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Mr. Robathan: What on earth do LEAs spend this 15 or 39 per cent. on? That is what confuses me. What do they do with all the excess money?
Mr. Pawsey: The pamphlet to which I referred, entitled "School Funding: Present Chaos and Future Clarity", sets out in great detail exactly how LEAs waste the money. I repeat: I want the funds to get to the classrooms. I do not want the money spent on the bureaucracy that surrounds town and shire halls, as it so often is.
Mr. Roy Beggs (East Antrim): If the hon. Gentleman is so committed to the money going to the classrooms, I am surprised that the Conservative Government have been creating even more local education authorities in England, Scotland and Wales.
Mr. Pawsey: That argument would carry more weight were it not for the fact that the hon. Gentleman ignores the GM schools, which cut the cord that used to secure them to the LEAs. Possibly unlike the hon. Gentleman, I want more GM schools to emerge. After all, that is what the parents want, because it gives them more control and makes the schools more receptive to their wishes and more responsive to local needs. Perhaps if there were more GM schools there would be fewer schools of the type described by the hon. Member for Halifax.
Mr. Gerry Steinberg (City of Durham):
Listening to the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Mr. Pawsey), as I usually do, I was struck by what a typically arrogant Tory speech he made, as he usually does. He implied that the electors are wrong because they have voted for Labour authorities. He seems to think that they should automatically vote in Tories. Does he not realise that we have so many Labour local authorities precisely because people were sick to death of the mess that the Tories had made of local government? Does he not realise that it is because of the mess that the Tories have made in Calderdale and Halifax that things are as bad as they are?
This year's Queen's Speech clearly shows that the Government are bankrupt of sensible policies. The proposed legislation of last week was either innocuous or
extreme, none more so than that arising from the Government's dogmatic education policies. Those policies favour the minority against the wishes and benefit of the majority. Measures to establish new grammar schools, to extend selection, and to extend the assisted places scheme to the primary sector will all create an even worse two-tier system in education than the Government have already produced.
A Gallup poll conducted earlier this year found that only 19 per cent. of the public thought that selection should be encouraged, while 77 per cent. thought it a bad idea. The Independent on Sunday of 30 June 1996 stated:
For years, the Government have promoted the myth of parental choice, but the more the system becomes selective, the more parents will find their children being turned away from schools that are full, both specialised and selective. The policies promoted by the Government have led, not to parents choosing schools, but to schools choosing their pupils. As more surplus places are removed, choice will become more limited because schools will be full. Parents may express a preference, but they do not have the right to choose a school.
The fact is that when, each year, the time comes for parents to choose a school for their children, a large number of them cannot get their children into the school they want. At that time of the year, my postbag is always full and my surgeries are full of parents desperate for me to take up their cases and enable their children to attend the school nearest where they live. Selection will make that worse.
I suspect that the Tories themselves recognise the pitfalls of selection because they envisage a legislative safety net whereby the 50 per cent. selection powers of grant-maintained schools, the 30 per cent. selection powers of specialist schools and the 20 per cent. selection powers of LEA schools will not apply if children are otherwise unable to find school places. The Tories are worried that their supporters will be unable to find places in local schools because of the selection arrangements. That is happening already in my area, where there is no selection at present.
If more selection is foisted upon us by legislation, it will mean multiple application procedures for parents, which will benefit only those with the skills and information to protect their children's interests. As usual, the less vociferous and the less well-off in our society will suffer. As more children are bussed around their local area, more public resources will be diverted from the classrooms into school-home transport, and sensible planning will have to give way to more fragmentation. In my area, Durham county council estimates that if only 10 per cent. of its schools were selective, its extra first-year costs would be £0.4 million, rising to nearly £8 million if a total selective system were introduced.
The comprehensive system has succeeded--it is not a failure, as the Tories would have us believe. Had secondary moderns--the type of schools to which the Government want to return us--continued, the huge increase in the number of students entering higher education in the past 30 years would not have happened.
Hon. Members can be certain that a system that allows only a small number of children to be selected for grammar schools while the rest go to secondary modern schools will not go down well with the vast majority of electors--particularly Tory electors. Rather than being an election winner, it will be an election loser for the Tories. Even Westminster council--that bastion of Toryism--warned that by giving schools greater freedom to select pupils, one could be seen to be diminishing parents' rights to select schools. As a result, there could be fewer--rather than more--satisfied parents.
It is a sad fact that right-wing dogma has created such a crazy system, but even crazier is the fact that, despite all the vilification heaped on comprehensive schools, there is no proof that they have failed because the Government have never evaluated their successes. Recently, independent research has found success despite the existence of selective schools.
Mr. Pawsey:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Steinberg:
No, I certainly will not. The hon. Gentleman spoke rubbish for 20 minutes, and I will not give him an opportunity to give us some more.
The successes in the comprehensive system were made clear in the 1996 research by Ben and Chitty.
Up till now in my speech, I have concentrated on the evils that I believe exist in the selection system, and on what parents, local authorities and the Government might want. One thing that I have not commented on--frankly, no hon. Member has referred to this in the debate--is what children want.
Mr. Pawsey:
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Could you refresh my memory? In 1976, did not the then Labour Prime Minister call for a great debate on education as he believed that the education system was failing his grandchildren?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes):
Whether I recall it or not is beside the point--that was not a point of order.
Mr. Steinberg:
That was an appalling abuse of parliamentary procedure by the hon. Member for Rugby and Kenilworth. That is the typical of the way in which
We must ask what children want and how they feel about the selection procedures. I have personal experience of what it is like to sit the 11-plus examination and fail. It was a traumatic experience at the time, and the sense of failure never leaves as one gets older. I do not want hon. Members to go "Ah!" nor do I want any sympathy from the House, but my father died when I was seven. My mother was convinced, and rightly so, that the only way in which anyone could progress in the world was to have a good education, and her ambition was for me to pass the 11-plus and go to a grammar school.
"The Tories have therefore invented all manner of devices to smuggle in selection by the back door--city technology colleges, specialist schools, opted-out schools. Ministerial assurances made again and again that none of these novelties were designed to bring about a new generation of grammar schools were lies."
It is now clear that this most reactionary education policy is being drawn up so as eventually to bring back total selection throughout the education system--grammar schools and secondary modern schools. Yet Tory education policies have been rejected by the vast majority in this country. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister trundles along in his own sweet way with his crackpot ideas, even though he must be aware that local voters have swept Tory education committees out of every town hall in Great Britain except for four London boroughs and a single county, leaving Tory education authorities responsible for only 2 per cent. of our schools. Fourteen LEAs are Tory-free zones--the Tories do not have a single seat on their education committees. That just shows how much confidence people have in the Tories and their education policies. The clearest sign ever came from Milton Keynes, where the Tories campaigned in the local elections on the platform of a return to a selective grammar school and were heavily defeated.
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