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Ms Estelle Morris (Birmingham, Yardley): That is not true.
Dr. Spink: The hon. Lady must accept that it is true. The schools resisted it and LEAs resisted it, but not now; they now see that it was right. I remember well when LMS was introduced in Dorset when the Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors who sat opposite me resisted it fiercely.
Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman: Where are the Liberals?
Dr. Spink: I must tell my hon. Friend that the hon. Member for Bath (Mr. Foster), the Liberal spokesman on education, is upstairs in Committee. He courteously apologised to me for his absence before the debate, and I respect that. He has a job to do for education in Committee.
Going grant-maintained gave schools management control. We need many more such schools and we must find the means to increase their number dramatically. GM status means that schools are prised away from the dead hand of extensive bureaucratic--and, too often, politically motivated--LEA control. We imposed the national curriculum, which has set out a clear set of entitlements to skills and knowledge for every child at each key age. We have established a common national set of standards and we have tested and measured achievement against them. We have now ensured that no child need unnecessarily fall behind, because we can now monitor his progress and report it to his parents.
We also set about measuring teaching quality through a system of inspections using registered inspectors. We have published the results so that education has become publicly accountable. We trust parents, employers and communities with the key information about their children's achievement, but Labour does not trust parents and the community with that information. We trust them and we have empowered them, but Labour would take away that power and hand it back to its band of local Labour activists. We know who I and my constituents would prefer to control our children's education.
We have now begun, finally, to tackle the problem of teacher training. With hindsight, that should have been among our first reforms, not our last, which we should have tackled in 1980. The Teacher Training Agency has been established for 18 months. It is still developing its role and working on a clearer statement on teaching skills. It should move fast and it should be starting to flex its muscles to force change, where necessary, in teacher training colleges.
Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman:
There again, my constituency is singularly fortunate because our local college, St. Martin's university college, has just been given four excellent ratings on its training. It is quite outstanding, and it makes a difference--that is why we have such a lot of good teachers around our way. Once they come to Lancashire, they do not want to leave. They go to St. Martin's and they are beautifully trained. Those student teachers are doing a wonderful job in the classroom; so, once again, we are singularly fortunate.
Dr. Spink:
I read about St. Martin's just last night, and I wondered whether to mention it as an example of good practice that should be repeated elsewhere. I am delighted that my hon. Friend has done that for me.
The right hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) has said that Labour wants 15,000 bad teachers to be sacked. He makes the time-honoured mistake of attacking the symptoms when he should be attacking the cause. Ineffective teacher training colleges should receive the bulk of our attention.
Mr. Greg Pope (Hyndburn):
Mr. Woodhead said that 15,000 teachers should be sacked.
Dr. Spink:
I agree that the chief inspector said that, but I believe that the right hon. Member for Sedgefield agreed with him.
If certain teacher training colleges fail to improve and to drop their politically correct progressive ideology, the TTA should close them down and their accreditation should be withdrawn. We should start that progress quickly.
It is not enough, however, to tackle the problem of teacher training colleges. Just 20,000 teachers qualify each year, but 400,000 teachers work in our classrooms every day. All of them need to train and improve constantly, as we all do. I welcome the fact that the Government have made available £400 million for in-service training, but we must ensure that that money is used wisely.
I welcome the 13 literacy centres set up by the Government to improve standards. I also welcome the HEADLAMP scheme to support newly-appointed head teachers. The Government have introduced these and other improvements, which are needed because the task of reforming education is desperately difficult as well as important.
It is fashionable to say that teachers suffer from innovation shock and that they should have no more change for a time. I reject that argument. There is some truth in it, but teachers, like the rest of us in the real world, must change. The world is changing fast and moving forward, and if we do not change we shall be left behind, and so will the teachers. They must change or fall behind.
We cannot wait to do what is right. For every year we wait, a year of our children's time is wasted at school because they are not making the progress they should. Young Tommy and young Sophie cannot redo their year 6 at school because the teacher has got it wrong. If the teachers get it wrong, that opportunity is gone for the rest of little Tommy and little Sophie's life, so we cannot delay.
Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman:
Talking about people being reluctant to change, it was interesting, in "Panorama" on Monday night, to hear a headmistress who had not been in favour of whole-class teaching who then started it and found it such a huge success that she and her staff now advocate it to other schools. It has made a startling difference in that school. That shows that teachers can change if they see the results.
Dr. Spink:
I agree with my hon. Friend. She, like me, does not advocate traditional methods only because it is fashionable. I did so in the 1980s, and was ridiculed. I did so in 1991, and was blasted in the local newspapers, before I became a Member of Parliament, as being out of control. I said that teachers used to be one of the top professions, rated alongside doctors, dentists and accountants, but that that was no longer the case because they were not acting as professionals--sitting in Levi jeans and baggy sweaters on the corner of the desk and not teaching the children, allowing the children to learn at their own speed and following child-centred progressive methods. I was ridiculed and laughed at for saying that.
What I now find pretty hard to swallow is hearing Opposition Members, not laughing at me, but pretending to agree with me. But they really are still advocating the socialist ideology that has submerged education in an execrable process of levelling down. That is what socialism is about--levelling down. As my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton said, Labour opposed selection, setting, streaming, testing and the publication of results.
Labour betrayed generations of children by its socialist Plowden project-based ideology. We need traditional methods; we need whole-class teaching; we need phonics, which contribute to the accuracy, fluency and confidence of children when they read.
Mr. Nicholson:
My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the history of the Labour party's position on this matter. Perhaps I might be a little more charitable to Labour. Labour Members appreciate that the children of their supporters, who do not necessarily grow up in a family with a reading environment, are being let down by some of these progressive teaching methods and the absence of whole-class teaching. We should welcome the evidence on the "Panorama" programme that some elements of the Labour party, such as Dagenham, which is a Labour-controlled borough--perhaps new Labour--are beginning to see the sense of reform. I imagine--my hon. Friend might like to explore this--that this will open up new divisions in the Labour party between those who realise that modern methods are wrong and those who will resist to the end any attempt to replace them.
Dr. Spink:
My hon. Friend is wrong. There is no such thing as new Labour. It is a con trick. It is a complete and utter fraud on the electorate. I hope that the electorate never have to find it out.
As my hon. Friend says, it is important for children to have books in their homes, so perhaps he would explain--I am sure that no Opposition Member will--why Labour-controlled Essex county council this year cut the library book fund by an unprecedented, massive, disastrous 25 per cent. That will not teach children to read. Labour sends kids down the video shop--that is what Labour is all about.
We need more selection at school and class level. Mixed-ability teaching, which was a socialist levelling-down mechanism, has failed. We have now understood that we should be ruthless in driving it out. It betrays the weaker child as well as the stronger. Labour has not really understood that. It would return to its old ideology and would be the puppet of the unions and the teachers' producers' influence if it ever came to power. It will not, because the country is not so foolish.
Labour tries to give the illusion that it accepts what I am saying, as my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton suggested. It claims to have undergone a Damascene conversion on education, as in all sectors, but we should not believe it for a moment. Labour's instincts are still driven by the politics of envy and its education policy can be summed up by the expression "levelling down". That is what Labour is about. Its words are warm, but they are dangerous. Labour would damage your children's education.
Labour claims that class size is very important. It is not. The Office for Standards in Education, with which I agree on this point, found that class size was
Of course, some unions with vested producer interests do not agree. What is new? Labour wants to destroy choice and diversity. It would scrap our grant-maintained
schools and make them revert to the status of foundation schools. It would place them, again, under the dead bureaucratic hand of the local education authority and its political placemen. It would scrap selection--along with child benefit, student grants and so on, but I do not want to stray off the subject.
Even Labour now knows that that would reduce standards. Labour Members show us that they know that because their party leader, their Front-Bench health spokesman and many other Labour Members have taken for themselves the benefits that we provided through choice and diversity. I congratulate them--they were absolutely right to do what they did--but I find their hypocrisy breathtaking. They seek to secure for their children the benefits that they seek to deny to everyone else. That is indefensible.
Labour's policy was best summed up by the Secondary Heads Association, which stated that Labour's recent education policy was
"only important for infant pupils."
Its research was based on the evaluation of 200,000 lessons. It was reliable and valid. Ofsted found that the effectiveness of teaching has greater influence on pupils' achievement than class size.
"simplistic . . . bland . . . will not raise standards . . . is poorly thought out . . . uncosted . . . short on ideas . . . lacking in detail . . . an uncomfortable combination of the naive and messianic".
Those words all appear in a Secondary Heads Association publication. I get the feeling that the Secondary Heads Association does not like Labour's education policy. It is right to reject it, because it is a sham.
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