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Mrs. Wise: Does the hon. Gentleman understand that it is not the education authority that teaches the children but teachers, and that the burdens that his Government have placed on teachers have led to intolerable stresses, greatly increased sickness rates and the need to take early retirement on health grounds? Does he agree that the priority should be to enable teachers to remain in post so that they can do their job, which they do so admirably in the vast majority of cases?
Mr. Mans: That was an interesting intervention; the hon. Lady should address her remarks to Lancashire county council, which should put teachers before bureaucrats and ensure that teachers get the support that they deserve. Her comment about sickness is also interesting, because, as she knows, the record of absenteeism in Lancashire county council is disgraceful. Lancashire county council has more people absent for one reason or another than the vast majority of local authorities, which says much about its leadership and how it cannot persuade people to work for it.
Mr. Nigel Evans: I should also like to say something about the hon. Lady's intervention. She knows a lot about early retirement, because her daughter was forced to take early retirement as leader of Preston council because
people in Preston and Lancashire are sick and tired of political posturing. They were extremely angry at the way in which Lancashire county council and Andrew Collier wrote to all the schools and scared all the parents, frightening them with an 8 per cent. budget reduction when they did not have any of the facts or statistics. The fact is that the Government were committed to funding education in Lancashire and in the rest of the country and to putting education first, and that is precisely what they did.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. In short debates, long interventions do not assist.
Mr. Mans: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making a point that I would have made a little later in my speech, but, of course, I shall not now do so, to ensure that a few more hon. Members are able to contribute.
Lancashire county council said no not only to testing but to grant-maintained status. That is hypocrisy of the worst order. We are told by the Labour leadership that it believes in stakeholding. What better example of stakeholding is there than to give parents, teachers and governors a stake in their school? That is what Conservatives mean by stakeholding. What the Labour party means, judging by its opposition to grant-maintained schools, is that it wants the bureaucrat miles away to have a stake in that primary, secondary or other school.
That cannot be right, and many Opposition Members understand that by their actions, because, as has been mentioned, Labour activists and Labour leaders throughout the country are voting with their feet and sending their children to Tory-controlled boroughs to grant-maintained schools. Even worse in terms of the doctrinaire policies of some Opposition Members is that some children were sent to selective grammar schools.
It is clear that the Labour's attitude to education has not changed one bit in 20 years. Opposition Members want to climb the ladder of opportunity and pull it up after them to ensure that no one else has the chance to take the opportunities that they had. That is precisely what the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms Harman) and the Leader of the Opposition have done. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Small Heath (Mr. Godsiff) went one stage further, because he made the interesting comment that people on MPs' salaries could afford to send their children to private schools. The hon. Gentleman exercised the option to do precisely that. Perhaps a few more Opposition Members would like to follow his example and provide more opportunities for people who do not have the chance to send their children to schools in their own areas.
The policy in Lancashire is clearly to get rid of selection, to get rid of the good schools, particularly in Lancaster, that have always had selection. That must be wrong. Parents must be given choice and the opportunity to send their children to the schools that they think are best for them. The county council wishes to deny that opportunity to parents and to create conformity and an image of levelling down rather than levelling up. That is what comprehensives are all about; we can see the effect across the county, because the results in comprehensives are not as good as they are in many other schools.
I shall now deal with the way in which Lancashire county council manages its budget. Last year, it cut the schools budget by 5.5 per cent., but, as far as I can ascertain, it did not cut the central administration for
schools at all. It increased the amount of money for social services. That is fine, but the money was not spent on helping the elderly. I do not know where it was spent, but I know that, at the end of January, the social services budget had a surplus of £3 million. The county council should spend that money now on helping people who need domiciliary care but have had it taken away from them, or it should be transferred back to the education budget so that it can be spent on books and teaching rather than sitting in county hall, which is where it is at present.
Mr. Colin Pickthall (West Lancashire):
I was somewhat puzzled, at the start of the debate, about its central matter, but it soon became obvious whenthe hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale(Sir M. Lennox-Boyd) described what he said was a method of escape for people in the county--grant-maintained schools. Perhaps it is no wonder that he wants to wrap the debate around that assertion--I understand that there are no grant-maintained schools in his constituency. I take it from that that, despite his vigorous efforts, the people in the area are satisfied with the education service that is being provided by the county.
Since 1989, only eight secondary schools and six primary schools have voted to become grant maintained. As schools have periodically to take a positive decision on the issue, that means that 591 primaries and98 secondaries have made a positive choice to remain within the Lancashire system.
Mr. Mans:
The hon. Gentleman has said that schools have to make a positive choice to go grant-maintained. That is different from the situation 10 or 15 years ago, when grammar and other schools had no choice about whether to go comprehensive.
Mr. Pickthall:
I am speaking about the system that appertains today and the system that Conservative Members try to advocate, which is at the centre of what they are about. They are desperate to get schools in their areas to go grant-maintained. However, schools do not want to do that and Conservative Members wrap a debate around the issue, using as many insults and myths as they can find. For example, the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Hawkins) called the chairman of education in Lancashire, who is the mildest and gentlest of men,a political monster. I have seen letters from the right hon. Member for South Ribble (Mr. Atkins) in which he tells schools in his area that the county will not put the money from the last Budget into schools. The same hon. Member and his colleagues, however, tell us all the time that the county is trying to frighten the electorate.
The hon. Member for Wyre (Mr. Mans) said that Lancashire likes to say no to education. That is a preposterous and silly remark. He described many of the legislative measures in education that Lancashire people and Lancashire county council have opposed. However
much we disagree with legislation, the key question is whether, when it has been passed, we in Lancashire put it into practice in the best possible manner. The answer to that is yes, as the record clearly shows. The hon. Member for Wyre said that Lancashire wants to get rid of good schools. That is absolute nonsense. What does it mean? Does it mean that they should be closed and thrown into the sea? That is plainly absurd.
The debate hovers around a self-seeking agenda that has been set by Conservative Members who pretend that they are concerned about the generality of education in Lancashire. They elide education funding and schools and use the two interchangeably. I remind them that education in Lancashire covers a heck of a lot more than schools, although schools form the central and most important part of it.
Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd:
The hon. Gentleman says that Conservative Members are self-seeking. In January, a discussion paper, not a decision, was issued by county hall for consideration by county councillors. It dealtwith cuts in primary and secondary school funding of£25 million. I appreciate that we must draw a distinction between specific cuts and cuts in education generally.The figure was later changed to cuts of only £6.7 million.How does the hon. Gentleman explain those figures against the background of the Government increasing funding by £26.6 million?
Mr. Pickthall:
They are explained against the foreground of the Government's Budget. The county council estimated what it would get from the Budget and it made its expectations public. Although I would quarrel with the nature of the extra money that was targeted at schools in the Budget, Lancashire decided to put that money into schools, and 5.1 per cent. extra will go to schools to account for the extra money. That extra money did not take account of the fact that, next year, a large number of extra pupils will come on stream in Lancashire or that a large extra amount will be spent on special educational needs next year. It did not take account either of next year's pay rise for teachers, which is likely to be higher than the rate of inflation. All those matters have to be taken into account when considering the money that Conservative Members perceive as extra, as a bonus. It is nothing of the kind.
As I have said, Lancashire is putting 5.1 per cent. extra into the schools budget--not into education in general.To be able to do that, it has to make cuts of 6.4 per cent.in spending on the rest of its services. They include not just highways and social services but the rest of the education service, the youth service and discretionary awards. They will have to be cut to pay for the extra spending on schools. That is an agonising decision for the county, and it has had to make such decisions for 10 or 12 years.
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