Educational Attainment: Yorkshire and the Humber — House of Commons, 2016-04-18
Topic: Education
Jo Cox (Labour, Centre-left): I beg to move, That this House notes that Yorkshire and the Humber was the lowest ranked region in England in 2013-14 for educational attainment; further notes that the January 2016 report from the Social Market Foundation entitled Educational Inequality in England and Wales found that geographical inequality was the most important factor in determining students’ educational attainment; and calls on the Government to take action to address the underlying causes of these inequalities as a matter of urgency and to set out the steps it is taking to ensure that children in Yorkshire and the Humber are equally likely to achieve good school qualifications as children in London First, may I thank the Members who made this debate possible this evening? For too long, attention has focused narrowly on socioeconomic inequality in determining academic achievement. We now know, however, that it is not just the relative wealth of parents that holds back the potential of our children—it is also where they live. New research in January by the Social Market Foundation found marked disparities in GCSE performance between the regions, with more than 70% of pupils in London achieving five good GCSEs compared with just 63% in Yorkshire and the Humber. These regional differences in attainment are already apparent by the end of primary school, and they are evident even when we account for other factors such as ethnicity and income. Furthermore, if we compare the performance of 11-year-olds born in 2000 with those born in 1970, it is clear that where someone is born has become a more powerful predictive factor of their performance at school than any other. Yorkshire and the Humber are a stark example of that. Tragically for our children, the region has gone from fifth lowest achieving in the 1970s to the worst in England today, with nearly a quarter of pupils attending schools that are rated less than good. That is despite the tireless effort, dedication and commitment of the headteachers, staff, parents and children across our great region As schools across Yorkshire and the Humber struggled, in London, with the targeted support and investment of the London Challenge, attainment surged. Indeed, according to the Government’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, London and the south are now pulling away from the rest of the country. This disparity is a disgrace, and education has become a postcode lottery. After 30 years of neglect and a lack of focus from Government, we now live in a country where a child in some regions has less chance of reaching their potential than one born in London. As London powers ahead in educational attainment, children in the so-called northern powerhouse are falling behind There is of course no silver bullet to improve educational attainment in our region overnight, but all the international evidence tells us that the key to a successful education system is the quality of its teachers. Evidence from the Sutton Trust and the London School of Economics shows that if we were to raise the performance of the least effective teachers in our schools just to the national average, England would rank in the top five systems in the world for reading and mathematics. Yet instead of taking action to support the profession, the Government have presided over a shocking teaching crisis. For four years, they have missed their target for recruiting trainees. Between 2011 and 2014, the number of teachers leaving the profession increased by 11%, which means that one in 10 schools is having to resort to using unqualified staff in the classroom. Instead of ensuring that every classroom has a world-class teacher, as Labour promised to deliver in its last manifesto, this Government remain obsessed with relentless tinkering of the curriculum and never-ending structural upheaval. As one of my local headteachers said to me last Friday: "It is time to stop beating teachers and start giving us the support we need to do our job." The evidence is now so compelling about this gulf in regional attainment and the crippling impact it has on individuals, communities and the economy that it is time for a revolution in how we tackle the problem.