Education, Skills and Training — House of Commons, 2016-05-25
Topic: Education
Lucy Maria Powell (Labour, Centre-left): I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend’s excellent point. The shortage of teachers is the biggest issue facing education today, and the Government have only recently begun to acknowledge that there is a problem Cuts to further education will make the Government’s agenda more difficult. As the Chair of the Science and Technology Committee pointed out, STEM subjects are critical if we are to compete in the digital, automated new economy. Yet the Government are taking us backwards, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood) said in her excellent speech. They must heed warnings from the OECD that the Secretary of State’s new maths curriculum is "a mile wide and an inch deep" and that it will fail to equip young people with the critical and conceptual thinking required to succeed in the new economy. My former schoolmate in Manchester, my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), gave an inspiring speech on the future skills needed for the new economy One thread of the new legislative programme that the Government just about managed to muster was that of their so-called life chances agenda. Although I and everyone in the House share these aims, the record and reality of this Government fly in the face of that agenda. It is almost laughable. Yes, let us support social workers by lifting the quality and the status of the profession, and let us enable quicker adoption for those who want to give vulnerable children a great start in life. We also welcome the care leavers covenant. But let us not kid ourselves that the context has not got much, much harder. Huge cuts to children’s services, the decimation of Sure Start centres and family support services, reduced tax credits, increased housing and childcare costs and a growth in insecure work have put many more families in crisis or on the brink, as has the Government’s failure to tackle child poverty, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) pointed out. It is no wonder that the attainment gap between the disadvantaged and their peers has widened under this Government. That is the measure of the Government’s life chances record As we have heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) and for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq), and others, scrapping maintenance grants and increasing tuition fees will not help the life chances of the disadvantaged either. The failure to prioritise adult skills and 16-to-19 education will not help people to better themselves, as we heard in a very personal speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner). Ministers need a reality check if they think that tired rhetoric will turn into results. That point was brilliantly made by my hon. Friend—my good friend—the Member for Darlington (Jenny Chapman) The biggest tragedy lies in the measures that the Government could have proposed for this Session. They could have had widespread support for raising life chances. They could have had real powers for local authorities on school place planning, incentives for teacher recruitment and retention, and a childcare strategy focused on quality or real measures to raise standards in our schools. The Secretary of State would have had strong support if, in her discussions with the Chancellor, she had focused on ensuring that schools were properly resourced rather than on forced academisation. The Secretary of State talks of fair funding, which we support, but she does so in the context of real and significant school budget cuts. If we talk to any headteacher, they will tell us what they are cutting: extracurricular activities, one-to-one tuition, teaching assistants, life-expanding school trips and visits and so on—all the things that should be at the heart of a life chances agenda. I recently visited a school in my constituency, a primary school in Moss Side, that had put on a Shakespeare play at the local theatre, but the headteacher will not be able to arrange that next year because of the budget cuts she faces.