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1.28 pm
Ms Tessa Jowell (Dulwich): No one could disagree with the words of the Secretary of State for Education and Employment addressing a Business in the Community conference last year:
- "I want all young people to have every chance to make the right choices at 16 and beyond . . . The education and training system has a vital role in addressing achievement. It should have high expectations of all young people, regardless of social background or disadvantage. We know that this is not happening. We need to act. We must ensure that we get it right first time for everyone."
First came the collapse of the South Thames training and enterprise council. That TEC fell apart before the Government's very eyes. In Dulwich, it left local schools high and dry without their promised funds, and training providers were left thousands of pounds out of pocket because of unpaid contracts. Hundreds of young people were left in limbo, not knowing whether they were going to be able to continue their work placements. They were denied the stability and certainty that is essential to sustaining young people's commitment to training.
During this shambles I was contacted by many parents. I particularly remember the parents of some young girls who were a month away from completing work placements with a nursery in east Dulwich. They had been told that their daughters could not complete the course as the funding had dried up. To them, lame excuses about the complexity of the funding arrangements and the
training and enterprise council were irrelevant; but they did know that the Government had not got it right first time and that they were the victims.
The scale of the disruption that followed the collapse of the South Thames TEC, and the disruption it caused to training providers in Dulwich, was incalculable. Perhaps the most distasteful aspect of all was the spectacle of a Government who claim to want to raise educational achievement for all but who washed their hands so quickly of responsibility for the whole affair.
Hard on the heels of the TEC debacle came the Government's bungled attempt to privatise the Southwark careers service, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East (Mrs. Prentice) referred. The Secretary of State claims:
Earlier this year, the Grand Metropolitan Trust emerged as the Government's preferred bidder in the race to take over the running of the service; it was only when Grand Met read the small print of the contract and found out exactly what service it was expected to provide that it got cold feet and withdrew pretty quickly. The result has been months of uncertainty and a further erosion of local young people's confidence.
I entirely share the sentiments of the Secretary of State and Ministers that we must offer young people the chance to raise their achievements and skills. I wholeheartedly agree with the Secretary of State, who told the Business in the Community conference that there is a need to identify the parts of the country that need extra support. She has failed to act on those words, however.
Let us examine the position of school leavers in Southwark in recent years. Last year, less than 7 per cent. of the 2,000 year 11 students in Southwark went on to sixth forms; just under half went on to study in FE colleges. The grand total of students continuing their education was just under 60 per cent.--the jointly held lowest percentage of any London borough. Southwark has now been at the bottom of the London league of 16 to 19-year-olds who continue their education for some years, but rather than deal with the problems, Government policies conspire to make them worse.
The worst aspect of all is that the Government appear to enjoy pillorying inner London boroughs for their efforts to improve standards of education.
When the Minister opened the debate, he referred to the Ofsted assessment of the performance of inner London primary schools, and Southwark was one of the local authorities studied. The right hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame A. Rumbold) underlined the link--and I entirely agree with her--between the level of achievement that children reach in primary school and their achievement later on as 16 to 19-year-olds. I wish to give the House a flavour of the unedited Ofsted report which, once it got to Ofsted's offices, appears to have been doctored for political purposes and not in the interests of raising education standards in Southwark, Islington or Tower Hamlets.
Some of the passages that were deleted from the Ofsted report--I leave the House to judge why they were deleted--were:
The Government have a choice. They can continue to use the Ofsted report for cheap political capital or they can join hands with Southwark and other authorities across London and work to improve the level of education standards and the opportunities for children in those schools. It is important in the context of the debate to get those issues on the record.
Southwark has few sixth form colleges and as a result young people rely on Southwark college and other further education colleges outside the borough. A number of other obstacles have been placed in the way of young people, to which my hon. Friends have referred, especially the perverse incentive behind funding for further education which now acts as a deterrent to many young people who wish to pursue further studies. For example, in 1992, Southwark was forced to take the decision to withdraw the funding of transport costs for young people going on to further and higher education.
I have collected a catalogue of instances from my own constituency that show how essential bus fares are to make it practical and possible for motivated young people to travel to FE and higher education colleges. They also show a depth of motivation that is deeply moving. Twin sisters who lived in east Dulwich studied at Southwark college. Their parents could not afford to pay two bus fares every day, so when the bus fares were withdrawn the twins attended the college in alternate weeks. That illustrates that these are people who are desperate to continue to improve their skills. They see education and training as the way out of their present circumstances. They have had no proper help from the Government.
Mr. Michael Stephen (Shoreham):
The hurricane of change that has swept through the entire western world during the past 10 years is nothing short of a second industrial revolution. At the same time, the western world has gone through the worst economic recession since 1929, one that has turned upside down the economies of the United States, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and almost every other developed country. The United Kingdom did not escape. It is fatuous to place the blame for that at the Government's door.
Those events have made it impossible for old industries to survive and for old patterns of work to continue. The end of the cold war has meant that new sources of cheap labour have opened up in eastern Europe along with new markets. Asian countries are now awakening and competing with us in low-tech and, sometimes, high-tech industries. That applies especially to information technology. It is now possible for a mail-order company, say in my constituency, to upload raw data via satellite to Pakistan, India or China, where the data will be processed by low-cost keyboard operators.
We live in a different, high-tech world. The education and training of our young people for the world of work is vital. Similarly, retraining is vital. Whether Governments like it or not, it is impossible now to guarantee a job for life. We must be flexible and retrain.
The Government take training immensely seriously, and I shall refer briefly to some of the many schemes that they have introduced. The youth training scheme has trained 4.5 million young people since 1983. Career development loans enable young people to purchase vocational training. There is also the Investors in People scheme; the job interview guarantee scheme; the training for work scheme, which provides places for 200,000 young people; and the job clubs. We know that 90 per cent. of 16-year-olds are in full-time education or training.
I have listened carefully to most of the speeches in the debate. I have yet to hear any constructive costed proposals as to how the Labour party, if in government, would do better or, indeed, do anything. Labour Members can only carp and criticise. No constructive proposals ever pass their lips.
There are 1.5 million places on employment and training programmes for the year 1996-97. I pay tribute to the work of the Industry and Parliament Trust, which arranged a conference at St. Andrews only two or three weeks ago, which the hon. Member for Oldham, Central and Royton (Mr. Davies) and I attended. A serious effort was made at the conference to identify the problems that face young people, and not-so-young people, who are seeking work. Employability was considered from all possible angles. We had the opportunity to interview people who were unemployed and in need of retraining. We heard from them, from a practical point of view, what was needed. I commend the trust's report on the conference, which I understand will be published in two or three weeks' time.
Not all people can benefit from training. Some people do not have the temperament or the mental ability to benefit from a training course and perhaps do not want the responsibility that goes with a skilled occupation. I do not want a country which is rich enough to pay generous benefits. I want a country in which a useful job is found for everyone. Therefore, even in this high-tech age, we must find manual jobs for people who cannot or will not acquire a skill. I ask the Government to consider again the various forms of workfare scheme that have been proposed.
Industry provides most of the training opportunities in this country. When I visit industries in my constituency and elsewhere, I ask them what involvement they expect from the Government in training. The answer I get is almost always, "The role of Government is to provide us with young people at 16 or so with a good basic education. We want young people who are good at reading, writing and basic numeracy. We will do the rest. We will train them for our industry."
Only yesterday, I had a meeting with the directors of Lucas Industries, one of Britain's most successful manufacturers. They told me that they had established three training schools at Cwmbran, Tamworth and Wolverhampton to train people for their company. The schools also admit people who do not work for the company and charge them fees, which go to help pay for the school. I asked the directors whether they were worried about other industries poaching the young people whom they had trained. They said that they could live with that and it was sometimes an advantage for people who had been trained by the company to work for other companies which might be their customers or suppliers.
As for the need for basic education, it is astonishing that, although the Government have provided more money per child for education than ever before in the nation's history, the results are so poor. That is partly due to the fact that we have a federal system of education. Central Government provide the money and are expected to take the responsibility, but the education, or what sometimes passes for education, is delivered by local authorities, many of which are left-wing authorities which still employ the half-baked education theories of the 1960s. Two local authorities in point are Islington and Southwark, where concerned parents in the parliamentary Labour party have taken their children away to be educated in other parts of the country.
The British grammar school was the institution that provided the professionals, engineers and scientists who made this country great in the 19th and early 20th century. The Labour Government committed a crime of the highest order against the children of this country when they destroyed the grammar schools. It is a matter of great regret to me that when my party came back to power in 1979, all that we could do was to save those that had not been destroyed. We should have restored the grammar schools. Perhaps it is too late to do that now, but I endorse the Government's scheme for grant-maintained status, which will be a way of restoring the ethos of the grammar school and of giving head teachers, governors and parents the ability and incentive to create a really good school in their area.
The public schools are also a source of excellence in our country. I want to bring all our schools up to the standard of the public schools. I want nothing to do with
socialist policies which would destroy our public schools or make it almost impossible for people of modest means to send their children there.
I believe in selection because it is impossible for mixed-ability teaching to work. If we ever had any doubts about that, we must look at the record of the past 30 years. Even the Labour party believes in selection because it talks about setting and streaming and about educating children of different abilities separately. If that is not selection, what is? There must be competition in schools because, in the outside world, the children will have to face competition. If they are artificially protected from it, when they get out into the world, they will not be able to cope.
"our reforms of the careers service are designed to provide more effective guidance."
Few people in Southwark would agree.
"Most of these characteristics--bilingualism, poverty, pupil and staff turnover--were outside the control of the schools and where schools faced a combination of them their task was a difficult one."
17 May 1996 : Column 1233
Another passage reads:
The final passage that was deleted reads:
"Weaknesses do not occur because the teachers are less well qualified or more inept than their colleagues elsewhere . . . teaching reading in many of these schools is a particularly difficult task for which the teachers are not always well prepared."
"The quality of teaching of reading was satisfactory or better in approximately two-thirds of the lessons observed in Year 2."
It was changed to read:
"In one third of these the quality of teaching was unsatisfactory or poor."
Neither I nor my hon. Friend the Member for Peckham (Ms Harman), nor anyone who sits as a member of the majority group on Southwark council, would for one moment defend the poor attainment of many of the children in Southwark schools. Southwark co-operated with Ofsted and welcomed it into the schools. The borough co-operated because it is united in an absolute determination to improve the standards that everybody agrees--for reasons which are clearly evident--are unacceptable. We are not prepared to say that because children come from homes in which English is a second language, or because they come from poor homes or because they live with only one parent, they are not capable of learning and doing well.
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