BME Communities (Educational Attainment)

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) on securing this vital debate. There has been much talk about this subject in the media and in the report by Alan Milburn, and I know that the Government are taking seriously the work on social mobility. None the less, unless we deal with the issue of differential attainment, we will be letting down a generation of young people.

We have a mixed story to tell. I applaud my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) for her pioneering work on this matter. Had she not been making noises about the underachievement of black boys in particular, some of the progress and bureaucratic changes that have been made would not have taken place. I will touch on that matter in my suggestions to the Minister at the end.

Over the past week, the Secretary of State has talked about changing and splitting the GCSE, which is relevant to many of my constituents in Hackney. I do not disagree that we need to see rigour in standards—in Hackney, we have seen huge improvements in schools, which were achieving well below the national average 10 or even seven years ago, but most are now achieving well above that, with Mossbourne academy, which my hon. Friend cited, achieving 84% A to C grades including maths and English. A number of children are going on to not just good universities but Oxbridge as well as other Russell group universities.

We have done a lot in Hackney to improve standards, which we attribute to good heads, rigorous standards and a clear framework of expectations for young people of all backgrounds. We accept no excuses because of poverty or ethnicity and no low expectations. In one school, City academy—its principal, Mark Emmerson, is now also acting executive principal of City academy Islington because of his success so far—the pupils have not sat GCSEs. He has told his staff that they should see all the pupils in his highly ethnically mixed school, which is populated mostly from the dense local council housing estates in the area, as future A* pupils, and that that must be the teachers’ expectation. The school has been growing year by year, and is now in its third year. Most of the pupils are a couple of terms ahead of the expected achievement at the end of year 8, their second year in secondary school. A couple of them are more than a year ahead of where they would normally be, but they did not necessarily come in with the highest level of achievement at key stage 2—level 5. Some were achieving below that. Mark Emmerson has got them back not just to where they should be, but to above that.

I spoke about one school, but I could spend a lot of time talking about good practice in Hackney schools. Everything is not perfect, but there are good heads and good rigour, and we have seen huge investment, thanks to the previous Government, in new schools and good buildings. Young people have been amazed when they have gone into their new schools, and feel that they deserve them. They have a feeling that they have the right to be in a good-quality environment. The schools operate long days, with breakfast and after-school provision.

Another school in my constituency, Petchey academy, gives same-day detentions, but that is seen as positive. If a child is falling behind, for whatever reason—they may have been messing around in class, they may just not understand something, or they may have difficulties at home and bring other issues into the classroom—at the end of the day they spend an hour focusing on that area of under-achievement so that by the next day at school they are back with the rest of the class. I am sure that that does not always work, but that aspiration is surely needed. Many pupils in Hackney come from challenging homes, and often live in overcrowded conditions in families with long periods of worklessness. I will touch on some of the issues of ethnicity and language in a moment.

Returning to the Secretary of State’s comments, I do not agree that reintroducing a two-tier system for education is the answer. The idea that 25% of Hackney pupils at 11, and certainly at 13 or 14, will be pigeon-holed and earmarked for a lower qualification is a retrograde step. The example I have just given of Hackney’s City academy shows that much can be done at secondary school for pupils who may not have achieved their full potential at primary school. It would be a retrograde step for a cohort of teachers to expect a percentage of pupils to take a lower-grade exam. The benefit of the GCSE is that whatever someone’s ability, they can progress on the same programme of attainment, and if they work hard they can achieve higher than C grade.

Changing the landscape massively confuses matters for employers, who tell me that they have several issues about the qualifications that young people leave school with, and I certainly do not believe that changing them will make a difference. I am not alone in thinking that. Lord Baker, former Secretary of State for Education, gave the Minister and the Secretary of State good advice when he said:

“The CSE certificate which we did away with in the eighties”—

I was one of the last pupils to sit the old GCE, which shows my age, but we are talking more than 20 years ago—

“became a valueless bit of paper. It wasn’t worth anything to the students or to the employers. That means that there has got to be rigour for the other subjects at 16 as well.”

Lord Baker is promoting university technical colleges, as I am. I have one in my constituency, Hackney university technical college, where young people will be studying from the age of 14 and taking more technical qualifications alongside academic qualifications, but that will not be seen as second best or something different, and will be not instead of but as well as GCSEs.

I am one of the vice-chairs of the all-party group on social mobility, and in the discussions I have touched on there is much talk about universities and getting young people into university, but the issue starts much earlier. That is one reason why I was a great champion of Sure Start. The investment in children under 5, and helping their parents to parent better and to understand the benefits of wider education through play, is very important. Professionals say that they can see the difference between children of parents who have been supported by Sure Start and those who have not, because the former have been positively engaged with the child. We must start there.

We need a raising of attainment in primary schools and a raising of ambition. That is why many Hackney primary schools take pupils to universities and into the workplace, through work programmes, to see those places for themselves. That is particularly important for a range of young people, including some from ethnic minority backgrounds, who do not have a pattern of work in their family.

I shall touch on some of the data, which show why this issue is so important and why the Minister, who I am sure is listening hard, needs to ensure that the Department does not take its eye off the ball. The inequality is still quite stark: we have seen some improvements in Hackney, but provisional data from 2011—last year’s results—show a 6% gap in achievement at GCSE level between Caribbean-heritage boys and all other boys and a 5% gap between the same cohort, Caribbean girls, and all other girls. We can look at the pattern from 2005. Due to interventions by various schools and the Learning Trust in Hackney, we have seen the number achieving five A* to C grade GCSEs, including maths and English, steadily improving for both boys and girls. It is a good story so far, but we should not sit back and say that that gap is acceptable.

[Ms Abbott]

As a Hackney resident and a Hackney mother, I am glad to see the very many improvements, but we need to be careful about what we say about improvements, because some of the stats go back to a period when there was the use of NVQ equivalents to GCSE. My concern is that although on paper the gap may have narrowed, it is because some black children have been palmed off with NVQ equivalents, which do not in fact equip those children to compete in the marketplace.

[Meg Hillier]

I completely agree. Statistics can bury many issues, which is why the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth about ensuring proper teacher training and support so that assumptions are not built in at the beginning is a key one. I shall give a couple of examples of where I have seen that in the past.

Some issues that probably do not figure on most hon. Members’ horizons, although my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington and I will come across them regularly, are those to do with Turkish, Kurdish and Cypriot children, who are still massively underachieving compared with their cohort group. Although there has been an improvement since 2011, we still see a gap in attainment between Turkish, Kurdish and Cypriot boys and girls and all other pupils of 14%. That brings in one of the other issues—language. At home, many of these young people will speak only their mother tongue. That is fine. The mother tongue is very important, and of course parents and mothers in particular are the first educators of a child. However, if the parent is not very literate in the mother tongue, the child may not be getting the range of educational input required from the parent in the mother tongue. Often, the only adult whom many of these young people speak to in English is their teacher. Their exposure to the wider world is sometimes a bit limited. Often, the young people will be helping in the family business, which will involve working with other Turkish families, for instance; and in the mosque and other community groups, it will be only the mother tongue that is spoken.

I do not want anyone to go away with the impression that I do not think that the mother tongue is important, because it is very important. Actually, it is very important for our young people as they go out into the world and develop their careers. Given that the Turkish economy, for example, is growing by about 7% a year, speaking their mother tongue is a real skill and strength for young people in Hackney. However, there is an issue and it may not hit the Minister’s radar screen because, in terms of the national population, this group is relatively small and focused in parts of north-east London.

I take the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington about statistics, but let us look at the differences between young people when they leave primary school at 11 and when they get to GCSE level. In Hackney in 2011, 77% of white boys left school at key stage 2 at the end of year 6 with a level 4 in English and maths. At GCSE level in the same year—so it is not the same cohort, but this shows the gap that we have to bridge—51.7 % got five or more A* to C grade GCSEs, including English and maths. That is a differential of 26 percentage points. If we look at the same figures for black boys, we see that 69% achieved level 4 in 2011 and, in the same year—so it is not the same cohort—42% achieved five A* to C grade GCSEs. That is a differential of 27 percentage points. The differential is similar, but there are endemic issues, on which I and others have touched, about why certain groups achieve less well.

I want to illustrate the importance of the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth about teacher training. For about nine years, I was a governor, and latterly chair of governors, at a primary school in north Islington. During that time there was a big shortage of teachers. We had a lot of very bright, talented, young teachers, who were keen to teach, but many of them, to put it bluntly, had never seen a black face in their lives.

The head teacher, who was a black woman, which was still quite unusual, and I were very concerned on a couple of occasions. On one occasion, a child was very scared about going into assembly to see African dancing. My immediate reaction was that it was terrible that a child was worried about seeing something that reflected, to a degree, their own heritage. There were a number of issues to unpack about witchcraft and pride in their background, but the other teachers saw it as naughty behaviour, because they had not come across the cultural issues involved.

On another occasion, they were casting for “The Wizard of Oz”. In the film, Dorothy is played by Judy Garland—a young, white girl—so presumably, that was the image in the minds of many teachers. Each class was asked to do a bit of “The Wizard of Oz”, so they each had a witch, a Dorothy and so on. The Dorothys, when they came out of the classes, were all little white girls. The head, being from a different background, challenged it, but at the time I was worried; this was a cohort of good teachers, but teachers who did not have that perspective, which was a real worry. We need young people in schools now not only to achieve well, but to go on to become teachers themselves.

The Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and I were at Sebright school in my constituency, which is one that works with City Year kids. Through City Year, young people on a gap year work with pupils, providing mentoring, physical training and an extra adult to support the students. They have found different ways to engage and are very popular with the Hackney schools they go into. They are now moving into secondary schools. What is good about that cohort is that the groups of young people, aged between about 18 and 22, coming into Hackney schools better reflect the wider Hackney community. They are not all from Hackney, but they better reflect what you might see, to put it simply, on a Hackney bus.

To a degree, there is a time lag with teacher training, but the teachers in our schools do not necessarily reflect the ethnic background of the pupils they teach. What is the Department doing to encourage change? Are the Government being proactive? Let us be honest, we do not have enough teachers from ethnic minority backgrounds. Just as we have concerns that there are not enough male teachers in primary schools to be role models, the Government need not to be shy at addressing this issue. That brings me to my final point and recommendation to the Minister.

We used to see a quite detailed breakdown of achievement by ethnic background. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. If she had not talked about, and made it acceptable to talk about, the difference between black and white children, the Department at the time would not have had the courage to produce a much more granular breakdown by different ethnic groups. We have gone back and shrunk to broad-brush breakdowns—black, white, Asian and so on. That breakdown does not work for me, because it would not pick up Kurdish, Turkish and Cypriot achievement, which is a big issue. We collect some of those data locally, but no wider dataset is collected.

I know that there has been nervousness about labelling and pigeonholing pupils by ethnic background, but used properly, such information can be very helpful. It can be used by MPs, parents and others to challenge what a school does and by good teachers and head teachers to ensure that they focus on areas of proven underachievement and do not contribute to it. I understand that that is a detailed point, but if the Minister cannot comment now, will he write to me with exact reasons why the Department no longer breaks down the data to that level of granularity? Will the Department consider doing so again? Will he also pick up the point about teacher training and attracting more young people from ethnic minorities into teacher training?

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) on securing this important debate.

The first thing to say is that the underachievement of black children is not a new issue. It goes back all the way to the 1950s, when children would come here from the Caribbean—bright and able children, who had excelled in the classroom in the Caribbean—but they suddenly found themselves in units for children who were educationally underachieving.

There is a clear pattern to that underachievement. When children of African and Caribbean descent enter the school system at the age of five, they are doing as well as white and Asian children. In some cases they are doing marginally better, because there is some medical evidence to show that black children are a little more developmentally advanced at the age of five. By the age of 11, their achievement levels, particularly for boys, start to drop off and by the age of 16 there is a huge gap. Although we—my Government—masked that gap, partly by the use of national vocational qualification equivalents for GCSE, it still remains startling.

Ministers might say, “Why does this matter to us? We don’t have many of these people in our constituencies. Maybe it’s their families. Maybe it’s them. Why should we bother?” First of all, as hon. Friends have said, it is an issue of equity and justice. If it means anything to be a British citizen—even in austerity and even in the times that we face—it ought to mean that there is the chance to make something of yourself through an educational system that treats people fairly.

As the child of immigrants who came to Britain in the 1950s, I know that that generation of West Indian immigrants knew that it would be tough, that they would have to work two jobs, that often they would live in overcrowded conditions and that they would encounter racism, but they thought—as immigrants always think—that for their children it would be better, and that education was the means by which it would become better. All the challenges faced by minorities today—whether about employment, policing or immigration—pale to nothing, in my view, in comparison with the betrayal of an earlier generation of immigrants who came to Britain to better themselves and their families, and thought that education would be the ladder for them, as it has been historically for immigrants all over the world.

Education matters because equity matters; it matters because fairness matters; and it matters because justice matters. I throw into the debate a quote from Martin Narey, who is the former director of the Prison Service and the former head of Barnardo’s. He said years ago that on the date and time a child is permanently excluded from school, they might as well be given a date and time to turn up in prison. The link between educational underachievement, social disorder and eventually a life of crime is a very clear pathway. Rather than spending money on rehabilitating young people and on dealing with the consequences of crime, let us focus on and pay attention to what I believe is the root of a lot of these issues—the educational underachievement of too many of our children, particularly black children, in our schools.

Post the riots last summer, people talked about the rioters being in gangs, about their parents, about lack of religious leadership and about all sorts of things. People did not talk about the fact that the biggest signifier when we looked at the young people who were arrested and charged with incidents in the course of the riots was that two thirds of them—I think that was the figure—had special educational needs, and the majority of them had been excluded from school. Those were the two biggest indicators. I am not saying that educational underachievement is an excuse for criminality or rioting, but the link is there. If we are talking about a business case, the business case for making sure that all our children achieve their very best in school is unanswerable.

As colleagues will know, this is an issue that I have harassed Ministers about, both in my Government and in this Government. On the question of the figures, I remember going to see a brand-new Labour Schools Minister in 1997 and asking him about the figures about ethnic achievement. I will not give his name—he was a very nice man—but he looked at me and said, “Well, Diane, we have got these figures and, you know, they seem to show that ethnic minorities are doing better.” I said, “How can that be?” I think he had a youth cohort study and the figures were broken down into white and ethnic minority, so I said, “I tell you what, you tell your officials to go away and break down those figures between white, Asian, African and Afro-Caribbean.”

The Minister looked at me, but he was a nice guy, so he went away and came back a few months later and said, “We have broken them down, and we find that you have the whites doing how they’re doing, and the Asian students doing better than the black students, but even the black students are creeping up a little bit.” I replied, “I tell you what, you go away and break down the black student figures between boys and girls.” He came back with what I and the black community knew, that black boys’ results were flatlining. What was happening to black boys at the end of the ’90s, and had been happening for decades, was masked by a failure to keep statistics. Although it seems arid and technical to ask for stats, we cannot have programmes that reach those children effectively without a statistical basis.

[Meg Hillier]

There is an emerging concern that although girls from certain ethnic minority backgrounds now achieve well in Hackney schools at 16, and in particular at 18, and some of them even go on to university, a number of them drop out of education after 18. Studies show that, and it exactly illustrates my hon. Friend’s point about the need to track the figures and keep the statistics at a detailed enough level for them to be meaningful.

[Ms Abbott]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend.

I also remember, a few years into that same Government, going to see the then Secretary of State for Education and asking for a breakdown by ethnicity of GCSE results. She said, “Sure Diane, of course you can have them,” but her officials looked shifty. At that time, schools were supposed to keep the figures; they just were not published. Months later, I got a letter from my colleague, who is now in another place, saying that unfortunately the data could not be released because they were “not in a usable form”. Even if schools are made to keep data, unless they know that the figures will be made public and used, it is in their interests, particularly those of schools that are failing our children, to keep them in all sorts of higgledy-piggledy ways so that no one can drill down and see what is happening to the children. I cannot stress enough the importance of examination data broken down by ethnicity, because if we do not have that we cannot reach those children because we do not know what is happening to them.

I suppose this is the appropriate point at which to raise the question of why. Why do black children fail? That is something I have struggled with, as have academics, parents and community workers. As my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth said, it is a mix of things. It is partly to do with poverty in an absolute sense, although all the research shows, particularly that done by the Institute of Education, that even when we allow for poverty—usually by using free school meals as an indicator—black children systematically do less well than children of other ethnicities. There is no question but that poverty is an issue. Nowadays there is also increasing peer group pressure. Parents can be devoted to their children’s academic futures but if, as the children reach adolescence, their cohort thinks that studying is not cool, that can be problematic. I have mentored the children of friends in that situation, and I do not discount its significance.

There is also a culture of low expectation in some schools. I am not talking about bad teachers, but about teachers who say, and have said to me, in effect, year on year, “What do you expect?” Well, let me tell Members what communities in areas such as Hackney expect: they expect each and every child to reach their potential. There is a culture of low expectation, of saying, “Well, if we can make school a nice, safe place, and the children come in and make samosas and bang steel drums, isn’t that nice?” That sort of culture masks the failure to give young people the academic equipment they need to fulfil themselves as people and to compete in the world of work.

Some educationalists, some teachers and perhaps some Ministers might say, “Well, you know, Diane, you can’t expect schools to make good the failings of society.” That is a strange thing to say because if we read the history of education in this country, the Victorians believed exactly that: school could make good the failures of society. Had we said to Arnold, the first inspector of schools, “Oh, you can’t expect schools to make good the failings of society”, he would have said, “That’s ridiculous! This is what we’re here for.” Hiding behind—I emphasise “hiding”—real social and youth culture issues to say that schools cannot make a difference is to take a position that the Victorians would not have recognised.

One reason why it is important to keep detailed stats is that it is not sufficient to talk generally about black and minority children. I have worked on the subject for years, and in London, which is the part of the country I know best, the figures and outcomes are complicated. Chinese children, I think, do best in London, white girls do second best, then children of east African, Asian or Indian origin and, going down the list, Bengali boys, who are bumping along at the bottom with white boys and black boys. Black girls always do better than black boys. The London stats show us differences in out-turn between Asian children from the subcontinent, Asian children from Bengal, Asian children from east Africa, African children or Caribbean children, and not keeping detailed statistics about out-turns year on year is failing such children. Only when we see the differences can we start to identify what the issues are.

For instance, one of the reasons why Bengali boys do so badly compared with Asian boys from other backgrounds is to do with rural Bengal and the conditions that they come from. Unless we have the detailed statistics, however, we cannot identify that. One of the things I have seen as the years have gone by is that first-generation African children tend to do better than Caribbean children. That is an interesting fact, which is worth contemplating. In my opinion—having studied this, held events and looked at the figures—the results of first-generation African children may speak to more stable families in the African community at this point and a stronger sense of personal identity. Until we have the figures and can analyse why there are differences, we cannot help those children.

We have not spoken much about higher education, which the debate is not primarily about, but we cannot talk about educational underachievement without mentioning what is happening to BME children in higher education. A case in point is London, where it is striking that universities within a few miles of each other and in theory serving the same population are very different in their demographic make-up. In fact, some of the former polytechnics in London educate more BME young people than some of our Russell group universities put together. I do not accept the argument, “Well, that’s because it’s all they are capable of.” A lot of things are going on, such as poor advice at school level or poor A-level choices. There is a lot to say about what is happening in higher education to BME young people.

[Meg Hillier]

As my hon. Friend knows, a lot of interesting work has been done on that, but for me it is summed up by the bright young woman from Hackney who was offered places to read medicine at Nottingham and Cambridge universities. She turned down the place at Cambridge because she said that she did not think she would fit in there. That demonstrates that it is about more than the academic side; it is about the attitudes of universities and their welcoming of the wide population of this country.

[Ms Abbott]

It is an interesting issue, and I hope that on another occasion in the House we shall have the opportunity to debate BME communities in higher education specifically.

The issue we are debating has engaged me for many years, almost since I first entered the House, and there are two specific things that I have done about it. I set up an initiative called London Schools and the Black Child. Over a decade we have had annual conferences at which we brought together parents, community leaders and teachers, not to say, “Oh, the system is terrible and these teachers are terrible,” but to ask what we could do to help our children. The heart of those conferences—officials can tell Ministers about them, if they look through the files—were workshops, where parents dealt with issues such as how to cope with exclusions, how to help black boys to achieve, and how to help children to achieve higher standards.

The extraordinary thing about the conferences was that every year more than 1,000 parents would turn up. We held them at the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre just across the way. The first one was due to start at 10 o’clock, and at 9 o’clock we had people queuing outside the door. Parents really want to help their children. There is an assumption that perhaps black children do badly because the black community does not value education. No. If I only ever say one thing in this House let it be that the black community does value education. That is why it is so important to me to keep making the case for focusing and having practical strategies.

The other thing that I have done, with the support of UBS, the international financial services company and bank, is to run an awards ceremony for London’s top achieving black children. One is always trying to counter stereotypes. The Minister might be surprised to know that there are black children at inner-city schools turning out 10 or 11 A* grades and four As at A-level, and going on to study medicine or law at Russell group universities. One year, we got Lenny Henry and the newscaster Trevor McDonald to hand out the awards, and we rang the Evening Standard and said, “We are having this awards ceremony—London’s top achieving black children; would you be prepared to cover it?” They asked, “Are any of the children gang members?” In other words, unless those children fit a stereotype they do not get coverage. We can open a London newspaper any day and see gang atrocities, stabbings and shootings. We do not hear enough about the children, of all ethnicities, who are achieving, and trying their very best. I thank UBS for its support. After the debate, I have a meeting with UBS to plan this year’s awards ceremony in the autumn, which will be held in the House of Commons.

I want to talk about what I think the solutions are. I have never doubted that part of the solution is to get parents to engage. The children who come to the awards ceremony are often from underachieving schools in socially deprived areas. One of the problems is that the room is always packed, because they bring their mum, dad, aunt and gran; the children who do best are those whose parents are most engaged in their education. It is important to get parents to engage, and that is why I have held conferences every year. Often parents do not quite know what to do for the best. The education system is very different even from when I was at school in this country. It is important to get parents to engage, but it is also important that the education system should recognise that. It is important to recruit more black teachers, not because only black teachers can teach black children, which is clearly absurd—I have mentioned Sir Michael Wilshaw—but because, particularly in metropolitan areas, unless the demographic in the staff room bears some relationship to that of the children who are being taught, there is unlikely to be the overall cultural literacy that will help teachers to engage with the children. It is also important, for all working-class boys, to recruit more male teachers. I deal with boys in Hackney—black, white, Asian, Turkish—who throughout their education have engaged only with women and have never seen a man as an educational role model. More male teachers are important. Teacher training is also important so that teachers have cultural literacy.

In closing, I will mention a subject on which I could talk for an entire hour and a half, because I have spent a lot of time on it in my life as a Member of Parliament. I had to have this debate with Labour Ministers: it is not good enough to adopt a colour-blind approach. With a colour-blind approach, ethnic minority children continue to slip under the radar and are palmed off with substandard qualifications, education and life chances. A colour-blind approach will not work. Comprehensive statistics are vital, as is recognising the importance of parents.

I must mention the institution of Saturday schools. For 20-odd years, Saturday schools have been run on a voluntary basis by the black community in London and other big cities. The same children of whom teachers in their mainstream school say, “Oh, what do you expect? We can’t get them to sit down,” go to a Saturday school, get their heads down and do their work. That is partly due to parental involvement.

We need statistics, recruitment of black and male teachers and teacher training, but above all we need to recognise that the issue is easy to ignore or to utter pieties about. If we abandon a cross-section of the community in our inner cities, they have a way of bringing themselves back into the political narrative—a way that is not good for them or for society. Better people than me have worked on the issue over their lifetime. I implore the Minister: let us not lose the advances made under the Labour Government. Let us continue to move forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

Yes. My hon. Friend speaks with a great deal of expertise on this subject. We are all concerned that a lot of very good work on equality could be undone—perhaps not in a deliberate sense—by Ministers who desire to follow their own path and ensure that they distinguish themselves from the previous Government in their approach to education and schools. They could be undoing very good work and taking a significant step backwards in relation to the education system and the topic that we are debating today.

My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth talked about the impact of exclusion on people’s lives and about the fact that the Department itself had calculated that there would be a significant loss of earnings for pupils who were excluded in the course of their lifetime. At the time of that study, I think the reduction in lifetime earnings as a result of exclusion was calculated at £36,000. Worse than that, 80% of the juveniles in prison had been excluded from school at one time or another. That statistic made me sit up at the time, and should make the Minister focus on the issue. If 80% of juveniles in prison have been excluded from school, that must tell us something about exclusion and whether it is effective in trying to change the sort of behavioural problems that probably led to exclusion in the first place. If that exclusion has a racial component, we should be significantly concerned.

[Meg Hillier]

I would always defend a head teacher’s right to manage their school, and clearly exclusion may have a place in that, but a concern that I came across recently is a child who was excluded but brought back into school with intense provision for a short period. That intense provision was for only half a day, so the working parent was left with half a day to try to cover, and it also took the child out of their normal environment. Has my hon. Friend given any thought to how that might have an effect on the outlook of that young person when they re-enter the school?

[Kevin Brennan]

For many years, the scandal was that excluded pupils received little or no education after they had been excluded. My point is that exclusion should be a last resort, and it is sometimes necessary. As a former teacher, I absolutely defend the right of schools to exclude, having followed due and proper process. The Government have reformed that process, and changed the way in which an appeal can be made against exclusion. Instead of insisting on reinstatement, they have introduced fines on schools and head teachers who refuse reinstatement after that has been recommended on appeal.

I do not want to go into the details of that, but I want to make the point that responsibility for that child does not end when they are excluded, and that includes a responsibility on the head teacher and the school that excluded the child, on other schools in the area, even if they are independent academy schools in the state sector, and on all of us who are interested in education. Responsibility for that child does not end at the point of exclusion. One reason why so many young people end up in the juvenile justice system is not that they are inherently bad, but that, at the point of exclusion, there is no proper follow-up to ensure that the child receives an education, let alone attempts made to try to prevent exclusion in the first place whenever possible, given that it should always and everywhere be a last resort.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington said that improvement in GCSE achievement might have been due partially to the use of equivalencies at GCSE, but I think the facts will show that even if that were taken out of the equation, the improvement in London schools in recent years is real, as the Mayor of London said. In fact, results for black Caribbean pupils were rising at a faster rate than those for many other groups, but that does not mean that there is not a real and continuing problem, and my hon. Friend was right to highlight that.

My hon. Friend also spoke about the need for detailed data, and I appeal to the Minister that in his wish to unburden schools of bureaucracy, which is laudable, he does not fail to collect the data that are essential to tackle issues such as this. The Government are keen on having masses of data available in other areas, and that is good because it enables people to trawl through and analyse it, and to get to the root of a problem, but in this matter, less data are likely to be collected and that would be a significant mistake.

I have a few questions for the Minister before concluding and giving him time to respond. In tackling the problem, how will ending the ethnic minority achievement grant help? How will introducing a two-tier qualifications system, if that is indeed what he intends, help to improve black and ethnic minority attainment? How will not collecting proper statistics help? How will abandoning the approach of Every Child Matters help? Obviously, educational achievement is partially a case of good leadership in schools and so on, but it does involve wider issues, which many of these children may be bringing to school with them and which need to be tackled. How will a fragmented approach to exclusions help to tackle this problem? I would be grateful to hear the Minister’s response to those questions.

Free School Meals (Colleges)

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and a delight to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), who has been a pioneer in so many aspects of 14-to-19 education. I am vice-chair of the all-party group on social mobility, and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) highlighted, free school meals are a critical part of that issue.

I want to highlight some issues in Hackney that demonstrate the benefits of providing support to 16 to 18-year-olds and its impact on their life chances and those of their families in future. Hackney has seen a huge increase in achievement at 16 and 18. A decade ago, Hackney schools were a byword for low quality, with five A to C achievement well below the national average and some schools failing. We now have a range of outstanding schools, with achievements above the national average. Mossbourne academy is well publicised, but it typically achieves 84% five A to Cs, including maths and English. Those young people come from the estates in the surrounding borough, not wealthy areas. They come from a range of backgrounds, but predominantly poorer ones. Young people entering sixth form now get offers of places at leading universities, including Oxford and Cambridge.

When I was selected for Hackney South and Shoreditch, there was a debate at the time about university fees. I said at my selection meeting, “If only we could have the luxury of debating young people in Hackney going on to university,” because at that point, it was not happening in large numbers at all. We needed to invest earlier, and that investment has now happened. Young people are playing their part. They are ambitious and hard-working. Although there may be poverty in terms of money, there is no poverty of ambition. They need this bit of help; they need this barrier dealt with and they need a level playing field.

We know what a difference a good meal makes; my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) highlighted that point, so I will not go into detail. Magic Breakfast is a charity working in Hackney across primary schools, because we know that many children, for all sorts of difficult reasons—not only poverty, but chaotic family backgrounds—turn up to school hungry in the morning. Those young people are given something as simple as a bagel at breakfast club, or extra support at breaktime for those who do not turn up to breakfast club because their parents do not have the wherewithal to get them there. Teachers and head teachers tell me that that has made a major difference to achievement. We know that argument, so I will not go into it further.

In contrast to the constituency of the hon. Member for Redcar (Ian Swales), Hackney has a range of post-16 provision. We have BSix, which is a sixth-form college; sixth forms in schools and academies; 16 to 19-year-olds studying at Hackney community college, which is our local FE college; and the Boxing academy, which offers 14 to 16-year-olds provision when they are unable to cope in mainstream school. We have embraced the 14-to-19 agenda pioneered by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough. Fourteen to 16-year-olds also study at Hackney community college, although they remain on school rolls, so are not affected by the issue.

From September we will be proud to open our first university technical college, on the same campus as Hackney community college, which sponsors it. That brings me to a major anomaly that demonstrates the ridiculous current situation. We will have a university technical college providing places for 14 to 18-year-olds on the same site as Hackney community college providing education equally for 14 to 18-year-olds, but particularly for the 16 to 18-year-olds on its roll. The same site, the same age. Students aged 16 to 18 at the university technical college will qualify for free school meals if they meet the criteria, but on the same campus students of the same age, possibly studying for the same qualification, at Hackney community college will not qualify. How ridiculous is that? As others have said, the Minister is a reasonable man. That situation demonstrates the ridiculousness of the anomaly and why it needs to be resolved.

Our sixth form college, BSix, has 1,500 students, 450 of whom receive bursaries under the bursary scheme. Previously, more than 70% of students received EMA, which was given out in similar numbers across Hackney sixth forms. There are still 568 students on EMA, and most of those will of course require bursary funding in future.

I want to touch on the points made forcefully by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) and by the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) about stigma. It is degrading to young people to have to beg someone with whom they have an academic relationship, or the college principal, for help. Someone’s circumstances may change during the year, such as when a parent loses their job, and they must then lay all that personal stuff before someone they want to have a relationship with in the classroom, and beg for money. At that point the bursary fund may have been spent; there may not be money available. The system should not be put in the hands of principals. We had a perfectly good system under EMA, which worked, and I regret that it is gone. The bursary system that replaces it is an acknowledgement by the Government that they made the wrong decision.

[Robert Halfon]

Does the hon. Lady think that the answer would be a requirement for schools, and the local education authority, to share with the college those pupils who had free school meals at a previous school?

[Meg Hillier]

I am not quite sure what point the hon. Gentleman is making. If there were a centralised way—I know that the Mayor of London is looking at this—of managing a bursary scheme to make it more like a local EMA, that would at least take out the stigma. There is a benefit in that. I do not think that young people should be told to go to certain places, to share out the number of people receiving free school meals. In Hackney the percentage for free school meal uptake is so high that it would make no difference anyway, but if the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that—I may have misunderstood his point—it would be the wrong way round.

At least 1,000 students at BSix alone would be eligible for free school meals for the next academic year, and that provision will need to be taken from the bursary fund. The raw figures show that 89% of the 450 students receiving bursary funds would be eligible for free school meals. To date in this academic year BSix has spent £96,315 on free school meals—nearly £100,000. That is 45% of its bursary budget, which, if it were a school sixth form, it would not have had to spend. That shows that there is a big cost, which is falling hard on young people.

We often talk about facts and figures, but I want to remind hon. Members of the human story. EMA was used by many pupils in Hackney for basic things. Happily, in London, there are certain travel discounts, or free travel, but there were issues about paying for food. One young woman told me that on a Thursday her EMA was used to top up the electricity key. It is as simple as that; it was used to have the lighting and heating working in the house, to enable her to study, and the family to live. The money was not used for luxuries.

I do not have time to go into other human stories, but I want to touch on the point that the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) made, when he talked about handouts with no strings attached. We need to think about free school meals, EMA and bursaries as they are now as an investment in young people, who will be the taxpayers of the future, paying for the pensions of the future. If we do not invest in them during the two years in question, and get them over the hurdles into further and higher education and better jobs, and skill up our work force, we shall be letting down our country and future taxpayers. About 22% of Hackney residents are under 16 and a third of them are under 24, so I appreciate the important and valuable contribution that young people make. It is a significant issue.

Overall, the Government profess to be in favour of choice. They promote free schools and talk about social mobility. In Hackney we have embraced that diversity of provision, but it is a false choice. If free school meals cost about £450 a year, and are provided in some settings, but not others, how will young people make their choices? Some will be forced to make a choice not, as the hon. Member for North Thanet said, for the right reasons, but simply on financial grounds.

Oral Answers to Questions

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

Absolutely. The survey that I have just mentioned—the biggest survey, producing the best ever results in terms of satisfaction—showed that 92% of apprentices were satisfied with their apprenticeship, and that 88% of the businesses that took on apprentices felt they had gained a business benefit. That information is critical to guiding our policy, described last week by the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, which I went before dutifully, as a flagship. My apprenticeship policy: our victory.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Hackney community college does excellent innovative work on apprenticeships, but along with other further education colleges it faces a 7% cut this year. Earlier, the Minister waxed lyrical about increasing social mobility, and in my constituency and others in east London, further education is a crucial way for adults who missed out to get back on track, often even before they get to the apprenticeship stage. What message does the Minister have for my constituents, as the college has to cut back further?

[Mr Hayes]

The message is plain: further education has never been given the priority in the past that it has been given by this Government. It is about the flexibilities and freedoms to respond to need in the hon. Lady’s constituency and elsewhere. Further education, once the Cinderella sector, when I became the Minister found its Prince Charming.

Oral Answers to Questions

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The council tax payers of Newcastle have already paid in the past for the failure of that local authority to raise standards in schools to a level seen in other local authorities, including Gateshead, for example. It is critical that we raise standards in Newcastle and we will do so by welcoming new educational providers, including those who propose free schools. We will certainly do so by tackling underperformance at primary level. For far too long, the last Government tolerated primary schools that were generating children who left at the age of 11 incapable of reading, writing and adding up properly. I have no tolerance for that sort of nonsense, which is why we are acting now.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Hackney South and Shoreditch has much to commend it, but it is rather a long way from Newcastle upon Tyne Central, so we will leave that one for another day.

--- Later in debate ---

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

My hon. Friend, who within and outside the House is an expert on attachment, is absolutely right. That is why, for young children in the care system for whom there is clearly no safe way home to their birth parents, getting a good-quality, strong, attachment in adoption as speedily as possible is absolutely essential, so that they have a good chance of a safe, stable, healthy upbringing with a loving family—something denied to them by their birth parents.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

T7. In the constituencies of Newcastle upon Tyne Central and Hackney South and Shoreditch, and in many other constituencies up and down the country, applications have been put in for free schools—bids for taxpayers’ money with which to run a school for children. When will the Secretary of State publish the financial plans that those schools have submitted, or will he continue with the secrecy of the Department, which does not publish the plans until the schools are open?

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for asking her question, and particularly grateful for the warm welcome that she showed me when I recently went to her constituency to visit the school of which your chaplain, Mr Speaker, is such an effective chairman of governors. All funding agreements for all free schools are published on the Department for Education website. Further information will be made available as funding agreements and other contracts are entered into.

Oral Answers to Questions

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2012 Commons Chamber

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

I am delighted that my hon. Friend has raised that matter again, as he has done frequently. He has done much work in Banbury in this area. The important thing to do next is to match the businesses to the young people. We can do that by getting businesses into schools and by speed-dating—that is an exciting prospect, is it not, Mr Speaker? We must use all modern media to ensure that young people know about the jobs and opportunities that exist—where they are, what they are and how they can find them.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

T5. Somethin’ Else is a design and creation company on Silicon roundabout in my constituency. It employs 65 people and recently produced a film that was shown at the Conservative party conference. Recently, it has been battling with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs over disproportionate fines for the alleged late payment of tax. That has led to a fine of more than £25,000. Given HMRC’s deals with large corporations and the Government’s professed support for small businesses, which the Secretary of State has reiterated today, what discussions is the Department having with HMRC and the Treasury to ensure that businesses are aware that it is on their side and that the Government are acting in a joined-up fashion so that punitive tax attacks are not made on small businesses?

[Mr Willetts]

That is, of course, a matter for the Treasury. The Department is on the side of small businesses. I have visited that business in Tech City and was very impressed with what it does. Tech City, which had about 100 small businesses when the coalition came to office, now has more than 600 small businesses because of our commitment to the area.

Oral Answers to Questions

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

The right hon. Gentleman will know that the E-bac—the core curriculum that we are developing—is sufficiently small to allow space for all kinds of other activities, including those relating to music, art and culture, as well. Certainly, it is the view of the Secretary of State and the whole Government that enriching a child’s education through their experience of art, music and culture is at the heart of good education.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

My constituency is one of the hotbeds of creative activity with a very high percentage of artists and creative businesses, and the schools have followed that through. However, I know from recent visits to primary schools such as Brook community primary school, which has excellent enrichment through the arts, that they are worried about future funding and are already having to make cuts in those areas. Will the Minister explain what the Government’s financial policy is to back up the warm words he just uttered?

[Mr Hayes]

I mentioned in my first answer the commitment we have made to music. The important thing about that commitment is that we have been very clear over the long term about what schools can expect to receive, and that will help with financial planning. The new music education hubs will help to bring this together. That recommendation very much arose from the original investigation we did. Art is not the study of positive reality; in Ruskin’s words, it is “seeking for ideal truth”. It is that spirit that imbues all this Government do.

New Schools

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

We hope that all maintained schools will abide by a new admissions code, which is explicitly designed to make it easier for schools to manage in-year admissions and for service children to secure admission to the school of their parents’ choice.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Of the six secondary schools in my constituency, three have been built new and three rebuilt, thanks to the Labour Government, so I am pleased that the Secretary of State and the Government have agreed to a proposed new 800-place academy near Victoria park in my constituency. It has the benefit of being sponsored by Mossbourne academy, which has a strong track record. In his haste, how will he ensure that other new academies meet the same high standards that all Members across the House would like to see?

[Michael Gove]

I am very grateful to the hon. Lady. I know she has returned to the Back Benches, so may I say on a personal note that I thought she was a distinguished member of the shadow Cabinet and that she has fought amazingly hard for her constituency? Her question absolutely gets to the nub of it. I am delighted that we are supporting the new Victoria Park academy and that it is linked with Mossbourne academy. I will continue to work with the Learning Trust in Hackney and will ask the new chief inspector, whoever he or she may be, to keep a special eye on that borough. I am sure that he or she, whoever they may be, will join me and ensure that it is at the top of their agenda.

Public Disorder

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

There have been devastating events in my constituency, where we saw criminals breeding fear in residents and leaving destruction in their wake. I, too, pay tribute to the authorities in my area and to the council, whose clean-up with the help of local residents on Tuesday morning was so effective that by the time I arrived back in the constituency from my holiday—I came as soon as I could—the area was unrecognisable from the night before.

Police commander Steve Bending and fire commander Graham Howgate and their officers have also done a good job in restoring order to our streets. Their police officers are sleeping in the corridors at Hackney police station, ready for any further trouble. They are working closely with council officers in the CCTV room controlled by the council. Although there was still damage in Hackney, the use of CCTV has been effective in reducing it. To anyone who suggests that we reduce the use of CCTV, I would say that not a single constituent has ever asked for that. They always want more, not less, and we have seen the effects of that today. I would ask the Government to remember that.

In Clarence road in my constituency, where the worst of the troublemakers were kettled in, the police faced a real challenge. Around the police line there was looting, with cars in flames. There were not enough police to stop the looting at that time, so there are questions that the Home Secretary and the Metropolitan police need to ask at the central level about police deployment—about their ability to deploy at the right speed to get to the right place at the right time—and, of course, about police numbers. I echo the comments of the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley). Now is the time to pause—to stop and think about cuts to police numbers. We do not need fewer; we need what we have now. We know that Ministers will trot out the mandarin maths that they are being fed. We need to listen to what people are saying out there on the ground and learn the lessons from what we have seen. Cuts of 20% are too deep and will have a devastating impact on our neighbourhood policing teams.

I welcome the support for businesses that the Prime Minister has announced. One business man, Shiva Kandiah in Clarence road, spent 11 years working seven days a week, with just one day off every year on Christmas day, building up a business that is now devastated. When will the full details of the Riot (Damages) Act 1886 scheme be announced, and can we be told now, at the end of this debate, whether it will help the uninsured and the under-insured?

I have very little time to look at the causes, but it is clear that gangs were heavily involved in such activity up and down the country, and certainly in Hackney. There are three reasons to tackle the gangs. I will not repeat what hon. Friends and colleagues have said about crime being punished. We know that those criminals need to be dealt with, and residents want them dealt with severely, but young people in Hackney make up around a third of all residents in the borough, and they are afraid. They are afraid to walk around their own streets at night, and their parents worry too. Those young people worry about going to activities and youth clubs outside their postcode areas. They should enjoy the same freedoms as most of us did when we were young, and their parents should not have to worry.

The key thing is that we are seeing a potentially lost generation, as children of primary school age are being hooked into gangs early, with some already directly involved and others with family members involved. Schools and youth support can do only so much. We need to break the cycle. I therefore welcome the Government’s talk of a report on gang culture, but it must be one that listens to young people. We have hardly heard a voice from young people in this place today, which I would have liked to have had time to reflect in the debate. We must talk to those who are good citizens, as well as those who are disaffected. Top-down will not deliver. We need local people and organisations working together to stop the gang culture once and for all and rescue and prevent the lost generation of very young children from getting hooked into wider criminal activity.

Academies Bill [Lords]

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Monday 19th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I suppose that one could describe this as the education, education, education moment for the new Government. They have not called it that, but this is their flagship piece of legislation. The dramatic difference is that in 1997 the new Labour Administration went straight for a policy that would help the most underprivileged children in our society. The academy programme that emerged later was targeted at the children in most need, at the poorest towns and cities and at schools that were underperforming badly.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the proof of the pudding is in the eating? In Hackney, six new city academies have been built or are being built, and 84% of pupils have gained five A to Cs in the one that has so far had results. Surely, that proves that the previous Government’s policy was a good one.

[Mr Sheerman]

I am trying to be even-handed, but I take my hon. Friend’s point. Over 13 years, the Labour Government built more new schools and more new colleges and renewed more educational facilities than any Government in the history of our country. That building programme is indisputable, whatever one thinks about BSF and whether if Labour had been returned, we would have had to tamp it down or ease it in over a much longer period. However, we can discuss that at another time.

The difference between what we did in 1997 and what is proposed in the Bill did not come out in the speech made by the Secretary of State. Why go for outstanding schools? What is the magic of the outstanding school? The right hon. Gentleman referred to the work of the Children, Schools and Families Committee, saying that we wanted to free things up. Yes, we produced three strong reports that recommended giving schools more control over the curriculum, taking away some of the testing and assessment and reducing the six levels of school accountability. We said all those things, but we did so in the spirit of their being particularly important for all schools, not just the outstanding ones.

I believe that the new Administration, like the previous one, want to do the best for every child in our country. We only have one chance for education and both sides of the House—all three parties—want at heart to identify the talent and potential of our children and push them as far as they can go. It is important that we start from that basis, because when we look, as I have done, having spent nearly 10 years as Chair of the Select Committee, over the past 20 or 30 years—a period that the Committee used to call “From Baker to Balls” or “From Butler to Balls”—we can see that there are many more continuities in education policy than we might think if we heard only rousing speeches from Front-Bench speakers on either side.

There is a great danger in the Bill. Every Government need to be able to deliver their policies, and I have never known a policy be delivered by a demoralised work force. One of the secrets of our success over the last 13 years was that gradually, with difficulty, we got the teachers on side, partly by paying them better than ever before, rewarding them and respecting them more. That was the secret of our success and I hope the new Government will continue it.

Another tremendous partnership is needed to deliver policy—with the people who work in local government. It is easy to say that they have only back-office functions or unnecessary core functions, and that somebody else could do things better. Over the years, I have visited schools and local authorities around the country and I found that the one thing most school leaders and most people in schools want is a good, supportive local authority that knows the system, supports schools, knows what the difficulties are and tries to do everything it can to make the education system a success across the piece. I am worried that the Bill will be atomising—there will be a direct relationship between a big central Department and schools, with no intermediary. The people who were the intermediaries—local government—have high skills and it would be sad if the Government wasted them.

Education and Health

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I could not agree more. School transport is covered by the revenue support grant in almost all circumstances and has not been affected. With respect to special educational needs, we are ensuring that the commitment is there to fund the services that our most vulnerable children need.

What I would say to all hon. Gentlemen on the Labour Benches—[Interruption]—and hon. Ladies too—is that in their requests for more spending, however passionately constructed, they should remember one thing. Who were the Government until just a few weeks ago? Who was responsible for the financial situation that we inherited? Who was responsible for writing a letter to the Treasury saying, “There is no money”? None of us in this House wants to see front-line spending on our schools reduced, but none of us on the Government Benches would have wanted the public finances to be reduced to the state that we inherited after the election. As the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) put it, in a rare moment of candour when he left the Treasury, there is no money left. In fact, as the markets are all too aware, there is less than no money left. We are currently spending £163 billion every year more than we take in taxes—

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Michael Gove]

And that is thanks to the financial mismanagement of the hon. Lady’s Government.

[Meg Hillier]

In the right hon. Gentleman’s desire to be sensible about money, which we would all want to see, will he think about the extended schools programme? What connections is he making with other Departments? That extension to school hours really helps working parents, and working parents help to tackle child poverty. That should be at the centre of his agenda, and I hope that it is.

[Michael Gove]

I pay tribute to the hon. Lady’s commitment to fighting child poverty, both in her role as a Minister and also, previously, as a member of the Greater London assembly. She will be aware that my Department is working with the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Communities and Local Government to carry forward the good work that is already in place as a result of the extension of hours, but it is critical to recognise that everything that is happening in and around our schools to support young people is taking place against a backdrop of dire economic news. That backdrop is one that she played a part in constructing when she was a member of the Government who left us with the desperate economic situation in which we find ourselves. Our debt is growing at a rate of more than £300,000 per minute. That money could have been spent on the front line—on our schools, on teachers and on teaching assistants—but it is not being spent in that way, thanks to the profligacy and inefficiency of the Labour Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a great pleasure to speak about a matter of vital importance to my constituents young and old. A focus on education matters a great deal in Hackney, where we have a multinational community and education is highly prized. Hackney is a poor borough in many ways, but it is also aspirant, and there is no lack of poverty in the desire to get educated and improve one’s life. Education and skills training more widely, which I would like to touch on, are important to my constituents. They also help to tackle poverty and social exclusion.

Hackney’s record is a good one. We have four brand-new city academies, with a further city academy on the way, and we have seen massive improvements to other secondary and primary schools. Hackney’s record on educational attainment at 16 has massively improved. The results improved from 30% of pupils achieving five GCSEs at grades A* to C in 1997 to 70% doing so in 2009. In particular, we should thank Mossbourne city academy and its head teacher, Sir Michael Wilshaw, for last year having 83% of students achieving five GCSEs at A* to C, which is well above the national average, and this in a borough that in the past would not have been a byword for good education. There is still more to do, of course. Bridge, Petchey and City academies in Hackney, which are yet to have GCSE years, are all working to emulate the Mossbourne example. It would also be interesting to discuss with Ministers the establishment of a 14-to-18 academy in Hackney community college.

There is more to do. Around 48% of 16-year-olds still leave school without five GCSEs at A* to C. It is not the only measure of success, but it is an important one in any attempt to get young people into work and further education. We also need further improvement in our primary schools. Some good work has been done in the 12 new Sure Start centres in the constituency, which are of huge benefit to parents and under-fives across all social backgrounds. I am concerned at the suggestion that this Government plan to segregate support for the under-fives and focus only on those in greatest need. One of the strengths of Sure Start in Hackney is its comprehensive nature. I have a one-year-old, as well as other children, and I know that all parents, whatever their backgrounds, need the support.

Hackney’s approach has been pivotal to how things have worked. We have an elected mayor and a council in Hackney, which have taken a can-do approach to what the Government have to offer. Hackney’s focus across the board has been on practical results that change lives. We are not bound up in ideology; we want to ensure that what we do makes a difference. Mayor Pipe should be congratulated on his work, as should others on their work. We have taken what the Government have offered and made it work for Hackney, tailoring it to Hackney’s needs and interests. Whatever the Government propose, we will continue to put Hackney children first in our schools system.

I am concerned about the free school proposal—I would love to talk more about it, but I do not have much time. How will it fit in with proper planning in local authorities? Is it not a distraction? Is not the proposal a policy for the few and not the many?

I want to touch briefly on extended schools. Schools in Hackney are leading the way in that respect, with provision usually provided from 8 am to 6 pm, and in secondary schools for far longer, with breakfast clubs, after-school clubs and, often, ESOL-type teaching—the teaching of English for speakers of other languages—for adults, as well as wider adult education. Such initiatives help to tackle poverty and social exclusion where it really matters: in the family, helping those parents to help their children get better educated. In many communities, the young children coming to school at both primary and secondary levels often go home to a household not only where no English is spoken—it is fine for them to have that mother tongue—but where the parents themselves are not very literate in their mother tongue. Addressing that is an important aspect of what primary schools in Hackney provide.

At the secondary level, we want to give young people the opportunities provided by extended schools well into the evening and before school. Those clubs are supported not only by schools, but by organisations such as the excellent Magic Breakfast, which provides young children with breakfast in schools. It was discovered that in Hackney, as well as in other boroughs, many young people turn up to school without food in their stomachs because of their chaotic family backgrounds. That meant that they were achieving less well. Thanks to Magic Breakfast and others, we have seen attainment increase.

I want to know that the Government are still committed to extended schools, because they are vital to working parents. If we want child poverty to be tackled and attainment increased, we need to see that input in the family—those role models in place and that income coming in—which is something that any Secretary of State for Education needs to see in the round, and as something that goes hand in hand with welfare support. It is all very well asking people to go back to work, but without the child care in place, that is challenging, and in Hackney that matters a great deal.

In the time remaining I want to talk about skills and training. I do not have the time to go into all the figures, but Hackney has one of the highest unemployment rates in London. However, we are fortunate to have a good further and adult education sector, in the form of Hackney community college, BSix and the sixth forms emerging in new schools for 18-year-olds. In particular, Hackney community college, organisations such as Working Links and Lifeline, and the jobcentre provide support to workless adults, focusing on the skills and education that they need to get off the dole and into work, supporting themselves and their families.

With 34% of Hackney households speaking English as a second language and 16% of adults in Hackney having no qualifications, which is above the London average, we need to ensure that this issue is tackled. Significantly, however, the figure for adults with no qualifications has gone down, from 25% to 16% in just three years, thanks to work by the community college and others. Significantly—this is directly linked to the work of Hackney community college, which should be congratulated—the number of young people not in education or training is down, from more than 12% to 6.4%, again in three years. That is evidence to back the argument that the college should be supported in being allowed to become a city academy in media and health, within the environs of the wider adult education that it provides.

Hackney community college is soon to receive an Ofsted report, which I do not doubt will be good. Because of its excellent reputation and work, the college deserves to have the freedom to decide how the money that it receives from the Government is spent, because what works in Surrey Heath might not work in Hackney. We need that flexibility between Government budgets to allow local priority setting, in order to ensure that ESOL, basic skills, work with 16 to 18-year-olds, as well as those who are 19-plus, Train to Gain and apprenticeships are judged by their results, rather than by the name attached to the money that is given to them. If the Government are serious about giving freedom to education providers, I hope that they will consider giving freedom to further education colleges to make their own choices about what works locally and be judged by the results, rather than the tick-box approach based on where the money comes from. I hope that the Government will consider meeting me and the principal of Hackney community college, Ian Ashman, to discuss that freedom, as well as setting up a city academy within the environs of the community college.