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5.59 pm
Mr. Edward O'Hara (Knowsley, South): Those of us of a certain age will remember an old popular song called "Three Wheels on my Wagon". I apologise to the House if that is banausic, but nothing is too banausic for the Government. In the song, cowboys are driving their covered wagons and being pursued by Cherokees. They lose wheel after wheel from their wagons and just keep rolling along. That is a good description of the Government, and nowhere is it more apposite than in those sections of the Queen's Speech that deal with education.
The proposal for the semi-commercialisation of student loans is a cheap conjuring trick--two feats of prestidigitation for the price of one. It would remove a large sum from the public sector borrowing requirement at a stroke, and would give the illusion of commercial success; finance houses, which previously would not have touched the scheme, will buy selectively into it because the interest rates will be subsidised. The important word is
"selectively", because commercial organisations would not consider bad risks. It would be like the social fund-- students most in need of loans would be ruled out by such commercial organisations.
The proposals are beside the point and have nothing to do with what is wrong with the student loan scheme, which is already inequitable and the cause of much student hardship. The proposals will not improve the situation.
I am a member of the Select Committee on Education. After the student loan scheme had been in operation for a year, we looked at a mass of evidence and at the allegations of hardship caused by the scheme. Unusually, the Committee split down the middle. I pay tribute to the chairmanship of the hon. Member for Crosby (Sir M. Thornton)--we usually manage to produce an agreed report. We could not do that on student loans because Conservative Members thought that the evidence of hardship was merely anecdotal. The Opposition issued a minority statement because, in their view, there was ample evidence of hardship.
The Government might have taken an interest in the emerging picture of hardship and corrected the shortcomings of the scheme. Instead, they pressed ahead at a dislocational rate with implementation. The scheme does not only cause student hardship; it causes student drop-out and some students do not even embark on higher education, including many from my constituency--for financial reasons and not on educational grounds. The scheme is a denial of opportunity; an impediment to social mobility
through education; a rationing of higher education opportunity at a time of retrenchment; and a waste of the latent pool of national talent. If the Gracious Speech had promised a thorough review--and an eradication of the shortcomings--of the present operation of the student loan scheme, it would have been more appropriate.
Grant-maintained schools will be given the ability to borrow against their assets in the commercial market. That is a recipe for asset stripping, and for further inequalities and divisions in education. Those schools that are best endowed with property, in extent or in value, will be able to buy further advantage over those with less. That will widen the divisions of opportunity between schools in areas where property values differ. Even within Knowsley, a relatively poor area, there are vast differences between schools with constricted sites in areas where land values are low and those with relatively large tracts of land with a high value for residential development or retail shopping.
Schools may choose to sell off land as well as risk it as collateral against loans in the commercial market. What right have they to do that? The schools are only the current trustees of public assets which have been handed over to grant-maintained schools by a stroke of Government legislation. The schools do not have the right to put their assets at risk or out of reach of their successors. There are ample, joint-financing arrangements that can bring private money into education without putting valuable assets at risk, as the proposals suggest.
The big, unspoken issue concerning grant-maintained schools is the idea floated several times by the Prime Minister--the so-called fast-track route into grant-maintained status for schools in the voluntary sector. That is the most desperate proposal yet to try to breathe life into the failed grant-maintained idea, and it would be a betrayal of both diversity and choice. That proposal would, at a stroke of the pen, eliminate a valued educational option. In my constituency, certain areas have more voluntary schools than county schools.
The proposal would also artificially inflate one favoured option. It would be a betrayal of choice because parents would be denied any choice in the matter. On the vast majority of occasions when parents have been given a say, they have given a clear thumbs down to the grant-maintained option. The Churches oppose that option. A Roman Catholic bishop in my constituency, when there was an opt-out ballot, went so far as to publish a letter to parents which said that a proposal to try to beggar one's neighbour by obtaining grant-maintained status was contrary to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
The proposal on nursery vouchers is the most cynical exercise in prestidigitation even by this Government of illusionists. "Never mind the quality, feel the width" might be a good description, but the situation is more serious than that. The Government know it. The scheme will stuff
£1,100 promissory notes into the back pockets of recalcitrant Conservative voters in the shire counties, and shamefully, those £1,100 promissory notes will be taken from the budgets of local education authorities such as Knowsley, South.
Will the scheme provide choice? Will the scheme provide equal opportunities? Will it improve standards? Is the scheme being introduced for the sake of diversity? The answers to those questions are no, no, no and yes. The scheme will not provide choice for parents already exercising the choice of private pre-school provision,
probably because their LEA does not provide nursery education. The only difference is that those parents will be given £1,100 to pay bills that they are already paying out of their own pockets.
The scheme will not provide choice for parents in LEAs such as mine with a good record of nursery provision. Their choice of a place in an LEA nursery class will be taken away in many areas. Will the scheme provide equal opportunity? No, again. The £1,100 will not fully fund a nursery place. Some parents will be able to top it up, others who cannot will have to settle for second best and for what
£1,100 will buy, especially if the LEA is not able to find funding to top up vouchers.
Will the scheme mean improved standards? No, again. When the Secretary of State for Education and Employment announced the scheme, to give the right hon. Lady credit, the words must have stuck in her throat. She talked of "revisiting standards" and having a "light touch" on inspection. In other words, the nursery vouchers scheme is a cowboys charter. It will produce diversity only of quality, just like all the diversity that the Government have introduced to education in schools in recent years. The truth about the diversity that the nursery voucher scheme will produce is that it will be patchy and divisive.
Mr. George Walden (Buckingham):
The hon. Member for Knowsley, South (Mr. O'Hara) made an intelligent and incisive speech; my pair always makes intelligent and incisive speeches.
This debate takes place against a background of historic events in the past few days--events that will, in one way or another, affect every citizen of the United Kingdom. I am speaking of yesterday's announcement by the Chinese President that he is moving his country decisively towards integration in world trade. It is notable that that announcement was not to be found in any British newspaper yesterday other than the Financial Times, which placed the story on the front page and printed an analysis and an editorial.
We, of course, were engaged in more important events--our palace intrigues. The Chinese also used to have palace intrigues, with public humiliations and public confessions and all that goes with them, but they decided to put them aside because they were part of a backward phase in their history. In the future, the Chinese will export to us the video equipment on which we shall follow our palace intrigues.
On education, and as I was talking about backward countries, it is extraordinary--the blame belongs to Conservative and Opposition Members--that we are arguing about a rather spatchcocked scheme to provide a little more partial nursery education to a few more people at the age of four. Although we are supposed to be a pragmatic people, it seems to take an awful long time for us to understand a simple fact about education: that it begins at the beginning.
A brief on the subject has kindly been provided for me. I was immediately struck by the figures. I understand that nursery education costs money. There were two sets of figures: the first shows that the Liberal Democrats were promising nursery education for all three and four-year-olds at a cost of £900 million, which is a large sum, and the second shows that our scheme will cost
£750 million, of which £550 million has already been spent.
The difference between providing nursery education for all three and four-year-olds and the rather spatchcocked scheme that we have is amazingly slight. If the difference is only £150 million, let us cough up the money by taxing child benefit, for example, to provide nursery education for all three and four-year-olds. If we do so, perhaps we will not import quite so many Chinese videos as we seem destined to do.
One point that concerns me about nursery education as it will be practised in the United Kingdom is that the Conservative party seems to fail to understand the basic philosophical point--it is a dreadful expression to use, but it is the only one that actually fits--that one can have market forces with telephones but that one cannot blindly apply those forces in the cultural sphere, whether it be in broadcasting or education. Culture is a fundamentally different domain, a mistake of category--again, I am sorry for the philosophical phrase. The effects on the ground, however, are not philosophical but they are very simple.
When there are vouchers in this educationally backward society, people will use them to get out of the state system. They will do so for the very good reason that the state system is often very mediocre and is dominated by the wrong sort of egalitarian thinking. What I fear will happen with nursery vouchers is that the people who are hovering just below the level at which they can afford good-quality, structured private nursery education will spend that money in order to get out of the state system, or to get into a better system--which, by and large, I am sorry to say, tends to be the private sector.
In the end, there will be a bit more nursery education, but there will also be a growing gap, which characterises this country uniquely in Europe, between the quality of private provision, which, by and large, is pretty good, and the quality of the state provision, which, by and large, is pretty mediocre. We now risk building that split into our education system right at the bottom, and thereby--the hon. Member for Knowsley, South mentioned this point-- perhaps even widening it further up. That seems a pretty bleak educational future when other countries are moving geometrically ahead of us, not least in the far east. As the House knows, examination results in Hong Kong are already better than ours.
As for grant-maintained schools, it seems a little distasteful that we should even be thinking of having education on tick, which is what the borrowing facility in fact means. I can just about accommodate it in my mind because I am very much in favour of grant-maintained schools, but let us not forget that those schools will have to pay back that money. Pace my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, these schools, unlike universities, do not have incomes from which they can legitimately get more funds.
I am also afraid that some grant-maintained schools will go a little haywire with facilities. They get very excited about facilities--staff showers or anything else-- but tend to get a little less excited about whether they are teaching grammar to the required standard.
Finally, and most important, what worries me most about the Government's education policy is the extension of the assisted places scheme, for which I shall not vote. It is presented to us as a bridge between the state and private sectors. In fact, it will widen the gap between the two. I am amazed that there has been no discussion and, apparently, no rudiments of any thinking about it. It is a one-way bridge.
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