Budget Resolutions

Maria Eagle Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 14th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

Absolutely. Our current approach is not just outdated but, in places, extremely unfair. We want our schools to be able to achieve the same outcomes, but we are funding them fundamentally differently in different places. There are differences for children often for no other reason than where they are growing up. No one who wants social mobility to get better should accept that, so we have to move to a more equitable funding approach. That is what we are consulting on right now.

We have to make sure that school places are there for children as they move through the system, but this is not just about the extra school places and new schools that we need; it is also about investing in the schools and school places that we already have. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor has therefore put forward an additional £216 million to help to refurbish existing schools and make them fit for the 21st century. Of course, that is on top of our existing plans to invest more than £10 billion improving the condition of the school estate by 2021.

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Lady accept that academic A-levels are one way in which young people can ensure that they get a good start in life, from which they can perhaps go on to great success through our university system? What will the proposals that she is outlining do for young people in Halewood and Knowsley, who have no option in the entire borough for doing academic A-levels and must leave the borough in order to study?

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Lady raises a profound and important point. There are parts of the country where, for far too long, young people’s educational attainment has simply not been good enough. I know that the situation she highlights is part of the much broader challenge that her local community faces in seeking to raise educational attainment steadily. It is important that alongside the investment in technical education that we have set out in the Budget, we make sure through approaches such as opportunity areas that we zone in on the places that most need additional support so that we can shift outcomes there.

The Government’s focus on opportunity does not end when someone leaves full-time education. In a dynamic, modern economy we need to foster a culture of lifelong learning, in which all of us—adults from every walk of life—are passionate about continuing to upskill ourselves.

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[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I echo what has already been said about the fantastic maiden speech of my new hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell). I went with him to visit a maintained nursery school in Stoke, and I know how committed he is to education and skills in the area. That brings me to the main thrust of my own speech.

After nearly seven years, the cumulative effect of Government policy on education and skills is now being felt by pupils, parents and teachers, and has given rise to a number of serious issues, each of which should demand the full attention of Ministers. School budgets are falling for the first time in 20 years. There is a teacher shortage crisis. There has been a huge rise in pupil numbers, requiring about 400,000 new school places. We are seeing the biggest changes in GCSEs and the curriculum for a generation, of which many people are unaware. Primary assessment is in absolute chaos: the pass rate in last year’s standard assessment tests fell from more than 80% to an appalling 53%. We have seen the introduction of more free childcare with insufficient funding, and serious failings in capacity and oversight in the schools system. Many of the Government’s previous “pet projects” have failed and closed. All that has come on top of what the Secretary of State described today as the biggest revolution for a decade in technical education.

Any one of those issues should command the undivided attention of Ministers, but they want to impose two huge further changes on the schools system: a new funding formula which seems to have left all sides unhappy, and the reintroduction of grammar schools without a shred of evidence, which has shone a light on the woeful record of existing grammar schools in supporting children from poorer backgrounds. The Budget had nothing to say about social mobility, closing the productivity gap, or creating the high-wage, high-skills economy that we need. Perhaps the Government would have done better to spend more of their time sorting out the last set of experiments that they said would create “more choice”. What has happened to them? Let us take a look.

Since 2010, when the Government introduced their previous gimmicks—university technical colleges, studio schools and free schools—there have been huge problems and a massive waste of resources. More than 1 in 10 UTCs has closed, and many more are now on the brink. While there are a few excellent UTCs, even the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove)—who had introduced them—admitted that the experiment had failed, saying:

“the evidence has accumulated and the verdict is clear”.

Three in 10 studio schools have closed or are due to close, as Schools Week analysis has found, and many more are on the brink of closure. Only one has reached the 300-pupil mark that was set. The future is therefore looking bleak for those experimental institutions, yet the Government are hellbent on creating more. One in five free schools are in places where they are not needed. With the starving of capital funds to existing schools, and the failure to meet the places crisis by continuing to throw good money after bad, this Budget does nothing to deal with the real issues facing our schools.

Even though we are awaiting the outcome of the Government’s consultation, we heard this week that the Government are hellbent on going ahead with their grammar schools programme, which they are now calling “selective free schools.” I note that the Secretary of State is so ashamed of that policy that she did not even mention it in her speech today. I reiterate that there are very few Conservative Members in the Chamber to defend that policy.

[Maria Eagle]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Secretary of State probably did not mention the policy because she does not agree with it?

[Lucy Powell]

Yes. We can infer that. The evidence is clear on selective education. Those systems do not boost social mobility. In fact, in many cases they widen the gap. As we all know in the House, the big challenge facing our education system is the long tail of under- achievement. It is not about how we can better support the already high-achieving. The only argument advanced by Conservative Members is that the tiny number of children on free school meals who get into grammar schools, who by definition are already high-achieving, do better than all the other children on free school meals. What a joke of an argument that is to base the entire policy on. There is a huge amount of evidence going the other way.

Perhaps that is why, when the Secretary of State addressed the usually mild-mannered and pragmatic Association of School and College Leaders at the weekend, she got booed, which has never happened at that conference before. It may also be why the Sutton Trust, the Government’s own Social Mobility Commission, the Education Policy Institute, the former chief inspector of schools, all the secondary heads in Surrey and many, many others and many Conservative Members have come out against those proposals.

There are plenty of things that the Government should be doing, and we have mentioned a few of them. Perhaps they should get to those core issues, rather than creating yet more uncertainty and instability in the system. They should get on with doing something about the major funding challenge. This is not about fair funding—it is about funding levels being maintained at the levels they are now. The belts are being tightened even more for some schools, but all schools are losing out from those funding measures.

The Government should do something about teacher shortages. For five years in a row, they have missed their retention and recruitment challenges. They should do something about the school places crisis and work with local authorities, rather than plonking free schools where they are not needed. And get a grip on what is happening with the new GCSEs and curriculum. There is absolute chaos there.

If the Government really want to do something about social mobility, they could do a lot worse than look at investing properly in quality provision in the early years, rather than trying to deliver child care on the cheap. There is plenty of evidence to support it, and I am happy to discuss that with Ministers if they want to have a real agenda for social mobility.

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[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

The Budget was more about what the Chancellor did not say than what he did. It is incredible that the consequences of us leaving the EU—the biggest cause of uncertainty and the biggest threat to our economic wellbeing in a generation—got no significant mention at all in the Budget. That fact alone is enough to render the Budget a failure, but it was not the only failure. Most Chancellors at least get to see good headlines the next morning, but not so “Spreadsheet Phil”, as the right hon. Gentleman likes to be known. However, the way in which the Prime Minister, her Chancellor, their close allies, ministerial aides and senior sources have been denouncing each other over the weekend—in the most vituperative terms—show just what his own colleagues think of him breaching a manifesto promise in his Budget.

Apart from the considerable entertainment value of all this briefing and counter-briefing, which shows the dysfunction at the heart of this blundering, fractious and divided Government, I find it astonishing that no one in the entire Cabinet spotted the howling, broken election promise at the heart of the Budget when the Chancellor briefed them on his plans. They have all been whinging to the newspapers that the Chancellor did not flag it up, but they all stood on a manifesto that promised no increase in income tax, national insurance contributions or VAT for the entire five years of this Parliament. They all repeated that ad nauseam during the election campaign, yet none of them noticed. I would not have expected that they had all forgotten about it, but apparently they all managed to put it right out of their minds. It shows just how cynical this Tory Government really are that the entire Cabinet failed to remember their main election tax promise within two years of winning that election. Some 5,400 people in my constituency, some of whom earn less than £17,000, will now have to pay more, and not all of them are self-employed by choice.

I will say a little bit about education because there are real challenges in my constituency. Schools are facing a real squeeze. There are some figures that the Secretary of State did not give us in her opening remarks. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, thanks to the Lib Dem-Tory coalition Government and the current Tory Government, spending per pupil fell by 14% in real terms between 2010-11 and 2015-16, and is due to fall by a further 6.5% between 2015-16 and 2019-20. That is before the new schools funding formula hits many schools with more cuts. In the Liverpool part of my constituency, another £3.6 million will be lost as a result. According to the National Union of Teachers, there will, on average, be a further 10% funding cut by 2020 for schools in my constituency. That is threatening the future of many schools.

A letter I have received from the head and governing body of St Francis Xavier’s College in my constituency spells out the reality of the financial pressures it is under. It cites increases in the salary bill because of unfunded public sector pay awards; higher pensions and higher national insurance contributions; the removal of the education support grant in September this year; the apprenticeship levy, which is payable from April; and losses in per capita sixth-form funding. As a consequence, the college has reduced its leadership team and their salaries and lost 13 staff to voluntary severance, and it has six teaching posts unfilled. It says:

“We are extremely concerned about the potential impact of the forthcoming national funding formula. The impact of this is likely to make it impossible that the college can remain financially stable and this will have a detrimental effect upon the educational provision for pupils in a city which has amongst the highest levels of deprivation in the UK”.

This is a popular, over-subscribed school. I have written to the Secretary of State about the issue, but I have yet to receive a reply. I can assure her that SFX is not the only school in my constituency with these problems.

This situation is a disaster for our schools, but the Budget has made it worse, when it could have made it better. In divisive and unfair measures, the Government have set aside £1 billion to fund new free schools and the Prime Minister’s back-to-the-1950s grammar schools vanity project. They have also agreed to pay school transport costs for poorer pupils, but only those who attend selective schools. Young people who live in Halewood, in my constituency, who can no longer study for academic A-levels without leaving the borough are to get no such help, even though they are from some of the most deprived families in the country, and even though education could help to give them better life chances.

When I asked the Minister responsible for the school system, Lord Nash, what assistance the Government could offer to ensure that Halewood kids can get transport to study A-levels, he said in a recent letter:

“It would be unfair to offer free transport to young people in one area of the Country and not to others.”

Quite, but that is precisely what the Chancellor has just done in his Budget—although only if pupils are attending a divisive selective grammar school. How typically Tory. The Chancellor has offered Halewood kids who want to study A-levels precisely nothing, because he is spending all the money on recreating the Prime Minister’s 1950s grammar school myth.

That is why Labour, in office, banned grammars, put money into rebuilding all our schools, doubled funding per pupil, and employed 36,000 more teachers and 250,000 teaching assistants. After seven years of the Lib Dem-Tories and the Tories, our schools are in crisis again, with class sizes going up, GCSE pass rates going down and teachers fleeing the profession. This Budget has done nothing to stop the rot; instead, it has set about doing even more damage and causing even more division.