Education and Adoption Bill (Tenth sitting)

Peter Kyle Excerpts

Tuesday 14th July 2015 Public Bill Committees

Amendment 75 would require the regulations that will define coasting schools to use definitions already in use in other countries. We want to compete with the best education systems in the world, and we look closely at other countries to learn from international best practice. International surveys show that reform is essential. Our 15-year-olds are on average three years behind their peers in Shanghai in maths, as assessed by the Programme for International Student Assessment survey. We are the only OECD country whose young people do not have better levels of literacy or numeracy than their grandparents’ generation. This international evidence informed our recent announcement that when the new reformed GCSEs are taken for the first time in 2017, a good pass will be a grade 5 on Ofqual’s new grading scale. This means that the new good pass will be more demanding than the present grade C, and broadly in line with what the best available evidence indicates is average performance in high-performing countries such as Finland, Canada, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

The Minister mentions international comparisons and draws attention to the outcomes that are achieved by other countries. Is not the real lesson that these countries have a focus on standards, which has delivered their outcomes, whereas the Bill proposes a focus on organisational status?

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[Kevin Brennan]

Well, we will see. By the way, “leafy suburbs” is not my phrase; that is the phrase of the Secretary of State. It is hardly fair of the Minister to describe it as my “main concern”, since I am quoting the Secretary of State.

[Peter Kyle]

The Minister touched on the issue, saying that the Bill would pick up on underperformance and coasting in areas of affluence. I draw my hon. Friend’s attention to the evidence given to the Committee by Rebecca Allen from the University of Central London. She said:

“My concern about the metrics that have been chosen to define coasting schools is that they display exactly the same type of what I call a social gradient. By that I mean that if a school serves an affluent community then it will not be judged to be coasting using these metrics.”––[Official Report, Education and Adoption Public Bill Committee, 29 June 2015; c. 7, Q2.]

Does my hon. Friend agree that that is exactly the problem with this Bill?

[Kevin Brennan]

Yes, and my hon. Friend has cited in an exemplary way the oral evidence that we were given, in order to bring home that point. It is a real point, and I am sure it is one that will emerge very strongly during the discussion of the Government’s draft regulations. That is because these schools are supposed to be the “coasting” schools, as defined by the phrases used by the Secretary of State, and not the ones with weaker-ability intakes, which seem to be destined, as per the evidence we heard from witnesses at the oral evidence sessions, to be hammered by the new definition.

However, there was a big difference in the approach that we had proposed previously. There was an interesting article recently in Schools Week by Laura McInerney, which I will quote from:

“Labour define coasting schools as those with GCSE scores above a threshold BUT have below average progress. Labour’s plan specifically targets the schools doing well in terms of their GCSE pass rates but whose pupils, having come in with average-to-high ability rates, only come out with Bs or As – rather than A*s.”

She went on:

“This compares to the current Conservative definition which specifically protects these sorts of schools by stopping any school above a 60% GCSE pass rate threshold from being considered as ‘coasting’. As datalab’s research shows this helps stop schools in wealthier areas – ‘the leafy suburbs’ – from being hit.”

I know that the Minister will go on to argue that if this is a problem—he does not seem to accept that it is—it will all disappear after 2018, because at that time “coasting” schools will be defined only by a progress measure. So, if we have got a problem here, I assume he will say, first, that it is not really a problem, and secondly, that if it is a problem at all, it will go away in time.

The problem is that schools with high-ability intakes tend to progress more quickly than those without such intakes. We should all be passionately interested in why this is. I think we can agree that we want to find ways to tackle that. Presumably, the Minister is hoping that Government policy is the way to do that so that people from a lower start can progress as quickly as people who have started from a higher level. We can debate that and have different views about the best way to achieve it, but I am sure it is an aim that we all share. However, that is not what the Secretary of State was talking about in relation to coasting schools when she made her remarks. In the absence of any other approach to coasting, the Government will end up targeting only schools with poorer intakes, rather then those in the leafy suburbs, which I thought was supposed to be the central point of the policy, certainly according to what the Secretary of State said.

What do the Government intend to do about these schools once they have been identified? We are told:

“Those that can improve will be supported to do so by our team of expert heads, and those that cannot will be turned into academies under the leadership of our expert school sponsors”.

The suspicion remains that forced academisation is really what this is all about, particularly in view of the academy performance targets that the seven remaining regional schools commissioners have, and of the point that was made in the Conservative manifesto.

There is also no sensible account in these proposals about the interaction between Ofsted and these measures. This came up in our oral evidence sessions. Are we going to get schools rated good and outstanding one week, only to be deemed to be coasting the very next week? How will staff, parents and pupils make any sense of it if they receive a letter from the school saying, “Our school has been rated ‘good’” or “Our school has been rated ‘outstanding’” one week, and the very next week they get a letter saying, “Our school is deemed to be ‘coasting’”? How will they, let alone the general public or the media, make any sense of it? What kind of headlines would it produce in the local papers for Members of Parliament concerned about schools in their constituencies? Will the Minister explain how that kind of situation would be managed? Would it have been better for some kind of interaction to be thought through between Ofsted and the coasting regulations and the way in which regional schools commissioners react to the coasting definitions? Could they have been made to interact more effectively so that such apparent anomalies would not arise? Perhaps the Minister is not worried about it, but it seems to me that it will cause confusion in the system.