Education Bill

One of the greatest failures of the previous Government, who started with great hope, was their failure to improve the performance of schools. We know that the performance of schools in international league tables, which is measured by the programme for international student assessment, fell from where we—the Conservatives—left it in 1997. The Labour Government promised that their three main priorities in government would be ““Education, education, education””. The aim was clearly for schools' performance to get better and, more importantly, for schools to get better, but the problem was that performance was getting worse all the time. While Ministers here insisted all was well, every external audit proved the opposite. Let me illustrate how well we were doing under Sir John Major's Government and how much worse the statistics were by 2009. The first PISA assessment took place in 2000, three years after the Labour Government had won power. In it, the UK ranked seventh in reading, eighth in maths and fourth in science. In the 2009 assessment, the UK ranked 25th in reading, 28th in maths and 16th in science. I confess that there are many ways to read the statistics, as the PISA readings were collected over a long period and any one set of results used in the tables may have been taken over a period of five years, but the striking thing is that the United Kingdom was, using the average of the three results, in sixth place in 2000, and yet we were in 23rd place in 2009. Opposition Members may argue about the finer details, but to any objective observer it is obvious that the UK has tumbled down the international league tables. Canada, New Zealand and Australia now occupy much higher positions, around sixth, seventh and ninth. Their positions are statistically significant above the OECD average. I would expect the United Kingdom to occupy a similar position, but we are ranked 23rd. We are only around average on the majority of indicators, although we are a little above average for science. The OECD says that average performance needs to be judged against a range of socio-economic indicators, most of which give the UK an advantage. The problem is not the money that we spend on education—only seven OECD countries spend more per student than the UK—but the way in which it is being spent. The best performing countries are China, South Korea, Finland and Hong Kong. The UK is now below Ireland and the United States, which, to make it clear, are pretty average. To be fair, the problem was clear to us even in the 1980s, when from a good position we were starting to get worse. We needed to slow down that slide in performance, and there were two ways in which schools could improve. One was greater independence for all schools, which was called local management and which was reasonably successful in many areas. The other was giving schools greater freedom—grant-maintained schools. Seventeen schools became grant maintained in the first group in 1989. In 1994, 554 secondary schools—about 15% of the total—enjoyed the freedom to make the right decisions for their school and their pupils that grant-maintained status gave them. The results in those schools were well above average, and grant-maintained status did what needed to be done for individual schools in individual areas. Finally, I draw hon. Members' attention to small schools, which have also benefited from having more freedom. The smallest grant-maintained school was Kettleshulme in Cheshire: it had 12 pupils, but the number grew to 19 by the time it was grant-maintained. It was already a successful small school and after it achieved grant-maintained status it became very successful. The head teacher at that time was Allan Ramsdale-Capper, who is now one of my constituents. Let me take this opportunity to pay tribute to him and to all the other headmasters and mistresses of grant-maintained schools who have done so much to improve the education of their pupils. Large schools are often very good, but I want to make it clear that small ones are equally successful and that their position does not need a huge influx of money to keep them going. I believe that decisions are best made by parents, head teachers and governors. The OECD comments that"““the international achievement gap is imposing on the United Kingdom economy an invisible but recurring economic loss””." That needs to be addressed urgently. When grant-maintained schools were created in the '90s, they were successful, and it was the freedoms they were given that made them so. I should like to say to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education that I am sure that free schools and academies will be successes given time, although they will not need that much time. They will be our successes and, most importantly, the successes of parents up and down the country.