Examination Results (Hansard, 15 December 1992)

§ 7. Mr. Congdon
To ask the Secretary of State for Education if he will make a statement on his assessment of the relationship between spending by local education authorities and examination results.

§ Mr. Patten
High spending is no guarantee of good examination results. Some authorities obtain good results at much lower cost than others. I have looked at the relationship between the percentage of pupils in each LEA achieving five or more A to C grades at GCSE, and find that some of the highest-spending authorities gain relatively poor results.

§ Mr. Congdon
I thank the Secretary of State for that answer. Does he agree that the publication of school examination results and other research confirms that the level of achievement for schools with children from similar backgrounds is widely different? Is it not time that schools improved their performance, rather than seeking excuses for failure?

§ Mr. Patten
Indeed, schools in inner-city areas, such as Mulberry school in Tower Hamlets, Stockland Green school in Birmingham and Archbishop Blanche school in Toxteth, Liverpool, have shown that schools can perform well in apparently adverse circumstances. We should all look to those schools as beacons of excellence. I congratulate them, and other schools in those areas should draw lessons from them.

§ Mr. Eastham
Is the Secretary of State aware that about three years ago a study carried out by York and Sheffield universities concluded that when poverty and social deprivation were taken into consideration the results of most inner-city schools were as good as those of schools anywhere?

§ Mr. Patten
It seems very odd to me that the Labour party, which historically has liked measuring statistics of poverty, housing need or alleged social deprivation, so much dislikes the Government's pioneering radical measurement of school performance.

§ Mr. Anthony Coombs
In rejecting the Opposition's apparent obsession with equating spending with standards, does my right hon. Friend agree that time and again reports by Her Majesty's inspectorate have shown that the factors that lead to higher standards are high expectations from teachers and parents and some investment from parents? Does he agree that the investment that parents make in grant-maintained schools through their participation in balloting is likely to lead to such investment and, therefore, higher standards?

§ Mr. Patten
My hon. Friend is entirely right. I would only add to those factors the leadership qualities of the headteacher, whoever she or he might be. A correlation seems to be emerging in some areas between poor examination performance, high public expenditure and a high level of surplus school places. I shall investigate that. Those three factors linked together seem to point to poor management of public resources and hence bad education of our children.

§ Mr. Win Griffiths
Does the Secretary of State agree that the publication of school examination results generally reflects the social and economic make-up of England and Wales? His reference to beacon schools in inner-city areas is worth examining in great detail. In deprived areas, where examination results are generally bad, will he make efforts to ensure that proper funding and good advice are available to enable teachers in hard-pressed schools to achieve even better results than at present?

§ Mr. Patten
The hon. Gentleman must surely have noticed that I took the trouble a few moments ago to praise three named schools, one in a Liberal-controlled area and two in Labour-controlled areas, which have performed exceptionally well. Even at the season of good will, I find it hard to take the assumption that because a little boy or a little girl comes from a difficult background—perhaps from parents who are not well off and in an area with high unemployment—we should automatically have low expectations. That shows just how out of touch the Labour party is in the 1990s with the aspirations of ordinary working people in Britain.