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Mr. Greenway indicated assent.
Mr. Foster: I see that the hon. Gentleman agrees.
Having been critical of the Government, I must add that I do not believe that Labour's attempts to steal the Government's clothes are helpful either. Opposition Front Bench Members will soon be telling teachers what colour chalk to use. I was interested to read a comment from a former Labour Member of Parliament, Mr. Christopher Price, in the education supplement to today's Guardian. He said:
Instead of telling teachers how to teach and schools how to organise, Government and Opposition would do well to commit themselves to increase investment in the education service to reverse some of the recent damaging cuts. In so doing, I hope that they will, like me, recognise that, while extra money will not by itself raise achievement, it is an essential starting point. What is the point of streaming pupils--if that is what people want--if there are not enough habitable classrooms? What is the point of advocating a return to traditional whole-class teaching methods if pupils still have to share books and to work in overcrowded rooms?
Expanded nursery education, ensuring that schools have books, equipment and decent buildings and making sure that our teachers have the opportunity for high-quality, in-service training courses cannot be achieved without increased resources--or by a string of gimmicks that look back to a failed selective system. If the House passed legislation providing that there should be a no new education gimmick day, we would spend the day examining gimmicks from earlier days and finding that they do not provide the means for raising achievement that the country desperately needs.
Sir Malcolm Thornton (Crosby):
I do not think that even my severest critic would describe me as a rabid right winger. Opposition Members have often prayed in aid some of my criticisms of Government policies in recent years. I remain committed to education. I abhor extremism, whether of the right or the left. The politicisation of the education debate has much to answer for in respect of many of the problems that we face.
I would be less than true to what I believe if I did not say how appalled I was by the comments of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett). That is not because I disagree with what he said he wanted to achieve in education, such as an improvement in standards, better quality across the board and a variety of teaching methods. A remarkable consensus exists in the education world for those things, which we all want in our schools for the benefit of our children.
In a recent article, I said that one of the most significant benefits gained by the Government has been by dragging the Opposition on to our ground in espousing so many of the things in education for which we fought for so long. However, to turn round and blame all the ills of education on the past 17 years is not just to rewrite history but to ignore it. The seeds of many of the problems that we are trying to tackle today were sown many years ago. I shall mention one or two.
It was in the 1960s that changes were made to the requirements and qualifications for entry into the teaching profession. It was in the mid-1960s that O-level mathematics was dropped as a prerequisite for entry to teacher training. That happened between 1965 and 1970, only 30 years ago. A teacher who entered teacher training at that time was probably 18 or 19. A simple sum shows that they are still in schools and still without O-level mathematics. I instance that because maths has been much mentioned not only in this debate but outside the House.
The ease with mathematics that many of us had taught to us has gone. It is small wonder that many teachers have said since that they feel ill at ease with the subject or that their lack of ease has been passed on to so many pupils. It was not until the early 1980s that that requirement was reinstated. One must be careful before picking points in history to illustrate and bolster specious arguments.
To talk about rationing excellence is ridiculous. It was when the evolution that followed the 1944 Education Act, which worked through the system in the next two decades, was abandoned in favour of an egalitarian revolution that the problems started to arise. It was not a question of rationing excellence but of abandoning it. Abraham Lincoln once said that we cannot make the poor rich by making the rich poor. Never was that more true than with education. If we deprive children who can benefit from it of the opportunity for excellence in the name of egalitarian nonsense, we shall not achieve the perhaps laudable aims that we set out to obtain. Common sense dictates that that will not be the case.
We talk about pendulums swinging. My wife is an able and distinguished primary school head teacher.
Mr. Robin Squire
indicated assent.
Sir Malcolm Thornton:
I thank my hon. Friend for his endorsement.
My wife tells me how much she hates pendulums and that she prefers balances. Trying to get a little movement either way from the centre achieves far more than the vicious swing of the pendulum that throws out so much of the good in the name of change. In education, we must surely look at what is good and build on it. We must look at the best and use it as an example. We must consider what needs to be changed and seek the most effective way of changing it.
In all that, we must seek the co-operation of those who work in education. Most importantly, we must recognise that education policy is delivered not by politicians but by teachers. Improving the quality of teachers and their training and giving them the resources that they need is critical to the whole debate.
On resources, we have heard what the £1 billion windfall is to achieve. I was staggered by the list of commitments that it would finance. I will give the House a simple example of the cost of improvements. Recently I was invited to speak at the launch of "Making Sense of Science", which involved improving the opportunities for science co-ordinators to acquire extra skills to take back into their schools. That is fine, but in a school with 10 classes and only 10 teachers there are no opportunities for staff release time. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, for them to do their jobs.
Let us imagine that, by way of a single improvement, we want to offer every primary school in the country increased resources of 0.2 per cent. for its staffing costs. That represents two teaching periods a week. Let us further assume that we pay for that solely from the supply budget, so that no permanent or even temporary contract is entered into. That will cost about £92.5 million.
Doing the sum is easy: it costs about £120 a day for a supply teacher. There are 39 teaching weeks in a year, and 19,500 primary schools in the country. That shows the danger of making wonderful promises about increased resources. Of course I would like improvements of this kind; I have recommended them in the past both on my own behalf and via the Select Committee. The difference is that we recognise the need to be realistic. It is the cruellest of deceptions to pretend that £1 billion will do more than scratch the surface of the problem.
Of course we want more money for education; of course we want it targeted on achieving better standards. But unless we are realistic about the costs we shall be perpetrating a cruel deception on those who believe that the promises can be delivered.
Mr. Kilfoyle:
My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) mentioned the windfall tax in the context of initiatives for the training of young people. The Labour party has consistently said, on public platforms and in policy documents, that we will provide extra resources for education, as for other areas, as and when the economy allows.
Sir Malcolm Thornton:
I accept that that is what has been said, but it was not said today and it is not said very often. It is one of those convenient omissions that many people make when trying to justify a case. The House should be concerned about promises of increased expenditure, because it will take a massive amount of money to bring about even the minimal improvement that I have mentioned.
A great deal of this debate is about standards and whether they are as high today as they used to be. In this context, I offer the House a brief quotation:
Today a revolution is under way in many of our classrooms. Some standards have undeniably fallen. Standards of numeracy and literacy are not as good as I should like them to be; there is empirical evidence to show that they have declined. But the wonderful breadth of knowledge, particularly evident in primary schools today, makes what I learned in primary school look very small beer indeed. We have brilliant teachers teaching mixed ability classes at varying speeds of learning. Brilliant teaching requires excellent preparation, delivery skills, and understanding of the differing needs of children--especially in the primary schools, which have come in for so much criticism.
"Labour at the moment is committed to "do" very little; most of its policy statements consist of tactical manoeuvres to outflank the Conservative Right on school discipline and avoid any spending commitments before the coming election."
How right Mr. Price is.
"Many who are in a position to criticise the capacity of young people who have passed through the Public Elementary Schools have experienced some uneasiness about the condition of Arithmetical knowledge and teaching at the present time. It has been
11 Jun 1996 : Column 154said, for instance, that the accuracy in the manipulation of figures does not reach the same standard which was reached 20 years ago. Some employers express surprise and concern at the inability of young persons to perform simple operations involved in business."
That is an extract from "The teaching of arithmetic in elementary schools", HMSO 1925. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The golden age of education exists largely in people's minds.
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