§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Jim Murphy.]
§ 11.3 pm
§ Jeff Ennis (Barnsley, East and Mexborough)I am delighted to have succeeded at long last in the ballot for this important Adjournment debate. I can tell the House that I have been trying for at least a year to secure this debate. Before turning to the issue of education in the coalfields, may I be the first Member to congratulate the Minister for School Standards on the recent football award that he won for scoring a goal at Newcastle? I am sure that he will enlighten the House further when he comes to reply to the debate—[Interruption.] Yes, I know.
The coalfields of Britain are still an important area despite the fact that most pits have now closed. The coalfields are substantial, and range from Fife and Ayrshire in Scotland through the north-east, west Cumbria, Yorkshire, Lancashire to the midlands, and the Welsh valleys. There are even coalfield communities not so far from here, in Kent. In total, Britain's coalfields have about 5 million people living in and around them. What is more, they are strong Labour communities, commonly known as the heartlands, so the Government ignore their voice at their own peril.
The main stimulus for this debate was the publication in September 2000 of a report commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills from Tony Gore and Nicola Smith of Sheffield Hallam university, entitled "Patterns of educational achievement in the British coalfields." The four main findings of the research that I draw to the attention of the House are, first and foremost, that the proportion of pupils achieving five or more GCSE passes at grades A to C is 7 to 10 percentage points below the national average.
Secondly, educational attainment in the coalfields tails off badly in the mid-teen years, between the ages of 14 and 16. In primary schools, the gap between performance in the coalfields and the national average is relatively small and has tended to narrow over time. Thirdly, there is no evidence that performance in the mid-teen years relative to the national average is getting any better. Lastly, even among those staying on in full-time education beyond 16, performance in the coalfields still lags behind the rest of the country.
There is no suggestion in the research that the coalfields are unique. A number of comparator industrial areas show similar evidence of underachievement, but the research concludes:
Although none of the individual coalfield areas may be amongst the worst performing in the country when compared with some inner city LEAs, the consistency of the shortfall between the figures and the national averages, especially at secondary level, gives cause for concern.The report also states:Further action is required, especially directed at those in their teenage years. The geographical scope of such action needs to be wider than a small number of schools or a limited selection of relatively small neighbourhoods.For mining areas, the issue is a great worry, because it is in our children that the future welfare of our communities lies. The widespread closure of the pits in the 1980s and 1990s brought mass unemployment and 666 social decline to many parts of Britain, none more so than in my area. In 1984 we had 10 pits employing 12,000 workers, and more importantly, the prospect of well-paid steady jobs in the coal industry for the young people of our towns. Less than 10 years later, all 10 pits were shut and a whole generation of workers was effectively written off as surplus to requirements by the previous Tory Administration.Why do we have a record of underachievement in many of our coalfield areas? I suspect that one of the main causes of the problem is historical. At school-leaving age, young men and women could rely on getting a job at the pit or in its related industries. There was no need for qualifications, as the Coal Board provided on-the-job training throughout one's career, so there was a great tradition of schooling in coalfield areas. The most able children went into professional careers, such as management and surveying. The middle tier became electricians and fitters at the pit, and the less skilled became faceworkers or worked on the pit top or in haulage and so on.
Now times have changed, and the only way young people will get decent, well-paid jobs is if they are adequately qualified. The research is worrying. Without action by the Department for Education and Skills, another generation could go the way of the previous one. I do not deny that the present Government, more than any other before them, have made education their top priority. Government initiatives such as the literacy and numeracy hours are making a tremendous impact on the overall levels of attainment throughout Britain. However, good as these policies are, they are national policies from which all our children benefit, but they do not address the problem of the gap in performance that exists between the coalfields and the rest of the country.
In the coalfields and in other areas where performance lags badly, there need to be extra, targeted initiatives if those areas are ever to catch up with the rest of the country. I have mentioned the success of the literacy and numeracy hours in primary schools. Another Government initiative that has been extremely successful at both primary and secondary level has been education action zones. The Barnsley education action zone, which was set up in 1998, was one of the first 12 nationally. It contained 21 schools—three secondary schools, 16 primary schools, one special school and one nursery school. I should like to highlight the record of achievement of one of the schools in that zone, which is situated in my patch: Willowgarth high school in Grimethorpe. Willowgarth's improvement has been greater than the zone average. It has moved from a record of 13 per cent. of pupils gaining five A to C passes in 1998 to 35 per cent. in 2001. That is a remarkable increase of almost 200 per cent. in its success rate in less than four years. I had the privilege of presenting the annual achievement awards at Willowgarth some two weeks ago. It was a delight to see the look of satisfaction and pride on the faces of all the children and parents.
Achieving educational success is not the big mystery that it is sometimes made out to be. It is about a motivated work force, both teaching and non-teaching, working in harmony with the students and, equally as importantly, with parents and the local community, so that the school becomes a focus for local pride. That is what is now happening at Willowgarth. Before the 667 education action zone was established, Willowgarth never came higher than 12th out of the 14 secondary schools in Barnsley in its record of achievement. It is now fifth out of 14—an incredible performance that speaks for itself.
Another important feature of Willowgarth's success is the fact that 35 per cent. of pupils leaving the school were accredited with work-related key skills. Some 90 per cent. of pupils leaving in 2001 did so with an accredited information and communications technology qualification—either a GCSE pass or a GNVQ—helping better to equip the children for the world of work.
In my opinion, the main reasons why the EAZ has been so successful at Willowgarth are the broadening of the curriculum to include more GNVQs and the extension of the school day to support targeted students. It is that sort of support, which the EAZ staff have provided, that is vital to continuing educational success in the coalfield areas, especially via the excellence in cities initiatives, which are now superseding many of the larger EAZs.
Incidentally, Willowgarth high school has submitted a bid for technology specialist school status. I endorse the bid and commend it to the Minister.
While I am on the subject of specialist schools, I should like to point out that all coalfield MPs were delighted with the Secretary of State's recent announcement that greater flexibility would be given with regard to achieving the £50,000 private sponsorship level. I know from my constituency's experience that that has acted as a major barrier to schools in coalfield areas in bidding for specialist school status. I have personally campaigned on the issue for some considerable time.
An exception to the £50,000 sponsorship rule can, however, be found in my constituency. Ridgewood school in Scawsby in Doncaster has submitted a bid to become one of the country's first engineering specialist schools. The bid has struck a chord with local businesses. Given Doncaster's international reputation as a centre of engineering excellence, that does not surprise me. After all, great steam engines such as the Flying Scotsman, the Mallard and the Blue Peter were all built in Doncaster. Some 70 local employers have already signed up to the bid and 20 have offered financial support, ranging from an offer of £150 from a small company to one of £10,000 from a major local engineering employer.
Ridgewood's record of achievement is very impressive. This year, it achieved a 65 per cent. rate in those gaining five GCSE passes with A to C grades. That was the second best record of any school in Doncaster. From a social inclusion perspective, more than 90 per cent. of the students achieved five A to G grades. Every student in the sixth form at Ridgewood was entered for exams and the school achieved the outstanding success rate of 100 per cent., with every student getting at least one A to G grade. That is also fantastic.
As I understand it, only a handful of schools nationally are so far bidding for engineering specialist school status. I commend Ridgewood's bid to the Minister as an exceptional one.
It would be remiss of me not to mention Doncaster's desire to become an education city. This is an excellent initiative, putting education at the heart of Doncaster's 668 future regeneration. It is an extremely interesting project, co-sponsored by Doncaster council, Doncaster college and Huddersfield university. As the Minister probably knows, I am a member of the Select Committee on Education and Skills, which will go to Doncaster in the new year to look at the education city project.
Another successful initiative from which both Barnsley and Doncaster have benefited is the implementation, in recent years, of education maintenance allowances. They have made a big difference to the staying-on rate among pupils over 16, especially in Doncaster, where there has been a 5 per cent. increase. I was delighted to learn that from next April EMAs will be rolled out nationally. As I am sure the Minister knows, my Select Committee has recommended that consideration be given to extending EMAs to higher education. I strongly support that idea.
There is no doubt that there is a major funding crisis in higher education that the Government must address. I am glad that they seem to be moving away from the idea of top-up fees, which I know would be very unpopular with students and parents alike. My bottom line is this: I will support the system that will take more students from poorer backgrounds to university. That should be the Government's main objective in trying to deal with the funding crisis. So far, we have signally failed to achieve that goal. I believe that tuition fees have produced a major barrier to higher education, particularly for students from mining communities.
The Minister may well say "How can that be, as 40 per cent. of students do not pay tuition fees?" I would give two main reasons. First, a cash culture is still very prevalent in coalfield areas, which probably contain the highest percentage of people without bank accounts. Cash is still the key in those communities. Secondly, but more important, there is still an anti-debt culture in the coalfields as a direct consequence of the 1985 miners' strike. Many mining communities and families were brought to their knees financially by that strike, and it will be some time before the anti-strike attitude disperses.
It is for those reasons that I am becoming more in favour of a graduate tax, or an end-loading rather than a front-loading of student debt. I also feel strongly, however, that not just graduates should bridge the current funding crisis in higher education; the Government have a responsibility to play their part.
So far I have tried to highlight the Government's many achievements for the coalfield areas, but what more can be done? I would like the Government to consider two issues in particular. First, in response to the 1998 coalfield taskforce report commissioned by the Deputy Prime Minister, the Department for Education and Skills has introduced no measures targeted specifically at the need to raise performance in coalfield schools and colleges. The coalfield communities campaign, which I am pleased to say is based in Barnsley and represents more than 80 local education authorities, would like the Government to consider measures intended specifically for coalfield areas, given the scale of the current problem of under-achievement.
Secondly, the most important deviation from the Government's "one size fits all" approach has been the introduction, in 1998, of the excellence in cities 669 initiative, which set a precedent by targeting areas where educational achievement lags behind. The trouble is that most coalfield areas tend not to be cities. The classic mining communities usually have a population of between 2,000 and 10,000, so most coalfield areas fail to qualify for this important source of special support. The Government must seriously consider rolling out the relevant features of the excellence in cities initiative to all coalfield areas—and I mean all of them.
In the coalfield communities, a generation of older workers has been discarded through the running down of the mining industry. The Government must not discard a younger generation of people in the same communities through failing to enable them to achieve acceptable educational standards.
§ The Minister for School Standards (Mr. David Miliband)I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, East and Mexborough (Jeff Ennis) on not only his outstanding speech tonight but the passion with which he speaks on the Floor of the House, in the Select Committee on Education and Skills and elsewhere. On my first appearance before the Select Committee in June, he asked me about some of the issues that he raised tonight. He pursues them diligently. He knows, although other hon. Members may not, that I shall appear before the Committee again on Wednesday. I look forward to continuing the conversation with him then.
I am pleased that my hon. Friends the Members for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping), for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham) and for Barnsley, Central (Mr. Illsley), and the hon. Member for East Carmarthen and Dinefwr (Adam Price) are present. I congratulate them on staying here at this late hour for an important debate and providing moral support for me as well as for my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, East and Mexborough. I hope that I would have been present for the debate, even if I were not the Minister answering it because South Shields is a former mining constituency. Many of the issues that my hon. Friend raised also affect my constituency.
The meeting of the coalfield communities campaign to which my hon. Friend referred, and at which the educational research was first published, was held in the town hall in South Shields. I spoke at the conference, and I perceive such issues as critical in changing structures and cultures in my constituency.
My hon. Friend mentioned some important data that were produced jointly by the Department and the coalfield communities campaign under the Department's sponsorship. That independent research dealt with educational attainment in coalfield areas. It is unfortunately true that although pupils in our constituencies fare well at primary school and do some outstanding work, by the time they reach secondary school and key stage 3, which covers 11 to 14-year-olds, GCSE and beyond, attainment falls well below national averages.
The research that we commissioned warned against a specific "coalfield effect", and highlighted other parts of the country where similar under-performance occurs. 670 However, my hon. Friend made a powerful case to show that specific factors are at play. For example, the lack of investment in the coalfield areas in the past 20 years, especially in the 1980s, had a devastating effect and the speed of economic collapse left little time for the planning that is necessary to deal with major industrial change.
My hon. Friend did not have much time to congratulate the teachers and pupils in Barnsley on their outstanding work. I hope that he will forgive me if I take a few moments to do that. In the middle of much discussion of problems, we should not forget that teachers, head teachers, support staff and pupils work in schools in the coalfield areas day in, day out for 38 weeks a year. Some achieve remarkable results. My hon. Friend may know the figures that I am about to cite, but perhaps other hon. Members do not. In Barnsley, at key stage 2, which covers 11-year-olds, the number of children who read, write and count well when they leave primary school increased by 11 per cent. in the three years to 2001. In maths, the percentage of children who do well has increased from 55 per cent. to 63 per cent., and for science, the figure increased from 64 per cent. in 1998 to 82 per cent. in 2001. Those are significant advances.
Just under 30 per cent. of 15-year-olds and 16-year-olds gained five A to C grades at GCSE in 1998. In 2001, that had increased to more than 35 per cent. My hon. Friend referred to the outstanding work of the education action zone in Barnsley. The higher than average rates of improvement in that zone are testimony to the power of Government intervention and to the potential that exists in those communities. The young people who are growing up there have the potential to do well in education.
In the education action zone, the number of seven-year-olds who read to the expected standard has increased by 12 per cent., compared with a national average of 4 per cent. in the past three years. There are similar figures for 11-year-olds: there has been a 16 per cent. rise in the number of young people doing well at that age. The effects are, however, less marked at secondary level than at primary level, and that is the issue that my hon. Friend is highlighting in this debate.
I want to focus the second half of my remarks on the challenge that we face in the secondary sector. In the spirit of harmony that is prevailing in the Chamber at the moment, I shall start with some more good news about Barnsley. My hon. Friend will remember that, in 1999, 28.6 per cent—nearly a third—of children in Barnsley were failing to get five grades A to C at GCSE. I beg your pardon, Madam Deputy Speaker, I meant to say that the percentage of lower-attaining schools was nearly one third. Two years later, that percentage had been halved. The number of schools where less than 25 per cent. of pupils were getting five good GCSEs had been halved in the space of two years. We await this year's statistics with—well, I was going to say trepidation, but, in the light of the figures that I have just given, I should say that we await them with anticipation, because I am confident that the outstanding performance of the young people and teachers in the area will continue.
Like my hon. Friend, we want to go further in raising the performance of young people in the coalfield areas, because the truth is that they do not just need average 671 levels of performance; they need to perform above the average level if they are going to overcome some of the disadvantages that are placed in their way. I want to highlight for my hon. Friend four issues that we are focusing on over the next three years to tackle some of the problems. The first relates to the quality of school leadership—not just the head teacher but the senior management team, comprising 12 to 15 people in any primary school. We want to ensure that they are of the highest quality, and have the proper training and support. As part of the excellence in cities group, schools in Barnsley will be receiving £125,000 a year extra for the next three years, specifically for leadership development, because we all know that the leadership of a school is a critical factor in raising performance.
Secondly, we want more schools to have access to the specialist schools programme and to share their facilities and their excellence. I can tell my hon. Friend that 20 per cent. of secondary schools in coalfield areas are now specialist schools, and I am delighted to say that, of the four bids for engineering college status, two have come from coalfield areas. I hear what my hon. Friend has said about Willowgarth and Ridgewood, and I will certainly look carefully at the applications that have been made. In fact, they are already being carefully scrutinised. I would trespass into dangerous territory if I said anything further on that, but I promise him that there will he due diligence in the assessment of those bids.
I hope that my hon. Friend was pleased by the announcement by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State about the development of a partnership fund to help to bridge the sponsorship gap in cases in which schools have worked hard to build the links with the outside community that are important to a successful secondary school and can lead to the motivation and development of curriculums and programmes that support young people's achievement, but in which there has been a problem in raising the full funds. We want to help to bridge that gap, and the partnership fund will help to do that.
The third priority for us is the reform of the school work force. My hon. Friend referred to the range of professionals who work in schools. Obviously, there will be the head teacher, the teachers and the caretaker, but there will also be learning mentors who come in to support young people, language specialists, and sports coaches who come in to support teachers and help young people. That is a major part of the agenda, and I am pleased to say that funding for young people in Barnsley will have risen from an average of £2,840 per pupil in 1996–97 to £3,850 by 2005–06. The preponderance of that money will be in the hands of the head teachers to spend on a range of staff—not just teachers; other support staff as well—to make the most of the learning opportunities for young people.
Our fourth priority is to develop partnership beyond the classroom. My hon. Friend referred fleetingly to the important role of parents, and I completely agree with his points about supporting good behaviour and high aspiration. The role of outside bodies, notably universities, is also important in helping to broaden the horizons of young people and to give them the 672 confidence to aim high in terms of higher education or high-quality vocational education. This is not just a matter of programmes and structures; it is also a matter of culture. Too many young people think that university is beyond them, when in fact they have the brains to do well. We need to do a better job of helping them to gain access to information on what is good about university life. We also need to ask the universities to play a more proactive role in helping to raise standards within schools. There is major work to be done in linking our higher and further education institutions with our secondary schools. That is the way to provide the role models that will help young people to believe that they can move on and achieve a lot.
On challenging the poverty of aspiration that has at times marred some coalfield communities, my hon. Friend will be pleased to know that 15 of the 72 education action zones and 13 of the 58 excellence in cities areas are in coalfield communities. I very much take his point about the need to extend the excellence in cities programme and its success beyond cities. That is why we are developing the excellence clusters programme to take care of smaller areas, which are not defined as a city but which can benefit from the strands of work at the heart of that programme.
My hon. Friend also referred to education maintenance allowances, and I know that he has campaigned for a long time for the nationwide outreach of that programme. I can confirm that that will happen next year.
The debate is drawing to a close, so I should point out that we on the Labour Benches—I am sure that I can speak also for the hon. Member for East Carmarthen and Dinefwr (Adam Price)—are all committed to every single child. We believe that every single child is special and that every single child has a talent and a potential to fulfil. It is the job of the education system to help to develop that talent to the full. Some children face greater barriers than others, and the Government's job is to help them to overcome those barriers. We recognise that and the need to address the issue, which involves funding as well as programmes. It also involves a culture of achievement, which must go from the top of the education system to the bottom.
I reject wholeheartedly the terrible English curse according to which, somehow, more means worse and that more achievement represents a dilution of standards. I say the opposite—more achievement is testimony to the hard work of children and the skills of their teachers. If any proof of that were needed, I know from my research for the debate that there is already a beacon school in Barnsley, Darfield Upperwood primary, whose outstanding performance has delivered a better education not just for its own pupils, but for other pupils in the area.
That is the theme behind much of what we are doing. Let us not confine excellence to the few; let us spread it to the many, because the many have potential as well as the right to see it fulfilled.
Question put and agreed to.
Adjourned accordingly at twenty-nine minutes to Twelve o'clock.