Funding and Schools Reform

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend has made a very important point. I have invited the Secretary of State to set out how he will ensure that no school sees a huge loss of funding to the pupil premium, with that then causing a problem in terms of service continuation.

As I said, I ask the Liberal Democrats to examine their consciences, and I got the impression that the hon. Gentleman was thinking about it. If they do not, for goodness’ sake they should speak up and show that they have some influence in the Government. They should speak up for the kids in the school that I went to this morning. We need to hear their voice to ensure that the pupil premium is what we were told it would be. At the moment, it is nothing more than a con.

The real trouble is that we do not have a new and additional pupil premium at all. The danger for the Liberal Democrats is that this issue goes to the very heart of the politics of the coalition. In the post-election talks with Labour, the right hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr Laws) told my right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) that he had secured from the Conservatives a pupil premium additional to a schools budget protected in real terms. Let there be no debate about that—that was what the Liberal Democrats said they had secured.

The Minister of State, the hon. Member for Brent Central, told the House many times that that would indeed be delivered. Well after the coalition talks, on 7 June, she told us that it would involve

“substantial extra money from outside the education budget.”—[Official Report, 7 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 15.]

That was meant to be the Liberal Democrats’ big win, and it was paraded as the consolation prize on the day of the tuition fees announcement. The painful truth for them is that they have failed to deliver it. They have been chewed up and spat out by the Tories. We are now looking at a pupil premium that will take money off her constituency in Brent, where more than 20% of kids are on free school meals, and give it to the Secretary of State’s constituency in Surrey, where less than 10% of children receive them. That Liberal Democrat fig leaf of credibility for staying in the coalition has been snatched away.

Because the education budget is not rising—it is falling in real terms—the pupil premium is simply a relabelling of existing funding. There will be more losers than winners. The IFS estimates that 60% of primary school children and 80% of secondary school children will be in schools whose real budgets are cut. On the day when the budgets for those schools land, the “Schools protected” spin will be wearing very thin indeed.

The problem with this ministerial team is that they simply have not got a grip on the detail. They simply do not know what the changes will mean for schools. However, the situation is still worse than that. They are also obsessed with costly, untested structural reform. That lethal combination of incompetence and ideology is toxic for our schools. The Government’s preoccupation with structures risks a loss of focus on standards. Under Labour, school standards rose year on year, with some of the highest ever results at every stage and the best ever results this year in GCSEs and A-levels. In 1997, half of all schools fell below the basic benchmark of 30% of students getting five good GCSEs graded A to C. [Interruption.] I hear Conservative Members speaking up, but those were our schools and our children in our constituencies that were being failed. Many children were leaving school without any hope of a better life—that was the reality.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

Is it not accepted that in science, for instance, the UK has gone from fourth to 14th position? In literacy we have gone from seventh to 17th, and in mathematics from eighth to 24th. That has to mean we have less, not more.

[Andy Burnham]

I must say, the hon. Gentleman’s literacy was very impressive there when he read the Whips’ handout. He almost read it word for word, and he did not have any help.

The hon. Gentleman cannot deny the figures that I have just read out, which show a transformation in our secondary schools. Half of schools were not achieving the basic benchmark in 1997, but today it is fewer than one in 12. Just think how many thousands of kids have hope of a better life because of that transformation in our schools, particularly in our most deprived communities.