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Mr. Spearing: Despite the hon. Gentleman's rather tangential approach to the Bill, which he is entitled to take, does he agree that policies also need resources, the motivation of teachers and sensitive support for their difficult tasks? Does he think that the Government over the past 15 years have provided the encouragement, understanding and resources for his schools, administered locally, to perform a proper task?
Mr. Stern: The hon. Gentleman is seeking to draw me even further from the Bill. If he does not mind, I will continue with the trend of my remarks, during which the answers to his questions may become apparent.
I was heartened when I read an interview with the Prime Minister in The Times on 24 August 1995. In that interview, he said:
I was heartened by the Prime Minister's comments because I knew that an application for just such a school, in an area where it was deeply needed, had been before the Secretary of State for Education and Employment for almost a year. That application was to be before the Secretary of State for almost two years.
Oak Hill school, which was started in my constituency as a Christian-based independent primary school with strong ambitions and qualities that would enable it to provide secondary education, put forward in 1994--it may even have been slightly earlier--a proposal for a 675-place, five-to-16 school to be established in an area of undoubted educational need. There was a lack of places near the proposed school, which was to have been built in a new town in my constituency called Bradley Stoke. Inevitably, the school needed to acquire land on which to build, but that did not matter because land was available, which already had planning permission for educational purposes. The school needed to demonstrate, which would not have been difficult, that there was a lack of surplus places in the immediate vicinity, and to prove that a new school would fit comfortably into the state education system. It would have been, as I have made clear already, the only grant-maintained school in my constituency, and--with the exception of the voluntary-aided school that I mentioned--it would have been the only school in my constituency that was other than local authority maintained.
Eventually, after almost two years under consideration--a period that any business organisation would find drove it close to bankruptcy--the application was rejected by the Secretary of State on 15 December 1995. It is worth considering, in the context of the Bill, the reasons why the Secretary of State rejected that application. First, it was rejected because the Secretary of State found unwillingness on the part of the local
education authority to release the land on which the school would be built, so that a compulsory purchase order would be necessary. I fail to understand why, if that was a reason for rejection, it was not pointed out to the school two years earlier. The local education authority, as I said, was rabidly opposed to grant-maintained status, so it was not surprising that it would not release the land. However, the local education authority has made it clear that it is unlikely to want to build its own school on the land for at least 10 years. Nevertheless, that was one of the reasons given for rejection.
The second, and in my view more worrying, reason for rejection of the application for a grant-maintained school in my constituency was, to quote the Secretary of State, "insufficient evidence of demand". I have a couple of points to make in that regard. First, evidence of demand comes--it was made clear in the Secretary of State's letter of rejection--from the local authority. Would anyone ask a local education authority such as Avon for evidence of demand for a grant-maintained school within its boundaries? The answer, of course, is to look for other evidence--and other evidence was forthcoming.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Geoffrey Lofthouse):
Order. I have been very tolerant, but I am beginning to wonder how much of the hon. Gentleman's speech has anything to do with the Bill.
Mr. Stern:
I am happy to explain, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The Bill is about expanding powers for grant maintenance. I am trying to show that it is pointless trying to pass a Bill for that purpose if the Government are rejecting applications for GM status in the first place.I hope, however, to come to a conclusion shortly.
A local university survey has made it clear that the number of secondary school-aged children in Bradley Stoke will rise from 550 in 1994 to more than 1,500 by 1999. More than 550 new dwellings a year are going up there, and local employment is growing even faster.
Ms Jean Corston (Bristol, East)
rose--
Mr. Stern:
I am sorry, but I have promised to finish soon. Yet it was deemed more relevant, when rejecting the application, that there were surplus places that parents did not want in schools in what has now become another LEA than that there was a demand for places in the neighbourhood in question.
Next, I want to examine the contrast between the results of those events and the aspirations of the Government, as expressed in the Bill. The Government would seem to aspire to expand the powers and the provenance of grant maintenance in education. Yet in my constituency not only has the only likely opportunity for grant maintenance in the state education system for the next few years been rejected, but there will be a record number of appeals against secondary school placements this year.
Mr. Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire):
Is it always a pleasure to participate in education debates, because they give us the opportunity to listen to the right hon. Member for Brent, North (Sir R. Boyson), who has unfortunately left the Chamber. He said that the vouchers idea had come to him in a dream. I think so too. In fact, I think the whole Bill must have come to someone in a dream, probably induced by illegal substances.
The right hon. Gentleman also called in aid Tom Paine who, he said, advocated spending £4 a year on educating the children of America. That is probably about the same amount of money in real terms as is spent now. One wonders whether it was a spending commitment--no wonder the French revolutionaries tried to bump Paine off. I can just imagine him wandering around the forests of 18th century America denouncing local authorities for the lack of choice in their nursery schools and inveighing on the subject of the capital programme needed to restore run-down log cabins and teepees.
To be fair, the right hon. Member for Brent, North also made a more serious point. He envisaged parents--following the passage of the Bill--taking their children and their vouchers from one nursery institution to another to find the best one. That sounds like the sort of choice that Conservative Members have been talking about all day. Is the right hon. Gentleman really suggesting that parents of four-year-olds are going to wander around putting them into one school after another--put them in, become dissatisfied, take them out again, and put them somewhere else? Under the Government's plans--even at the moment--most of them will be there for only a year anyway. The idea is preposterous and represents one of the major flaws in a proposal that has not been thought through.
Any legislation on early-years education provision, especially nursery schools, must be judged by one clear criterion: by how much will it extend and improve nursery provision? The pattern of provision across Britain has, for historical reasons, been extremely patchy--not just differing from one LEA to another, because some of them have placed more or less emphasis on nursery education, but differing within LEAs. I think particularly of the shire counties after they were reformed in the early 1970s.
My county, Lancashire, inherited extensive provision in boroughs such as Burnley and Blackburn, but virtually nothing in more rural districts and small towns. Since then, Lancashire has engaged in a long struggle to improve, and even to introduce, provision in many of its districts, especially rural districts.
To do that, Lancashire has made use of rising-five provision. Pupils are admitted full time to school from the beginning of the year in which their fifth birthday falls, as happens in many other authorities. Summer-born children are therefore already covered by the period that the vouchers purport to cover. Moreover, a large proportion of spring and autumn-born children receive one or two terms of nursery schooling under Lancashire's
current scheme. The county has also used spare space in some primary schools and converted it to nursery classes; and there has been a slow but steady programme of new build of specially designed and planned nursery schools.
In recent years, Lancashire has also used a sparsity criterion to locate some nursery classes in rural areas and scattered parts such as Burscough. By these means, since 1981 Lancashire has increased proper nursery places from about 1,000 to about 4,000. In no case has this increased provision been less than enthusiastically received or less than fully taken up, yet there is still enormous unsatisfied demand, leading to a proliferation of private play schools, daycare centres and nurseries of all kinds.
Despite all this, the demand is still far from being met. Parents are not daft: they know that full-blown nursery education is the best thing for their children and, in my area at least, they know that it is best provided by LEA nursery schools and parents clamour to get their children into them.
Formerly, as a county councillor, and now as a Member of Parliament, have had irate parents queueing up at my surgeries to complain that they cannot get their children into an LEA nursery school. I tell them that the schools are oversubscribed and suggest that they try a private nursery, but they do not want to do that because they know that nursery education is best provided by LEA schools and they want their children to go to them.
Local education authorities have been forced to target their provision, often giving preference to disadvantaged families. Recent research shows clearly the considerable long-term social and cultural advantages of nursery education, so the policy pursued by authorities such as Lancashire shows a great deal of long-sighted common sense. We only wish that it had been shared by Governments over the past few decades.
The extension of nursery education by willing local authorities has been shackled, first, by the Government's tight spending restrictions; secondly, by what was formerly the Conservatives' belief--as expressed by a previous Secretary of State--that nursery education was at worst irrelevant and at best not proven to be useful; and, thirdly, by the method of calculating standard spending assessment for under-fives education.
A long-standing gripe of many local authorities is that they receive SSA for the number of under-fives in the population, but no account is taken of their spending on nursery education. For years, many authorities have collected SSA for the number of under-fives in their population and then spent it on whatever else they wished, whereas local authorities making good and decent provision have received similar amounts of money but been committed to spending it on nursery education only. That has caused some anger among the good providers. Ministers have often said that they do not want to circumscribe how local authorities use their money on under-fives provision. I understand that argument, but I disagree with it.
Recent changes in the political make-up of local authorities have meant that more and more authorities, no longer controlled by Conservatives, can spend their due resources on nursery education. That is good. The steady increase in resources directed to the ends that most local authorities aspire to achieve will eventually enable them to fill more and more of the gaps in provision in a way that parents will enthusiastically approve of, using
existing criteria and expertise and broadening and targeting until the supply encompasses every three and four-year-old--therefore effectively ending the need for targeting.
The Government, however, have introduced a wheeze that will take resources away from local education authorities--a major motive behind the Bill--for a job that even this Government do not usually complain about. The wheeze is intended to finance what might well prove to be a spatchcock provision that is so uncertain that it needs a vast new bureaucracy to organise and watch over it.
The voucher scheme will secure little or no additional provision, but it will certainly dislocate existing LEA provision. It will focus on four-year-olds, despite the fact that the Department's figures show that only 4 per cent. of four-year-olds are not provided for at the moment. Not only will the voucher scheme do nothing for three-year-olds, it might hold back any extension of nursery education to them. Many nursery places in Lancashire are occupied by three-year-olds who would not be eligible for vouchers. There is a distinct possibility--indeed, a probability--that nursery schools will not replace those three-year-olds with new three-year-olds, but will choose instead voucher holders--four-year-olds.
"We should also make it easier to open new schools and to allow new independent schools to opt into the state-funded system and become grant maintained."
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