Graham Stuart
MP for Beverley and Holderness · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I hope and expect that we can move forward in the right way and get the balance right between being overly prescriptive to the banking industry and setting a clear sense of direction to make sure that no one is left behind, as so many Members have set out.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wishart. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) on securing this debate.”
“Is my hon. Friend as astonished as I am that the Minister—I know she is new to her post—has come here to propose a six-month extension of the movement of costs from bills to the Exchequer and cannot tell the Committee how much money that will cost?”
“The Minister is being most generous again. I did not ask her about protecting consumers from energy price shocks; I asked about a clear, unequivocal manifesto pledge to reduce household energy bills by £300. She, like her predecessors, refuses to address it directly. It was a clear promise.”
“Banking hubs themselves came out of an industry response from the NatWest executive. Does the Minister agree that we must present the information from the Lloyd review to the banking groups, be clear about what we want, and give them the opportunity to respond and provide a solution, as they did with banking hubs, so that we can perhaps a…”
“I am pleased to say that Lloyds listened and, as of this morning, people can deposit cheques at those places. These issues being raised by Members across the House today are important. I trust that given the timing of the Richard Lloyd report, the Minister in her seat will make sure that they are be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.”
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“The right hon. Lady is making a powerful speech, and I think that she and Alan Milburn are absolutely right to focus on the need to embed those incentives in the system. The combination of the pupil premium and the changes in accountability are systemic approaches to provide the wherewithal to reward people for coming in to teach in those schools, and to ensure that we do not have an accountability system whereby those in more prosperous areas are less likely to be found wanting than those in areas where the educational fight is fiercest.”
“Getting a decent job is the first step in climbing the ladder in a socially mobile society, as the Government’s child poverty strategy acknowledges. This is a huge and complex area of policy, and I look forward to hearing the thoughts of colleagues and the Minister today. When considering this issue, we must remember that the extent to which social mobility is achievable goes to the heart of who we are and what we are about as a nation, and what we achieve in this area for the next generation will determine the sort of country Britain will become.”
“If I recall it correctly, it showed that 29% of young people thought they were going to work in culture, media and sport, even though fewer than 5% of jobs are expected to be in those areas. It showed that only 5% of young people expected to work in finance, yet 20% of the jobs are expected to be in that area. We have to find ways of making this information available to young people and their parents, not so that they can discard their dreams, hopes and desires, but so that they can be informed by the realities of the labour market when they make their choices, both in school and beyond. The ultimate goal of the £57 billion a year that the Department spends is to help young people get on in life.”
“The Humber gold standard is being piloted in a small number of local academies and maintained schools, with a view to a roll-out across the LEP area from this autumn. There will be lessons to learn from the pilot experience, but this approach, which is being complemented by an integrated online portal and the employment of dedicated advisers, appears to be a potential model of its kind. Helping young people to make informed choices about the courses they take and the careers they follow is vital to boost their success in finding employment. A couple of years ago, the Education and Employers Taskforce undertook a major survey of 15-year-olds, asking them where they thought they would be working in years to come and then mapping their responses against the national data on where the jobs are expected to be. It showed a horrific mismatch.”
“I know that Lord Lucas is working on a programme to get employers to help to do the practicals that will be part of the science A-levels in future; they will move to being on a pass/fail basis because of the difficulty of externally monitoring standards there. If employers are getting involved in practicals in all our sixth forms, that will not only help to embed a careers perspective into that learning, but it will make the learning richer and more interesting, and make the practical skills learned seem relevant in an exams system that might have appeared to have downgraded their importance. The local enterprise partnership gold standard stipulations also include targeting and prioritising those most at risk of disengaging from learning or of becoming NEET—not in education, employment or training.”
“The document sets out, in comprehensive detail, the work that schools and colleges should be doing to provide a first-class careers education, and I recommend it to Ministers. Its stipulations include a requirement that schools offer young people face-to-face careers guidance and that employer engagement and external expertise are integrated into the programme through mentoring, work experience and enterprise clubs. Too often, it seems as though schools can be hermetically sealed worlds with their own drivers, cut off from the real world into which the young people in them will come blinking, and too many will be left on the dole as a result. We need to open up the schools and allow the world of employment into them in multiple ways.”
“The Department’s development of destinations data, showing where pupils go on to work and study, may help to build this challenge in the medium term, although they also may not be the silver bullet that some hope for. Time will tell how useful the data are, not least in driving behaviour and accountability in schools. A more immediate such challenge can be posed by school governors, particularly where the school appoints a designated careers governor to focus on this area—that person could be from a local employer. That is what is recommended by the Humber local enterprise partnership, which has just published its gold standard assessment criteria for schools in Hull, East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire.”
“At the moment, organisations ranging from Ofsted to the CBI and to my Select Committee are clear that careers provision in schools is patchy in its availability, too often underwhelming in quality and frequently affected by perverse incentives, such as those that discourage some struggling schools from advertising further education or apprenticeships properly for fear of losing the funding that follows the pupil and because of the need to keep pupils sitting on seats. For too many school and college leaders, in a system with very sharp-edged accountability structures, careers advice and guidance is simply not a priority. If it is to improve, we need more challenge in the system.”
“In 2012, four of the bottom five performing local authorities on attainment outcomes for pupils on free school meals were Peterborough, West Berkshire, Herefordshire and the Isle of Wight. The weak performance of many schools in rural and coastal areas is yet another reason, alongside basic fairness, why launching a national funding formula that is based on need rather than on skewed political priorities should be such an important priority for the Government. In the relatively short time available to me, I wish to discuss a second area where performance needs to improve if we are to increase social mobility: careers advice and guidance for young people.”
“On other possible measures, the Education Committee has advised that it would be helpful if school accountability measures could be redesigned to incorporate encouragement for schools to work together. I am not yet clear exactly what that would look like. Head teachers must be held to account for the performance of their schools, but we must consider how we ensure that someone’s work in collaboration with others is recognised and encouraged. When considering how to support pupils from deprived backgrounds we need to remember that patterns of deprivation are complex. Ofsted’s “Unseen children” report highlighted that the places where the most disadvantaged children are being let down are, as the right hon. Lady said, now no longer so much in the inner cities, but in rural and coastal areas.”
“The Select Committee also recommended that the Government reintroduce targeted seedcorn funding for sustainable partnerships between independent and state schools. School leaders could be encouraged to sign up to partnerships by introducing the excellent leadership awards proposed by Ofsted’s Sir Michael Wilshaw, which would be available only to those who supported underperforming schools in disadvantaged communities. Never again should anyone be able to be seen as a national leader in education or a significant player in our education system—or to be given an award of any sort—if they are not working in some of the deprived communities. We have to make working and being successful in those communities the sine qua non of recognition of someone doing the best job in the toughest of circumstances.”
“Linked to this, we also need to encourage schools to work together to share expertise. The Education Committee has recommended that the Government should widen the funding available to schools to support collaboration beyond academy sponsorship, so that it could be used to assist other partnerships. The Government’s own figures provided to the Select Committee in February showed that the majority of academies were not currently part of a formal partnership. More needs to be done to build on the greater collaboration that exists in our schools, between schools in academy chains and across academy groups as well as between academies and other maintained schools. We need to go further to ensure that we have the right incentives in place to make that collaboration genuine and much more prevalent than it is now.”
“In its 2013 report, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission found that fewer than a third of schools in the most deprived areas in the north-east had teaching rated as good or outstanding, compared with 85% in the least deprived areas. That this does not have to be the case is shown, as the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles said, by the statistics from London, where 77% of the teaching in the most deprived areas was good or outstanding. We need to put in place the right incentives to encourage the best teachers and school leaders to work in those schools. Governing bodies’ newly granted flexibility to design attractive pay packages to recruit and retain teachers will help, especially when coupled with the additional financial firepower of the pupil premium for schools that serve particularly deprived communities.”
“There is an idea that there is an enormous difference between a teacher in the 90th percentile and one in the 10th percentile. The figures that I have already mentioned show that good teachers have a peculiarly positive impact on children who have less support at home, and a peculiarly negative impact on those same children as well. The effects of high-quality teaching are especially significant for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, who gain an extra year’s worth of learning under very effective teachers, compared with poorly performing ones. These findings underline the importance of good recruitment and teacher training, which are critical. They also show that we must ensure that the best teachers work where they are needed the most.”
“It is not our biggest problem if people like him end up in middle management instead of becoming multi-millionaire philanthropists like him. Our biggest problem is that so many people have lousy, miserable, deprived lives because we did not give them the basic tools that they needed, along with a bit of self-belief and the idea that if they worked hard, they could do maths and pretty much anything else they wanted to do in life. I just throw that in to be controversial. It cannot be emphasised too often that the key lies in the quality of teaching. Professor Eric Hanushek from Stanford university, working with Professor Steve Machin and Richard Murphy from the London School of Economics, calculated that one year with a very effective teacher adds an extra 25% to 45% of an average school year to a pupil’s maths score performance.”
“The biggest problem in our society is that we do such a dismal job for those people who are not only poor but do not have massive academic ability. They are not hopeless, however. We know that, if they have the right teaching, they can do well. Our problem as a society is that so many young people end up on the dole. In other countries, such as Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, the education system does not leave similarly disadvantaged people in the dole queue; it enables them to enter employment. I am just throwing this into the debate because social mobility is very popular with people such as Sir Peter Lampl of the Sutton Trust, which does fantastic work. He is from a fairly underprivileged background and has reached the top. I say to him that the challenge is not people like him.”
“Ultimately, however, the goal of increasing social mobility is best served by taking action at system-wide level, which will benefit children of average and below-average ability as well. I am often told that this country is dominated by a public school elite, but it is frequently people from poorer backgrounds who have made it to the top who tell me this. There is some truth in the observation, but those powerful people from poor backgrounds are often obsessed by people like themselves. A lot of the social mobility agenda appears to be about getting a tiny number of very bright kids out of the poorest homes and into the top universities and the top jobs. That is indeed an important aim, but the question of whether someone goes to the university that is ranked 30th rather than second is not our society’s biggest problem.”
“In outstanding schools, the figure was 50%. There was a 100% increase in the number of children from the poorest groups getting five good GCSEs. The difference between the inadequate and outstanding schools for children not in the poorest group was only 50%. That reinforces the long-standing view, which the Committee has examined, that poor children are peculiarly sensitive to the quality of leadership and teaching in their schools. This is not just a social equity point; the pupils that we need to get the most effective teaching to are the poorest children. They are also the ones who are the most responsive to it, and if they are provided with it, they can do a great deal better. I support initiatives designed to help talented youngsters from deprived backgrounds to achieve great things.”
“The Government say that they want to close the gap, yet the key resource—quality teachers—is being incentivised to roll down the hill towards where they are least needed. This reminds me of the Select Committee’s recent report, “Underachievement in Education by White Working Class Children”, which found that this was not just a boy problem. It was thought that white working-class boys had a particular problem, but the report showed that white working-class boys and girls now constitute the lowest performing ethnic minority group. One of the most telling pieces of information I saw during that inquiry related to what free-school-meals children were achieving in the four different Ofsted categories of schools. The percentage of such children getting five good GCSEs—grades A to C on the current measure—in inadequate schools was about 25%.”
“I am referring in particular to quality teachers. Not all teachers are the same; there is a massive difference between those at the top of the performance levels and those at the bottom. As well as trying to increase the overall quality of the work force, we need to put in place incentives to ensure that teachers are deployed in the most equitable way possible. Some of the most idealistic people are committed to doing their best to help in the most deprived areas, but at the moment they are being incentivised to teach elsewhere. A head teacher in a prosperous leafy suburb is far less likely to be fired than one in a deprived inner-city school. The same is true for department heads and other teachers.”
“They therefore see it as a sensible deployment of resources to assign the least able teaching practitioners to the most needy pupils. I do not recognise that as the right thing to do, but I recognise that it is what a head teacher would be tempted to do if they were being held to account and stood to lose their job if they failed to meet that threshold. The practice has had a detrimental effect. This goes to the heart of a whole series of issues relating to incentives in the system, to which the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles and Alan Milburn have referred. It is important to get those incentives right. Otherwise, there is a risk that successive Governments who have a genuine commitment to closing the gap will create an uneven playing field for the key resource in education—namely, teachers.”
“An example is the extension of free child care, and the refining of accountability structures so that teachers can focus on the whole class rather than just on the pupils at the C-D grade borderline. I welcome the fact that these reforms focus on the whole cohort of young people. It means that school leaders can place equal emphasis on pushing a child on an A grade up to an A* or perhaps—this would not be captured by the accountability mechanisms, but I would hope that the system would acknowledge it in spirit—pushing a child on an A* from their present score to a higher score still. Too many children have been “warehoused”—I use the word advisedly—because those in authority believe that they are unlikely ever to contribute to the A to C grades in a school.”
“Perhaps too often in the Government in which she served, there was ring-fencing to try to ensure that ministerial will was translated into action. Often that had counter-productive results. What we have now is a framework in which Ofsted, when it inspects schools, looks at the way in which they use the pupil premium, and data are used to try to ensure that the performance of children on free school meals, or the “ever 6” is watched carefully from the governors downwards and informs their questioning of the head to ensure that every school offers opportunity to all those children. The right hon. Lady made strong points about the need constantly to ensure that that money is used for the purpose for which it was provided. That thinking also lies at the heart of the structural changes made by Ministers.”
“Lady touched on between demography, deprivation and destiny. Because of that, the Education Committee held a pre-appointment hearing to scrutinise the appointment of Alan Milburn as the chairman of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission two years ago. The Government have two main education priorities: raising standards for all and narrowing the achievement gap between the most disadvantaged pupils and the rest. Those aims underpins the reforms that the Government have undertaken in the past four years. That is most obviously apparent in the introduction of the pupil premium, now extended to cover the early years. The right hon. Lady made some telling points about ensuring that that money is used to best effect.”
“Sometimes perhaps we have been so quick to recognise the different pace and different circumstances of each child that we lose the idea that they are capable of a lot more if we ensure that they are aware that if they work hard they will get on. I thank the Backbench Business Committee, chaired by the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), for granting the opportunity to discuss this important issue today. As has been said, last week the Government published their child poverty strategy from 2014 and 2017. It has three main strands: supporting families into work, raising living standards and raising educational attainment. It is on the last of those three that I will focus. The work of our education system will go a long way towards determining whether we are able to break the connection that the right hon.”
“They do not say to someone who does well in maths, “You are very clever at maths.” They say, “You’ve worked hard and mastered those skills.” They emphasise the fact that with practice and application, every child can do well. A number of years ago in Japan, all the children in a class would be judged by the performance of the weakest child in the class, which is an interesting concept of communal working on the basis that every child can learn. Sometimes in our education debate—it will be the primary focus today—we talk too much about differentiation and insufficiently about ensuring that every child comes up to a standard. More of them are capable of it than we have realised.”
“It is a pleasure to take part in the debate and to follow the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), who made a powerful speech. In her closing remarks, she put her finger on a key point: if children work hard, they are as good as anyone else and they can get somewhere. Perhaps at times it has been suggested too often in this country that it is not about working hard. Yesterday and the day before, 32 maths hubs around the country were launched. They are designed to ensure that the methodologies used in the eastern countries, which have such a big lead over us in maths education, are brought here. What are the core principles there?”
“Has my hon. Friend seen the articles by Christopher Cook, who is now the BBC’s education correspondent, which suggest that there is a link between the London effect and graduates, particularly graduate teachers, marrying?”
“The shadow Minister is being a little churlish, which is not in her nature, so I am sure she will want to correct what she has said. After all, the results for children who have free school meals have improved against a tougher level, and that is worth celebrating. One of the interesting aspects of our report was looking at the gap between free school meals children in inadequate schools and those in outstanding schools. That gap stayed roughly the same, but doubling outcomes for them is something to celebrate, regardless.”
“I am grateful to the hon. Lady since she mentioned me. As she has made clear, qualified teachers can do a great job, but I trust heads to make that decision. Given the accountability they are subject to, the idea that heads would take on people who they do not think will improve the education of their children is false, and there are fewer non-qualified teachers than when the Labour party left office. I just throw that in—it is a bit of a distraction when such a tiny percentage of the work force do not have that particular piece of paper, which is not all that indicative of quality.”
“The Minister will know that thanks in part to the flexibilities that this Government have introduced, there is an increasing correlation between the amount of money that schools get and their efficacy in a way that there was not in the past, which is probably a good thing. That shows the need for a new national funding formula that ensures equitable distribution of funds across the country. We do not have that now. London is doing well, and we are all delighted about that, but it is also the best-funded part of the country.”
“My right hon. Friend rightly paints a picture of the devastation that occurred in December last year. Does he recognise that if the timing had been different by a couple of hours and if the wind direction had been different, the devastating event that we are talking about could have been catastrophic and caused major loss of human life?”
“With rising sea levels and the risks of climate change, we need a strategic overview by Government of the risks around flooding. Without that, we are putting our constituents at risk of devastating flooding of their homes, and we are also risking investment in and commercial success for this country. Having made that plea, I shall sit down.”
“The bank involved needs to be restored, but investment is being held back until the overall realignment scheme is confirmed. Decisions need to be made more quickly and action must be taken so that we have ongoing, sustained and sensible protection from the risk of flood for industry and for residential properties. Minister, those of us here today will maintain our joint efforts in this regard—not only when we meet the Prime Minister next week, but thereafter. I will finish by referring to an issue that I touched on earlier, which is trying to get a framework in place that means that the MPs for a particular area do not have to make a united effort to get people to see the long-term risk when the technical evidence for that risk already exists.”
“However, I have a point to make about them, which I hope the Minister might take up with the Marine Management Organisation, if he has not done so already: that new, fresh quango no sooner came into being than it slapped a £10,000 bill on my local IDB for carrying out work that, had it been carried out by the Environment Agency, with the same contractors, would have attracted no such bill, which represented more than 10% of the project cost. If we are to have local areas taking responsibility, investing money and making things happen, we need to ensure that large quangos do not come along to give an initial estimate of £3,000, which I think is outrageous, before finally charging £10,000, which truly is outrageous. One final local point is the Welwick realignment scheme, which is ongoing, although delays are causing increased flood risk.”
“The bank is important to defend the residential and business properties of the village, such as that fine purveyor of great ales, the Crown and Anchor pub, and it also plays a vital role in defending the road to Spurn point, which is a popular tourist destination of national significance. Spurn point also plays a phenomenally important role in protecting the Hull ports area. It provides a natural barrier that deflects the longshore drift away from the estuary, thus allowing the estuary to self-clean to an extent. I must pay tribute to the local internal drainage boards, which do such an excellent job of maintaining inland watercourses.”
“One criticism of the 2008 strategy was that, perhaps because of its funding and the brief it was given, it failed to understand the interconnectedness of city and rural areas, including how rural areas often act as a sponge for the urban areas. As I think my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) said in his opening speech, we cannot view areas of the Humber in isolation. There is no way to ring-fence them, have just a limited spend here or there and somehow protect a particular place. We have to view the area as one joined-up whole. To return to the issue affecting Kilnsea, the replacement of the bank that was overtopped in December will cost £450,000. The Environment Agency has promised £300,000 and £50,000 has been raised locally, but that leaves the project £100,000 short.”
“That fits entirely with the analysis that the Government have themselves made of the risks around climate change and rising sea levels, yet we do not see a co-ordinated, well thought through, long-term plan to ensure that the correct protections are put in place. I want to make sure that the Minister is aware that, separately from the Humber efforts, the River Hull advisory board is studying the factors that contribute to flooding in the River Hull valley, which will have a strategic impact on the Humber, too. Across the piece, we are all working as hard as we can to ensure that we have a joined-up approach.”
“The danger is that we will and that we will not take the long-term view, which is so important if we are to get this right. My message to the Minister is to look at how Government can create the frameworks to ensure that the resource that is required is invested in time to meet the long-term threat, because we recognise that the dynamics of the politics in which we operate on a daily basis are not very good for dealing with long-term threats. Therefore, we need to look hard at how we get a framework in place to ensure that there is an incentive to deal with those long-term threats, and that we deal with them, because although we will strongly make the case today, as we are doing, for the Humber area, the truth is that, nationally, we need to take the risk of flood damage more seriously.”
“Anyone involved with climate change will know that the risks around it are twofold, or in two areas: the need to mitigate and the need to adapt. It is not enough simply to mitigate; we also need to adapt. I have in front of me the excellent latest science briefing from the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences. It shows the sea level rise record since the beginning of the 20th century, including the acceleration of sea level rise in the last few decades, which is expected to carry on accelerating to the end of this century. Given that, how can we allow the short-term political time frames in which we operate—four or five years to a general election, or between local government elections—to inform our attitude to this subject?”
“However, what I do see is the prospect of the chilling impact of the risk of flooding. If manufacturers such as Smith & Nephew, which the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) mentioned, see that their investment is at risk from a failure to provide suitable protection, they can so easily take that investment elsewhere. That is true of so many of the companies that we have made such an effort to attract to the Humber area, reinforcing the presence of industry there. We have that enormous opportunity and we cannot afford to have it chilled by a failure to take the long-term view of the need for flood protection. The Government rightly recognise the challenges of climate change.”
“Of course, the previous Culture Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller), announced that Hull had been made city of culture 2017, and that announcement, too, is having a galvanising effect. From the Prime Minister down and throughout Government, efforts were made to encourage Siemens to sign up to come to Hull and for the supply chain to come to Paull in my constituency, which is immediately east of Hull. That work was also successful. It was my great pleasure to lead the members of the Education Committee to Hull last Monday and Tuesday, for them to visit schools there and see a real sense of renewal, energy and drive to raise standards. There is a massive opportunity for the area and it is waiting to be grasped. If I look at clouds on the horizon, I see remarkably few.”
“We have lower than average incomes in Yorkshire and the Humber—in fact, they are among the lowest average incomes in England—so we start from a position of having great deprivation and some history of economic failure, relatively speaking, yet a massive opportunity is opening up. We are working on taking that opportunity, cross-party and across authorities. The Government should take enormous credit for the steps they have taken to help. The halving of the Humber bridge tolls has meant that instead of that bridge acting as a barrier between the two banks of the river—stopping them working together for the economic betterment of the whole area—it is a catalyst. Cross-party, we made representations to the Secretary of State for Transport. He has agreed to the electrification of the line to Hull, which will make a significant difference.”
“They devastated Hull and the East Riding, led to Hornsea in my constituency being cut off, and led to flooding in every area of my constituency and in Hull, with many people being driven out of their homes—not just for months, but in some cases for years. Flooding is personally devastating, and that will always be at the forefront of my mind when I consider this issue. If I may, I shall echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) around opportunity. We have a fantastic and phenomenal positive opportunity around the Humber. I pay tribute to Lord Haskins, the chairman of the LEP, and others, who are working together to take the area forward.”
“I saw his devastation and that of his wife, as their brand-new kitchen and recently installed facilities had been wrecked by the overtopping of the nearby bank. To his credit, he was not primarily concerned with his own interests, but was going out to meet other residents. He took me to meet them and their homes had similarly been devastated. Some of those people were less resilient than that couple, because of their age or infirmity. As the Minister will know, the personal impact on people whose homes have been flooded is utterly devastating. The recent flooding comes just a few years after the 2007 floods. Last Wednesday—25 June—was the anniversary of those floods.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger, and to follow the excellent speeches made by Members across the Chamber, which have given the Minister and the rest of the Front-Bench team a clear message about the unity of feeling around the Humber. As has been said—it is worth reiterating—that goes across party lines and includes local authorities working together under the industrial leadership of the local enterprise partnership. We are all united in this, alongside the technical input and understanding of the Environment Agency and other agencies. I take the Minister back to December, when I visited residents of Kilnsea in my constituency, just above Spurn point, and met the chairman of the parish council there in his house, which had recently been refurbished.”
“I am grateful to the Minister. On the point about putting a strategic framework in place, will he reflect on whether we need to establish, as in Holland, flood protection standards that trigger the resource to deliver the standard, rather than having a certain amount of resource and doing the best possible with that?”
“10. What steps he is taking to obtain data from HM Revenue and Customs to improve the development of destination measures for school leavers.”
“During the last Session, an attempt at change was made in a private Member’s Bill. I hope that the Minister is telling us today that he will make it a Government priority to strengthen destination data, as the Select Committee recommended, so that we can give schools an incentive to take account of not just short-term exam results, but the long-term interests of the child.”
“I wonder whether we can clear this matter up, because the Minister for Schools appeared before the Education Committee during the school places inquiry. He said: “We have got £12.5 billion or more for basic need that we are going to spend over the 2010 to 2021 period, which is absolutely massive. The Treasury have been very clear with us and we have been clear with them that basic need is the top priority. If we thought jointly that we couldn’t fund the basic need because of the free school programme, we would have to reduce the free school programme. But the free school programme is additional; it does not compromise our basic need objectives.” Is the evidence that was given to the Committee correct or is what we heard in anonymous whispers over the weekend correct?”