Tag: Damian Hinds

Below is the text of the statement made by Damian Hinds, the Secretary of State for Education, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2019.

The world of work is transforming. In particular, automation is a key opportunity for the economy, creating new jobs and raising wages, but it could also bring significant changes to the economy. This means it is critical that we develop a national retraining scheme that helps prepare citizens for future changes to the economy, including those brought about by automation, and supports them to retrain into better jobs.

That is why we are developing the national retraining scheme through a unique partnership between the Confederation of British Industry, the Trades Union Congress and Government, which will keep the voices of workers and businesses at the heart of the service.

The scheme will initially focus on employed adults aged 24 and over, without a qualification at degree level and earning below a certain wage threshold that we are testing to focus on those earning low to medium wages. We are investing in this group of people first as they have comparatively less access to existing Government support and are most in need of adapting their skills to take advantage of the opportunities the future changes to the economy will bring.

A key feature of the development of the scheme has been to start small, test, evaluate and scale up. We are putting the needs of individuals and employers at the heart of the development of the scheme, conducting ​extensive user research to understand what they need from a national retraining scheme. We are also conducting a range of pilots investigating innovative approaches to overcoming barriers to training that adults face.

Today, I am pleased to announce the release of the first part of the national retraining scheme, “Get help to retrain”, to a small number of eligible adults in the Liverpool city region. This digital service will help adults to understand their existing skills, explore alternative roles or occupations and find relevant training to unlock opportunities for a broad range of good jobs that could be within their reach. “Get help to retrain” will be rapidly expanded to more people and more areas throughout the testing phase before being made available to all eligible adults in England in 2020.

This is the first of a series of products that will make up the complete national retraining scheme and marks the first step of an adult’s journey towards gaining the skills needed to secure a better job.

Below is the text of the statement made by Damian Hinds, the Secretary of State for Education, in the House of Commons on 15 July 2019.

A positive experience of sport and physical activity at a young age can build a lifetime habit of participation. It is central to meeting the Government’s ambitions for a world-class education system which promotes character, good physical health and mental wellbeing. We face a significant challenge to increase and maintain activity levels among children and young people, particularly ​given the levels of childhood obesity. Data from Sport England’s Active Lives Children and Young People survey show that a third of children are currently doing less than 30 minutes of physical activity a day, less than half the amount recommended by the Chief Medical Officer.

The Department for Education, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and Department of Health and Social Care are today publishing a joint school sport and activity action plan which will set out the following ambitions:

All children and young people take part in at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day.

All children and young people have the opportunity to realise developmental, character- building experiences through sport, competition and active pursuits.

All sport and physical activity provision for children and young people is designed around building basic skills as well as confidence, enjoyment, knowledge and understanding (known as physical literacy) with a focus on fun and enjoyment, and reaching the least active young people.

The action plan will set out a number of immediate actions that feed into realising these ambitions, including a strong commitment to joint working between schools and the sport sector. The plan also sets out areas of activity for the future with action to be confirmed in a further updated plan later in the year, following the spending review.

The immediate actions include a commitment to an additional £2.5 million from the Department for Education in 2019-20 to support schools through further work on teacher training, more help and advice to enable schools to open up their facilities and make links with providers, as well as providing more opportunities for young people to volunteer in sport. The plan also sets out over £4 million of Sport England investment in new after-school clubs, strengthening the school games competition and building girls’ confidence through a programme linked to ‘This Girl Can’.

The Government are also committing to develop regional pilots to trial new and innovative approaches to getting young people active, jointly funded by Sport England and the Department for Education from 2020. The pilots will involve collaborative working from the school and community sector to offer a co-ordinated sport and physical activity experience for young people.

We will be working with sporting organisations like the Youth Sport Trust, RFU, England Netball and the Premier League to ensure that sports clubs and programmes can reach even more children, encouraging them to get active by focusing on fun, enjoyment and increasing confidence.

Below is the text of the speech made by Damian Hinds, the Secretary of State for Education, at the NSPCC Conference on 26 June 2019.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Have you ever been in a restaurant where you’ve seen somebody meeting up with old friends and taking a photo of the food in front of them? And it almost seems like the photo of the food is more important than the food itself. Or have you heard a conversation where somebody says, that was a really good walk. It’s just a shame I wasn’t wearing my Fitbit.

Or have you ever seen that thing, or even possibly done that thing yourself, standing on the pavement, looking at your weather app, and it says the weather’s fine. And you feel a raindrop on your head, and just for one split second you think, I wonder which one’s right?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, if we struggle sometimes with the blurring of reality that we get with technology, imagine how much harder it is for our children. And for kids growing up now, we have come a long way since Photoshop. Now it seems, sometimes that every photo might have some sort of filtering applied to it. The certainties of the world can’t be banked on anymore, and in the most acute cases have caused children falling victim to people who are pretending to be something and someone that they are not.

Now, at this point, before going too much further, it’s obligatory for the person standing on the stage to explain that he or she is not, in fact, a Luddite. And I do appreciate the huge potential that there is for technology both in education and further beyond. And actually, to be fair to me – and I’m keen on being fair to me – I think my CV actually bears out that I am not a Luddite and I have a lot of belief in the power of technology.

When I was a teenager – although this bit isn’t on my CV – I was what these days would be called a coder. We used to call it a programmer. I wrote games, and I even managed to sell a few – just a few – by mail order. When I did my first job, I went to work for the computer giant IBM, and I learned about some of the transformational effects that technology could have on businesses. And in the early 2000s, I found myself working at a hotel company running the e-commerce operation for the European division. And we set ourselves, at that time, a crazy target that one day, 10% of hotel bookings might be made on the internet. So, I do understand the power of technology, but these days I’m also concerned about some of its effects.

Those of you with children – and I guess, everybody here one way or another – works with children. You will know that you don’t really have to persuade kids to engage with technology. The challenge, usually, is to get them to disengage sometimes.

Actually, I want this generation growing up in our country to be the most techno-savvy generation we’ve ever known, but I also want it to be one of the most techno-savvy or the most techno-savvy groups of young people in the world, so we can make the most of the rapid technological revolution that we are seeing. So we’re putting quite a lot of resource, money – £84 million over time – and a network of hubs around the country to promote the learning of computer science. I want more kids growing up being masters of the machines.

But it’s not when young people are producers in technology that I worry about. It’s when they are… I need my clicker. I knew there was something I’d forgotten. It’s when they are consumers. And you will know that the amount of time that young people now spend on the internet is really quite significant. And how that manifests itself, you talk to teachers…

And when you talk to teachers, you hear this regularly, that teachers worry about the effect of the amount of time that kids spend online, on concentration, on sleep. Sometimes I hear teachers in reception year talking about the effect on school readiness. And later on in school careers it’s well documented, some of the issues that we have around mental health.

So although technology and the use of it can be incredibly beneficial to young people, there are definitely downsides. And I suggest it’s not just a question of what individual piece of content might we find harmful. Actually, I find, talking to parents and talking to teachers, they want a bit less time spent online.

And of course, the way that the various apps and so on are designed, they are designed with what’s called stickiness in mind. Because ultimately most apps of this sort rely on advertising revenue, of course you want to have people being as long as possible on your site. Shouldn’t be surprised about that. It’s a commercial motivation. But it does mean that kids are then spending longer on than we might like.

Look, kids have always enjoyed watching television or listening to music sometimes, for hours on end. But at least with children’s television, eventually you would get interrupted by either the end of children’s television programming for that day or some content which was factual or educational in some way. Now with the way that autoplay works, and the way that social media works, actually you’re not interrupted by anything at all. You can keep on going and keep on going round and round.

And, of course, it’s parents who ultimately are in control, but for parents, sometimes it’s just not as easy as it should be to exercise that control. I don’t know if I’m alone here. I will ‘fess up that when I myself have tried to use parental controls, it turns out to be not quite as straightforward as I would like to think I was capable of.

And even when you do master it, you discover that when you set a control on the hardware, it doesn’t necessarily translate over to the software. And if you set it on one app, it doesn’t necessarily translate over to another app. And I would like to see all of these things being made easier. I wonder why it’s not possible, actually, to have them as the default setting in many cases, that then you would adjust away from a restrictive parental setting, if you were so minded.

And we have good reason to be concerned and to want to do more. Because, although we think about the internet, rightly, as a global thing, actually it turns out we have a particular issue in this country. There was a new survey came out last week from the OECD. They call it TALIS survey, which looks across different countries and asks questions of teachers across a whole range of subjects.

And this was one of them. I don’t want to read too much into this, because it’s based on survey data. But nevertheless, the results for our country are so, kind of, out of line with the average for the countries surveyed, that they warrant further investigation and further thought. The frequency, the prevalence that head teachers responding to the survey in England said that they came across either instances of hurtful information being posted online or a student having unwanted electronic content – these were in secondary schools, I should add – was significantly greater than it was in many of those other countries.

So it’s natural that we want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to protect children and to make sure that childhoods can be as happy as possible. And when things go wrong on the internet, when they go wrong with social media, it’s really important that help is available, help and redress. And so organisations like the Diana Award and what they do on bullying is incredibly important. Internet Watch Foundation in terms of taking away some of the very worst material off the internet is very important, too.

But I think it’s also really important… And this is where the school system comes in, not on its own but along with other organisations, in building up resilience of children. And most of the building up of resilience is really about quite old-fashioned stuff. It’s nothing to do with technology at all. It’s about, you know, your self-belief, your ability to stick with a task, your focus on goals, your belief that you can do stuff. And when things do go wrong, being able to bounce back.

And, you know, I think in our school system, the development of character and resilience in this way is absolutely instinctive to teachers. It runs through their veins. But there’s many other ways, actually, that we can help build up character and resilience as well, everything from taking part in sport to joining a membership organisation to doing a Saturday job, all kinds of purposeful activity that helps to build up resilience.

And it’s closely related to, but not quite the same thing as, in some ways, a slightly more new-fashioned thing, which is about mental health and wellbeing. I say new-fashioned because we just have more focus on it now than we used to. We have more awareness of mental health issues. We are trying harder throughout society to help to support people’s mental health and wellbeing, and that goes for children as well.

So, in schools we are bringing in health education as a mandatory subject in both primary and secondary, and that’s going to include mental health education, from quite a young age. Starting to talk about, you know, how you cope with the ups and downs of life, self-regulation, being able to stop frustration turning to anger turning to rage. All the things that, hopefully, can help to keep relatively low-level mental health issues as low-level mental health issues.

We’re also running one of the biggest, or possibly the biggest ever trial of its kind in schools of various techniques and programmes to help to support children’s wellbeing, such as mindfulness. Obviously, you can tell, this is a Venn diagram. There’s a circle missing. There’s a third circle which goes here as well. So far, everything we’ve talked about, building up your character, your drive, self-belief and so on, all of it could help you to be good at all sorts of things, including some bad things.

But, of course, we want children to grow up with virtues and values. And this is particularly significant and important in the context of the internet and social media, because, you know, children are the victims of bullying on social media. They’re the victims of people saying nasty things. But of course, more often than not, it’s also children doing it. And so, if we are to make the internet and technology a friendlier kind of place, actually that’s a shared responsibility for everybody, in terms of how they, themselves, behave on it.

So, character and resilience, mental health and wellbeing, virtues and values. These are the core attributes, I suppose, that we tend to want all of our children growing up with. And they’re important, as well, when it comes to the use of technology and the internet. But I wanted us to go further, because I think the other thing which can really help to build up children’s resilience to problems online is to understand it as deeply as possible.

So, today, we are launching our new guidance on teaching online safety in school, and it is a fusion of parts of the relationships education curriculum, the citizenship curriculum, and the computing curriculum. And it’s based on the premise that if you really understand the technology, you’re less likely to get used by the technology. So, you know, you understand the anatomy of a URL. You understand an IEP address.

Actually, then, even when the technology changes, your knowledge is somewhat future proofed for how it will develop. But it’s not just about understanding technology, it’s about understanding technique. So, you know, we tend to quite often focus on the outputs, if you like, of bad stuff online, people trying to defraud you, people pretending to be someone they’re not, in the worse cases grooming of a minor. But actually, you’re more likely to not be a victim of these kind of things, and indeed what may come after them, because we don’t know what the successor to phishing will be, but there will be something else.

You’re more likely to have resilience, to have resistance to those things, if you understand how they come about. So understanding how network effects work on the internet, how somebody could manage to come across as being something or someone other than they are, how companies, kind of, work out how to target a particular advert for a particular product at you through tracking your behaviour online.

And at the very most elemental level, discussing and understanding what people’s motivations might be. Why people behave differently when they’re behind a computer screen than when you meet them in real life. Why companies want to get your information from you, get your data to be able to make a commercial advantage point. Why people might have an interest in spreading fake news. So in these ways, I think we can help to make people more resilient to things going wrong.

But, of course, it shouldn’t only be about building up young people’s resilience, and sometimes I hear from people who think this is the only thing you need to do. Make people aware of the dangers, help them to deal with them, get a sense of perspective, and that’s what you need to do. Well, that’s not how we deal with anything else in life.

We don’t say, well, of course people are going to try and sell you cigarettes. We just advise you to say no. You know, we don’t think that the most important, or the way to stop unwanted contact from adults is just to teach children to be wary of strangers. We do those things as well, to help to build up their resilience and their resistance, but we have to tackle harms at source.

And I suggest there are three big types of harm that we need to think about. Actually, there’s a fourth as well, which is really acute harms at the most extreme end, when we talk about child abuse, when we talk about terrorism. But beyond that, there are these three areas. And we hear quite a lot around worries around the promotion of, for example, suicide or eating disorder or self-harm. And that is, indeed a terrible thing, but there’s another level as well, which I call prevalence and normalisation.

So even if you’re not actively promoting some of these harms, just the very fact of more and more children coming into contact with information about it can have a damaging effect. I don’t know about you, but I managed to get through more or less my entire childhood without knowing much about self-harm, and I didn’t have that sheltered a childhood.

My worry is that with more and more children coming across more and more content, in every group there will be a certain percentage whose curiosity is pricked, and of that group there will be a certain percentage who want to take it further. And so, prevalence and normalisation we need to worry about more than we have in the past. And finally, there’s personal behaviour, and that’s what I was talking about earlier. The fact that, for children and young people, when we talk about bullying and so on, it’s also about the way that they behave.

So there is some great stuff going on. The online harms white paper in this country is truly, you know, world-leading, actually, and we hear that from other governments around the world. And I’m sure others will want to emulate parts of it, learn from parts of it, learn from what happens. And of course, we’ve got the regulator to come. I very much welcome the ICO’s consultation on Safer by Design, and also some of the wider debate that that has sparked.

Let me dwell for a minute, if I may, on age. And obviously we have different ages of which we consider children to become adults, but I think there is a risk in the phrase digital age of consent. It has a very specific meaning, to do with the GDPR regulations and the use of data, but we must be very careful not to think that there is something inherently different about the internet which means children should be protected in a different way or a lesser way than we would want to protect them in any other context in the world.

But I think we can and will go further. Ultimately, of course, the internet is a global thing. We have global institutions, these days, to talk about trade, talk about climate change, to talk about scientific cooperation. I think that we’re going to have to move towards, and we should move towards, eventually, having a global approach, global institutions looking at these issues around technology and young people.

And, of course, then there’s the tech companies themselves. There is legislation coming on the duty of care, but no one has to wait for legislation to do something. I want tech companies to be using their very clear and very extensive talents right now to be working out what more they can do to help to protect our children. I want them to be thinking about whether they can cooperate more with other companies to make parental control, make parental choice easier.

Maybe one of them will be really bold and stick out in front, and notwithstanding the competitive nature of these markets, maybe they’ll be bold and say, actually, we’re going to try and reduce the amount of time that children spend on our site by changing the design, by changing the way that it works.

I started talking about grownups, and it’s probably a good place to finish, because, of course, we set the context. And you’ll be relieved to hear I’m not here to start lecturing parents or anybody else, and if I did I’d be on extremely thin ice. My own New Year’s resolution was to put my phone away while I was sitting at the dinner table with my children. Which, by the way, itself doesn’t happen quite as often as I would like. But that when we had family time, there would be no phones involved. You ask my kids how I’m doing, they’ll say, Daddy’s doing pretty well. Give him seven out of ten.

That’s not really good enough, I realise. And actually, for all of us, it is difficult. You know, I remember when you would go to a concert and everybody would have a lighter in the air, you know? Now it’s a phone in the air. And I want to say to myself as well as to everybody else, let’s enjoy the moment. You know, the ability to record, to store masses of electronic data, does lead us down strange avenues sometimes.

You remember that film The Lives of Others, which showed the ridiculousness of the Stasi storing all these recordings and all these people, far more than anyone could ever possibly listen to. These days it’s more about the lives of ourselves. And we have 28,000 photos of our children at home. I’m not sure when we’re ever going to get round to looking at them all.

But at least, for us, for grownups, for everybody in this room, that’s a choice. What we’re talking about here, and why I’m so pleased that NSPCC is putting on this conference today, is about how the world is being shaped, the world into which our children are growing up. I think it’s difficult to overstate either the potential for good that there is from technology, or the risks and harms. I commend you for what you’re doing. I hope that what we’re doing in education, and particularly the new guidance that we’re issuing today, is going to have a positive effect, and thank you for the invitation.

Below is the text which was planned to be made by Damian Hinds at Wellington College on 20 July 2019. The speech was made by Lord Agnew as Hinds was unable to make the event.

It’s great to be here at Wellington College and also to be the warm-up act for Amanda, our HMCT. I want to thank you Amanda for the important work that you and Ofsted do. For your personal commitment to educational rigour.

I know you’ve already heard from some excellent speakers today and that this festival is always a fantastic opportunity to debate the big ideas when it comes to education.

It’s a privilege to be surrounded by those who share a passion for this subject. Events like this are essential in bring together the big thinkers in our education system.

At times like this, with so much uncertainty in the air it’s important that we all take the time to reflect on where we are going.

By its nature, education is about the long term. At its heart, the work that all of you do is about shaping the minds of the next generation. A great education is fundamental to success – the individual success of all those who study, whatever their age and success for our country.

A great education system can, and should, be geared towards tackling the big, long term challenges our country faces.

One of these great, generational challenges is productivity. It’s not an abstract concept. We should care about productivity because it decides not just the size of our economy but our quality of life. Higher productivity means more fulfilling, higher paying jobs. It means new investment, leading to greater prosperity.

Productivity matters because it’s about people being able to fulfil their potential. Economically, we can’t afford to waste the talents of young people held back by the circumstances of their birth. This is why social mobility has always been critical to my vision for education and inseparable from the goal of raising productivity.

But when it comes to productivity, we lag behind. Badly. Our key competitors such as Germany, France and the US – all produce over 25% more per hour than the UK. This didn’t happen overnight. The productivity gap with our European competitors opened up in late 1960s, and earlier still the US.

Just as the gap has been around for some time, the gap won’t be closed unless we take the long term view. To fix Britain’s productivity we need a major upgrade in the nation’s skills. That should start with an honest assessment of where we are.

Across the UK as a whole we have a large number of people who either never progressed beyond GCSEs or gained low level vocational qualifications. 65% of our working population have completed upper secondary education (that’s Level 3). When you consider that the equivalent in Germany is 87%, its clear we have our work cut out.

The answer lies in our schools and our colleges. As part of the review of the national curriculum which began in 2011, we benchmarked our curriculum against those of high performing jurisdictions and found that they set higher expectations without compromising curriculum breadth.

We reformed the national curriculum in 2014, and then GCSEs qualifications, so that we set world-class standards across all subjects. We’ve removed hundreds of pointless and unproductive qualifications.

When you look at how productivity differs between places in the UK, the picture is stark.

According to the CBI the most productive area of the country is almost three times more productive than the least. Educational attainment is the single most important driver of those differences.

Of course the gap between Britain and Germany, or between one region of the UK and another, isn’t a reflection of the innate talents of our young people.

Instead it’s a challenge to us all to ensure that our system is delivering the opportunities for education and training across the whole country.

We have made progress. The industrial strategy sets out a plan to invest in the three engines of productivity – individuals, innovation and infrastructure. Through our Opportunity Areas programme we’re investing £72m in some of the places with the biggest challenges, to make sure our efforts are focused on eliminating the productivity gap between different parts of the country.

In order to transform Britain’s productivity and set our young people up for the future, the goal of building a world class education system drives everything we aim to do at the DfE.

This is why we’ve focused on school autonomy and trusted leaders to run their schools, because that’s how you raise standards

It’s why we’ve focused on teacher retention. This includes our Recruitment and Retention Strategy. This provides a commitment to develop world class training and development together with strong career pathways.

It’s why we are committed to reducing the workload of teachers and supporting school leaders to create the right culture in their schools.

We know that more schools are taking action to tackle workload. We have seen over 150,000 collective downloads of our workload reduction toolkit in less than 18 months.

We are working with Ofsted to simplify the accountability system. The new Ofsted framework will have an active focus on reducing teacher workload.

An education system can only ever be as good as its teachers and its leaders. We are very lucky to have some of the very best. They, indeed you, are the fulcrum of the system

We have been rigorous about the curriculum so that young people are prepared for adult life; reforming GCSEs and introducing the EBacc. We will continue to pursue the manifesto target of 75% EBacc entry at GCSEs.

These are subjects which form part of the compulsory curriculum in many of the highest performing countries internationally, at least up to 15 or 16.

We have focused relentlessly on social mobility and disadvantage. Narrowing the gap between children from well off families and their less well-off peers so that every young person has the opportunity to make the most of their talents.

We have made progress. I could stand in front of you and reel off more statistics on how far we’ve come. But I want, instead, to talk about where I think we need to go from here. Not in the short term but the long term, so we can confidently continue to build the world class education system our country needs.

To do that we must be ambitious for the future of our schools and colleges, not just for the next year but for the next generation.

That requires a vision for how we continue to raise school standards. How we ensure that we have the very best teachers for our children and how we will fix technical education. We owe it to the next generation to confront the big choices, not to duck them.

Yes it’s true that we live in a time of uncertainty, at home and abroad, but that uncertainty makes it more urgent, not less.

I want to reassert our long-term vision for an education system that achieves these goals, and the challenges we must overcome in order to get there.

Part of the reason we’ve made such progress since 2010 is that we know what works: school autonomy, great teachers, and a rigorous curriculum.

That is why we want to see us finishing the reforms we began in 2010. That means continuing to be ambitious about academisation by growing the best trusts, where teachers and leaders are already making an extraordinary difference to the lives of children. We must do that in the parts of the country where the need for those teachers and leaders is greatest.

Our ambition remains for all schools to be academies, working in partnerships in great school trusts. This year we hit the milestone of 50% of pupils taught in academies.

Looking to the long term; 10 years from now, we want to see the vast majority of schools becoming academies and joining strong academy chains.

To achieve this we will build on the experience of previous capacity funds for academy trusts. We will shortly be announcing a fund that will boost the growth of our strongest academy trusts allowing them to support a greater number of schools across the country.

The fund will increase the capacity of academy trusts to grow partnerships that support the development of teachers and leaders and the education of children. We have learnt from earlier growth funds what works best and we intend to build on this.

The fund will support smaller school trusts that wish to merge into existing or new academy groups, and providing high-potential academy trusts with funding to meet the challenges they face as they grow.

Local authorities have an important role to play and we are committed to working with them to consider how this will evolve as we move towards the vast majority of schools becoming academies.

This will include exploring how they might support the growth of academy trusts in their areas. As we think about the future, we must take a long-term view of how to attract more high calibre teachers into the profession.

We won’t get the teachers we need unless we focus on creating the right conditions for them to excel. There is clearly a strong case to explore reform of teacher pay to ensure that the money schools spend on pay is targeted where it will have the biggest impact on recruitment and retention.

We must be bold about the offer that we make to new teachers. We recently announced the Early Career Framework – in itself the most significant reform to teaching since it became a graduate profession.

We will build on this by introducing a new, rigorous core content framework for Initial Teacher Training to align with the Early Career Framework.

Taken together, this will create an entitlement for new teachers to 3 years of structured training and development, backed by the best available research.

In doing so we aim to ensure that people enter teaching in a manner that reflects its position as one of the most important professions in our society.

Alongside this we will deliver the other commitments in the Recruitment and Retention strategy, including the expansion of flexible working and more diverse career pathways.

We know that our economy has evolved in its ability to accommodate flexible working and we need to help the schools system do more to support teachers who want this.

We must be relentless in ensuring that our reforms are always improving the odds for young people. Where you end up in life shouldn’t be determined by where you start, and yet many disadvantaged young people lose out by not having a parent or guardian who is ‘in the know’ about what to study.

Central to a world class system in the long term is ensuring that children are setting themselves up for success with their subject choices, which is why EBacc is so important.

Participation in creative subjects such as music and the arts is vital, particularly up to Key Stage 3. The DfE is committed to supporting both participation and progression – most notably in music.

Alongside this it is vital that we ensure that pupils are encouraged to study the core academic subjects at GCSE – English, maths, science (including computing), foreign languages, history and geography.

Schools previously entered many more pupils in these subjects. In 2000, three quarters [76%] of pupils entered a language GCSE. By 2011, however, the proportion of pupils entering science, a foreign language and geography GCSEs had fallen to less than a quarter.

These subjects are essential if young people are to succeed in the knowledge economy, particularly if they are considering a good university. They are also at the heart of a well-rounded education.

Since our reforms began in 2010 we have seen entry levels for science increase dramatically from 63% in 2010 to 95% in 2018.

The proportion of those taking history or geography has increased from 48% to 78%. The proportion of pupils taking the EBacc combination of subjects as a whole increased to 38% in 2018. But we need to go much further.

In particular, we want to focus on languages. While we have seen a rise in the number of pupils taking at least one language from 40% in 2010 to 46%, there remains much more to do.

It is vital that children should be given the opportunity to learn languages to prepare them for a world that is more connected than ever. It’s why almost three-quarters of parents and carers [73%] said they would advise their child to take a foreign language GCSE.

As part of a long term approach to education we will keep up the focus on language curriculum programmes and continue to recruit and train more MFL teachers.

We would like to work with schools to do more to strengthen opportunities for more children to learn a foreign language.

Our Free School programme has led the way in deploying a rigorous knowledge rich curriculum with over 400 now open and many more in the pipeline.

We all know that digital skills will be become increasingly critical, whatever career path a young person chooses. That is why we reformed the computer science GCSE, with input from leading industry experts, to equip pupils with the knowledge and skills they will need for the high-tech jobs of the future.

Computer science will become an essential skill in the digital era and already leads to a wide range of careers. We want to see more pupils, including girls, follow this path.

To support this, we launched the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) in November 2018, backed by £84 million of government funding to ensure pupils are better prepared for further study and employment in digital roles.

To deliver on these promises, schools and colleges need to have the resources to support the development of healthy, happy children.

From my conversations with heads and colleges principals – I have heard first-hand about the pressures you face.

You will have heard the Secretary of State promise that he would back teachers to have the resources they need and would make the strongest possible case for investment in our schools and colleges. The Secretary of State has asked me to make that commitment to you again today.

It must be right that in a world class education system, there can be no people or places left behind. We must look again at how we can be bolder in supporting the schools facing some of the greatest challenges, in our plans to help schools tackle behaviour and attendance and for the future of our successful Opportunity Areas programme.

As the Secretary of State set out in his speech on Monday, in all our reforms we must bring to bear a new focus on Children in Need and recognise the changing face of disadvantage.

Alongside this, we must find ways to work with heads and principals to support schools in making every pound count in the classroom.

There are many lessons to take from the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. But a clear lesson is that we must turn our attention to making all parts of the country engines of productivity and places where there are plenty of high quality, well paid jobs.

The most productive parts of the country benefit from a virtuous circle, where strong schools with great teachers lead to strong skills with investment following behind as the skilled workforce is in place.

That is why – to create that virtuous circle everywhere – we want to do more to incentivise the best teachers and leaders to work in parts of the country and the schools where they are most needed. We want the best Trusts to expand into areas that some would describe as being “left behind”.

But we have no chance of providing the next generation with the skills to succeed if we do not get serious about investing in technical education.

Which is why we will continue to pursue the reforms of technical education, including the delivery of T-levels and the NRS, which have already been announced.

Colleges are the critical infrastructure of the Industrial Strategy. Last month the Prime Minister was right to say that we have fallen behind our competitor nations when it comes to technical education as successive government have failed to give FE colleges the support they need.

The Post 18 review argued compellingly for much greater investment in further education – both talented teachers and the essential infrastructure, such as buildings and equipment, that underpins the sector. Working in partnership

We are clear on where we want the schools system to go, but we plan to listen to your advice on how to get there.

We want to work with teachers, governors and school and college leaders to turn this vision into reality, just as we worked with you to produce our teacher R&R strategy

Now is the time to think big, not small. Long-term not short term. To ensure that we can fix the generational challenge of productivity and that our world class education system continues to improve and be available to all children.

Below is the text of the speech made by Damian Hinds, the Secretary of State for Education, at the Reform Conference held on 17 June 2019.

Thank you very much, Charlotte [Pickles]. Thank you very much to Reform for hosting this morning. Your organisation has a long track record taking on the big issues in public policy.

This isn’t in the strictest sense a scripted speech. I think it’s probably fair to say that makes my brilliant civil servants a little nervous this morning, but I’ll still ask them and you to bear with me for the next… Well, we never know exactly how long, but don’t worry, it won’t be too long.

I wanted to take the opportunity to draw together some of what we know now that we didn’t know a relatively short time ago, about the nature of disadvantage in education and attainment, and then of course in what happens in later life. Why does this matter? Well, I don’t think you would ask that question, because I think to everybody in this room it is self-evident that in public policy, in government, in what all the organisations represented here do, we should be constantly redoubling efforts to equalise the odds.

Because no child’s prospects in life should be limited by the circumstances of their birth or who they were born to. They should have no limits other than the talents and the application that they themselves will put in.

There’s also of course a hard-nosed economic argument. Because if we’re going to have an economy that’s operating at its maximum potential, which, of course, in turn is what allows us to afford the excellent public services that we all rely on, we do need every child to be able to fulfil absolutely their full potential.

So, this sort of thing will be familiar, I think, to you all. We know that obviously people have innate ability, but how that is able to translate into attainment in school and then what happens later, can get significantly affected both by the background, the circumstances they’re born into and the experiences that they go through.

It goes without saying, by the way, that obviously you also need to put the work in at school. But I’m just taking that for granted. This is about the factors that we as individuals perhaps can’t control. We know that the gaps in attainment, in development, actually start to appear from very early on in life. So, even in the early years the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged is something like four months of development. But it keeps on growing as you go through school.

By the end of Key Stage 4, in other words GCSE time, that gap is the equivalent of 19 months. We also know that the effects of what happens back here [during school years] actually still has an effect much later on. In research that we released last year we showed that the effect of being a child who is eligible for free school meals still shows up in the data, in the workforce. So, still at age 27, you’re materially less likely to be in good, sustained employment if you’ve been on free school meals than somebody who was not.

We also know that it can become something of a cycle. Because there’s a multigenerational impact that then means if you haven’t managed to, break out of that cycle then another generation also experiences some disadvantage coming through.

Charlotte mentioned this, and this is worth reflecting on. The gap between the rich and the poor has narrowed in this country. And this isn’t something that’s happened all over the world. It’s not something natural or inevitable.

When Michael Gove first instituted the reforms that started in 2010, he was very clear all the way through that we as a government should always be measured on two sets of criteria. First, that we’re raising the attainment overall. But secondly, that with everything we are also narrowing the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged.

And this is something very much to be celebrated. But of course, you’ll have spotted that if you reduce the gap by 9% or 13%, the gap is still very large. Some of the things that I think would have helped this progress are things like the Pupil Premium, the Education Endowment Foundation. It’s great to see Kevan [Collins] here today who has produced some of the guidance that’s been given to schools on how to use that.

Also the two-year-old offer, ensuring that more disadvantaged children have the benefit of high-quality early years education. Sponsored academies, and free schools, and the general school improvement drive that we’ve had consistently through that time. And of course most of all, teachers. It is the people who run, who operate education. Who inspire the next generation, who have made it happen.

The problem we have right now is that although we’ve seen this great progress, although the gap has been narrowing, the pace has started to slow. So, if we’re going to sustain the progress on narrowing the gap, we need to figure out what else we need to do. We need to think about what we need to do differently.

And that’s really what today is about. It’s about recognising the face of disadvantage; understanding more about aspects of disadvantage. It’s about recognising how disadvantage may have changed in certain respects, or for certain groups. And it’s also about understanding more about the scale of particular types of factors, and how they may have changed.

And then ultimately, of course, whatever you know about disadvantage, the question is, what are you going to do about it? Both within the school system and also because schools cannot do everything. We cannot expect them to do everything. It’s a wider societal question of how the rest of society operates.

So, today, I’m going to particularly cover five areas associated with disadvantage: Ethnicity, language, place, or in other words part of the country, the home environment and adversity in childhood. Some of those things you can think of as being more about the background of the child, more about where they’ve come from, and some of them are more about the experiences, the things that happen to that child during the course of their childhood. But actually, each of them has some elements typically of both.

I’m not going to cover absolutely everything about disadvantage, otherwise we really would be here a very long time this morning. But in particular, I want to mention two very important areas.

Mental health – we are more attentive today than ever before and we know that mental health problems can affect all sorts of young people. Of course, those in the most difficult circumstances are most likely to face this adversity. We’ve been doing quite a lot on mental health, both in terms of the Mental Health Green Paper, making sure that support networks will be available around schools, and Designated Mental Health Leads in schools. But also crucially, from an early age, through the new health education curriculum, we’ll be talking about mental health. Including talking at quite a young age about some of the strategies that you can put in place on self-regulation, on trying to help cope with the difficulties that come along in life.

And you’ll also have heard the Prime Minister speaking this morning about the announcement today on mental health including enhancing the content in initial teacher training about spotting the early signs of mental health difficulties.

And then of course, there’s the whole area of SEND. Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, which is in itself a huge and varied area in terms of the effect on children. It’s not something I’m going to cover today, but it is something that we will be coming back to in a similar vein.

But it’s worth saying that all of these things can interact with each other. Clearly, everybody has an ethnicity and they live somewhere, and sometimes the danger is that we spot something, which we think is to do with one of those factors, when actually it’s to do with another. And they can easily be conflated.

It is also true that things can operate one on top of another. So, you can have a cumulative effect of different disadvantages. They don’t quite work in a purely mathematical additive way, but they do concentrate the effects of each other. So, for example, later on when we talk about Children in Need, that is to say children who have need of the services of a social worker, many also have Special Educational Needs and are eligible for free school meals. That number of children adds up to 120,000.

So, the Prime Minister instituted the Race Disparity Audit, to ask some of those difficult questions and face up to what can be difficult and deeply uncomfortable answers, when we look at the different experiences of people of different ethnicities in our society. And part of that is about education.

Now, what do we see when we look at the experiences of people from different ethnic groups? Some ethnic groups experience a below average experience and attainment pretty much across the board. So, if we talk about black Caribbean children, for example, they are more likely than white British children to be eligible for free school meals, and they are likely to statistically attain a lower level when it comes to GCSEs.

But for other groups, it can be more complex. This chart here shows the experience of black African children on average. Again, it’s important to stress, on average. Because of course, in every ethnic group you have a wide distribution. But among black African children, you’ll see that at primary and secondary school, compared to [the national average which includes] white British, they actually perform slightly better. Although, that reverses when you take other factors into account. And there’s actually a significantly higher rate of black African children going into university than [the national average which includes] the white British population. But when they get there, they are less likely to complete with a top degree, a first or a 2:1. Later on in life, they’re more likely to be in work but they’re less likely to experience good earnings growth.

So, as I say, a complicated picture. .When we talk about social mobility, or disadvantage, how often do we just focus on GCSE attainment and assume that everything else will follow? Or historically, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, said that, the ability to go to university can be the most life-changing opportunity. That can be true. But not if you don’t finish university. So, we need to think about every stage along the way.

There is another group of children who we often mention, but sometimes just in passing. Which is white British children. Among the disadvantaged population the lowest performing group is white British children. This isn’t among the population as a whole, but just among those who are classed as disadvantaged. Within that, you separate out the ethnicities and white British children are [among] the least likely to reach the expected level at reading and writing and mathematics, and make progress at secondary school.

If we talk about ethnicity, we tend to talk about all other ethnicities and then sometimes say, well, of course we mustn’t forget this group of white British children. But then you convert the charts by volume and you realise that almost two thirds of the cohort of disadvantaged children are white British. So, if we are to really, really narrow the gap when it comes to the disadvantaged kids versus the rest, it is important to think about the places where there is a heavy concentration of white British children, as well as about the places where there are heavy concentrations of other ethnicities and those that are more diverse.

So, let me move onto language, and you might think that having English as an additional language is a disadvantage at school. In fact, ladies and gentlemen, children with English as an additional language perform slightly better when it comes to GCSEs. Not a huge amount and not in every subject, but about half a grade better on average across eight subjects. It’s a slightly counterintuitive result. Let me explain this graph. Those who have very recently arrived do worse. But the longer you’re in the system, the better you do. And in fact most of the gap is gone within three years. If you’ve been here longer, you actually perform on par with or even slightly outperform the average.

And it’s sometimes also thought that it’s not good for the rest of the class if you have a number of kids with English as an additional language. But actually, that’s not true either. The evidence shows there is no, disadvantage for other children in the class. In fact, there can be a slight advantage. But again, it’s important to stress that pupils with English as an Additional Language is a large group, which covers a number of different types of circumstance, and clearly, as this chart shows, there is a huge difference between being a newly arrived refugee and being a child growing up in a multilingual household.

Now, I said at the start there is often an overlap between a number of these different factors, and I’m now going to talk about an important overlap between language and place. In this city, London, there is an extraordinary number of children who have English as an additional language.

In fact, of last year’s Year 6, so in other words the kids who just started secondary school, in London 49% of them were classed as having English as an Additional Language. And that may be one of the reasons, but only one – and I’m going to say a number of times in the next few minutes that there are many, many reasons why performance in London is different – but that may be one of the reasons why London children do so much better than children elsewhere in the country.

This table charts the different stages of school: early years, infants, juniors, secondary and higher education, for those who go. It shows separately, for all children and for those eligible for free school meals, what the performance is for children in London compared to elsewhere.

You’ll see that among pupils as a whole, actually in the early years and the infants there’s not much difference really at all. They’re performing on par. Then they start performing a bit better, and a bit better, and by the time you talk about entry to a selective university as opposed to a recruiting university, you’re 1.5 times, 50% more likely to go if you’re a child in London.

But it’s among the disadvantaged, among those eligible for free school meals, were the really striking difference is. The gap’s actually already there in nursery school and in infant school. And then it carries on growing as well, but the multiplicative effect is that by the time you talk about whether or not you’re going to a selective university, a free school meals eligible child in London is twice as likely as a free school meals eligible child elsewhere.

What is different about London? I’ve said I was going to say this a number of times. Almost everything, actually. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to ascribe exact causes to the effects that we see of these strong results. Families are different. Places are different. The work environment is different. What children walk past to go to school is different. Pretty much everything is different.

Some things aren’t different, it’s worth saying, and sometimes they are the things that people most naturally look to as being likely drivers of difference in performance. But let me give you an example of a couple of these things, which are different and might surprise people that have an effect.

First of all, tutoring. There’s a very high proportion of children in London who have tutors, and by the way, before anyone says it, this didn’t start in 2010. This is a long-standing phenomenon. Both that there are high levels of tutor usage in London and a gap between that level in London and the rest of the country.

Shorter distances. It may seem like a trite and obvious point. But in a city, which is much more concentrated than most of our country, it means that from a school choice perspective, for example, you’ve got that many more schools within a reasonable travel distance. Even if you compare, say, Lambeth with Manchester, there are twice as many schools within a one-mile radius in Lambeth, as there are in Manchester, and of course that ends up being important also later on in life.

There are also many more universities. The average travel to university is 59 miles. There are many, many more universities within 59 miles in this city than there are in most parts of the country. And in terms of work opportunities, the opportunities are that much greater. So, there are many, many possible explanations of why London outperforms the rest of the country. The one that is most often cited I’m going to suggest is not likely to be the biggest factor. The thing which is most often cited is a thing called the London Challenge, and for those of you in this room who worked on the London Challenge, let me be clear, I’m not dismissing the London Challenge. It was a very good thing to do and actually elements of it we have, shamelessly, borrowed for use elsewhere, for example in what we’re now doing in the north east.

But the year that London started outperforming the rest of the country on GCSEs was the same year that the London Challenge started. So, in other words those kids had just been alive for 16 years, not under the London Challenge.

And, in fact we see, as I’ve shown on the previous slide, that the outperformance of London was also in primary school and indeed in early years, whereas as the London Challenge initially was only focussed on secondary.

There is some good news for the rest of the country of course as well on this, which is that the city effect doesn’t seem to occur only in London. So, some of the things I was talking about, like distance for example, of course are also relevant elsewhere.

And, we find that if we look at cities, and this is new research that we’re releasing today, disadvantaged kids in our bigger cities do better than in school settings elsewhere.

If we take Birmingham, for example: disadvantaged children in Birmingham will have a stronger performance than, say, neighbouring boroughs, Solihull, Dudley and so on, as well as performing above the national average.

The performance of disadvantaged children in our biggest cities overall exceeds that in other types of areas. The north-south divide, ladies and gentlemen, I think there is still some truth to there being some differences on average in the north and south, but actually it’s far too simplistic a concept, if we’re to understand the complex makeup of the United Kingdom today.

There’s another type of location, which we’ve had more focus on of late, and we now understand in greater detail: coastal areas, where people have long had a sort of suspicion that there is something endemic, which means that performance is lower on average. Again, there’s a big spread that will be lower, among disadvantaged children in coastal areas and elsewhere.

And the new research that we’ve got demonstrates that that is indeed true. It’s no coincidence that our Opportunity Areas Programme includes many coastal towns, like Blackpool and Hastings and Scarborough and the north coast.

One other area I want to touch on is the North East. This is relevant to the discussion about opportunity areas, because we’ve had some criticism that we didn’t have any opportunity areas initially in the North East.

The reason for that is that nowhere in the North East fits the normal criteria that there isn’t a sufficient proportion of very strongly performing schools, because actually there are loads of really, really strongly performing schools in the North East.

What’s different about the North East is that at primary and indeed early years, there’s a very, very heavy preponderance of very strongly performing schools, but at secondary, whilst there are a number of brilliant schools, as there are everywhere, it’s a much, much lower preponderance.

What that means is that the outcomes for kids, by the time they get to 16, are lower than they are elsewhere. And then the progression on to college or on to university is lower as well. And so we introduced Opportunity North East specifically to look at that disparity between primary and secondary, to work on the transition from primary, secondary and to work with a number of secondary schools on school improvement.

There are great schools everywhere, as I’ve just said, this is a map of outstanding schools. In every single part of the country there are outstanding schools.

And it is worth just repeating, as everybody in this room knows well, that whatever we say about people’s background, whatever is true about people’s experiences, school can make a massive, massive difference, specifically the teachers within that school can make a massive, massive difference, but you do have to be there.

We completed an extended project looking at exclusions, and you’ll be familiar with the very important findings from Edward Timpson’s report, and I want to thank him again for the extensive work he did.

But actually I think one of the most important findings, from my perspective, to come out of that was about all the children who were not in school, who have not been excluded. And actually it turns out that there are a lot more children not in school, than those who have been permanently excluded.

Now, that could be for many different reasons, but quite a few of them are unauthorised persistent absence, or what I call hyper-persistent absence. Hyper-persistent absence is when you’re missing half of school.

Now the full amount includes others as well, including people who are away for medical reasons, for good reasons, but a significant proportion of that number are out of school unauthorised.

And I said, although we’ve got a lot of focus on the permanently excluded, we need to worry as much actually about these children, those who are on unauthorised absence, and particularly the vulnerabilities that they may then experience.

Okay, so we talked about place, there is another place that probably doesn’t get quite enough attention, and that is the home. I mentioned right at the start that there could be a lot of overlap between different factors, and actually most factors, if we talk about ethnicity, most of the factors,in different performance, different attainment of groups of kids with different ethnicities, actually could be explained by other things, including the home.

And we know that the home learning environment, what parents do, is actually far more important than who the parents are. And we know that in the very earliest years, gaps appear in development, at even at age two and three, and about a fifth of the difference in development of cognitive ability, about a fifth, is to do with, parental engagement. This really matters, because, as I said at the start, you know, we know that gaps appear early, but we also know that they grow. And if we’re serious about social mobility, if we’re serious about narrowing that gap, then actually we have to pay attention to what happens in the very earliest years and we have the knowledge that what happens in the very earliest years actually happens mostly at home.

I had a conversation with Alan Milburn a few years ago, and I can’t remember if I said it to him and he agreed or he said it to me and I agreed. I’m happy to credit Alan with the phrase, that home is the last taboo in public policy.

Because none of want to go there, nobody wants to be the politician that starts talking about ‘you should do this and do that’ or make it sound like they think they know better than a family. I don’t want to be that person either.

But if we are serious about social mobility, we have to go there; we have to care about the home learning environment, because it is going to determine the futures of a lot of those children. And that is why we’re putting in place a new programme, which isn’t going to be patronising and lecturing, but a new programme to help support parents.

And we know that overwhelmingly parents do want support. Nobody’s born with a manual of how to bring up children. Parents want the hints and tips. And so we’re introducing a new programme, which will come out next month to support parents.

We also know the effect the home environment has. We tend to talk about it for the very earliest years but actually it carries all the way through school and indeed beyond. If you take a child who has a combination of a lot of strife at home and parents being disengaged from their education, so not going to parents evening, not reading reports, these children’s attainment is the equivalent of nine grades lower across eight GCSE subjects. And just to put that in perspective, that – the strife at home and disengaged parenting – is a bigger difference , than either being born into a low income household or being at a school rated less than good or outstanding.

So, the most, concentrated form of strife that children may experience when young is this one, Children in Need.It’s not a phrase which is particularly well understood out there. Most people in this room will understand it, but let me just explain what in public policy terms Children in Need means.

These are children who are not children in care, they’re living at home, but they do need the services of a social worker and they either have a Child Protection Plan or a Children in Need plan. And there are five times as many of them as there are Children in Care. Now, this is a group that is not that well understood. I don’t get asked about them when I do media interviews, I don’t answer Parliamentary questions about Children in Need. It is I’m afraid a cohort of children who in general public discourse are just not as well understood as, Children in Care or indeed children overall.

We understand Children in Care, or Looked after Children, have very poor outcomes, very poor attainment at school, compared to other children. Actually the truth is that this group, Children in Need, have outcomes which are almost as bad, I mean, very, very nearly as bad, but there are five times as many of them.

And, if you talk about children who’ve ever been in those circumstances, so they have needed a social worker at some point, that’s 1.6 million children, or to put it in perspective, one in 10.

Now, in our Children in Need Review, we are looking at, or we have been looking at what more can be done to help and support those children, and I’ll come onto that in a minute. As well as knowing that the attainment and the outcomes for Children in Need are very poor, we also know that those effects sustain.

So, even if you are not classed as a Child in Need at the time when you’re doing your qualifications, you can still see that effect coming through. Overall if you’ve needed contact with a social worker at any time, since Year 5 in school, on average you score 20 grades lower across eight GCSEs.

It’s quite an astonishing, gap. And as I say we’ve known, and it’s widely understood, that for Children in Care, so the Looked after Children, there’s a wide gap, but this doesn’t get talked about nearly as much.

So, I said in our Children in Need Review, we’re considering and putting forward, what more we need to do. The first thing we need to do is improve the visibility of this group of children. And that’s true, both for individual schools and for the system as a whole.

In fact, schools in general will know about this group of children, those who are in need of a social worker, because of safeguarding arrangements. But we need to make sure that is true in every case, so that information is passed on when a child moves a school, for example. We also need to make sure that at a system wide level we are tracking the outcomes of these children overall. So, that as we carry on developing policy, we always have this group of children high in our minds. We also need them to be in school.

Now, I mentioned the absence persistence a moment ago, it probably isn’t a great surprise to you to hear that Children in Need are considerably more likely to be persistently absent from school than other children.

And being in school is a key protective factor. It is not just about what you’re learning, but the very fact of being there in school and being around other trusted adults, is very, very important for these children. And helping to reduce the likelihood that they fall prey to criminal or sexual exploitation.

So, we’re going to do a couple of these, including changing the admissions code, so that when a Child in Need has to move schools, so for example in the case of domestic abuse, we’re going to change the admissions code to help accelerate that process. And if one of these children is excluded from school, and we would hope that that is reduced, but if they do have to be excluded from school, we will make sure that their social worker is informed. We also need to continue to improve our knowledge of what works to help and support these children.

We mustn’t lower our expectations to only expect so much, but actually, for these children, it’s more important than anything that they, can do their very, very best, make the very, very most of their talents when they are at school.

And so, we need to learn what works with Looked after Children, Children in Care, for example the virtual school heads’ approach, and see what learning we can derive from that, for this group as well.

To sum up, for the different groups that we have talked about ( ethnicity, English as an additional language, where you’re growing up, the home environment and for some children the adverse experiences that happen in childhood), our understanding of what constitutes, what drives disadvantage is greater than it used to be. And we need to make sure we use that greater knowledge to best effect.

And there of course those many, many different levers, many different things that we can do to help minimise disadvantage, to help to continue to sustain the narrowing of that gap. One of them that I wanted to talk about very briefly just now is the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and the Pupil Premium.

And I think this has been a very, very important structural change that we made in education, not only the Pupil Premium but crucially the guidance that goes with it.

And today I thank EEF for publishing the new guidance on effective use of the Pupil Premium, which recommends a tiered approach. It starts with hiring brilliant teachers, because we know that, great teachers make the biggest difference to all children, but an even bigger difference to the most disadvantaged children.

And the second tier is about targeted interventions with particular children, groups of children, and third making sure they have access to the goods and extra curriculum opportunities as other children.

But there are many other things, as I say, that we have done, starting with the institution of the EEF, the increased entitlement to early years’ education and particularly for disadvantaged two-year olds.

The Opportunity Areas, the virtual school heads for children in care, the changing accountability of the performance measures from the cliff edge, five or more GCSEs to the progress measure, which means that the progress and development of every child is counted.

And overall, what we have been doing, and many people actually who I see in this room have been in the forefront of, is school improvement, and making sure that we are impatient for there to be a brilliant education, not just for some kids in our country, but for all kids in our country, and the School Improvement Programme, along with free schools and academies, particularly sponsored academies, has been at the forefront of that.

There are a number of things which we’re at a relatively early stage development, like Opportunity North East, that I mentioned, the careers strategy to make sure that all children have a broad view and a stretching view of what they can achieve in life.

Access and participation – whenever I hear that phrase, access and participation, I always want to insert another word, which is successful, there’s no point in widening access, if people aren’t finishing university, so access and successful participation of higher education. And the home learning environment, where actually it all starts, from that grounding that you get in the very earliest years at home and then that actually gets sustained through life as well. And there will be more to come in the future.

This set of levers may not end up being a fully comprehensive set, there may need to be other things that we do as well. Because until we have closed that gap, until we have ensured that every child can make the absolute fullest use of their talents, there will always be more to do. Thank you.