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Mr. Eastham: If you want to intervene, I will gladly give way.
Dr. Spink: Of course we must look after the fabric of our schools. Would the hon. Gentleman care to predict whether his Front-Bench spokesman will promise to spend extra money on education above the amount that we are spending?
Mr. Eastham: I promise that we will make a better job than your Government.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): Order. I remind the hon. Gentleman of the convention that all remarks are addressed through the Chair.
Mr. Eastham: I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, but sometimes hon. Members make such silly asides that one becomes outraged.
Madam Deputy Speaker: That is why remarks are addressed through the Chair.
Mr. Eastham: I do not think that the hon. Member for Castle Point intervened through you, Madam Deputy Speaker. He intervened directly on me. The convention should work for hon. Members in all parts of the House and not just for Opposition Members.
If you want to improve standards--and you keep on professing that you do--you have to put your money where your mouth is and start spending on schools. You have to give them good working conditions. Some schools in Manchester are Portakabins with holes in the walls. They have no heating and are rat infested and you are doing nothing about it. It cannot be said that it is up to a Labour Government because Labour is in opposition. For God's sake, the Government have been in power for
17 years. [Interruption.] The Minister makes a seated intervention which, of course, was missed by the Deputy Speaker. It was directed to me.
Madam Deputy Speaker:
Order. I am not aware of missing any intervention.
Mr. Eastham:
In that case it looks as though you have condoned the Minister speaking to me. Perhaps it is all right to make such remarks, but on our side we cannot make them.
The Minister's little aside was about LEAs, but where do the Government come into these matters? What is their part in the formula? Are they not responsible for spending taxpayers' money on education in the cities? What are you collecting taxes for if you do not disburse money in the interests of education? The hon. Member for Castle Point spoke about the high priority of education. We are paying a great deal of tax, and a fair proportion of that ought to be directed to education.
When I met the Minister, he was very kind and he finally sent me a letter which stated that the Government had finally agreed that two schools would have some assistance. There was £233,000 to Manchester local education authority in recognition of its education capital expenditure needs in 1995-96. As I have said, we need £50 million a year and we have a growing problem that requires £500 million, but that is the sort of response that we got. We are grateful for it, because it will affect two schools, but we have 250 schools.
Mr. David Amess (Basildon):
I apologise for not being here for the start of the debate. I hope that the Whip will note that I was listening to proceedings in the Select Committee on Defence. I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Dr. Spink) for not hearing his opening remarks, but I got the flavour of his speech and thoroughly enjoyed it.
In the four minutes remaining to me, I should like to reflect on the two main Opposition parties. I became a Member of Parliament at precisely the same time as the leaders of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. I stand by exactly those matters on which I was elected in 1983, but those two party leaders seem to have changed their views on a range of issues.
There is some irony in my personal circumstances in that my family's education was attacked by both the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. The attack was led by a former Labour Member, Mr. Arthur Latham, who for a time was the leader of Havering council, which is the
council that the Minister is under. I was criticised for sending our eldest child to a non-selective, non-grant-maintained, single-sex school. There are none in Basildon--the school was outside my constituency--and the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties behaved disgracefully. The House can imagine my disgust when some months later I learned precisely what the two leaders of the Opposition parties were up to. Last Thursday, the Labour and Liberal Democrat alliance lost control of Havering council.
Last year I visited every primary school in my constituency and we ended with a meeting with the Secretary of State for Education and Employment. I was proud of the way in which all my head teachers conducted their discussions with the Secretary of State. We shared views on many issues. There are many single parents in my constituency, and when we debate standards in education it is quite wrong for any hon. Member to expect schools to bring up our children for us. I take my hat off to those parents who, for various reasons, are on their own and struggling against all the odds.
I suppose that all Members of Parliament draw on their own circumstances. My education started four decades ago, in the London borough of Newham, and I shall reflect on the remarks made by the hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley (Mr. Eastham). All the classes were of 50 or more, in poor Victorian buildings. As an individual, I owe everything to my teachers, and salute them for their efforts, as we could spell properly, write clearly and could certainly command the rudiments of basic arithmetic. I am not sure what conclusions I would draw from that. My hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point mentioned languages. That is fine, but I hope that our children can master English first, as occasionally there is an over-emphasis on computers.
Ms Estelle Morris (Birmingham, Yardley):
I congratulate the hon. Member for Castle Point (Dr. Spink) on securing the debate, since when--I am sure that it is just a coincidence--the newspapers have been full of primary education matters.
I agreed with the hon. Gentleman on one point, but my enthusiasm for his speech ran out thereafter. He said that we have not given primary education the priority that it deserves in recent decades. I whole-heartedly agree. The blame lies not only with the Tory Government but with past Labour Governments and councils. It is an error that everybody has made. We say that the years spent in primary education are important, and we know that unless
we get it right at five, six and seven, it will be much more difficult to get it right at 11, 12 and 13. Despite that, we consider it unacceptable for sixth-form classes to have more than 15 students, when children are well motivated, yet it is tolerable, apparently, to have classes of more than 30 at age five and six.
Historically, the teachers with the best qualifications were always guided into secondary education. The Government must act on the recent work carried out by the Select Committee into the disparity in funding between secondary and primary education. As a former secondary school teacher, I know that everybody in education, no matter in what area their interest lies, accepts that primary education has been the Cinderella part of the service, and it is high time it secured the resources to which it is entitled.
I agree with the hon. Member for Castle Point that there is much good going on in primary schools. For many children, it is the point in their lives when their love of learning is born, when anything that they achieve thereafter can be traced back to a good relationship or experience in a reception class. All of us know the precious enthusiasm that a child has when he or she starts school. Some of us are saddened and wonder where it has gone by the time they start secondary school, but to have the task of nurturing it and ensuring that it grows into a love of learning and to ambition and high aspiration is one of the joys for those who choose to spend their teaching career in primary education. To the teachers who get it right and thus give the children a good start in life as a result we owe a debt of gratitude as a nation.
Having said that, it would be silly to have a debate on primary education and not express concern about some of the real problems in that sector. The evidence that we are falling behind is overwhelming, from reports from the Office of Standards in Education, from international studies and from the Basic Skills Agency, which reports that one third of inner-city children are starting secondary education with a reading age at least two years behind their chronological age. What worries me most is that the gap between those who do well and those who do not is wider in this country than anywhere else. It is growing. Even the Prime Minister made mention of it, as recently as two years ago. We must address that problem. The crusade and the challenge is to bridge the gap so that everybody can have a chance to do well.
That is where I parted company with the hon. Gentleman for Castle Point, because the rest of his speech seemed to fall into the old Tory trap of saying that it was everybody else's fault except theirs. He said that it was the fault of parents for not taking responsibility, that it was the fault of socialists, labour councillors, the Teacher Training Agency, and information technology--all and sundry, but it was not the fault of his Government. I do not know why a party seeks power other than to try to achieve change and to do the things that it wants to do. The corollary is that, at the end of their period in power, the Government are judged by what happens.
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