I have changed my speech; I have rewritten it while listening to the debate. I was going to talk about the free school bid in Bristol and my hope that the local council would give parents what they wanted: an all-through school. I was also going to make a plea to the Front-Bench team to consider my idea for a trigger for a special needs assessment after a certain number of exclusions to see whether something was wrong with the original assessment. However, I am not going to talk about any of that, because I want to address something else which has been at the heart of the debate: appearance versus reality.
The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) talked about ideology and appearance and the importance of evidence, and I could not agree more with him. I know that Opposition Members are concerned about social mobility, as are Government Members, and I saw their bleak faces when the Secretary of State illustrated the awful situation facing children on free school meals and their lack of opportunity in comparison with their richer counterparts. I know that they are concerned, so we must ask how we deal with that.
In asking that question, we cannot shy away from things that might not be ideologically to our liking. International league tables are so important, because there is a tendency to get caught up in a self-referential bubble of success, of exam results getting ever better. Our young people always work hard, and I believe that the cohort of young people in the country today is every bit as good as that in the 1950s, but that is not the point. The point is this: what is the objective reality of the qualifications that we are offering those young people? We must look at those measures to work out what is going on and then what we can do about it.
I will re-rehearse the statistics. I understand that statistics always have wriggle room, but I do not think that Members can argue with the general thrust of the statistics from the OECD programme for international student assessment. They show that the UK has moved from fourth to 16th in science; from seventh to 25th in literacy; and from eighth to 28th in maths. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) for his brilliant breakdown of those figures and their background. The worst thing about that is that it is the poorest who suffer, and we have to look at why that is so. That is why the idea of an English baccalaureate is so interesting and crucial. The fact of the matter is that the poorest suffer in the curriculum. The evidence is overwhelming that those who go to state schools in deprived areas do not have access to the kind of academic subjects available to those who go to state schools in better-off areas or to private schools. That is because struggling schools have perverse incentives to put their pupils through qualifications that lead to equivalents so that they look good in the league tables. We cannot blame them for that, because it is obvious why they do it. The English baccalaureate is an attempt to offset that perverse incentive.
Education Bill
Proceeding contribution from
Charlotte Leslie
(Conservative)
in the House of Commons on Tuesday, 8 February 2011.
It occurred during Debate on bills on Education Bill.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
523 c226-7 
Session
2010-12
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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2023-12-15 14:34:49 +0000
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