Queen's Speech 2017: Schools and Technical Education

“My Government will continue to work to ensure that every child has the opportunity to attend a good school and that all schools are fairly funded. My Ministers will work to ensure people have the skills they need for the high-skilled, high-wage jobs of the future, including through a major reform of technical education.”

We want every child to go to a good or outstanding school. We will look at all options and work with Parliament to bring forward proposals that can command a majority.

We want to make sure all children, regardless of where they live or their background, can get a world-class education that unlocks talent and creates opportunity. We want to make Britain the world’s Great Meritocracy: a country where everyone has a fair chance to go as far as their talent and their hard work will allow, where advantage is based on merit not privilege.

Thanks to our reforms there are 1.8 million, more children in schools rated good or outstanding than in 2010.

Delivering enough school places is one of the Government’s top priorities. We have already committed £5.8 billion for local authorities up to 2020 to deliver new school places, on top of our investment in the free schools programme.

We will continue to encourage more people, schools and institutions with something to offer to come forward and help deliver more good school places.

To continue the growth of good or outstanding school places, we have made available to academies and maintained schools a £140 million Strategic School Improvement Fund.

We will continue to convert failing maintained schools into academies so that they can benefit from the support of a strong sponsor, and we are focused on building capacity across the system to enable this, including through growing new multi academy trusts.

Key facts

• There are now 18,726 good or outstanding schools, up by 3,829 since 2010.
• Over 6.6 million pupils are taught in good or outstanding schools, up by 1.8 million since 2010.
• We have already committed £5.8 billion up to 2020 to deliver new school places, on top of our investment in the free schools programme.
• Over 50 new schools are expected to open in September 2017. There are currently over 350 new schools in the pipeline that will create over 150,000 places when the schools reach capacity.

Fairer Funding

We believe that the current arrangements are unfair and we remain committed to changing them.

The way funding is distributed to schools in England is not fair. Across the country, schools teaching children with the same needs gets markedly different amounts of money for no good reason. The data that we use to allocate funding to local authorities is over a decade out of date.

That is why we recently consulted on a National Funding Formula for schools, and why we will deliver on our manifesto commitment to make funding fairer. This has been widely welcomed across the sector.

Since 2010 the schools budget has been protected in real terms. This Government has committed to increase the school budget further, as well as continuing to protect the Pupil Premium to support those who need it.

We know that how schools use their money is also important in delivering the best outcomes for pupils. The Government has produced tools, information and guidance to support improved financial health and efficiency in schools.

Technical Education

This Government is determined to create a world-class technical education system and see technical excellence valued as highly as academic success.

We will be investing an extra half a billion pounds a year in England’s technical education system.

The Post-16 Skills Plan, published in July 2016, confirmed the Government’s acceptance of all 34 of the recommendations made by the Independent Panel on Technical Education to improve technical education.

The centrepiece of the proposals was the introduction of 15 technical education routes (within which sit “T-levels”) based on standards designed by employers and grouping together occupations where there are shared training requirements.

Each route would allow progression from Level 2, which is the GCSE-equivalent, to level 5, the Higher National Diploma equivalent for college-based, and to level 7 for apprenticeships.

As part of our Industrial Strategy, we will also deliver on our plans for new Institutes of Technology. These will enable more young people to take advanced technical qualifications and become key institutions for the development of the skills required by local, national and regional industry.

We will also continue to create millions of apprenticeships and to ensure that they are of high quality, so that employers get access to the skills they need.

And we will continue to work towards making it easier for young people to take technical and vocational routes, so that they can make effective choices about how these will benefit their careers and future study.

Key facts

• We will be investing an extra half a billion pounds a year in England’s technical education system, once the reforms are fully implemented, to increase the hours of learning and introduce work placements.