House of Commons Hansard Debates for 5 Jul 1995

Mr. Peter Kilfoyle (Liverpool, Walton): The hon. Gentleman will recall from a previous debate that, for9 per cent. of children, the only hot meal they get in the course of a day is the subsidised school dinner provided by local education authorities. Is he suggesting that needy children should be deprived of that hot meal, which they would otherwise not get?

Mr. McLoughlin: No. I am not suggesting anything,I am simply revealing figures and facts--Lincolnshire spent £11 million on subsidising school meals, whereas Derbyshire spent £115 million. I accept that a comparison between Lincolnshire and Derbyshire is not a good one, but it is worth comparing Staffordshire and Derbyshire, which are roughly the same size.

In those seven years, Staffordshire spent £47 million on subsidising school meals, which is still £60 million short of that spent by Derbyshire. The hon. Member for

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Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) must accept that a lot could be done with that £60 million. I accept that education authorities decide what they want to spend their money on. The county breakdown and the differentials revealed by my hon. Friend's answer were, however, extremely interesting.

The other great benefit of grant-maintained schools--I plead with the Opposition to think carefully about it--is that they have made LEAs act more responsibly, because there is now an alternative available to parents. When I entered the House in 1986, the sixth form of Ecclesbourne school, in my constituency, was under threat of closure, because the LEA wanted to close all sixth forms in the centre of Derby and replace them with a tertiary system of education.

The school launched a massive campaign to save its sixth form, which was supported by all the parents. The LEA's proposal was sent to the Secretary of State for consideration. After a very vigorous campaign, I am glad to say that the Secretary of State rejected the proposal to close the sixth form.

I attended a public meeting at Ecclesbourne school at which one governor said, "I believe that the school should keep its sixth form, but because I am a socialist--and the county council's socialist--I must do what the county council wants me to do". County councils and local education authorities can no longer impose their views upon schools quite so easily, because schools now have an alternative. I turn to the suggestion that somehow grant-maintained schools are unaccountable. A sad but true fact is that the voter turnout at local government elections averages about 40 per cent. The voter turnout when a school ballots to become grant-maintained is usually more than 70 or 80 per cent. Parents who are involved in the school and in the community want to ensure that there is a good grant-maintained schools system in place for their children.

Mr. Gerry Steinberg (City of Durham): Does the hon. Gentleman think that it is democratic that parents can vote to take a school out of the local education system and into the grant-maintained system for ever? Under the present rules, there is no way that a school can ballot to re-enter the local education system. The hon. Gentleman is saying that parents who send their children to a primary feeder school will have no choice whatsoever about whether their children should attend a grant-maintained school. They have no option because that decision has been taken for them. Is that

accountability?

Mr. McLoughlin: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. We spent many long hours taking the legislation through Committee when my right hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Mr. Baker) was Secretary of State for Education. The hon. Gentleman misses the point entirely. If he had his way, parents would have no choice at all. They would be forced to send their children to LEA schools, and the local education authority would determine the admissions policy, irrespective of parents' wishes.

Parents now have a choice. If they do not wish to send their children to grant-maintained schools, they do not have to do so. Parents can be certain that grant-maintained schools will remain, and that we will continue to have the diversity and choice in the state education system that I have talked about and believe in passionately only by ensuring that the party in government supports the grant-maintained policy.

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Unlike Labour Members, the Conservatives do not mouth one thing and then another because a senior party member chooses to take advantage of the grant-maintained system. I will give way to the hon. Gentleman once more, but I am conscious that time is short.

Mr. Steinberg: I wish that the hon. Gentleman would be honest with the House and with the country. The majority of parents, whether they send their children to grant-maintained or local education authority schools, have absolutely no choice in the matter. The majority of schools choose the children who attend those schools. Parents who live in certain catchment areas have no choice but to send their children to the nearest school. It is the schools and the local education authorities which allow parents to send their children to those schools. It is a misnomer to say that parents have any choice; they do not. Will the hon. Gentleman please be honest with the House and with the country?

Mr. McLoughlin: If the hon. Gentleman does not believe that choice exists, he should take up the matter with the Leader of the Opposition, who has exercised that choice, as have a good many Members on the Labour Front Bench. The Labour party is displaying grand hypocrisy on the issue. I have asked questions about grant-maintained schools in the past.

Mr. Don Foster: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. McLoughlin: I will not give way, as time is short. The number of admissions to grant-maintained schools has increased. Schools that were threatened with closure by local education authorities have gone grant- maintained, and they have flourished. They are run by the local community, and they are part of the local community. They provide a diversity of choice in education.

The Labour party would offer a choice only to those people who could afford to go to the private system. The Government believe that every parent should be able to choose what kind of school their children will attend. There is a choice in the state system: between the local education authority schools and those that are independently grant-maintained but part of the state education system.

Mr. Kilfoyle: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. McLoughlin: Time is short, or I would give way

willingly--although the hon. Gentleman has a bad record for giving way when he is at the Dispatch Box.

That is why I am passionately committed to grant-maintained schools, the grant-maintained sector and the state education sector. The element of choice that we have introduced into the education system has also brought many of the loony local education authorities under control. Before we introduced the grant-maintained system, schools had no escape route; they had nowhere to go. Schools now have an alternative to being run by local education authorities; as a consequence, those authorities have become more responsible. All hon. Members should welcome that development.

10.56 am

Mr. Don Foster (Bath): I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Erewash (Mrs. Knight) on securing the debate. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, I agreed entirely with one or two of her remarks, to which I shall return in a moment.

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Of course, I disagreed entirely with a number of her comments--not least the paeans of praise that she heaped upon the grant-maintained schools sector. She seemed to suggest that the Government's grant-maintained policy has proved a tremendous success. However, anyone who has examined the figures will know only too well that it has not been a success--indeed, it is an ailing policy that has failed almost completely.

Towards the end of her remarks, the hon. Lady referred to the 1.3 million parents whose children attend grant-maintained schools. She failed to point out that fewer than 50 per cent. of those parents voted in favour of grant- maintained status. It is worth recording that only 500,000 people in this country voted for grant-maintained status, and that very few people are currently voting for grant-maintained status. The number of ballots for grant-maintained status has declined markedly, and the number of schools that opt out of the local education sector has also decreased significantly.

Ms Estelle Morris: Many parents did not vote to opt out in many local areas. In some schools that have been opted out for four or five years, none of the parents whose children currently attend the schools exercised their vote, because their children did not attend the schools at the time the ballot was taken. Is that not even more despicable than the figures cited by the hon. Gentleman?

Mr. Foster: The hon. Lady is absolutely correct. She also draws attention to the welcome remarks of the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg), who pointed out that the grant-maintained system is not the system of democratic choice that the Government would have us believe.

It is perhaps worth recording the figures for opting out. From Easter 1994 to Easter this year, there have been only 48 secondary school ballots, and only 13 schools voted to go grant-maintained. That compares with 171 ballots in the previous year, when 107 schools voted to opt out. There has been a similar decline in the number of primary school ballots.

As the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr. Jamieson) said, the grant- maintained policy has failed, despite the many bribes that the Government have offered. The Government have promised to phase out double funding gradually, but it is interesting to note that, in the process, a number of grant-maintained schools will receive additional money this year for the first time.I suspect that many local education authority schools will be pleased with such phasing out, despite the various bribes in respect of capital funding. Grant-maintained schools are a failed policy in terms of the number of people voting for it and its ability to lever up standards. The hon. Member for Erewash was unable to answer when I asked her whether, despite all the financial advantages that had been given to grant- maintained schools, there was any hard evidence that standards had been levered up. The Minister is now about to give us some figures.

Mr. Robin Squire: It would be invidious to run down a list of schools, but the hon. Gentleman will remember, as will the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Ms Morris), who is about to speak from the Labour Front Bench, that the evidence from Baverstock school--the solid accounts of achievement and its turnaround from a

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school that was failing in virtually every respect to what we now have--has been attributed by the head overwhelmingly to its grant-maintained status.

Mr. Foster: If the Minister can cite only one school, that is extremely worrying. We can swap school for school, and I could start talking about Stratford school, for example.

However, if we look at the base starting point for grant-maintained schools, taking into account the number of children with free school meals and the selective nature of many grant-maintained schools and we then look at the examination results, the SAT figures or anything else, we realise that there is no clear evidence that all that additional support--the uneven playing field provided for grant-maintained schools--has led to a levering up of standards. The hon. Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin) said--I have forgotten his precise words--that Liberal Democrats totally hated grant-maintained schools. When I nodded to him, he implied that I accepted what he said. I should like to put it clearly on record that we dislike not the schools, but their grant-maintained status and the two-tier education system which has grown up because some schools have that status.

Mr. McLoughlin: As we understand there is a coming together between the Liberal party and the Labour party, would part of that be an undertaking to abolish the system of grant-maintained schools?

Mr. Foster: I was about to answer that point. Having criticised the two-tier system that grant-maintained schools have introduced, it is important that I make it absolutely clear where my party stands. We have a simple policy. We would bring grant-maintained schools and city technology colleges back into a light-touch strategic planning framework of the LEA, which would be responsible for the fair allocation of resources, establishing the pupil admission procedure, sorting out such issues as special educational needs, and determining, for example, whether a school needs to close or a new school needs to open. The LEA would also be responsible for issues relating to quality monitoring and levering up standards, and would have a role to play in the arbitration of disputes. Individual schools would decide which LEA services they wished to provide. We believe that all schools in Britain should be given maximum freedom to make decisions that affect their own day-to-day running. Our approach does not pander to old-style corporatist, centralist, domineering local education authorities; it is a system that frees up individual schools within a local, democratically accountable, strategic planning framework.

Ms Estelle Morris: Can the hon. Gentleman confirm that his party's policies would continue to allow some schools 100 per cent. delegated funding?

Mr. Foster: The hon. Lady uses 100 per cent., and her document uses 90 per cent. Those figures do not make sense without identifying the base line. We are saying that some money would be retained at the LEA level to fund the various functions that the LEA would carry out.

I agree with the hon. Member for Erewash about Labour party policy. At least the hon. Lady, the Minister and the hon. Member for West Derbyshire have a clear

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policy. They would like the continuation of grant-maintained status, and they have introduced legislation to force every school to consider it on an annual basis; and, if possible, they will continue to make as many arrangements as possible to help grant-maintained schools to become established.

My party is also clear about where it stands. We would bring grant- maintained schools back into a light-touch LEA strategic planning framework. The hon. Member for Erewash was absolutely right to point out that the Labour party now has a totally fudged policy that satisfies nobody. Despite all the efforts of its spin doctors, the Labour party is unable to convince schools in the

grant-maintained sector that it is now being nicer to them; nor can it convince Labour activists, many of them with roots in local government, that Labour has not gone soft on grant-maintained schools.

The big anomaly in the Labour party's proposal is that, having totally opposed grant-maintained status and undertaken to bring those schools into the local strategic framework, Labour now says that schools that opted out will be allowed to continue their special status as foundation schools. They will have a different governing body and composition, and they will be able to retain access to their own assets by way of a trust. That makes nonsense of the ability of local education authorities to plan properly and strategically.

Mr. Kilfoyle: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Foster: I shall happily give way to hon. Member. I hope that, in the intervention that he is about to make, he will remind the House of what he said in the House on 9 December last year: "One of the problems with GM schools is that they increasingly complicate the sort of strategic provision that needs to be made."--[ Official Report , 9 December 1994; Vol. 251, c. 542.]

Will not the Labour party's latest fudge proposal make that strategic planning almost impossible?

Mr. Kilfoyle: It is obvious that the hon. Gentleman has not read the document in question. We made it absolutely clear that schools choose from the three categories that we have designated in our paper on the local democratic framework. The hon. Gentleman's final point concerned strategic planning and admissions policy. If he looks at appendix 3 of "Diversity and Excellence", he will see that it is carefully spelt out.

The hon. Gentleman made much play of underlining the clarity of the Government's view, particularly in terms of the 100 per cent. delegation that they would afford to grant-maintained schools, but he failed to address the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Ms Morris) on the implications of the Liberal Democrat proposal, which in theory would allow every school to opt for 100 per cent. delegation of the ASB.

Mr. Foster: With respect, the hon. Gentleman is talking absolute nonsense. I have just explained that, if the LEA is carrying out some central functions, funds need to be retained to pay for them. That is clearly set out in our document.

The hon. Gentleman fails to recognise that his party is trying to put a precise, specific figure of 90 per cent. on it. That is nonsense, because the central services that are needed vary from one LEA to another. For example, the

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costs of transport in a rural area differ from those in an urban area. The hon. Member cannot have it both ways, but that is what his document "Diversity and Excellence" tries to do.

The hon. Gentleman was as critical as I was when the Government brought out their document "Choice and Diversity". We used to jokingly call it, "Chaos and Confusion". I believe that the Labour party's document is "Chaos and Confusion--the sequel".

11.9 am

Ms Estelle Morris (Birmingham, Yardley): The Opposition welcome the chance to debate what has often been called a Government flagship policy. This has been an interesting opportunity to try to shed some light on why that flagship policy has gone so badly wrong. It was the former Secretary of State for Education who said, on Second Reading of the 1993 Education Bill, that he was setting "in place a new framework for primary and secondary schools that will endure well into the next century."--[ Official Report ,9 November 1992; Vol. 213, c. 627.]

He went on to predict that, by April of last year, there would be 1,500 grant-maintained schools. He could not have been more wrong. Seven years after GM status was introduced, only 5.6 per cent. of all schools have chosen to go that way. Only 16 schools in Wales have GM status, and 28 local authorities throughout England and Wales still have no GM schools at all. No one--not even the most optimistic Government supporter--can possibly claim that, numerically speaking, the policy has been a success.

The hon. Member for Erewash (Mrs. Knight) has a cheek to come to this House and try to give us the impression that schools are still queuing up to opt out. Every prediction made by the Government has proved false; every target that they have set for GM opt-outs has been missed.

We could just dismiss GM status as a failed policy, had the consequences and costs for all schools and for all pupils not been so serious. In its first year of operation, £11 million was spent by the Funding Agency for Schools; 261 officials administer GM schools from York; 77 more officials help to administer GM schools from Sanctuary Buildings. Almost £1 million--£800,000 in fact--has been spent on the Grant- Maintained Schools Foundation.

All this amounts to millions of pounds spent, not on reducing class sizes or on putting more equipment and resources into schools, not on the £4 billion school buildings maintenance backlog, but on administering a bureaucracy that merely duplicates the work being done by local education authorities.

Wasteful though that is, what people find most offensive about the financial aspect of GM schools is the way in which schools that do not choose GM status are deliberately discriminated against. Why should not children attending schools whose governing bodies and parents have decided to stay in partnership with local authorities get the same funding? It is not just the £25 million that has been lost to locally maintained schools through double funding: it is the 2.7 times more spent on capital projects in GM schools which causes such harm.

It is all very well for the hon. Member for Erewash to say that schools which want the money can just opt out, whereupon they will be given it. The hon. Lady is parliamentary private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer--

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Mr. Robin Squire: As of this moment.

Ms Morris: Indeed. Still, I wonder what he would say if he knew that the hon. Lady wants every school in the country to opt out so as to get additional resources. That would mean that the national pot of money spent on education would have to grow--but it has never done that under this Government. As more GM schools have come into existence, the amount of extra money given to them has steadily decreased. If all schools opted out, they would, of course, not be funded at the enhanced rate given to the first opt-out schools.

Mr. McLoughlin: The fact is that the amount of money spent on education has substantially increased under this Government. The reductions took place between 1974 and 1979. The figures since then show a steady, consistent increase on the money spent on education.

Ms Morris: Why does no one believe the hon. Gentleman? Why do parents not believe him? Because their children are in classes with more than 30 pupils. Why do teachers not believe him? Because they are being asked to do their job without the necessary resources. The hon. Gentleman might believe what he says, but he and his colleagues are probably the last people left in the country who think that way. What sort of message does the Minister think he is sending to children and parents when he seems to value one child, in financial terms, more than he does another? No one except the Government--not parents associations, not local authority associations, not, to their great credit, even GM schools themselves-- continues to defend this sort of inequity of funding. As our Public Accounts Committee said, it is unacceptable.

Unacceptable though the financial arrangements for GM schools are, the greatest damage is the damage that has been done to the local partnerships in which schools operate. The whole GM notion was based on the belief that schools and parents shared Tory Ministers' dislike of locally elected education authorities. On Second Reading of the 1993 Education Bill, the then Under-Secretary of State found himself unable to make a single positive statement about local authorities. He showed no inkling of understanding of the good that local authorities can achieve.

What Conservative Ministers have never understood, but what parents and schools have always understood, is the fact that, to succeed, a school needs not just to compete but to co-operate. To succeed, it needs to share ideas. It needs to learn from others. To succeed, it needs quality information about its performance and its targets. It must pool its resources so that important areas such as special needs, music and sport can flourish.

Schools, in short, do not exist as separate competing units. They need strong, stable local partnerships, and good local education authorities can provide them.

Mrs. Angela Knight: As the hon. Lady is so obviously against GM schools and in favour of LEA schools, will she urge her leader to send his son to an LEA school instead of a GM one?

Ms Morris: I am not against GM schools: I am in favour of all schools that raise standards for their children. I am not here to criticise schools, teachers or pupils.I welcome high standards in every school, no matter what

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its status. Parents base their decision about where to send their children on a number of aspects. The leader of my party would have sent his child to the school in question whether or not it had grant-maintained status.

The Government's whole approach has been divisive. It is no good Conservative Members such as the hon. Member for Erewash complaining about the alleged behaviour of some local councillors. I do not condone bad behaviour by councillors on either side of the political divide, but the Government have a lot of gall, given that Ministers have approached GM status in a way that meant that a divisive mess was bound to ensue. We warned the Government that their approach would lead to divisions and bitterness, but they took no notice. The Government talk about choice, but they have failed to offer schools different but equally valued options. The Government have been so committed to the GM option that they have almost made enemies of those who did not follow in their wake.

Conservative Members of Parliament have campaigned hard on every opt-out ballot, so that they can come here and wear each new opt-out in their constituencies as a badge of pride. Time and again, they have stood up during education questions and asked Ministers whether they welcome the decision of a school in one of their constituencies to go grant-maintained. Certainly every Labour councillor has campaigned hard against GM status ballots, because not to do so would have threatened the status of other schools in their areas. This is no way to run schools; but the legislation was framed in such a way that it was inevitable that these problems would follow. We have wasted valuable money, time and ideas talking about structures, when the real issue facing us is how to raise standards. We must end the divisions and the turmoil of the past 15 years. Our task is to rebuild partnerships and restore trust. We can do that only if we move forward and stop looking back; if we listen and learn from what we hear; and if we seek change through consensus. That is what Labour does in its paper "Diversity and Excellence: a New Partnership for Schools" .

It has been interesting today to see which side of the Tory divide Conservative Members put themselves on. Do they belong to the category who try to tell us that we have changed our minds on GM schools and will keep them? Or do they belong to that brand of Tory who tries to tell us that we, the Labour party, have it in for GM schools? Within three days, the Prime Minister has said one thing and the Secretary of State for Education another.

We shall offer schools a choice within a framework that strengthens crucial local partnerships. We shall ensure that funding is fair and open. Labour accountability will exist locally, to parents in the community, as well as nationally, to central Government. Parents will know that admission procedures will be fair, with no return to selection through the 11-plus. Above all, schools will know that they are responsible for managing themselves, and that local authorities are there to support them in raising standards.

A notion much favoured by Ministers is that local authorities control schools. That control vanished with the introduction of local management of schools. Schools control themselves, but local Labour education authorities

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throughout the country are showing a new role for LEAs that involves raising and monitoring standards and supporting schools in their vital task of improving the performance of their pupils. Labour will root all schools in that locally accountable and supportive partnership. It will offer them the choice of being community, foundation or aided schools. We shall preserve the best of the changes, which is independence for schools. But we shall restore local accountability, which has been so badly damaged.

A debate about a failing Government policy has been useful, but we, the Opposition, look forward to our agenda, which will focus on success.

11.21 am

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Mr. Robin Squire): In the time available to me, I shall try to cover as many points as possible. The House will understand that I do not have a significant amount of time.

I begin by echoing the congratulations that have come from both sides of the House to my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Mrs. Knight) on the splendid way in which she opened the debate. It was a typically rumbustious speech. She was backed by my hon. Friend the Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin). My hon. Friends are a credit to their county. I listened with great interest to their contributions.

Inevitably, the debate has generated heat as well as light. That, perhaps, is scarcely surprising. Every one of our education reforms has aroused hostility within the Opposition parties. The grant-maintained initiative has probably ruffled more feathers than most others. The reason is simple. Opposition Members belatedly pay lip service to parental preference and to school diversity and autonomy, but they do not really believe in them. Yet putting these ideals into practice is precisely what self-government is all about. Only six years ago, local authorities had a monopoly of state schooling. We do not need a PhD in economics to know that monopolies rarely serve the best interests of the consumer. The GM initiative broke that monopoly. It gave parents a high-quality alternative to local education authority schools within the state sector. It also gave parents a direct and decisive say in the future of their children's schools.

Five years ago, there were only 30 GM schools. There are now well over 1,000 in the primary, secondary and special sectors, and the number continues to grow. Incidentally, whenever a percentage is quoted by Opposition Members, they never tell us that, at secondary level, after only six years, one in five of all secondary school children is at a GM school. That is some progress.

Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover): Not in Bolsover.

Mr. Squire: The hon. Gentleman says from a sedentary position--he kindly joined us nine minutes ago--"Not in Bolsover." That is Bolsover's loss.

There is no mystery about the rapid growth of the GM sector. It has taken place because self-government is good for schools, pupils and parents. In other words, it works. Self-government gives a school control of its total budget, not only the portion that is delegated by the LEA. Some of the additional funding is used to buy services that were previously provided free by the LEA.

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But GM schools have freedom to shop around and get better value for money. That means that most GM schools have money left over to pay for additional staff, books and equipment. These are important practical benefits of GM status, which pupils, teachers and parents can see and feel. But there is much more to self-government than that.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash said, self-government is about being in control of one's own destiny. It is about getting rid of dual controls and the back-seat driver. A self-governing school is free to preserve and develop its existing character. These freedoms, combined with total control of resources, give GM schools much greater responsibility to respond to the needs and aspirations of the communities that they serve. They do so without getting bogged down in the mire of LEA policies and procedures.

We know that GM schools are popular with parents. That echoes and enlarges what my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash said in response to an intervention. For three successive years, GM comprehensive schools have, on average, achieved better GCSE results than their LEA counterpart comprehensives. We know that GM primary schools achieved better results than LEA primary schools in last year's key stage 1 tests. So the GM sector is flourishing as well as growing. It is a clear example of a successful initiative that has attracted interest throughout the world.

I believe that, in due course, all maintained schools will be run on GM lines--indeed, not only maintained schools. The Education Act 1993 extended opportunities to independent promoters to propose the establishment of new GM schools. I am delighted to say that we have given approval in principle today to the first of such proposals, from St. Anselm's Roman Catholic college for boys and Upton Hall Roman Catholic convent school for girls, both in Wirral. They will be the first independent schools to come in from the new route. I look forward to welcoming them to the GM sector.

I shall deal briefly with Labour's plans. We did not hear too much about them from the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Ms Morris) when she summed up on behalf of the Opposition.

What is the Labour party's response to the success of GM? Anyone who read the press reports of a fortnight ago might well think that the Labour party is now supportive of the policy. The hon. Lady rightly confirms that, throughout the country, Labour councillors and Labour Members are opposing GM schools wherever there is a ballot, but she says that, in theory, they are supportive of GM schools. That is an interesting policy combination.

The detail behind the policy document tells a rather different story. Behind that public relations facade--the exciting talk about new relationships, partnership and trust--is a much duller reality. The Labour party proposes only three types of barely distinguishable state school. It assumes that most GM schools will become foundation schools. Some have seen this as a U-turn on the GM issue.

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In fact, it is nothing of the kind. Foundation schools would hold their own premises and employ their own staff, but voluntary aided schools do that now, and they are not self- governing.

The essence of self-government is a school's ability to control its total budget, and to manage its own development without LEA interference. Foundation schools would have neither of those characteristics. All three categories of school proposed by Labour--the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster) highlighted this--would have up to 10 per cent. of their budget held back by the LEA. All three would have LEA representatives on their governing bodies. As my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash said, we can imagine the nature of one, if not both, of the councillors who would turn up on the governing bodies. At least one of them would be ideologically opposed to the schools' very existence.

All three types of school would have to negotiate their admission policies with the LEA. Again, all three would be subject to an LEA planning regime. So all three would, in slightly varying degrees, be LEA-controlled. Labour proposals for the GM sector boil down to the abolition of self-government.

Labour has invented the O-turn; an elaborate manoeuvre which leaves it facing in exactly the same direction as it has always faced. Labour's policy remains what it has always been: to return GM schools to LEA control. Although it is easy to accuse the Labour party of malice in this respect, its policy could even be the result of simple ignorance.

It is not too long ago that a Labour Member, whose name I shall protect, said during an informal discussion with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that he could not possibly support GM schools, because at heart he did not agree with fee paying. Is that the level of knowledge of the Labour party? For those who have not followed, there is no fee paying in GM schools. I make that clear in case there any other hon. Member thinks there is.

There is insufficient time to reply to the very wise and detailed comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash on funding. I assure her that we will continue to look carefully at the national funding formula. She has heard me say before from the Dispatch Box that there are some problems in that respect. I assure her that we are considering the matter with the best will in the world. The hon. Member for Bath spoke of a policy that had failed. He should ask the grant-maintained schools about it; he should visit them. Labour Members can contemplate visits only when armed with a cross and clove of garlic, but I would have hoped that Liberal Democrat Members might visit the schools. If they did, they would find that the schools, far from having failed, are popular and successful.

We are grateful to the hon. Member for Bath for having affirmed his party's continuing outright oppostion--

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Geoffrey Lofthouse): Order. We must now move to the next debate.

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