Delivering a Fair Start for Every Child

Liberal Democrats believe that a quality education is the biggest opportunity to improve people’s lives. Nothing is more important than giving every child a fair start in life.

Today the coalition government published its white paper on schools – “The Importance of Teaching”. It sets out our ambitious reform programme to raise standards for all children while narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

It shows how the Government is delivering the fair start for every child that we promised in the Liberal Democrat manifesto.

The White Paper announced four key reforms –

– Delivering a Pupil Premium, on top of the budgets that schools already have, to go to every deprived child wherever they live, to allow schools to put extra resources into narrowing the gap in attainment between the richest and the poorest.

– Giving all schools more freedom to make the right choices for their pupils – slimming down the national curriculum, removing bureaucracy and red tape and reducing testing and league tables.

– Recognising that it is the quality of teaching that really makes a difference in the classroom – expanding graduate teacher programmes like Teach First, developing networks of “teaching schools” and supporting continuing professional development.

And, something important to Liberal Democrats, matching school freedoms with a strong strategic role for local authorities in ensuring fairness – in admissions policies, for children with special educational needs, and in championing educational excellence in all schools, including
Free Schools and Academies.

You can read more about the white paper – and you can watch the video below about the pupil premium.

As part of the consultation process, you can send your views on the white paper to: schoolswhitepaper.team@education.gov.uk. If you have friends or family working in education, please foward this email so they can get involved.

The Liberal Democrats are delivering in Government the fair start for children we promised.

Sarah Teather MP
Minister of State – Department for Education

Making Welfare Work and Making it Fair

Our Universal Credit is a radical and liberal policy. It will simplify and amalgamate the main welfare benefits into one single system; ensure that work always pays; and alleviate poverty by boosting take-up and encouraging people into work. It is exactly the kind of change that we came into politics to make.

Labour failed miserably on welfare. During their 13 years in office the welfare bill rose by 40% to £87bn. Under their system people moving into work can still lose more than 90% of every pound they earn: a punitive tax on the shoulders of the poor.

The welfare system should not be judged on how much money is spent on it, but on how much of a difference it makes to people’s lives. We will return the welfare system to its historic mission, as articulated by the great Liberal William Beveridge, to offer security but not ‘stifle incentive, opportunity and responsibility’.

Poverty plus a pound is simply not an ambitious enough goal.

That is why the plans we are announcing today will remove artificial disincentives to work. It must always be worth working, even for a few hours. Taken together our welfare reforms should reduce the number of workless households by 300,000 within three years of implementation. And of course any fair system must include power to use sanctions, so we are giving JobCentre advisers the powers to ensure that there are appropriate and measured steps that can be taken against the small minority who persistently refuse genuine opportunities to work or to train to get the skills to work.

Making welfare work and making it fair is a key test for any government. We are determined to ensure that a government of which the Liberal Democrats are a part passes that test.

Nick Clegg MP
Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Liberal Democrats

Steve Webb MP
Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions