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Mr. David Nicholson (Taunton): I always listen to my hon. Friend with interest on these matters. I share his hope that we shall move towards selection by aptitude, which is something that is fit for the 21st century. We should not go back to the tired old dogmas of the 1960s and before. Does my hon. Friend agree, however, that, under the present comprehensive system, a comprehensive school that serves a suburb is infinitely better in terms of its raw material than a comprehensive school that serves an inner city or large council estate, as happens in parts of Taunton in my constituency?
Mr. Walden: That may be so. I know a little about our country, and I know that comprehensive schools are very good schools for the children of other people. I am sorry to say that that is my overwhelming experience in my party. That is my overwhelming experience in discussing these matters with those I meet in society. In other words, the degree of education hypocrisy is profound, and that is reflected in the Chamber.
Mrs. Alice Mahon (Halifax): Nothing in the Queen's Speech depressed me more than the proposal to allow more schools to select. Before the education Bill becomes law, I urge the Government and anyone interested in state education, including the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) who showed such an interest in having grammar schools in every constituency, to visit Halifax and talk to members of the local education authority, the governors of LEA schools, the children who attend the Ridings and their parents and ask them about selective education and choice.
Riding is a strange word. It is an old Yorkshire word which means thriding--to divide into three. That is what we have in Halifax--a three-tier system. When it comes to selection and choice, I urge the Government and everyone interested to talk to councillors in all parties in Halifax and ask them why secondary education in Halifax is in such a mess.
The hon. Member for Calder Valley (Sir D. Thompson), who is no longer in his seat, said how good the comprehensive system was in his constituency. Yes, it is good. It has well and long-established comprehensive schools which sometimes, in the past, provided an escape route for people in Halifax. Unfortunately, they are now mostly full. That system has existed there for years and that is exactly what we want in Halifax--nothing more, nothing less.
Halifax has always had a selective system. Because of the disastrous Education Reform Act 1988, probably the worst modern education Act ever, one of our local authority secondary schools--the Ridings--faces a crisis. The world's media have trekked to our doorstep and, if headlines are anything to go by, most had an instant scapegoat.
The Secretary of State, I am sad to say, was no exception, when she acted in a most irresponsible manner at a press conference last week. Without consulting the LEA, or any of the teachers, parents or governors, she decided to play party politics with the feelings of the children who attend the Ridings and their parents. She prejudged the inspector's report. She decided who the culprit was and drew her own conclusions before sending in the inspectors. She did not speak to the LEA until half an hour before the press conference and I had to follow her to the press conference before she would see me.
In contrast, I pay tribute to the director of education, all councillors of all political persuasions, the parents and the teachers at the Ridings who, compared with the Secretary of State, have conducted themselves with much dignity, in the face of extraordinary publicity.
Because the Secretary of State was so badly briefed about the Ridings, she appeared to be unaware that the amalgamation which has been the cause of so much of the trouble there was implemented by a Conservative-controlled administration. Some Labour councillors objected, pointing out that, without adequate resources and money to rebuild part of the school, the merger could be explosive, and they have been proved right.
I want to concentrate on what should be done now, not apportion blame. The councillors involved in that decision were faced with falling rolls, so they knew that the two schools had to be merged. Nor should the teachers or the council officers be blamed. If blame is to be laid at anyone's door, it should be directed at the Government, who, through their policies, have done more to bring about the situation at the Ridings than anyone else.
I do not know how many education Bills the Government have introduced during the past 17 years. I have been told that it is 18; it is certainly many. But they have all had one aim: to introduce and encourage selection. They have thrown admission policies to the forces of the market. All that on the pretext of parental choice--what rubbish. What choice is there for many of the pupils who attend the Ridings? There is none.
When a school is burdened with 135 children with special needs, when nearly 50 per cent. of the pupils qualify for free school meals, when a school takes 20 pupils who have been expelled from other schools and when it is surrounded by grammar schools which are highly selective and by opted-out schools, it is cruel to make comparisons, as happens in the league tables. Such comparisons show nothing about the children and what
they can achieve. After everything that has happened to education in Halifax, does the Secretary of State seriously believe that parents who sent their children to the Ridings had a choice? Of course they did not. Choice is a sham, as the right hon. Lady knows well.
The crisis at the Ridings should be put into context. I do not dispute that there are disruptive children at that school. Like every other Opposition Member, I deplore disruption and violence of any sort in the classroom. We all have a duty to try to do something about it. Since the late 1970s, Halifax has put forward more schemes than I care to remember to bring about a comprehensive system to do something about the inadequacies of the education system offered to most children in our town.
As I have said, Halifax has two highly selective grammar schools operating the 11-plus that now take pupils from outside the area. I understand that they are now rejecting some of their own sixth formers with A and B GCSE grades because they can get more A-grade pupils from outside. That is causing some problems. That is the brave new world of competition in education which Government policies have introduced.
Halifax also has two secondary Church schools which have opted out and the LEA is left with four secondary schools which are bursting at the seams. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) knows one of those schools well. He has visited Sowerby Bridge school in my constituency which has 13 mobile classrooms, one of them 30 years old.
One reason I so much resent the criticism which has been made is that the Labour group has been in charge for only 18 months, but it is still trying to do something about the problems. Most recently, a school is being built at Withinfield in Southowram. The Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment, the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), told us to repair that school, where children were packed in like sardines; but the LEA has committed itself to building a new school there, because anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that that is the only answer.
In Northowram, the most Tory ward in Halifax--I live there, so I know--money has been spent on a nursery and a new library for the primary school there. No political bias has been shown there. The local education authority is very responsible. If LEA schools received the same financial assistance as the opted-out schools and the grammar schools, there might not have been so many problems at the Ridings.
The Secretary of State, at her press conference, denied that schools in Calderdale were underfunded. She said that that was ridiculous. Not all are underfunded. Some are very favoured. I want to put on record some of the facts about funding. Since 1991, because of the unfair funding of grant-maintained schools--double funding by the Government in an attempt to bribe schools to opt out--Calderdale has had to pay £1,093,000 more to the grant-maintained schools than the equivalent LEA schools received in cash and services. Because of the capping regime, the only way in which such additional payments could be funded was by cutting local authority services. In addition, the introduction of the common funding formula has meant that, in the past two years, grant-maintained schools have received a disproportionately high share of any increase allowed by the Government.
Even worse are the proposals for 1997-98 in the common funding formula. For all the Secretary of State's preferred options, the proposals would mean an average reduction in the allocation of resources for special needs of 15 per cent. Those allocations are for the LEA to provide services for special needs children in all schools, including grant-maintained schools. In Calderdale, if the proposals go ahead, they would mean a reduction of more than £750,000.
The reduction in the LEA special needs allocation would lead to a further increase in the funding of grant-maintained schools. That is not fair, by any measure. Schools such as the Ridings would suffer. As well as that increase, the grant-maintained schools in Calderdale have been given a capital grant of £2.9 million, but the Secretary of State has told us that the problem is not one of resources. If she thinks that is so, please will she throw the same amount of money at the LEA schools? We will tell her whether it has made any difference after a few years. She certainly has not minded throwing money at the grant-maintained schools and the grammar schools.
I wish to consider briefly the effects of the three-tier system on other aspects of education policy in Halifax, especially the policy of integrating children with special needs. As I said earlier, the Ridings has 135 children who have special needs, ranging from stage 1 to extreme needs. Some 59 are on the register with behavioural problems. Those figures expose the Secretary of State's cruel charges against the children and their examination results. We must not forget that the children went from a secondary modern to an amalgamated school, and the selective system distorts the results. Credit could have been given for the improvement, albeit small, which happened in such a short time.
We should compare the Ridings, with 600 pupils, 135 of whom have special needs, to the nearest grammar school, which last year had one child with special needs on the register. The other grammar school had three. People can draw their own conclusions, if they are fair-minded. It is not true to say, as some people have, that the Ridings did not exclude pupils permanently. Of course it did. Last year, it excluded two pupils permanently, as did the nearest grammar school.
The Ridings had to shoulder another burden: it had to absorb all the pupils excluded from other schools. It has taken an extra 20 pupils who have been excluded from other schools, so 20 out of the 61 so-called unteachable children have already been excluded from other schools. To its credit, Calderdale council does not let excluded children wander the streets. It already spends £500,000 of its limited budget to send 24 disruptive youngsters to special schools outside Calderdale.
The Secretary of State accused Calderdale council of not doing anything to help the Ridings, but it has taken steps and I shall list a few. It has seconded an advisory teacher to work with the middle managers on aspects of curriculum development and production of curriculum materials. It has assisted the school in the introduction of a computerised system to develop basic reading and comprehension skills. It has made limited resources available to support initiatives taken by the school. The council has also assisted the school to make available a residential experience to all year seven pupils. It has also helped to set up a task force to deal with the behavioural problems at the school. The council has now appointed a new head and deputy head and has started building a
sports hall. Any suggestion that the governors and the LEA failed to act when it was apparent that the school faced considerable difficulties is without foundation.
A few months ago, I visited the Ridings school at the request of the governors. They wanted to talk to me about some of the problems and the new buildings that they wanted. They told me about the serious disciplinary and practical problems that they had faced since amalgamation. Since then, I have spoken to governors and teachers, who have all complained about growing problems. The Secretary of State asked what I was going to do about the Ridings. I invite her to come to my office to look at the file on the Ridings if she thinks that I have not tried to play my part to help that school. I live next door to one of the governors, so it is difficult to get away from the subject.
When I met a small group of governors and the head teacher, they spelled out some of the problems they faced. They said that it was not possible to deliver national curriculum physical education at the school. They have only one, inadequate, indoor facility--a gymnasium with changing rooms that accommodate only 30 pupils. Science is taught in various labs scattered around school, which is inefficient and presents hazards when equipment has to be moved. The technology curriculum is restricted and provision for the emergent sixth form is non-existent, because the school was originally designed for 11 to 16-year-olds. The hall is used for assemblies, examinations, tests and PE and massive daily chair removals are necessary. Some parts of the building and campus are falling into disrepair. They have real problems in that school and it is not fair to say that the governors and teachers did not know about them and had not tried to face them.
Over the weekend, I was inundated with telephone calls from concerned parents, teachers and others. Like the union involved, I welcome the Government's intervention, but only if it is genuine. We must all hope that the Secretary of State's inspectors show more professionalism and objectivity than when she prejudged the outcome of the inspection in a knee-jerk reaction at her press conference last week. Like many others, I have every sympathy with the teachers and governors, because they have had a horrendous job.
I am sure that the inspectors will make some criticisms, but the narrowness of the remit given to them means that they will not see the overall picture. Only five inspectors have gone in for only two days and they will not consider the selection system, which I believe to be the major problem in Halifax. Such a system means that we end up with schools such as the Ridings, which has become a whipping boy. The teachers were told to cope and we have seen the resulting cheap headlines, but the blame should be directed at the Government.
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