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7 July 2009 : Column 201WH—continued
10.43 am
The Minister for Regional Economic Development and Co-ordination (Ms Rosie Winterton): As always, Sir Nicholas, it is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) on securing what is, as has been recognised, a very important debate. He demonstrated his considerable expertise in the matter as well as concern for all constituents affected. I also thank him for his kind opening remarks about my work, particularly as Minister for Yorkshire and the Humber. The many contributions today, especially by colleagues from the Yorkshire and the Humber region, demonstrate the keen effect on the region of the recent announcements by Corus, although I am obviously aware that other regions have been affected too. We all feel strongly about the knock-on effect that the recently announced reductions in output and employment have had on individuals and their families, on our communities and, as right hon. and hon. Members have said, on suppliers.
My right hon. Friends the Members for Rotherham and for Wentworth (John Healey) and my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Ms Smith) recently met the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and have a follow-up meeting in the not-too-distant future. I hope that I can illustrate that there has
been a focus within Government on this issue to establish what can be done to reflect the many concerns raised today by all hon. Members, many of whom referred to the fact that this is a global issue and that steel companies across the world have made huge cuts in output in an attempt to weather the storm of collapsing demand for, and prices of, steel, during a period of de-stocking. Obviously, the UK sector is not immune and has had to cut employment in an attempt to reduce costs and balance supply with demand. Short-term working and pay freezes have also been introduced across the industry.
The hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Prisk) asked about previous falls in steel production during the period of growth. The explanation relates to some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough. During that period of growth, the UK steel industry exploited some of its strengths by concentrating on high-value-added steels. Some of the basic bulk steels were being produced more cheaply in emerging economies, such as China, India and those in central and eastern Europe. That was the reason for the change during that time.
Mr. Prisk: I accept the Minister’s point—it was a good point—but does she accept the concern, raised by many hon. Members, about the lack of competitiveness of energy prices, particularly in this country? Why has that not been tackled until now? Why did we wait until it became a crisis?
Ms Winterton: I am going to come to that point, which was also raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham.
Right hon. and hon. Members set out the number of recently announced redundancies, which, as I have said, are tragic for individuals and their families and for communities. Corus currently employs about 24,500 people in the UK, but after the reductions, that could fall to about 20,000 or less. However, a substantial UK steel business will remain, which we must not lose sight of, if we are to do many of the things that right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned today. Some steel businesses have mothballed plant and equipment and some complete closures have been avoided. It is the job of the Government and others to look at what we can do to assist in such times.
Let me reiterate how important the steel industry is to our economy. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Central (Mr. Caborn) referred to some of the work that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has been doing. He will also recall that the Prime Minister and I recently visited Sheffield Forgemasters, which again shows how much importance we attach to the industry.
Let me return to the wider issue of Government support. Obviously, to start with, we considered how to protect the wider UK economy. That is why we intervened in the banking industry. In January, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills set out a number of ways to help businesses. Along with regional development agencies and local government, we decided to bring forward billions of pounds worth of infrastructure, to which both right hon. and hon. Members have referred. We are increasing capacity in the motorway and rail network, improving and building new social housing and primary and secondary schools, to which
my right hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) referred, focusing on hospitals, energy efficiency, carbon capture and many other green technologies. Such development is vital for stimulating the demand for steel.
In the meetings that Corus had with Ministers, a number of key requests were made. First, there was the fiscal stimulus, and the need to promote the demand for steel by intervening and bringing forward investment. Secondly, Corus mentioned trade credit insurance, which could be used by not just itself but customers and suppliers. We introduced the trade credit insurance top-up scheme as a direct response to the industry’s requests. A third request from Corus related to trade credit insurance and energy.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham raised the issue of energy supplies. Although wholesale electricity prices are falling, the effect will take time to feed through, particularly for those who are locked into long-term agreements. In one case, Corus is looking to negotiate a long-term agreement with Electricité de France. Officials from my Department have met separately with both companies to encourage them to reach agreement. There was a meeting on 3 July, and I will write to Members when I know the outcome. Although commercial decisions are involved, we are considering what we can do to encourage companies to make a mutually successful agreement in that respect.
I want to address the issue of what we are doing with regard to the £5 million offer that has been made to Corus. Moreover, let me mention the support that has been made available to those who, unfortunately, will be made unemployed as a result of the recent announcement. Many hon. Members talked about the Train to Gain initiatives, including one worth £2 million at the Corus Scunthorpe site to support apprenticeship programmes. There has been support for apprenticeships at the Rotherham and Teesside plants and support for Corus employees at the Redcar site. All those plants are being supported by Train to Gain. It is vital that regional development agencies, the Learning and Skills Council and Jobcentre Plus work together to continue to provide that support, which has already been effective.
However, following discussions involving the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Prime Minister, we are considering ways in which we can effectively use the £5 million of training support. As my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, East (Jessica Morden) said, how do we ensure that when the upturn comes, the people who are working in our steel industry, particularly in Corus, are fully equipped, trained and
skilled to take advantage of the available markets? I have met the trade unions, Yorkshire Forward and Corus in the Yorkshire and Humber area. However, wider discussions are going on, and we are saying that £5 million is on the table. We want to consider the points raised by right hon. and hon. Members today. We want to know what Corus can offer in the areas of proper training, skills and job guarantees in exchange for the Government and RDAs working to provide that assistance. That is not a meaningless offer; it is a very real offer and one that has not been made in the past. During previous recessions, Governments stood by and let people sink or swim. They did not say, “This is what we can do in terms of a fiscal stimulus.” They did not have regional development agencies, which the Conservative party intends to scrap. The RDAs provide vital help for people, communities and businesses during such times.
Mr. Prisk: Will the Minister give way?
Ms Winterton: No, I will not, because I have only three more minutes. As I said, those are the issues that we are taking forward at this point in time. Questions have been raised about ProAct in Wales. Obviously, certain offers have been made, but so far there has been no take-up. As for the money we have on offer to Corus, we want to ensure that we get good results for the employees of the companies. We want to ensure that it can continue to exist so that the suppliers and the communities can also benefit.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham asked what was happening in the Department. We have a range of staff working in the Department from the sector unit, the regional policy unit, and the skills and innovation teams. I will pass on the points that have been made about energy prices. I have already had discussions with the Secretary of State and the Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change, and I will pass on the points that were raised in this debate.
Let me assure all right hon. and hon. Members that we do see a future for the UK steel industry. There is a huge commitment to it. I hope that the interventions that have already taken place and those that are still to take place—at regional, national and international levels—will demonstrate that we are a Government who are committed to helping people during these difficult times and looking to stimulate demand for steel in the future.
Sir Nicholas Winterton (in the Chair): We come to the end of what has been an excellent and well-informed debate. I congratulate all right hon. and hon. Members who have taken part.
Teaching Standards (England)
11 am
Mr. Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con): It is a great pleasure to introduce this important debate under your chairmanship, Sir Nicholas. I begin by apologising to the Minister. Having said that I would try to get a copy of my speech to her in advance, I failed to do so. I shall try to be more efficient in future.
Never before have England’s young people faced such a competitive environment. The knowledge-based economy demands ever higher levels of skill and education, and the emerging giants, China and India, are producing record numbers of graduates. That is why teachers in English schools are so important. We have no divine right to remain a wealthy and powerful country, and more than ever we are dependent on the quality of the education that we give our children.
I am full of admiration for our teachers. I have visited many schools in my constituency, some more than once, and I have been struck, as you will have been in your area, Sir Nicholas, by the dedication and commitment shown by so many. Teaching is a remarkably demanding profession and not everyone can do it. Moulding the minds of our young people, inspiring them to learn and giving them rigour and academic confidence is no mean task.
I applied for the debate because of the importance of teachers to our national life. Teachers play a crucial role in tackling disadvantage, building cultural understanding, boosting our economic prospects and giving people the wherewithal to enjoy life and achieve their dreams. The quality of those teachers is critical to those outcomes. We need the brightest and the best to be attracted into teaching, and we should make that objective a central focus of Government thinking in education.
Those countries with the best educational achievement, such as Finland, South Korea and Singapore, have one thing in common: they attract the best into teaching. Michael Barber, a one-time education adviser to Tony Blair, has said that
“the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers”.
In Tennessee, Sanders and Rivers found that the difference between an excellent teacher and a poor teacher in maths, in terms of student achievement, was 50 percentage points over three years. They also discovered that when teacher effectiveness increases, lower achieving students are the first to benefit, so when teachers are not inspiring or effective, the most disadvantaged suffer most. The Institute for Public Policy Research found recently that a good teacher can improve performance by more than a grade, and separate research published in 2002 found that in secondary schools 53 per cent. of the variation in performance is down to the quality of the teacher.
David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire) (Lab/Co-op): I have agreed with every word that the hon. Gentleman has said so far, but the debate is on teaching standards in schools in England, which presumably includes private schools. Does he agree that the Education Act 1980 should be widened to include private schools such as the one he had the privilege of attending in rural Perthshire, because at present teachers in private schools can operate without qualification and registration? That is not acceptable in 2009, is it?
Mr. Stuart: That goes to the heart of the debate on how to respond to the issues, to which I hope to return, but I am tempted to be discursive for now. Everyone agrees on the need to improve the quality of those going into teaching, and there are two views about how best to do it. Do we raise the barriers to entry and ensure that people have certain achievements before they come in? Obviously, there will be an element of that in any solution. Alternatively, do we need to make it as easy as possible for people to come in and go out of teaching? Perhaps we could make it as fluid as possible and lower the barriers, so that people who can inspire our young people do so.
In a straight answer to the hon. Gentleman’s question, I do not agree with him. In fact, I would like more schools to be freer to recruit as they see fit. Just last weekend, someone told me that a private school in Hull had taken on a music teacher who did not have the qualifications, but was a gifted musician who inspired the young people. I believe that she is now the head of music at the school, which is particularly successful in music, so I do not think that artificial barriers are necessarily the right way to proceed, although they may have a part to play.
I shall continue to make the case for the importance of the quality of teachers to outcomes. In Dallas, research into the effect of teachers on student achievement shows that the difference between having three great teachers in a row and having three bad teachers in a row is nearly 50 percentage points in pupil attainment. The evidence of the importance of teachers is overwhelming and consistent. Great teachers transform lives.
We can look at this another way: the impact that a poor teacher can have on pupil performance is every bit as significant. Research published in the “Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability” journal this year looked at the annual progress of more than 73,000 pupils in vocabulary, reading and mathematics between 1999 and 2005. It found that children whose classes were in the bottom 16 per cent. of progress in the reception year performed on average about a fifth of a level worse in their standard assessment tests than those whose class progress was average. By contrast, those whose classes progress most in their first year at school performed about a fifth of a level better. In other words, the quality of teaching, whether good or poor, has not only an immediate impact, but a sustained impact for a number of years. If a young person is turned off learning by a teacher who is unable to inspire them suitably and who does not do a good job, the impact can endure in the following years.
When we look at the matter that way, we can see that it is as important to remove inadequate teachers as it is to attract and retain as many good ones as possible. Ten years after the former chief inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead, claimed that there were 15,000 incompetent teachers in England, it emerged this year that only 10 have been struck off in that period. The General Teaching Council has said that the systems in place for complaining about poor teachers are “virtually non-existent” in many areas, and that two thirds of local authorities have not made any referrals to it about inadequate teachers in seven and a half years.
What is the Minister going to do to put that right? Are the Government taking the issue seriously? Is peace with the unions more important than tackling
disadvantage and underperformance by professionals? Will the Minister explain what has happened and why poor teaching is not being rooted out? Does she have a convincing explanation? How, working closely with those in the professions and unions, can we move from the current situation to ensure that those who teach in our classes are the best they can possibly be?
For the past 30 years, Finnish teachers have needed a five-year masters degree. That is quite different from the English system, notwithstanding the Secretary of State’s saying that he wanted teaching to be a masters profession in future. At the moment, applicants are required to have GCSE grade C in maths, English and science, and a degree. The new masters in teaching and learning looks more like an afterthought than a dramatic change. It has £30 million allocated to it in the current spending period, which may not make that much of a difference. I will be interested to hear what the Minister thinks about the quality of the maths and English skills of someone who has scraped GCSE grade C.
In Singapore teachers come from the top 30 per cent. of graduates, and in South Korea from the top 5 per cent. The United States recruits its graduates from a lower percentile than us, and seems to have commensurate underperformance in its schools, so it is critical to get the best people to go into teaching.
Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): In relation to the earlier exchange, I entirely agree with my hon. Friend that more attention should be paid to ensuring that teaching for the poorest of our pupils is enhanced, rather than worrying too much about recruitment policies in private education.
On the point my hon. Friend just made, I understand the concern about the low educational achievement of some who go into the teaching profession, but does he agree that the single most important factor is that the teacher inspires? One difficulty is that if we are overly prescriptive about the educational attainment achieved by everybody in the teaching profession, we may end up missing out one or two great, inspirational teachers who do not have an outstanding academic record but are brilliant pedagogues.
Mr. Stuart: I agree. It is a difficult balance to get right. The Conservative party’s position, as we recently announced, is that people should be required to have a B grade GCSE and at least a second-class degree in order to qualify to enter teacher training. That is how I understand it; my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) will doubtless give us a master class of explanation later. I might be pre-empting him and getting it wrong at the same time, but as I understand it, the Conservative party proposes to give greater freedoms to academies, for instance, to tackle disadvantage, so that they would have the same freedom to do what the school near my constituency did and take on people without those qualifications.
Mr. Stuart: The hon. Gentleman obviously wants to intervene again, because he is obsessed with standards in independent schools. It is interesting to note that hon. Members from this party are more interested in tackling disadvantage in state schools, including those in inner cities.
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