Contribution
I am grateful to be called to speak in the debate. It has been an honour to be a member of the Bill Committee. Over many days, we considered the Bill in detail, providing line-by-line scrutiny. Today, there are many amendments before us, many of which I support, and there are important issues to discuss, including elective home education. My right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) made some excellent points, and the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) also made important points.
It is important that we discuss the breakfast club provision. In principle, schools providing breakfast to children is a good thing—why not?—but as we get closer to implementation, colleagues on the Labour Benches may find themselves getting more mail from headteachers in their constituencies, noting that the Government say that the pilot scheme will save parents £450 per child, but the amount of money that the Government are giving to schools goes down as low as £114 per child. That is clearly quite a gap for schools to make up, and we will see how they intend to do that.
We had some good debates on uniform in Committee. I gently say to Labour colleagues that if they think the changes in uniform will automatically result in the cost of sending children to school going down—because everybody will go to Asda and get unbranded clothing, so there will be no pester power or fashion competitions when it comes to sportswear, for example—next time they do a school visit, they should go to a PE lesson and look down at the children’s feet. If they cannot make it to a PE lesson, just wait for the end of the school day, stay at the school gate and look at the children’s bags. It is not automatically the case that not having uniform items for sport, for example, makes things cheaper. I also hope that at some point during the passage of this legislation, the Government will get rid of the bizarre anomaly by which they say it is all right to have a school tie as an additional logoed or branded item in a secondary school, but not in a primary school, for some reason.
There are also important new clauses for us to consider—on free school meal auto-enrolment, for example. We had that discussion this morning in Westminster Hall with the Minister for early education, the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan). Historically, there have been barriers to auto-enrolment for free school meals to do with IT systems and the legal basis for such a measure. The IT system issues are melting away as technology improves, and I hope that the Government will look at that seriously.
If I were to comment on every clause with which I have an issue, or every amendment on which I have an opinion, I would stretch even your famed patience, Madam Deputy Speaker. Instead, I propose taking a step back. What we are debating is more than just the 84 pages of parts 2 and 3 of the Bill, or the 62 pages of amendments. This is really about the soul and direction of education in England. As other colleagues have mentioned, this new Government have a very solid base on which to build when it comes to attainment in England; we have the best primary school readers in the western world—yes, that bears repeating. Under the last Government, at secondary school, we went from 27th to 11th in mathematics, and from 25th to 13th in reading. Children on free school meals became 50% more likely to go to university. That is the record of the last 14 years. It is not the record of the 13 years before that, when we went down the international comparison tables.
There were stand-out reformers in new Labour, and I pay tribute to them, starting with Sir Tony Blair and his famous epizeuxis, “Education, education, education.” There was also the noble Lord Blunkett, Lord Adonis and others, but they were always swimming against the tide from the left of politics and the Labour party to push through reforms. We should not exaggerate how much was achieved by the end of the last Labour Government. There were a couple of hundred academies, as opposed to many thousands today.
What happened between 2010 and 2024 was not all about academies—far from it. It was really about brilliant teachers—that is always where it starts and finishes in education—in an ecosystem that valued high standards and high quality. Crucially, it was about the combination of autonomy and accountability for schools, a knowledge-rich curriculum, and proven methods, such as synthetic phonics and maths mastery. It was about schools learning from each other, both in the hub-and-spoke network across the country and in academy trusts, which became the primary vehicle for school improvement.
That improvement also needed diversity and parental choice, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness, who is on my left—spatially—pointed out. That starts with clear information and knowing how children are doing at school. There was a time, for many decades in this country—going back way before the new Labour reforms, by the way—when nobody knew how many children were just being let down by schools. We took that provision of clear information further, of course—as did the Blair reforms—with clear Ofsted judgments that anybody could access readily, but also much longer judgments that could be read by anybody who could read.
We do not talk nearly enough about Progress 8—it is so much better than the measures that we used to have—either on raw GCSE attainment or the contextual value-added measures of the Labour years. We also knew that if we were to have choice, there needed to be spare capacity in the system. Remarkably, in spite of the fact that there was a known demographic need, in the years up to 2010, the previous Labour Government cut school places by a six-figure number; we added 1.2 million more. We also made the diversity of academies and free schools happen, and welcomed it.