Social Mobility Commission: State of the Nation Report — House of Commons, 2017-03-23
Topic: Education
Nicholas William Peter Clegg (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): The hon. Gentleman is entirely right. I have gone on a bit of a journey on this: I have always had a somewhat kneejerk liberal reaction of slight squeamishness and reticence about the idea of politicians, the Government, Whitehall and public policy experts seeking to tweak or improve how parents choose to raise their children, which I intuitively think is no business of politicians, but I agree with the evidence. Much like the right hon. Member for Loughborough, I agree on almost nothing with the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) on many issues, but on this I think that he led the pack in saying that this is something that politicians need to grapple with, although we need to do so with care The first page of the summary of the report recommends that the Government should introduce "a new parental support package, including a guarantee of help if a child’s 2 to 2½-year check shows that they are falling behind." I entirely agree with that. Public policy is inching towards greater involvement in an area that many folk have previously felt should be kept immune from such interventions I want to make one more point about early years that I am sure everyone here is aware of. It is unglamorous, rather fiddly and difficult to fix, but it is acutely important: it is the quality of early years provision. The pay and status of early years teachers are real problems. We do not have enough men going into early years teaching. Pay is very low, and there is no qualified teacher status. As the Government seek to expand the entitlements for three and four-year-olds, it is terrifically important that quantity does not come at the further cost of diminished quality. If the Minister can tell us how the quality, status and—in the long run—pay of early years teachers can be improved, so much the better I also want to talk about money. In those glory days back in 2010, I intervened aggressively in internal discussions when we had to announce what was in many ways the fateful comprehensive spending review setting out all sorts of unappetising cuts. I insisted that the per-pupil and indexed core budgets for schools should be protected. Those budgets needed to be protected in terms of prices and of pupil numbers, not least so that we could then add on the pupil premium in a meaningful way and ensure that it added genuine value I look now at the trouble the Government are getting into, and yes, a lot of this is complex. A lot is to do with the higgledy-piggledy, unjust, idiosyncratic way in which schools have had their budgets allocated to them over many decades, but some of it is pretty obvious. The Government simply cannot cancel the £600 million education services grant, as they did shortly after the 2015 general election, while protecting the per-pupil allocation only in cash terms and not in real terms and while diverting hundreds of millions of pounds to free schools—many of which are doing a great job, but frankly, far too many of which have been opened in places where there is no desperate need for extra places—and possibly compounding that error by spending hundreds of millions of extra pounds on new selective schools, and then ask schools to shoulder their own newly increased national insurance and pension contributions and, in some cases, apprenticeship levy costs, and, on top of that, introduce a national funding formula with no additional money to make that work. If they do all that, they are bound to get into terrible trouble I do not say this in a spirit of recrimination, but the Government should not be surprised that they are encountering huge resistance to these plans across the House and huge disquiet from parents, headteachers and governors up and down the country. There is a limit to how much they can keep expecting improved performance from a schools system that is being put under those multiple and entirely self-inflicted financial stresses and strains I know a little bit about this because, in the coalition Government, we looked exhaustively at the case for introducing a national funding formula. In principle, the case for doing so is impeccable; of course it is. The current situation is woefully unfair. There are many non-metropolitan schools, smaller rural schools, suburban schools, schools in the shires and so on that have received far less funding over a long period. However, the problem is that if we introduce a national funding formula in a way that does not raise the overall financial tide for all schools, what happens is exactly what is happening now. The schools that think they are going to gain pots and pots of money are disappointed at how little they gain, and those that are going to lose will lose an unacceptably large amount of money. No one is pleased The one issue in this debate on which I disagree with the right hon. Member for Loughborough is that, if I understand it correctly, her solution is to adjust the deprivation calculation buried within all the numbers in the national funding formula, which—all credit to the Minister and his Department—is a bona fide attempt to protect the funding to the poorest. The right hon. Lady will no doubt correct me if I am wrong, but one way to try to square the circle is to take a little money from the deprivation allocation and raise the floor or the minimum amount—