I, too, congratulate hon. Members who have made their initial contributions in today’s debate. It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh), for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), and particularly for Norwich South (Clive Lewis). He and I between us have doubled Labour’s representation in the east—from not a lot to, sadly for us, not quite enough.
The Bill claims that schools should do better, and no one is going to disagree with that, but the real question is whether the Bill provides the best way to go about it. Representing an education city, where nearly 1,500 young people are attending schools rated as “less than good”, if one trusts that definition, I find that to be a question well worth asking.
The trouble is that the Bill does not address some of the obvious problems, such as inadequate funding. As a Cambridgeshire Member, I can hardly stand up today without pointing out the chronic long-term underfunding from which Cambridgeshire schools have suffered in comparison with other areas. It is worth pointing out that, partly as a consequence of foolish decisions made in the past by Conservative county councils, today’s young people should not be made to pay for the political errors of previous generations. As the Government consider the national funding formula, I urge them to create a long-term change that will correct this imbalance. The last Parliament saw some limited progress in that area, and produced a welcome, although relatively small, sum for Cambridge schools. This progress, however, will need to be improved on massively if we are to bridge the funding gap that has so weakened investment in schools for decades.
I would ask—I am not entirely sure that it will be achieved—for any changes made to be done in an equitable way across the country, rather than being just a further cash grab at other parts of the country that have already suffered and lost out heavily. I would ask, too, that any such funding changes do not reduce the minimum funding guarantee for the most disadvantaged schools, where such an impact would again mean the worst-off schools disproportionately bearing the brunt of Government meddling in education.
I suspect that that point will resonate with many of the people I meet in schools—the headteachers, teachers and support staff to whom I speak regularly. The problem with the Bill, as so many others have noted, is that further structural change is not what is needed to improve schools. What we need are good teachers, good leaders, good support staff and a whole team highly motivated, well rewarded and well regarded. Sadly, we are a long way from that. As we have heard, a record number of teachers left the profession last year, and, as a combined result of these incessant cuts, the attack on morale and exodus of over-worked teachers, even in a prosperous city such as Cambridge, 7% of the teaching work force is unqualified, and in some schools, it is double that number.