clearly, with 1 million young people unemployed, having high-quality apprenticeships is going to be a vital part of a strategy to address that problem, but it must not become simply a numbers game. I would like apprenticeships to become the gold standard of vocational education. I attended an Edge Foundation event a few weeks ago and made the point that it would be wonderful if the parents of a 17 or 18-year-old who gets an apprenticeship were as proud of their daughter or son getting that apprenticeship as they would have been of them getting into higher education. That should be what we aspire towards, and at the heart of that is quality, as the hon. Gentleman said.

[Mr Stuart]

In the light of the requirement to try to secure places, does the hon. Gentleman agree that apprenticeships need to be for a decent period and that an important part of making them work for employers—thus being provided and sustained in the long term—is that the rate of pay should not be too high? The aim should be to make the ticket at the end the valuable part; that is when the benefit comes. Keeping the rate of pay relatively low and ensuring that it lasts for a decent long time will mean that the apprenticeship will work for the company and that at the other end the young person will earn considerably more money.

[Stephen Twigg]

I might be told off by Madam Deputy Speaker, but let me say that the quality of the education and training elements of the apprenticeship are vital. What we must not do, however, is allow apprenticeships to become a form of exploitation. A balance has to be struck. Clearly, an apprenticeship should be first and foremost about quality education and training, but with a decent amount of pay, too, for those who are apprentices.

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate. These are very important issues. I do not believe that any Opposition Member doubts the personal commitment of the Minister, particularly on apprenticeships. We have concerns that we have expressed previously about the impact of other changes—the abolition of the education maintenance allowance and the trebling of tuition fees—and we would be very concerned if there was any weakening of the apprenticeship brand. Let us perhaps forge a cross-party national consensus to the effect that we want apprenticeships to increase in number, but more importantly we want to see them as a high-quality gold standard for those young people who follow a vocational route of education.

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) raised a number of points, which I shall try to address in my closing remarks. I would like to speak first to amendment (a) to Lords Amendment 29, under which the first as well as any subsequent regulations exempting certain providers from Ofsted inspection in particular circumstances would be subject to the affirmative procedure. The hon. Gentleman asked me particularly to address those matters.

My hon. Friend the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), has already spoken about a related amendment to the schools inspection exemption. The same intentions lay behind the exemption for further education providers and our plan, in essence, is to exempt outstanding colleges. I will listen, however, to the points raised. I do not have a dogmatic view on this matter, and as we move to a lighter-touch inspection regime, it is important to do so with appropriate caution.

I would like to deal with one particular concern. Where students feel that an outstanding institution is not maintaining high standards, Ofsted will take very seriously any comments students might make as part of the risk assessment, which could trigger an inspection. My hon. Friend the Minister spoke about the risk assessment process, and it is important that it is tied closely to the view of students about the quality of teaching and learning in an institution.

I spoke to the National Union of Students today about representation on college governing bodies, which we discussed when we dealt with the amendments to which the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby also referred. As I described earlier, we view such representation as a baseline. Representation on governing bodies does not provide the whole answer for learner or staff engagement. Learners and staff should be engaged at a policy level in plotting the strategic direction of a college. As we move to a more freed-up system, so learner choice and learner judgment will play an increasingly critical role in how colleges evolve. I hear what the hon. Gentleman says about the process. We are moving ahead boldly, but cautiously. At this juncture, it is probably best for me to leave that there.

Amendment (a) to Lords amendment 36 would require the chief executive of skills funding to make “best” efforts rather than “reasonable” efforts in respect of apprenticeships. Of course I understand the intention to strengthen the focus on the delivery of this important objective. It is crucial to maintain and, indeed, improve the quality of apprenticeships while we grow their number. When something grows rapidly, it obviously creates a pressure on quality. Inevitably, the momentum will lead to more employers and more providers becoming involved and more individuals becoming apprentices—including people who might not have done so if the system was smaller. I believe that places an extra responsibility on us to ensure that the integrity of the brand is retained by an appropriate emphasis on quality, and as I said on the Floor of the House a few days ago in a different debate on a different subject, we will do that. The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby is right to say that this amendment, and his argument about it, draws attention to the issue of quality. The debate in the other place and the discussions to which he referred—I pay tribute once again to Lord Layard and others—helped us to concentrate our thinking on maintaining and improving the quality of the apprenticeships offered.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the number of apprenticeships going on to level 3 is a big indicator of quality and that we want more apprentices getting to level 2 to go on to level 3? Has he given any more thought to providing a more flexible level 3 offer for 16 and 17-year-olds who often find that, if they want to go on to level 3 after completing level 2, the funding gets cut in the current system?

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby spoke a little about the age spread of apprenticeships in arguing for his amendment. Although he did not deal particularly with the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) just raised, this is not the first time that my hon. Friend has mentioned it. It is important to devise a system that maximises the prospect of progression, in the way that he describes.

The good news is that the biggest proportion of growth in the numbers that were drawn to the House’s attention a week or so ago was in level 3 apprenticeships. I think that that rather frustrated the critics who had assumed that the biggest proportionate growth would be at level 2. In proportional terms, the number of level 3 apprenticeships has grown at the fastest rate over the last year. I can also inform my hon. Friend of a fact that has not been in the public domain until now: indications suggest that the length of apprenticeships among those aged over 25 is increasing. That is also rather counter-intuitive for those who listen to the critics from the bourgeois left, the glitterati and chatterati who look down their noses at practical learning in a way in which you and I do not, Mr Deputy Speaker.

My hon. Friend was, however, right to draw our attention to other measures that we might take in respect of progression. I know that one of his suggestions is that we should look at ways of helping people to undertake parts of a level in which they were otherwise already competent. There may be ways in which we can adopt a more modular approach to progression. I do not intend to discuss that at length now, because it is not entirely pertinent to the amendment, but it is relevant to what has been said by my hon. Friend and by the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby, who also made a point about the age spread of apprenticeships.

Oral Answers to Questions

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Willetts]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his ingenuity in pursuing that constituency case, about which we have corresponded. Just as he was with the Pfizer case at Sandwich, he is a persistent hon. Member and I congratulate him on that. However, we believe that if we were to take the ingenious approach he proposes, it might mean that the 10,000 undergraduates currently benefiting from financial support lose it.

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

18. What assessment he has made of the difficulties faced by apprentices aged 19 and over in obtaining adequate funding for level 3 qualifications.

[The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning (Mr John Hayes)]

The Government are investing significantly in adult apprenticeships, with earmarked investment of £679 million in 2011-12. We rely on employers coming forward to make places available and many more are doing so every day, week and month. There were 114,900 starts in 2010-11—nearly twice as many as in the previous year—for those aged over 19.

[Mr Stuart]

The Minister not only champions apprenticeships but facilitates their delivery and I congratulate him on that. May I ask him to consider introducing a flexible three-year contract for young apprenticeships, with a break clause after year 2, so that there is an equalisation of funding for young apprenticeships on courses both before and after their 19th birthdays?

[Mr Hayes]

Knowing my hon. Friend’s expertise and commitment to this subject, when I saw his question I spoke to my officials and got an interesting response from them. I think that if we better estimate at the outset people’s prospects of progression, we may well be able to take account of what my hon. Friend says. I invite him, as I did earlier, to come to the Department to talk that through and to see what changes we can make to remove any disincentives of the kind to which he refers.

New Schools

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

May I thank the hon. Gentleman for his generous words and welcome him back to the Front Bench? He was a superb Minister in the Department for Education. Like Lord Adonis and the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), he was a reformist in government and I am more than happy to underline my appreciation for the work that he did. He is the third shadow Education Secretary whom I have faced across the Dispatch Box. His two predecessors indulged in raucous opportunistic assaults on our reform programme and were promoted as a consequence. I realise that there is now a battle between ambition and principle in the hon. Gentleman’s breast. I know that he will choose principle, as he always has done throughout his political career.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the support that he has given to the university technical colleges. They are emphatically a cross-party achievement. Lord Adonis played a part. I think others, including the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), acted as fairy godfathers to the project. I am delighted that UTCs have their support.

It is important to recognise that the English baccalaureate is there to ensure that students pursue the sort of subjects that will get them into universities. The great advantage of university technical colleges is that they also have that link with higher education institutions that help to raise aspiration for all. There is no single tool that will raise aspiration in all our communities. We have to use whatever tools are to hand. I believe that the English baccalaureate, as so many head teachers are demonstrating, helps alongside high quality vocational education, to raise aspirations and increase the number of students going into higher education.

The hon. Gentleman said that when he was looking at free schools, he wanted to apply a series of tests. The tests that he asked me to apply are: will they extend opportunity, will they drive up standards, will they have a fair admissions policy and will they close the attainment gap? Those are four sensible tests, and I would add a fifth—can they ensure that we have a low-cost way of adding capacity to our school system so that exactly the solution to the problem that he alluded to, the need for good school places, was found at the lowest possible cost?

The hon. Gentleman asked me about capital and drew attention to the difficulties that we have with capital in the Department for Education. These difficulties, I am afraid, are a consequence of economic decisions that were taken while he was out of the House by his successors in the Labour Government, and they landed us with a poisoned economic legacy. We are doing our very best to deal with it, and one of the things that we can do is ensure that we get more schools more cheaply. That is why I am so delighted that as well as the additional sums that have been made available for school repair, and as well as the additional sums that we are making available for new schools, the free schools programme has seen schools being delivered at a unit cost lower than was the case under the Labour Government’s school building programme.

Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked me whether I regretted not getting the same settlement for the Department for Education as other Government Departments. No, I do not regret it. I am delighted that we secured the same level of funding in cash terms for education as the previous Government had secured. I am delighted that we had the best revenue deal of any domestic Department, apart from the Department of Health. I am overjoyed that, thanks to the support of our coalition partners, there is £2.5 billion of additional money going in the pupil premium to the very poorest schools. It is additional money being spent in a progressive cause, and it is deliverable only thanks to the leadership shown by two parties working together in the national interest.

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

The Secretary of State is bringing choice and diversity to our education system while seeing off his shadow at the same time.

For too many 14-year-olds school is an ordeal from which they learn and benefit not at all. I welcome the support for more UTCs, but for those who do not have the choice of a UTC, what steps will the Secretary of State take to ensure that young 14-year-olds can go to college instead of school if they wish?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, which is that we need to think hard about the paths that those from the age of 14 will follow. One of the things that I believe we can do is ensure that high quality further education colleges make available their resources, whether through sponsoring underperforming schools or allowing lecturers or others from FE colleges to operate in schools. Following on from the Wolf report, we have already changed the law to allow that to happen. But there is more that can be done to integrate the great work that FE colleges and schools do.

Careers Service (Young People)

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend puts her question very well. The Government have got their priorities completely and utterly wrong. If I were a young person watching these proceedings tonight, I would be asking why since the coalition Government came to power they had singled out young people for this barrage of cuts. Do they think that young people are an easy touch? I do not know, but that is what I would be asking if I were them. I would also be asking what an elected police commissioner was going to do to improve life in the community. Very little, I would suggest. I return to the point that I was making earlier. If Government Members do not think that an impersonal, remote service is good enough for their children, they should not accept such a service for anyone else’s children in their constituency.

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

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) said, everyone in the House would like to see high-quality careers advice, but a little humility might be required all round, not least from representatives of the previous Government, under whom the number of young people not in employment increased in this country despite the fact that it fell in other OECD countries. Furthermore, as their own report showed, at the end of their term in office, the standard of careers advice for young people was palpably poor. Does the shadow Secretary of State agree with the Government’s intention to take the decision making down to school level and let the school decide what is most appropriate? In many cases, that will involve face-to-face advice, although I do share his desire to see greater resources allocated to that.

[Andy Burnham]

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for his question. He calls for humility, but I acknowledged at the beginning of the debate that we did not get the Connexions service perfect and that we were prepared to work with the Government. I pay tribute to him in leading the Select Committee’s production of a very good report that comes to the right conclusions on this issue. It is possible for schools, with sufficient support, to provide face-to-face advice, although I do not think that he or I would want to go back to the days when the PE teacher or some other member of staff was responsible for giving careers advice and did not do a particularly good job of it. We need independent, good-quality, face-to-face advice.

There is an important point to be made about conflicts of interest. At 16, young people face choices about whether to go on to further education college or sixth-form college, or whether to stay at their school. It is important, in the highly competitive world that the Government are creating, that the careers adviser in the school should not have a vested interest in advising the young person to stay there if that would not be the best option for them. That needs to be thought through, but, without a transition plan, we have no means of judging what will happen. The Government have simply not provided us with any detail.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Twigg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. I was going to make a similar point later, but she has made it very powerfully.

The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, who is not here this evening, has been cautious in his criticism of the previous Government’s programmes, and rightly so. Of course, as Members on both sides of the House have said, there were serious imperfections with Connexions and Next Step, but we must be careful not to write off the positive features and the important work of many talented and committed professionals who have worked, as some still do, in those programmes.

Today, in advance of tonight’s debate, I spoke to people in some of the secondary schools in my constituency. Those at St John Bosco school in Croxteth told me about the work they have been doing with the Aimhigher programme. They have drawn particularly on the importance of the role of face-to-face contact by employing a graduate mentor to assist the girls at the school with their university applications and career development. This is a school in a very deprived neighbourhood that has an excellent reputation and a high percentage of its girls going on to university.

Cardinal Heenan school for boys has pioneered a particularly innovative approach to careers advice. I want to commend Dave Forshaw, the head teacher, and his team for their industry day programme, which I have had the opportunity to visit on two occasions. The programme draws on alumni, partners and a range of local organisations to deliver rich and effective careers advice, starting in year 7. Its recent industry days have had contributions from a former pupil of the school, the actor Ian Hart, who appeared in the Harry Potter films, as well as local and national journalists, sports professionals, solicitors, accountants and others. West Derby school has adopted a similar approach and held its first careers convention last year.

I cite those examples because they demonstrate two important points. The first is the critical importance of giving information and advice at an early age. Too often, these things are left too late. The second is the importance of drawing on expertise, including among the alumni of the schools themselves, to inspire young people.

The head teachers of those schools said to me today that quality careers advice needs resources. They are very concerned about what they see as a potential shift in policy away from face-to-face interaction to online and telephone-based services. My right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State set out the research published by Unison that was done at the university of Derby, which shows the sheer scale of the cuts in careers services up and down the country. That is the backdrop for this important debate.

Some of this debate has focused on low-cost solutions and how effective they are in delivery. I would like to bring the House’s attention to the work of an organisation called Future First. It has done excellent research on careers services. Like the head teachers of the schools in my constituency that I have cited, it emphasises that careers advice cannot be reduced to online information and telephone services. A complementary model is surely the best way forward. Future First seeks to increase social mobility by building communities of alumni around state schools to inspire young people about their futures.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is giving a passionate speech. He has just said that careers advice should be complementary, and I agree. However, the Opposition motion does not say that the Government should seek to find additional funds to provide face-to-face careers advice; it says that all young people should be provided with face-to-face careers advice whether they need it or not. That does not sound complementary; it sounds like the cumbersome over-specified and overly expensive processes that we saw too much of under the previous Government.

[Stephen Twigg]

Not at all. What I mean by complementary, and what I understand Future First to mean by complementary, is that we need face-to-face advice, but that that is not enough. We also need the other projects to which I and other Members have referred.

School Funding Reform

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. A great many right hon. and hon. Members are seeking to catch my eye, but I remind the House that there is another statement to follow and a series of very heavily subscribed debates to take place under the auspices of the Backbench Business Committee, as a consequence of which there is a premium on brevity from Back and Front Bench alike.

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

I welcome the statement from the Secretary of State. Too many areas, particularly rural areas, have suffered from grossly inequitable funding for too long. I welcome what the Secretary of State said because rural areas have additional costs, which are not met by current funding. Can he assure the House that we will not falter in moving to fairer funding and we will put real need ahead of political convenience in bringing forward a national funding formula in due course?

[Michael Gove]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct.