Grammar and Faith Schools

Kate Green Excerpts

Tuesday 8th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy]

My hon. Friend posed an interesting question to the Minister in the Education Committee’s evidence session this morning. She asked why, if he was keen to ensure that all schools improved, rather than recreating a system of grammar schools and secondary moderns, he did not just enable children to go to good schools by expanding the number of places in good comprehensive schools. The Minister did not seem to give an answer, but I hope that he will have an answer by the time he responds to the debate.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

As my hon. Friend knows, in my local authority of Trafford we have selective education. We also have high-performing schools, but they do not perform well for every child, and particularly not for the most disadvantaged. Nor does every parent, or indeed the majority of parents, get a choice of school. Most parents, if they put their child forward for the entrance examination for the grammar school, find that their child is not successful and is not admitted. The choice of which school their child goes to is made by the schools, not by the parents.

[Lisa Nandy]

I suspect that the Minister would reply that the Government want to expand the number of places in grammar schools, so that more children will get in. There is no question but that grammar schools outperform non-selective schools in terms of exam results, but the Government make a great leap in claiming that grammar schools are somehow intrinsically better for the children in them than other similar schools in the area. I want the Minister to consider for a moment that there is evidence to the contrary.

We know that when grammar schools were the norm, working-class children were far more likely to drop out of those schools. The Robbins report revealed that only 2% of children whose parents were semi-skilled or low skilled then went on to university. The Minister’s claim that disadvantaged grammar school pupils are more likely to go on to a Russell Group university, which I have heard him repeat often, is based on research that does not control for prior attainment. He also often mentions the Sutton Trust research. The 2011 report concluded:

“Given their selective intake, grammar schools would appear to be underrepresented among the most successful schools for Oxbridge entry”.

All I am asking the Minister to do is consider the whole range of evidence on this subject and base education policy on it accordingly. This morning before the Education Committee we saw what happens when Ministers do not do that. He was forced to admit that in areas of selection, the impact on children in non-selective schools is mixed. Until now, he has been fond of citing one report by the Sutton Trust, which says that there is no negative effect on children who are not in grammar schools in areas where there is selection, but against that the Education Committee was able to cite Dr Becky Allen, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Education Policy Institute, and the education journalist Chris Cook, who found that the only thing that shifts in areas where selection is introduced is who does well, not how many do well, and that, put simply, the better-off do well at the expense of the rest.

Policy Exchange set out clearly the stark impact in terms of lost opportunities and earnings for those who do not attend grammar schools, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research says that for girls there was some raised wage potential, but not for boys.

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[Neil Carmichael]

Yes, I would agree with that. The hon. Lady, who is also a member of my Select Committee—I will have to pay tribute to the whole lot in a minute—makes a very astute point. The fact is that if pupils are selected on the basis of academic testing to go to a school and then do very well, people really should not be surprised; they should actually be disappointed if one or two fail the grade, let alone get the sort of figures the Minister suggested they did.

[Kate Green]

The hon. Gentleman is right, of course, that pupils who are selected and supported at home and who go to selective schools will, on the whole, do well. However, does he share my concern that, in my borough of Trafford, where we do have selective education, some grammar schools are beginning to see a rise in mental health problems among their students because of the academic pressures placed on those kids? Now, that can happen for a whole range of reasons, but it is certainly something that troubles headteachers in Trafford, and I wonder whether he would like to comment.

[Neil Carmichael]

I thank the hon. Lady very much for that interesting intervention. She is right about two things. The first is the specific point about children’s mental health being put under pressure in certain circumstances. However, there is also the wider issue of the mental health of young people, and we need to think carefully about that, because there is evidence that the number of children being affected by mental health issues is rising, and rising too fast. That is something that the Committee, which I note the hon. Lady is not a member of, will consider in due course.

I want to finish this section of my speech, on Professor Jesson’s observation. If grammar schools are introduced as new schools, they really must make a contribution to surrounding schools and feeder schools. One way for us to achieve that—rather than simply saying that we will punish grammar schools because they are not doing something we want to do and that those punishments will include, for example, no right to expand further—is to say that such schools should be part of a multi-academy trust. If they are going to be new schools, and if we insist on having them, they should be absolutely responsible for, and indeed charged with the task of, making sure that the schools around them are really improved through direct action.

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[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman). I send my best wishes to the Parliament choir for a successful concert.

In Trafford, part of which I represent, we already have a selective education system. All our schools perform very well, but that is despite selection, not because of it. Trafford’s success reflects excellent teaching, strong schools leadership, a culture of schools working together to support one another, and very good support from families and parents. I pay tribute to everyone—staff, students and the wider community—for the excellent results that Trafford achieves.

It is important to note, however, that selection at age 11 is not an unalloyed good for everyone, or even for the majority of our children. A few weeks ago, I went to meet the headteacher of one of our very successful non-selective girls’ schools—well, I guess it is selective, in that it is single-sex—and she talked about the challenges that she and her staff team face when girls who have failed the entrance examination for our local grammar schools arrive at her school, at the very young age of 11, demoralised and dispirited, believing that they are failures and have been written off.

That headteacher’s team do a tremendous job to recover the morale and confidence of those girls, who go on to perform extremely well, but I find it offensive that we should say to young children, “You are a failure”, on the basis of an inflexible and unsuitable examination that does not reflect the wider context of what is going on in children’s lives and what learning ought to be for. If we have a system in which only one in four of our children aged 11 are told they are successful and have potential, we are getting something very wrong.

As I say, the selective system does not perform well for all our children in Trafford, nor does it deal with the postcode lottery, which Ministers have said they want to address through their proposals. In Trafford, children from the richest wards are by far the most likely to be in Trafford’s grammar schools. Those from the poorest wards, largely concentrated in my constituency, are the least likely to be in grammar schools. In preparation for this debate, I saw a graph of the numbers, and the curve was startling and shocking: a tiny proportion of children in wards such as Bucklow-St Martins and Clifford in my constituency go to grammar school, compared with a much higher percentage of children from Hale and Bowdon, in the more prosperous parts of the borough.

[John Glen]

I always listen carefully to the hon. Lady, but is the issue not sometimes aspiration and getting applicants from a diverse range of backgrounds? If more from such backgrounds applied, could we not make some progress?

[Kate Green]

I will be very honest with the hon. Gentleman: I do not know. I just feel that a system that says to parents, “Don’t bother putting your child forward because they have no chance of succeeding,” is not a very good system either. What that headteacher told me gives the lie to what he suggests. She said that parents felt under pressure to put their child forward for the assessment even when they knew that they were unlikely to succeed. The disappointment is being compounded by a great deal of wasted effort and pain. He is right about the complexities around who applies and what happens when they do, but there is something very troubling about a graph that shows that only children from the richest parts of the borough have a high chance of entry into grammar schools. I suspect that their having supportive parents, and lots of assets in their home to support their learning through educational toys, reading, educational trips and leisure activities and so on, is the reason why they have a higher chance of getting into grammar schools. I do not negate what he says, but I strongly suspect that it is those wider social factors and family resources that dispose children from the richer parts of the boroughs to have a higher chance of entering grammar schools.

[Lucy Powell]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech about her experiences in Trafford, but further to the intervention from the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen), is she aware that the more selective an area—the higher the concentration of grammar schools—the wider the attainment gap? Conservative Members like to argue that if only there were more grammar schools, more poorer children would attend them, but that does not stack up against the evidence.

[Kate Green]

Headteachers in my borough believe that if there were more grammar schools, by definition there would be more secondary modern-equivalent schools, too, and that for every grammar school we create, we will have to create four secondary moderns, unless the ratios of children in grammar and non-grammar schools are to change.

The Minister indicated that there would be a range of different schools available to students, such as technical schools or schools with different specialisms, and I welcome that, but we have had the latter for many years, under the academy system introduced by Labour. I already have specialist sports, science and art academies in my constituency. We do not have to overlay that with academic selection to ensure a different emphasis in the education that children receive, and we must not use division to exacerbate the attainment gap.

I want to speak about a group of children who really lose out in Trafford: children with special educational needs and disabilities, who have not been mentioned much this afternoon. In a written answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) on 2 November, the Minister appeared to say that the Government were not tracking the number of SEND children in grammar schools. I am surprised if that is the case. If I misunderstood the thrust of his answer, I would very much welcome his correcting me. I am certainly disturbed if we are not following the engagement of those children and their experience in the selective system.

I can tell the Minister and the House that the numbers of children with special educational needs and disabilities in grammar schools in Trafford are shockingly low. Based on the May 2016 school census figures, we had a grammar school population in my borough of 7,539 children, 224 of whom were receiving SEN support, and just 20 had education, health and care plans or statements in place—just 20 out of more than 7,500 kids. I have seen some figures subsequently that suggest that the numbers could be even lower now.

In practice, therefore, the selective system is clearly not working and not serving SEND children in our borough. The system is not working for them. It does not work for them in a number of different ways. First, for the children and their families, the entrance exam process is very stressful—compounded, I must say, in Trafford by the fact that each grammar school sets its own entrance exam. There is not a common 11-plus across the borough—each school has its own tests—so children sit, and quite often fail, not just one, but two, three or four tests. On top of that, they will have received intensive tutoring in advance of taking those tests, where their parents can afford it, that starts for many children from the age of nine or even younger, putting incredible stress on those families and children in preparation for those tests.

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

rose—

[Kate Green]

I shall give way to the shadow Minister, who is my parliamentary next-door neighbour and also a Trafford MP.

[Mike Kane]

I am grateful to my neighbour, who is making a very powerful speech. Does she agree that the pass and fail line of the children taking all those tests is absolutely arbitrary, because it will depend on how many grammar school places there are in the system for that current year?

[Kate Green]

Of course it will. Perhaps the Minister would like to say whether he wants to see more such grammar school places at the expense of a lowering of this arbitrary bar, or whether he believes that the right thing to do would be to ensure that every school offered a great education to every child, which would be my aspiration, and indeed was exactly what I received in my comprehensive school in the 1970s. I am a little bit surprised that, nearly half a century later, we are having to revisit the success of such schools.

In truth, it is not even selection at age 11 in Trafford; in practice, it is selection for most children at age 10, because the entrance examination is taken at the start of year 6 before many children have reached their 11th birthday. I think that putting little children of 10 years old through that kind of process is really wrong. I feel really uncomfortable about it, and I would like to hear the Minister tell us in his response what analysis the Government have made and what consideration they have given to the pressure that that kind of system puts on young children and their parents.

As I said earlier, selection is not really about parents making a choice; it is choice by the schools, which impacts particularly on children with special educational needs and disabilities. In Trafford, many parents have told me that they believe that grammar schools, deliberately or otherwise, deter or reject their children because they believe that admitting such children would have an adverse effect on their overall school results. The inspection and monitoring systems do not sufficiently incentivise grammar schools to take those children, and where they do take them, there is ample national—not just local—evidence that it is more likely that grammar schools will take SEND children only if they are at the milder end of the SEND spectrum. In other words, that means children who are more likely to be able to develop and improve.

I have heard far too many reports from parents in my constituency of the failure of the system to make adjustments for the way in which SEND pupils take the entrance tests—even if the schools have been alerted to the special needs of the students in advance. For example, a parent told me about her child with a hearing impairment. She had told the school about it and about the need for a quiet environment in which the child could take the test, instead of which the child was put at the front of the hall with about 100 children in it and no sound insulation, and the child struggled to perform. I have heard, too, that the tests fail adequately to recognise the special needs of those with autism or dyslexia. In truth, no matter how well the tests are administered and no matter how responsive they might try to be to the particular needs of children with special needs, the 11-plus system is inherently discriminatory against those special needs children, as indeed the exam board GL Assessment itself confirmed in its research of 2009.

In addition to the exam system, developments in the curriculum also discriminate against some SEND students. We have already heard about the EBacc, which the Minister appeared to regard as a measure of success among students, but in fact that measure does not work well for SEND children, and neither do some of the back-to-basics traditional teaching methods that are now being applied at GCSE in English and maths.

All this means that, in practice, the non-selective schools in Trafford end up taking a disproportionately large number of children with special educational needs. I must say in their defence that those schools do exceptionally well for those children, but it puts those schools under huge pressure and often means that parents cannot get their children into them, even though they are the local schools, because the children with special needs and statements have to take priority for the available places. Those schools also struggle to maintain sixth forms, which means they sometimes struggle to recruit the most academically specialist teachers. In practice, children in those schools are not necessarily getting the chance to have the best education and the best teaching.

It is my firm belief that greater expansion of grammar schools would make a bad situation even worse for SEND children in Trafford. I am therefore particularly concerned that the Green Paper makes no mention of SEND children at all. I specifically raised this matter with the Secretary of State on the very first occasion after the summer recess that we discussed selective education in early September, and she assured me that those children would receive careful consideration by Ministers. They do not make an appearance in the Green Paper at all. Yet, as I hope I have shown this afternoon, all my experience is that the proposals to expand the number of grammar schools will impact most negatively on those children. As the Alliance for Inclusive Education pointed out, 87% of respondents in a recent Nasen survey—this is the body of SEND professionals—said that they, too, believed that the expansion of selection would have a negative impact on those kids.

Ministers owe a very special obligation to those children—a special obligation to ensure that they can fulfil their potential, make the most of their education, and be included and educated alongside other kids. The Trafford experience shows that the opposite is true. The result is that we are failing to protect the rights and interests of disabled children, and it is endemic to the selective system to fail to do so. I would argue that it is also at odds with our international obligations under the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, as well as our obligation to serve the best interests of every child.

If the Green Paper and the Government really want schools that work for SEND students, here are some of the things that I would like Ministers to look at that I believe will work. They should ensure that there is a special educational needs co-ordinator and a dedicated SEND champion on every school leadership team. They should ensure that there are strong, firm processes for school-to-school knowledge exchange and opportunities for children in special needs schools to share some of their learning with children in mainstream schools. They should ensure that all SEND children receive the best-quality teaching and look at how school funding can incentivise teachers to be in schools to educate those kids. Overall, they should look at the resources, the inspection regime and the incentives for schools to give special attention to the needs of children with special needs and disabilities.

That is what I would have liked the Green Paper to concentrate on, and it is what I would like to see Ministers concentrate on now. I hope that the Minister will say this afternoon that he is prepared to consider rethinking and re-prioritising away from these damaging and divisive proposals, which do very little for a very large number of children in my constituency and which have the potential to do considerable harm to more children right around the country.

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[Mr Gibb]

I could not have put it any better. That is a classic example of a grammar school working with a non-selective school to raise the standards in both schools, and it is working extremely well. We want to see that replicated up and down the country, and that is what we are consulting on in our proposals.

Under our proposals, existing grammar schools and new grammar schools would be allowed to open only if they met strict conditions designed to ensure that increased numbers of less-well-off pupils have access to a selective education. The hon. Member for Wigan asked for evidence that the proposals would work. We know that selective schools are almost 50% more popular with parents than non-selective schools, based on the preferences expressed in the secondary school application process. The most recent GCSE figures show that pupils at grammar schools make significantly more progress, relative to their similarly able peers in comprehensives, with a progress 8 score in aggregate of plus 0.33, compared with the national average of nought. The results are even starker for pupils from less affluent backgrounds. Disadvantaged pupils from grammar schools are almost twice as likely to go to a top Russell Group university than their wealthier peers who attend comprehensive schools, and they are more than three times as likely to attend one of these prestigious universities as their comprehensively educated peers from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

According to the Educational Policy Institute report, pupils at grammar schools achieve a third of a grade per subject higher than those at non-grammar schools, and 78% of highly able children—those who achieve level 5 at the end of primary school—who go to a grammar school achieve the EBacc, compared with 52% of highly able pupils who go to a comprehensive school. If we look at the Oxbridge entrance—

[Kate Green]

rose—

[Mr Gibb]

I will give way to the hon. Lady when I have finished responding to the hon. Member for Wigan’s points.

One in five of the state school-educated students at Oxford between 2012 and 2014 were from grammar schools. In Cambridge in 2015, 682 students came from the comprehensive sector and 589 from grammar schools, so almost as many students from the state sector came from 163 grammar schools as came from 2,800 comprehensive schools. Disadvantaged pupils are, as I have said, twice as likely to go to a Russell Group university.

The hon. Member for Wigan also asked me to praise some non-selective schools, and I am happy to do so. At the King Solomon Academy, 95% achieved five good GCSEs including English and maths. At the West London Free School, which she does not like, 37% qualify for the pupil premium and 46% achieve the EBacc. She also asked about capital spending. The 2015 spending review allocated £23 billion to all capital funding, including capital funding for 500 new free schools by 2020. I should add that none of that capital will be spent on schools without classroom walls, which the last Labour Government built in Knowsley and elsewhere. Those schools are now struggling to put those walls back at great expense.

[Kate Green]

A few moments ago, the Minister said that no new grammar school would be allowed to open without it accepting a certain proportion of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In Trafford, around 3% of children in grammar schools are on free school meals, compared with a borough-wide average of 11% or 12%. Will the Minister say whether existing grammar schools in Trafford will also be required to lift the proportion of children from disadvantaged backgrounds on their rolls? If not, why not?

[Mr Gibb]

If the hon. Lady had read the consultation document, she would have seen that page 28 states that we will require

“existing selective schools to engage in outreach activity… We therefore propose to require all selective schools to have in place strategies to ensure fair access.”

We want to extend the requirements to existing schools which, incidentally, is something that no Labour Member urged their Government to do over 13 years. This Government, however, are seeking to take measures to ensure that all grammar schools that want to expand and all new grammar schools do more to widen their social intake.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) mentioned alternative priorities for the Government. During his speech today and during the Select Committee hearings, he hinted that his alternative priority was Brexit, but he also mentioned the national funding formula, the transition from primary to secondary and post-16 literacy and numeracy. All three are priorities for this Government and we have taken and are taking action. We have already consulted on phase 1 of the national fair funding formula and will be consulting on phase 2 shortly. I have already described all the measures that we have taken to improve outcomes for primary school pupils, so that they are ready for secondary education.