Teachers need the power to keep order

Shadow Schools Minister Nick Gibb has added to warnings about the Government's plans to give teenagers a direct right of appeal against exclusion.

"This Labour Government has weakened teachers’ powers to keep order in the classroom", he said.

"Nothing undermines the authority of a headteacher more than an appeals panel returning an excluded pupil back to the same school – even in cases where knives have been involved".

Gibb pledged to give head teachers more freedom to discipline violent and disruptive pupils, and to "make sure teachers have the powers they need to nip problems with behaviour in the bud before they spiral out of control."

Core academic subjects disappearing from many state schools

Nick Gibb has attacked the Government after new figures revealed that, in many state secondary schools, no A-level pupils are entered for core academic subjects such as Maths, History and the Sciences.

The Shadow Schools Minister described the news as "extremely worrying", pointing out that Labour's league tables encourage weaker schools to push pupils away from the traditional subjects towards alternatives that are less valued by universities and employers.

Nick reiterated our plans to reverse this trend by giving more weight to the most valued subjects, which provide the rigorous academic training that enables children to succeed across a number of fields later in life, and added:

"Ministers like to pretend that employers and universities value all A-levels as highly as traditional academic subjects but it simply isn't true. The Government's flawed league tables incentivise weaker schools to push pupils away from the traditional subjects towards less crunchy alternatives. In doing so they are cheating those children, many of whom are from more deprived backgrounds."

Gibb slams Labour's handling of school refurbishment programme

A new report by the Public Accounts Committee has condemned Labour’s handling of a multi-billion pound school refurbishment programme.

The Committee said the Building Schools for the Future scheme was “over-optimistic” and created expectations “that could not be met”.

200 schools were originally planned to be completed by December 2008 under the scheme; but only 42 actually were. And the programme, which was meant to be delivered over 10-15 years, is now expected to take 18 years.

Nick Gibb, the Shadow Schools Minister, condemned the Government’s “appalling handling" of its flagship school refurbishment programme, and stressed it had led to “massive delays and overspending”:

“Billions of pounds are being spent but parents and children aren’t seeing the results. We need a Government that gets proper value for taxpayers’ money, not one that squanders public money through its incompetence.”

Gibb attacks Labour for making it harder for teachers to keep order

Shadow Schools Minister Nick Gibb has attacked Labour for making it harder to expel disruptive pupils after new figures showed a huge increase in children being repeatedly suspended.

Data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveals that at least 867 pupils were suspended from school more than ten times last year.

The number of children repeatedly suspended has therefore nearly trebled in four years, after 310 children were suspended more than ten times in 2003/04.

Nick Gibb warned, “Suspending a child from school over and over again does them no good at all. If a child has been seriously disruptive or violent they should be properly removed so they can get the specialist help they need to return to mainstream education.”

And he stressed, “Teachers want these pupils out of their classroom so other children can learn, but the Government’s restrictions on expulsion have caused this phenomenon of endless suspension.”