That, for the year ending with 31 March 2022, for expenditure by the Department for Education: (1) the resources authorised for current purposes be reduced by £484,799,000 as set out in HC 1152,
(2) the resources authorised for capital purposes be reduced by £385,099,000 as so set out, and
(3) the sum authorised for issue out of the Consolidated Fund be reduced by £29,468,000.—(Amanda Solloway.)
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this important debate. I particularly thank the members of the Education Committee, including the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson) for co-sponsoring the debate, and my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Miriam Cates). My hon. Friend is a brilliant Committee member and I appreciate all the work that she does.
To reassure the Whip on the Front Bench and, I am sure, the Minister, I should say that I fully support the estimates today. I will try to recommend things that I think can be improved and to argue that, although extra money has been raised, we need to ensure that we have value for money and that that money is spent well. I hope that the Government see my remarks in that spirit.
In last year’s autumn Budget, the Chancellor and the Education Secretary set out a vision of support for schools, skills and families. Of course, I agree with that—it is very important to focus on those three things—but I think that social justice needs to be added. I believe that the fundamental challenges now facing education are recovery from the covid-19 pandemic, addressing social injustices and early years intervention. I see that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) is in her place; she is an expert on this issue in Parliament and does so much to ensure that the Government focus on early intervention.
It is also important for me, in opening this debate, to thank the teachers and support staff in schools and colleges in my constituency, who do so much to keep pupils learning and who have worked incredibly hard during the pandemic. I also thank the teachers and support staff around the country.
Clearly, the Government are making progress on skills and standards. Literacy rates are up and 1.9 million children are now in good or outstanding schools. The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill and the lifetime skills guarantee, which passed through the House of Commons only a couple of weeks ago, could be very exciting, alongside proper money—£3 billion of extra funding. That should be welcome; that is real money.
Does my right hon. Friend agree that one way to ensure that every baby has the chance of the best possible start in life is to ensure that all the services that support families are universal, and not in any way stigmatising?
I could not agree more. I have seen the work of Manchester Council in this regard and I think that it should be replicated throughout the country. More families would benefit as a result, particularly disadvantaged families.
Parental engagement is critical and the family hubs should follow a model of best practice. Feltham Academy, for instance, takes a “cradle to career” approach. When I was in Nottingham last week, I met the headteacher of a school that trains parents to act as mentors in the community for other parents who would otherwise be disengaged from the school. That really works.
I should like the Government to consider, in the spending round, its funding of early years entitlements. I do not understand why the three or four-year-old child of an MP, when both parents are working and earning up to £100,000 each a year, qualifies for 30 hours of childcare, while the three or four-year-old child of a single parent in my constituency—or elsewhere in the country—who may not be able to work because they have that young child to bring up qualifies for just 15 hours. I cannot see how that can be the right decision on the Government’s part. I know the Minister will tell me that some poorer families qualify for extra benefits and extra hours, but the fact remains that that is the position.
I always give way to the hon. Lady and I promise to do so if she will allow me to finish this paragraph.
I am not necessarily asking for more money, but I do ask the Minister to work with colleagues and consider reducing the generous threshold that exists for parents to claim tax-free childcare, a subsidy that does not capture society’s most disadvantaged families. One way we could do this is by dropping the eligibility cap to £65,000 from the existing £100,000 mark. That could free up £150 million, which would go some way towards covering the additional outlay.
I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on his excellent speech. On his point about childcare, I declare an interest as he is talking about MPs with children who qualify for the 30 hours free childcare, as my three-year-old son does. We can have a good debate about who should and should not be eligible for that, and I agree broadly with the point he is making. Does he agree, however, that those 15 or 30 free hours are not actually free because most childcare providers cannot afford to provide childcare at the rate the Government are giving them? Parents are therefore regularly asked to top it up. I can afford the top-up, but many people just cannot afford it and therefore cannot make use of childcare, which is preventing them from going out to work.
I absolutely accept that where there are strains for providers of early years education, the Government should look at that and fill in the holes, but I think it varies. Some providers have found it very hard and some have managed to provide that service, but I accept the point the hon. Lady makes.
In conclusion, education recovery and the catch-up programme must be the immediate spending priority. I have previously described the Education Secretary as someone who can get mangoes in the Arctic and Brussels sprouts in the desert. He is that kind of person, and I am not surprised that he has managed to wangle all these extra billions from the Treasury for the catch-up and for an overall budget growth of almost 3%. That is a significant achievement in the current climate, and it has to be acknowledged. The House will have noticed that I have not necessarily been asking for lots more money; I have been asking for the Department to spend the money more wisely. It needs to demonstrate, above all, that the catch-up programme is providing value for money. When the Minister goes back to the Treasury, it is going to say that it is not working, and the evidence out there is that it is not necessarily working for the most disadvantaged. There are serious issues regarding the catch-up programme and questions to be asked about whether children are fully recovering from the lost learning in the pandemic. There are long-term issues of social injustice that need to be tackled, and of course early years must be supported, as I have just set out.
I hope the Minister will recognise that these are the priorities for the Government and that education will finally get a long-term plan and a secure funding settlement. We can have a debate about how much it is, but if the NHS can have a 10-year plan and a long-term funding settlement and the Ministry of Defence can have a big funding settlement over the next few years and a strategic review, I do not understand why Education cannot have a long-term plan and a secure funding settlement, at least over a few years. That would give a lot of stability to everyone working in education, to schools, to colleges and to universities, and that would make a huge difference.
I find myself in a happy position, because normally I am furiously trying to cut down my speech to three minutes. I do not think that is going to happen today, however. I am really quite surprised and shocked at how few people are here for this debate. To my mind, education and our children’s future, particularly given the impact of the pandemic, is one of the most important issues facing us, and given that this debate is meant to be partly focused around the national tutoring programme, which is key to the recovery plan, I would have thought that Members on both sides of the House would be interested, given that children in every constituency are affected. I thank the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) for his speech and congratulate him on securing the debate.
When I looked at the estimates and saw that they had been reduced from the beginning of the financial year, I was a little surprised. I know that there are explanations as to why that has been the case, but given that we have just been through one of the biggest crises that has faced our country since the second world war, which has had a massive impact on children’s learning, their lives and their mental health, I would have thought that, if anything, there would have been a surge of spending through this financial year. I would have expected to see the estimates go up, not down, so I am a little surprised by this. Maybe the Minister will explain more when he responds. Certainly in my constituency, where I am visiting schools week in, week out, every school is really struggling to make ends meet and increasingly relying on fundraising and parental donations, which I find quite shocking.
I see spending on children and young people as an investment, not a cost, and I would urge the Government to do the same. That investment should be made wisely, but the national tutoring programme, which was set up with the very best of intentions and ambitions, risks proving to be “a disaster”, to use the words of Lee Elliot Major, the professor of social mobility at Exeter University. As the right hon. Member for Harlow has already said, even the Department’s own annual report published in December stated that the risk of catch-up efforts failing to address lost learning was “critical or very likely”.
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) on securing this debate and on his excellent speech. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), with whom I agree about the impact of school closures. The biggest challenge facing our children is recovering from the pandemic. In the context of this debate, we are talking about lost learning in reading, writing and maths. My right hon. Friend has already spoken about the number of months—six, seven or eight—that some children are behind, but of course our children face a much wider issue, as they have lost social development and confidence, with many struggling with anxiety placed on them by adults over the course of the pandemic. These children have been forced to spend so much time online—six or seven hours a day—often unaccompanied, as they are doing work. Understandably, we have seen a rise in online harms and serious situations for many of our children. So there are huge challenges for our children at this point.
However, this debate is on the Department for Education’s spending, and I know the Minister will be relieved that I will focus my remarks on educational recovery. As has been mentioned, the Government’s flagship programme for academic recovery is the NTP, for which the plan is to deliver 100 million tutoring hours for five to 19-year-olds by 2024. I am pleased that it is a long-term strategy, acknowledging that we are not going to catch up overnight or even in one or two years. I understand that in the first year of the programme we have already launched 311,000 tutoring courses, and we are hoping to offer access to up to 2 million more this year. I very much support this approach in principle, because I have no doubt that tutoring works and has the potential to turbocharge progress.
I have been both a classroom teacher and a private tutor, and I have to say that the roles are extremely different. A teacher who has 30 year 8s in their chemistry class and is trying to do a practical, where there are 30 Bunsen burners and perhaps some scalpels out—and perhaps some lads want to start a fire in the bin when they are not looking—is multitasking. They are prioritising children’s safety, trying to get them logistically to get the right equipment out and trying to keep to the lesson plan. Of course, they are making formal and informal assessments of what the children know, what progress they are making, who is not paying attention and who is not understanding, but they are very much focusing on bringing the class along as a whole as much as they can. Of course, they do not have that much time to invest in individual students who may be struggling, and their ability to know what each student is struggling with at any particular moment is limited. That is the role of a classroom teacher, and that is how it should be.
We are talking about the big challenge of catch-up across the nation, but does my hon. Friend agree that it is also about the vulnerability of young people? There is a complete contrast in the way people have been affected—for example, there were youngsters who did not have access to the internet at home or to an iPad. It is not a consistent catch-up programme for everybody because some did not have the tech and there were children with special educational needs and so on. It is all about empowering local leaders in local schools to deliver a tailor-made solution.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right and I completely agree. All children have been affected by the pandemic—of course, certain demographics and ages have been affected more, but all children have suffered—so he is right that we need to give headteachers in particular the autonomy to decide how budgets are spent in their schools in the best interests of their children.
Let me move on to the adult education budget. We have had a chronic skills gap in this country for some time. The last census showed that in Stocksbridge in my constituency less than 50% of adults had a level 3 skill or above. The fact that there are 1.3 million job vacancies in the UK shows that our population must have a skills gap. In England, just one in 10 adults has a technical qualification; in Germany, the proportion is one in five. We have clearly fallen behind many of our developed-nation competitors when it comes to skills, so I welcome the extra investment of £3.8 billion in further education and skills over this Parliament. The £1.6 billion for the national skills fund and the funding for the lifelong learning entitlement indicate a positive change of direction by this Government that will have a huge impact on levelling up and adult skills.
I wish to focus on a particular type of adult education provider. In my constituency we have Northern College, which is one of just four residential adult education colleges in the country. Its Wentworth Castle setting is amazingly inspirational. I do not know why they built it by the motorway—it is a bit noisy—but it is a fantastic setting: the grounds are managed by the National Trust and students have access to the best Italian staircase in Europe and the longest suspended ceiling. It is an amazing setting for adults who need a second chance at education, for whatever reason.
The college offers short and long course, GCSEs, A-levels, access courses, vocational qualifications, technical qualifications and higher education courses. The residential element is so important for people who need to step out of the normal run of their lives—perhaps they do not live in supportive households—and need the space to develop their learning skills. Many of the adults at Northern College, which I have visited a number of times, have been in prison or have been victims of domestic violence. For all sorts of reasons, they need an intensive second chance in education. The students themselves speak of the transformational impact of residential education on their lives, and the outcomes—in terms of people getting good jobs and staying in work for the rest of their lives—are truly outstanding.
My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. She has talked about how important the tutoring programme could be if it works correctly. Does she not agree that attention needs to be paid not just to the tuition catch-up, but to mental health and wellbeing catch-up? As I highlighted a little bit in my speech, mental health referrals among young children have gone up enormously since lockdown.
I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend. If children are not in the emotional and mental state to be able to learn, all the tutoring in the world will not get them to the place where they need to be. We do have a crisis in child mental health. Lockdown is one reason for that, but there are other reasons, too. We should not fool ourselves that any amount of catch-up spending will solve this crisis in mental health.
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As the Education Secretary and Ministers know, I think that more needs to be done to increase the amount of careers encounters that young people have at school. The Government are suggesting just three—so one a year in key years—but I suggest that there should be nine encounters altogether. That would not cost the Government any more in funding.
I have also suggested that additional funding should be made available to support adults to obtain a level 2 qualification as long as they can demonstrate their intention to progress to level 3, as per the lifelong learning entitlement. As I said in our debate on amendments to the skills Bill, many adults are not yet ready to do a level 3 apprenticeship. I want them to do so—it is wonderful that the Government are going to offer level 3 in the core subjects—but if they are not ready, it makes sense to give them the opportunity to start on a level 2 apprenticeship and use that for progression, as long as they progress to level 3 after that. I recognise that funds are difficult and that they are not readily available, but if we are going to bid for things in the next spending round, that should be a significant Government priority.
To go back to the careers encounters—what is known as the “Baker clause”—the Secretary of State has indicated to me that the Government want to do more on that. The Minister responsible for skills—the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart)—has said the same. The Bill is being discussed in the Lords at the moment and no doubt this issue is being brought up by Lord Baker and many other peers. If we are serious about transforming adult education and building an apprenticeship and skills nation, we have to get more skills organisations, further education colleges, university technical schools, apprenticeships, apprentice organisations and apprentices into schools to encourage and set out the incredible career paths available, so that pupils know that there is an option not just of university, but of skills and apprenticeships.
As I said in the previous debate on this subject, when I go around the country and meet apprentices—meeting apprentices in all walks of life is one of the most enjoyable parts of my job—it grieves me that eight or nine times out of 10 they tell me that they have never been encouraged by their school to do an apprenticeship. My first speech in the House of Commons was on this subject in 2010, and that situation has not improved. I have even met degree apprentices who are doing incredible, high-quality apprenticeships—they do not have a loan and are going to get a good job at the end of their apprenticeship—who have offered to go back to their school to talk about their higher-level apprenticeship, but the school has turned them down. That has not just happened once—I have asked those degree apprentices about that—because, with their school, the whole culture is university, university, university when it should be skills, skills, skills.
I urge the Minister to introduce teaching degree apprenticeships. I do not understand why there has been resistance to them in the Department; we have policing degree apprentices, nursing degree apprentices and many public sector apprentices in other walks of life. We have apprentices in every other field, from engineering and law to plumbing and hairdressing. Why on earth cannot we have teaching degree apprentices? There are teaching assistant apprentices; there are also graduate teaching apprentices, but they have to go to university first. If we are to deal with the teacher recruitment crisis—a third of new teachers are leaving before five years in the profession—one way to encourage teachers and would-be teachers would be by introducing teaching degree apprentices. I would like to know the Government’s view on that point. I see the Minister nodding; I hope it is a sympathetic nod.
On adult education and skills, the Government are making significant progress, even with the things that I am calling for, and it is important to recognise that. I am excited about some of what is going on. The Government are talking about skills and apprenticeships in a way that they have not talked for a long time. Importantly, they have also reversed the spending cuts to further education.
Harlow College is, I would argue, one of the best colleges in England. As its Member of Parliament, I have visited it nearly 100 times since 2010; it is one of my favourite places to visit in my constituency because I see there how important and transformative further education is. Colleges are places of academic, vocational and social capital and are doing many of the things that the Government want and need in order to ensure we address the significant skills deficits in our country. However, if we do not get educational recovery from the covid pandemic right, and if we do not address social injustices in education, many of our young people will be at risk of not even reaching that stage in their academic career or reaping the benefits on offer.
I want to focus on the catch-up programme, for which I campaigned. From day one, I was passionately opposed to school closures. I have said time and again that they were a disaster for our children. I know that schools were open for vulnerable children and for the children of key workers, but in the first lockdown more than 90% of vulnerable children did not go to school. We know the damage that that has done to educational attainment, to mental health—referrals are up 60% and eating disorders among young girls are up 400%—and to pupils’ life chances. Tragically, it has also meant enormous safeguarding hazards, with children suffering domestic abuse at home and joining county lines gangs. Closing the schools was a mistake and we should never do it again. That is why, alongside other hon. Members, I campaigned for the catch-up programme early on and was very excited when it was announced. I thought it was incredibly important.
Let us look at the figures on the negative effects of school closures. The Education Policy Institute is to education what the Institute for Fiscal Studies is to economics: it is an incredibly respected organisation. Its chair told the Education Committee:
“In our most challenging communities for the most disadvantaged youngsters, they could be five, six, seven—in the worst-case scenarios eight—months behind in some of their learning.”
Ofsted says that some of the hardest-hit children returning to school after the first lockdown had even forgotten how to eat with a knife and fork and in some instances they had lost their progress.
Given the importance of catch-up, there are real questions about whether the catch-up programme, particularly the national tutoring programme, is fit for purpose. My view is that, under Randstad, it is just not working. The Education Committee has heard evidence from multiple sources about the problems besieging its delivery. In January, Schools Week reported that the national tutoring programme had reached just 15% of its overall target. Moreover, it reported that just 52,000 starts had been made through the tuition pillar of the NTP—just 10% of the 524,000 target.
I have met quite a few headteachers, not just in Harlow but around the country; the Committee has done roundtables and I have gone to schools. They have talked about the bureaucratic nightmare that they face while trying to use the catch-up programme and the national tutoring programme. There are also regional disparities: the NTP is reaching 96% of schools in the south-east, which is good news, but it is reaching only 59% in the north-east and the north-west, so there is a north-south divide yet again. Perhaps most alarmingly, the Department for Education’s annual report and accounts, published in December 2021, rated as critical and as very likely the possibility that the measures in the national tutoring programme to address lost learning would be insufficient.
Just last week, we heard that Randstad has removed the requirement to reach 65% of pupil premium children from the tutoring contracts with providers. What is the point of a targeted recovery programme if it does not reach those who are most in need, and if its targets are removed? Was the decision taken by Randstad or by the Department? I very much hope that the Minister will answer that question. Surely the whole point of the programme is that it is disadvantaged children, who learned the least during lockdown, who need most help. Every child suffered during the lockdown and we need catch-up programmes for all, but we must focus on the most vulnerable children. What is the point of that decision? I do not understand why the target of reaching 65% of pupil premium children has been removed. It is really important that the Minister explains what is going on.
The Government must also, as a priority, address the social injustices in our education system. The Department rightly points to higher standards; as I have mentioned, 1.9 million children are in good or outstanding schools, which is really good news. Until the pandemic, standards were going up, but we must also address social injustice in education.
Let me explain what I mean by social injustice. Just 5% of excluded pupils pass English and maths GCSE, just 7% of care leavers achieve a good pass in English and maths GCSE, and 18% of young people with special educational needs get a decent maths or English grade at the time of taking GCSEs. Attainment 8 scores for free school meal-eligible pupils varied across ethnic groups: for white British pupils, the average was just 31.8; for black Caribbean pupils, it was 34.1; Gypsy/Roma pupils scored 16.9; and Irish Travellers scored just 22.2.
Until a few years ago, we were making improvements to the attainment gap, but that progress is now stalling. Disadvantaged pupils are now 18 months of learning behind their better-off peers by the time they reach the age of 16. Progress had stalled before covid, so we cannot just blame it all on covid that the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their better-off peers is 18 months.
Children’s special educational needs is, understandably, a subject that I care about very deeply and that my Select Committee has done a lot of work on. Parents and families have waited nearly three years for the SEN review to be published, and in the meantime they are wading through a treacle of unkind bureaucracy as they try to get a level educational playing field for their children. The Committee has done a big report on special educational needs. It is wrong that children are not given a level playing field, it is wrong that so many families have to wait for education, health and care plans, it is wrong that the healthcare element of those plans is often non-existent, and it is wrong that there are not enough trained staff.
It is not always a question of money. I recognise that the Government put in an extra £800 million for special educational needs a year or so ago. It is also about money not being spent in the right way. We are wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on tribunal cases that the local authorities always lose. Because children with special educational needs are getting a poor service, their parents are going to tribunals, and I believe that more than 90% are winning their cases. That money could have been spent on the frontline. This is what I mean about money not being spent in the right way; the same applies to the catch-up programme.
I have mentioned that just 5% of excluded pupils pass GCSEs in English and maths. Every day, 40 pupils are excluded from our schools and they are not ending up in some wonderful alternative provision. As we know, there is a postcode lottery. Of course there are good alternative-provision schools, but often in the areas where the most pupils are excluded there is poor or non-existent alternative provision. I agree with Michael Wilshaw that we should try to minimise exclusions and that we should invest in local support units in schools—even if they have to be in a separate building—to train staff and to ensure that parents understand their rights.
Our Committee wrote a report entitled “Forgotten children: alternative provision and the scandal of ever increasing exclusions”. The Government said that they welcomed the recommendations of the Timpson review, but what worries me is that very few of those recommendations have begun to be adopted. That is what I mean by addressing social injustice in education. I want disadvantaged pupils to benefit most from the catch-up programme. I want children with special educational needs to have a level playing field like everyone else, and to be able to get on to the ladder of opportunity. I also want excluded pupils—40 of them each day, as I keep repeating—to be given that chance in life, and not end up in prison. We know that 60% of prisoners have been excluded from school.
A further problem that the Government must confront is persistent absence, which has been highlighted by the Children’s Commissioner today. I call children who are persistently absent “the ghost children”. Even before the pandemic, the Centre for Social Justice reported that about 60,000 children were severely absent from school, and in the autumn of 2020 the total rose to more than 90,000. In her report, the Children’s Commissioner says that, according to a survey of local authorities, in the autumn term of 2021, more than 1.7 million pupils were persistently absent and 124,000 were severely absent. I pay huge tribute to her for highlighting that and for her work with the Government to try to get those children back to school. We are allowing this to happen: more than 100,000 children have mostly not returned to school since the schools were fully opened last March.
I urge the Minister to look at the recommendations from the Centre for Social Justice—I stress that this is my personal view; I am not speaking for my Committee at this point—and to use the underspend from the tutoring programme to fund an additional 2,000 attendance practitioners to work on the ground and return these children safely and securely to school. My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge, who is better at mathematics than I am, says that that is about 13 per county, which is not a lot.
What are we going to do? Are we really going to allow this? These children are potentially facing enormous safeguarding hazards, so we have to get them back to school. The Government have said that they will introduce a register of children who are not in school and are being home-educated. That must happen, and it must happen sooner rather than later. I have campaigned for it for a long time, along with members of my Committee, and we recently produced a report on the subject.
If the Minister does not agree with the recommendation from the Centre for Social Justice for an additional 2,000 attendance practitioners, I urge him at least to ensure that there is a proper programme of action that we all know about to return those “ghost children” to school. We need to know exactly what is happening. Six attendance advisers are simply not enough to deal with this problem. Education cannot just be for the majority. Academic capital and social capital must go hand in hand. The Government must prioritise levelling the playing field of education so that every child, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, has the chance to climb the ladder.
Given that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire is present, I had better say something about early years provision. I suspect that she would be upset if I did not, because she is such an expert on the subject. The additional £500 million for family hubs that was announced in last year’s Budget is very welcome: it is an incredible amount of money. The Secretary of State visited my brilliant local family hub, which is run by Virgin Care and Essex County Council and does a great deal of work on parental engagement. As I have said, the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their better-off peers is 18 months by the time the children reach the age of 16, but we also know that 40% of that attainment gap begins before children reach the age of five. Targeted support at this stage of life is therefore crucial. We also need to ensure that younger children from disadvantaged backgrounds are learning more at an early age.
The concept of small group or one-to-one tuition is an intervention that is well supported by evidence and welcomed by many schools, yet we know that the Government’s contractor, Randstad, has met only 10% of its targets for delivering this sort of tuition. I am surprised that when I challenged the Education Secretary in this Chamber a few weeks ago, when we were in the heat of omicron, on why we were not putting air purifiers into every school, he told me—as he told Sophie Raworth on “Sunday Morning”—that he is laser-focused on ensuring value for money. If Randstad is meeting only 10% of its target, I question whether that is value for taxpayers’ money. I particularly look forward to the Minister’s comments on that.
The national tutoring programme was particularly aimed at tackling the learning loss that has been felt most keenly by the most disadvantaged children. As the right hon. Member for Harlow said, all the evidence seems to be pointing to those children having been failed miserably. The National Audit Office questioned whether the programme is reaching the most disadvantaged, and the Education Policy Institute found a marked disparity in the take-up of the NTP between the north and the south. In the south, upwards of 96% of schools are engaging with the programme, compared with just 50% of schools in the north.
It has been reported that tutoring providers will no longer have to ensure that their catch-up reaches at least two thirds of poorer pupils after the target was ditched, even though this was stipulated as a key performance indicator in Randstad’s contract. How does this all fit with the Minister’s levelling-up ambitions?
The feedback from those on the ground trying to access the programme is damning. The leadership team of one academy trust told me they would give NTP a generous two out of 10. There are concerns that the tutoring partners strand is sucking teachers out of schools, and particularly the supply pool, which the Minister will know has come under significant pressure from omicron. Although all the restrictions have been eased, there are still staff and pupil absences in schools. There are many stories of lessons being cancelled at the last moment and tutors not turning up. Schools have had a mixed experience of the tutors with whom they are partnered.
The administrative complexity and burden have left many schools wondering about the value of opting into the programme. One teacher described the admin side as a farce, telling me, “There’s no way you’ll actually get paid if you try to put in honest information. It’s obvious no meaningful records are being kept. To get paid the first time, I had to do six hours of admin over a weekend. There appears to be no evaluation or feedback on what’s going on.”
With schools having to pay a contribution towards the school-led strand of NTP, how does that work for schools that are struggling financially given the huge disparities in school funding in different parts of the country? I know that at least two primary schools in Twickenham have a budget deficit. They lost fundraising money during covid and were unable to claim for many of their additional covid costs. They rely on parental donations and parent teacher association fundraising for some of the basics, with one school having to ask parents for monthly donations to be able to employ teaching assistants. Many schools are having to fundraise to fork out thousands to switch to one of the Department for Education’s mandated phonics providers.
A DFE survey last year found that just 29% of schools are planning to use the NTP in the current academic year, with 30% being unsure. That statistic speaks for itself. The national tutoring programme, if not failing, is severely struggling. It is time for a fresh approach. The Liberal Democrats have been calling for an ambitious package of support for our children and young people as we deal with the consequences of the pandemic. Sir Kevan Collins’s recommendation of £15 billion should be honoured, with the majority of that money being put directly into the hands of schools and a third going to parents and carers in the form of catch-up vouchers, as they are best placed to know what each individual young person needs, whether it is academic or social. That could include counselling support and so on.
The Education Policy Institute suggests that the economic impact of school closures during the pandemic could run into the trillions over the next few decades. A £15 billion investment in our young people would deliver a far greater return than most infrastructure projects.
One-to-one tutoring is completely different—it is child-led. A good tutor can quickly establish the child’s strengths and weaknesses, and what they do and do not know. They can use intensive questioning to build a child’s knowledge and confidence. Tutoring is especially good for children with low confidence, who perhaps do not have the ability to contribute in a large class. So I have no doubt that a tutoring programme is a really positive way forward and could have truly transformational results. Of course, it also gives the opportunities to disadvantaged children that many advantaged children have been using for many years; private tutoring has become the staple of many middle-class educational aspirations. So the idea of being able to give disadvantaged children access to a truly transformational tool is a very positive development, and I applaud the Government’s decision to allocate resources to this. However, I agree that we need to look carefully at how this money is spent, whether this approach is working and whether we are getting value for money.
One issue we need to address is supply. There are not hundreds of skilled tutors in every part of the country ready to deliver this scheme. If there were, we would be in a completely different scenario. We have to hope that if this programme is going to run for a number of years, those skills will come, people will move into tutoring and they will become the supply we perhaps do not have now. We need to be careful, because tutoring is a skill and teaching is a skill. Just because someone has A-level maths, it does not mean they can tutor somebody for GCSE maths. The skills of teaching and the way of assessing a child’s knowledge are not something just anyone can do. We need to have skilled and trained practitioners.
Schools do not always need to look for external tutors. There are advantages in that approach, particularly for disadvantaged children in meeting new adults and learning to form new relationships, but for many schools the best thing will be to use internal providers and train up existing staff. So I welcome the £579 million for schools to develop localised, school-led tutoring provision, as that is an excellent option for schools. We need to be careful about small schools, which may not have the resource, personnel-wise, to allocate to that, but it is certainly a good development.
There are serious issues with Randstad, as we have heard on the Education Committee. The Government urgently need to reassess its ability to deliver the NTP, because if this is going to be our flagship programme and we are relying on it to deliver results on catching children up on academic education, we have to be sure that it is working and it is money well spent, and that in four or five years’ time we can look back and see that it has achieved results.
We also need to consider the fact that some schools would prefer to have their catch-up funding as a lump sum so that they can decide how best to spend it. They know what their children need most, and many will have more pressing concerns than academic catch-up, as we know from the evidence to the Select Committee about the wellbeing and mental health issues that many children face. There is some great practice out there. For example, Horizon Community College in Barnsley in my constituency appeared on the local news last week. It has set up a wellbeing centre and invited the charity Mind into the school. Children can drop into the wellbeing centre at any point; it is having a huge impact on the mental health of children at the school and they very much welcome it. There are some great examples of good practice out there, although it tends to be found among the bigger schools, which have bigger budgets so can be more flexible. Nevertheless, it is definitely something to learn from.
It is, of course, too soon to tell whether the national tutoring programme is working—it needs to run for longer—but evaluation is key and we have to find a way to assess it over time and, obviously, to make sure it works to start with. If the outcomes are good, I would like to see tutoring become an established part of our education system. It provides a brilliant opportunity to level up. There will of course be an element of trial and error to start with, but if we find a way to make it work, particularly for our most disadvantaged children but perhaps for those who show the most academic promise as well as those who are struggling, it could become a key part of our education strategy, so I very much welcome it.
Residential adult education colleges are a very small aspect of adult education provision—as I said, there are only four of them in the entire country—but they are really important. Some adults want to get another chance at education and to upskill, but if someone is 35 and has been in prison, is it really appropriate for them to go to their local further education college and sit with a load of 16-year-olds with completely different life experience and priorities? Northern College and the three other colleges across the country offer a unique and successful opportunity for people who need a second chance. I must mention the inspirational leadership of the principal of Northern College, Yultan Mellor, who has seen the college go from strength to strength to the point at which it is truly transforming lives.
I very much welcome the devolution of the adult education budget; it is a good step forward. Northern College is now jointly funded by the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and the South Yorkshire Combined Authority, which is an understandable move given that that is where the majority of students are drawn from. However, as a result of this devolution, the residential uplift—the element of funding that provides residential support to the adults who need it—is now under threat. That is a problem because there is good evidence to show that this period of intensive learning, with the counselling and the study skills support that is available for these adults, can be life changing. It is also the case that Northern College is not just a local institution; it is a national provider, so there should be some sort of understanding that this residential uplift needs to continue.
The Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) is due to meet me and the principal shortly to talk about this matter, but may I ask Ministers urgently to take a decision on this uplift so that Northern College and the other three colleges can continue to be an important part of our national education strategy? I know that it is small, but it is key provision for many adults who would not otherwise have the access, the opportunity and the success in learning both academically and in skills.
I want to make two broader points about education spending. First, we must recognise the limits of our education system and what it can achieve. We often think that any issues or policies around children have to be fixed by our education system, particularly by our schools. Certainly the social demands on schools have increased in recent years. It is not just post pandemic, when, yes, children have regressed in terms of basic skills, but was an issue even before then. There are increased reports of children going to school without having been potty trained, and increased incidences of parents not being able to cope and needing the school’s support. We saw that particularly at the beginning of the pandemic when we realised how many families were completely reliant on schools not just for academic provision, but for the surrounding services that schools provide.