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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack), who always has something interesting to say in debates such as this—although both he and I often find ourselves addressing a half-empty Chamber on Thursdays. I shall concentrate on the education implications of the Budget. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor made it clear that we would continue to invest in education, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Skills described some of the effects of that this afternoon. It is a policy that the Government have espoused throughout their term in office, and their investment has produced spectacular results. Standards of literacy and numeracy have risen dramatically in our primary schools, and the key stage 3 strategy is improving results in secondary schools. More young people are obtaining five good GCSEs than ever before, and we ought to recognise and celebrate their achievements, because they are too often denigrated when the results are published. There are many hard-working young people who are achieving very good results. Nevertheless, as we all know, underachievement and inequality remain in the system. The Select Committee on Education and Skills has drawn attention to that in a number of reports. The way in which we tackle inequalities is crucial to education spending. There is still too wide a gap between our best schools and the schools that are struggling. It has been a scandal for many years that young people can leave school at 16 and be given no further education or training, and it was good to hear the Secretary of State commenting on how we propose to tackle that in the future. It is also true that a young person’s chances of proceeding to higher education are still overwhelmingly determined by the social class into which he or she is born. That inequity must give Ministers sleepless nights, but the social and economic consequences are also potentially catastrophic. We know—and we heard again this afternoon—that the number of unskilled jobs in the economy is set to decline, and that the number requiring higher-level skills will rise. If we do not tackle educational low achievement and underachievement, there is a risk that a section of our society will not be able to obtain jobs and that the gap between the haves and the have-nots will increase, with consequent damage to civic society. That is how high the stakes are in respect of education, because what is at stake is the kind of society that we produce, not only in economic terms but in a host of other areas as well. The Government have taken steps to tackle underachievement. There have been valuable initiatives such as those to do with children’s centres and extended schools, but many such initiatives attempt to tackle the problem through making changes to the structures of the school system, and I have concerns about how well that works, because I think that the jury is still out on a number of them. First, there is doubt about how well some of the initiatives gel with what the Government are trying to do in other areas—making schools the focus of their community, for example, or having extended schools. There is also an issue to do with dynamic leadership, which we talk about often in terms of education. That is important, but unless such dynamic leadership feeds through to improvements in teaching and learning—unless it is embedded in the system—when the leader moves on, the school might decline again. We should focus our education spending much more on developing the curriculum and improving teacher training. Those are the keys to improving education. The results of some of the initiatives that have been taken are difficult to interpret at this stage—and the evidence is sometimes contradictory. Ofsted has so far inspected only nine academies. My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) talked about Mossbourne community academy, and the more I have read about it the more it has become clear that it is a very good school—in fact, I learned more this afternoon about education in Hackney than I have for a long time. Of the nine academies inspected, overall effectiveness was judged to be good in three, satisfactory in five and inadequate in one. That shows that the performance of academies differs; some are very good, while others have not achieved good results. It is too early to say how this programme will work through.