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out that a number of independent schools were pegging their fees because they were finding it difficult to attract pupils. My hon. Friend said that the schools were holding down their fee levels in an attempt to reverse the drift away by parents who were struggling to pay their bills.One of the schools mentioned in the article was Dulwich college, which the previous year received the largest amount of assisted places money-- £1.3 million. Dulwich college is a school in my borough, which is also the borough of the Minister for Transport in London, who is in his place. My hon. Friend was not arguing that Dulwich college could not do without assisted places, but he made the case that there were a small number of schools which benefited, with a much smaller number of schools which received a disproportionate benefit. The hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) made the point that Wisbech grammar school gets more than 49 per cent. of its pupils through the assisted places scheme.
Mr. Robin Squire: I will not labour the point, but, as the hon. Gentleman's quotation demonstrated, the reference to Dulwich college and the fact that it received the highest amount followed immediately after a reference by his hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) to the fact that
"a number of independent schools . . . find themselves in increasing difficulties."--[ Official Report, 19 July 1994; Vol. 247, c. 269.]
If it was not meant to be read together, why did he follow the first comment with the second?
Mr. Hughes: I do not want to go into a detailed analysis. The point is that a relatively small number of schools benefit. Clearly, the scheme is a relevant consideration and is financially helpful for them. I am not arguing that the Government keep the scheme in operation to keep certain schools in being. Coincidentally, it may have that advantage. However, if I were running an independent school that was dependent on fees, I would certainly regard it as helpful if I could get the local authority to pay for a certain number of places.
Finally, the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth mentioned a subject that is tangential to the debate, but which must be dealt with. When counties such as Essex, which happens to be under a joint Liberal Democrat and Labour administration, decide that they cannot continue funding travel out of area, they do so on budgetary grounds. Like every other education authority at a time of Government restraint on their funds, they have to look for money savings. That is not an invalid criticism. The Secretary of State and Ministers keep on telling education authorities that they must shepherd their resources properly--excuse the pun--as they must, and that was the reason for the cut. It was not an ideological attack on a certain type of schooling as such travel represented a considerable budget cost. The cut has resulted in considerable savings, which have gone to other mainstream school activities.
Mr. Pawsey: Is the hon. Gentleman saying that it is purely coincidence that children whose schools happen to be attacked by both his party and members of the Labour party were selected? If he is saying that, I must point out, very gently, that I am not entirely persuaded that it is accurate.
Mr. Hughes: My colleagues voted to reduce the budget in that sector and transfer the money elsewhere, not for
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ideological but for cost reasons. The hon. Gentleman can believe it or not as he chooses. It is a perfectly valid ground for the decision and it is the one that they chose.There is all the difference in the world between accepting the continuing existence of the independent sector and working with it, and buying places for a few pupils, which clearly gives them an advantage that the majority do not get. My hon. Friends and I will oppose the regulations this year, as we have opposed them in previous years, because of the failure to attain any of the objectives and the lack of evidence that the scheme is succeeding in what it was intended to do or fundamentally changes anything and, above all, the lack of evidence that it is the best way to spend what will always be limited public resources. We would not continue with assisted places. Of course, we would not prejudice those who currently enjoy them, but in the future we would look for better ways to use public money, to ensure that co-operation, where appropriate, was delivered. I believe that the public would find that considerably more acceptable. 9.1 pm
Mr. David Atkinson (Bournemouth, East): I want to use the opportunity of this debate to refer briefly to a practical example in my constituency, which clearly demonstrates how this modest, low-cost but great value-for-money assisted places scheme is helping those whom it is designed to help, by providing greater opportunities for able pupils from less well-off families, who would be cruelly affected if Labour were ever given the opportunity to abolish it, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) confirmed tonight.
Earlier this year, I received a letter from Rev. Godfrey Taylor, the vicar at St. John's Anglican church in Boscombe, which is in my constituency. I am sure that he will not mind my mentioning his name because, as he reminds me in his letter, some of his previous correspondence with me has been critical of Government policies. In this letter, however, he tells me how much his family have appreciated the assisted places scheme for children from families such as his, where money is tight. He is a Church of England clergyman on a very low income, with four children to educate, one of whom has been able to benefit from the scheme by going to an excellent independent girls' school in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Mr. Butterfill)--Talbot Heath. He certainly could never have afforded to send her there on his income, regardless of any personal sacrifice that he and his family were prepared to make.
In addition to his experience, my constituent tells me that he knows of many other families in his parish who have found this scheme of equally great assistance to them. In no way can those families--my constituents--on low incomes be described as
"creating a self-perpetuating elite whose grasp of the profound economic and social changes taking place is minuscule",
to quote the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) in his article in The Daily Telegraph on 28 November 1994. My constituent has not always supported the Government but has taken the trouble to commend them on the assisted places scheme. He hopes that it will be safe in the future and, in so doing, is clearly not alone
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among my constituents. On their behalf, may I welcome the assurance given by my hon. Friend the Minister, which he has since confirmed to my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey): that the scheme, and independent schools, will be safe in the Government's hands? As we now know from both Opposition spokesmen, it will be safe only in the Government's hands.9.4 pm
Mr. David Jamieson (Plymouth, Devonport): It is usually my lot in education debates to follow the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey): tonight is an exception, I am pleased to say. He said that the Secretary of State had entered the Chamber due to her interest in this matter. She came in only during the hon. Gentleman's speech and I suggest that it was not out of her natural interest in the debate but simply to hear his eloquence. Given how he performed tonight, I suspect that we might see his name tossed forward on Wednesday for even higher office.
The hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth said that tonight's debate was about excellence. It is not about excellence; it is about division. He said that the assisted places scheme gave children from inner cities an opportunity to benefit from private education. But that applies only if they are bright. Does he accept that children from inner cities and other deprived areas, who are of average or below-average intelligence, could also benefit from the assisted places scheme? I take it from his silence that he does not accept that.
Mr. Pawsey: The hon. Gentleman clearly listened to the first part of my remarks. Had he concentrated with equal intensity on their latter part, he would have heard me say that I am anxious to see the scheme reach down-- for example, into the ethnic communities. I want more young people to attend those schools from all strata of society. [Interruption.] I cannot speak over the barracking nonsense from the Labour Back Benches. The hon. Gentleman may remember my saying that I was keen on ensuring that the scheme did not apply simply to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I want it to have a much broader base.
Mr. Jamieson: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reaffirming what I already believed: that he believes that the scheme should be open only for bright children and does not accept that children of average, just above average or just below average ability should benefit from it.
I shall not repeat the points that were made ably by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle). It is interesting that we should have this debate a week or so after a debate on the capping orders. Those orders cut the budget of my authority of Devon by £9 million, which is having profound effects on children in my area.
In that debate it was argued that the funding provided for children in my area and other capped areas was sufficient. Let us contrast that argument, which we heard but a week ago, with those that we are hearing tonight from the Minister and his apologists on the Conservative Back Benches. Last year the assisted places scheme
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received £102 million for just 32,000 children. I do not want to trouble the Minister with too much arithmetic because I know that it gives him difficulties. May I assist him by explaining that, in a local authority secondary school--even a grant- maintained secondary school where capital is included--the average amount spent is £2,200 per pupil. Yet if the Minister works out what is spent on each place in the assisted places scheme, he will see that it is at least £3,300 per pupil. If he then adds the parental contribution, he will find that we are giving about twice as much funding to children in private schools as we are to those in local education authority schools. Decent, ordinary people throughout the country are asking: if that funding can be made available to private schools, why cannot it be made available for our children in local education authority-funded schools?If we need extra funding to create smaller classes in private and independent schools, why cannot that money be available to local education authority schools? Like many other matters, such as the double funding of grant-maintained schools and the massive extra amounts that have been given to city technology colleges, it is simply intended to prop up the failed dogma of the Tories. The Minister says that the purpose of the regulations is to give choice to parents. Why does not he give all parents the choice of their children, whatever school they attend, benefiting from twice as much funding as at present?
Many other arguments have been advanced in the debate, but I shall not go into them all. The hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Hawkins)--who is not in his place at the moment--said that the Opposition were displaying the politics of envy. I can tell him that people in my part of the country do not understand the politics of envy, but they do understand the politics of fairness.
There is a difference between private and independent schools and local education authority schools, and it is to do with accountability. For years, the Government have made great play of accountability, the national curriculum, the standard assessment tasks and the compulsory Office of Standards in Education report, some of which we support. However, I should like the Minister to answer the following question: why does he not expect the same accountability in those private and independent schools that receive £102 million under the assisted places scheme?
The taxpayer also pays more than £130 million into private and independent schools through the service boarding scheme. For the Minister's assistance, I calculate that slightly more than £0.25 billion of taxpayers' money is being poured into private and independent schools, which are not properly accountable in the ways that local education authority schools have been made accountable. One or two of those schools have had Ofsted reports. Under the law as it stands, not only does an LEA school have to meet the parents, governors and the inspectors and provide to all parents a summary of the Ofsted report, but it has to make the full report available to all those parents who want it: contrast that with the schools that receive money from the taxpayer under the assisted places scheme. I refer the Minister to a letter that I received from the then Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Forth), on 17 February 1994. He said, on the subject of independent schools:
"Any . . . school which is the subject of a published report is supplied with copies which it can distribute as it sees fit"--
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none of that sending it to all parents. It is not, "make the report available to all parents", but"distribute as it sees fit".
One way in which a school might distribute that report is to distribute it around the head's study and ensure that it got no further than the boundaries of the school.
The then Under-Secretary of State said in the final sentence of the letter:
"The onus is on the school to distribute the report to interested parties or to advise them where reports can be obtained." I refer the Minister to an example of a school that I have dealt with in the past year or so, a private school that receives substantial amounts of taxpayers' money-- Finborough school in Suffolk. It is not in the assisted places scheme, but it is a private school. In March 1994, the head teacher wrote to the parents of the school, as follows:
"We have not obtained copies of the Report"--
the Ofsted report--
"for parents because"
and then he goes on to list all the reasons why parents cannot have the Ofsted report.
I suggest to the Minister, and to his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, that if we are to place £102 million of taxpayers' money into private and independent schools, the least that we should expect of them is the accountability that we expect of local education authority schools.
9.14 pm
Mr. Robin Squire: We have had an interesting debate. If nothing else, I can assure Opposition Members that any doubts that they may have about the assisted places scheme are not shared by the many parents on modest incomes whose children have benefited from it in the past, who continue to benefit from it now and who hope to participate in it in the future. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Atkinson) made that point well in his good speech.
The assisted places scheme is plainly achieving its objective of giving access to some of the best independent schools for children who would not otherwise have been able to contemplate them. Conservative Members believe that it can be only to the pupils' and the nation's advantage. We believe that the scheme has a vital continuing contribution to make. That is why we have introduced the draft regulations.
Hon. Members raised detailed points, which I shall deal with briefly. The hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) leads for the Opposition on these matters. He must have enjoyed being able to made an education speech in which for once he was able, root and branch, to oppose a Conservative reform. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey) so tellingly reminded us, a litany of reforms introduced in the past 10 years or so were fought tooth and nail by Labour Members only for us to find, particularly in the past couple of years, that suddenly the penny had dropped, the light shone and all the things that we had said about testing, publicising results and so on--I will not go through the whole list now--were accepted as a significant contribution to improving standards in this country, as of course they are.
The hon. Member for Walton found a subject tonight on which his party was able to unite. I find it a strange subject on which it unites. Let me go into the detail of some of the
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points that he made. He and several hon. Members, including the hon. Members for Cambridge (Mrs. Campbell), for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) and for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson), made great play of the alleged extra cost of the assisted places scheme. I covered part of the point in my immediate response to the hon. Member for Cambridge, but let me say a little more.The most obvious point is that any suggestion that the abolition of the scheme would save more than £100 million a year is obviously untrue. If the scheme were abolished, the great majority of assisted pupils would have to be accommodated in the maintained sector because their parents simply would not be able to afford full fees in the independent sector. Moreover, the figures quoted by some Opposition Members were misleading. That possibly even includes the hon. Member for Devonport, whose grasp of some of the figures may be just a little shaky. There is little difference between the average cost of an assisted place and that of a maintained school place when all relevant factors are taken into account. It is misleading to contrast the average net cost per assisted pupil--about £3,700 in the current financial year--with the standard spending assessment unit cost of maintained secondary schooling, for example-- currently more than £2, 600 pre-16 and more than £3,600 post-16. That is not comparing like with like.
First, the assisted places scheme has a greater proportion of sixth form places, which, as the House will be aware, are more expensive to provide. Moreover--
Mrs. Anne Campbell: Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Squire: No. I was generous in giving way earlier, as I know the hon. Lady will concede. I am anxious to answer the points raised in the debate.
The scheme's overall unit costs include elements for capital and other overheads not counted in SSAs. There are wide variations in SSAs between different local authorities. Some of them, for example, in inner London, are higher than the cost of the average assisted place, even without making the adjustments that I have just mentioned. Above all, the assisted places scheme offers good value for money. It produces better GCSE and A-level results than the maintained sector, as well as choice and diversity.
The hon. Members for Walton and for Southwark and Bermondsey, who speaks for the Liberal Democrats, asked about targeting. I do not want to drown the House in figures, but the simplest way to demonstrate how the scheme continues to reach those on low incomes is to compare figures on the average income of parents with children on the assisted places scheme in 1984-85 with the average national income and the figures nine years later in 1992-93--the latest year for which I have the full figures. In that time the proportion of parents on average income with children on assisted places has fallen from 69.3 per cent. to 58.5 per cent. In other words, as average national incomes have grown, the average income of parents with children on the assisted places scheme has not increased at the same rate.
Mr. Kilfoyle: The Minister has moved sharply from costs to targeting. I remind him of one of my earlier questions. To put it simply, if the cost of the scheme between 1989 and 1994 has gone up 100 per cent., from £50.9 million to £102 million, can he explain why the actual
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expansion of places available has gone up by only 2.6 per cent. and the take-up by just 6 per cent? Where has the money gone?Mr. Squire: The simplest answer to the hon. Gentleman is to look gently at how the costs in education have grown in that time. He will note a significantly similar movement in the figures. He can by all means pursue the subject on a future occasion, but I suggest that that is where the answer lies.
The hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey spoke about targeting. The Government do not claim, nor have they ever done so, that the assisted places scheme alone will meet our educational needs. The scheme should be seen as part, albeit an important one, of the Government's overall strategy to improve the education of all pupils in the maintained or independent sector. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth said in a telling intervention, if one were to run through each and every aspect of diversity in education--which the Government endorse and applaud--the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey could pick off grammar schools and a range of other measures and subject them to exactly the same schedule.
The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mr. Griffiths) asked about Wales. I confirm that 700 pupils have assisted places in schools in Wales. I cannot give a precise figure for the percentage that that represents of the total pupil population in Wales, but I do not believe that it will be different from the corresponding figure in England of about 0.5 per cent. The number of assisted places in Wales reflects the number of schools that wish to participate--eight--and the demand from parents for places.
My hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth, whose speech I have already praised, made an important point about the use made by ethnic minorities of the assisted places scheme. I take his point, but the proportion of such children on the scheme is broadly in line with the population as a whole. I will, however, certainly consider what further steps the Government and schools might take to ensure that ethnic minority families are fully informed about the scheme and given every encouragement to seek places on it.
The hon. Member for Devonport rehearsed his argument about the accountability, real or imagined, of independent schools to Ofsted. I am inclined to repeat what the Minister of State said to him 12 months ago: he should take the matter up with Ofsted because it is an independent body which is not in any way controlled by the Government.
Mr. Jamieson rose --
Mr. Squire: No, let me finish. Hon. Members have had a good run and I have given way quite a lot. I believe that I have covered all the points raised in the debate.
Despite the current user-friendly style that the Labour party leadership tries to throw over all its policies, the Opposition remain at heart opposed to real parental choice. That was demonstrated in their recent education policy statement. Nothing better underlines that attitude than their continuing opposition to APS. We point out tonight, and on every occasion that we can, that the Labour party, led incidentally by someone who was educated at Scotland's premier private school, no longer has time for bright children from poorer backgrounds. There was a time when
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the Labour party would have emphasised enhanced opportunities for such children. Now, those children and their parents must look to the Conservative Government to fight their cause. We shall not let them down.Question put:--
The House divided: Ayes 243, Noes 169.
Division No. 191] [9.25 pm
AYES
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Ainsworth, Peter (East Surrey)Alexander, Richard
Alison, Rt Hon Michael (Selby)
Allason, Rupert (Torbay)
Amess, David
Ancram, Michael
Arbuthnot, James
Arnold, Jacques (Gravesham)
Arnold, Sir Thomas (Hazel Grv)
Ashby, David
Atkins, Rt Hon Robert
Atkinson, David (Bour'mouth E)
Atkinson, Peter (Hexham)
Baker, Rt Hon Kenneth (Mole V)
Baker, Nicholas (North Dorset)
Baldry, Tony
Banks, Matthew (Southport)
Bates, Michael
Bellingham, Henry
Bendall, Vivian
Beresford, Sir Paul
Biffen, Rt Hon John
Body, Sir Richard
Bonsor, Sir Nicholas
Booth, Hartley
Boswell, Tim
Bottomley, Peter (Eltham)
Bowden, Sir Andrew
Bowis, John
Boyson, Rt Hon Sir Rhodes
Brandreth, Gyles
Brazier, Julian
Bright, Sir Graham
Brooke, Rt Hon Peter
Browning, Mrs Angela
Budgen, Nicholas
Burt, Alistair
Butcher, John
Butler, Peter
Carlisle, John (Luton North)
Carlisle, Sir Kenneth (Lincoln)
Carrington, Matthew
Carttiss, Michael
Cash, William
Channon, Rt Hon Paul
Chapman, Sydney
Churchill, Mr
Clappison, James
Coe, Sebastian
Colvin, Michael
Congdon, David
Conway, Derek
Coombs, Anthony (Wyre For'st)
Cope, Rt Hon Sir John
Cormack, Sir Patrick
Couchman, James
Cran, James
Curry, David (Skipton & Ripon)
Davies, Quentin (Stamford)
Davis, David (Boothferry)
Day, Stephen
Deva, Nirj Joseph
Devlin, Tim
Dicks, Terry
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