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Mr. Gerry Steinberg (City of Durham): Does the right hon. Lady not realise that we oppose the assisted places
system because it gives privilege to the few at the expense of the majority? If the right hon. Lady will tell her Ministers to spend the same amount on each child in the public sector as is spent on each child in the independent sector, I will support her 100 per cent. Does not she realise that a few people are being subsidised at the expense of the majority?
Dame Angela Rumbold: I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but I fail to understand his logic. The majority of those who send their children to independent schools pay their taxes and support the state system, but choose to spend more to give their children a different education. Forgive me if I am wrong, but I thought that being allowed to spend one's taxed money on whatever one chooses was the benefit of living in a free society. [Interruption.]
I should like to make a further point to the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg), who seems very excited. The abolition of the assisted places scheme will not provide a pot of gold for any prospective Government who might come in as an alternative to our extremely good Conservative Government. It would benefit perhaps one child in 16 at the most. It is misleading nonsense to say, "We shall abolish the assisted places scheme and then all your children, all you poor people, will get a much better education." That is untrue. It is high time that somebody said loudly what the benefits would be. Those benefits would be minimal and would not fund anything--certainly not the aspirations of the hon. Member for City of Durham, laudable though they might be.
I welcome the extension of grant-maintained status. I was probably one of the earliest people to believe that grant-maintained status would become the norm for schools and would be of great benefit to pupils, parents and teachers. It is a pity that we are still slightly hidebound by bureaucratic local authority procedures for the allocation of school places. I do not know how many hon. Members came across that problem during the summer.
It is important that we should be able to deliver choice and diversity. Sadly, we cannot always do so when parents choose a school, for good and sensible reasons, only to find that the local authority will not allocate them a place there and that the appeals system appears not to be as fair as they would like. I am not pleased to be making that point, but the Government need to consider it. Schools should have a greater say in choosing the children whom they take in. It is better for children to go to the schools that their parents want and for parents to have an opportunity to choose the schools that they prefer for their children. That is reasonable in a free society. I dislike the allocation of places by overseeing bureaucracy. It leads me to wonder seriously whether the role of the local education authority is still too overbearing.
The remarks of the hon. Member for Bassetlaw raised some interesting issues relating to the role of local education authorities. Many LEAs refuse to allow schools in their area to opt for grant-maintained status. It is reasonable to argue that it is not up to the local education authority because the governing body chooses, but we all know the pressures that can be brought to bear on a governing body and on voting parents. Little notes have gone out in my constituency to the parents of every child in a school saying, "If you vote for grant-maintained
status, your school will lose £800 this year and £1,600 next year." It is nonsense, of course, and quite wrong, but let us not deny that it happens.
We should also remember that many LEAs claiming to be giving their schools the maximum amount under the local management scheme--85, 90 or 95 per cent., whatever it may be--are misleading parents, because they do nothing of the sort. They retain far more than that. My LEA retains 30 per cent., after taking into account the way in which money is paid back to it by schools for the services which the authority says that they must buy. A considerable sum which is not properly managed or used is going back to local education authority. I ask my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Government to think about that and to see whether it might be considered for a Bill after we have won the general election and a successful Conservative Government are returned.
I welcome the Government's measures and wish them every success.
Mr. Don Foster (Bath):
I disagree fundamentally with many of the remarks of the right hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame A. Rumbold). I spoke immediately after her last time the House had a major debate on education, when I was so incensed by one of her remarks that I suggested that it should be widely published, so that people would know where she stood.
I hope that the right hon. Lady's opening remarks today on morality in schools will also be widely published, because they were very sensible. I was delighted to hear her say that teachers cannot be expected to take on the full burden. They have a part to play in this important issue and we should give them more trust. Although she did not say so specifically, I suspect that she might agree that our schools are already highly moral places, providing good examples for young people on issues of right and wrong.
The right hon. Lady will be well aware that many schools find themselves under considerable pressure on the issue, not least because the significantly overcrowded national curriculum has made it very difficult for teachers to devote as much time and attention as they might to what in many schools is called personal and social education--a vehicle for dealing with some issues of morality. I very much welcome her early remarks, but I shall explain later why I disagree fundamentally with some of her other points.
It was said of Calvin Coolidge many years ago, "He don't say much, but when he do he don't say much." That is a particularly apposite remark on this year's Queen's Speech--it don't say very much at all. However, it speaks volumes about the Government. They have run out of steam and run out of ideas. Many of the proposals in the Queen's Speech are aimed more at trying to embarrass other parties than at trying to solve the many problems of our society.
We are meant to be debating local government and education today. It is a pity that the Secretary of State for Education and Employment did not mention local government. Perhaps that is not surprising, because we know that the Conservative Government are no fans of local government. That is no shock, because the Conservatives have no power base there. My party now has many more councillors than the Conservatives and
controls four times as many councils. However, that does not absolve the Government of the responsibility to respond more effectively and robustly to the problems of local government.
The Gracious Speech refers to one Bill on local government, which will bring forward precious few measures far too late. What a pity the Queen's Speech did not contain a serious local government Bill to give local authorities a general power of competence for the first time. The Prime Minister is keen to talk about the notion of subsidiarity--devolving power downwards--in relation to Europe. What a pity he does not take a similar view on the need to devolve power downwards from central to local government in this country.
Legislation to give a general power of competence to local government would enable authorities to take action that they believe that local people want at local level. It is a pity that such a Bill could not have had tacked on to it a Government commitment to remove capping and thus to remove the ludicrous situations which currently exist in local government as a result of capping. I would not expect it from the present Government, but it was a pity that they did not propose a change to the way in which local taxes are raised--a change from the council tax to a form of local income tax.
5.15 pm
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