Access to Education: South-East Northumberland

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Wednesday 21st February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered access to education in south-east Northumberland.

As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Henderson, as we discuss an incredibly important issue for many in my constituency of Wansbeck, and indeed in wider south-east Northumberland. I understand that it might be complicated, because I will be mentioning the different schools, areas, towns and villages, but myself and my staff are happy to discuss the geography with the Minister and his team following the debate.

At the outset, it is important to put on the record my thanks to the school leaders, trustees and governors, the parents, the kids—everybody who has worked extremely hard in my constituency. For quite some time, the Ofsted ratings have not been where they should be, but they are on the turn for the first time in a quite a while. I want to assure the people involved in the schools in every part of the educational structure that they have my full support and sincere thanks for turning the worm with regard to qualifications in the constituency. They have all been at the forefront of turning around the fortunes of the children. For far too long, we have seen what can only be described as less than acceptable educational results.

The crux of this debate is the concept of parental choice in education—something that sounds so reasonable, but has had a disastrous impact on some children. At the 2019 general election, the Government pledged to

“continue to ensure that parents can choose the schools that best suit their children and best prepare them for the future.”

That is something that parents in south-east Northumberland will consider with utter confusion. In the time I have been a Member of Parliament, education in south-east Northumberland has largely been converted to a two-tier system from a three-tier system. I do not intend to make any comment on the effectiveness of either system—that is for another time. The change was certainly opposed by many people, but implemented after consultation, and it will not have been seen by those opposing it locally as upholding parental choice.

The upshot of the change was the closure of middle schools in some of the larger villages of south-east Northumberland. Specifically, it meant that Newbiggin-by-the-Sea and Guide Post lost their middle schools and that children who would previously have been schooled in their community are now travelling to secondary schools in neighbouring towns at a much younger age.

Parental choice in special educational settings is an incredibly important topic, too, but I do not intend to dwell on that today. That topic deserves its own debate, and is something we can return to at a future date.

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my great and hon. Friend and I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Henderson. Is the population of my hon. Friend’s constituency sparsely distributed? Mine has got 23 separate villages, and there are probably four or five high schools, so making a choice is limited by the geographic spread of the secondary schools especially. That impacts communities like my hon. Friend’s in the north east, and mine, and those elsewhere, too. In that respect, competition between secondary schools and academies does not necessarily help parental choice in my hon. Friend’s constituency.

[Ian Lavery]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. As he suggests, it is basically the semi-rural and rural villages—small villages—that have had children travelling to certain schools as feeder schools for years and years, indeed decades and decades, and choice is now being taken away from parents. That is a massive issue—basically, it is the crux of this debate we are having here today.

[Jon Trickett]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again. Has he had the experience of some entrepreneurial secondary academies excluding kids who have issues about attainment in an effort to drive up the average result for those schools? And if he has, what does he think happens to those children—those young people—who have been excluded?

[Ian Lavery]

Again, that is an important issue with regard to what has happened to a number of, shall we say, allegedly problematic children in education. It has proven to be a massive issue, certainly in my constituency in the past, as it probably has across the piece.

In my view, there is a reluctance among some schools and academies to continue to educate some young people. Basically, they should try to nurture them. A lot of these kids are not going to be told what to do; they have got extreme difficulties. They are living in poverty and have problems. They live in socially deprived areas, which are getting worse and worse. A lot of their parents are using food banks. A lot of these kids need somebody to put an arm around them, but a number of them, at a very young age, get kicked into touch far too early by different schools and academies, across constituencies.

[Jon Trickett]

Will my hon. Friend give way again?

[Ian Lavery]

Of course.

[Gordon Henderson (in the Chair)]

Order. We do not really want multiple interventions by one Member.

[Jon Trickett]

I absolutely take your guidance, Mr Henderson. I have not asked to make a speech, but my hon. Friend is raising a number of issues of national importance. With your forbearance, Mr Henderson, can I make one final intervention, please?

[Gordon Henderson (in the Chair)]

I am a very generous Chair.

[Jon Trickett]

You are very generous, Mr Henderson. We have a 90-minute debate and my hon. Friend probably has an 85-minute speech, so he will have to cut it down slightly.

I have noticed that the proportion of young people in my hon. Friend’s constituency with no qualifications at all is almost one in five; in the city of London, only 6% have no qualifications. Is that due to social class or is it partly about the density of the population in London compared with the sparsity of the population in his area? In my own constituency, 24% of all the kids have no qualifications at all when they leave school. Is that not a disgrace?

Department for Education

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

It is a privilege to follow the contribution from the Chair of the Education Committee, the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon). His words were brave, but one suspects a degree of worry in some of the things he said about the direction of policy, especially on the funding of the Department. I welcome the new regime under the new Secretary of State for Education, the right hon. Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan). We shall see which direction she takes the Department in.

We are discussing why we spend billions of pounds on education, and it is worth beginning my contribution on that thought. Our society puts so much money into education to try to achieve several different objectives, but I just want to focus on one. Education ought to help each person to achieve their full potential in life, and that raises the question of what our society offers to people. The British promise is that each generation can expect the next generation to do slightly better than them, and the one after that to do slightly better; and that if people work hard and play by the rules, they can expect to do well in our society.

We sometimes call that social mobility. I note that we are about to move responsibility for social mobility back to the Cabinet Office. I do not object to that, but the truth is that education, as I describe it, plays a central role in delivering social mobility, or it ought to do so. Yet the Tory Government’s own Social Mobility Commission concluded that inequality now extends from birth through to work, and that our class structures are ossified. The ossified stratification of our society is an ancient British problem.

That suggests that not every human being is achieving their full potential. To that extent, their education has to be judged as not working properly, unless we take the view—I do not think many in this House do—that the children of the wealthiest are somehow more genetically endowed than the children of the poorest. If we took that view, we could say that the stratification reflected the genetic inheritance of each child, but that is clearly not the case. The truth is that millions of people’s potential is not being realised because our education system is not working properly.

Before I talk about a distributional analysis of how we spend our money, it is worth restating that I do not take the view—very few people would—that each person’s attainment is determined purely by the amount of money we spend. The way we deliver education must of course be continually developed, analysed and fully understood. Without adequate funding, however, the rest of it must fail. The truth is that the amount of funding we are discussing today will determine the number of staff working in education, and their morale. If the number of staff is in decline and their morale low, that will cast a shadow through every classroom in the country. I think there is some evidence that that is the case, although we have brilliant teachers, staff, children and parents. Over the term of this Government, from 2010, the amount of funding per child has fallen, and it is still falling.

What was the impact of those cuts? I do not want to talk about university funding, because that is largely done in a different way, through student borrowing and so on. There are, broadly, three sectors: early years, schools and further education. There is an increase in provision for early years, but the truth is that the cuts have been savage. The first months and years of a person’s life absolutely determine how much progress they will make in educational attainment, but the cuts have cut deep. Childcare costs are soaring, and many families simply cannot afford their childcare needs. Even since 12 months ago, there are 4,000 fewer childcare providers in place.

Let me skip schools for a second and go on to FE. There will probably not be many people in the House with my background. I left school with no qualifications, but eventually I ended up doing a first and then a second degree. What was the stepping stone for me, having left school with no qualifications? It was further education—a college that took an interest in me after I failed, effectively, or was failed by the school system. There are millions of people in the same position who would like to do more, whether they have left school, changed profession or simply want to catch up. However, under this Government’s austerity programme, FE funding has been cut by two thirds. That stepping stone has almost been removed. Many people in my patch and throughout the country simply do not have access to a college as I did when I was a younger man.

Let me turn briefly to schools and the main point that I want to develop. Do not take my word for it; the House of Commons Library briefing for today’s debate quotes the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It is quite shocking, but in its placid, bureaucratic language the IFS states:

“Deprived schools have seen larger cuts over the last decade. The most deprived secondary schools saw a 14% real-terms fall in spending per pupil”

over the 10 years up to 2020, compared to a 9% cut for the least deprived schools. So the most deprived schools have had a 14% cut and the least deprived schools have had a 9% cut. It goes on to state that the national funding formula simply repeats all those problems, providing increases of 8% to 9% for the least deprived schools and 5% for the most deprived, and that the pupil premium has failed to keep pace with inflation. In dry language, the quote in the House of Commons Library briefing states that these patterns of funding “run counter” to the Government’s so-called central objective of levelling up poorer areas. We have a Prime Minister and an Administration who regularly talk about levelling up, but they have to will the means to achieve a levelling-up programme. That is not happening.

Let me illustrate the impact on an area such as the one I represent. I am one of four MPs from the Wakefield district, and Wakefield Council is the 54th most deprived council area in the country. When we look at levels of educational attainment, we see that one in five people get to national vocational qualification level 4. The national figure is twice that, and the levels of attainment in Uxbridge, the Prime Minister’s constituency, are 250% higher than those in my constituency. Given the levels of deprivation and attainment that I mentioned, we would think that Wakefield Council would get more money, rather than less, in the distribution of school funding, but that is not the case. The cuts to schools in the Prime Minister’s Uxbridge constituency amounted to £276 a child. In my constituency, they amounted to £514, which is almost twice as much. How can that be right?

I will put on my Facebook page an analysis of the cuts in our area to every school. However, to take one at random, St Helen’s Primary School in Hemsworth—I know the school, which is in a great community, with lovely parents and vital, vibrant children—has had £746 cut per pupil since the cuts began, and yet 38% of the children are on free school meals. That deprived community is doing its best against a Government who are cutting, cutting and cutting. Why should children in an area such as the one I represent, and in deprived areas up and down the country that are lacking in social mobility, have to face cuts on that scale while children in the Prime Minister’s constituency—a better-off community, with higher levels of attainment than in mine—do not?

The truth is that the Government have presided over the most prolonged and savage cuts to education since at least the war. They have cheated the children, staff and parents in deprived communities everywhere for the benefit of those who live in the least deprived, most well-off communities. That is not right; it is immoral. Today’s estimates fail dismally to make proper provision for the damage that the Conservatives have done since they took power in 2010.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Williamson]

Even before he was elected to this House, my hon. Friend was campaigning to ensure that the people of Radcliffe and their children have a high school for their town. I know how passionately he feels about that; he has had a petition highlighting the issue and numerous meetings with me. We are still in the final phases of allocating round 14 of free schools, but his passionate campaigning has been noted, and I am sure we will all work to ensure that his constituents get the best educational attainment possible.

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

It is well known that working-class boys and young men are severely disadvantaged in the educational system, but I wonder whether the House is aware of the recent Sutton Trust report, which showed that the situation has become deeply entrenched during the Government’s mishandling of the covid crisis. It is the job of the Department for Education to promote social mobility, yet the report predicts that working-class young men and boys will be 7.5% less mobile, with £4,000 less in lifetime earnings. Either the Government are incompetent or they simply do not care about the entrenchment of privilege and poverty—which is it?

Oral Answers to Questions

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Nick Gibb]

Remote teaching has been a significant challenge for teachers across the sector, and I am grateful to all those who have worked so hard to ensure their pupils’ education has continued despite the difficulties of lockdown. Some innovations will no doubt continue to be beneficial, and we are working with organisations such as the Education Endowment Foundation to take an evidence-based approach to establishing how schools can best use remote practices in future.

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

What proportion of children (a) classed as vulnerable and (b) eligible for free school meals are attending school.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Vicky Ford)]

About 18% of children with an education, health and care plan or a social worker attended an education setting on 11 June. The Department does not collect separate attendance data for those eligible for free school meals.

[Jon Trickett [V]]

Is the Minister not ashamed that after 10 years of a Tory Government, in West Yorkshire alone there are almost exactly 100,000 children at risk living in families of multiple vulnerabilities? Many of them are still not at school and therefore at risk. What will she do about it?

[Vicky Ford]

I am enormously proud that after 10 years of a Conservative-led Government the attainment gap between those from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from more advantaged backgrounds has narrowed at every stage of children’s education. We have kept schools open for vulnerable children, and those children most at risk have been seen or contacted by their social workers. I thank social workers and schools across the country for doing that. We need to get children back to school, and the Opposition should support us.

Academies Bill [Lords]

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Monday 26th July 2010 Commons Chamber

Academy orders

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

I beg to move amendment 54, in page 3, line 34, at end insert—

‘(3A) An Academy order must include provisions which make available for community use some or all of the school’s facilities.

(3B) Such provisions shall not be fewer and on less advantageous terms than those which have been available prior to the application being made for an Academy order.

(3C) Such provisions may be made by means of a contract or contracts with a local authority or other non-profit making or commercial body.

(3D) “Local authority” in this section means a county, district, unitary or parish council.’.

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Hoyle. I think that this is the first time I have served under your distinguished chairpersonship, to use a gender-neutral phrase. Notwithstanding the fact that you and I come from different sides of the Pennines, I am sure that you will exercise justice and mercy if I happen to cross the line from time to time—if that is possible between people from different sides of the Pennines.

Amendment 54 is a probing amendment, and a similar proposal was discussed, albeit briefly, in the House of Lords, where the Minister prompted more questions than he gave answers. I shall be brief because I know that we have other important matters to debate tonight.

We now know that the Government have effectively given the Secretary of State the power to change the status of schools by order—by fiat or administrative measures—notwithstanding the fact that we seek some form of accountability to local communities, which the Government have denied. Members of the House will know that I was against academies and that I voted against them when they were introduced by my own party. However, at least the previous Government had the merit of saying that schools should be accountable and responsible to local communities, and that their facilities should be as widely accessible as possible.

The concept of the extended school—a school that reaches out into the community, and a community that reaches into the school—was very much at the heart of Labour’s schools provisions. It occurred to me that I should like to know what will happen to schools’ assets that are associated with that community provision. The idea of the extended school is that the school is a facility for the whole community. After all, in the African phrase, it takes a whole village to educate a child—sometimes it takes a child to educate the village, too—so the interaction between the community and the school is important, and lies at the heart of modern educational thinking.

I am pleased that over the years of the Labour Government, many schools in my area developed a series of community activities, and I shall highlight two—I am sure that every hon. Member could talk about what happens in schools in their areas in the same way. At Minsthorpe community college, a gym provided by the Labour Government, the Labour council and the college is open to everybody. A brand new sports hall that was built at the cost of millions of pounds in 2009 is also open to the community at subsidised cost. The college might become part of the Olympic preparations, because it is an Olympic-recognised site, which is a very proud achievement for our whole community. The school also has AstroTurf, which is used by local football clubs, a training and conference centre, beauty training, adult education, and crèche facilities on site and in the local village of Upton. The youngest pupil at the college is three months old, and the oldest is 80 years old. That is the school’s range of provision.

Hemsworth arts and community college has also had millions of pounds spent on it, and it opens every single day in one form or another. Cherry Tree House, a multi-agency drop-in centre, is available to the whole community, the police, the health service and others, and an on-site sports centre is open all year. There is an Ofsted-registered day-care nursery, an adult education learning programme, and a programme of arts that works with all kinds of community groups, which use creative skills that were unimaginable even a few years ago in Hemsworth. There are outreach programmes with local Churches, the skills centre and so on and so forth. That is a description of two schools, but I am sure that every school in every community provides similar facilities.

By tabling amendment 54, I am asking the Government: what do they intend to happen to all that community outreach? I propose that there should effectively be two further aspects to the Bill. First, there should be no less provision to the community than there is on the day of transfer, and secondly, those provisions should be available on at least the same advantageous terms as they are now, meaning that there should be no increase in price or decrease in accessibility. It is a simple proposal.

Tens of thousands of people use community schools in my constituency and throughout the country. The question is: what will happen to those community facilities? After all, they were provided not by the school, but by the whole community, through council tax and central taxation. The Bill ought to make it clear that that community provision should continue—that should be the underlying philosophy of the nature of the relationship between educational institutions and the people who live in a community—and that the pricing should not change.

Paragraph 33(e) of the Government’s proposed model funding agreement allows the academy to

“charge persons who are not registered pupils at the Academy for education provided or for facilities used by them at the Academy”.

I guess that the Minister will say that that is simply a measure to give academies a legal power to charge. However, there are fears, including in the schools that I mentioned and among the people who use them, whom I represent, that fees will increase rapidly, and that the community will be seen as a cash cow. Like many other right hon. and hon. Members, I represent many deprived communities. They, too, are seriously worried about the intentions of some academies.

I mentioned that a similar proposal was debated in the Lords. Lord Wallace of Saltaire, speaking for the Government, said:

“We therefore entirely agree with my noble friend”—

who moved the amendment—

“that it is important for a school to be at the heart of its community and that it should, as far as possible, encourage the community to make use of school facilities in the evenings and at weekends. The place to impose obligations on an academy is through the academy arrangements—either the funding agreement or the terms and conditions of grant. We therefore resist the imposition of this in the Bill but entirely sympathise with the intentions of the amendment.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 28 June 2010; Vol. 719, c. 1620.]

I guess that the Minister will say the same thing.

There are two ways to deal with this community access issue. One would be for the thousands and thousands of academies—if that is how many are eventually created—to each have their own funding agreement, which would have to be policed separately. If constituents come to my surgery and say that the fees that they used to pay to do French or learn IT, or to use the sports or beauty facilities, have suddenly tripled or quadrupled, where will I turn if the amendment is not accepted? I will have to turn to the Minister and his civil servants, who will have to look at the funding agreement and make a separate enforcement order. This is not releasing schools from red tape, as was suggested a few moments ago by the Minister. It is nationalising the education system and the schools because, instead of schools being accountable to the local authority, or regulated under an amendment of the type that I propose, the Minister will have to take separate enforcement orders for every academy. How can that be the case for a Government who claim to believe in freeing up institutions and the education system?

If the Government are determined to go ahead with the system proposed in the Bill and if they agree with the philosophy that schools should be part of their communities, it would be simpler, more direct and cheaper to put something in the Bill so that each principal and governing body of an academy will understand from the beginning that they have taken over community facilities that the council helped to build, that they have inherited pricing structures, and that they have to honour them. The amendment is not an earth-shattering one, but I want to test the Government’s commitment to their expressed desire to release people rather than bind them up in red tape. The Minister’s answer in the other place opened up a Pandora’s box of national control over an education system that we have always been proud of it being administered locally. The Bill is a reversal of that trend.

[Mr Mike Hancock]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hoyle. This is the first time that I have had the honour of speaking when you are in the Chair.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) because he makes a very important point. We have had a helpful debate on all the issues over the three or four days of consideration of the Bill, and it has been remarkable how much common ground has been found, even by those who are diametrically opposed to the idea of academies. Several of us have seen the merits of some of the issues, and the debate as a whole has been fair and frank. I suspect that the Minister has also found some of the comments helpful in framing the final form of the legislation and the detail that is provided to future academies.

I support the amendment, because the effect of a large secondary school on the social fabric of a community—with possibly an increased role in the future—is important for social cohesion. I had hoped that we would consider new clause 2, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson), because that talks specifically about the importance of social cohesion. If that obligation were in the Bill, there would be no going back on the school’s commitment to the community. I have been a governor of schools where the local authority put in money for community facilities—such as a nursery—and bit by bit those services, which were additional to the school, disappeared, because of the weight of numbers. First, we lost the community room, and then the nursery. Those community facilities are not paid for by the education budget, but by the general rate fund—and in large council estates by the housing revenue account—but the pressure of numbers at the school means that they are lost to the community.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jon Trickett]

I am grateful to the Minister for the way in which he has presented his case to the Committee, and I do not wish to press the amendment to a vote. He has had the opportunity to put the Government’s views on record, and they will no doubt form part of any future debate when academies begin to operate. I predict, however, that the monitoring system he is introducing will be more expensive, more bureaucratic and more top-down than the present system of accountability of schools to their local communities through the local authorities, and that is deeply regrettable. With that, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Mr Iain Wright]

I beg to move amendment 79, page 4, line 8, at end add—

‘(8) Before making an Academy order in respect of a maintained school under this section, the Secretary of State shall consult with—

(a) the local authority,

(b) any other local authority who would in his opinion be affected by the making of an Academy order,

(c) teachers and other staff at the school and their representatives,

(d) parents and pupils of the school and the other schools in the community, and

(e) such other persons as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.’.