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Mr. Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op): My hon. Friend knows the impact that the four rigid pay bands have on schools in my constituency and, indeed, in his constituency. He mentioned the School Teachers Review Body, which has made some recommendations that are currently being consulted on. Those
 
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recommendations would introduce greater flexibility in allowing schools to respond to teacher shortages. What is the Government view on those recommendations, and will they take them up when the School Teachers Review Body reports in September?

Mr. Twigg: I thank my hon. Friend for making that point, which it would be most sensible for me to take up in my closing remarks. At this stage, I want to emphasise that it is important to ensure stability of funding in our schools. That has been a priority for the Department over the past year following the difficulties of 12 months ago. For the medium and longer term, we need to consider how schools can be in a position to recruit and retain the best possible teachers and other staff.

I am conscious of the time and will draw my remarks towards a close. In doing so, I want to refer to some of the programmes that are making a real difference in London. I particularly commend Teach First, which is not a DFES programme, although we partly funded it. That is a business-led programme that recruits some of the best graduates from universities across the country. It has cross-party support and support from all the head teacher associations and teacher unions. It seeks out graduates who would not normally go into teaching. They commit themselves to at least two years teaching in London, usually in the most challenging schools, and acquire qualified teacher status at the end of year one. Last September, the first cohort of Teach First graduates—179 of them—started in London schools, and the aim is to recruit 230 for September this year, prioritising challenging schools. That is the kind of exciting and innovative programme that I am pleased to support for the schools of London and that I believe to be very much in the spirit of the London challenge.

Finally, I want to focus on the need to ensure that we have a range of secondary schools in London that meet the real needs of the children and young people of our capital city. London now has 196 specialist schools—nearly half of its secondary schools—with a further 50 applying in the current round, the outcome of which is due to be announced later this week.

Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab): Does my hon. Friend recognise the huge success of Deptford Green school in my constituency? When I first became an MP, parents begged me to get their child out of Deptford Green school; today, they beg me to get their child into it. That is a measure of its success. The school has done groundbreaking work on citizenship, and we very much hope for a favourable decision on its specialist school application, which will be largely centred on citizenship.

Mr. Twigg: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I am not in a position to anticipate announcements scheduled for later in the week. As she knows, however, I have visited Deptford Green school, which is hugely impressive and has done groundbreaking work on citizenship. It was very much the influence of that school and one or two others that led to our creation of the new specialism of humanities including citizenship. I have every confidence that Deptford Green is a school that will continue to go from strength to strength.
 
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Another school that has done very well, partly as a consequence of specialism, is Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school in Islington. Just five years ago, 23 per cent. of its students achieved five A* to C grades at GCSE; last summer, that figure topped 50 per cent. That is a school in the heart of north London. The majority of its students are eligible for free school meals, and they are from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds; two thirds have English as an additional language.

The academies programme is critical to our chances of success in London. We are working with sponsors and local education authorities to broker academy projects across London. Six academies are already open, a further four will open in September, and we aim to have 30 by 2008. The academies have huge value in three respects: first, they break the link between deprivation and underachievement for students and families in the most challenging schools; secondly, they raise standards for the whole area by working with local schools and local government to share resources, facilities and professional development opportunities for teachers; and thirdly, they use the levers of innovation and diversity to bring new ways of working driven by the partnership of professional teachers and sponsors for the benefit of the whole school population.

We have begun to look across London to establish the demand for new schools and places. Our projections suggest that some 20 additional secondary schools will be needed over the next four years. We will achieve that through a mixture of traditional routes, academies, and the "Building Schools for the Future" programme. More widely, "Building Schools for the Future" will lead to the rebuilding or refurbishment of the country's entire secondary school estate over the next 10 to 15 years, and I expect many of the most challenging and deprived parts of London to be involved in the early part of that programme.

The improvements that we need to make cannot simply be left to the schools themselves. London has all sorts of other resources that we can tap into, including cultural, sporting, and business and employer resources. Last year, we launched the business challenge to offer every secondary school the opportunity to forge a high-quality partnership with leading London businesses. More than 100 businesses are currently involved in working with and getting behind the efforts of schools in the capital city. For many areas, notably Tower Hamlets, forging those links has already made a difference, and I am confident that it has the potential to make much more of a difference in the future.

There is a genuine sense of optimism. I recognise that there is an enormous amount to do if we are to recruit and retain the highest quality teachers. I also recognise that some schools that are key to success need to improve, and that we must work with them to ensure that they do. I do not underestimate the challenges that we face, but things are moving in the right direction. I am impressed by the broad support across London for the work of the London challenge. I am grateful to Tim Brighouse, who acts as our chief adviser, and to the London challenge team in the Department for Education and Skills. I invite the House's support for this important work, because that will show that Members on both sides of the House want to ensure that every London child has the chance of a world-class education.
 
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1.17 pm

Angela Watkinson (Upminster) (Con): Having heard the Minister's comments, I am surprised at how much consensus there will be in most, if not all, areas. I suspect, however, that we may have sourced our statistics differently.

In terms of local environment and socio-economic profile, there are widely differing circumstances in the 2,300 maintained schools that serve 1 million pupils in the 33 London boroughs, which range from leafy suburbs in outer London to densely populated inner London. London has the highest levels of child poverty in the country, and its schools have an unequalled ethnic diversity, with 275 languages spoken. The map of London is like a patchwork quilt of affluence and poverty, which are never far away from one another. Not surprisingly, the schools in those areas produce widely differing results, and widely differing challenges face London schools to ensure that each one is the best that it can possibly be. Those challenges do not respond well to centrally imposed policies.

It is important to start by acknowledging the many highly successful schools in London. We should then look closely at why they are so successful and why others are failing their pupils. We need to examine best practice and the factors that lead to success in a school, and to use that information to raise the standard of failing or less successful schools to the same high standard. Levelling must always be up, not down. There is no merit in equality of achievement and opportunity if it is based on the lowest common denominator. The sky should be the limit for the educational aspirations of our school children. The different aptitudes, needs and interests of each individual child should be developed so that they are able to reach their full potential.

The picture across London schools is very patchy. Only one of the nine local authorities in London to be rated as excellent on education by the Audit Commission is Labour controlled, as is one of the lowest rated for comprehensive performance assessment. After seven years of "education, education, education", the performance of some of the capital's schools represents one of the Government's greatest failures. Some have the lowest results in the country.

One in three of London's 14-year-olds cannot read, write or count properly. That is a shocking statistic. Only half the pupils in London's schools pass five or more GCSEs by the age of 16. That means that the other half does not. What of their future career prospects? They must either go on to a further education college if they have the motivation and parental support to catch up on what they did not achieve at school or try to find a job that requires no entry qualifications.

To get secondary education right, we must start at the beginning and get early-years education right. Early-years education plays an essential foundation role in developing children's interpersonal skills in preparation for primary school. Those skills bring long-term benefits to pre-school children that are far greater than any early formal learning. If children arrive in their reception class reasonably self-confident, co-operative, already knowing how to communicate, play, give and take, share and simply get on with other children, their teachers have an ideal base on which to start their
 
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formal education. So often, teachers have to teach those essential basic life skills as well as the standard curriculum.

Inner London in particular has many children for whom English is a second language. Children in the same class often have a range of different first languages. My statistic for that was 42 per cent. and the Minister's was 38 per cent., so can we agree that 40 per cent. of children in inner London speak English as a second language compared with a national average of only 8 per cent.? Teaching those children a good command of English as early as possible to enable them to live and learn successfully alongside their peers is essential if they are to realise their full potential.

Seventy per cent. of all African-Caribbean pupils in the country attend London schools. They are concentrated in the boroughs of Hackney, Haringey, Lambeth, Southwark and Islington. They enter compulsory schooling as one of the highest achieving groups but, by the age of 11, their achievement begins to drop and when they leave at 16, they form the group least likely to have attained five high grade GCSEs. The "Aiming High" pilot project is working on the problem in 18 schools in London. Smaller projects, such as that in Winchmore school in Enfield, ease the transition from primary to secondary school. Developing interpersonal skills is an important part of those schemes. School life would be so much easier for those pupils, as well as their peers and teachers, if they acquired such essential life skills in their early years.

Recent examination results show that African, African-Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi students perform noticeably less well than Chinese and Indian students. That suggests that more individually tailored solutions might work better to raise achievement levels among black students, who also have the highest exclusion and truancy rates. Various other mentoring schemes have been introduced to tackle disaffection, substance abuse, social exclusion, truancy and discipline and, essentially, to involve parents so that one set of standards applies at home and at school.

Mentoring is usually for a defined period and there appears to be a dearth of evaluation of the effectiveness of the schemes in the short and long term and of the accountability of the mentors. However, the Dalston youth project in the London borough of Hackney and the Islington-based "Chance" were found to have achieved some success. Early anecdotal evidence suggests that other projects have had a measure of success in broadening horizons, raising achievement and self-esteem. However, there is a danger that it will be difficult to collate the results of so many concurrent schemes.

It is essential that the 10 new schools—seven of them city academies—that are being built in the five boroughs with the worst secondary schools have the freedom of management to succeed. In Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth and Southwark, new purpose-built schools alone will not lead to the improvements in standards that everyone wants for the pupils in those boroughs.

Choosing a school is an emotive task for parents. It is important to them that they get a place at the school of their choice because their child's future is at stake. Apart from the acknowledged reputation of the school, one of
 
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the biggest influences on that choice is the appearance and behaviour of the pupils outside school. Pupils are a school's best or worst advert as they wait for buses or use local shops when they travel to and from school. Responsible parents will not want to send their children to a school whose pupils look scruffy and are noisy and badly behaved in public. Enforceable home-to-school contracts will be beneficial in that regard.

The Government intend to introduce a joint admissions register in 2005 for 41 local education authorities in London and the surrounding areas. They say that that will "simplify and reduce confusion" in the allocation of secondary school places. Well, it might, but for whose benefit? The priority for a schools' admission system should be ensuring that as many parents as possible can send their children to the school of their choice, not making it simple to administer. Far from reducing parents' anxiety, the proposal has increased it.

Are all parents to be punished because some held multiple offers in the past? Parents will be able to express six prioritised choices, but what about those who are offered a place at school No. 6—the school that everyone is trying desperately to avoid; the one with the undisciplined children who could be a bad influence on theirs? The new system might be easy and convenient to administer, but will it leave parents with one take-it-or-leave-it offer from a command-and-control, nanny-knows-best state? That is the opposite of parental choice. I predict that many parents will not approve of the place that they are allocated and that admissions appeal panels will burn the midnight oil to resolve the muddle.

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