Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has used a speech to North East business leaders to say that changes due to be set out in the coming weeks will aim to tackle regional inequalities in school attainment.
Ms Phillipson was on home turf in Sunderland as she addressed a lunch of the North East Chamber of Commerce. Her speech came as she is running to be deputy leader of the Labour Party but concentrated instead on the Government’s record on education and skills.
Ms Phillipson said that coming White Papers on both schools and post-16 education would aim to improve the standards of young people leaving the country’s schools. She acknowledged that more needed to be done to help businesses recruit people with the right skills for the changing world of work.
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She said it was a key priority for the Government to reduce child poverty but also to improve funding to further education colleges, saying that they had been neglected in favour of universities in recent years. The Government this week said it was scrapping a policy of getting 50% of young people to go to university in favour of a new target of getting two-thirds of school leavers either at university or on a top-level apprenticeship.
The struggles of North East schools was seen in this year’s GCSE and A-level results, where the North East got the lowest percentage of top grades. Other data shows the region has the lowest number of young people getting places at the most selective universities.
Asked about the tough challenges facing North East schools, Ms Phillipson said: “As well as the post-16 White Paper that we’ll be publishing shortly, we’ve got a busy month ahead because we’re also going to be setting out our Schools White Paper alongside that. And at the heart of that will be our vision that every child should achieve and thrive wherever they are in the country and whatever their circumstances.
“What we face at the minute is a very stark gap in terms of regional inequality and in terms of attainment by young people, and that’s most pronounced in terms of white working class kids. Their outcomes, particularly at 16, are way behind where they out to be.
“This is a complex area and I could spend a long time talking about what some of the challenges are. But it is about how we tackle child poverty, it’s about how we drive up teaching quality in our schools and the work under way with our regional improvement teams to support schools to succeed.
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“But it’s also why I’ve had such a priority on the early years because we know that by the age of five so much of that attainment gap has already opened up and it doesn’t recover. It’s why we make the biggest difference to children if we invest in the early years. Even the colleges and institutions that I visit say that it’s too late if we wait until children are 16 or 18 in order to deliver the change that’s needed.”
Ms Phillipson is running against Manchester MP Lucy Powell to be deputy leader of the Labour Party, with ballots going to members next week. Early polling put her behind with members, but she has since received the backing of two of the country’s largest trade unions.
Earlier this week, Ms Phillipson gave the clearest indicator yet that the Government is looking to scrap the two-child benefit gap as a way of reducing child poverty. She said that she was “clear about the evidence” and added that “we’ll sort it.”