argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Jeremy John Elton Lefroy (Conservative, Centre-right): I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. He is absolutely right. Some of us here could do with training in the use of social media, because some of the things that colleagues on both sides of the House—I will not mention any names—tweet or say on social media are, frankly, outrageous and do not improve the quality of debate, but that is just my personal opinion. I would like us all to be a bit more positive. If teachers want to look for training, they should not look to the House of Commons to learn how to use social media unless we improve our own standards. I would welcome the approach he suggests, and perhaps the Minister for Apprenticeships and Skills could address that in her response Funding for 16 to 19 education has been particularly squeezed over the past few years. My right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), the Chair of the Select Committee on Education, said in a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer a couple of months ago: "It cannot be right that a funding ‘dip’ exists for students between the ages of 16 and 18, only to rise again in higher education. Successive governments have failed to give further education the recognition it deserves for the role" it plays in addressing our problem with productivity—or words to that effect. He is absolutely right. Young people of 16 to 19 are moving into the next stage of their life, and it is vital that there is no let-up in preparing them for an incredibly challenging, demanding world. The world is full of opportunities, but people need to have the skills and the background to take up those opportunities.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Jeremy John Elton Lefroy (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. Clearly, some of my constituents go to schools in his constituency and vice versa. I have experience of the issues faced by rural schools, including small ones, but he has much more experience of that than I do.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Jeremy John Elton Lefroy (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Lady makes it clear that it is happening elsewhere in the country I want to end on an optimistic and positive note. Again, I wish to thank all those involved in education across the country for all they do, day in, day out. They do it with great spirit and humour and sensitivity. They invest in the future of our young people, who are the future of this country.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Neil John O'Brien (Conservative, Centre-right): I will always be grateful to the hon. Gentleman for opening doors for me. He did ask who I worked for, and I was pleased to say, "The people of Harborough, Oadby and Wigston." When MPs start to look younger, perhaps it is a sign that one is becoming more mature and statesmanlike. As I said, school funding is going up in Leicestershire, and going up twice as fast as the national average, which is hugely welcome The early years agenda has not been neglected. We will have spent a record £6 billion by 2020, covering: the 30 hours free offer, which will be very helpful to many people, the tax-free childcare and, particularly, that extra free childcare for disadvantaged two-year-olds In addition to those headline reforms, there have been many other less visible, but hugely important improvements in our schools. One of them has already been mentioned. I believe that it was an important and positive reform when the Government ended the right of appeal against exclusion because that helped to protect teachers and helps those pupils who want to get on and learn from disruption and violence. I have every sympathy with Labour Members who say that we must improve pupil referral units. I started my contribution by talking about bullying and order in our schools. However, I hope that the Government will not backslide and do anything to weaken schools’ ability to maintain order I had a lot of sympathy with some of the comments of the hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Vicky Foxcroft) and of my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy). We must improve provision for those who could be in a pipeline towards prison. I have visited prisons and worked with the homeless. It is absolutely true that some of these people’s careers begin with school exclusion. However, this must not come at the expense of increasing disorder for those who want to learn. Young people do have agency and need to behave responsibly. I am afraid that I do not agree with the idea of a zero exclusions policy, or taking away schools’ freedom to exclude altogether Another important reform that is perhaps less visible—
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Neil John O'Brien (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the hon. Lady for clarifying that point. My concern is that the goal will quickly lead to a number of policies, some of which she has just alluded to, which bog down schools’ ability to act quickly on disorder and which gum up the works. I sense that that is something about which we disagree but I take her point One positive development in recent years has been the growth of low-stakes testing—things such as year 1 phonics screening, which enables us to spot problems early and nip them in the bud. That is one other reason that this country’s performance on primary school reading in the international tables is going up. We are bringing in those kinds of tests. Likewise, the proportion of pupils in the new and improved SATS who are achieving the expected standard in reading, writing and maths has gone up from 54% in 2016 to 64% now. That is a really good example of our teachers and our pupils rising to the challenge when a lot of opponents said that that would be too hard for kids to do Another positive development has been ending grade inflation and restoring rigour to our exams. I do not mean to make a partisan point here, but the number of pupils getting three As at A-level doubled under Labour. I do not think that anybody could credibly claim that that was all down to real improvement. There was grade inflation and a drift away from the most hard academic subjects, with the proportion of pupils doing the EBacc at GCSE falling from half in 1997 to 22% in 2010. Therefore, we had a drift away from the most difficult academic subjects and a move towards things such as the computer driving licence, which, because of comparative tables, were scoring huge numbers of points in GCSE league tables, but in fact were not valuable qualifications. I do not think that the hon. Lady would agree with that approach.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Neil John O'Brien (Conservative, Centre-right): That was an important intervention from the hon. Lady. I do not agree that those subjects were chosen on ideological grounds. Funnily enough, when we look at the longitudinal earnings and outcomes data, those kind of hard sciences and subjects are the ones that are important gateways to the professions, which will lead to higher earnings. On her point about design and technology, if we were to look again at the subjects and include something else, that would be one of the first things that I would consider.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Luke Patrick Graham (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is making a comprehensive speech. He seems to be focusing a lot on England though. Obviously, this is the United Kingdom Parliament and improving educational standards is especially important in Scotland, where our international standards, particularly in maths and science, are falling. We are falling in the international tables, whereas other parts of the UK are rising. It would be interesting to hear—perhaps he will come on to this shortly—why he thinks that is and why Scotland is being left behind, while the rest of the UK is taking a step forward.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Neil John O'Brien (Conservative, Centre-right): I always look for points of agreement, but the hon. Gentleman is free to shout, "You were caught out", from a sedentary position. Let me reach over the heads of the chuntering Opposition Front Benchers to say I agree with the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle that we must have a good look at all proposals for different types of schools, where they are to be located, where the need is greatest and so on. However, I caution the hon. Lady against the attentions of Her Majesty’s Treasury, where I used to work, because there is always the temptation to say, "We don’t need any new schools. Experimentation is expensive, so let’s just push more people into low-performing schools and keep schools going that are not working." She will not be surprised to learn that I do not entirely agree with her point on this One of the most important changes in our school system is the growth of multi-academy trusts. Some people talk about them as chains, as if schools are supermarkets or part of the market economy, but I think of them as families of schools. I am grateful and glad that Robert Smyth Academy—a school in my constituency that had some problems because of the move from three tiers to two—is now part of a brilliantly high-performing multi-academy trust and has a new, amazing and incredibly dynamic headteacher. I am confident, because of the experience of replicating success, that that school will also be a success We have always had miracle schools, super-heads and flashes of inspiration in the school system, but one of the new and exciting things about multi-academy trusts is that those successes are now being replicated at scale. I hope that the Government will push a sort of industrial policy for schools. Let us get behind high-performing multi-academy trusts, think about their geographic distribution around the country and help the best chains to expand in areas of the north and midlands, which are lagging behind in school outcomes Of course, this debate goes beyond schools. FE and sixth-form colleges have already been mentioned. If it is acceptable to the House, while we have the education cognoscenti here, I would love to pay tribute to Dr Kevin Conway, who sadly died too young—[Interruption.] I am so sorry.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Neil John O'Brien (Conservative, Centre-right): I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman; he held the door open for me earlier this week, and has done so again verbally today Kevin Conway was a guy who turned around Greenhead College—the college I attended—in Huddersfield, which had been rather underperforming. He was a great and totally uncompromising individual who achieved amazing things in my sixth-form college and transformed the lives of generations of people who grew up in Huddersfield.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Luke Patrick Graham (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is making a fantastic point about great thinkers in education. Earlier this week, I went to a YouTube event where I was able to see the rapping teacher, who is now getting about 4 million hits a week on some of his online content, which is helping students across the United Kingdom and internationally to make progress and improve their grade results—something that I am sure my hon. Friend would welcome.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Neil John O'Brien (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to my hon. Friend for intervening in such a friendly way. The rapping teacher is clearly able to speak in whole finished paragraphs, while I am barely able to articulate a sentence I really just wanted to say that Kevin Conway was an inspiration to me and really did amazing things for the town of Huddersfield—the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) was briefly here a moment ago, but has had to go—through his uncompromising approach. He did not have an ideological approach; it was just an insistence on very high standards. Through that great work, he really did change the lives of a lot of people Let us move on from the debacle of my attempt to pay tribute to my old principal to a point of policy and boring stuff that I can talk about without welling up. When one visits technical colleges, one always sees the potential. I was in South Leicestershire College just the other day visiting the public services class—the wonderful young people who are going to go off and become firefighters and police officers The Government should look again at the whole issue of GCSE resits in FE colleges, because the move to FE and a more work-like environment—I particularly like apprenticeships, but FE is also an important part of the mix—is such an important part of the process for young people who perhaps did not get on with school. These people may have felt like it was not for them and that they were not achieving. The thought behind it was right—that everyone needs a basic grounding in English and maths—but I increasingly think that the GCSE is just not the right thing. Almost everybody who fails it a first time goes on to fail it a second time, and that is very discouraging for young people. It is not the right qualification to ask them to do. Instead, we should look at offering some kind of "maths and English for the citizen" type of qualification.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Neil John O'Brien (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to the hon. Lady, as she has managed to put the point that I was trying to make more clearly than I was able to Opposition Members and my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford have already touched on the issue of funding for sixth-form colleges. Clearly, there is a very odd shape of funding—there is this drop-off at sixth form. On the productivity in our schools and the bad consequences of that, I think sixth-form colleges are actually our most efficient type of school. They achieve the highest results, even though they do not benefit from the £1 billion a year internal transfer within schools as school sixth forms do. It is sort of obvious why they are so effective: instead of having an A-level class with two people in it, there are classes with 30 kids in them, like the classes in the college that I attended. If we changed funding for sixth-form colleges and that stage of education more generally, it would help to level the playing field, and I think we would see a lot more sixth-form colleges I have probably detained the House too long already, but if it is acceptable to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will mention two last things. We have already touched on the issue of smartphones and social media. There is so much potential to improve education. I know that the new Minister at the Department is passionate and is pushing the exciting things that are going on in edu-tech. But it also has the potential to disrupt and cause problems in our classrooms. I am a strong supporter of the idea already mentioned and the work that is going on in the Science and Technology Committee on the effect of smartphones and social media on young people’s mental health. I am a strong supporter of having a national campaign to limit and control the use of smartphones in class. There is an excellent London School of Economics study based on a randomised control trial that shows that there is a substantive increase in GCSE performance in schools that introduced a ban on smartphones in class. I agree with the Government that we should not have a one-size-fits-all national policy —I do not think we should do exactly what France has done—but I would love to see a national campaign to help schools to put in lockers and to adopt other policies to get smartphones out of the classroom, because they can be distracting in class and they are also sometimes distracting at home. Children arrive at school tired because they have been on a Snapchat streaks feature until 1 o’clock in the morning. There is lots of bad practice by our social media companies which are aiming to addict and to take up young people’s attention I think that I have covered all the things I wanted to cover in my speech. I am incredibly grateful to the various hon. Members who helped me to get through it.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Luke Patrick Graham (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Lady says that those protests were unprecedented, but they have also been happening in Glasgow, where the pay award for teachers and headteachers is seen as insufficient. This is not a particular problem in her part of the United Kingdom, but right across it.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Theresa Anne Villiers (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to take part in a debate on such an important issue and to follow the powerful speech made by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) I would like to start by praising the hard work of teachers, governors and support staff in schools in my constituency. I am deeply grateful for the work they do. As I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) agrees, we are very lucky in the borough of Barnet to have some of the best state schools in the country. I particularly commend Totteridge Academy, which I visited recently for its democracy day. I am always hugely impressed by the students I meet in schools in my constituency, including Totteridge Academy, which had an immensely successful democracy day, engaging students in a range of activities to encourage participation in politics I welcome the expansion of school places in Barnet as part of the Government’s delivery of around 800,000 more school places—the biggest expansion for well over 30 years. I very much agree that providing the best education for children and young people is a huge engine of social mobility. Great educational opportunities are essential if we are to give young people the chance to get on in life and make a success of their lives. A good education is crucial. That means that raising standards in education and improving schools are vital parts of delivering social justice and social mobility It is welcome that there are now so many more children—1.9 million—studying in good or outstanding schools than eight years ago, when the Conservatives returned to office. Under the last Labour Government, England slipped down the international league tables in reading, maths and science, but that trend has been reversed, as shown by a number of international benchmarks. For example, the progress in international reading literacy study shows that pupils in England are now outperforming their peers in many countries, including Canada, Australia and the United States.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Richard Michael John Ogilvie Graham (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend is making an important point about how crucial it is that there are opportunities for our young in schools, more and more of which are rated good or outstanding. Does she agree that that can happen in areas that are described as deprived? Robinswood Primary Academy, Tredworth Junior School, Finlay Community School and Coney Hill Community Primary School in my constituency are all great examples of outstanding primary schools in difficult areas. With the right leadership and the right support from Government, it can be done.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Theresa Anne Villiers (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend makes a strong point. One of the impressive aspects of the improvements in education over recent years is that so many of them have been seen in areas with high levels of deprivation. The improvement of schools in London is an important illustration of that, with schools supporting children from diverse backgrounds and, in some instances, very disadvantaged backgrounds. They have been some of the really striking success stories of recent years. As he says, it is absolutely possible, indeed essential, to ensure that improvements in schools and school standards deliver for those communities.
Improving Education Standards — House of Commons, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Theresa Anne Villiers (Conservative, Centre-right): There were aspects of the Labour Government’s approach to education with which I did not agree, but I agree that they did have some real success. That was at its most obvious in many of the London boroughs, so the hon. Lady makes a fair point about that project One of the main reasons for the improvement in school standards in recent years is the emphasis that the Conservatives have put on ensuring that children are taught to read using the most effective methods. Thanks to the hard work of teachers and the Government’s drive for phonics, the results of the phonics screening test introduced in 2012 have improved significantly As we have already heard in today’s debate, efforts have been made to tackle grade inflation. In the Blair-Brown years, employer and university confidence in the school exam system was eroded. The reforms made by this Government and their coalition predecessor to make GCSEs and A-levels tougher and more rigorous are bearing fruit. The exams are now more stretching for students, ensuring that they have a better grounding for further study or indeed for life in the workplace. I for one particularly welcome the increased focus on good spelling and grammar, which I think are important life skills for any young person The striking improvement in schools over recent years means that state schools are now beginning to catch up with the independent sector, as acknowledged in evidence cited by Professor Alan Smithers, director of the centre for education and employment research at the University of Buckingham. Even more importantly, the attainment gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and other students has closed by 10% since 2010 It is important to highlight that an effective way of improving standards in schools is to ensure that we have the best possible early years education. Delivering high-quality early years and pre-school education can play an incredibly positive role in improving educational standards in schools, but also in delivering social mobility and opportunity. Research demonstrates that if children fall behind in the early years, many simply never catch up. Their life chances can be permanently blighted by being held back at that early stage I would always urge Ministers to have a strong focus on helping parents access the highest-quality affordable early years education and support. The reformed early years foundation stage profile will have an important role to play in that. I hope the Minister will update the House on progress on that initiative when she sums up the debate.