Children, Schools and Families
The Secretary of State was asked—
Teaching Life Skills
The flexibility in the new secondary curriculum allows teachers to tailor it to local circumstances and the needs of all pupils. Personal learning and thinking skills, which I agree are critical if children are to reach their potential, are embedded in the curriculum. Through personal, social and health education, young people are helped to develop the social and emotional skills that they need to make informed decisions and good choices. The children’s plan announced reviews of sex, relationship and drugs education, and those reviews will report shortly.
The Minister will know that the basis of all attainment is adequate social and emotional intelligence, but the provision of life skills education for those aged 11 to 16 is currently not fit for purpose in constituencies such as mine. Sex and relationship education, PSHE, civics and the secondary-level teaching of SEAL—the social and emotional aspects of learning—all create a confused, overlapping and unstructured offering. Will the Minister support Nottingham’s early intervention plan to pull together a coherent 11-to-16 life skills curriculum, including modules on preventing teenage pregnancy and reducing drink and drug abuse? Will she ensure that it reaches the years that need it most, and becomes a mandatory, tested and inspected part of the curriculum?
Many schools across the country are already doing what my hon. Friend suggests, using the new secondary curriculum to build an innovative, personalised curriculum for their pupils that has personal thinking and learning social and emotional skills at its heart. Of course, schools now have a statutory duty to promote the well-being of their pupils. The new curriculum gives schools the flexibility to do that. There is an extensive programme of support to enable schools to start developing their curriculum. I understand that only three schools in the city of Nottingham have attended the PSHE events, and that schools there have not drawn down the expert help that we are offering. If my hon. Friend can encourage schools in Nottingham to do that, they can make the same progress that schools across the country are already making.
The ethos of the school and the wishes of parents and governors should be the main driver of the PSHE curriculum. Will the Minister guarantee that there will be no national prescription of the content of PSHE? There are many schools where PSHE is already very successful and reflects the cultural and religious views of the school’s community. Where it is necessary, and where there is failure, help should be given, but some schools are already perfectly capable of providing such a service.
The hon. Lady is probably aware that there are two new, non-statutory PSHE frameworks that schools can apply and develop according to the needs of their pupils and the wishes of parents. As I have said, we are currently reviewing sex and relationship education, and will come forward with the outcome of that review shortly.
Does my hon. Friend agree that there is another aspect to the lack of education about sex and unprotected sex? Many women today have to undergo invasive, unpleasant and expensive treatment to help them to conceive, but they would not have been in that position if they had had information fed to them at school about the need to have protected sex to avoid conditions such as chlamydia.
I agree with my hon. Friend, who has done a great deal of work on the issue, that the long-term effects of early and unprotected sexual activity and of getting pregnant in one’s teens are numerous. She identifies some of the health consequences, but of course there are also other consequences, such as poverty and lack of opportunity later in life. That is why we have put a great deal of effort into reducing teenage pregnancy and making sure that young people can get the advice that they need when they need it on all aspects of sexual health.
The new child maintenance and enforcement commissioner recently suggested that children as young as 11 be taught about the consequences of becoming young fathers, and the repercussions of failing to fulfil their parental responsibilities. While that is admirable, does the Minister think that there is room in the curriculum for such information, and does she think that it will be successful?
I agree, if the hon. Gentleman is making a general point about the need to focus on the behaviour of boys as well as of girls when we try to help young people to make the right choices in relation to sexual activity. I would certainly like to see as much a focus on boys as on girls within SHE in schools and within sex and relationship education. I am sure that that is something on which the review will comment, and I hope that we can take that forward.
Britain stands in stark contrast to many countries in continental Europe in these matters. For example, only a little while ago in Holland, there was one sixth the number of teenage pregnancies compared with Britain. Is my right hon. Friend looking into why those contrasts are so dramatic, and can we learn something from countries such as Holland that would serve to improve the situation in Britain?
Yes, indeed, I think that we can, and we have been looking at that quite closely. It is true that our relatively high teenage pregnancy rates in this country are long standing, and go back as far as records began, some 40 years ago. In making comparisons, a couple of factors might be associated with the different rates in different western countries. First, in Holland, there is much more acceptance by parents of the subject, and there is a freedom and lack of embarrassment among parents when talking to their children about sexual activity—much more so than here. Secondly, the quality and nature of the sex and relationship education in Dutch schools is something from which we can learn.
Whether or not it is schools teaching too much sex or parents teaching too little, or the other way round or neither, the fact is that in my constituency, which I guess is typical, the major public health problems among young people are chlamydia and penile warts, exacerbated by excessive alcohol consumption. That is a real problem, and we have been ducking it for years. It is time that we recognised that there is a free-for-all out there among young people, who are not inhibited by the social mores under which most of us grew up. Is it not time that we helped them, and whether the answer is schools or parents, or both, we have to raise the tone of this debate?
I certainly agree that for a minority of young people, that is a problem that we have to take seriously, and we are doing so. The hon. Gentleman is right to suggest that there is clearly a link for some young people between alcohol and drug consumption and unsafe sex. However, I regret the general stereotype that he painted, because it is not true of all young people. We should be careful in the House lest we reinforce the negative stereotypes of young people that we see all around us in the press, which are very regrettable.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) on his excellent work with the Centre for Social Justice and on his co-authorship of the pamphlet, “Early Intervention” because he knows more than most people about the problem, as after 11 years of Labour Government in Nottingham, his city has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in western Europe and, at 8 per cent., the lowest proportion of people going into higher education. Does the Minister agree that the teaching of life skills is not just the responsibility of teachers battling to fit everything into the curriculum, and that school nurses, parents and other professionals have a key role to play in reducing teenage pregnancies and substance abuse as a precursor to better educational achievement? In that case, why in a parliamentary answer of 3 June from a Health Minister, was it revealed that the grand total of qualified school nurses employed by Nottingham City primary care trust amounted to zero?
The hon. Gentleman is quite right that dealing with the issue at local level involves all the relevant organisations, as well as parents, working together. Health professionals have a clear role to play. I cannot tell him what the figures are for Nottingham, but I will obtain them for him.
I do not think that that figure is probably right, but I will check it. The number of health qualified professionals working in the community nationally—that includes community nurses, school nurses and district nurses as well as health visitors—has risen under the Government, and I am sure that that will be shown to be the case in Nottingham as well.
Primary Schools (Rural Areas)
The Government are committed to rural primary schools. Recognising that small rural schools cost more to run, we provide extra funding to sparsely populated areas, and we calculate the dedicated schools grant in 2007-08 contained almost £188 million funding for sparsity. To protect rural schools, we introduced a presumption against closure in 1998, which has reduced the number of closures by two thirds. In January, my hon. Friend the Minister for Schools and Learners wrote to local authorities, reminding them of the presumption and making it clear that we wanted spare capacity in rural schools to be put to other use—for example, to broaden the services that schools offer in line with the likely future pattern of children’s services. We also promote shared governance arrangements between small village schools as a means of addressing financial and educational challenges.
I am glad that the Minister agrees with me that the survival of rural primary schools is absolutely vital to the areas that they serve. However, bearing in mind that the prediction of school rolls is an inexact science and that during an economic downturn the birth rate often goes up, does the Minister agree that a reduction of capacity from 105 to 75 places at Church Lawton school in my constituency, for example, is a contribution to the reduction of surplus places throughout Cheshire, and that Church Lawton as a whole should not be deprived of the school, which is down to be closed?
Church Lawton school is not designated as a rural school, and it is the local authority’s responsibility to manage spare capacity in all the schools in its area. We can never guarantee that no rural school will ever close, but we hope that given the measures that we have taken, the presumption against closure and by working together to try to get in other children’s services, we can protect surplus places and recognise the valuable contribution that rural schools play.
The presumption against closure is an excellent step forward. What active encouragement is there in respect of the clustering of schools—one headmaster, say, being responsible for two or three schools—as opposed to having to look towards closure? Clustering can be creative and useful. Are the Government giving instruction in that regard?
We recognise that rural schools play a vital role. In trying to keep them open, we are helping them to work with other organisations within the local authority and community at the sort of clustering that the hon. Gentleman is talking about. We will issue further guidance.
I support the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) of Plaid Cymru who has just put his question—
And your hon. Friend, too!
Indeed; I also support my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Ann Winterton), who put the original question.
Does the Minister not accept that transforming learning communities is causing huge anxiety in rural areas and that schools in rural areas are often the centre of community activity? Will she look carefully at whether the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy—to have a federation or partnership of rural schools—is the way to ensure that a very large number of rural schools can be kept open?
Having federations of schools is one of the ways in which we expect this to work; there is also the sharing of governance arrangements and the use of spare capacity in schools for other children’s services. We expect schools across the country to be the centres of their communities. Nowhere is that more true than in rural areas. We will certainly take that suggestion on board; in fact, we are already doing so.
Academy Programme
May I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth, North (Sarah McCarthy-Fry) to the Front Bench and congratulate Lord Adonis on his further elevation and promotion to the position of Minister of State at the Department for Transport?
Due, in part, to Lord Adonis’s important work, 47 new academies opened this September, part of the biggest opening of new schools that we have seen for more than three decades. On top of the 130 academies now open, four more are due to open in January, 80 next September and a further 100 in 2010—well on the way to our goal of at least 400 academies nationwide. Today, I have given the go-ahead to three new academies, in Northampton, Poole and Portsmouth; they all replace national challenge schools.
May I advise the Secretary of State that although there is much rejoicing at Lord Adonis’s move to the Department for Transport, unfortunately the academy locomotive is still steaming down the track? Where local communities have demonstrated as clearly as they did my constituency in May, when the Conservatives lost five seats partly because they want to impose academies on the town, will he listen to those local communities and pick up on the concept of federations as the way forward, not the imposition of academies when people do not want them?
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his appearance at today’s Question Time; he is rather lonely on his Benches. [Hon. Members: “So are you!”] There is more than one.
Today, the Minister for Schools and Learners and I took the opportunity to have a discussion with Lord Adonis, who will continue to ensure that he gives us his views on academies. He told me that on Friday he spent some time in the cab of a train, which he said was the most exciting day of his life so far.
The hon. Gentleman will know that the question of whether to bring forward proposals for academies is a matter for the local authority, not for us. It is for the local authority to decide on the way forward and to consult and build a consensus. There are several different ways in which structural change can occur for national challenge schools, and there is the option of a national challenge trust as well. I will wait to see whether Essex proposes academies—that decision is imminent—but it is for the local authority to decide rather than me.
Will the Secretary of State accept that not everybody is quite as enthusiastic about academies? I do not oppose academies, but, first, the consultation process has to be adequate. Secondly, more than one choice should be given to an authority and to the governors. Thirdly, in my view—I hope that the Secretary of State will agree—somebody who is heavily committed to a political party should not be chosen as the single sponsor. Fourthly, in a school where a high percentage of the kids come from a range of religions, the person chosen as sponsor should not be a little off-centre with his own religious views and proselytising skills.
Given those comments, I am not sure whether “off-centre” means lurching to the left or to the right, but I will not comment on the individual case of a sponsor. It is of course extremely important that the consultation is done properly. I am pleased that more than half our universities are now coming forward as sponsors of academies. It is very important to forge a consensus in the governing body, in the school and among parents as to the way forward. The important thing to say, though, is that academies are delivering results faster than average, often in the poorest communities, so they provide real opportunities for young people in our country.
I very much support the academy programme, which is making a great difference in my constituency at the erstwhile Pimlico school, which has had academy status. However, one concern is brought up time and again—that whereas the old school had no fewer than seven parent governors, the new academy constitution allows for just one parent governor. What does the Secretary of State think of that? In future, will the treatment of parent governors ensure that academies can have a proper rooting in a local community?
It is very important that the sponsor is able to lead the school, but it is also vital that parents are properly involved in the school. There is a clear requirement as regards parent governors, but there is also a minimum requirement. It is open to the school to have more parent governors, or alternatively to have a parent council. It is vital to our reforms that there is more active engagement and involvement of parents in setting up and managing schools. We are currently taking forward proposals for 100 co-operative trust schools, which will actively engage parents as members of the school community. There are different ways in which this can be done, but every school, including academies, needs to ensure that it involves parents properly.
A year ago, the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister opened a new school in east Bristol that exemplifies what the Government are trying to do to improve educational standards in deprived areas. It is an academy, it is a federated school, and it was the first school to be completed under the Building Schools for the Future programme. I thank the Secretary of State for returning to Bristol Brunel academy this month. Does he agree that what he saw on that visit proved that Labour’s education reforms are working?
The fact that the rise in results over the past 12 months was so dramatic shows that our education reforms are working. Bristol Brunel academy has a fabulous new building and great leadership. The teaching staff are really onside for it, and the results speak for themselves. We want to have more academies like Brunel around the country. I look at it and am proud at what a Labour Government are delivering in Bristol.
The Secretary of State may have been envious of the success and cross-party support enjoyed by the architect of the academies programme, Lord Adonis, but was that really reason enough to force him out?
That was rather a silly question, if I may say so. Lord Adonis was promoted from Under-Secretary with responsibility for schools to Minister of State at the Department for Transport and, as he has said very clearly, he went to the Prime Minister and said that because academies were now embedded as part of our schools system and were so successful, he wanted to move to a new challenge. I fully backed that. I tried to persuade him to stay at our Department because I thought he was doing a brilliant job, but he wanted a new challenge. We have an excellent successor in the Minister for Schools and Learners, who will lead the academies programme forward. My advice to the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) is to ignore the gossip and look at the facts.
Given the ascension of the spiritual leader of academies to the Department for Transport, and given that private sector investment is being withdrawn, that there are disproportionately high exclusion rates and that there is opposition from parents in Bolton, Camden, Colchester, Sheffield and a number of other places, would it not be kinder to draw a veil over this unfortunate experiment so that local authorities can go back to running schools, giving a voice to the communities that those schools serve?
The answer is no. That would be the wrong thing to do.
First, I congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, the hon. Member for Portsmouth, North (Sarah McCarthy-Fry) on her elevation to the Front Bench, and may I also congratulate the Minister for Schools and Learners on his elevation to the Privy Council? Both are richly deserved promotions.
Since taking over his Department, the Secretary of State has deprived new academies of many freedoms and he has sacked Sir Cyril Taylor, the guiding spirit of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. Now he is deprived of the services of Lord Adonis. To lose one of the parents of the academies programme might seem like a misfortune, but to lose two looks rather like carelessness. In the past few months, we have discovered that the Government have cut core funding for the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust from 60 per cent. of the trust’s income to just 20 per cent. Is the academies programme still safe in the Secretary of State’s hands?
That question was even worse than the one from the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart). The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust is expanding its role in schools throughout the country. It is helping us to take forward our academies programme and, through the national challenge, our proposals for national challenge trusts and wider specialisms. The appointment of the chair was a matter for the trust and was not something that I was involved in at all. Lord Adonis was promoted and is moving on to new challenges because we are accelerating our academies programme. As I said, today we are announcing three new academies: the Unity college in Northamptonshire, the Rossmore school in Poole and St. Luke’s in Portsmouth. Those academies are all national challenge schools, which will see their standards rise because of the injection of new funding and support that can come from an academy.
The suggestion that I have taken the academies programme backwards in the past year is complete nonsense. I have brought more universities into our academies programme than ever before, I have made sure that our academies are teaching the core parts of the curriculum, while retaining their basic flexibility, and I am building a broad-based consensus about the importance of academies in our country, which would be put at risk by the cuts to the Building Schools for the Future programme proposed by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove). He is talking complete nonsense. It is my party that will take forward the academies programme; it is his party that would put those investments at risk.
It is interesting to see that the Secretary of State decides to reward success by kicking Lord Adonis out of his Department and decides to back academies by cutting funding for the body behind them.
Talking of cutting funding, may I ask why the Government have also denied funding to Teach First, preventing a charity that does so much to help academies expand into the north-east from doing its work? Can we have an assurance from the Secretary of State that he will remain true to the academies programme not just in name, but in spirit, and that he will endorse the vision outlined by Lord Adonis of “independent state-funded schools” influenced by “the successful Swedish experience”, which operate “outside the local authority system”?
Once again, what we are getting from the hon. Gentleman is laughable, bombastic nonsense. The fact is that we are expanding the Teach First programme, not cutting it. We introduced it, and we are expanding it. We are accelerating our academies programme. Again, we introduced it and we are expanding it. We are bringing more sponsors into our academies programme and putting more money in. We now have more academies coming forward year by year than before I arrived in the Department. The fact is that the hon. Gentleman’s so-called Swedish proposals, which would cut £4.5 billion from the constituencies of Conservative Members, would be the biggest threat to our academies programme and our school building programme.
I am happy to have these debates with the hon. Gentleman. It is good to see that he is at last willing to have discussions during oral questions about the future of our school building programme because, over the next 18 months, we will expose the grave risks to our school system that he represents.
Milton Keynes academy in my constituency is being built as we speak, superseding the Sir Frank Markham school, which has had a rather troubled history. The academy is greatly welcomed by the students, their parents, their teachers and the local community. May I urge the Secretary of State to concentrate on taking this policy forward and to rise above the ridiculous personality-obsessed politics of the Opposition?
I would be very happy to take my hon. Friend’s advice.
UK Council for Child Internet Safety
On 29 September, the Government launched the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, an unprecedented coalition of 100 organisations dedicated to working with us on improving internet safety for children and young people. Reporting directly to the Prime Minister, the council will work to implement the recommendations in Dr. Tanya Byron’s landmark report, “Safer Children in a Digital World”. This launch fulfils the Government’s commitment set out in our action plan, which we published last June following the Byron review.
I welcome the establishment of the council, but will the Government and the council now consider the recommendation of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee that the industry should come forward with a self-regulatory body to implement the council’s recommendations, to publish performance statistics and to adjudicate on complaints arising when member bodies do not meet those recommendations? Does the Minister not feel that the establishment of such a body would help to improve public confidence that everything possible is being done to increase our children’s safety online?
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question. I also thank him for the work that he has done on this matter through the Select Committee and for the Committee’s report, to which we will respond shortly. Everyone on all sides, and particularly the Government, agrees that there needs to be stronger self-regulation by the industry on a whole range of fronts. Self-regulation is the right way to go, given that many of the internet sites are hosted outside the United Kingdom and are therefore outside our jurisdiction. We therefore need very strong self-regulation. We are open to discussion on whether that would involve a particular body or a new body. The industry is well represented on the council, as the hon. Gentleman knows, alongside other sectors to which we shall also want to listen. We are open to discussion on how we get there, but much stronger self-regulation is absolutely imperative. On that, I agree with him.
Zentek Forensics in my constituency has analysed the use of the internet by several school pupils, and the news is not good. They are undoubtedly accessing undesirable internet sites by breaking through the firewalls that the schools provide. What advice is my right hon. Friend giving to all schools to prevent that from happening?
We have already given quite extensive advice to schools, but we also want the council to consider whether we need to go further in that regard. Another aspect of the council’s work is to help us to progress our commitments on providing public education and public information to parents, children and young people. This is an important part of the range of factors that we need to address so that young people can understand the dangers that they face when they enter inappropriate sites with inappropriate content.
I am very interested in what the Minister said about parents, because it is essential that more guidance and information are given to parents so that they are able to understand the mechanisms that restrict access to unsuitable sites. May I urge the Minister to make giving parents that information a top priority in public education?
Yes, that important strand of the work is now going ahead. We have accepted Tanya Byron’s recommendations for a public information awareness campaign and we have put in £9 million to develop an authoritative one-stop shop or site on the internet where parents can go for advice and information. We also want to ensure that we suffuse information about e-safety over other helplines and internet sites that we fund to provide parents with information more generally, so that they can get the advice that they need.
Would my right hon. Friend ensure that any recommendations from the UK Council for Child Internet Safety apply equally to private and state schools? In particular, will she close the current loophole whereby directors of children’s education services have no power to intervene in independent schools in order to protect children’s well-being?
We have a very good relationship with private schools on a range of matters through the Independent Schools Council. Independent schools are certainly very willing to work with us on issues concerning the safety of children. I will certainly take on board my hon. Friend’s comments.
Sex and Relationship Education
As part of the children’s plan, we have given a commitment to review best practice in effective sex and relationship education and its delivery in schools. We have fully involved young people in the review, many of whom told us that they did not have the knowledge they needed to make safe and responsible choices about relationships and sexual health. We expect to announce the review’s recommendations shortly.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that extremely informative reply. Given the chronic rates of teenage pregnancies in this country, the rising incidence of sexually transmitted infections among young people and the description by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority of our sex and relationship education as patchy, will the Minister now heed the call by the Sex Education Forum to make sex education part of statutory personal, social and health education, to be delivered by a qualified work force in an age-appropriate way, as a matter of priority?
As ever, the hon. Gentleman makes his points clearly and forcefully; I always listen to what he has to say. Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen by 12.9 per cent. over the past 20 years, so, although there is further to go, we have made some good progress. The hon. Gentleman is right, however, that we need to improve the consistent quality of sex and relationship education. I have received many strong representations for making personal, social and health education statutory in order to address the problem. I think that that is only part of the argument, but we will make our announcement shortly.
I am sure that my hon. Friend is aware that Ofsted has said that a substantial amount of PSHE is not satisfactory and that too many teachers are not well qualified to teach it. Will the Minister also heed that the PSHE Association, which supports teachers, has said that in many cases teachers find it difficult to get time off for professional development in that subject because the school does not regard it as a high priority? Making the teaching of PSHE statutory would, I am sure, help schools to give the subject the priority it deserves and secure better qualified teachers.
My hon. Friend is right that Ofsted has raised concerns about the consistency of the quality of the teaching of sex and relationship education. That echoes the work of the UK Youth Parliament and the Sex Education Forum, which each conducted a survey of young people that showed that about 40 per cent. and a third of young people respectively said that the sex and relationship education they received was not good enough. We set up the PSHE Association in order to improve its overall quality. I am listening closely to the argument that my hon. Friend makes for statutory provision of PSHE.
Whatever may be done in secondary schools, is there not something deeply disturbing about a society in which young primary school children can be taught the mechanics of sex by those who are not allowed to put a comforting hand on their shoulders?
The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting philosophical point. It is important that we as a society allow better sex and relationship education in both primary and secondary schools without sexualising young people too early. It is right to share the responsibility between home and school: it is not something that schools can deliver on their own; parents need to have a loud voice in how sex and relationship education is delivered for their children. As a Government we put the safeguarding of children as our highest priority and we will continue to do so.
On that very point, before entering this place I had 20 years’ experience as a teacher. I once had a post teaching health education, including sex education, at Hillsborough primary school in Sheffield. It was always my view that the best way to teach sex education was to do so in the early years at primary school, so involving the parents before the children reached the age of puberty. Does the Minister agree that we are talking about the beginnings of teaching sex education and that that ought to be done in the primary sector, rather than leaving it to the later stages in secondary school?
My hon. Friend is right that the international evidence suggests that teaching aspects of sex and relationship education before puberty has a positive effect on such things as teenage pregnancy rates. Clearly, that has to be done with a high degree of sensitivity and, as he says, the involvement of parents, with children reaching puberty at different ages. We must ensure not only that, as a society, we are comfortable with the level of detail and of education that people receive during sex education, but that we are strong on relationship education. We are proud of the introduction of SEAL—the social and emotional aspects of learning—which my shadow described as ghastly, but which is improving relationship education in primary as well as secondary schools.
The Government’s guidelines clearly say that sex education has to be delivered in the context of relationships to be effective, but the Youth Parliament has already shown that four out of 10 youngsters have not received any relationship education while at school. For more than six years, Ofsted has been calling for fundamental changes in how sex and relationship education is taught in our schools and the Minister’s new review is welcome, but when will he be able to reassure parents and young people that action has been taken and that every child will be taught sex and relationship education by a teacher who understands best how to deliver that challenging subject, because they have had some training in it?
I would be happy to proceed on the issue on a cross-party basis, and I would be delighted to meet the hon. Lady this week if she would like to discuss where we might end up with our review. She is right that it is important that we have strong relationship education as well as sex education. It is important that we have listened to the voices of young people. That is why I co-chaired the review with a member of the UK Youth Parliament, which did such useful work in its survey of more than 20,000 young people.
School Meals
The latest School Food Trust survey shows that take-up of school meals in England at secondary school level stabilised between 2007 and 2008 at just below 38 per cent., which brings to a halt the steady decline that we have seen since the mid-1970s.
Schools up and down the country are banning all sorts of ingredients, such as Marmite and tomato ketchup. My favourite food, in common with many children, is chips. Will the Secretary of State explain why oven chips, which contain less than 5 per cent. fat and qualify for three green traffic lights, are subject to the same restrictions as their deep-fried unhealthy alternative?
I was at two schools on Friday, both of which were serving chips. There are restrictions on the serving of chips, but not an outright ban. As for the detail of the difference between deep-fried and oven chips, the matter has been gone through in detail by the School Food Trust over the past couple of years during consultation with the industry. There are fewer restrictions on certain products than on others, depending on the nutritional content of the food. I shall not go into the detail of the precise nutritional content of oven chips—that is something I shall leave to the experts.
Having last enjoyed a delicious Staffordshire school meal only two weeks ago, may I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the great improvement in the quality of meals over the past three years, which is leading to more locally sourced ingredients and healthier, fresher food? However, at this year’s Labour party conference, did my right hon. Friend note the concerns expressed about the affordability of school meals, and the calls for a broadening of the entitlement to free meals? Might the money that he has been given jointly with the Department of Health make it possible to offer all new entrants an initial free trial of school meals, so that they and their parents can become used to the quality that such meals now offer?
A number of local authorities are already doing precisely that. A couple of weeks ago, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and I had lunch with a group of five-year-olds in a Bolton primary school that offered free meals throughout the first term of the reception year. We have put more than £240 million into subsidising ingredients over the next three years. We have also announced that we will conduct a £20 million pilot in two local authority areas to assess the impact that free school meals in primary schools for all children can have on health, discipline and learning. We will examine the results in detail, and then consider the next steps.
It is still of concern to me that slightly more than half our primary school children are not having a hot meal at lunch time. I should like to see the take-up increase, and I hope that the free school meal pilots will help us to work out how we can achieve that.
Topical Questions
This afternoon I am publishing for Parliament our 14-to-19 implementation plan. I welcome recent endorsements from Ofsted and the Public Accounts Committee of our focus on quality rather than quantity. Consistent with that approach, the latest figures from local consortiums show that 12,000 young people started diploma courses this September. I am also announcing today plans for a world-class academy—the Joseph Cyril Bamford academy—in Staffordshire that will cater exclusively for diploma students. All the Russell and 1994 groups of universities are now accepting our diplomas, and Wellington college was the first major independent school to announce that it would offer the engineering diploma from next September.
Education maintenance allowances are vital to ensure that students from low-income families stay at school or college after the age of 16. Following processing delays in recent weeks, as of last Thursday 580,000 of the 682,000 applications received had been processed. The backlog has fallen from 155,000 a few weeks ago to 92,000 at the end of last week.
The Schools Minister has today written to all colleges to express his disappointment at the continuing delays, to assure them that the contractor and the Learning and Skills Council are doing all that they can to process the remaining applications as quickly as possible, and to inform them that he has agreed with the LSC that if any college has insufficient funds to cover the needs of students in hardship, it should contact the LSC to discuss the need for additional funds so that no learner loses out.
During the recess, the Secretary of State wrote to all secondary schools in the country encouraging them to participate in the Give and Let Live donor education programme for 14-to-16-year-olds. Given that the Northamptonshire-based Jeanette Crizzle Trust, of which I am pleased to be a trustee, recently commissioned independent research which demonstrated that only 3 per cent. of schools were taking part in that important programme, what level of take-up does the Secretary of State expect this year as a result of his letter?
This subject has been close to my work and that of many other Members in recent months. I am sure that Members in all parts of the House will wish to send their condolences and sympathies to the parents of Adrian Sudbury, who sadly died in August. He had campaigned for more information and support in schools in regard to blood and bone marrow transplants. The memorial service for Adrian is on Friday, and I shall be meeting his parents tomorrow.
As part of the commitment that I made to Adrian in August, I said that the Secretary of State for Health and I would write to all secondary schools to ensure that they had information about the Give and Let Live programme, and also that we would update the pack of material that goes to secondary schools to encourage more young people to become donors. I know that the hon. Gentleman himself has campaigned on this issue for a number of years. The research commissioned by the Jeanette Crizzle Trust was conducted before the mailings in September, and revealed that the majority of schools surveyed were not aware of the details of the material.
We will push hard to ensure that all schools publicise the importance of the Give and Let Live campaign, and the importance of young people becoming donors through their curriculum and in other ways through their schools. We will do so informed by that research. As I have said, tomorrow I will be talking to Adrian Sudbury’s parents about how we can proceed with the campaign even after his death.
There were representatives from all political parties on the march the other week. I was pleased to be there, and to meet my hon. Friend's constituents and others as part of that march. It is very important that we reaffirm our commitment, goals and targets to halve child poverty—then double that—by the end of the next decade. The measures in the Budget that were introduced in spring this year will take hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. The thing that concerns me is that the money that is needed to pay for the measures to reduce child poverty were all opposed by the Conservative party.
I do not think that it is, but, as I have said, the Schools Minister has written today to all colleges throughout the country. An issue arose in August in that the contractor was unable to meet the demand at that time because of its IT processing and calls to its helpline. There has been active work by the contractor and the Learning and Skills Council to get those matters under control, which is being achieved. It is important that those problems are scrutinised and I was pleased that the Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families announced that it is planning to consider them. It is important that we learn lessons. We regret what has happened but it has fundamentally been a failure of the contractor and its IT systems.
I have met the hon. Gentleman and debated that issue with him on more than one occasion. He knows that our priority is to ensure that all children, including his constituents in Colchester, get the education that they need in order to prosper. Frankly, the results in some of the schools in Colchester are not good enough. We will do whatever it takes, including establishing academies if that is what is appropriate, working with the county council, to ensure that the young people whom he represents get a high-quality education.
Naturally, I am happy to talk to my hon. Friend about the capital bid. We have been working on the primary capital programme in recent months to ensure that primary schools start to benefit from the sort of investment that we are seeing across our secondary school programme. We were delighted in September to be able to open 130 brand-new schools, some of which were primary schools, but I will be happy to meet my hon. Friend to see whether more needs to be done in his constituency.
In the Westminster Hall debate on Thursday on testing, the Schools Minister indicated that in 2010 key stage 2 and key stage 3 tests may not go ahead in their existing form. Is that also the view of the Secretary of State?
I made it clear in my statement to the House back in July that the principle of externally marked national tests was very important and that it would be completely retrograde to go back to the old pre-test days when there was not proper information for parents on the performance of either their child or their primary school, but I said that the current system is not set in stone and that we were studying very carefully the Children, Schools and Families Committee report on testing and assessment, which we have been doing over the summer.
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of having home access to a computer. Currently, there are about 1 million children who have no access to a computer in the home, and they are disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds, which is reinforcing the attainment gaps. It is a great pity that the Scottish Executive have not yet followed our excellent example, and if they do not do so, I am sure that the voters of Glenrothes will take that into account on 6 November.
More than 90,000 students are still waiting to receive their education maintenance allowance. I listened very carefully to what the Secretary of State has said during this Question Time, but Liberata, the company to which the Secretary of State awarded the £75 million contract, had a well known poor track record, just like the company the Government contracted to administer the standard assessment tests; the Financial Services Authority described Liberata’s record as reckless. Are not those 92,000 students owed an apology from the Secretary of State, and will he this afternoon commit the Government to an independent inquiry so that we can find out, yet again, what went wrong with the way in which his Department is administering its responsibilities?
The company is a contractor to the Learning and Skills Council, so their relationship is a matter for them, but I am pleased, after the initial problems with the IT system and the helpline to which the Secretary of State referred, that the contractor has been able to apply resources so that the processing backlog, for example, has now decreased from 147,000 on 1 October to 111,000; that is making very significant progress in eating into what is a highly regrettable problem. The LSC, as the responsible agency, has apologised, and we welcome scrutiny of this, which is why we welcome the Select Committee’s inquiry.
I am very happy to congratulate the head of Westfield primary school in my hon. Friend’s constituency, and to mark the fact that he is the Yorkshire teacher of the year, and to regret only that the national teacher of the year did not come from Yorkshire—although I met the excellent teacher from Bath who won that award, and she was also a truly inspirational leader. We are doing everything we can through pay, but also through our new master’s qualification and the expansion of Teach First, to encourage more of the best graduates to come into the teaching profession and also then to rise to headship. We will do everything we can, including through pay and incentives, to make sure that people such as my hon. Friend’s constituent continue to do a great job for the children of our country.
These are obviously difficult times, but it will be crucial to ensure that the investment in our children’s future—in our schools and our children’s centres—is properly protected. However, given that it is not the Labour party that is proposing to cut the Sure Start programme, the best way for us to ensure that those cuts do not happen is to do everything that we can to prevent the election of a Conservative Government, and that is what we will do.
I am very happy to meet a delegation. I reassure the hon. Gentleman that the Ministry of Justice and myself have ensured that the regulations will not have those unintended consequences. Also, the Lamb review is considering how we can support parents of children with a special educational need more effectively in future. As well as a meeting with myself, I will organise for the hon. Gentleman and his constituents a meeting with Brian Lamb to discuss the work of his inquiry.