Education and Local Services — House of Commons, 2017-06-27
Topic: Education
Lucy Claire Leigh (Frazer) (Conservative, Centre-right): I would like to start by congratulating our new colleagues on their outstanding maiden speeches, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for Aberdeen South (Ross Thomson) and for Ochil and South Perthshire (Luke Graham) During the six-week general election campaign, Members on both sides of the House will have had the opportunity to listen to thousands of people. We have all heard their disappointments, hopes and fears. I value the long conversations I have had with many people who provide our outstanding public services, including our nurses, policemen and teachers, and I wish to feed back their thoughts One issue that came up consistently was education. I think we must first acknowledge how far we have come in recent decades. I recently read, with some amusement, a Government report that my grandfather, who was a headmaster, had contributed to. It sought to tackle head-on the importance of education for women. It stated: "For girls, too, there is a group of interests relating to what many, perhaps most of them, would regard as their most important vocational concern, marriage. It is true that at the age of fourteen and fifteen, this may appear chiefly as preoccupation with personal appearance and boy friends, but many girls are ready to respond to work relating to wider aspects of homemaking and family life and the care and upbringing of children." We have come quite far since the 1960s, but there is further to go A significant priority must be a system in which every child has equal access to education, and that involves a system of fairer funding. That is why I am pleased that the Queen’s Speech included a commitment to fairer funding. It must mean that those schools that have historically been underfunded for years have their funding increased. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Jayawardena) has just said, funding is not the only mechanism to ensure future success. We need to ensure that we have enough teachers in training, especially in STEM subjects, and when they join the profession we need to ensure that they feel respected, supported and trusted. In an age when technology is so fast paced, would it not be brilliant if those STEM teachers were linked to businesses that are at the cutting edge of technological innovation in industry, and to businesses that ultimately might give jobs to the students they train I think that one way of doing that is staring us right in the face, because businesses are now paying the apprenticeship levy. For the first time, businesses will be actively required to think constructively about their role in training their workforce. The apprenticeship levy potentially goes further. It currently proposes that from next year 10% of the apprenticeship levy can go to a business’s supply chain, and what is the start of that supply chain, if not students and thus teachers? If businesses were allowed to use their 10% on supporting teacher training in STEM, that could forge important links between businesses and teaching. It could ensure that teachers had up-to-date knowledge of their sector and subject and were ready to relate that to the workplace. It would enable teachers to train without further increasing their student debt. Now is the time, if ever there was one, to properly engage businesses with learning, and innovation and technology with schools, and to rise to the challenge of how to help to build the next generation, because it is our future.