Primary School Tests and Targets

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:31 pm on 20 May 2003.

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Photo of Damian Green Damian Green Shadow Secretary of State for Education 12:31, 20 May 2003

I thank you, Mr. Speaker, for granting this urgent question, which enables this House to do its proper work of scrutiny.

The Secretary of State launched this morning what he calls a new primary schools strategy. I welcome this tacit admission that the Government's previous complacency about standards in primary schools has been completely misplaced. Just as his Department has caused uncertainty and demoralisation in secondary schools and among university students, so it has signally failed even to meet its own targets on primary school standards. Does he accept that the strategy does nothing to deal with the key issues affecting schools at the moment? Will he admit that it will have no impact on the school funding crisis that his Department has created, and will be of no comfort to head teachers faced with budget cuts? It is significant that, as he introduces the strategy for primary schools, thousands of the assistants whom he must rely on to implement it face redundancy because of the funding crisis. If he talks, as he did this morning, about more skilled adults in the classroom, what does he say to teachers and teaching assistants facing redundancy?

A signal of the Secretary of State's problems—indeed, it is always a symbol of a Secretary of State in trouble—is the fact that in his tour of the media this morning he consistently tried to misrepresent our policies. He has been saying, on the basis of my speech to the National Union of Teachers—I know he has read it because he keeps quoting from it—that we would abolish the tests. He knows that we are committed to testing—but not to the arbitrary targets that he insists on setting schools. I know that he would not wish to mislead the House, even though he wishes to mislead the media, so perhaps he will take the opportunity to set the record straight. The shift in his position on testing and the use of targets is breathtaking. Only last month, he told the conference of the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers:

"The tests are here to stay, and so are the targets".

Today, he is changing the testing regime and abandoning one of his own targets. Is he genuinely moving towards abolishing the destructive regime of national target setting that has caused so many problems in schools? If so, I welcome his first tentative step towards our policies. However, given the problems that the targets created for his predecessor, I can understand why he would want to abandon them. If he is genuinely interested in scrapping these national targets, will he now confirm that he will abandon all of them—for secondary schools, colleges, and the 50 per cent. university admissions target—because they have had such a destructive effect on our education system?

I suspect, however, that today's announcement is merely a convenient way for the Government to shift responsibility for their own failures. Will the Secretary of State admit that his Department has failed to meet the targets that it set for literacy and numeracy among 11-year-olds, meaning that every fourth child leaves primary school unable to read, write or count properly? Will he also admit that his use this morning of the language of autonomy for schools is merely a hollow vehicle for shifting the blame, as his Department has admitted that it will fail to hit those targets? There will be no extra autonomy for schools that have already set local targets because the national target will still exist—it will just be deferred to 2006, conveniently after the next general election.

Will the Secretary of State confirm that the real problems for schools lie in his Department's addiction to a regime of central command and control that sends teachers up to 20 pages of paperwork every school day, instructing them how to do their job? When he said this morning that primary education should be magical, did he not realise that that would be greeted with hollow laughter in hard-pressed staffrooms throughout the country?

This is not a new strategy. It is a smokescreen designed to hide the central fact that the Government are failing in primary schools, just as they are failing in secondary schools and our universities. With every week that passes, it becomes clearer that the Secretary of State is presiding over a Department in disarray, letting down hard-working teachers as well as pupils and parents. Unless and until the Government stop interfering and start trusting professionals while giving parents real choice, his policies will continue to fail. Will he reverse those policies, because if he does not the failures of the present will be repeated in future and he will let down further generations of schoolchildren, teachers and parents?