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21st Century Schools

May I take this opportunity to welcome you, Mr. Speaker, to your position and congratulate you on your elevation? Over the past 12 years, school standards have risen significantly in our country, and our education system has changed beyond recognition. The number of secondary schools with at least 30 per cent. of pupils failing to achieve five good GCSEs, including English and maths, has fallen from over half in 1997 to just one in seven schools today. We now have more than 40,000 more teachers, backed up by more than 200,000 more support staff. We now also have 200 national leaders of education, compared with none in 1997. Our best state schools now match the best schools in the private sector and anywhere in the world. The reason is that we have rebuilt the school system on a foundation of sustained record investment, matched by tough accountability. That is why we can now go further and transform our school system to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Our country faces an economic imperative, because every young person now needs skills and qualifications to succeed, and a moral imperative, because every child and young person has potential and can do well with the right help and support. It is to meet those twin imperatives that I am today publishing our 21st century schools White Paper, based on new guarantees for pupils and parents; a significant devolution of power and responsibility to our school leaders, matched by strengthened school accountability; and an uncompromising approach to school improvement, because we want every child to succeed and we will never give up on any child. First, we will now legislate for our pupil guarantee, to ensure: that all young people get a broad and balanced curriculum and high-quality qualifications, whether their strengths are practical, academic or both; that every secondary pupil has a personal tutor; that all pupils get five hours of PE and sport every week and access to cultural activities; that gifted and talented pupils get written confirmation of the extra challenge and support that they will receive; that all pupils with additional needs get extra help, with 4,000 extra dyslexia teachers; and that all pupils in years 3 to 6 who are falling behind in English or maths get one-to-one tuition to help them to get back on track. We will now extend the offer of one-to-one or small-group tuition to all pupils at the start of secondary school who were behind at the end of primary school. Following the report of the expert group on assessment, we will now introduce a new progress check at the end of year 7, so that parents can be confident that their child has made up the lost ground. Our new parents' guarantee will ensure that all parents get regular online information about their child's progress, behaviour and attendance. It will also ensure access to their child's personal tutor and fair school admissions in line with the admissions code, as well as ensuring that parents' views will be listened to and reported in the school report card, so that all parents know what other parents think when choosing a school. Where parents are unhappy with the choice of schools on offer to them, local authorities will have to listen to and respond to their concerns, based on an annual survey of parents. Because all parents want their children to learn at an orderly school, where they are safe from bullying and lessons are not disrupted by bad behaviour, we will now legislate to strengthen home-school agreements, so that all pupils and parents will accept the school's rules when they apply for a school place and will be expected to sign up to renew their commitment every year; schools will have stronger powers to enforce discipline through intensive support, parenting contracts and parenting orders; and parents will have the right to complain and expect action if schools fail to act to enforce the home-school agreement. Building on the success of the literacy and numeracy hours of the national strategies, which will continue in all schools, with Ofsted continuing to inspect them as now, we will devolve power and funding to school leaders to decide, with ring-fenced funding, what support they need, school by school, to drive up standards further. We will also ensure that schools can get the support that they need from other services through children's trust boards and encourage multi-agency teams based in schools. The new chair of our independent bureaucracy watchdog will review any unnecessary obstacles that get in the way of delivery. Building on the success of our national leaders in education and academies programmes, we will now act so that our best head teachers can run more than one school, with better pay for executive heads. We will accredit high-performing schools, colleges and universities to run chains of schools in not-for-profit accredited schools groups, with the first providers up and running by January. Already nine schools, one multi-academy sponsor, four colleges and four universities, including today Nottingham university, have come forward, and I am today setting aside funds over the next years to support their growth. We will match this transformation in school leadership with a transformation in school accountability. School league tables are easy to read, but because they present a narrow view of performance, based solely on the attainment of the average pupil, they cannot provide the full picture that parents need. Our new school report card will include full information on school attainment, but will go beyond that. It will set out clearly for parents how the school is improving standards and how well it is helping those pupils who fall behind to catch up and stretching the most able. The school report card will also report on discipline, attendance, sport, healthy eating and partnership working, and set out what parents and pupils think of the school. We will begin pilots of our school report card this September, but although we will consult further, I am now convinced that if parents, newspapers and websites are to make fair, clear and easy-to-understand comparisons between schools, our school report card will need to include a single, overall grade. As a world-class schools system needs a world-class work force, we are making teaching a masters-level profession, and we will now introduce a new licence to teach, similar to that used by other high-status professionals such as doctors and lawyers. Teachers will need to keep their practice up to date to renew their licence, and they will be given a new entitlement for continued professional development. We will start with newly qualified teachers beginning their training this September, those returning to teaching from September 2010 and all supply teachers shortly afterwards. We will make governing bodies slimmer and more highly skilled, and require all chairs to undergo specific training. The primary responsibility for school improvement lies with head teachers and governing bodies, including their chairs, but where progress is too slow and performance does not improve, local authorities have a responsibility to act. Since we set out our national challenge and our coasting schools challenge, local authorities have drawn up improvement plans and we have already announced 55 new academies and 27 national challenge trusts. Today, I am giving the go-ahead to two new academies, in Halton and in Redcar and Cleveland, and confirming funding agreements for two further academies in Nottingham and Hertfordshire—all replacing national challenge schools. Some argue that where underperformance is entrenched, where locally led change is not working and where excuses are being made, the right approach is to stand back, to let schools wither and slowly decline, and to allow the children and young people in those schools to pay the price. I disagree. I believe that the Government have a responsibility to step in and demand improvement. I will not shirk that responsibility. Following Ofsted's December 2008 assessment of Milton Keynes, which found children's services there to be inadequate, with serious weaknesses in secondary school attainment and improvement, we commissioned an independent performance review. The review concluded that, despite some progress, urgent improvement was still required. The Children's Minister has today written to the council in Milton Keynes, directing it under section 497A of the Education Act 1996 immediately to appoint Mr. Peter Kemp to chair an independent improvement board that will report directly to Ministers, and to submit and agree an improvement plan. The Schools Minister and I are concerned about the rate of progress in Leicester, where we issued an improvement notice last June. So I am today asking Sir Mike Tomlinson, the chair of our national challenge expert advisers, to provide us with a progress report in September. On the basis of his report on Leicester and of this summer's results, we will consider whether further action is needed. I am also asking our expert advisers today to work with Blackpool and Gloucestershire—areas that need to make more progress—to identify what more needs to be done to deliver the national challenge and to report back to me on progress in September. If this year's exam results reveal serious weaknesses in those areas, or in any other area of the country, I will do whatever it takes to secure the progress of children and young people. With this White Paper, we match continued investment with reform and higher expectations, so that we can meet the economic imperative by ensuring that every young person gets the qualifications they need, and so that we can meet our moral imperative by ensuring that every child can succeed, whatever barriers they face. I commend this statement to the House.