Education Committee
Oral evidence: Underachievement in Education of white working class children, HC 727
Wednesday 26 February 2014
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 26 February 2014.
Written evidence from witness:
- Department for Education (WWC 028)
Members present: Mr Graham Stuart (Chair); Neil Carmichael; Alex Cunningham; Bill Esterson; Siobhain McDonagh; Ian Mearns; Mr Dominic Raab; Chris Skidmore; Mr David Ward; Craig Whittaker
Questions 301-390
Witness: Rt Hon David Laws MP, Minister of State for Schools, Department for Education, gave evidence.
Q301 Chair: Good morning, Minister. Welcome to this session of the Select Committee. It is a pleasure to have you before us again. Today we are inquiring into the underachievement in education of white working class children. Historically, people have tended to suggest there is a particular problem with the underachievement of white working class boys, as opposed to girls. Do you think there is a particular gender issue, or is it common regardless of gender?
Mr Laws: There is a bit of a gender split. As you probably know, the performance of working class children is worse than other social classes. The performance of white children in the more disadvantaged groups is lower than other ethnic groups. There does also seem to be a split between boys and girls, where the performance of boys is lower than that of girls.
Q302 Chair: The Committee, you may be aware, took oral evidence from Professor Robert Plomin in December. He told us that up to 50% of the differences between children in terms of achievement in education are due to genetic differences between them. He describes this as the “elephant in the classroom”. What are the implications of this for education policy?
Mr Laws: The first implication is that we need to do a bit more research to establish whether the professor is right or not. We do not, at the moment, have any solid international database, let alone a DfE database, that would allow us to establish whether he is correct. Sometimes, as you know, professors say things that are accurate, and sometimes they say things that are inaccurate. There is a need here for more research to establish whether or not this is accurate.
In any case, I am not sure what policy implications it would have for us. We can see from places such as inner London the massive impact on young people you can make if you get the school system right. Our focus is on trying to achieve similar big improvements in attainment and reductions in the gap that we have. We would want to do that whatever genetic characteristics particular individuals might have, and we certainly would not want that to be an excuse for accepting low levels of attainment.
Q303 Chair: You mentioned London. One of the characteristics of London is that it has been put under the spotlight. It has had a lot of support, including financial. When are we having the fair funding—one of the Department’s key priorities for this year—which was imminent months ago and is still not here? When are the provinces that have laboured under unfair funding, in your own terms, for so long, finally going to get a Government with the courage to do something about it?
Mr Laws: I fear, Chairman, that I might not entirely satisfy you, because the best I can say is, “Soon.” We are still very committed, as a Department, to tackling unfair funding.
Q304 Chair: Is it the quad that is against it then? Who is stopping it? Is it your leader who is nervous, from Sheffield’s point of view?
Mr Laws: No, he is certainly not impeding this in any way. It does require a lot of detailed work and analysis. It requires a lot of thought about how a much fairer funding system can be brought in at a time of public sector austerity. But we are very committed to delivering fairer funding across the country, and I hope that within a matter of weeks, rather than either days or months, we will have some positive news to report to your Committee and others who are interested in this debate.
Q305 Mr Raab: Will Parliament get a chance to scrutinise that? It is clearly an issue that will affect a lot of areas, MPs and constituencies, so I would have thought it was right that there is an oral statement, at the very least, rather than it slipping through with a written statement. Are we likely to be satisfied on that count?
Mr Laws: I cannot commit the Secretary of State to a particular outcome but I would certainly regard this as being very important for many Members of Parliament and people outside Parliament, so I would personally welcome the opportunity for there to be an oral statement, but I would need to consult the Secretary of State on that. We would also have to consult the usual channels on whether we would be able to make an oral statement, but I think it would make a lot of sense. A lot of Members of Parliament are very interested in this issue.
Q306 Chair: Can you give us a commitment today that the Government will respond, not least to the Unseen children report from Ofsted, which highlighted so many rural and coastal areas that have been long neglected, and will change the funding formula to give a fairer distribution to areas like that, which have been left on the sidelines too long with a detrimental impact not least on poor children, regardless of their ethnicity?
Mr Laws: Yes. We are committed to a fairer funding formula. We certainly do intend to take that forward in a material way. What is fair to one person may not appear to be fair to somebody else. One of the key issues we have to address, which is something your inquiry has probably been pondering as well, is how we fund disadvantaged youngsters. The reason for some of the big differences in funding across the country is to do with the way in which we choose to fund disadvantage. I would not want to, unless we get evidence that we should be funding disadvantage in a different way, roll back on any of the action we have taken since 2010, particularly through the pupil premium, to give schools that have a lot of disadvantaged youngsters a much better funding deal.
So there will still be big inequalities in funding across the country, but we hope they will be based on a rational way of funding individual children and schools, rather than the irrational system we have had over the last couple of decades.
Q307 Chair: You talk rational and irrational, and you have talked about the inequalities in the funding. In the context of the continued gap between outcomes for rich and poor—the unseen children in so many areas—coupled with underfunding, how can you justify spending hundreds of millions of pounds on free school meals for the children of wealthy people as well as others, rather than focusing on disadvantage and trying to close that gap?
Mr Laws: We are trying to do both. We will have put in £2.5 billion extra into the pupil premium by the final year in this Parliament. We also do think there is a strong educational and social rationale for making sure young people in schools have a healthy meal each day. We saw from the pilots carried out around the country that that has an attainment impact, as well as an impact on healthy eating. Both the Secretary of State and I are very strongly of the view that this is good, both for the education system and for young people more widely, in terms of socialisation, for example, in the practice of eating properly and sitting down for regular meals. We think this policy does have a benefit rather than just having a cost of living advantage for families who will no longer have to pick up the bill for this meal themselves.
Q308 Bill Esterson: Is this just a question of more money, or are there particular actions you are taking and that you need to take?
Mr Laws: Do you mean to reduce the gap?
Bill Esterson: To close the attainment gap.
Mr Laws: It is about a lot more than money. More money is extremely important, which is why we have introduced the pupil premium and why we are giving schools with a lot more disadvantaged youngsters the financial resources to implement the right interventions. But it is about getting the accountability system right and creating strong incentives for schools to support young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who may have very low levels of attainment. We know, for example, that under the last Government there was a very big incentive for schools to get themselves above the floor target of GCSE level—to get more than 40% of youngsters over that, or 30% or 35%, as it first was. That was relatively successful in spurring schools into action to get many young people across the D/C borderline because that was where the strong incentive was. But even in the sponsored academies, the performance for some of the most disadvantaged young people, who were obtaining really low levels of performance, was not that impressive because we were giving schools a powerful incentive to focus on only some young people. So the accountability system is really important, not just in raising aspirations, but making schools focus on all young people, rather than just a cohort.
We have to make sure we spread good leadership throughout the entire system and that we have more ability for weaker schools to learn from good schools. We have to improve the quality of the teaching work force. We have to spread best evidence‑based practice throughout the system and make sure the schools are using the interventions that work. Most of those things are helped by having a better financial settlement, but they are not just about money. We know that we had, particularly in the past, a lot of well-funded schools that were delivering very poor levels of attainment.
Q309 Bill Esterson: As you said, it is not just about the money. These things have been done before; these things have been done for quite some time in many cases. Is it about something that goes beyond school? Are there other factors that you need to influence?
Mr Laws: Many of the problems with low attainment in school are due to factors outside the school gate: parental support, or lack of it; parental aspirations; poverty in the home environment; poor housing; and lack of experience of life.
The challenge for all Governments is in trying to work on all the factors that are driving low attainment in particular environments. What are the most effective interventions? Changing some of those things outside the school gate can be much more challenging than trying to get those interventions right in schools themselves. That is not a reason for giving up on some of those wider factors, but areas such as inner London have shown that even with the same characteristics in the communities around the schools, they can produce radical improvements in performance through education-related interventions, backed up sometimes in schools by more social interventions to support the education interventions.
I am more optimistic about making rapid progress in raising attainment for disadvantaged youngsters by really focusing on what goes on in schools and that schools can easily impact upon, rather than trying to change the whole of society, which is a rather big ambition—important, but not easy to do in the short term.
Q310 Bill Esterson: You are convinced, then, that what goes on in school is the best way of influencing children’s attainment and closing the gap.
Mr Laws: I suspect that for every pound spent, an intervention within a school with good leadership, using the right interventions, is more likely to be of use than very generic social interventions, which might generally help in terms of aspirations and generally help disadvantaged youngsters, but without focusing on precisely the things they need to do to be more effective in school.
That is not to say there are not some very important things that could be done outside the school gate: getting support from parents; getting parents to be more supportive of young people; trying to bring a greater degree of stability into the home environment; and schools working to make young people more aspirational and more positive about life when they have lots of things sometimes, in the home environment, to feel unhappy about. Those things can all have big impacts but the more diffuse the interventions are, and the more generic about trying to tackle wider economic disadvantage in society, the more risk there is that we will not focus on the things that make the most impact to young people.
We ought, through things like the Education Endowment Foundation, to be able to get much more evidence over time over the interventions that work. They are, as you know, not just looking at educational interventions, like English and maths support, but at things like how you engage parents outside the school gate and whether those things make as much difference as more restricted and narrower educational interventions.
Q311 Bill Esterson: That is where you are drawing your evidence for the approach you are advocating.
Mr Laws: Yes, it is very important. One of the good things about the Government establishing the EEF is that over time, in this country, we are going to get a lot more evidence about what works. Sometimes that will confirm the instincts or prejudices of politicians, but sometimes it will point in different directions. The political and policy debate will be a lot better for it.
Q312 Bill Esterson: Our inquiry was prompted partly by Ofsted’s report, Unseen children: access and achievement 20 years on. Has that influenced your approach as well?
Mr Laws: Yes. Ofsted and the DfE have a very similar view about the challenges that there are. Both Ofsted and the Department, over recent years, have become more focused on some of the regional challenges there are, and we have become more focused on some of the gaps that there are between the performance of different ethnic groups. The evidence of how well London has done over the last 10 or 15 years has also been a spur towards people thinking about the interventions that may work or may not work, and a spur to thinking about why, if these things can be achieved with disadvantaged young people in the capital city—which used to be one of the sink areas for educational low attainment—can they not be achieved in places like Bournemouth and Barnsley, where barely one in five white children on free school meals currently get five Cs at GCSE, including English and maths, which is a pretty disgraceful outturn.
Q313 Bill Esterson: You mentioned the national picture. Does the data across the country suggest that a strategy is needed either for white working class or white children eligible for free school meals? Do you have a sense of what the right indicators are?
Mr Laws: It certainly suggests that we need to look very closely at why white children with similar levels of disadvantage are doing so much worse than the other ethnic minorities. You know how dramatic the figures are. In the most recent year for which we have information, about half of non-white disadvantaged youngsters who are currently on free school meals got their five good GCSEs, including English and maths. The figure was 32.7% for white children, which is an absolutely massive gap. Although there are undoubtedly differences between the ethnic groups, those differences are less than the differences between most of the ethnic groups and white children.
We can see that London does a lot better for all ethnic groups than outside of London, but we can still see that, even in London, the white groups are not doing as well as the ethnic groups. That ought to cause us to think not only about the impact of school quality, because we know, in general, there are better good and outstanding schools in London, but it ought to lead us to reflect back on some of the characteristics of young people that explain whether they have high or low attainment. We know that a lot of those are to do with economic deprivation, but our Department produced a report in 2010 about identifying the components of the attainment gap, so we also know that things like parental engagement, parental employment status and pupil aspirations are very important and do explain some of the differences in attainment.
I am not particularly in favour of devising all sorts of different strategies for different ethnic groups. However, we do need to learn the lessons of why it is that these ethnic groups, both in and outside London, appear to have better levels of attainment for the same level of deprivation, because that might help us to understand what we need to do for white children to improve their attainment beyond the things that we know work for all children.
Q314 Bill Esterson: What do you think those lessons are, at this stage, which would help inform a national strategy?
Mr Laws: We know, from this work that was done in 2010, that if you take the top factors that explain the differences in attainment, the first couple are fairly predictable. They are income and material deprivation and SEN status. I do not think those would really surprise anybody.
Then, behind that, we have parental engagement as the third factor, and parental employment status will obviously link to income issues but not completely. There is parental background, and we have, lower down the ranking, pupil aspirations. That appears to suggest that getting parents onside and getting parents to be very aspirational are factors that seem to be important for the ethnic community.
Q315 Bill Esterson: How do you achieve that with these groups?
Mr Laws: It means looking at some of the interventions that the EEF is already exploring, where they have commissioned work to see what happens to engage parents who are disengaged at the present time.
Chair: Minister, I will cut you off because we are going to come back to parental engagement later.
Q316 Chris Skidmore: If you came to Kingswood, just outside Bristol, you would meet plenty of pupils who I would term as working class, where the parents are working poor. They earn over £16,190, so these pupils do not qualify for the pupil premium and do not qualify as eligible for free school meals. They are not on benefits. I see it time and time again that these pupils are doing as badly, if not worse, than some students on free school meals. Would you agree with Michael Wilshaw who came to the Committee and said that free school meals, as an indicator alone, is a bit of a blunt instrument, and, in order to look at how we tackle white working class, we have to reach further out for new indicators?
Mr Laws: Yes. You have obviously had the discussion about what white working class is and that it extends beyond children who are either on free school meals or in the “ever 6” category. It is undoubtedly true that people do regard themselves as being working class if they are working, as well as if they are not working. The evidence we have suggests there is a continuum of improvement in attainment as you go up the income and work distribution, so there is a choice to be made about how much money you target on the most disadvantaged and out of work compared with up the system.
We know, for example, that of white children who currently receive free school meals, 32.7% of them receive five good GCSEs, including English and maths. If you take those who are disadvantaged and not currently on free school meals, but have been in the last six years, 32.7% rises to 40.7%. So what we understand to be the case is that the further up the system you go, the higher the attainment will be. That does not necessarily mean that it makes sense to put all the money in just those young people who are the most disadvantaged and have the lowest level of attainment.
This issue came up in the debate yesterday in Westminster Hall on the issue of regional underperformance as to whether there could be an argument for putting more deprivation funding into factors that are not only related to free school meals. At the moment, we spend, as a Department, or a country, probably something in excess of £6 billion on deprivation funding within the school system, only £2.5 billion of which is the pupil premium which, as you know, is allocated on “ever 6”.
Local authorities and others then allocate money based on free school meals and free school meal “ever 6” on area-based deprivation measures like IDACI and also on prior attainment, which would pick up the type of children you are talking about, who will not be eligible for FSM but may have low levels of performance.
So we already have a more complicated system of allocating deprivation money than the pupil premium may give the impression of, because we allocate on more factors. Whether we should change that allocation in the future is a really important and interesting issue. We should go on seeking evidence about the links between characteristics and attainment. We should not assume that the deprivation system we have now is perfect. The Chairman started off by asking about moving towards a more national system of funding schools. When we do that, some of the debate will move on beyond how we fund the core pupil allocations for every pupil to how we fund things like deprivation and prior attainment, and whether we are doing that in the right way. For the time being, by putting a lot of money into free school meals and free school meals “ever 6”, we are putting money into the children whose attainment is undoubtedly lowest.
Q317 Chris Skidmore: Do you think there is any chance of creating new indicators? For instance, you have this cliff edge at £16,190. If suddenly the household income is £16,200 and there are no free school meals, you are not being picked up in the system by the data. Is there any way that you would look at expanding the dataset to include household income up to £20,000, or even £26,000 so that it would tie in with the benefits cap, because then you would have data available there as well?
Mr Laws: We will have these options in the future. Free school meal entitlement was, at one stage, linked to family credit entitlement, and then that was changed. That meant that the nature of people in this category would have changed. When universal credit comes in, we will have the ability to set particular thresholds for different types of entitlements at different income levels, so those things are possible.
It is very sensible to have a more evidence-based debate about this issue over the years ahead. We were absolutely right, based on the evidence we have as a Government, to put all the money into the pupil premium and to put it in, ultimately, on the “ever 6” measure. We are definitely targeting the youngsters in most need of support. We do not completely have a cliff‑edge system, because we know that local authorities and others are using IDACI and prior attainment to target aspects of disadvantage. With this system of funding disadvantage that has built up over the years because of lots of incremental choices, can we be confident, as a Government, that it is yet perfect and all the cliff edges are in the right place? It would be a brave Minister who would say that they could be confident that it would be perfect. So one of the challenges as we go into the next Parliament—whichever Government it is in the next Parliament—should be to look at the way we are funding disadvantage and to reflect on the lessons of the last few years and see whether there are any improvements that we can make.
Q318 Chris Skidmore: What about non-economic indicators? We have talked about historical trends, but a clear historical trend is the level of parental education. In Denmark they have created a system by which they are able to analyse what impact parental education might have on a child. Is there any thought in the Department about looking at non‑economic indicators that would redefine deprivation away from economic deprivation to educational deprivation?
Mr Laws: Yes. I am interested in us doing more of that work. It is something we have been reflecting on for a few months in the Department. The work is at a very early stage.
We have to bear in mind that the evidence base is that the young people with the greatest level of challenge are the ones we are currently targeting through the pupil premium in the way that we are. But it is sensible for us to look at the other characteristics that relate to underperformance, and to consider whether, in the future, this is an issue definitely for beyond this Parliament, because it would take time to get an evidence base to assess whether we have the perfect system of deprivation funding now or not.
Q319 Mr Ward: Is it not the case that it is made even more murky because there is some evidence that non-free school meals pupils are benefiting, even when the expenditure from the pupil premium is not on them?
Mr Laws: We want schools to use the pupil premium funding to narrow the gaps and they are held accountable for improving the performance of their pupil premium pupils. We have to be very clear about that. But any school that is using the pupil premium money will think about whether it has underperformance among other young people, and it would be surprising if it did not have a certain amount of that. It will be using its existing deprivation funding, which is worth more than the pupil premium, because we already have a lot of deprivation funding in the system to help with those young people. Quite often schools will be designing solutions that will benefit not just the pupil premium pupils, but others.
Q320 Chris Skidmore: In terms of simple, quick solutions by which you might be able to rejig the data, somebody who gave evidence talked about linking the national pupil database to things like the census or tax records. That would involve cross‑departmental working with the Treasury. Would you be prepared to consider that as a quick fix to create new datasets?
Mr Laws: We would like a lot more information about what educational experiences work for young people, and a lot more information linking attainment, performance and pupil characteristics with destinations. We can do some of that on an ad-hoc basis at the moment by data sharing within particular confines, but to do it effectively we would need to have more data sharing across government. We would need legislation to do that.
One of your colleagues did put forward a bill for some data sharing within the education space as a private Members’ Bill last year, but unfortunately it was blocked in the Commons. It would be very sensible for a future Government—I do not think it is something that is likely to happen in the fourth Session of a Parliament—to look at data sharing at the beginning of the next Parliament. Data sharing in general is a sensitive issue, but it could be very helpful in terms of giving us a better evidence base for our interventions.
Q321 Chris Skidmore: In terms of data sharing within the education sector, Ofsted, in its annual report on FE and skills, raised the issue that it was too often the case that managers and staff do not know who the disadvantaged young people are, or what provision and support would be most appropriate for them. The Association of Colleges also pointed out that the colleges themselves are not receiving the data from schools. There is a real transition issue here. The schools are not passing the data on to the colleges so the colleges cannot provide the level of support to pupils on free school meals. What do we do about that in terms of ironing out this transitional problem?
Mr Laws: Colleges do collect quite a lot of deprivation-related data because they have to get involved in the disbursing of the bursary, for which they need that information. But we can take further action to strengthen the data transfer between schools and colleges, and one of the things that will spur us to do so is the fact that we have extended free school meals from schools into college settings, so colleges will now need to have that information so that they can identify the young people who have that entitlement.
Q322 Chair: When will you do that? We have been asking for that for ages. The previous response from Government has been, “There is nothing to stop it happening.” The fact that Ofsted, the AOC and everybody says it is not happening often enough, and it has a detrimental effect on the very people we are most trying to prioritise, has not, so far, led to any Government action. Now we have your assurance that it will probably prompt you to do something. When?
Mr Laws: We are working on it right now, not least because of the extension of free school meals. I cannot remember, if I am honest with you, Chair, all the details of it, and therefore what I would prefer to do, if it is okay with you, is write to the Committee just setting out what we are planning to do in this area.
Chair: We would support you in moving as quickly as possible to ensure that that happens because it seems to be discordant with what the Government themselves want, so it is frustrating it has taken this to lead the Government to actually do something about it.
Q323 Mr Raab: Minister, when Sir Michael Wilshaw published his report Unseen children, he gave a speech—I will quote so that we can be totally accurate—in which he said: “Far too many children fail because they live in families and attend schools which have far too low expectations of them”. He talked about a “poverty of expectation”. Breaking that up, do you agree that, in relation to schools serving the underperforming white working class boys, there has been a poverty of expectation in the schools themselves? If so, how do you think the reforms the Government have introduced will tackle that?
Mr Laws: There has been a poverty of expectation in the past throughout all aspects of the system, to be honest, for which everybody has some responsibility. I do not think we have set our national expectations at nearly a high enough level. In fact, under the previous Government, who were trying to do a lot to raise educational standards, by focusing only on a floor target that was necessarily low, because the capacity to intervene in schools was limited, people were fixated on achieving a target above 30%, 35% or 40% of young people receiving five good GCSEs when, frankly, we know from some of the best schools in London in the toughest catchments, there is no reason why, in the future, 70%, 80% or 85% of young people cannot reach those levels of attainment. In some of our competitor nations abroad they now are.
In terms of our Government leadership in this, we are showing a lot now, and in the primary accountability decisions we have taken, we are not only raising the bar for what success will look like at the end of primary from the 4c grade to 4b, but saying that instead of expecting 60% or 70% of young people to get over that bar, we want it to be 85% in the future. These are the types of aspirations that we should have.
There are schools and local authorities in all parts of the country where aspirations are very high, and that will be based on good leadership in local authorities, schools or academy chains, but there are too many where, even today, after all the pressure of the previous Government and this Government, aspirations are way too low in local areas, schools and local authorities. I meet all the local authorities that have been failed by the chief inspector when he inspects their school improvement functions, and many of them report to me that even within the last year or so they have been too weak in terms of their aspirations and there is too much of an excuse culture. It is frustrating to hear that some of those low aspirations and that tolerance of failure are still around in 2013 and 2014, when they really ought to have been extinguished many years ago.
Q324 Mr Raab: In terms of the other side of the coin that Sir Michael was talking about—the poverty of expectation in the families these boys live in—do you agree with that as well and, if so, to what extent is Government policy seeking to address it? Can it address it?
Mr Laws: Yes. We have some evidence that in areas like London there are some higher aspirations that have an attainment impact. Sometimes that seems to be related to immigrant groups, who may be more aspirational by the nature that they have made big efforts to get where they are.
Sometimes it may be—although we need more evidence on this—by virtue of being in a capital city like London, where it is easy to see what some of the big opportunities are. It is more challenging when you are away from big cities and attractive areas of employment, higher skills and higher pay areas, when sometimes the expectations in the community and among parents is that the children will go into the same types of jobs that most people in the local community have had, which on some occasions do not require very high levels of skills and do not have very high levels of pay. If you have a large number of people expecting that they need bare-minimum qualifications to get into jobs that are low paid and low skilled, it must be difficult to motivate them. There is some evidence of that, but we need to collect more, and we need to do much more to raise aspirations.
Q325 Mr Raab: You talked a bit about the evidence and you seemed to say, “Yes, there is some, but we need to get more evidence,” which is a perfectly respectable position. Sir Michael was very robust about this issue. He even talked, in evidence he gave to us, about neighbours waking up families who have allowed their children to sleep in, meaning that they are no attending school, as one policy response. I do not necessarily expect you instantly to endorse this but, at least, in fairness to Sir Michael, he was trying to think about how you not only collect the evidence, but do something about it. Do you have any views on policy areas that it is legitimate for central Government to try to encourage to increase expectation in those areas where it is lacking?
Mr Laws: I think there are three. One is that we need more head teachers such as Sir Michael Wilshaw used to be: the type of person who would, if he had problems with children and aspirations, go round to their flat and drag the parent out—not quite kicking and screaming—to engage in education. If you have very highly aspirational schools with no tolerance of low expectations—
Q326 Mr Raab: In fairness, he was saying that neighbours should do it, not just head teachers. You have endorsed him doing it, but do you think that neighbours should? Is there is something to be said for a community getting together and taking a stake, if they see families slipping below the radar, by nudging and cajoling them along? Is that something you are endorsing?
Mr Laws: Not really because, first, people are not likely to pay much attention to what I say about what neighbours should do. Secondly, I do not want to spark a whole series of violent incidents across the country where people take it on for themselves to drag people out.
Q327 Siobhain McDonagh: One of the local police officers attached to one of my Harris academies, if the child is not there by a certain time, does go round and knock on the door, and he stands there until the mother or child comes to the door. He waits while the child gets dressed and then takes them to school.
Mr Laws: I would be very reticent to give the police that role because they have enough to do as it is.
Siobhain McDonagh: He is happy to do it.
Mr Laws: However, the pupil premium is exactly the kind of thing that could be used by schools, particularly where there is a large disengagement problem—if they think there is evidence this works—to employ somebody who could spend quite a lot of their time engaging with families, sorting out problems, making sure parents are supportive of the school and getting children into school each day and on time. As you know, many of the best schools do this already.
So schools can do a lot of this themselves. There are very good organisations like Future First, which you may be aware of, which tries to use alumni in schools to go back into schools they were in with a wide range of employment experiences to show that people like “you”—the pupils—can go into the types of professions that previous pupils have gone into, which would be a wide variety in most schools.
We need to do more, as a Government, to get support from businesses to make sure that young people in all communities can see the employment prospect they could have outside their local communities. It is great in places like London that big legal firms and City investment banks engage with young people in some of the poorest boroughs, but we need a system where those aspirations and opportunities are seen by everybody across the country, not just in inner London, but in Blackpool, rural areas and right across the United Kingdom.
Chair: We will return to the inadequacy of careers advice information and inspiration later on.
Q328 Mr Raab: In terms of parental involvement and engagement—and you have talked about the schools—should we be a bit more careful, at least in the way we talk about this? The Sutton Trust, for example, has given evidence to us about the way in which the sharp-elbowed middle classes have dominated the system and the good school places. Some politicians and commentators talk about that in rather pejorative terms. Do you agree with that, or would you rather see that middle class parental engagement and aspiration is something that should be spread as best practice more widely?
Mr Laws: Definitely the latter. Sometimes people do complain about sharp-elbowed parents and people who seek to invest a huge amount of money to give their young people opportunities in life, but we should not complain about any parent doing those things, whether they are in the state sector or the private sector. To do all you can to help your children exceed in life is exactly what we want everybody to be doing. I am afraid that we cannot cap any of those opportunities. What we need to do is extend them to young people who are not getting them at the moment.
Q329 Ian Mearns: Are you confident that the pupil premium is proving to be effective in closing the gap for disadvantaged white British children, and what evidence do you have that it is being used effectively by schools.
Mr Laws: I think it is making a difference. It is making a difference in two ways. First, it is a lot of money that is giving schools the opportunity to deliver interventions recommended by the Education Endowment Foundation—not just by the Government—that really do make a difference. We know about that from some of the early reports. We know not only that schools are very positive about it, but that there is evidence that Ofsted and other bodies are collecting about how well it works.
The other thing that is incredibly important about the pupil premium is not just that the money is there, but that it is part of a new focus on the most disadvantaged young people and on closing the gap, which means that schools, since the pupil premium has come in, are much more conscious of the attainment and progress of their most disadvantaged youngsters. It might seem odd to say that, given that the previous Government were very passionate about improving educational opportunities, but because of some of the accountability mechanisms, there was quite a big incentive for schools to focus on just getting lots of pupils to get their five good GCSEs so that they were above the floor target. There was not as much focus, as there now is, on those disadvantaged pupils, whatever their level of attainment.
When I go round to schools now, they know that Ofsted, when it comes in, will be looking at pupil premium expenditure very closely and at progress for disadvantaged youngsters. They know that, if they are an outstanding school, they could lose the “outstanding” label if they do not succeed for disadvantaged young people, so the pupil premium has not only given a lot of money, but has put a lot more focus on this.
It is only two years into the pupil premium, so we are talking about the results of young people who have spent most of their time in a school system that has not had this money. We will not really know how successful it has been until two, three, four, or five years down the line. What we need to do at the moment is to show that it is pushing things in the right direction, that we have the right accountability measures in place, and that we make sure that we keep a political consensus to stick with the policy until we can demonstrate that it is delivering, which I think it will do.
For it to be of maximum effect, it needs to be there for young people throughout their time in schools. There is no point in just thinking you can introduce it for a year or two when people are just about to take their GCSEs and it will suddenly transform their opportunities. It is only next year that the pupil premium grows to its full size, as you know, of £2.5 billion.
Q330 Ian Mearns: So, in a nutshell, there is an awful lot of cachet in Ofsted’s judgments about what a school’s category would be, and the fact that schools are being held accountable for the disbursement of the pupil premium by Ofsted is focusing minds.
Mr Laws: I think it is. That is as important as the money. It is important as a Government to say, “We are giving you the money to do this job,” because otherwise schools would just feel that it is another accountability pressure on them. But if we just gave them money and said, “You can spend it on anything you want and we are not even going to see what its effects are,” there is a real risk we could be disappointed. But, the fact that the chief inspector and all his inspectors are going round to every school—whether they are in a leafy area, or an area with very high free school meals and pupil premium—and really asking what they are doing is that is far more effective than anything I, the Secretary of State or any other body could do because schools know that Ofsted assessments and judgments are incredibly important.
Q331 Ian Mearns: My next question was strayed on to earlier on by Chris, but it is important because the measures of disadvantage are not just economic, as there are also educational disadvantages in certain family settings. Children may be subject to those kinds of disadvantage rather than economic disadvantage. You have already mentioned that you are considering other means to target pupil premium funding. How far are we from seeing that fleshed out by the Department?
Mr Laws: I am not considering other ways of targeting pupil premium funding. Pupil premium funding has a good rationale based on the evidence that pupil premium pupils are those with the lowest level of attainment.
Q332 Ian Mearns: But it is mainly on free school meals.
Mr Laws: Yes, free school meals and “ever 6” free school meals, which covers 1.83 million pupils, which is a lot, but it will make sense for whichever party or parties are in government after the next election to do a stocktake. Having, I hope, got a fairer funding system in place for the average pupil unit, it would be sensible for any incoming Government to look at how we fund deprivation. It is not just the pupil premium; it is prior attainment, IDACI and so forth. We should take stock of whether we are using the best measures and about whether the cliff edges are in the right place. You could go on funding disadvantage for ever until you have reached the level of people going to Eton who are on four A* grades or whatever. You have to stop somewhere. Whether we are stopping in the perfect place at the moment, we ought to take stock of at the beginning of the next Parliament.
Ian Mearns: Even the children of the “workers’ party” are disadvantaged in some ways, I am sure.
Mr Laws: Absolutely.
Q333 Ian Mearns: The fact is that there is an economic threshold for free school meals—it is roughly £16,190 in terms of income—that triggers eligibility for free school meals. The trouble is—I said this yesterday in the debate we had about the regional variations—in many schools where you have significant clusters of youngsters who are entitled to free school meals, you also have, living cheek by jowl with them—because of the neighbourhood, the type of property, the tenure, and the economic circumstances of the neighbourhood—many other youngsters who are just above that threshold, but are not entitled to free school meals and therefore not entitled to pupil premium. That is a big disadvantage for such a school, as opposed to a school where they have a number of youngsters who are entitled to free school meals, but lots of other kids who are well above those economic thresholds.
Mr Laws: Yes, and I can think of my own constituency—some Members will be able to think of their own—where there are schools that have an average or below average free school meal uptake, but where there are quite a few challenges in the area; parental qualifications are not necessarily particularly high. Those schools will be able to make sure that the non-pupil premium pupils still benefit from some of the interventions. They will probably be getting funding on area‑based measures as well as free school meals. They may well be receiving it on the basis of prior attainment as well, so they will not be reliant only on free school meal funding. In addition, the pupils who you are talking about, who are not going to be on free school meals themselves, are going to be on average doing better than free school meal pupils, because that is what our data shows us.
I am perfectly open and perfectly interested in commissioning work on whether there are other characteristics of pupils. Somebody in the Adjournment debate yesterday mentioned the Netherlands, where they said they look at parental qualifications and whether that should be a factor in distributing money. We have, so far, distributed money in the most rational way open to us based on the evidence. It would be useful to go on looking at that evidence and trying to improve the system. It would be surprising if we had a system of allocating the deprivation money—the £6.5 billion—that is perfect.
Q334 Ian Mearns: Given the fact that two thirds of the youngsters who do not get five A* to Cs, including English and maths, are not entitled to pupil premium, there is obviously a problem that needs to be addressed.
Mr Laws: Yes, but that is also why we do not just rely upon pupil premium as a mechanism for funding disadvantage. We could have consolidated—it would have been quite a big job—all the money into the pupil premium and put every bit of deprivation through that, but we have not done so. That is not just for pragmatic, practical reasons, but because we would then be taking away the other monies that are distributed on the basis of other factors.
Q335 Ian Mearns: Given that the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission recommends extending the pupil premium to early-years education to support early intervention, would you consider that? I think just about everyone and their granny accepts that the early stages for youngsters and their development are very important for determining how their life will go on.
Mr Laws: Yes, I am personally very keen on that. My party, within the coalition, has said that we would like to see a nursery premium, which would be extended down to the pre-school groups. We have fully allocated the £2.5 billion we have for the pupil premium at the moment in this Parliament, so we do not have the option of allocating that £2.5 billion to two, three or four years. As you know, in the last year of the Parliament, we have shifted extra pupil premium money into the primary phase to emphasise early intervention.
To get a nursery premium, we would need a few things. We would need a consensus in this Government or the next, and we would need a bit more money to do so. Importantly as well, we would need to make sure we had mechanisms in place to ensure we were targeting the right pupils and giving the settings an incentive to focus on those youngsters and show that their interventions were working. The more you go into pre-school, the more informal some of the assessment mechanisms are. If the Treasury was going to give us any money to do these things, it would want to ask us whether they were working or not. We would need to be able to show how it was working.
Q336 Chair: One of the challenges in the early years is that, despite record amounts of expenditure by successive Governments, with the difference that made in closing the gap and preparing children from poorer families for school, there is little indication of much progress so far. In that context, do you have any policy thoughts on what we do about nursery schools and maintained nursery schools, which typically have been centres of excellence and have been based in poorer areas, and are under stress now and were under stress before? We have seen these centres of excellence closing, ironically, at a time of record amounts of expenditure on early years. Can you do something about it so we stop spending so much money on interventions that do not seem to work when we have centres of excellence that are being shut?
Mr Laws: There needs to be a lot more focus in the early years on the quality of intervention, rather than just scaling it up, but one of the challenges for the previous Government was that because it ended up extending the early-years entitlements to quite a wide group of young people, that probably diluted the quality a bit and meant that everybody was benefiting from this, rather than just the most disadvantaged young people.
We want to make sure the most disadvantaged are accessing the system. We need to make sure that quality is much better, and we know from some of the recent reports that the status, pay and qualifications of our early-years teachers are way below those in many other countries. We need to raise that in general and, as you say, make sure we are protecting settings that do a good job.
Q337 Chair: Can you say anything particularly about nursery schools? As I say, they were shutting under the previous Government and they are shutting under this one, yet every bit of evidence suggests these are centres of excellence with international renown but, at a time when there is record expenditure, they are still under pressure.
Mr Laws: We need to make sure that the early-years settings are funded as effectively as possible in these difficult times. We also need more evidence about which settings are delivering more school-ready children. My colleague Liz Truss is very keen on getting schools more involved in early-years settings, in terms of trying to professionalise the quality of early-years education, which personally I think is a good thing, but we probably need more evidence of the effectiveness of these different settings.
Q338 Mr Ward: We have mentioned in the debate yesterday and here before about getting the best teachers into the most difficult schools, but what is pretty evident is that the more affluent parents, for one reason or another, are able to get their children into better schools. There is a link between those. Looking at the whole issue of parental choice and the difficulty in poorer families being able to move to better-off areas, and the information that is available being studied by middle class parents disproportionately much more than those from deprived backgrounds on attainment and so on, what can we do to ensure that those, in a broader sense, from a more deprived background have opportunities to access schools that are typically serving more affluent areas?
Mr Laws: We do have a big problem in this area because of the increase in concentrations of disadvantage over the last few decades, including in the way we allocate social housing, so that to get into social housing, you need to show high levels of disadvantage in a way that you did not in the immediate post-war era. We have ended up with a housing policy that has unintentionally concentrated disadvantage, and that means that many schools that serve those areas are now serving much more concentrated disadvantage than they used to be when they were established.
Trying to unravel those things is extremely difficult. We are trying to do it in a number of different ways. We are trying, for example, to talk to grammar schools about giving young people fairer access opportunities into those schools. We are trying to allow them to use the pupil premium as a factor in their admissions policy. We are trying to encourage them to ensure that testing is fairer to young people and is not just coachable.
We are also going to have to take a lot of the interventions to the schools and challenging neighbourhoods because of the difficulty, unless you are really willing to bus people around in a way that would be quite controversial, of getting children into the non‑catchment schools that are the ones that are presently doing well.
We know from places like inner London that this is not just a fantasy and you can have a big impact. The things you need to do is, first, to make it more attractive for the best head teachers and teachers to go to some of the more challenging schools. You need to make sure the accountability measures are fairer so that the people taking on those schools and teaching in them do not feel that their chances of doing badly are greater because they are teaching in more challenging schools. In the past it has been more difficult to show you are doing well in more disadvantaged schools; we are changing that with the focus on progress rather than floor targets.
We now need to make sure that schemes such as Teach First, which were very focused in parts of the country, are national schemes that impact on all the regions. We need to use schemes such as the one that the Deputy Prime Minister launched a few months ago—the Talented Leader programme—to encourage some of the best people in the education system to take on some of the schools which, at the moment, have the lowest level of attainment.
I would not give up on your aspiration of trying to make it easier for young people to get into schools that are already doing well, but because of the link between school performance and catchment area, we need to do a lot more than that. We need to get some of the schools serving disadvantaged neighbourhoods to attain at much higher levels themselves.
Q339 Mr Ward: You smiled when you mentioned bussing but, in effect, this does happen, certainly in terms of faith schools, which is funded in some areas, but also in terms of free schools or academies where young people may be taxied—if not by mum and dad, by taxi firms—into an area. The problem with that is they are tending to take away the children of aspirational and probably more affluent families from other areas, which would then have a reduced level of children in their schools from those backgrounds.
Mr Laws: It is possible to use the admissions system to try to give young people from disadvantaged backgrounds a fairer deal. There are some schools that have used fair banding systems in a helpful way. We need to watch how such systems are administered because they could easily be a surrogate way of getting more advantaged young people into schools that have been disadvantaged just for league-table reasons. That would not be a good thing, so it needs close scrutiny.
But the key for politicians, schools and others is to do some of these good things while keeping the public on board. The more you are requiring young people to move way away from their own catchment school and then moving young people from considerable distances in to create a social mix, the more you have a difficulty with keeping parents onside, because if they can see a school down the road and they cannot get their child into it but then somebody is travelling two miles, they are not going to be very happy.
Q340 Mr Ward: You would keep onside the parents of the children from the deprived communities who were going to a better area. You would keep those onside.
Mr Laws: You would, but because of the strong culture of people expecting to be able to access a good local school near them, rather than having to travel a great distance, the presumption of being able to access your local school is quite strong. It is quite difficult to fight beyond a certain point. I am not saying that there are not more things that can be done.
Q341 Ian Mearns: Underpinning all that, though, Minister, is a robustly fair admissions process across the whole of the board. While earlier you were saying that you welcomed the attitude of sharp‑elbowed parents, quite clearly if a youngster has an entitlement to go to a nearby school just by proximity, but then has their place taken away from them by the sharp‑elbowed parents of a child from a little bit further away, schools are, I would say, gaming the admissions process in terms of trying to qualify their intake. Is there not an inherent danger within that, because we are trying to eradicate these differentiations, not make them worse?
Mr Laws: I do not think we know enough about whether schools are trying to do that. A lot of academies, for example, have been using fair admissions systems in a very sensible way to try to create a proper mix and to give people opportunities, but there are clearly risks if you allow schools to do too much of this themselves.
We need, through our overview of admissions, to keep an eye on this. We also need to keep an eye on developments that could have unintended impacts on disadvantaged young people. For example, now that we are getting early-years settings associated with schools, there are a lot of schools that want to keep those youngsters from the early-years settings into the school setting and create a presumption that they would have a preference in the admissions system. That may be very helpful, especially for disadvantaged youngsters, and it is very logical for schools, but if there is any connection between payment for access, because of the funding of early-years places, you could unintentionally end up with a system where people could be given an unfair advantage in the early years that could then subvert a fair admissions system in schools, and that is something we need to keep a very close eye on.
Q342 Mr Raab: What we are really talking about is social mobility, and rather than whacking middle class domination of the state sector, I wonder whether we could tempt you into something even more radical, which would be to put your shoulder into, or to give your view on at least, the Sutton Trust’s open access scheme, which has talked about allowing pupils from more deprived backgrounds to use their pupil funding to carry into some of the top independent schools. Even the Social Market Foundation has done a variant on suggesting that public schools should be able to take 25% of their intake from the most deprived areas. Do you think that that would be something that we should think about and look at in terms of social mobility, and in particular in relation to white working class underachievement?
Mr Laws: If private schools wanted to come to us and say, “For the amount of money you are spending on state education, we will take in a lot of disadvantaged youngsters and educate them well,” I would want to look at that very seriously. At the moment they are not saying that.
Q343 Mr Raab: In fairness, the Sutton Trust is saying that there would be a very small subsidy in order to make it effective, but it is something like 0.3% of the education budget. If you think about the cost of the pupil premium, is that not something that is at least worth looking at?
Mr Laws: I am guarded about it if what it means is creating an even more stratified system in the English education system than we have at the moment. The logical endpoint of that type of thinking is that you would give the state funding, which we give to schools, to parents, and then allow them to shop them around with it so that a parent could add to it to get into private education. That would mean that we would have even more tiers of stratification than we already have. What we want to do is to try to reduce that by raising the quality of the schools that serve the vast majority of young people in the country.
Q344 Mr Ward: Failing my radical desegregation policy, which I seem to be the only one in favour of in terms of social integration, what we need to do is to ensure that there are schools that buck the trend in terms of serving deprived communities and doing exceptionally well. So what we need to do is to ensure that we learn as much as possible and share that. The next question is to do with collaboration versus co-operation, the current accountability system and the incentives that exist to share best practice, as opposed to keeping it to ourselves because, “We are up against you in the league tables.” How do we deal with this disincentive to share and collaborate?
Mr Laws: First, we need to make sure that schools are aware of the schools they ought to be collaborating with, so we are starting to publish these similar schools league tables, where schools can see other schools with a similar intake, see schools that are doing much better, and go to those places to see what works. A lot of schools do have a strong sense of system responsibility and they want to support other schools.
We need to consider whether there are ways we can reward and acknowledge system contribution without, for example, making the system of school designation through Ofsted distorted by trying to make judgments about something other than the quality of the education that you get in a particular school. There have been proposals over time on having different designations of Ofsted category for schools that are doing system leadership work as well as performing well for themselves.
Q345 Mr Ward: Am I right in saying that to get “outstanding” twice a school has to show it is sharing its success with others?
Mr Laws: You can be outstanding and be outstanding only for your own pupils, but there is a growing expectation that good practice will be shared. What some people have suggested is that there should be a higher grade given to acknowledge system leadership, but that raises lots of issues, not only about how you would assess the quality of system leadership, but about whether it would be useful for parents to tell them about the job that their school is doing in somebody else’s school.
We need to make sure that existing schemes, like the national leaders of education scheme, are properly supported so that there is a strong incentive for as many good and outstanding heads as possible to take on that work. We ought to look, and we are going to look as a Department, at whether there are other ways in which we can, in a high‑profile way, acknowledge the good work being done by those schools that are willing not only to concentrate on their own pupils, but to try to improve the system as a whole.
Chair: Is there anything else you can do to incentivise it? Ofsted told us there are not enough incentives. You have categorisation and accountability, sure, but what else is there? The whole fundamental, I would have thought, of the Government’s view of the education system is to make it self-improving. To do that, you have to get co-operation and partnership, and Ofsted, your inspector, says there are not enough incentives to get people to co-operate. So you have these little centres of excellence and we have too many schools and too many pupils abandoned when they have the expertise available; we are not incentivising the sharing of it.
Q346 Mr Ward: In a chain you would expect the chain to have a sense of collaboration with members of the chain, but that chain will be in competition with another chain. I may have a really good outstanding school as part of a chain in Bradford that will share with another school in Hull and one in Leeds, but what I want them to do is share with all the schools in Bradford.
Mr Laws: There are some things that you can do, first by making sure that the designations for schools doing this work are more high-profile, without distorting the Ofsted system of classification. Clearly you can make sure that schools doing this work feel that they are funded appropriately, because sometimes they will be reticent about using key resource that could be used in the school, if they have to cover for it. We can promote multi‑academy and multi-school organisations that are sharing best practice. We can have similar schools tables. We now have hundreds of teaching school alliances, which are creating groups of schools working together. There is all of the system work that the national college is doing.
Where we would draw the line is to have ways that were forcing schools to co-operate with other schools. The right way of going about it is to have powerful incentives and to spread more information in the system about schools that are performing well, given their catchments. Those are the two main policy directions that we ought to be using to make sure that best practice is shared. I am not really in favour of a stick approach.
Q347 Chair: Sir Michael Wilshaw recommends a form of national service for all teachers to ensure the best leaders and educators are deployed in the areas that need them most. The Government’s response is the Talented Leader programme which, over two years, will match 100 outstanding leaders with schools that need improvement. Given that there are over 540 primary and secondary schools rated as inadequate and almost 4,000 more that require improvement, is your Talented Leader programme an adequate response to the problem?
Mr Laws: We wanted to make sure the numbers were realistic in the first couple of years, so we talked of about 100 heads over that first two‑year period. We would like the scheme to grow considerably further beyond that. We will not know, frankly, until the scheme is fully up and running, how many head teachers and deputy head teachers there are who are prepared to move particular travel distances away from their existing home environment to take up these responsibilities. We need to be realistic; there are many people who have strong reasons for staying in their home area, such as strong family ties or children at local schools who are not necessarily going to move. I would like to see that scheme expand considerably over time.
We also want to make sure we have more teachers going to these schools. That is why we have spread next year, for the first time, the Teach First initiative, which involves thousands of teachers each year, right across the country. It is not just a scheme focused in London and a few big cities.
We also need to make sure, through the accountability systems and the pay systems, that we reward and are fair to teachers, right up to a leadership level, who take on schools in some of the most challenging areas of the country. In the past, the focus on accountability and the remuneration in schools with higher levels of disadvantage have sometimes not been commensurate with the additional challenges you have as a teacher or head teacher from teaching in those types of schools compared with schools in leafier areas, which may be already good or outstanding. I do not know whether I would call it a system of national service, but we need to make it easy—in a system that does have a lot of passionate, ambitious people who want to do the right thing for young people and help those young people who most need help—for people to get to those schools where they can really make a difference.
Q348 Chair: Is this not the most fundamental issue in the system? Quality of teaching is the most important thing. We know that if you look at outstanding schools, there is still a huge gap between white working class—or generally children on free school meals—and the rest. It is similar to what it is in inadequate schools. It is roughly around a quarter, if you look at the last schools inspected by Ofsted. In fact, whereas 50% more children who are not on free school meals get five good GCSEs at an outstanding school, 100% more children on free school meals do, so quality teaching makes a bigger difference to the most disadvantaged. Surely the central challenge, if you are to do more than pay lip service, which some critics outside may say that successive Governments have done to closing the gap, is that you have to get great teachers where they are most needed. You have recognised the incentives are the other way and you have said you would like to change them, and then you have come up with a programme over two years that is going to do a pretty small amount to address it.
Mr Laws: That is only one part, Chairman, of the programme. The rest of the programme is what we are doing for teachers, what we doing in terms of pay flexibility and what we are doing in terms of a fair accountability assist. I also think what we are doing in terms of holding local authorities and others to account for educational failure in their area is very important. If we are successful in focusing more on the parts of the country where we have educational failure, what we then expect the key decision makers to do is to put in strong leadership in those schools. Strong leaders get the best out of their existing teaching work force. They are also very good at getting rid of teachers who are not doing a very good job and getting in good teachers.
Chair: How do they do it? We know that Ofsted shows that outstanding teachers and leaders tend to be in the more prosperous areas. The poorer the area, the more deprived the school and the poorer the standard of teaching, in the round. You have also said you are much more likely to be fired or be found wanting because of the challenges there, so you create a playing field in which the most talented, whatever their original idealistic intentions, are encouraged to move where they are needed least.
Q349 Ian Mearns: Additionally, Minister, an important point, which you have mentioned, is that you are also holding local authorities to account for the performance of schools over which they have no control anymore.
Mr Laws: We are not, actually. We are very clear with local authorities that they are responsible directly for the maintained schools in their area. The academy chains, and the Department, ultimately, are responsible for the performance of academies.
Coming back to the Chairman’s point, it is not just getting these things right in terms of talented head teachers programme, pay flexibility and fair accountability; it is the ability to change the leadership of schools that are weak and change it rapidly that is crucial.
In inner London 10 or 20 years ago, people said, “Nobody wants to teach in inner London. The schools are not very good. How are you going to deal with it?” It was dealt with in inner London, in part, by having very ambitious aspirations for schools, replacing the leadership of weak schools and making sure that weak schools were partnered up with strong schools. That is why the work Ofsted is doing to hold local authorities and other bodies to account for the performance of weak schools is very important.
Q350 Ian Mearns: Ofsted is not going to be holding academy chains to account because it cannot inspect them.
Mr Laws: Ofsted is inspecting, as you know, the schools of academy chains. It is, at the moment, inspecting a lot of the E-Act ones.
Q351 Ian Mearns: It is an interesting dilemma because there is no accountability via Ofsted there, is there?
Mr Laws: I have been very clear and open—it is not a state secret—that I think it would be sensible for us to grant, which would require legislation, Ofsted the ability to hold to account academy chains as well as local authorities.
Ian Mearns: We look forward to the change, Minister.
Mr Laws: At the moment we have an excellent Minister in Lord Nash who is very tough with failing academy chains, but we need a system, in the future, which is robust for whoever a Minister is and makes sure that there is that scrutiny of local authorities and academy chains. That would be a logical way to go.
Q352 Chair: Could you write to us on this, because Ofsted told the Committee that the incentives are not there to encourage our very best teachers to work with the children who are hardest to teach or have the most to learn?
Mr Laws: I will write to you directly.
Q353 Chair: That is its evidence to us and this issue of getting the distribution of teachers where they are most needed is, in the context of tackling disadvantage, the most central and important one.
Mr Laws: I will write to you. I think Sir Michael would also accept that what we are doing on pay flexibility is going to help a lot. It will make it easier for schools in challenging areas to use things such as their pupil premium budgets to attract some of the best teachers in the system.
Chair: The entire Committee may not do so, but I too would accept that. But we would like to hear all the measures that you are taking to shift this playing field to get the outcomes we would all like, regardless of party.
Neil Carmichael: To some extent, my question has already been answered because you have indicated interest in Ofsted being able to inspect chains, but it does seem to me that such a power would help the very point that Graham has mentioned in terms of the letter he has asked you to write about making sure teachers are deployed in the right places within a chain. That is a key issue. So I would like to put on record that we really do think, as a Committee—or at least Ian and I—that inspecting chains would be a good thing for Ofsted to be able to do.
Q354 Chair: You can take that as a comment that supports your view, Minister. Ofsted says that the teaching agency, now the national college, no longer collects information on where newly qualified teachers work, describing this as a weakness in the system. Will you resume collection of this information to inform the work on getting teachers to work in the right areas? If you do not know where they are, it is quite hard to find out how to get them where you want them.
Mr Laws: I am not aware of the basis of the statement you have just made, so I would like to look into it in more detail. I am sure that we are aware in broad terms of where those teachers are going early on, but whether or not there has been any diminution of the detail, I would need to check out. So, if I may, Chairman, I will write to you about that.
Q355 Chair: Please do. The GTC used to do it and when that went the data collection died with it, I understand. It was in the Unseen children report that Ofsted commented on this and said it was a weakness in the system that needs to be addressed.
Mr Laws: I will look into that for you.
Q356 Chair: What steps are the DfE taking to ensure that, within the school, the best teachers are used to support the children that need it most?
Mr Laws: We are putting pressure on schools to make sure not only that they are measured by the numbers of those who achieve over a particular benchmark—the old 35%, 30% or 40% GCSEs—but that they are held to account for the gaps between disadvantaged pupils and the rest, and particularly the attainment and the progress for disadvantaged youngsters. That means that there are now much more powerful incentives than there were in the past for schools to improve the outcomes of all young people. That is reinforced by the new accountability system at key stage 4, where we are going to give weighting to all the grades, not just raising pupils over the C-D borderline. Those things are going to have quite a dramatic impact on schools focusing on raising the teaching of the most disadvantaged youngsters.
Q357 Chair: We agree, and we congratulate you on your change of heart on thresholds, which we think will have that effect. At primary, as the proposals from Government at the moment would suggest a retention of a threshold, are there not the same dangers that the best teachers will be put with those most likely to contribute to getting the school over that threshold level and be focused in year 6?
Mr Laws: There might be if we were reliant only on the very high threshold that we are setting. In fact, the prime mechanism with which we will hold the primary sector to account is through progress. Progress for most schools will be the thing they are really under pressure on, and that will give them an incentive to focus on all youngsters, not just the 4b threshold.
Q358 Ian Mearns: I understand that your ministerial colleague, Liz Truss, has been in Shanghai talking about training enough maths teachers so that we have specialists in every primary school. That is a tall order, but I am not seeing any real evidence that there is any significant national work force planning going on anywhere and at any level. Are you confident that the Department and its agencies are engaged in that process in a meaningful and deliverable way?
Mr Laws: Yes, I am. There is far more work force planning in teaching than in almost any other profession in the country. It is a far more centralised, planned system where we attempt to estimate each year how many PE teachers we want to train and so forth. We have very big aspirations for trying to raise the number of people coming in to teach, and applying to teach, subjects such as maths, physics and chemistry. We have very large bursaries and scholarships, as you know, to incentivise students to come forward. We are having some considerable success in some of these areas, and in a few of the other areas last year we were below target. It is too early this year to know where we are going to come out, but we are making a major effort to get more people with maths and physics.
Q359 Ian Mearns: Importantly, Minister, you did just yourself say that in some areas we were below target last year. That could well be an indirect or unforeseen consequence of the expansion of School Direct.
Mr Laws: No, it was not, because both School Direct and the university settings were not able to take up their full numbers in two or three particular shortage subjects. It was not because we had capped universities at a particular level; they could have gone on recruiting—
Q360 Ian Mearns: Could you furnish us the evidence of that?
Mr Laws: Yes. We discussed that when your Committee had its inquiry into initial teacher training, but I am happy to drop you a note. We have set the targets at a very high level. The level of applications we are willing to take this year is at a much higher level than the number of teachers we need to make sure that we do not inadvertently lose people through either of these routes in these key subject areas.
Q361 Chair: Following your appearance, you kindly provided us with the Teacher supply model: a technical description, but that did not have any worked examples within it to enable anyone to work out how final numbers were arrived at. Would it be possible to provide the Committee with some worked examples? I found it an easy‑to‑read document, but it was hard to determine from it where exactly the final numbers you published came from.
Mr Laws: Yes, I am sure we would be happy to do that either by putting something in writing or, Chair, if you or any other members of the Committee would like to come into the DfE at some stage to talk with us about how we do those calculations, we would be very happy to do that.
Q362 Alex Cunningham: On teacher morale, we need to take teachers with us if we are going to get the best teachers to go into schools and get teachers to perform to their best. But morale in the teaching profession is quite low, and I am sure you would accept that. I wonder what we can do to build the morale of and respect for teachers. It is quite low as far as the community as a whole is concerned. What are the Government going to do to try to raise morale and therefore the performance of teachers, which will have benefits across the piece?
Mr Laws: There are three quick things. First, by making sure we have outstanding people coming into teaching and people can see it as a real profession of choice.
Alex Cunningham: I am more concerned about the ones who are in the profession now.
Mr Laws: We are getting a stronger cohort of teachers over time. We can make sure we have good continuous professional development for the teaching work force. That is important too.
There is a responsibility on politicians, when we point to the big weaknesses that there are in some parts of the country in attainment, to balance that off with praising schools that are doing really well. We, as a Department, have written, at the end of last year, to hundreds of schools across the country that had very good levels of attainment and gap-narrowing to praise them, as well as challenging some of the schools that are not doing well.
There is also a responsibility on the trade unions and others not to pump out so many negative messages about what is going on in our education system. There are a huge number of things to be proud of. We understand that teachers would rather we did not have to make some of the tough decisions on pay, pensions and other matters, but what we are doing in these areas is no different from what we are having to do in every part of the public sector during these times of austerity. Sometimes the teaching unions themselves do not help by hyping up the bad news, rather than concentrating on some of the good news.
Q363 Alex Cunningham: You talked about the need for flexibility in pay and all that sort of thing, but teachers do feel badly done to, do they not?
Mr Laws: I do not think they have been. Everybody in the public sector has had a squeeze on their pay since the extraordinary recession of 2007-08. In terms of funding, we have treated the education sector better than almost the whole of the public sector. The same caps on public sector pay have related to teachers compared with other public sectors workers. The average teacher who is not politically motivated in any way is more positive about what is happening in education today than is often said. There are lots of really good things. The trade unions will have their things on which they want to lobby and the Government will have low attainment to challenge. Both need to make sure that the messages that they convey are properly balanced and do not focus just on either the bad news or on the good news.
Q364 Alex Cunningham: When I tour schools, I get quite a different picture, but I will move on to the parents in the community. The Committee has heard that parental engagement may be a promising approach to tackling underachievement. Have you made any assessment of the benefits of schemes to improve parental engagement on educational output?
Mr Laws: We have not. We have made assessments of the existing evidence base and that does show that parental engagement, if done in the right way, can have a very positive impact on attainment. What is encouraging and far better than us doing the work is that the EEF is commissioning a lot of evidence-based studies of parental engagement. In some of the first work that it has been commissioning, it has been focusing on this as a theme. That means that, once that is complete, we will have a lot more serious evidence about what type of engagement with parents works, and how it works compared with other educational interventions.
Q365 Alex Cunningham: As you say, it probably works in many, many places, but of course, in many others, it certainly will not be working. Would you think about reintroducing dedicated funding to promote this?
Mr Laws: No, I do not think I would. What I would regard as a potential source of funding for this is the pupil premium. If schools decide that getting young people from disadvantaged backgrounds properly engaged is a big priority—getting parental engagement, getting children to get in through the school gate each day and attend, and having them motivated in the right way—they ought to think about using their pupil premium for that. We have not got any other sources of central funding that we are holding back in pots. We are trying not to allocate out blocks of money for particular interventions. The money is going to the schools. The schools need to be taught what interventions work not by politicians, but by organisations such as the EEF. They are then free to spend the money on whichever of these interventions they want, provided it works. If it does not work, they will be held to account.
Q366 Alex Cunningham: Schools that have got these underachieving, white working class children need to concentrate those resources in very specific ways, targeted at the individual child. Do you not think that they need some additional resource to reach out into that community?
Mr Laws: They are getting all the additional resources that we have got, which is the pupil premium. They are then getting information and evidence from the Education Endowment Foundation, the Sutton Trust and others about what interventions work. They are getting more advice from us about schools that look like them, in terms of their catchment, which are doing much better in terms of attainments, so they can go and find out what works. That is a better way of doing it than the Department having a ring-fenced fund for these particular things. It is better to let the schools come up with the solutions that are best for them.
Q367 Alex Cunningham: In yesterday’s debate, we discussed the poor attainment of parents and previous generations before that and the impact that has on the expectation of parents for their children. What steps are the Government taking to tackle intergenerational underachievement?
Mr Laws: First, we are trying to make sure that we break the cycle. Through interventions, accountability and leadership in the pupil premium, we are making sure that we take today’s group of young people, whatever the disadvantage they have in the home environment, and help to give them the best start in life in their education. The other thing that we are trying to do is to make sure that we have a strong evidence base of what works in terms of engagement with parents so that we can try to get parents onside for the work that we want to do with schools.
Q368 Alex Cunningham: The Chairman has talked about the number of schools that are underachieving in the past. Have you made any assessment of what is happening or what exists there in parental prior attainment in those areas to see if there is something we can learn?
Mr Laws: The last time we were able to do that in a very comprehensive way was probably when we had this longitudinal survey data, last published in 2006 or something like that, which gives us a much richer vein of information, including working class children who are not in the free school meal category. There is another one of these surveys that is just starting to collect information. I think it is going to start to produce evidence in 2015. That then will give us a lot more granularity to understand what is going on with particular groups. It will help in this type of inquiry.
Q369 Alex Cunningham: Can you see policy change as a direct result of that, perhaps reaching back into the generations rather than just concentrating on the child?
Mr Laws: It will come at a time when it will be a good moment to review the way in which we are trying to fund schools to deal with different types of challenges they have. It is possible that it may provide a rich resource of information at a time when I think it will sensible for whichever party or parties are in power to do a stocktake of how they are trying to tackle this issue of underachievement from disadvantaged youngsters, and look at other aspects of disadvantage.
Q370 Alex Cunningham: The schools currently have a duty to promote community cohesion. The communities have been told that this could be important in raising the achievement of different groups of pupils. What evidence do you have that schools are fulfilling this duty and that academies are also picking it up?
Mr Laws: The evidence that we have is patchy in terms of the amount that we collect in this particular area. I am not aware of any recent, reliable statistical database that would allow me to tell you what percentage of schools is doing this work effectively. If there is more quantitative evidence than is in my head, I will come back to the Committee and update you on that.
Alex Cunningham: Yes, because we need to encourage all schools to do a bit more.
Mr Laws: Yes, but I would be particularly keen to ensure that it is focused on activity that impacts directly on those pupils who are in the schools, and is therefore productive in an educational sense, rather than dispersing their activities in things that give schools an even more impossible job than they sometimes feel they have got at the moment.
Q371 Mr Raab: Minister, what role do you see vocational training playing in dealing with this issue of white working class underachievement in boys?
Chair: And girls.
Mr Laws: It has, potentially, an incredibly important role for both girls and boys. What I think is important is that it should be high-quality vocational education. It should be vocational education that people engage in because they think it is going to lead somewhere, rather than just getting easy results in the school league tables. There were incentive effects previously for people to do some qualifications, which included vocational qualifications, for league table performance rather than because they were always the best ways of progressing. It does make sense for all young people to have a solid core of academic skills built up by the age of 16 so that they can make choices beyond that. We do not want vocational education to be a presumed to be a low-quality route for young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. For many young people, it will actually be a very high-quality route to good employment, but it should be available in all schools in all parts of the country. It should not be something where there is an expectation that poor children will do vocational education because they are not capable of doing anything better than that.
Q372 Mr Raab: I would certainly agree with that. The fact is that if you look at the official truancy rates for between 14 and 16, the truancy spikes, both in terms of overall and persistent truancy rates. I wonder whether there is a risk that the focus on academic rigour in the national curriculum turns off some bright but not necessarily bookish youngsters, and that could cut across class. Is there a risk of that?
Mr Laws: There is a risk, but I think we ameliorated in two ways. We made sure that many more young people at the age of 14 had the core academic skills to be successful. It is not surprising that so many of them are turned off when large numbers of young people enter primary education without good enough skills to get five good GCSEs. If they have weak maths and English, they are not going to—
Chair: I think you mean secondary education, do you not?
Mr Laws: I meant if they enter secondary education from primary, sorry. We need to do a lot more to make sure that the overwhelming majority of young people have those skills. There will be young people who are much more motivated by vocational, practical-type routes, or whose skills lead in that direction. That was why it was quite important, in the new measure that we are bringing in for secondary accountability at key stage 4—the best 8—for there to be spaces available for high-quality vocational qualifications. If they want to, people can fill three of the eight places in the best 8 with vocational qualifications.
Q373 Mr Raab: The Government are obviously doing quite a lot in this area already—tech bac, the UTCs, and all the rest of it. In addition to that important work, do you think that there is a case for at least offering the option of young apprenticeships, previously offered by the Blair Government and then dropped by the subsequent Labour Administration? That would satisfy your desire to make sure you have got the numeracy and literacy up to scratch, but would also give them the option of work-based, educational experience.
Mr Laws: Do you mean at age 14?
Mr Raab: Yes, the young apprenticeships that they introduced in 2004 for 14 to 16-year-olds.
Mr Laws: There will be a small proportion of young people who, in spite of all the support that can be given, for a variety of different reasons do struggle between 14 and 16 and may even struggle with vocational qualifications delivered in a conventional school environment. Probably all of us from our own constituencies see the work that some educational institutions are doing with those young people to engage them in things that seem practical and relevant to the work place. We ought to leave open those possibilities for educational institutions to create some of those partnerships, but I would see them as an option for a very small minority of young people who need to be engaged in that way. For the vast majority, we ought to be able to engage them in schools in a rich and attractive curriculum, which is school and college-based, rather than employer-based.
Q374 Mr Raab: None the less, you would accept that it would make sense for that small category to leave the option open. You do not think that the Department should stand against it.
Mr Laws: We already enable some young people to engage with both the conventional educational system and some more practical skills, between 14 and 16. This is for a very small minority. That makes sense, but I would want the central focus to be on the educational institution. I would not want schools or colleges to feel able to shed young people at 14 or 15 into work-based settings completely.
Q375 Mr Raab: Just to be clear, the young apprenticeships are approximately half in schools and half work-based. Is this an option that should be left open for the small few for whom it may be appropriate, in fact, irrespective of class?
Mr Laws: For me, it would depend on the amount of time that is being engaged beyond the education setting. I would be very reticent if the amount of time was such that it effectively meant that young people were leaving education settings for the majority of their time, pre-16. That is too early for the vast majority. Those who are turned off from formal, school-based education can sometimes be turned back on by a small amount of engagement with employers, or sometimes by practical, vocational education delivered within the school setting. In my own constituency, I have seen buses coming into schools with engineering equipment and people who have got engineering expertise from employers. They are working with young people still on the school site, but detached from the conventional classes that they are in. Some of those initiatives are very, very successful. They do not involve simply sending the children outside the school gate.
Q376 Chair: We have got very little time left. Following on Dominic’s questions, can I press you on the Ebac? I remember that when we did our Ebac inquiry, we looked at the collapse in the number of young people on free school meals who were sitting the Ebac suite of core academic subjects. It was a pretty material one. The Government had highlighted it, which was why we needed the nudge of the Ebac to get more doing it. The completion rates for those who had got A to C in those subjects had not really dropped very far at all. From memory, it was something like from 5% to 3.9% of the whole cohort. Four out of five children on free school meals who sat the Ebac suite of subjects back in 2004 were not passing at C grade or above. I have not managed to get last year’s data yet. What is the situation? We would like everyone to have access to core academic subjects, regardless of background, but is there much point if they sit them, fail them and feel put off education as a result?
Mr Laws: We certainly want to incentivise people to go on and do well in these subjects. I do not have the data at my fingertips for what both the take up and the attainment data on the Ebac are. From the last time I saw it, my recollection is that this has been a stunning success, educationally, in terms of creating an incentive or removing disincentives to do really important subjects, which has led to a massive increase in the uptake of things like modern foreign languages, which people were previously fleeing. It has been very, very successful.
Q377 Chair: Were they better off doing something in which they got a commendatory pass, as long as it was useful, rather than getting an E in French GCSE?
Mr Laws: I would have to come back to you with the actual data, but my recollection is that there are not only more people taking those subjects, but more people passing them. It is not just that we have got a whole load of people taking foreign languages who were doing some vocational qualification of low grade and who are now failing modern languages as a consequence of it.
Q378 Chair: Does that include free school meals children?
Mr Laws: That includes free school meals pupils, but only from memory. I would need to get the data and write to you on that.
Q379 Ian Mearns: HMCI drew the Committee’s attention to the connection between student engagement in education and good careers advice, particularly in terms of being able to show the connection to the local labour market. What evidence do you have that the transfer to schools of responsibility for careers advice is having a positive impact, including for the white working class children we are talking about? We have seen evidence from the past that an awful lot of schools were giving youngsters advice, which was good for the institution in terms of getting them on to post-16 courses, as opposed to what was best for the youngster.
Mr Laws: We have a long way to go before we get in place the system of careers advice and guidance that we really need in this country. I do not think there has ever been a golden age of careers advice and guidance. We need to ensure that, first, the advice and guidance that young people get is in their interest and not just in the institution’s interest. Secondly, we have to make sure that it is prompted and available at a time when it is useful in terms of the qualification choices that young people are making. That is something the Government are looking at very closely at the moment through the review that Sir Jeremy Heywood has been leading.
Thirdly, as I mentioned earlier on, we need to do more to engage employers in offering opportunities to young people while they are at school and signposting different career routes. We need to make sure that that is available not just where there happen to be employers for geographic reasons. We need to make sure that wherever you are in the country, you can see those opportunities to go into different professions, so that pupils are not restricted by the history in their own area of people sometimes only going to one, two or three employers.
Q380 Ian Mearns: While I would agree that there was no golden age of careers advice, one of the strengths of previous systems—both Connexions and its predecessor, the Careers Service—was that the advice was impartial and independent of the institution. Quite often, a lot of the tensions were about those independent and impartial advisors having access to the students in some institutions. We are an awful long way from having even that strength returned to the system.
Mr Laws: Most institutions actually are reliable at giving young people advice that is in the young person’s best interests, but we have to be aware of the fact that there are pressures on institutions through funding, accountability and so forth. We must have a system where the information, advice and guidance given to young people is in their interest, rather than the institution’s. That is something we are looking at at the moment, as a Government, to make sure we get it right. We cannot have a system where the only advice young people get is that that is in their institution’s interest, rather than their own.
Q381 Ian Mearns: As well as trying to make sure that there is robust, independent and impartial careers advice, how will we better connect employers to our education system and our schools? The capacity to do that in different parts of the country is very different. We cannot have a one‑size‑fits‑all response to that, because the labour market, the nature of employment and the nature of businesses in different parts of the country are very different.
Mr Laws: The way we can resolve that is first by providing better information over an electronic forum, rather than simply assuming that this is about the local employer coming into the institution. A lot of young people have amazing IT skills today. They can very easily access information online. We need to consider ways in which we can bolster that. We need to support groups like Future First and similar organisations that get young people who are alumni back into institutions to talk to young people, where they will be the individuals who have gone on to work in not only the local labour market, but other parts of the country.
There is also a point about trying to get organisations that are good at doing this type of work in their own home markets to extend their offer into other parts of the country. As I mentioned earlier, there are lots of institutions in London that do really great work in giving opportunities to people in and around London. As a constituency MP, I want people in Chard or Yeovil, or any of your constituencies, to be able to go off and get experience of law, investment banking, social services or building helicopter—whatever it is—rather than just people in those areas.
Q382 Chair: That will take some infrastructure, will it not? I just got your departmental estimates: you are proposing to move £400 million in underspend from this year into capital for next year. Did you consider using any of that to invest in careers advice and guidance, which successive reports suggest has currently moved from bad to worse in our schools?
Mr Laws: At the moment, before we take any further policy decisions on this, we are waiting for the conclusions of the review that is currently taking place in government. This links together not only DfE, but the Business Department. The Deputy Prime Minister has a strong interest in it and the Cabinet Office has been involved as well. I hope that some positive policy conclusions will come out of that.
Q383 Mr Ward: For those who were not there yesterday, and for the Committee’s records, can we briefly go over yesterday’s topic, which was the geographic variations in performance? What is the current thinking in policy intentions for sub-regional challenges?
Mr Laws: Our attitude to sub-regional challenges is this: we are very supportive of them as a way of getting schools to work together and challenging underperformance. We are very pleased to see that a lot of regions and metropolitan areas are establishing these themselves. However, both the Secretary of State and I are nervous about centrally determined, top-down initiatives that would single out five, 10 or 15 areas of the country and say, “These are the ones that merit this type of investment and other areas do not”. You run the risk of leaving out a lot of areas that need these interventions. You run the risk of having borders that do not make any sense in reality. You have a particular local authority area where the interventions are present and you cross the border into an area where the amount of disadvantage and low attainment is just the same, but does not have those interventions.
We need to learn the lessons of things like London Challenge and some of the other sub-regional challenges, and then we need to build those into a national system. So if you are a school in the country that has disadvantage of any type and a need for support and challenge, you should be able to access this type of support wherever you are, not just because I, Michael Gove or the Chief Inspector has made a decision that your area is a priority area. We ought to be creating a national system with the right mixture of autonomy and co-operation, rather than just building in that sort of co-operation in various selected parts of the country.
Q384 Mr Ward: Sir Michael referred specifically to the market towns and coastal resorts, but there are other areas that no doubt could benefit. Is that a policy intention: to develop a national system, following on from the review, for dealing with geographic variation?
Mr Laws: Not in the sense that we would mandate a national system from a top-down, DfE perspective. Although we are very strongly in favour of an autonomous school system, we are also very much in favour of an autonomous school system in which there is a lot of school‑to‑school work and co-operation. That is why we are increasing the number of teaching school alliances. It is why we are working, through John Dunford, the pupil premium champion, to bring together collections of schools in parts of the country to talk about the challenges of disadvantage. It is why we are challenging academy groups and multi-academy trusts to come together to work between schools. It is why we are getting local authorities, in areas of weakness in terms of attainment, to work together with their schools in groups, rather than just silos of individual schools.
Our approach is potentially different from the last Labour Government’s of selecting various national challenge areas. We want to build this extra element of co-operation into the whole school system, rather than having five, 10 or 15 areas picked out. We want to encourage local areas to take this initiative themselves. A lot of them are now doing this. I have a Somerset Challenge in my area. There is a Manchester Challenge. There are lots of these challenges emerging across the country.
Q385 Siobhain McDonagh: Looking at what wider social policies could affect attainment, could more be done through the curriculum to support young people in learning parental skills? Would this help to tackle white working class underachievement? It is a slightly scary question.
Mr Laws: It is important to impart some of this wider aspect of education beyond the formal academic subjects. As a Department, we try to make sure that we have the right balance between prescription and encouraging schools to educate young people beyond the formal curriculum. Barely a day passes at the DfE without somebody asking us to add a new compulsory subject to the curriculum.
Q386 Chair: An astonishing percentage of girls who get no qualifications have a child while they are teenagers. The school knows that they are not getting any qualifications and they are being let down on an academic front, and they know they are highly likely to have a child very soon. Would it not make sense to have policies that try to ensure that they have at least imparted those skills, if the schools have failed in other respects?
Mr Laws: Yes, you are right, Chair, to say that a lot of young people who do not succeed in education and do not get good qualifications have their children at a very early age. We see this polarisation between the age at which people have their children, with the more educated young people and women delaying the child-bearing age and a lot of others having children very, very early. The first right response to that is to get those young people success in education. They will then go on and have their children later.
Q387 Chair: Surely not so blindly as to ignore their immediate need when they are clearly not going on in education.
Mr Laws: No, schools should accept that they have a wider responsibility than the core academic curriculum. The main policy challenge is to get all young people with the right qualifications so that they do not end up just having children as a better alternative to going into a dead-end job or having no job at all.
Q388 Ian Mearns: The Committee has heard from head teachers that they can effectively be the front-line of social services, in some cases. Is it right that schools should find themselves in this situation? Do schools have sufficient resources to act in this way, anyway?
Mr Laws: It is certainly not ideal and it is one of the reasons why teaching, and being a head teacher in a school in a disadvantaged area, is so stressful and challenging. A lot of your job is not just focusing on maths, English and attainment; but is managing children from very disadvantaged backgrounds and managing sometimes very awkward and challenging parents who had a bad experience of education themselves.
Q389 Siobhain McDonagh: Problems with social services do not just exist for working class kids. There are as many kids from other classes who bring other problems to school with them, as the report on anorexia among girls from independent and fee‑paying schools indicated this week.
Mr Laws: That is true, but if you look at the level of the pressures that there will be in a school in an area of high disadvantage, it will be significantly greater than with a school in a more advantaged area. There is a very clear correlation between disadvantage and those sorts of problems.
Q390 Mr Ward: For your information, Minister, we visited a school in Peterborough. The head teacher said that they had called social services on 120 out of 190 days in the school year.
Mr Laws: I do not know what the nature of that school was, but it does not surprise me. One of the things that worries me, and had worried me before the introduction of the pupil premium, is that there are a lot of young people in families that have those acute problems that are barriers to learning. Children’s services departments often do not have the resources and numbers of staff to deal with all those people, so they focus on those that are most needy. They focus on children on the child protection register, for example.
One of the good things about the pupil premium is that it gives schools, particularly those with more disadvantaged youngsters, the capacity to provide some of that support themselves, rather than having to phone up the social services department every day to find out whether there is somebody available to do this work. Schools with very high levels of disadvantage need to consider building into their staffing structures staff who have the capability of working with young people to try to deal with and ameliorate some of those problems. This is not news to schools in such catchment areas; they do a lot of this work already and they have been for many years.
Chair: Minister, thank you very much for giving evidence to us this morning. We look forward to further missives from you.
Mr Laws: Quite a few letters, yes.
Chair: Thank you very much.
Oral evidence: Underachievement in education of white working class children, HC 727 2